Women and work, women and sex, women who feel they have to re-define themselves – these are all serious topics and they’re being studied seriously by historians, economists, sociologist, psychologists, statisticians and other scholars – but luckily for us there’s another approach. If novels reflect reality – and even the fantasies do because they are someone’s vision of what should or could be and therefore tell us what isn’t – we can look at some books by famous American authors that deal with those issues and see what real life was like at the time and, more important, what has changed and what has remained the same.
Let’s start with work. The issues surrounding women and work and the choices they have to make – marry, have a career, combine both – aren’t new. They’ve been with us for almost 150 years, since just after the Civil War when some middle-class women first decided they wanted to work even if they didn’t have to because they were widowed or orphaned. We know that they stayedhome before that because historical records tell us so, and we think that they were happy to do so because among the thousands of novels published between 1800 and the end of the Civil War, there isn’t one that has a heroine who says she wants to work, wonders what it would be like to work, or is sorry that she can’t work.
That makes sense historically because for the first half of the 19th century in America woman was seen as being by her very nature, by definition, timid, modest, chaste, submissive, spiritual, self-sacrificing, and impulsive. Obviously, those qualities hardly suited a woman for life outside the home, so she was also, by definition, domestic. (Obviously, poor women, immigrant women, farm women always worked, but at that time no one wrote books about them!)
Even among middle-class women there were some exceptions. A few were active in abolitionist, temperance, or suffrage movements, and during the Civil War, many worked as nurses in hospitals and on the battlefield. Still, the first novel about a middle-class woman who works because she wantsto, not because she hasto, didn’t appear until 1871. The book was called The Silent Partner, and the author was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who already had an international reputation as a novelist (The Gates Ajar) and poet by the time this novel appeared. She was seriously and well reviewed, and in this one, her very feminine heroine turns her back on love and domesticity in favor of what she sees as a vocation. The book would have been considered scandalous if Phelps hadn’t had a reputation for being a truly spiritual and religious woman. So let’s look at this novel.
Conventional but very moral young Perley, whose father dies and leaves her his 1/3 part in a profitable mill, decides that if she’s going to profit from the business, she should also assume some of the responsibilities. The other two partners, one of whom is her fiancé, are first amused and then horrified, and both tell her they’ll never allow her to be anything but a “silent partner” – and that she should be happy because she’ll be able to spend her dividends on feminine frippery without having the masculine problems of having to earn them.
This makes her break her engagement, and with the help of a young woman mill worker, she begins to learn about the lives of the poor people whose work provides those dividends. When she sees the poverty and ugliness of the company town they must live in, she decides to spend her income to arrange for nursery schools, clinics, recreational facilities, and evening schools. Her moment of truth, and the climax of the novel, comes when she meets a man she likes a lot and who likes her. When he proposes, he tells her he’s rich now but he’s a self-made man, approves of what she’s doing, and would never stop her from using her money to help the workers – which he could do legally in those days because men legally controlled their wives’ incomes. She’s tempted, but she decides that marriage is a holy sacrament and deserves a woman’s total commitment, but because she feels she can’t be equally committed to a home, husband, and family andto her unpaid but very real work in the mill town, she refuses..
We don’t know what may happen to her in the future, but when she chooses work over marriage at the end of the novel, she goes against every contemporary convention about women. While her choice didn’t immediately become a common one either in life or in literature, she must have been a model for at least a few of Phelps’s many readers, because during the next 20 years, the problems of women and work became a more and more frequent theme in real life and in literature – including her own, for she wrote two other and even better novels dealing with the same subject: work? marriage? both?
P.S. Phelps herself didn’t marry until her mid-forties, after her best work was done.
If work didn’t become even a minor issue for women until the 1870s, what about sex? Remember what I said about women being perceived as spiritual and chaste? That meant there was no mention of a woman’s sexual desire – not the words and not the sensation – until 1899, with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. (Actually, there was an earlier novel on that theme published in 1862, but the Civil War was going on, and people ignored it.)
Chopin was from St. Louis, married a man from New Orleans, lived with him on his plantation in the bayou country, had six children, and never wrote a word until she was widowed and returned to St. Louis. Once there, she published two collections of short stories about the bayou country, which both critics and readers loved because they beautifully described an exotic and unfamiliar world. Then she wrote a novel that reviewers called “sick,” “sordid,” and “scandalous.” Why?
Edna , the heroine, is 26, married to Leonce, 40. They have 2 young children and live a proper, middle-class life in New Orleans which Edna never questions until they rent a summer cottage on an island, where Edna meets other women who are very different from her friends in the city. She begins to try to figure out who she is and where she belongs, and her first “awakening” is negative. She decides that she’s not one of those wives who “worshipped their husbands and esteemed it a . . . privilege to efface themselves as individuals,” and that she’s not even a “Mother-woman,” because when the kids are being taken care of by someone else, it freed her of “a responsibility for which fate had not fitted her.” She won’t be defined as either a wife or a mother, the definitions of a married woman.
Her next awakening is her recognition that she’s attracted to Robert, the son of the owner of the island colony. Because he’s aware of what‘s happening and is an honorable man, he flees temptation and leaves the island. She’s unhappy, but summer is almost over and the family returns to the city, where she finds it difficult to go back to her old life. One day after a minor quarrel with her husband, she locks herself in the bedroom – many heroines did that in 19th-century books – and when she comes down in the morning, she has decided she will only “do as she liked and . . . feel as she liked,” which means starting to paint and abandoning friends, social obligations, worries about the children, and especially the marital bed, which confuses poor Leonce no end.
When Leonce leaves on a business trip and the children are sent to their grandmother in the country, she takes up with some very different people, begins to gamble and go to the races, and encourages the advances of a man who has a bad reputation as a rake. Out of curiosity, she invites him home, allows him to kiss her, realizes that it’s the first kiss “to which her nature had really responded,” and then sleeps with him – which is her sexual awakening. Though she doesn’t even like him, she sleeps with him once more as a test, then dismisses him, decides to move out of her husband’s home, rents a cottage, begins to sell her paintings, and resolves never again to “belong to another than herself.”
One day she runs into Robert and invites him to her cottage, where she tells him how she feels about him and offers herself to him. Instead of rushing her into the bedroom, he tells her that he loves her and has prayed that Leonce would set her free. To which she proudly replies “I’m no longer one of my husband’s possessions. . . . I give myself where I choose.” Well, no wonder he runs away again! Those are not the words one wants to hear from a prospective wife.
To think things out, she returns to the island where her awakenings began and comes to the conclusion that nothing is permanent – not marriage, not children, not sex, and not even love, because she realizes that even if she and Robert had gotten together, there would come a time when that too would pass. At this point, having stripped herself of all her illusions, she strips off her clothes, enjoys the sun and the breeze on her naked body, and then deliberately walks into the sea, never to return.
Yu can see now why the critics called this novel “sick,” “sordid,” and “scandalous.” Coming after a century of heroines who were by definition not bodies but only pure spirits, Edna leaves a kind and loving husband, has adulterous sex with a man she doesn’t even like, immodestly offers herself to the man she loves, and finally commits suicide – the ultimate sin. The book was banned in her home town and in many libraries, and Chopin, who lived another 5 years, never found a publisher for her next book. Now, of course, this groundbreaking portrayal of a woman’s sexuality is considered a classic American novel.
So we have two novels about women who rebel against the conventional image of what they should want and be in the area of work and then of sex. But there are other problems as well, and I’d like to talk next about a book that came out in the 1920s – the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, famous for its flappers, speakeasies, gangsters, and so-called “free love.” But not everyone lived like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and there were plenty of good novelists writing about more ordinary people trying to figure out how to live their lives in a world very different from the prewar one they had grown up in. And there were even a few who wrote about some groups that hadn’t yet been described in mainstream American novels, including immigrants.
In 1917 there had been a Jewish male immigrant in a novel called The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan, but the female Jewish immigrant came a little later and had some problems the man did not. She not only had to find her place in WASP America, but she had to liberate herself from the ties, conventions, and traditions of her family, her culture, and her religion. I’d like to say a few words about the author of the first novel to describe that situation before getting to the book itself because her fiction was strongly autobiographical, just as her most autobiographical novel included a lot of fiction!
Anzia Yezierska came to this country as the youngest of 10 children of an Orthodox rabbi and lived an early life that may remind some of us of the lives of our grandparents or even our parents. She lived in a tenement, worked in a sweatshop, learned English in night school, and was determined to escape from the poverty of her surroundings and the personal and societal restrictions on her as a woman.
Intelligent, dynamic, pretty, and fearless, she went everywhere and impressed everyone, including John Dewey up at Columbia, to whom she famously said: “I want for to be a person!” – a sentence that illustrates one of today’s themes very clearly. At some point she married, divorced, remarried, had a child, left the child with the husband, and began to publish stories about the lives of Lower East Side immigrants. When a collection of these stories came out, a film company not only bought the rights to them for $10,000 but gave her a 3-year contract as a staff script writer. She did, she made a lot of money, she hated the place, and she soon returned to New York, where she published her first novel, the one I’m going to talk about, and was a well-paid, well-read, famous novelist and short story writer all during the 1920s. During the ’30s she worked for the WPA, and when she published her last book in 1950, it had a preface by W. H. Auden. But by the time she did in 1970, she was poor and forgotten.
Sonya Vronsky, the heroine of that first novel, Salome of the Tenements – such a wonderful title! – published in 1923, writes for a Jewish community paper and is sent to interview John Manning, a millionaire philanthropist running a settlement house in her neighborhood. She’s overwhelmed by his education and idealism, he’s overwhelmed by her beauty and desire to improve herself. He invites her to lunch, which she postpones so she can get a new dress. Having no money, she appeals to a famous designer named Jacques Hollins because she knows he was born Jaky Solomon and feels he will understand her wish to transform herself. He does, and designs a simple but beautiful dress that so impresses John that he wants to have a long talk with her in her home. Again she postpones their meeting until she can persuade her landlord to paint her room and a moneylender to advance her enough money – without security – so she can furnish it tastefully: she succeeds because no man is immune to her extraordinary vitality.
John is finally allowed into her apartment and by the end of the evening asks her to work with him because he sees her as his passport to a strange world. She agrees because she sees him as her passport to a more ordered life, not only as his employee but as his wife! Yes, she’s manipulative, but after a few weeks, they both honestly fall in love and he proposes. Of course she accepts, thinking she’ll be able to work with him to help her people and also to have a beautiful life in an elegant East Side home.
It doesn’t work that way. His family and friends find her uneducated, crude, loud, vulgar; she finds them stiff, cold, unwelcoming, unfriendly. She’s physically passionate while he’s the stereotype of the cold Anglo-Saxon. He expects her to make all the compromises, but much as she loves him, she eventually can’t help telling him “I got to be what’s inside of me. I got to think the thoughts from my own head. I got to act from the feelings in my own heart.” The language is different, but she’s obviously blood sister to Kate Chopin’s Edna.
After a while they recognize their basic incompatibility, and Sonya walks out on him when he refuses a divorce because he doesn’t want to shame the family name. She returns to the Lower East Side, decides she would like to design the beautiful clothes she loves to wear, takes a job in a clothing factory, learns the manufacturing process, and insists she be given a chance to design a dress. It’s a success, and just as she’s promoted to designer, she’s plucked from the factory by none other than Jacques Hollins – aka Jaky Solomon – who has recognized her work, tells her he’s loved her from the first moment, and wants to marry and work with her. Her final triumph, after she’s accepted Jaques/Jaky, is that Manning begs her to return to him on her terms and she can refuse because she will have with Jaques/Jaky a marriage of both body and mind as they create not only clothes but a life together.
The book is lush and romantic, filled with great subplots, and it was a huge success. It’s really two stories. One was of men and women trying to integrate themselves into American society – a story that was every reader’s story at some point back in his or her history. But the second is a personal one, because Sonya is a heroine who consciously and deliberately re-defines, re-forms, and re-designs her life against the assumptions, conventions, rules, traditions, and restrictions not so much of her time as of her social and educational limitations and especially of her particular community.
On to the final novel, which seems to deal with a relatively new problem but which also has a long history. The book is Dorothy Canfield’s The Home-Maker, which came out a year after Salome and is a story about two lower-middle class people living in a small conventional town in middle America – ordinary people caught in the trap of gender roles. Canfield, like Phelps, was an enormously successful and critically admired author when this was published, and it was in 1924 as counter to the conventional and accepted image of woman as The Silent Partner had been 50 years earlier.
Eva, a perfectionist, hates being a home-maker because she doesn’t have enough money for household help, is impatient with her 3 children, and irritated by her husband who doesn’t earn enough to make things easier. Lester, a dreamer, hates being an accountant in the town’s department store but knows he must support his family. Both play their “natural” roles until Lester is in an accident that paralyzes him.
Eva then has to support the family. She gets a job as a stock girl in the store her husband had worked in, is quickly promoted to saleswoman and then to department head, earns more money than Lester ever did, and is very happy to be out of the house – though she never admits it and tells all her friends that she hates working because she knows that every woman is supposed to wantto make a home and be a mother while her man is doing his thing out in the world. Meanwhile, Lester in his wheelchair learns to cook and sew from books, manages to keep the house clean with the help of the children, adores listening to them and discovering what they’re like and what they need, and manages to solve all the discipline problems that had driven his wife mad.
When the doctor says he may be able to cure Lester, everyone is quietly unhappy: Lester will have to go back to work, which he hates; Eva will have to go back home, which she hates; and the children will again have to deal with an impatient and angry mother, which they hate. Luckily the doctor comes to understand these unspoken undercurrents, and after a private conversation with Lester tells the family he was wrong and there is no cure. No one admits it, but everyone is relieved because living the roles that people expected of them is exactly what had made these particular people unhappy.
So because Eva is afraid of what people would say if she admitted she didn’t want to go back to the children because it’s unnaturalto feel that way, and because Lester can’t face the “scorn” and “contempt” with which he would be treated for choosing to do “women’s work,” which is also unnatural, Eva’s liberation comes not because she figures out who she is and what she wants to do, but because Lester chooses as the lesser of two evils to live his life as an invalid. Nevertheless, in this novel, which because of Canfield’s reputation was read by both men and women, was widely reviewed and seriously discussed, we have the beginning of today’s discussion about the reality of gender roles.
Obviously the world – and women’s lives – have changed a lot since those four books were published, but I’d like to take a few minutes to bring you up-to-date about women, work, sex, and gender roles.
In October 2001 there was a NYT interview with a CEO in which she explains that she decided not to marry because “I didn’t think I could be married and give it all it deserved, and at the same perpetuate my career in the way I wanted to.” Her choice was work. A month later, there was a double-page ad in Timemagazine that shows a well-put-together woman who has a contented baby in her arms while she’s working at a computer, and the headline reads: “Make the meeting in Prague. Make the dinner at home. Yes you can.” That woman’s choice was to combine the two. And in January 2005 there were 5 letters to the editor of the Times about women who have decided to stay home with the kids, one pointing out that there are many women like herself who are “corporate, liberal, feminist,” but give it up to stay home and raise their children and that feminism has forgotten that “mommies” are women, too. Third choice: stay home, at least until the children are grown. There is no one image of women as workers and mothers these days.
About sex, I only have to say that it seems to me that just about anything goes these days – but I don’t really know how Middle America feels about women like those in Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives in real life. What do women teach their daughters these days? I hope you can tell me.
And as for the gender-role issue, have a folder full of articles about contemporary househusbands, and I’ll just mention a couple. In June 2002 Lisa Belkin, who writes a regular column called “Work” in the Sunday Times, interviewed a “househusband” who said that he felt people questioned his “manhood.” A year later she did an update interview with the same man who this time complains that he doesn’t know any other stay-at-home fathers and that there’s an “awkward silence” at parties when he explains that he’s the one who does the cooking, shopping, and child-care in the family. His name is Michael, not Lester, and he has the courage to deal with his choice without pretending paralysis, but his society’s response is largely the same. But it may be slowly changing, because in an article by Julia Lawlor in the Times of August 1, 2004, an “executive coach” advises fathers trying to reenter the work force to “approach it in terms of your responsibilities: negotiating, relationship skills, scheduling. You were the C.O.O. of the family.” Good advice for a woman, too. It isn’t that rare a decision these days, though still certainly not the usual one.
I’d like to say a final word about these novels. They’re not propaganda pieces but real novels with real people who have lots of things on their mind other than what I’ve discussed, and they take place in a real period of time in a real historical context, and they appeared at the same time as other novels that were concerned with completely different problems. If you’re interested in this larger picture of American fiction that focuses on women, I’d like to tell you – a bit of self-promotion, here – that this is what my book, Fictional Females: Mirrors and Models, is about.
– Book talk given at Womanspace (Great Neck), April 2006
