1. See, for example, Kenton, Edna, “A Study of the Old ‘New Woman’—Part I,” The Bookman, 37 (04 1913), 158.Google Scholar

2. Wyant, G. G., “The Relation of the Novel to the Present Social Unrest—Part III. The Feminist Movement,” The Bookman, 40 (11 1914), 287.Google Scholar

3. Abbott, Harriet, “What the Newest New Woman Is,” Ladies Home Journal, 08 1920, p. 154.Google Scholar

4. Gillmpre, Inez Haynes, “Why I Am Glad I Am a Woman,” Harper's Bazar, 07 1912, p. 384.Google Scholar

5. Atherton, Gertrude, Julia France and Her Times (New York: Macmillan Company, 1912)Google Scholar; Beals, May, Rebel at Large [short-story collection] (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1911)Google Scholar; Beckley, Zoe, A Chance to Live (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1917)Google Scholar; Cather, Willa, My Anlonia (1918; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946)Google Scholar; Converse, Florence, Diana Victrix (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1897)Google Scholar; Cooke, Marjorie Benton, The Threshold (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1918)Google Scholar; Deland, Margaret, The Rising Tide (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916)Google Scholar; Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, The Portion of Labor (1901; rpt. New Jersey: The Gregg Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Gale, Zona, A Daughter of the Morning (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill Company, 1917)Google Scholar; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, What Diantha Did (New York: The Co-Operative Press, 1910)Google Scholar; Harris, Corra, The Co-Citizens (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1915)Google Scholar; Hirsh, Charlotte Teller, The Cage (Boston: D. Appleton and Company, 1907)Google Scholar; Malkiel, Theresa Serber, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker: A Story of the Shirtwaist Maker's Strike in New York (New York: The Co-Operative Press, 1910)Google Scholar; Martin, Helen R., Fanatic or Christian? (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918)Google ScholarPubMed; Miller, Alice Duer, The Beauty and the Bolshevist (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920)Google Scholar; Norris, Kathleen, Saturday's Child (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1914)Google Scholar; Price, Hannah J., The Closed Door (Knoxville, Tenn.: Knoxville Lithographing Co., 1913)Google Scholar; Raimond, C. E. [Elizabeth Robins], George Mandeville's Husband (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1894)Google Scholar; Scudder, Vida D., A Listener in Babel (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1903)Google Scholar; Van Vorst, Marie, Amanda of the Mill (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1904)Google Scholar; and Yezierska, Anzia, Bread Givers (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925).Google Scholar

Except for Cather, these writers and their fiction are virtually unknown—I included My Antonia because none of the other novels I discuss deals with women on farms. However, the Feminist Press has reprinted Freeman's short stories and Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Yezierska's Bread Givers has recently been reprinted by Braziller.

6. The Beauty and the Bolshevist is the exception. Ben, the Bolshevist, not Crystal, the Beauty, is the focus.

7. Hirsh, , The Cage, pp. 86–87.Google Scholar

8. Sochen, June. The New Woman in Greenwich Village, 1910–1920 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972), p. 35.Google Scholar

9. Gale, , A Daughter of the Morning, p. 285.Google Scholar

10. Ziff, Larzer, The American 1890s: Life and Hard Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking Press, 1967), pp. 280–81.Google Scholar

11. O'Neill, William L., “Divorce in the Progressive Era,” The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Gordon, Michael (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. 251.Google Scholar

12. Ziff, , p. 279Google Scholar. Ziff suggests that some of the novelists handled this dilemma by allowing the heroine two successive marriages; the limitations of the marriage institution would be revealed with the first marriage; the husband would die, and the heroine would then find a match that allowed her independence and selfhood.

13. Ziff, , p. 285.Google Scholar

14. MacAdam, George, “Henrietta Rodman: An Interview with a Feminist,” 1915, in The New Feminism in Twentieth Century America, ed. Sochen, June (Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1971), p. 60.Google Scholar

15. Sochen, June, Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists, 1900–1970 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973), pp. 81–82.Google Scholar

16. Among other things, Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin in the late 1860s and 1870s advocated free love in their weekly. Woodhull called a mass meeting in New York to declare herself a “free lover,” and when the press and feminists alike attacked her, she exposed the Henry Ward Beecher-Mrs. Tilton affair. According to William L. O'Neill, the Woodhull affair

reaffirmed the general conviction that suffrage politics and radical speculations, particularly those affecting marriage and the family, did not mix. In consequence the movement, although it never disowned the social goals that women's votes were presumably to implement, emphasized the most conservative aspects of the suffrage question. The vote was shown to be compatible with the existing domestic economy, and—at best—with those reforms that would elevate and refine domesticity to the level of perfection for which the society yearned. Suffragists thereafter, vigorously resisting the temptation to think seriously about the domestic institutions that ruled their lives, made sexual orthodoxy their ruling principle (“Feminism as a Radical Ideology,” in Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, ed. Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade [Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973], p. 307).

17. Rowbotham, Sheila, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It (London: Pluto Press, 1973), p. 72Google Scholar. See also Buhle, Mari Jo, “Women and the Socialist Party, 1901–1914,” Radical America, 4 (02 1970)Google Scholar and Bebel, August, Woman Under Socialism (1904; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1971).Google Scholar

18. Buhle, , pp. 51–54Google Scholar. In the pages of The Progressive Woman and The New Review men and women of the Socialist Party debated the relationship of socialism and feminism; the men especially expressed hostility to the “sex struggle” as opposed to the workingdass struggle.

Socialist novelists in the years before World War I were, as Walter Rideout describes it, no more “‘daring’ in dieir opinions on man-woman relationships than, say the Dreiser of Sister Carrie or the David Graham Phillips of Susan Lenox…. Although willing to attack sex ignorance, prostitution, and venereal disease as aspects of an archaic social system,… they were also unanimously unwilling, at least in their books, to condone a sex relationship outside the marriage bond.” What they did try to do is show how a change in social and economic relationships would change sexual relationships also. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 73–74.Google Scholar

19. “The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution: Evidence and Interpretation,” in The American Family, p. 330.Google Scholar

20. Rowbotham, , Hidden, p. 73.Google Scholar

21. From American Voices, American Women, ed. Edwards, Lee R. and Diamond, Arlyn (New York: Avon Books, 1973), pp. 263–64.Google Scholar

22. “The Long Journey,” 124 (04 27, 1927), 473–74Google Scholar. Elaine Showalter, who has done a considerable amount of research in this area, was kind enough to share some of her information with me (including the names of the anonymous women).

23. “The Woman in Love,” Harper's Bazar, May 1910, p. 365.

24. “The Woman in Love,” pp. 342 and 365.Google Scholar

25. Hirsh, , The Cage, p. 223.Google Scholar

26. In “The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals,” in Our American Sisters, James R. McGovern demonstrates that the so-called revolution of manners and morals, especially as it affected women, began in the Progressive Era around 1910, well before the era of the flapper. Sochen, in Movers and Shakers, discusses how the flapper's “emancipation” was superficial and individualistic; she does not represent what the woman's movement had fought for, as this self-description (p. 103) makes clear:

I am not a progressive person but a “jazz baby.”

I am not a free and equal partner but a gold digger.

I am not a herald of a new age but a “red hot mamma.”

27. Fuller, Margaret, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1971), pp. 96, 110, 121.Google Scholar

28. Cazden, Elizabeth, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, to be published by Feminist Press, chap. 5, ms. p. 8.Google Scholar

29. Duncan, Isadora, My Life (1927; rpt. New York: Liveright, 1972), p. 18Google ScholarPubMed. Sue White, writing in The Nation, explains why she did not marry: “Marriage is too much of a compromise; it lops off a woman's life as an individual.” Nevertheless, she confesses that the alternative is painful: “Yet renunciation too is a lopping off. We choose between the frying-pan and the fire—both very uncomfortable.” (“Mother's Daughter,” 123 [12 14, 1926], 634.)Google Scholar

30. “The Making of a Militant,” 12 1, 1926, p. 555Google Scholar. Deegan, Dorothy Yost in The Stereotype of the Single Woman in American Novels: A Social Study with Implications for the Education of Women (New York: King's Crown Press, 1951)Google Scholar discovered, not surprisingly, that of the seven major single women characters in the 125 American novels covering the period 1820–1935 “not one of the seven women is successful in an endeavor of her own; not one is widely and wholesomely influential. All are regarded as amusing, queer, or grimly tragic figures” (p. 82). She concludes that neither in fiction nor in life is the thoroughly emancipated woman yet accepted.

31. Converse, Florence, Diana Victrix, p. 140.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., p. 143. Agnes Smedley's 1929 autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, reprinted by Feminist Press (New York, 1973), presents a strong case against marriage. Like Eni. Marie feels sorry for the abuse her mother takes from her father, not for the unmarried woman everyone seemed to pity: “Strange! She didn't seem at all unhappy that no one would marry her! Her lovely face was dignified and calm. Calmer than my mother's” (p. 36).

33. Cather, Willa, My Antonia, p. 291.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., p. 328.

35. Ruth, Richard, “Gay Woman Adorns Stamp,” New York City Star, November 1973Google Scholar, quoted from Woodress, James, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art, p. 93Google Scholar. It has been suggested that the narrator of My Antonia, a young boy who writes in loving tones about Antonia, was really meant by Cadier to be a woman; however, social pressure forced her to mask this love of one woman for another (“Lesbian Writers Come Together,” Off Our Backs, 11 1975, p. 20).Google Scholar

36. Davis, Allen F., American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 90.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., pp. 90–91.

38. Bernikow, Louise, The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950 (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 15.Google Scholar

39. Diana Victrix, p. 241.Google Scholar

40. Ibid., p. 145.

41. Ibid., p. 63.

42. Ibid., p. 341.

43. Ibid., p. 351.

44. Freeman, Mary Wilkins, The Portion of Labor, p. 362.Google Scholar

45. Cazden, , chap. 4, ms. p. 23.Google Scholar

46. Goldman, Emma, Living My Life, (1931; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1970) I, p. 157Google Scholar. See also pp. 124, 158, 232. In The Vagabond (1911; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 161Google Scholar, Collette describes the comradeship of two women, Renee and Amalia:

Two women enlaced will never be for him anything but a depraved couple, he will never see in them the melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who have perhaps sought shelter in each other's arms, there to sleep and weep, safe from man who is so often cruel, and there to taste, better than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, frail, and forgotten.

47. Marcus, Jane, Diss. Northwestern Univ. 1973, p. 366.Google Scholar

48. Irwin, Inez Haynes, Angels and Amazons: A Hundred Years of American Women (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1933), p. 120Google Scholar. Rosenberg, Carroll Smith in “Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America,” American Quarterly 23 (10 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, sees the early reform movement, and specifically the Female Moral Reform Society, as an attempt to overcome the social isolation of women, and create a “feminine-sororial community” and a “system of female values and priorities” (p. 517).

49. Beckley, Zoe, A Chance to Live, p. 248.Google Scholar

50. Van Vorst, Marie, Amanda of the Mill, pp. 253–54.Google Scholar

51. “Staying Free,” 124 (03 30, 1927), 340.Google Scholar

52. A Chance to Live, p. 286.Google Scholar

53. The Portion of Labor, p. 10.Google Scholar

54. “The Long Journey,” 124 (04 27, 1927), 472Google Scholar. As a result, Blanchard was soured to marriage:

But the shadow of those early experiences darkened my attitude toward men and marriage long after. I was sure that I should never marry, never give any man an opportunity to ruin my life. My mother upheld me in these views. By the time 1 lost this support through going away to college I had read enough feminist literature and studies on marriage to encourage an opinion which had its origin in my early emotional experiences.

Nevertheless, she did marry, as did at least ten of the seventeen women writing in The Nation, as did many of the women in the novels and many feminists outside the novels who had vowed they would not marry because of their mother's experience. See Richard Jensen, “Family, Career, and Reform: Women Leaders of the Progressive Era,” in The American Family.

55. McGovern, , in Our American Sisters, p. 240.Google Scholar

56. Gale, Zona, A Daughter of the Morning, p. 11.Google Scholar

57. Martin, Helen R., Fanatic or Christian?, p. 18.Google Scholar

58. None of the mothers in the novels was consciously a feminist (except for George Mandeville), of the kind of mother that Crystal Eastman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Mary Austin remember having. Crystal Eastman's mother was among the first generation of women crusaders. She was a preacher who held symposiums at home, where Crystal at the age of fifteen gave a paper on women, and who organized a housekeeping co-op. Thus, Crystal Eastman explains her own lifestyle: “The story of my background is the story of my mother” (“Mother Worship,” The Nation, 03 16, 1927, p. 288).Google Scholar

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who in 1906 at the age of fifteen gave a speech to the Bronx Socialist Forum on “What Socialism Will Do For Women,” had a mother who advocated equal rights for women and who shocked everyone by both continuing to work after she was married and using women doctors to deliver her children in the 1890s (The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography—My First Life, 1906–1926 [1955; rpt. New York: International Publishers, 1973]). Mary Austin, a novelist of the period, although she felt unloved by her mother, described the inevitability of her becoming a “fighting feminist” because of her mother's lifestyle:

I scarcely know why me being a radical should have proved such across to the rest of the family, since they were themselves shouting Methodists, black Abolitionists—my grandfather was known to have entertained Negroes at his table—and my mother was suffragist and an ardent member of the W.C.T.U., which at that time represented the most advanced social thinking among women, saving itself from ostracism only by remaining well within the orthodox religions and confining its activities to moral crusades. There were also “purity leagues” for achieving a single standard of sex behavior, and in connection with the temperance movement, what would now be called “eugenic” propaganda, though that word had not then come into use. My mother saw to it that I read the pamphlets and heard the lectures pertaining to all these matters, without in the least realizing that she was thus preparing me for radical career. I personally “sat under” Anthony, Susan B., Willard, Frances, and Shaw, Anna. (“Woman Alone,” The Nation, 03 2, 1927, p. 228.)Google Scholar