Turned

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
From Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems

Interesting Links

“Finding Women in the Archives: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Forerunner” (Lauren Schaffer, New-York Historical Society)

“The Maternal, Feminist Utopias of Charlotte Perkins Gilman” (Michael Robertson, LitHub)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Unnatural Mother,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “An Unfinished Story,” O. Henry
• “Miss McEnders,” Kate Chopin
• “How I Went Out to Service,” Louisa May Alcott

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems
900 pages
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Detail from The Lost Path, 1863, oil on canvas by British artist Frederick Walker (1840–1875). WikiGallery.

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During the first decade of the twentieth century, the “white slavery” panic swept the United States, with lurid tales in the press of rural and immigrant women moving into cities and being pressured or lured into prostitution by unscrupulous men. The uproar led to the adoption in 1910 of the Mann Act, the law prohibiting the transportation across state lines of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The following year, McClure’s Magazine published in installments Jane Addams’s new book, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, a treatise on prostitution and trafficking. Among other measures, Addams urged the adoption of a safety net, including higher starting wages and better housing, that would allow the many young women migrating to the cities to survive without deprivation.

The fourth chapter of the work, which appeared in the February issue, includes a passage describing the plight of numerous household servants:

A surprising number of suicides occur among girls who have been in domestic service, when they discover that they have been betrayed by their lovers. Perhaps nothing is more astonishing than the attitude of the mistress when the situation of such a forlorn girl is discovered, and it would be interesting to know how far this attitude has influenced these girls either to suicide or to their reckless choice of a disreputable life, which statistics show so many of their number have elected. The mistress almost invariably promptly dismisses such a girl, assuring her that she is disgraced forever and too polluted to remain for another hour in a good home. . . . Such a woman seldom follows the ruined girl through the dreary weeks after her dismissal; her difficulty in finding any sort of work, the ostracism of her former friends added to her own self-accusation, the poverty and loneliness, the final ten days in the hospital, and the great temptation which comes after that, to give away her child.

Literary scholars Janet Beer and Katherine Joslin have suggested that many of Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s ideas were “either shared or inspired by the work of Jane Addams; there are numerous points at which Addams raises the social problem and then, through enactment of the problem in her fiction, Gilman offers a solution.” As it happens, the previous September—just weeks before before Addams’s treatise was beginning its run in McClure’s—Gilman published a short story, “Turned,” that could well have taken its premise from the above passage. The major difference between the two works is the way Gilman’s story takes an unexpected “turn” in a new direction, toward a new “solution.”

Because only a handful of letters from their decades of friendship survives, however, we have no way of knowing if Addams and Gilman ever discussed the matter in the months before they wrote their respective works. The two women met in 1894, and Gilman stayed with Addams in Hull House for several months in 1896; subsequently they ran into each other at conventions and lectures. In addition, both women wrote several pieces about the challenges facing servants and the households that employ them. Gilman published “A New Basis for the Servant Question” in 1894 and Addams published “The Servant Problem” in 1903. The topic is discussed in their various books, and the London Daily News even interviewed Gilman on “the servant difficulty” in 1904. In this instance, then, each writer might well have come to this topic at the same time on her own, spurred by the headlines in the newspapers around the passage of the Mann Act.

“Turned” was a front-page story in The Forerunner, the magazine that Gilman singlehandedly wrote, edited and published for seven years. Although she is better known for her earlier gothic stories “The Yellow Wall Paper” and “The Giant Wistaria,” both written in the 1890s, Gilman’s writing two decades later was more influenced by the novels and stories of the literary realists, the works of Charles Darwin and American sociologist Lester Frank Ward, and the utopian visions of the likes of Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward. As she proclaimed in the first issue of her new magazine, her writings were intended “to stimulate thought; to arouse hope, courage, and impatience; to offer practical suggestions and solutions, to voice the strong assurance of better living. . . . It is a magazine for humanity, and humanity is social. It holds that Socialism, the economic theory, is part of our gradual socialization, and that the duty of conscious humanity is to promote Socialization.” As biographer Cynthia J. Davis notes, however, Gilman distrusted Marxism. When she attended the International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress in England in 1896, Gilman declined to sign the membership card because of the Marxist views printed on it, and she acknowledged that others regarded her as “merely a kid-glove Socialist.”

Her literary evolution also stopped short of following the path taken by such naturalist writers as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London. “Gilman rejected the doctrine of determinism embraced by canonical literary naturalists,” writes Gary Scharnhorst in his study of her writing career. “Her didactic purpose led Gilman to adopt a fortunate literary strategy, a type of reform naturalism, which enabled her to transcend the contradiction of design and purpose inherent in conventional naturalism.” She disparaged much of the work by the naturalists as the “Jack Kipling school” and “Masculine Literature.”

“Her legacy is a complicated one,” reflects Lauren Schaffer at the New-York Historical Society, “filled with an unconquerable struggle to correct the balance between men and women in the world within her lifetime, yet deeply influenced by racist beliefs, particularly in her later years. . . . Many of her ideas about evolution and social motherhood stemmed from her xenophobia and racism, which were prevalent in her private writings and became more obvious as she aged.” Her prejudices become more noticeable in later issues of The Forerunner. Yet her stories and early essays continue to intrigue scholars and readers: While her male contemporaries at the turn of the last century used their fiction to extol or lament the world as it was, she too, in her own way, portrayed the existing social order—and then she imagined how it could change for the better.

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In her soft-carpeted, thick-curtained, richly furnished chamber, Mrs. Marroner lay sobbing on the wide, soft bed. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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A Modern Lear

Jane Addams (1860–1935)
From Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now

Interesting Links
“Becoming Jane Addams” (Alan Wolfe, The New York Times)

“A Brief Overview of the Pullman Story” (National Park Service)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Shakespeare,” William Dean Howells
• “General Macbeth,” Mary McCarthy
• “South of the Slot,” Jack London

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Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now
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The Arcade Building, Pullman, Illinois, c. 1895. Illinois Digital Archives.

“American writers and leaders have often turned to Shakespeare in moments of national crisis,” writes James S. Shapiro in his introduction to Shakespeare in America. The social reformer Jane Addams, for instance, found herself caught between the two sides of the Pullman strike of 1894. “Before it, there had been nothing in my experience to reveal that distinct cleavage of society, which a general strike at least momentarily affords,” she later wrote. Her attempts to mediate during the dispute led many in her circle to call her a “traitor to her class,” while the workers became disenchanted with her because she would not definitively take up their cause. “Her stance—that she would take no side—guaranteed that nearly everyone in the intensely polarized city would be angry with her,” writes Louise W. Knight in a recent biography. When the strike was over, she turned to the pages of King Lear to help her make sense out of the conflict, and she shared her thoughts on the comparison with audiences nationwide.

Built by railroad tycoon George Pullman on the outskirts of Chicago in the 1880s, the town of Pullman was both praised and criticized immediately after it was founded. The town provided workers and their families with immaculate, modern, and relatively spacious cottages with indoor plumbing on tree-lined streets, as well as daily trash collection and groundskeeping services. The large Arcade building, anticipating the malls of the twentieth century, contained dry goods shops, an 800-seat theater, the bank, and a library.

Yet, as the economist Richard T. Ely wrote in Harper’s in 1885, “The Pullman companies retain everything. No private individual owns today a square rod of ground or a single structure in the entire town. No organization, not even a church, can occupy any other than rented quarters.” Pullman was designed to be a profit center; investors were promised a six percent annual return. In an era of free public libraries, for instance, Pullman’s residents were charged an annual fee for the use of the Arcade reading room, with its books all selected and “donated” by George Pullman himself, most of them on topics of mechanics and industry. Even the town’s sewage was pumped to the for-profit Pullman Farm a few miles away. Town meetings were prohibited; associations and clubs had to be approved by the company; the town’s officials—indeed, its entire government—were officers of the company.

Ely—who later became Addams’s good friend and edited two of her books—described Pullman’s “philanthropic undertaking” as little more than “benevolent, well-wishing feudalism”:

It is impossible within the realm of Pullman to escape from the overshadowing influence of the company, and every resident feels this, and “monopoly” is a word which constantly falls on the ear of the visitor. . . . Here is a population of eight thousand souls where not one single resident dare speak out openly his opinion about the town in which he lives.

Ely also anticipated the fatal flaw of Pullman’s company town: its workers would inevitably want to take charge of their own lives, to fulfill (among other things) “the desire of the American to acquire a home.” Above all, as their situations improved, the community’s residents would eventually want to govern themselves:

One can not avoid thinking of the late Czar of Russia, Alexander II., to whom the welfare of his subjects was truly a matter of concern. He wanted them to be happy, but desired their happiness to proceed from him, in whom everything should centre. Serfs were freed, the knout abolished, and no insuperable objection raised to reforms, until his people showed a decided determination to take matters in their own hands, to govern themselves, and to seek their own happiness in their own way. Then he stopped the work of reform, and considered himself deeply aggrieved. The loss of authority and distrust of the people is the fatal weakness of many systems of reform and well-intentioned projects of benevolence.

These themes—how benevolence begets domination, how gratitude can turn into rebellion—are what Jane Addams found reflected in the doomed relationship between Lear and his daughter Cordelia. More than a year after the strike ended, she collected her thoughts in a speech she first delivered in Chicago in March 1896.

(The first page of this week’s selection features additional remarks about Addams and the Pullman strike by James Shapiro, editor of Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now.)

Note: Addams quotes Giuseppe Mazzini, a leader of the nineteenth-century movement for Italian reunification and an advocate for women’s rights; Addams was greatly influenced by his essay The Duties of Man, written in 1858 and translated into English in 1860.

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Those of us who lived in Chicago during the summer of 1894 were confronted by a drama which epitomized and, at the same time, challenged the code of social ethics under which we live, for a quick series of unusual events had dispelled the good nature which in happier times envelops the ugliness of the industrial situation. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Toward Human Unity

Emily Greene Balch (1867–1961)
From War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing

Interesting Links
Emily Greene Balch: Biographical Information (Nobel Prize)

International Congress of Women of 1915 (C. Alihusain, Peace Palace Library)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Heroes,” Ellen N. La Motte
• “Writing a War Story,” Edith Wharton
• “Notes on War Experiences,” Eddie Rickenbacker

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War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing
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Jane Addams (behind the “P” in “PEACE”) and Emily Greene Balch (behind the final “E”) aboard the Noordam in April 1915, on the way to the International Congress of Women at The Hague. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

What Emily Greene Balch later called the “turning point in my life” almost didn’t happen. In 1915, when the prominent activist Jane Addams asked her to travel to Europe to an international conference of women opposed to the war, Balch declined, citing her duties as professor and chair of Wellesley College’s department of economics and sociology. But Addams persisted: “Don’t you think that there is a certain obligation on the women who have had the advantages of study and training, to take this possible chance to help out?” Balch ultimately changed her mind, hiring a substitute to teach her classes and convincing the college president to grant her a leave of absence. After arriving in The Netherlands in May 1915, Balch sent a letter to her students, which was reprinted in the college newspaper:

When I sailed on the Noordam in April with forty-two other American delegates to the International Congress of Women at The Hague, it looked doubtful to me, as it did to many others, how valuable the meeting could be made. I felt, however, that even a shadow of chance to serve the cause of peace could not to-day be refused.

Their transatlantic voyage was not without incident:

We were first stopped one evening under the menace of a little machine gun trained full upon us by a boat alongside while two German stowaways were taken off and searched and carried away. If the proceeding had been staged for dramatic purposes, it could not have been more effective. One prisoner, with a rope about him to prevent his escaping or falling overboard, shouted Hoch der Kaiser. Deutschland über Alles before he stepped upon the swaying ladder over the ship's side. . . .

After the stowaways were discovered, the travelers still had to face the British blockade of European waters. The authorities held up their ship for four days and the women helplessly watched combat vessels of several nations surround them or steam on pass. Worried they would arrive too late for the conference, the Americans sent messages to diplomats and ambassadors, all of whom claimed to be unable to interfere. The ship was released at last, and they ended up arriving in Rotterdam just hours before the opening session.

More than one thousand women gathered for the conference to confer “on the vital subject of international relations.” Addams served as the convention’s president, and Balch was impressed by her skill in managing the meetings and sessions, “difficult as it was to conduct business with so mixed and differing a constituency, with different languages [and] divergent views.” Upon returning to the United States, Addams and Balch collected the proceedings, including the letter Balch had sent to her students, as the book Women at The Hague.

In the short term, of course, the Congress failed: the war intensified and the United States entered the fighting two years later. But in the long term, its influence was immeasurable. From the meeting came the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organization that continues to thrive today. In 1931 Jane Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize, for her advocacy “for a peace that would not engender a new war,” as well as for her campaign to prohibit the use of chemical warfare in combat. Fifteen years later Balch, who served as the League’s International Secretary and opened offices and programs in some fifty countries, received the Prize herself, both for her peace and disarmament activism and her work with refugees during World War II, including “the refugees who came to the United States, especially for the Jews.”

To commemorate Balch’s sesquicentennial (she was born January 8, 1867) and to mark the centennial of America’s entry into the First World War in 1917, we present two selections: her 1918 letter to Wellesley College expressing her opposition to the war (which resulted in her termination) and excerpts from her Nobel speech thirty years later. Additional information about Balch will be found in the headnote by Lawrence Rosenwald preceding the selections.

Notes: In her letter Balch disparages Junkerism, a reference to the spirit of the Junkers, aristocratic German army officers, especially from East Prussia, who were devoted to militarism and authoritarianism. The speech mentions the Kellogg Pact (also known as the Kellogg–Briand Pact or Pact of Paris), a 1928 international agreement signed by Germany, France, and the United States resolving not to resort to armed conflict to resolve “disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them.” Bertha von Suttner, a Czech-Austrian novelist and peace activist, was the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1905. Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully was the most trusted minister of King Henry IV of France and was widely credited for bringing about, after the Wars of Religion (1562–98), peace and prosperity during the last decade of the reign.

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