Maternal Modernism: Narrating New Mothers 3031089103, 9783031089107

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: The “Persistent Rebels” of Maternal Modernism
Introduction: Framing Modernist Motherhood
The New Woman and New Modernism
Outline of Chapters
Chapter 2: The New Woman, New Modernisms, and New Motherhoods
Introduction: Modernist and Maternal Scholarship
The True Woman, Republican Mother, and Race Mother
The New Woman: Names and Narratives
The Woman Movement, Feminism, and Maternalism
Birth Control, Eugenics, and Imperial Motherhood
Chapter 3: Mothers in New Woman Fiction: Mapping “the Terra Incognita of Herself”
Introduction: Epochs of the Vanguard
New Modernism and “New” Realism
Mother-Problem Novels
Wild Women
The Daughters of Danaus
Gallia
The Awakening
The Mother’s Recompense
The Home-Maker
Quicksand
Conclusion: Bad Mothers of Modernism
Chapter 4: “The ‘Momentousness’ of Motherhood”: Maternal Discourses and Debates in The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review and The Freewoman: A Weekly Humanist Review
Introduction: Bondwomen Versus Freewomen
Maternal Manifestoes
New Women, New Periodical Studies, and New Modernism
Talking the Talk: Modernist Salons
Public and Counter-public Spheres, Discourses, and Intimacies
The Freewoman: Feminism and the Endowment of Motherhood
Endowment: Attacks and Counter-attacks
Maternal Collaboration and Co-operatives
Individualism and Motherhood
Marriage, Motherhood, and Reproductive Agency
Conclusion
Chapter 5: “The Title Role of ‘Mother’”: Silent-Film Stardom and Celebrity Maternity in Photoplay Magazine
Introduction: “The World’s Greatest Motion Picture Publication”
The New Woman and New Journalism
Popular Modernisms
Between the High and the Low
Fandom and Feminism
Marketing Women’s Lives
Role Mothers
Alice Joyce
Billie Burke
Mae Marsh
Florence Vidor
Alice Brady and Catherine Calvert
Belle Bennett
Barbara La Marr
Gloria Swanson
Conclusion
Chapter 6: “Freedom and Childbearing”: Prams, Politics, and Literary Life in New Woman Autobiographies of the Interwar Era
Introduction: Mothers on the National Arena
Auto/biographies of Relational Motherhood
The Personal, the Political, and the Collective
Women’s Autobiographical Traditions
Interwar Work, Motherhood, and Modernism
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Ida B. Wells
Storm Jameson
Naomi Mitchison
Vera Brittain
Conclusion
Chapter 7: “A Mother, a Wife, a Worker and a Wonder-Woman”: Matroethnography, Black Feminism, and Postcolonial New Womanhood in Buchi Emecheta’s London Narratives
Introduction: A Hybrid Trilogy
Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Periodization
Modernism and the Social Sciences
Black Feminism and the Institution of Black Motherhood
Traditions of African Women’s Writing
The New Woman Künstlerroman
Second Class Citizen
In the Ditch
Head Above Water: An Autobiography
Conclusion
Chapter 8: Coda: New Womanism in the Twenty-First Century
Opposing Camps
Leaning Out and Opting In
Media, Myths, and Fantasies
New Matrifocal Genres
Childfree by Choice and Maternal Regret
Continuing Crusades
Correction to: “A Mother, a Wife, a Worker and a Wonder-Woman”: Matroethnography, Black Feminism, and Postcolonial New Womanhood in Buchi Emecheta’s London Narratives
Correction to:
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Maternal Modernism Narrating New Mothers

Elizabeth Podnieks

Maternal Modernism

Elizabeth Podnieks

Maternal Modernism Narrating New Mothers

Elizabeth Podnieks Department of English Toronto Metropolitan University Toronto, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-031-08910-7    ISBN 978-3-031-08911-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: CSA-Printstock / Getty Image This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my mother, Elizabeth Podnieks

Acknowledgments

Virginia Woolf now-famously proclaimed in A Room of One’s Own that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” Maternal Modernism is predicated on such an historical perspective, while also thinking about our mothers of today and tomorrow. This book is the product of much reflection about mothers, mothering, and motherhood over many years. I am grateful to the diverse figures examined herein—novelists, journalists, film stars, and auto/biographers—whose archives and oeuvres provided me with such a substantive trove of compelling and courageous narratives that inspired me to rethink motherhood. I am equally indebted to the numerous scholars whose innovative respective studies on modernism, the New Woman, and motherhood have stimulated my own. A special thank you to Andrea O’Reilly, whose scholarship launched my entry into the field of motherhood studies, and whose personal and professional support continues to drive me; and to all the members of the International Association of Maternal Action and Scholarship (IAMAS) (formerly the Motherhood Initiative for Community Involvement [MIRCI]), for building, nourishing, and promoting a global community of peers. Deepest thanks to Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature publishing for its ongoing support of this project. I extend my especial gratitude to Molly Beck, Executive Editor for Literature, for her interest in the book from its early stages and for her dedication to realizing its publication. I greatly value her most engaged, generous, and sustained efforts on my behalf. Likewise, I thank Ruby Panigrahi and Petra Treiber, Project Coordinators, and V. Vinodh Kumar Venkitesan, Project Manager, along with their vii

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team, for their meticulous attention to detail and design as they worked to prepare the book in its final form. I am further most grateful to the Reader for the press, for the time involved in reviewing the manuscript, and for providing me with thoughtful and insightful feedback so helpful to strengthening the book. For over two decades at what is now called Toronto Metropolitan University, I have had the privilege of working alongside a group of accomplished friends and colleagues, to whom I offer my profound thanks. As a member of the Department of English, I have benefitted immensely from being immersed in an environment where faculty and staff so unconditionally respect and enrich each other’s research, teaching, and administrative roles. Additionally, I owe much to the Office of the Faculty of Arts, including Pamela Sugiman, Dean; Patrizia Albanese, Associate Dean of Arts, Research and Graduate Studies; and Jean-Paul Boudreau, former Dean, for their sustained commitment to my career, including the funding of my participation at academic conferences (where parts of Maternal Modernism were first disseminated) and research assistant hires. On that note, I acknowledge the many multitalented students from our Literatures of Modernity graduate program who have contributed to this project along the way: Selena Jodha, Charlene Chow, Anne Dion, Emily Hunsberger, Brianna Cooze, Jamie Hayes, Rebecca Anderson, Lauren Matera, Natalja Chestopalova, Mubina Virsram, Jon Whitzman, and Melissa Silva. A few, small portions of material herein have appeared elsewhere: “‘Disposed to Daring Innovation’: New Woman Fiction, New Modernism, and New Motherhood,” Re-reading the Age of Innovation: Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830–1950, edited by Louise Kane, Taylor & Francis/Routledge, 2022; “Maternal Stars of the Silent Screen: Gender, Genre, and Photoplay Magazine,” Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas, edited by Eva C.  Karpinksi and Ricia A. Chansky, Routledge, 2020, 80–88 (originally published in a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies, “Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre,” Vol. 33: 3, Autumn 2018, pp. 578–587); and “‘The Other Problem—That of the Woman with Children’: Vera Brittain, Maternal Work, and the Politics of Leaning In,” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 5.1 (Spring/Summer 2014): 242–262. I note that all quotations from published and unpublished work by Vera Brittain are included here by permission of Mark Bostridge and T.  J. Brittain-­ Catlin, Literary Executors for the Estate of Vera Brittain 1970. I also want

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to acknowledge with much thanks Bev Bayzat, McMaster Library Assistant, for providing me with access to the unpublished materials of Brittain, housed in the Vera Brittain Archive, William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library. Relatedly, I greatly appreciate the editors of the books and journals listed above, as well as their peer reviewers, for supporting and advancing my research. Finally, there would be no “thinking back through our mothers” without my own mother, Elizabeth Podnieks—your role modeling, guidance, and love have made everything possible. Thank you to the rest of my team, too, including Andrew Podnieks and Jane Podnieks—your adventurous spirit motivates; Zachary Smith and Emily Smith—you reward me with motherhood each day; and Ian Smith—you encompass it all.

Contents

1 The “Persistent Rebels” of Maternal Modernism  1 2 The New Woman, New Modernisms, and New Motherhoods 15 3 Mothers  in New Woman Fiction: Mapping “the Terra Incognita of Herself” 49 4 “The  ‘Momentousness’ of Motherhood”: Maternal Discourses and Debates in The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review and The Freewoman: A Weekly Humanist Review 87 5 “The  Title Role of ‘Mother’”: Silent-Film Stardom and Celebrity Maternity in Photoplay Magazine129 6 “Freedom  and Childbearing”: Prams, Politics, and Literary Life in New Woman Autobiographies of the Interwar Era169 7 “A  Mother, a Wife, a Worker and a Wonder-­Woman”: Matroethnography, Black Feminism, and Postcolonial New Womanhood in Buchi Emecheta’s London Narratives223

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8 Coda: New Womanism in the Twenty-First Century267  Correction to: “A Mother, a Wife, a Worker and a Wonder-­Woman”: Matroethnography, Black Feminism, and Postcolonial New Womanhood in Buchi Emecheta’s London NarrativesC1 Bibliography291 Index315

CHAPTER 1

The “Persistent Rebels” of Maternal Modernism

Introduction: Framing Modernist Motherhood Asking “What Does Motherhood Mean?” in a 1928 article for the Manchester Guardian, British author Vera Brittain observes, “Motherhood of late years has become a subject of controversy, which grows acute as soon as anyone ventures to suggest that, for some women, being a mother may not be sufficient to occupy the whole of their time, thoughts and energy.”1 In another piece, a 1935 article for Good Housekeeping, she laments, “Times have changed, but tradition lingers.”2 Despite having inherited “new rights and duties won for it by the suffrage movement,” women in her generation “have always been torn between professional claims and domestic demands” and must still contend with social dictates placing “an artificial emphasis upon marriage and children.”3 Brittain aligns herself with the “persistent rebels” who refuse “to adapt ourselves to family expectations.”4 In this regard, she participated in the broader project of modernism, famously conceptualized according to the edict “make it new” issued by Ezra Pound to his fellow artistic revolutionaries.5 As Peter Gay summarizes, Pound’s slogan “was implicit in all the rebels’ programs, which, whatever their detailed proposals, stood for liberation from the burdens of the past.”6 The push to “make it new” was for modernists “a professional, almost a sacred obligation.”7 Maternal Modernism examines rebels like Brittain who struggled with oppressive patriarchal

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_1

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ideologies of motherhood, and who challenged, resisted, and negotiated them with their own versions of maternity. In this book, I trace inscriptions of these themes in novels, periodicals, and life writings of the long modernist period. In the spirit of new modernism (on which I will elaborate shortly), I focus on the latter half of the nineteenth century through the twentieth. Just as Bonnie Kime Scott emphasizes that modernism as theorized in the first half of the twentieth century is not a “monological sort of phenomenon,”8 so my conception of maternal modernism is capacious. I showcase how some of the numerous elements and forces we have come to call modernism—or rather, modernisms—are manifested in equally diverse and often competing representations of mothers, mothering, and motherhood.9 I explore how historical figures and fictional protagonists used, and were constructed within, textual spaces where they engaged critically with the maternal as identity, practice, and institution; and from perspectives informed by gender, sexuality, nationhood, race, ethnicity, and class. In my formulations of maternal modernism, I pay particular attention to dichotomous depictions of mothers. Conventional versus unconventional mothering typically goes hand in hand with so-called natural versus unnatural and good versus bad mothering. In the simplest sense, the first terms describe mothers who are regarded as intuitively skilled, nurturing, self-sacrificial, and sexually pure; the second, as not. ‘Natural’—and therefore ‘good’—mothers are celebrated as the “angel in the house”10 and womanly woman, physically and emotionally ever present for/ever available to their children in the domicile. ‘Unnatural’—and therefore ‘bad’— ones are denigrated as unwomanly, absent, anarchic, deviant, smothering, and even monstrous. Andrea O’Reilly describes motherhood in terms of normative and non-normative practices and identities. Normative maternity, as a construction of patriarchy, is limited to women in nuclear families who are white, heterosexual, married, and economically dependent on their provider-­husbands.11 Non-normative maternity includes women who are unable to satisfy the requirements of normative motherhood due to the fact that they may be “young, queer, single, racialized, trans, or nonbinary”; non-normative mothers like these “counter and correct as well as destabilize and disrupt normative motherhood.”12 In the texts I examine herein, I illuminate how resistant strategies are enacted by both non-normative and normative mothers. Patriarchal motherhood is problematized in diverse ways in relation to topics like biological destiny, imperial duty, racial uplift, eugenics, reproductive

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choice, sexual desire, illegitimacy, maternal endowment, maternal instinct, and maternal ambivalence. Rhetorical tensions pit women who embrace motherhood against those who forego it, and further, set women who remain with their children at home against those who seek independence and creative, professional, and intellectual fulfillment outside of wifehood, parenting, and domesticity. In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich offers a now-classic distinction between “two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control.”13 Of the latter, she expands, “for most of what we know as the ‘mainstream’ of recorded history, motherhood as institution has ghettoized and degraded female potentialities,” and she clarifies that her study “is not an attack on the family or on mothering, except as defined and restricted under patriarchy.”14 O’Reilly draws on this separation of female experience and patriarchal institution in order to advance her theories for a feminist practice of mothering, or matricentric feminism, which “functions as a counter narrative of motherhood: it seeks to interrupt the master narrative of motherhood to imagine and implement a view of mothering that is empowering to women.”15 In defining resistance to the nuclear family, O’Reilly lists what she coins “the five A’s of empowered mothering: agency, autonomy, authenticity, authority, and advocacy/activism,”16 terms that drive my analysis in Maternal Modernism. It is important to emphasize that feminist or empowered mothering must be appreciated within its context of race. Patricia Hill Collins predicates her work in Black Feminist Thought on the fact that Western feminism is universalized as white and therefore exclusionary to Black women. I will take up her crucial theorizing of a Black feminism and Black motherhood herein. My study begins with the premise articulated by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver: “As the sanctification of motherhood gained its full ideological force in the nineteenth century, the successful or failed performance of maternity became the ubiquitous subject of social debate and textual representation.”17 In charting these various performances, I look at how diverse figures responded to dominant principles—in place since the late eighteenth century and persistent through the Victorian period and beyond—like the cult of True Womanhood and Republican Motherhood. Claudia Tate contextualizes such concepts within a “politicized motherhood that views mothers and the cultural rhetoric of

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maternity as instruments of social reform.”18 Ideologies like these were designed for white, heteronormative, middle-class American and European women who were deemed responsible for the moral purity of their children and husbands and, by extension, the nation. Relatedly, I consider how authors and protagonists engage with what Ann Taylor Allen refers to as the “patriotic mother-citizen,” whereby motherhood was presented as a woman’s civic responsibility or “social function” to produce healthy citizens in high numbers.19 Allen connects patriotic motherhood to what  is referred to by  historians  as “maternalism,” an ideology promoting “the public importance of motherhood and child-rearing.”20 Lynn Y. Weiner explains that maternalism stands for “a kind of empowered motherhood or public expression of those domestic values associated in some way with motherhood,” and related “to either state-building or to feminism.” In more broad and frequently competing ways, it is regarded “variously as feminist, antifeminist, conservative, progressive, radical, or some combination thereof”21; and just as “the construction of ‘motherhood’ changes over time and place,” so too maternalism, which is predicated on motherhood, “is also a dynamic term with shifting meanings.”22 I explore maternalism in these shifting and contested iterations. Analyzing inscriptions of dominant ideologies, I focus largely on texts produced by and about white, middle-class families, especially as they speak for or against notions like True Womanhood, Republican Motherhood, and patriotic motherhood at the nexus of race and class. I contextualize this material according to concepts like the institution of white patriarchal motherhood and white Western feminism, and contrast it with texts by Black authors and in relation to the institution of Black motherhood and Black feminism. In particular, I examine stories and articles that are written in English by and about American, African American, British, and Nigerian British authors, narrators, and protagonists; and that were produced out of and circulated within Euro-American, transatlantic, and (post)colonial contexts. Sara Ruddick defines ‘mother’ as a figure who is called on to fulfill her children’s demands for “preservation, growth, and social acceptability,” and that such “maternal work” involves “preservative love, nurturance, and training” (17). Acknowledging the complexity of the term ‘mother,’ I agree with O’Reilly, who applies it “to any individual who engages in motherwork; it is not limited to cisgender women but it includes anyone who takes upon the work of mothering as a central part of their life.”23

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Within the limits of this book, though, I concentrate on women who have biological, legal, adoptive, or communal ties to their children. Paid caregivers like governesses, nurses, and nannies are beyond my scope. Further, the kinds of maternal modernisms articulated here necessarily encourage reassessments of, and demands for more engaged, fatherhood. While my analysis considers how women define themselves as mothers in relation to men in general, and more specifically to their husbands and male partners who are or might become fathers, a comprehensive treatment of fatherhood is beyond my purview. While the limited scholarship on mothers in modernism tends to treat women from their (adult) children’s point of view (notably that of the daughter), or as objects rather than subjects, my emphasis here is primarily matrifocal, that is, on texts written and/or narrated by mothers in the firstperson or limited third-person voice.24 In privileging the maternal “I,” I employ Olivia Heal’s conception of a “‘matricritics,’ a matricentric feminist criticism concerned with mother as writer and the attendant subjects.”25 This matricentric strategy aligns with what Susan Maushart calls the unmasking of motherhood. Maushart speaks to women at the twentieth-­ century fin de siècle about the “mask of motherhood” they wear “to disguise the chaos and complexity” of their lives,26 and that prevents them “from speaking clearly what they know, and from hearing truths too threatening to face.”27 She urges today’s women to “strip off the masks” that have kept them silenced, and to “speak with open voices” about their realities.28 Heal and Maushart are addressing their contemporaries, but as Maternal Modernism makes clear, women have been unmasking motherhood for public audiences since at least the Victorian fin de siècle, rendering maternal identity, knowledge, and practice stripped of myth, taboo, and ideality, and from their own authentic—and authorized—perspectives. Unmasking motherhood helps in responding to Allen’s controlling question in Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970: “is it possible to be both a mother and an autonomous individual?” Allen calls this tension “the ‘maternal dilemma,’”29 which she traces to the turn of the twentieth century when women began to demand and exercise choice in whether to become mothers. One of the most pervasive dilemmas was—and remains to this day—how to combine motherhood with paid employment and professional satisfaction. The material covered in Maternal Modernism is substantively taken up with this home/work dilemma.

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Privileging a matrifocal lens allows us to view motherhood on a continuum from the personal to the political and in ways that fuse the two. In their work on maternal autobiography, O’Reilly and Silvia Caporale Bizzini insist “upon the polity of maternity”; “not only is motherhood understood to be political, but also, as a result, mothers themselves become political agents or actors.” Thus, matrifocal autobiography, “in foregrounding the inherent and inevitable self-reflexive and social dimension of motherhood, makes possible a political resistance to institutionalized motherhood.”30 Relatedly, Heal utilizes the discourse of political protest in showcasing a “politically committed” matricentric project, wherein “writers do not so much inhabit as occupy a maternal first person.”31 In so doing they overthrow representations of maternity that are debilitating. Crucially, these authors are not fighting to replace “old myths with new ones: the task is not to construct a new good mother,” but rather to explode all myth-making apparatuses and agendas regarding motherhood.32 I demonstrate how these resistances and protests unfold not only in matrifocal autobiographies but also in fiction and journalism.

The New Woman and New Modernism In defining maternal modernism, I frame my analysis around the figure and discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman. Ann Ardis opens her influential study on the New Woman with the following description: She was called “Novissima”: the New Woman, the Odd Woman, the Wild Woman, and the Superfluous Woman in English novels and periodicals of the 1880s and 1890s. A tremendous amount of polemic was wielded against her for choosing not to pursue the conventional bourgeois woman’s career of marriage and motherhood. Indeed, for her transgressions against the sex, gender, and class distinctions of Victorian England, she was accused of instigating the second fall of man.33

Nicole M. Fluhr acknowledges that the mother and woman writer were common topics in Victorian discussions about femininity. However, emergent discourses in the 1890s offered a fresh take on these figures, paying heed to their “curiosity about and interest in themselves as women and as individuals with identities and interests distinct from those of their children.”34 That said, because of their self-scrutiny and challenges to “maternal selflessness and authorial modesty,” mothers and female writers alike

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were charged with “selfishness and egotism.”35 At the same time, New Woman authors were pushing “for newly expanded rights for the mother even as they declared her freedom from what were formerly understood to be her responsibilities,”36 a detail underscoring the often contradictory New Woman approaches to motherhood. Indeed, Ann Heilmann points to “the variety of New Woman identities that exercised the turn-of-the century imagination”; “the polymorphous nature of the categories and meanings that could be ascribed to her”; and “the textual and semiotic hybridity of the New Woman.”37 In these ways, then, the New Woman serves as a compellingly apt representative for plural modernist maternities, and therefore I have organized my study around her fluid forms. The Victorian fin de siècle was an epoch signaled by the “collision between the old and the new,” when “British cultural politics were caught between two ages, the Victorian and the Modern.”38 As Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst document, the end of the nineteenth century was “fraught with anxiety and with an exhilarating sense of possibility,” evidenced by “a constellation of new formations: the new woman, the new imperialism, the new realism, the new drama, and the new journalism, all arriving alongside ‘new’ human sciences like psychology, psychical research, sexology, and eugenics.”39 Ledger explicates how “The ‘newness’ of the New Woman marked her as an unmistakably ‘modern’ figure, a figure committed to change and to the values of a projected future. Along with many other self-consciously ‘new’ phenomena of the late nineteenth century, the New Woman positioned herself in the modern vanguard.”40 I argue that the vanguard qualities of the New Woman can be recognized in specifically maternal iterations of her. These women emanate new types of motherhood, or modernist motherhoods, in that they question, resist, and thwart restrictions placed on women’s opportunities for self-­ realization and self-determination. They advocate for a reworking of definitions and ideologies that equate ‘woman’ with maternity, and that equate maternity with only the private, domestic sphere. At issue was how to regard, and where to place value on, the mother. Some feminist camps claimed that women should not have to be (or not only be) mothers, while others sought unprecedented means to elevate motherhood to national importance, and to professional status involving training and even financial remuneration. Maternal Modernism explores representations of New Woman and new mother figures and practices across the variegated terrain of feminist movements and modernist maternities.

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Although the New Woman is generally categorized as a late nineteenth-­ century phenomenon, I read New Woman stories and discourses as constitutive of, rather than merely a precursor to, modernism. As such, I push for a disruption of a Victorian/modernist binary, a project compellingly undertaken in recent scholarship.41 For example, Anne Besnault-Levita and Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada encourage a “remapping of the turn of the century by insisting on continuities and interminglings across the centuries,” so that “To think ‘beyond’ or ‘across’ the divide is therefore an invitation to think in terms of complexity and paradox.”42 Such a rethinking is manifested in the ongoing debates about the time frame of modernism itself. While Victorian (1837–1901), fin de siècle (1880–1900), Edwardian (1901–1910), and Georgian (1910–1936) are clearly delineated historical periods, modernism has canonically been understood as a series of seismic cultural, aesthetic, political, and philosophical movements vibrating across the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, to employ what Melba Cuddy-Keane calls a “flexible periodization” renders numerous contending sequences for modernism like 1837–1901, 1900–1945, 1870–1960, or 1922–2022.43 This flexibility is part of what is termed “new modernism,” the scholarly revising of canonical modernism. In general terms, canonical modernism is associated with the impact on society by a host of changes and events indicative of modernity, as in, among others, industrialization, urbanization, and technological developments that introduced the steam engine, railroad, telephone, airplane, automobile, radio, photography, and film. Additionally, multiple factors contributed to a sense of transformation, upheaval, and regeneration, such as women’s movements engaged with feminism, suffrage, and birth control; cosmopolitanism, consumerism, and mass media; secularization and the attendant focus on individual subjectivity, psychology, and the unconscious; socialism, imperialist agendas, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Communism and Fascism. In response, writers, artists, musicians, designers, and dancers experimented with novel materials, styles, and content in their respective interests to register a break from the Victorian past, to document the zeitgeist of disintegration and rebellion, and to embrace the potentiality of the new modern moment. Canonical modernism is attendant on the elitism of coteries, whose often avant-garde and esoteric imperatives were designed to protect insularity and keep out the uninitiated masses, and whose members contributed to the proliferation of ‘isms’ such as (post-)impressionism, primitivism, surrealism, imagism, and futurism. It has been historicized

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and critiqued as the product of mainly white, male, Anglo-American and European practitioners and communities. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz have been prolific proponents of innovative scholarship in the field. In Bad Modernisms, they outline and interrogate “the so-called new modernist studies or new modernisms” arising in the late 1990s with the creation of the Modernist Studies Association, and guided by two mandates: “one that reconsiders the definitions, locations, and producers of ‘modernism’ and another that applies new approaches and methodologies to ‘modernist’ works.”44 In their subsequent article “The New Modernist Studies,” they advocate for “expanding” modernism in ways that are temporal (rethinking rigid demarcations of literary history), spatial (moving beyond Anglo-American locations), and vertical (blurring ‘high’ art with ‘low’ or popular culture, for instance).45 They signal gender, sexuality, racial dynamics, and literary form as among the currents of expansion; and they identify transnational exchange, mass media rhetorics, and politics (rhetorics of citizenship and the state) as particularly salient strands for academic inquiry.46 After more than two decades on the scholarly circuit, new modernism may not seem so ‘new’ at this point. However, the New Woman fiction, journalism, and autobiography I examine herein constitute precisely the kinds of material and modes of dissemination still driving new modernist studies. In the following section, I provide an outline of my chapters, establishing how my readings are informed by a variety of new methodologies linking modernism, motherhood, and the New Woman, and thus testifying to the ongoing stimulus of new modernism.

Outline of Chapters Chapter 2 extends the introductory direction of Chap. 1 by providing background information, definitions, and historical and scholarly contexts for the book as a whole. It establishes, for instance, intersections of modernist and maternal scholarship; the rise of the New Woman as a figure and discourse; and the foregrounding of motherhood in feminist debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter 3 maps the emergence and endurance of the New Woman mother in British and American New Woman fiction from the 1880s to the 1930s, by Mona Caird, Ménie Muriel Dowie, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Canfield, and Nella Larsen. Through tropes of exile and expatriation, protagonists are positioned as rebels who (attempt to) flee the institutions of

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white and Black patriarchal motherhood as they seek freedom in creative, professional, and erotic outlets. Chapter 4 looks at maternal New Womanism in the full run of the London-based weekly feminist periodical The Freewoman (November 1911–October 1912). In addition to editorials by Dora Marsden, the chapter surveys articles furnishing public and “counter-public” discourses by both female and male contributors, among them well-known writers and activists like Ada Nield Chew, Rebecca West, and H. G. Wells; as well as letters to the editor by energized lay readers. Periodical study is invigorating for scholarship due to “modernism’s entanglement, in the pages of early twentieth-century periodicals, with what may seem at first quite unliterary promotions of feminism, socialism, nationalism, and other programs of social change.”47 It is here that we can situate The Freewoman, which covers topics like these as well as pointedly maternal ones like birth control, eugenics, endowed motherhood, and mothers in the workforce, among others. Relatedly, new modernism’s regard for the rhetorics of mass media, and for developments in “novel technologies for transmitting information: telegraph, radio, cinema, and new forms of journalism,”48 clears a vertical space for so-called low texts like the fan magazine, itself a product of the new twin fields of film and its celebrity journalism appearing in the early twentieth century. Chapter 5 takes up these themes in relation to the American mass-market fan magazine Photoplay, tracing the periodical from its first extant issues in 1914 to the arrival of the talkies in 1927. The chapter focuses on profiles, gossip columns, and photo spreads of celebrities of the silent-film era who were also mothers, such as Belle Bennett, Alice Brady, Billie Burke, Catherine Calvert, Alice Joyce, Barbara La Marr, Mae Marsh, Gloria Swanson, and Florence Vidor. It argues that Photoplay is a modernist site that made visible, to a previously unprecedented degree, how motherhood combines with women’s professional status, financial successes, and sexual liberations. Chapter 6 examines literary and political autobiographies published between the 1930s and the 1970s, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ida B. Wells in the United States, and Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, and Vera Brittain in the United Kingdom, who were New Woman mothers, authors, journalists, and activists. The chapter also discusses novelist and journalist Winifred Holtby, who served as the third parent or ‘other’ mother to Brittain’s children. As Brittain defined women’s political memoirs as being a “phenomenon new to the twentieth century,”49 the chapter

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considers how these texts signal new generic possibilities for inscriptions of modern womanhood and motherhood. Further, with an especial focus on the interwar period, the chapter engages with new modernist interest in the rhetorics of citizenship and the state,50 with attention to how the women participated in key historical movements driven by anti-racism, suffragism, socialism, pacifism, and feminism, and events like the two World Wars. In charting how they negotiated their unconventional public lives with unconventional domesticity, the chapter highlights how the personal is political, and how the political can be maternal. Expansions of periodization make it feasible to read the later autobiographies of Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain that extend from the 1950s to the 1970s in terms of modernism. Further, it inspires my inclusion of Buchi Emecheta in this book. Emecheta, the subject of Chap. 7, emigrated from her native Nigeria to England in 1962, where she began recording her experiences as a mother, wife, author, and sociologist. The chapter is indebted to scholarship that spatially extends modernism, as urged, for example, by Susan Stanford Friedman, who advocates for a “planetary turn” in the field.51 Such a turn insists on modernist readings of postcolonial texts like those by Emecheta. Concomitantly, the chapter draws on studies linking modernism to anthropology and sociology. The chapter assesses how Emecheta’s two autobiographical novels and her formal autobiography constitute a London trilogy of documentary life writing. The chapter positions these texts as hybrid versions of the Künstlerroman and matrifocal ethnography, or what I call matroethnography, foregrounding New Woman motherhood within an African women’s literary tradition and institution of Black motherhood. Each of Chaps. 3–7 is divided into two sections: the first frames the material in historical and modernist contexts, the second applies this material to close readings of the primary texts. Chapter 8 reflects on these chapters and then gestures to how themes and issues arising within and out of modernism as launched over one hundred years ago forge networks with our contemporaries, and remain relevant today. Media constructions and perpetuations of the so-called mommy wars, the querying of whether women can ‘have it all,’ and women ‘opting-in and out’ of the workforce are just some of the ways the debates and conversations generated by firstand second-generation New Woman mothers are ongoing in the twenty-­ first century. These varying strands of scholarly inquiry come together in my study at the locus of gender. In examining maternal modernism, I participate in

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the feminist revision of modernism that assigns unprecedented significance to women’s texts too long neglected or excluded by scholars, and to women’s participation in the production and distribution of modernism as it intersects with modernity. My work further aligns with Allen’s project of recuperating specifically maternal histories. Contending that historians of feminism have not taken up the topic substantively, Allen explains that these historians “are usually most interested in women’s entry into new areas such as politics, the professions, sports, and social life outside the family”; they have resisted looking at motherhood because of its associations with traditional, conservative, and essentialist views of womanhood.52 Filling this lacuna, she accounts for how feminists and feminist movements aided the radical transformation of the rights of mothers as citizens, and the creation of new roles for women as mothers “that would not restrict, but enhance, their development as individuals.”53 The primary texts examined in Maternal Modernism are predicated on and contribute to these feminist agendas. Indeed, the conjoining of modernism with motherhood studies opens up for critical and theoretical analysis a vital and complex tradition of women’s writings and identities grounded in maternal perspectives, metaphors, and transgressions. In viewing maternal fiction, journalism, and autobiography through the lens of gender, I expand the gendering of modernism to include a modernism of motherhood. In her 1898 treatise Women and Economics, Gilman commented on motherhood: “We have felt more on this subject than on any other, and thought less. We have also felt much on the relation of the sexes; but it has been made a subject of study, of comparison, of speculation. There are differences of feeling on the sex question, but as to motherhood none. Here and there, to be sure, some isolated philosopher, a Plato, a Rousseau, dares advance some thought on this ground; but, on the whole, no theme of commensurate importance has been so little studied.”54 Three-quarters of a century later, Rich echoes Gilman: “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”55 While motherhood studies has established itself as a flourishing field of academic inquiry from the late 1980s on—coinciding with the stirrings of new modernism—the topic of motherhood at the nexus of modernism remains under-examined. Maternal Modernism allows us to extend our appreciation of the remarkable degree to which maternal themes informed modernist literature and discourse, and to which modernism afforded opportunities for rebellious women to make motherhood

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itself ‘new.’ The matrifocal literatures showcased in Maternal Modernism exemplify how feminist motherhoods feature as a prominent thematic of the long modernist era, and how, by engaging in cross-cultural and transnational dialogue, rebellious mothers provocatively wrote maternity into text and history.

Notes 1. Brittain, “What Does Motherhood Mean?” The unpublished materials of Brittain cited herein are housed in the Vera Brittain Archive, William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Series G, and identified in the Bibliography as VBA.  I greatly appreciate the assistance of Bev Bayzat, McMaster Library Assistant. Quotations from published and unpublished work by Vera Brittain in this book are included by permission of Mark Bostridge and T.  J. BrittainCatlin, Literary Executors for the Estate of Vera Brittain 1970. I am most grateful for their support. 2. Brittain, “What Is the Main Business of Life?” 104. 3. Ibid., 104. 4. Ibid., 104. 5. Michael North offers a detailed history of Pound’s use of this phrase, emerging from Pound’s fascination with Chinese texts: “The source is a historical anecdote concerning Ch’eng T’ang (Tching-thang, Tching Tang), first king of the Shang dynasty (1766–1753 BC), who was said to have had a washbasin inscribed with this inspirational slogan” (162). It appeared in Pound’s 1928 Ta Hio: The Great Learning, Newly Rendered into the American Language (163). Pound also titled his 1934 collection Make It New: Essays. 6. Gay, Modernism, 46. 7. Ibid., 106. 8. Scott, “Introduction,” Gender of Modernism, 4. 9. By these terms, I mean respectively the person, the practice, and the institution. 10. “The Angel in the House” (1854) by English poet Coventry Patmore celebrates and idealizes Victorian marriage. 11. O’Reilly, “Preface,” Matricentric Feminism, 10–11. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. Rich, Of Woman Born, 13. 14. Ibid., 13, 14. 15. O’Reilly, “Matricentric,” Matricentic Feminism, 168. 16. Ibid., 11.

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17. Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 1. 18. Tate, Domestic Allegories, 14. 19. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 87–88. 20. Ibid., 2. 21. Weiner, “Maternalism,” 96. 22. Ibid., 98. 23. O’Reilly, “Preface,” Matricentic Feminism, 11. 24. I focus on the mother as author/protagonist; while these figures register complex relationships with their own mothers, I do not have the space to explore fully the daughter-mother dynamic. 25. Heal, “Towards a Matricentric Feminist Poetics,” 118. 26. Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood, 2. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Ibid., xxi. 29. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 1. 30. O’Reilly and Bizzini, “Introduction,” From the Personal to the Political, 16. 31. Heal, “Towards a Matricentric Feminist Poetics,” 120. 32. Ibid., 120. 33. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 1. 34. Fluhr, “Figuring the New Woman,” 243. 35. Ibid., 243. 36. Ibid., 243. 37. Heilmann, “Introduction,” Feminist Forerunners, 1. 38. Ledger and Luckhurst, “Introduction,” The Fin De Siècle, xiii. 39. Ibid., xiii. 40. Ledger, The New Woman, 5. 41. See Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr; Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada and Anne Besnault-Levita; and Louise Kane. 42. Besnault-Levita and Gillard-Estrada, “Introduction,” Beyond the Victorian/ Modernist Divide, 6; 8. 43. Cuddy-Keane, “Crossing the Victorian/Modernist Divide,” 35. 44. Mao and Walkowitz, “Introduction,” Bad Modernisms,1. 45. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 737–38. 46. Ibid, 738. 47. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 744. 48. Ibid., 742. 49. Brittain, “Autobiography,” 192. 50. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 738. 51. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 4–5. 52. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 2. 53. Ibid., 2. 54. Gilman, Women and Economics, 174. 55. Rich, Of Woman Born, 11.

CHAPTER 2

The New Woman, New Modernisms, and New Motherhoods

Introduction: Modernist and Maternal Scholarship In The Woman Movement (1909), Swedish feminist Ellen Key reports on the “continual inner struggle” faced by Western women since at least the late 1800s. She observes that “literature with woman as its subject has for some decades been filled with the great conflict of modern woman’s life: the conflict between vocation and parents, between vocation and husband, between vocation and child.”1 Historian Ann Taylor Allen similarly suggests that a particularly weighty “maternal dilemma” manifesting at the turn of the twentieth century involved a (white, middle-class) woman’s decision to stay home with her child or take up jobs outside the domicile.2 This conflict, or dilemma, resonated within matrifocal texts of modernism. In this chapter, I provide an overview of the contexts for understanding how late nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American motherhood was constructed in gendered, class, and racialized terms; how debates about home and work unfolded within the public consciousness; and how women’s movements, feminism, and eugenics influenced personal and national discourses on maternal choice and duty. In so doing, I build upon the themes and topics mentioned in Chap. 1, strengthening links between the New Woman, new motherhood, and new modernism. Such detail will inform and facilitate the close textual readings in the remaining chapters. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_2

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The emergence of new modernism can in part be attributed to the feminist revisioning of the field from the 1980s on. Women were as active as men in constructing and promoting modernist aesthetics and ideals, yet modernism was in its time privileged as male and masculine, just as it was attributed to male authors by male critics and theorists in the early scholarship on the period coming out in the second half of the twentieth century. For instance, T. S. Eliot wrote as editor of the London-based Egoist: “I struggle to keep the writing as much as possible in Male hands, as I distrust the Feminine in literature.” Ezra Pound wrote of the staff at the British New Age journal: “Not wildly anti-feminist we are yet to be convinced that any woman ever invented anything in the arts.” 3 In like manner, Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson’s The Modern Tradition and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era were instrumental in fashioning a canon of modernism that was almost entirely male (save for Virginia Woolf), one especially devoted to what Bonnie Kime Scott calls the “traditionally favored group”—Pound, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce.4 In response to this deliberate dismissal of women, in the 1980s and 1990s feminist scholars began retracing literary history and showcasing an alternative canon, positioning women’s subjectivities and contributions as central to modernist art, culture, and politics. This pioneering oeuvre reveals a modernism, as both textual and lived, that is inflected with women’s sexual, domestic, and—of primary interest here—maternal realities, sensibilities, and identities. In Writing for Their Lives, for example, Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers chart a vital network of Anglo-American women. For figures like H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Mary Butts, and Mina Loy, “the traditional chasm between life and art is breached, so that experimentalism and autobiography become inevitably enmeshed and the aesthetic drives impelling the transformation of literature also power the need to live anti-­ conventionally.”5 Men like Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and D.  H. Lawrence, “however radical or innovatory or ‘creative’ their respective literary genius, lived conventionally male heterosexual lives; perhaps wild, sometimes, or eccentric or egoistic, but somehow within the norm.”6 In contrast, for women, modernism “was not just a question of style; it was a way of life”; “What is most striking, both in itself and in relation to their writing, is the shared anti-conventionality of the personal lives of these women at a time when the overwhelming social expectation was that a woman should marry, bear children, and remain both married and monogamous.”7

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Likewise, for Bonnie Kime Scott, “Modernism as we were taught it at midcentury was perhaps halfway to truth. It was unconsciously gendered masculine.” She emphasizes, “The inscriptions of mothers and women, and more broadly of sexuality and gender, were not adequately decoded, if detected at all. Though some of the aesthetic and political pronouncements of women writers had been offered in public, they had not circulated widely and were rarely collected for academic recirculation.”8 Given the rich body of previously marginalized or neglected texts by Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard, Jean Rhys, and Antonia White, to name but a few offered in her anthology The Gender of Modernism, Scott concludes that “Modernism as caught in the mesh of gender is polyphonic, mobile, interactive, sexually charged.”9 Particularly salient is her observation that modernist authors who deliver “Radical critiques of the patriarchal family” are concerned with “maternal relationships” and look to “alternate familial forms,”10 as do my subjects herein. Attention to women’s realities, so often associated with or predicated on the home front, has led to a critical valuing of domestic modernism, or modernism of the everyday. My earlier monograph, Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin, was generated by this interest. For Judy Giles, “domestic modernity refers to the ways in which women negotiated and understood experience and identities in terms of the complex changes that modernization provoked in the so-called private sphere.”11 Victoria Rosner posits that modernist novels articulate a sense of “psychic interiority” and participate in “a post-Victorian reorganization of private life to accord with changing social customs.”12 Liesl Olson demonstrates that the “extraordinary moments” associated with Woolf’s “moment of being” and Joyce’s “epiphany” notwithstanding, commonplace experience is just as much a central topic of literary modernism, which is committed to “the ordinary, to experiences that are not heightened.”13 These notions assist me in arguing that modernist (re)commitments to the domestic, as both of value in itself and in relation to the broader contexts of society and modernity, provide an obvious locus for apprehending maternal praxis. Gendered revisions of modernism occurred near simultaneous to the explosion of motherhood studies. Andrea O’Reilly documents how the field arose out of second-wave feminism, making such a mark that by the 1990s, “most academic disciplines, from anthropology to women’s studies, were engaged in some form of motherhood research,” leading to its current status as a legitimized and distinct academic discipline.14 As such,

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O’Reilly asserts that while Adrienne Rich now-famously lamented in 1976 that “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood,” we can now, in light of countless texts, claim comprehensive insight into the topic.15 Inspired by Rich’s salvo, a plethora of publications in the 1980s and 1990s underpins a canon of maternal literary criticism and theory. This prolific outburst within so short a period testifies to the heightened readiness of researchers to direct their energies toward a profoundly relevant yet understudied subject. Marianne Hirsh helped to lay the groundwork for many in the field. In The Mother/Daughter Plot, she addresses the polarities generated by motherhood within feminism. She queries, “Can an analysis of motherhood point toward liberation or does it inevitably ensconce feminists in constraining cultural stereotypes?”16 Explaining the disconnect between feminist and maternal discourses, she identifies four areas where feminist rhetoric has avoided or been uneasy with the maternal: there is the sense that motherhood continues to be linked to patriarchy and thus mothers remain in bondage to men; that elements of maternity associated with “vulnerability and lack of control” are anathema to feminism’s goals of empowerment; that maternity—necessarily entangling women with their bodies—keeps women problematically equated with biology; and that, in light of women’s often competitive and iniquitous relationships with each other, “feminist theoretical writing in the U.S. is permeated with fears of maternal power and with anger at maternal powerlessness.”17 In order to bring the two discourses into greater alignment, she entreats theorists “to assume a maternal position and occasionally to speak in a maternal voice,” proposing that feminism should “begin by listening to the stories that mothers have to tell, and by creating the space in which mothers might articulate those stories.”18 Modernist women carved out textual spaces in which they told truths about their lives; Maternal Modernism pays heed to these stories. Hirsh’s work additionally illuminates how the mother has historically not functioned as a protagonist in plots structured on the Freudian family romance of father, mother, and son; and how, even in narratives about mothers and daughters, the perspective of the daughter, as subject, is privileged over that of the mother, as object. Hirsh holds up as a paradigm Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, wherein the voice of Jocasta, Oedipus’ mother, is missing. She sees this absence as indicative of a broader literary problem: “in asking where the story of Jocasta is in the story of Oedipus, I am

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asking not only where the stories of women are in men’s plots, but where the stories of mothers are in the plots of sons and daughters.” In order “to know Jocasta’s maternal story … we would have to begin with the mother.”19 Following Hirsh, in Narrating Mothers Brenda Daly and Maureen T. Reddy coined the phrase “daughter-centricity” to address the fact that “Even in women’s accounts of motherhood, maternal perspectives are strangely absent. We most often hear daughters’ voices in both literary and theoretical texts about mothers, mothering, and motherhood, even in those written by feminists who are mothers.”20 As a corrective, their collection of essays about North American and British literatures from the 1960s to the 1990s foregrounds maternal subjectivity. Maternal Modernism serves as another response to Hirsch’s call for creating a scholarly and creative space for the articulation of maternal voices. A number of scholars, like those mentioned above, theorize, analyze, and trace histories of literary motherhood across different periods and genres. Modernist scholars cite motherhood as a significant aspect of modernism. To date, however, there is little substantive treatment of motherhood and modernism in symbiotic terms. Hirsh, for instance, examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels by Western European and North American women, reading representations of mother-daughter bonds through realism, modernism, and post-modernism; the section “Modernism and the Maternal” (on 1920s works by Virginia Woolf, Colette, and Edith Wharton) makes up just a small portion of the text. Moreover, as Hirsh acknowledges, while stories of the early twentieth century often depict empowered young women who have benefitted from first-wave feminist gains related to suffrage and birth control, for example, daughter-centric perspectives dominate novels in this section (as they did in that on realism as well).21 While Hirsch, Daly and Reddy, and others suggest that matrifocal narratives tend to emerge later in the century—in post-modern, postcolonial, and second-wave feminist contexts—I situate matrifocal texts as constitutive of an unexamined facet of modernism. Jane Silverman Van Buren offers the first book-length study on mothers with reference to modernism, The Modernist Madonna. She investigates Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and a body of late nineteenth-century paintings by Mary Cassatt, referring to these artists as early modernists, underscoring an emergent new modernism whose temporal boundaries reach back to the 1850s. Van Buren details how these women registered their personal

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struggles with “a cult of a domestic Madonna” that influenced their psychic lives, moving from depictions of “a super-natural, idealized icon of mother and child” to those of “the flesh-and-blood mother and living, feeling infant.”22 In providing these more authentic, materialist portraits as a challenge to a culture driven by male perspectives and directives for spiritually glorified, mythic maternity, they carried out an artistic “rebellion”23—placing themselves within the heretical context of modernism I highlighted in Chap. 1. That said, despite the title, and beyond a handful of direct references to the term, The Modernist Madonna does not engage specifically with modernism as either a period or aesthetic. Moreover, the texts examined deal with mother-child relations, with much emphasis given to the infant’s/adolescent’s individuation and perceptions of the mother, rather than to the subjectivity of the mother herself. They are thus not specifically matrifocal. Mothering Modernity by Marylu Hill targets the 1910s to 1920s. Showcasing daughter-centricity, she explores daughter protagonists in novels by authors like E. M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf, positing that “the remarkable and consistent trope of the young modern woman” signaled an early and significant feature of modernism.24 (Hill sees these fictional women as sisters of the 1890s New Woman, a point to which I will return in Chap. 3.) The respective protagonists studied by Hill embody, as did those in Van Buren’s work, “a hopeful vision of ‘personhood’ rising out of the decayed hulks of Victorian gender codes.”25 By synthesizing and adapting the qualities and languages of the father (intellectual knowledge) and mother (perception), protagonists mature and empower themselves while also radically attempting “to literally ‘remake’ the mother—to bring the female past into new connection with the present.”26 While Hill is concerned with the daughter’s quest for self-realization through the mother, I am interested in texts depicting how mothers wrote themselves into modernity; how they sought escape from their imprisonment in “angel in the house” maternity; and how they “remade” motherhood on their own terms and in their own matrifocal voices. Three additional books of mention, given their titles, are Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism by Beryl Schlossman, Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal: From Yeats to Joyce by Diane Stubbings, and Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal: The Mother’s Son by James Martell. For Schlossman, “madonnas of modernism” are “literary and visual images of desirable objects, figures of girls and women conceived by

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men” in works by Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, W. B. Yeats, and Joyce.27 Stubbings and Martell equally and respectively explore how male authors like Baudelaire, Joyce, Sean O’Casey, and Samuel Beckett inscribed maternal influence within their son-focal texts, and as such like other studies they de-center the mother herself. Having briefly surveyed some of the origins of academic research into motherhood and modernism, I note that, despite the feminist rethinking of modernism that highlights the thematic of motherhood, the call has not carried over into full-scale inquiry, just as the equally proliferating field of motherhood studies in the twenty-first century has not yielded further monographs on modernist maternity. From within the two fields, however, and extending to histories of women’s writing and women’s movements, there are rich areas of scholarship engaging with literature, feminism, and gender to which I am indebted in my mapping of maternal modernism.28 As I argue that the New Woman is a central component of modernist motherhood, I necessarily engage with New Woman studies. In their introduction to New Woman Hybridities, Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham register how, in the early twenty-first century, the New Woman has been taken up by disciplines including “history, literature, cultural studies and women’s studies” so that it “may seem to be a topic on which it is difficult now to say anything ‘new.’”29 Yet, given that to date there is no book devoted to the New Woman as mother, I suggest that Maternal Modernism indeed has something new to say. In the following two sections, I first offer an overview of feminine directives prevailing in the Victorian age with which the New Woman was to grapple; I then turn to defining the historical and textual constructions of the New Woman in general and New Women mothers in particular.

The True Woman, Republican Mother, and Race Mother Ideologies like the cult of True Womanhood and Republican Motherhood laid out the terms for ‘proper’ female, feminine, and maternal conduct, ones to which New Women responded with compromise, criticism, and resistance. The most prevalent New Woman icon was white, Anglo-­ American, and middle- and upper-middle class, and I largely delimit the scope of my study to this dominant figure. That said, the New Woman could be a racialized, hybrid, cross-cultural, and international

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phenomenon. Martha H.  Patterson stresses that while the mainstream trope of the American New Woman is of “the bloomer-wearing bicyclist or slogan-wielding suffragist,” this figure can be found in “working-class newspapers and highbrow monthly magazines, in socialist and sensationalist newspapers,” in publications directed at white readers and those targeting audiences who are Black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican American.30 Heilmann and Beetham illuminate manifestations of the New Woman in periodicals not only from the United States and Britain but also from Hungary, Japan, Canada, and Germany. Acknowledging the breadth of this material, I also contextualize the New Woman figure within discourses of Black identity and nationhood, including the ideology of the New Negro Woman and the race mother, as well as within the postcolonial discourses of modernity that intersect with the temporal and spatial expansions of new modernism. I therefore participate in what Heilmann promotes as “a new departure in New Woman criticism by addressing the cross-national and ethnic dimensions of the field.”31 In Women and Economics (1898), Charlotte Perkins Gilman graphically describes women’s historical imprisonment in the domestic, private sphere. Affirming that “The human female has been restricted in range from the earliest beginning,” Gilman refers to “the increasing constriction of custom closing in upon the woman, as civilization advanced, like the iron torture chamber of romance.”32 There are profound consequences for “the reduction in voluntary activity to which the human female has been subjected. Her restricted impression, her confinement to the four walls of her home, have done great execution, of course, in limiting her ideas, her information, her thought-processes, and power of judgement; […] but this is innocent in action compared with her restricted expression, the denial of freedom to act.”33 Indeed, “in the ever-growing human impulse to create, the power and will to make, to do, to express one’s new spirit in new forms,—here she has been utterly debarred.” Overall, “Whatever she has been allowed to do must be done in private and alone.”34 The New Woman sought to break out of these physical and intellectual confines, as we shall see. Gilman’s description draws on and reinforces conceptions of the cult of True Womanhood. Barbara Welter defines this ideology as it took hold from 1820 to 1860: “Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women’s magazines, gift annuals and religious literature” of the period, “was the hostage in the home.”35 Despite changes within society throughout history, “one thing at least remained the same—a true woman

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was a true woman, wherever she was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues which made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as an enemy of God, of civilization and of the Republic.”36 (Recall from Chap. 1 Ann Ardis’ statement that the New Woman “was accused of instigating the second fall of man.”37) Welter frames the True Woman within a discourse of race: “It was a fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, the nineteenth-century American woman had—to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand.” Welter concludes, “The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife—woman.”38 To be a real woman, then, meant one had to embody these so-called virtues, all of which included whiteness as an intrinsic component. Conceptions of True Womanhood assume the political dimensions arising from the American Revolution and declaration of the United States as a nation independent from Britain, in 1776. Charting the rise of a white Republican Motherhood, Linda K. Kerber states, “For many women the Revolution had been a strongly politicizing experience,” yet they were granted little agency as political beings in the newly formed nation. Eager to make their mark, women “found what they were seeking in the notion of what might be called ‘Republican Motherhood.’ The Republican Mother integrated political values into her domestic life. Dedicated as she was to the nurture of public-spirited male citizens, she guaranteed the steady infusion of virtue into the Republic.”39 Discourses of Republican Motherhood allowed women to claim an important role in the body politic but one that had to be enacted within the home.40 In this position, “The Republican Mother was an educated woman who could be spared the criticism normally addressed to the Learned Lady because she placed her learning at her family’s service.” Ultimately, “The model republican woman was a mother.”41 As evidenced by these discourses of (white) femininity, the nineteenth century was increasingly preoccupied with the Woman Question or Woman Problem relating to women’s legal rights, status, and selfhoods within the private sphere of the home, and their roles in the wider public sphere of work, their communities, and nations. At issue was the degree to which women adhered to notions of “womanliness,” where success was the fulfillment of what Lyn Pykett calls the “proper feminine,” which

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situated the ideal woman within the white, middle-class domicile, as we have seen above. Domestically ensconced, she was valued for tending to the hearth, and for reproducing—and being morally responsible for the purity of—not only her children but also the race.42 As the “angel in the house,” she is asexual, self-sacrificing, and dependent on the provisions of her husband. Her “improper” antithesis, a failure of the feminine, is demonic, animalistic, sexually voracious, self-assertive, and independent.43 With women thus categorized, men secured their place within the competitive, economic, public domain of “industry, commerce and politics.”44 Pykett qualifies, “there was always a gap between the domestic ideology and social practice”; men and women participated to varying degrees in both spheres, and throughout the century the divisions were consistently contested in numerous “discursive contexts.”45 I adapt Pykett’s terms to argue that dichotomous femininities inform, more specifically, conceptions of “proper” and “improper” maternities. In so doing, I further adapt the era’s controlling concerns to include what I call the Motherhood Question or Motherhood Problem. My discussion builds upon the theoretical underpinnings of the institution of patriarchal motherhood. Adrienne Rich, for instance, in her ground-breaking treatise Of Woman Born distinguishes between “two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control.” Of the latter, she protests, “for most of what we know as the ‘mainstream’ of recorded history, motherhood as institution has ghettoized and degraded female potentialities.”46 Rich critiques constructions of the family and mothering as they are “defined and restricted under patriarchy,”47 as do many of the figures in my study. Drawing on Rich, Deirdre H. McMahon posits that motherhood is not only a manifestation of biology but also operates as a politically infused institution on three levels: the historical valuing of women for their reproductive capacities; the participation of women’s reproductive labors in the ongoing “maintenance of social institutions” such as “class hierarchies, normative gender roles, the concentration of wealth through inheritance, and nationalism itself”; and the institution of motherhood taking precedence over women’s actual experiences of parturition and relationships with their children.48 McMahon expounds that for the Victorians, mothers became “conduits of material and cultural reproduction,” so that the “idealization of maternity is invested in the reproduction of ideology rather

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than children—safe guarding norms and ideas, including the boundaries of identity.”49 As suggested by the ideologies of True Womanhood and Republican Motherhood, operating under the aegis of patriarchy, maternity was inflected not only with moral but also with racial and national imperatives, such that women were called on to mother future generations of healthy citizens. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver trace the centrality of motherhood to fin-de-siècle discourses in imperial Britain: “Maternity was expected to anchor key cultural oppositions such as masculine versus feminine, bourgeois versus working class, British versus foreign, and white versus racially other.”50 Sally Ledger details how Victorian culture within the British Empire “was underpinned by a strong sense of national and racial superiority,”51 measured by the fact that even many middle-class women with feminist sensibilities supported the imperial mission, embracing the “idea of British women as ‘mothers’ of the empire, and as the regenerators of a more specifically white and British ‘race.’”52 This stance was perhaps, at least for some, tactical: “Women’s roles as nurturers, child-­ carers, preservers of purity, could all be put to use as part of the wider imperial project. A good deal of feminist argument, in common with imperial discourse, was preoccupied with race preservation, racial purity and racial motherhood.”53 In this way, and in the spirit of Republican Motherhood, women used notions of empire and maternity both to satisfy societal dictates of proper feminine conduct within the private sphere and to empower themselves as being essential to the ongoing functioning of the public sphere. Claudia Tate looks at similar issues within American literary contexts. She uncovers eleven extant novels celebrating domestic life written by African American women from 1890 to 1903, during the post-­ Reconstruction era (1877–1915). Following the American Civil War, the period of Reconstruction in the South (1863–1877) amounted to a failure, generating in the post-Reconstruction a resurgence of racism and “one of the most violent periods of white/black relations.”54 Tate argues that the “black Victorian love stories” in her study were a calculated response to this violence, an aesthetic attempt to counter racial stereotyping and injustice with images of “proper womanly” achievements of the kind championed and condoned by white society. The novels constitute their own popular genre directed at female and male middle- and working-­ class readers, depicting “a heroine who is an exemplar of feminine purity, piety, and the work ethic,” and charts a plot promoting “bourgeois social

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objectives of domesticity and respectability.”55 Underscoring that these novels were not intended as a memetic record of African American courtship and marriage, she concludes, rather, that Black women writers constructed narratives of idealized Victorian domesticity, along with “civil ambition and prosperity,” to celebrate symbolically African American social advancement.56 Anne Stavney explores how literature of maternal racial uplift proliferated in the early twentieth century and during the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance of the 1920s, a movement showcasing and politicizing Black art and culture. She explains, “In their promotion of the true black woman, black male leaders accepted the tenets of the white cult of True Womanhood with its attendant emphasis on the importance of motherhood.”57 Black leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois were instrumental in articulating a “reformist ideology of motherhood,” laying out a program for recuperating respectability for Black women too long denigrated by the racist iconography of the sexualized female body on the one hand, and the desexualized mammy figure (detached from nurturing her own children) on the other.58 Speaking to a group of students at the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary in 1902, Du Bois addressed the topic “The Work of Negro Women in Society” by asserting that women’s “first and greatest function” was motherhood, the second, homemaking.59 According to Stavney, the pervasive circulation of this argument solidified the truism that “Special feminine qualities suited black women for motherhood, and by becoming good mothers and creating a good home life, they advanced the race.”60 This Black maternal paragon was regarded as the New Negro Woman, an epithet that complicates maternal disobedience associated with the white New Woman, as I will discuss later in this chapter and in Chap. 3. The privileging of feminine and maternal ideals was, clearly, a dominant trope in constructions of both white and Black womanhood. As the work of scholars like Welter, Kerber, Ledger, Pykett, Tate, and Stavney illuminates, Victorian and early twentieth-century women, Black and white, were pressured into the cult of True Womanhood, enlisted to do their part for their respective republics and races by mothering the next generations. Allison Berg highlights that the fusion of racial and gendered ideologies inform the “race mother,” whom she defines as “a woman whose maternal labors were viewed as contributing positively to racial progress.”61 Moreover, both “black and white women’s movements […] used the figure of the race mother as a powerful symbolic construct” employed in nation building.62

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True Womanhood, Republican Motherhood, and race motherhood defined Victorian society across the transatlantic board, and constituted dominant concepts with which New Women engaged. Although idealized maternity enjoyed a privileged place within the social imaginary, it was also a contested one. As Rosenman and Klaver contend, “no one could live up to the perfect selflessness, purity, and love connoted by ‘mother.’”63 Jill Matus, Mary Poovey, and Sally Shuttleworth analyze medical and advice literature, for instance, and find that “the image of the idealized mother was continually threatened and displaced by that of the demonic mother”— illustrated through topics like infanticide and insanity, and the sexualized mother.64 These and other “maternal aberrations” became “Fraught sites of instability” leading to “both anxieties and discursive possibility.”65 Such “anxieties and discursive possibility” are inscribed within the texts examined in Maternal Modernism. Rosenman and Klaver assert that the “reorientation” of Victorian studies in the last few decades “has created a propitious moment to dislodge maternity from its imbrication in conventional formulations of domestic femininity. If scholarship no longer conceives of the domestic ideal as the linchpin of Victorian culture and society, then motherhood, too, can—and needs to—be reconceptualised,”66 as the chapters in their book—and mine—work to do. Their collection of essays helps with “defamiliarizing maternity”67 by generating a dialogue about its diverse and alternative possibilities, predicated on their findings that the Victorian model was not the only option for motherhood, being “more complex, less stable, less coherent, and less universal than the iconic simplicity it connoted.”68 This defamiliarizing informed the agendas of New Woman writers and protagonists, as many wrestled with resisting or rejecting the maternal ideal, contending with charges of ‘unnatural’ mothering and ‘unwomanly’ behavior. In the section below, I chart the first appearances, definitions, and textual renderings of these New Women.

The New Woman: Names and Narratives The capitalized phrase New Woman entered the lexicon in the British Westminster Review in 1865, where the heroines of sensation novels were castigated as the “New Woman” who was “no longer the Angel, but the Devil in the House.”69 Although sensation novels of the 1860s should not be confused with the New Woman fiction emerging in the 1880s and 1890s—the former boasting scandalous plots of adultery, crime, and

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intrigue, the latter offering proto-feminist critiques of women’s roles and identities within patriarchy—both genres featured rebellious women.70 Thirty years later, in August 1893, the label was applied by The Woman’s Herald, a marginal British feminist publication. In “The Social Standing of the New Woman,” readers learn that “woman suddenly appears on the scene of man’s activities, as a sort of new creation, and demands a share in the struggles, the responsibilities and the honours of the world, in which, until now, she has been a cipher.”71 As Michelle Elizabeth Tusan relays, it is here that the New Woman “was first invented as a fictional icon to represent the political woman of the coming century,” that is, “a reasonable and thoughtful woman who had only the best interests of the British state at heart. In essence, the New Woman represented feminists’ utopian vision of the model social reformer. Her interest in politics and social justice, however, were not represented as a challenge to her dedication to the home, but rather were depicted as an extension of her domestic duties.”72 As we can see, then, the New Woman emerged out of and in relation to ideologies of True Womanhood and Republican Motherhood. The following year, the term went mainstream in a disagreement between Irish feminist author Sarah Grand (Frances Bellenden-Clarke) and English anti-feminist author Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé) that was played out in the pages of the influential literary magazine North American Review.73 In March 1894, in her article “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” Grand advocates for a social or sexual purity feminism, a broad nineteenth-century movement predicated on Christian morality that assumes the social and racial health of the family and nation will be elevated through the noble attributes and behaviors of women. In this line, Grand attacks “the Bawling Brotherhood” of men for their moral failings, which have rendered them essentially effeminate boys. She proposes to solve the Woman Question by urging the “new woman”—who will no longer acquiesce to the old order—to awaken from her apathy in the “Home-is-the-Woman’s Sphere” and to develop her own intellectual and spiritual powers, and in so doing restore men to proper manhood.74 Grand assures man that in seeking agency and voice, woman is not endangering her “True womanliness”; rather, “the sacred duties of wife and mother will be all the more honorably performed when women have a reasonable hope of becoming wives and mothers of men.”75 Grand’s new woman must “set the human household in order” by drawing on her traditional feminine instincts for household cleanliness and child-rearing, and in this way “the new woman” is “elevated” above man.76

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In the May 1894 issue, Ouida replied with hostility to Grand in the piece “The New Woman.” In her opening salvo, she charges that the New Woman (capitalizing the phrase) is humorless, “sitting aloof and aloft in her solitary meditation on the superiority of her sex.”77 Regarding motherhood, Ouida disparages that the New Woman’s “influence on children might be so great that through them she would practically rule the future of the world; but she delegates her influence to the vile school boards if she be poor, and if she be rich to governesses and tutors; nor does she in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred ever attempt to educate or control herself into fitness for the personal exercise of such influence.” The New Woman is, in sum, “a menace to humankind” due to “her fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her over-weening estimate of her own value and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous.”78 With these opposing New Woman images provided by Grand and Ouida setting the stage for fin-de-siècle debate, Tusan concludes that “the utopian vision of feminists translated into a dystopic nightmare for social critics writing for the mainstream press.”79 Indeed, British popular newspapers and magazines like The Pall Mall Gazette and Punch responded with derisive treatment of the New Woman. Seizing the opportunity to register and perpetuate society’s increasing anxieties about the Woman Question, they unleashed satiric captions and cartoons ridiculing the New Woman as ‘improperly’ feminine who, above all, resisted the call to wifehood and motherhood.80 While a treatment of men is beyond the scope of my book, it is important to acknowledge that figures of the New Man accompanied those of the New Woman. Chris Willis notes that authors of New Woman fiction “were left with the problem of finding a man to match the New Woman. Punch joked about the New Man of the future as the anxious, downtrodden house-husband of an emancipated wife.”81 The New Woman’s presence in periodicals marks the transatlantic nature of her currency. Emerging in Britain, she concomitantly shaped American culture. From the initial appearances of the New Woman in the Victorian fin de siècle, Patterson finds that “American magazines borrowed New Woman iconography mostly from European, especially British, sources and charted the status of the New Woman around the world.”82 To be sure, her attributes cross national boundaries: she is a “suffragist, prohibitionist, clubwoman, college girl, American girl, socialist, capitalist, anarchist, pickpocket, bicyclist, barren spinster, mannish woman, outdoor girl, birth-control advocate, modern girl, eugenicist, flapper, blues woman, lesbian, and vamp.” Above all, the New Woman connotes “a distinctly

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modern ideal of self-refashioning” and signaled “a crucial modern social development.”83 Similarly, in asking, “Did the New Woman really exist?” Talia Schaffer points to women like “clerks, typists, teachers, college students, journalists, or perhaps even shopgirls” who “agitated for greater autonomy in everything from etiquette to employment.” These women “walked without chaperones, carried their own latchkeys, bicycled, and the more daring ones smoked cigarettes, cut their hair, or wore divided skirts and plain costume.”84 The attention to appearances here underscores not only how the New Woman presented herself physically, but also how she was a product of, and delineator of, consumer style and culture, a further indicator of her modern pedigree. Willis, for example, traces how the New Woman in the 1890s shifted from being imaged as “an unattractive bluestocking” to “a beautiful bicycling Amazon” in the commercial fiction of the day.85 Hilary Fawcett relatedly describes how the fin-de-siècle New Woman (the “feminist, the suffragette, the student and professional woman”) donned a uniform of “the ‘tailor made’ and shirt waister, a look which referred to masculinity in its plainness and tailored cut, yet retained the lines of conventionally fashionable female dress.” By the 1910s, the New Woman had become the “fashionable flapper” connoting luxury consumption and stylishness, and signaling “the new order in relation to female sexuality and status.”86 Studies like these, illuminating the confluence of fashion and feminisms, inform my reading of celebrity mothers profiled in Photoplay magazine in Chap. 5. Patterson emphasizes that the New Woman was both “a character type and a cultural phenomenon,” in both cases subject to contradictions and paradoxes.87 As a discursive figure constructed in novels, periodicals, and cartoons from the mid-to-late nineteenth century and beyond, the New Woman was defined and depicted in contested terms. Her antagonists mocked her as being a mannish, overeducated bore, an oversexed vamp and champion of free love, and self-absorbedly preoccupied with her psychological and emotional states of being; her allies promoted her as highly educated, career driven, engaged in and by the public world around her, and sexually healthy.88 Scholars testify to the kaleidoscope of meanings associated with the New Woman. Heilmann describes her as “The harbinger of cultural, social and political transformations” who symbolized the turn-of-the-century zeitgeist: “Her political demands reflected the crisis of the ancien régime beleaguered by issues of class and race, authority and ideology, while her

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‘sexual anarchy’ exacerbated deep-seated anxieties about the shifting concepts of gender and sexuality.”89 Ledger illuminates that the New Woman came into being at the same cultural moment as the dandy and the decadent, such that the late nineteenth-century press frequently co-accused them of violating Victorian moral sexual codes. Moreover, the sensationalism of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial carried over to the New Woman, who became linked with homosexuality as she was necessarily pathologized for having sexual desires and demands that may have undermined True Woman conduct.90 Associations of the New Woman with sexual deviancy led to fears that the New Woman would bring ruin to the institution of motherhood, as we shall see. The New Woman was, all in all, an ontological composite. Heilmann queries the relationship between text and history accordingly: “Who or what was the New Woman? A literary construct, a press fabrication and discursive marker of rebellion, or a ‘real’ woman? A writer, social reformer, or feminist activist? A middle-class daughter eager to study for a career, a married woman chafing against legal inequality, a woman-loving spinster, a reluctant mother, a sexual libertarian? Even the factual writers who defined and were defined as New Women were apt to shift and contest the parameters of the category.”91 Ledger concludes that the only certainty was that the New Woman “was dangerous, a threat to the status quo.”92 Tagged as such an enemy, the New Woman was subjected to a misogynistic discourse that sought to demean and diffuse her gendered anarchy. However, Ledger argues that the New Woman challenged this “dominant” discourse via a “reverse” discourse by which the New Woman “began to speak on her own behalf.”93 It is precisely in these empowered spaces that we hear matrifocal voices. Appreciating how the New Woman dually functioned as a corporeal being and constructed entity, I subscribe to Ledger’s conviction that scholars must balance the findings made by social historians about “historical events and actualities” with those made by cultural and literary historians about discursive phenomena. Like Ledger and others, then, I work from the position that the discursive New Woman “is just as ‘real’ and historically significant as what she actually was”;94 and I situate the New Woman within relevant movements and events of the day. The texts examined within Maternal Modernism present female characters and authors directly confronting the realities and milieu of their own and other women’s lives. Their narratives reveal, for instance, how the diverse New Woman participated in the woman movement and in developments in

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feminism—including campaigns for suffrage, birth control, and maternal welfare—during the fin de siècle and beyond. While a detailed history of these philosophies, groups, and goals is beyond my scope, in the next section I highlight some of the terms by which we can appreciate the New Woman’s political engagements.

The Woman Movement, Feminism, and Maternalism Conceptions of the New Woman went hand in hand with the politics of gender and the gendering of politics. Schaffer posits that the creation of the New Woman as a “mythic icon” allowed authors to evoke “an extraordinary range of emotional associations, a flood of feelings which can powerfully support whatever goal the writer has channelled it towards.”95 That is, in their “rejecting, affirming, decrying, or defining the ‘New Woman,” authors and journalists could stake a claim for their respective positions with regard to women’s issues, and in this way may have contributed to the establishment of “‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ camps” in Europe and North America.96 Many New Woman narratives endorsed the goals of what we now call first-wave feminisms. The transatlantic successes of the New Woman writer’s project is registered by the fact that “feminist ideas were taken up by young middle-class women and modified into claims for personal liberty and equality,”97 reflective of legal, educational, economic, and social advancements on both sides of the Atlantic.98 Feminism is, of course, a complex and historically contingent term. In clarifying what ideas were ascribed to it, and in order to talk about feminist mothering, I want to look briefly at how feminism as a concept and movement evolved in the early 1900s, and how it informed, and was in part generated by, imperatives for maternal modernism. Patricia Hill Collins underscores that Western feminism has “suppressed Black women’s ideas” through its racism and preoccupation with issues concerning white, middle-­class women.99 In this section, I focus on outlining this white Western feminism, given that it was the dominant feminism of New Womanism emerging out of and influencing mainstream culture. Later in this chapter, and throughout the book, I take up what Collins and other scholars distinguish as Black feminism and the institution of Black motherhood. In her comprehensive survey The Grounding of Modern Feminism, Nancy F. Cott cites the first definition of feminism, in the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary … Supplement, as “the opinions and principles of the

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advocates of the extended recognition of the achievements and claims of women; advocacy of women’s rights.” 100 Conceding that the word is difficult to pin down, she offers her own working definition, recognizing that it is limited to the scope of her American-based study on “the big-city, well-educated, white, usually Protestant, gainfully employed or politically active women who showed up in national media and in national women’s organizations.”101 This feminism is a “belief in what is usually referred to as sex equality”; “presupposes that women’s condition is socially constructed”; and “posits that women perceive themselves not only as a biological sex but (perhaps even more importantly) as a social grouping.” Acknowledging that certainly not all women hold to these tenets, and that men can also be feminists, she concludes: “Feminism asks for sexual equality that includes sexual difference. It aims for individual freedoms by mobilizing sex solidarity. It posits that women recognize their unity while it stands for diversity among women. It requires gender consciousness for its basis yet calls for the elimination of prescribed gender roles.”102 Early twentieth-century feminism had its antecedents in nineteenth-­ century women’s activisms. Cott highlights three noteworthy aspects of what was called, in its own time, the “woman movement.”103 These comprise “service and social action, motivated variously by noblesse oblige or by neighborly or altruistic intent”; “more overtly self-interested, more focused campaigns for ‘woman’s rights’”; and “more amorphous and broad-ranging pronouncements and activity toward women’s self-­ determination via ‘emancipation’ from structures, conventions, and attitudes enforced by law and custom.”104 Throughout the century, participants in the woman movement gave speeches, wrote books and pamphlets, engaged in civil disobedience as they fought for abolition and suffrage, and created institutions to aid women like homes for widows and orphans, colleges, medical offices, and organizations for mothers, among other things. Despite the differences of opinion and tactics of the various groups operating under the umbrella term, there was a demonstrable “common thread of rage at the injustice of male dominance and the arbitrariness of male privilege.”105 By the end of the nineteenth century, the woman movement was defined by paradox, such that many women used a tactical duality to “argue on egalitarian grounds for equal opportunity in education and employment and for equal rights in property, law, and political representation, while also maintaining that women would bring special benefits to public life by virtue of their particular interests and capacities.”106 Such dualities parallel debates about motherhood that my

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study addresses: some women argued that men as much as women could and should assume the duties of childcare, for instance, while others sought to highlight and elevate the status of women by championing them for their incomparable parenting abilities. A shift in nomenclature from “woman movement” to “feminism” occurred at the fin de siècle. The French word féminisme became associated with the New Woman when used by French suffrage pioneer Hubertine Auclert in the 1880s. It made its way to Britain in the 1890s and then spread across Europe as well as to North and Latin America in the early twentieth century. As an English term (often capitalized), it was initially used with derogatory intention, and had the ability to shock, but by 1913 had entered into common usage.107 By the 1910s, feminism had cohered in that its “several strands were all loudly voiced and mutually recognized as part of the same phenomenon of female avant-garde self-­ assertion.”108 As I showcase in Chap. 4, emergent feminism directly shaped The Freewoman periodical, whose first issue (November 23, 1911) exclaims: “The publication of THE FREEWOMAN marks an epoch. It marks the point at which Feminism in England ceases to be impulsive and unaware of its own features, and becomes definitely self-conscious and introspective. For the first time, feminists themselves make the attempt to reflect the feminist movement in the mirror of thought.”109 Cott’s invocation of the avant-garde testifies to how feminism was at least in part a response to modernity and constitutive of modernism. At the start of the twentieth century, “Science applied its force to technology and industrial management; its mystique reigned in philosophy and literature. Individuals’ attempts to grasp hold of their changed world broke through the surface of time-worn expectations in assertions of the value of the ‘new.’”110 This “new” value extended to the New Woman, whose successes in the fin de siècle expanded within the twentieth century: “The noticeable growth of single women’s employment outside the home, the diversification of living patterns and family relationships that implied, and the emergence to social concern of a new type of woman leader, educated in college and perhaps graduate school and trained to analyze social problems, set the stage for a new era in the woman movement.”111 Cott argues that the word feminism made “a semantic claim to female modernism.”112 Driving home the point, she cites American writer Edna Kenton’s July 1914 article for the woman’s magazine The Delineator, “Feminism Will Give—Men More Fun, Women Greater Scope, Children Better Parents, Life More Charm.” Accepting that “We have grown accustomed … to

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something or other known as the Woman Movement. That has an old sound—it is old,”113 Kenton playfully yet powerfully positions feminism in the vanguard: “Feminism, something so new that it isn’t in the dictionaries yet, is undoubtedly the newest thing wrong about women.” That is, “Anything new in the world, whatever it is, so long as it is new, particularly if it concerns women, is wrong”—previous and ongoing “wrongs” being women’s demands for higher learning and suffrage.114 From its earliest manifestations, feminism, like the woman’s movement, had a tremendous impact on personal and institutional motherhood, just as women (and men) who sought rights and recognitions for mothers made maternity a central facet of feminism. In order to appreciate these links, it is important to position feminism in relation to maternalism, the predominant maternal ideology at the fin de siècle. A capacious term, maternalism encompasses the valuing of maternity as a public service, and the elevation of motherhood to the loftiest of human accomplishments.115 Maternalism functions as an extension of the cult of True Womanhood and Republican Motherhood, discussed earlier, but pushes for greater awareness of and respect for women’s own choices about motherhood. The agential imperatives of maternalism operate despite, or in league with, its traditionally ‘womanly woman’ agendas. This argument is advanced in Mothers of a New World, an essay collection examining maternalism within France, Germany, Britain, and the United States between 1880 and 1920. Editors Seth Koven and Sonya Michel explain that women defined themselves in new ways when they began to take an active interest in maternal and child welfare, issues closely bound up with women’s traditional domestic sphere. That is, “Using political discourses and strategies that we have called ‘maternalist,’ they transformed motherhood from women’s primary private responsibility into public policy.”116 Consequently, “Maternalism always operated on two levels: it extolled the virtues of domesticity while simultaneously legitimating women’s public relationships to politics and the state, to community, workplace, and marketplace.”117 Here, then, we can see maternalism as an outreach of Republican Motherhood. Maternalism is so vital to a history of new motherhood because it underscored for women that motherhood was not necessarily detrimental to their civic life “but instead transformed the nature of politics itself.”118 In her monograph Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970, Allen emphasizes that “feminist rhetoric was pervaded by” concepts of maternalism, ones that historians today respond to across “a

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broad spectrum from vehement denunciation to fulsome praise.” While some have lauded maternalist feminism for its vital contribution to the period’s creation of a welfare state—as Koven and Michel’s collection treats at length—others “have condemned all tendencies to identify womanhood with motherhood, whatever their context, as a betrayal of feminism.”119 As I noted in Chap. 1, Allen’s probing of the “maternal dilemma” arises from her question, “is it possible to be both a mother and an autonomous individual?” She examines how feminists living and working within her titular parameters sought new definitions for motherhood in ways that would “not restrict, but enhance, their development as individuals.”120 I draw on Allen’s work to trace how feminist mothers were divided between (and aimed to reconcile) obligations to self and community. Reporting on the empowering goals of maternalism, Allen attests that women “aspired to be both mothers and human beings,” and thus “feminists who extolled motherhood as woman’s distinctive contribution to society— and they were many during the period from 1890 to 1914—had no intention of confining mothers to their conventional roles of dependent wife, domestic drudge, and sexual slave.”121 Women wondered, for instance, “Must motherhood consume an entire life? Or was it a limited commitment that could coexist with other forms of work, including paid employment?”122 Questions like these were taken up by Ellen Key, with whom I opened this chapter, and her American counterpart Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In 1913, the American William English Walling, founder in 1903 of the National Women’s Trade Union League, commented, “Of the leaders of present-day opinion on woman and related subjects, marriage, love, sex, and the home, the most influential with the general public are undoubtedly” Key and Gilman.123 Gilman divided feminism into two schools. The “Human” school regards women independent of their sex, holding that “what women need most is the development of human characteristics”; the “Female” school regards women’s biology as an all-encompassing facet of identity, and that “what woman needs is an even fuller exercise, development and recognition of her sex.”124 Gilman was associated with the former, Key the latter, allowing us to appreciate that a variety of feminisms went in to the shaping of new conceptions of motherhood. I discuss Gilman’s autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in detail in Chap. 6. Here, I want to register how she theorized motherhood in Women and Economics (1898). She upholds the truism that motherhood is “the common duty and the common glory of womanhood,” but she refutes any ideology that women should be subsumed by

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it.125 She rails against “absurd” and “revolting” scenarios in which women have been granted economic standing only relative to their functions as mothers in the home, dependent for their entire survival by the economic provisions of their husbands126—a reality that has forced women to become “Parasitic creatures.”127 Welcoming the new political climate generated by the woman movement, she celebrates how physical changes “even in size of the modern woman, with its accompanying strength and agility,” are manifested in “new women” like The Gibson Girl and the Duchess of Towers.”128 Gilman outlines that mothers can and must be empowered by society’s demythologizing of a maternal instinct, providing maternal education to girls and young women, and shifting the responsibilities of childcare from the individual to the social collective.129 She reiterates her views in her 1910 article “The New Motherhood,” a follow-up piece to her review of Key’s Century of the Child (1909). After reading the book, Gilman is inspired to write “a ‘brief’ for the New Motherhood,” asserting  of the book, “I disagree with its persistence in the demand for primitive motherhood—for the entire devotion of each and every mother to her own children—and disagree on the ground that this method is not the best for child service.” She explains that “we have now reached a stage of social development” when we acknowledge that “women are differentiating as human beings: they are no longer all one thing—females, mothers, and NOTHING ELSE.”130 Key, for her part, concludes her book The Woman Movement (1912) with the chapter “The Influence of the Woman Movement Upon Motherhood.” Holding motherhood in the utmost esteem, Key lashes out at those she calls “extreme feminists” for their negative impact on maternity. She blames them for propagating what she coins “the amaternal theory, which now confuses the feminine brain and leads the feminine instinct astray.”131 She particularly disparages how the “amaternal idea is advanced with great ability” by Gilman.132 Promoting her own version of maternal agency, Key accepts that “Women must, for their own sake as well as for that of society, have free choice of work,” but she insists that this “choice” should be to stay at home with children.133 The conscious decision to serve the state delivers personal rewards to women: “The modern developed mother feels with every breath a grateful joy in that she lives the most perfect life when she can contribute her developed human powers, her liberated human personality, to the establishment of a home and to the vocation of motherhood.”134 She credits the woman movement for

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spurring women to demand maternal respect and opportunities to become the most competent mothers possible. She heralds “the new type of women” who represent “the new mother”: “The new mother, as the doctrine of evolution and the true woman movement have created her, stands with deep veneration before the mystic depths she calls her child, a being in whom the whole life of mankind is garnered.”135 While Key’s theories were highly persuasive, the mothers in Maternal Modernism aligned themselves more closely with the tenets espoused by Gilman and by other social reformers, like Olive Schreiner, for whom paid employment was regarded as both an economic necessity and a crucial means of self-fulfillment. Schreiner, a South African author and one of the most iconic New Woman figures of her time, in Woman and Labour (1911) sought an end to “the parasitism of woman” on man. She decrees: “We demand that, in that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of honoured and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labour of the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less. This is our ‘Woman’s Right!’”136 Similarly, in her 1914 text The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement, British socialist Mabel Atkinson stakes a claim for women to ‘have it all’ well before her twenty-first-century sisters: “What women who have fully thought out the position want, is not this forced alternative between activity in the human world, and control of their own economic position on the one hand, and marriage and children on the other, but both.” Consequently, “the full meaning of the feminist movement will not develop until this demand becomes conscious and articulate among the rank and file of the movement.”137 For Allen, the sentiments expressed by Atkinson illuminate an “innovative, indeed radical redefinition of the maternal role” that has been neglected by historians;138 my aim is to showcase this “radical redefinition” in especially modernist literary contexts. As I highlight in particular, authors and protagonists featured herein tackle the substantive dilemma generated by feminist maternalism: how to have both family and paid work. Women’s economic autonomy is a topic informing feminism from its earliest associations with female suffrage, as American activist Susan B. Anthony insisted in 1853, “Woman must have a purse of her own.”139 Woolf borrowed this image in her 1929 treatise A Room of One’s Own, avowing that a woman “must have money and a room of her  own.”140

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Woolf addressed how a woman could earn that money in her speech “Professions for Women,” delivered on January 21, 1931, to London’s National Society for Women’s Service.141 Woolf reflects on her writing career: “I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom,” whom she names “after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews.”142 This Angel “excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily.” Woolf admits, “Had I not killed her she would have killed me.”143 However, she recognizes that “it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against,” and that “Even when the path is nominally open—when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant—there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way.”144 One of these phantoms is motherhood, which haunted (and still haunts) professional women as they sought, and profoundly struggled with, unconventional ways to mother from the Victorian fin de siècle on.

Birth Control, Eugenics, and Imperial Motherhood While some maternalist discourses grappled with how women could ‘have it all,’ others contended with the increasing prevalence of women who might not want to be mothers, or who were, at the least, becoming more calculating in their approaches to maternity. Woolf, for instance, acknowledged to her audience in A Room of One’s Own, “You must, of course, go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves.”145 Issues like declining size of families146 and women making informed decisions about their own reproduction were related to a new public preoccupation with women’s sexuality, eugenics, and developments in birth control. Many of the texts examined in Maternal Modernism deal with reproductive choice and the consequences of both involuntary and voluntary motherhood upon the individual and the state, especially Dowie’s Gallia, The Freewoman, and Emecheta’s trilogy. Scholarship on birth control, eugenics, and modernism by Layne Parish Craig, Aimee Armande Wilson, and Marius Turda underscore modernism’s contribution to, and the recent academic interest in, these often overlapping scientific, intellectual, and cultural discourses.

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Diverse forms of contraception have been used throughout history. For the period of my study, typical methods of birth control included “abstinence, condoms, coitus interruptus, douching, spermicides, and pessaries”;147 the birth control pill arrived in 1960. Among the pioneers of family planning are the British Marie Stopes and the American Margaret Sanger, the latter coined the phrase “birth control” in 1914.148 As Craig shows, through their transatlantic activism—Stopes and Sanger even worked together for a period after Sanger moved to England in 1914— they “promoted not only freer access to contraception but also new relationships between the individual and medical and governmental authority, more powerful roles for women in public and private arenas, and new ways of understanding and policing race and nationhood.”149 Birth control benefitted women in granting them agency over their reproduction, fostered a narrative predicated on care for women’s health, and afforded increased sexual satisfaction with the removal of the threat of unwanted pregnancies.150 As such, birth control was linked to sexology (or “the new morality,” as it was labeled), the new scientific approach to sexuality (i.e., behavior, development, and pathologies) as developed by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing in Germany in the 1880s, and Havelock Ellis in England in the 1890s.151 Birth control problematized notions of voluntary motherhood when used in the service of eugenics. Based on Francis Galton’s theory that heredity, not environmental factors, determines racial differences across populations (as outlined in his Hereditary Genius, 1869), the ‘science’ of eugenics took hold in Britain and the United States from the late nineteenth century on.152 Eugenics distinguished between so-called “fit” citizens—who were lauded as healthy, middle class, and Northern European—and “unfit” members of the masses. Through positive eugenics, the “fit” were to be encouraged to procreate via financial incentives like maternity stipends, while through negative eugenics the “unfit” were to be subjected to “restrictions on marriage, tight immigration laws, institutionalization, and forced sterilization.”153 Here we can note that both Gilman and Key employed the rhetoric of eugenics in their respective versions of New Motherhood. Gilman invoked her generation’s “higher demand for race improvement.”154 Key likewise insisted that women fulfill the “higher ends of culture”;155 in so doing, women would achieve greatness “in and with the physical and psychic exercise of the function of maternity, because of the conscious desire, by means of this function, to uplift the life of the race as well as her own life.”156 Failure to embrace motherhood would

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ultimately “become the problem of a future for the European-American people.” 157 The intersecting discourses on birth control and eugenics were grounded in a troubling preoccupation with race. I have discussed earlier how the concept of the “race mother” emerged out of ideologies of True Womanhood and Republican Motherhood; I want now to further situate these ideologies within the discourses of the New Woman and white Western feminism. That is, while feminism promoted women as active agents in controlling their reproduction, women—in particular here, New Women—were concomitantly castigated for abandoning their biological destinies and absconding on their maternal duties. The New Woman could certainly be a ‘patriotic’ mother, like Sarah Grand, who spoke as one of “the mothers of the English race.”158 However, a legion of New Women resisted maternal imperatives, and for that were branded as putting future generations in peril. Richardson and Willis describe how the New Woman within imperial Britain was caricatured either as “a bespectacled, physically degenerate weakling or as a strapping Amazon who could outwalk, outcycle and outshoot any man,” inciting “hopes and fears about racial development.”159 Ledger lists the twin fears attendant on the New Woman who ventures outside the private sphere in pursuit of intellectual, masculine, and thus ‘unwomanly’ experiences and rewards: she would bring ruin to her body and compromise her reproductive abilities, and consequently give birth to sickly, inferior children who would signal the extinction of the (white, British) race. Fears generated by and about the New Woman were concomitant with Britain’s imperial anxieties about military and economic competition from Germany and the United Sates, rendering the New Woman a national threat.160 Berg takes the threat to the United States, drawing attention to how the New Woman was viewed as a traitorous figure. Berg cites the 1906 “Sixth Annual Message” by President Theodore Roosevelt in which he accuses middle-class, white women of the crime of “willful sterility … the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death.”161 Roosevelt’s diatribe illuminates his own and a broader cultural fear about declining birth rates as native-born white women sought university over marriage and motherhood.162 Berg adds that “if white women were frequently criticized because their apparent abnegation of motherhood compromised racial supremacy, black women were frequently praised, in racial uplift literature, for their maternal contributions to black racial advancement.”163 This maternal Black woman is the New Negro Woman I discussed

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previously. Berg qualifies that many Black female modernists of the Harlem Renaissance—like Nella Larsen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Angela Weld Grimké—used their creative texts to repudiate the New Negro Woman, decrying that she was constructed to elevate the New Negro Man at the expense of women’s self-actualization.164 I will discuss Larsen’s relationship to New Woman discourses in detail in Chap. 3. Rebecca Stott links the New Woman to Black discourses, connecting how the New Woman and the Woman Question emergent at the fin de siècle were coterminous with “the Scramble for Africa,” the “Africa Question,” and the construction of Africa as “the Dark Continent.” She dissects discourses of evolutionary progress as registered in writings by Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, and Olive Schreiner, querying relationships “between the myth of Africa as monstrous woman […] and the myth and fears about the New Woman.”165 Stott finds that through the symbolic representation of Africa as a feminized landscape traversed by male colonial adventurers, Black womanhood was established and reinforced as barbaric, sexualized, demonic, and dangerous.166 Stott’s analysis helps us to appreciate the mandate of the Black love stories categorized by Tate, examined earlier. If white discourses promoted images of ‘unnatural’ Black women, then Black women were countering these depictions in their sentimental, ‘womanly woman’ narratives, the majority of which were composed in the 1890s, the decade when New Woman fiction proliferated. In like spirit, Stavney cites Elizabeth Ammons, who studies late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women writers. Ammons asserts that unlike the rebelling white middle-class woman, her middle-­ class Black sister was “not busy casting off a constricting ideal of Victorian femininity. She had never been included in it in the first place.”167 Black women were preoccupied with gaining entrance to the very realms of ‘respectable’ femininity that their white sisters had historically enjoyed; they were not in the same privileged position to reject what they had never been afforded. Berg attests how “motherhood was a primary site of racial hierarchy during the first third of the twentieth century,” but qualifies that “a cross-­ racial, cross-class analysis reveals a shared project of denaturalizing maternity by confronting the distortions of successive maternal ideals, from the nineteenth-century True Mother to the twentieth-century New Mother.”168 That is, “while the True Mother’s cardinal virtue was self-­ sacrifice, the New Mother typically combined an instinctive desire for children with a scientific and/or civic interest in improving the race.”169

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Concepts like these testify to the complexity and contradictions of feminist principles of the period, and to how motherhood was made ‘new’ through them. From the late nineteenth century on, the often-inseparable themes of feminism, motherhood, reproduction, and race dominated the private and public spheres. In Chap. 3, I examine how six New Woman novels from the period are informed by contexts like those showcased in this chapter, and how their feminist protagonists fight for and achieve varying levels of success and satisfaction as new modernist mothers.

Notes 1. Key, The Woman Movement, 183. 2. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 1. 3. Eliot quoted in Lee 439; Pound quoted in Scott, Refiguring Modernism, 79. 4. Scott, Refiguring Modernism, 79. 5. Hanscombe and Smyers, Writing for their Lives, 7. 6. Ibid., 10. 7. Ibid., 11–12. 8. Scott, “Introduction,” The Gender of Modernism, 2. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Ibid., 14. 11. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb, 6. 12. Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, 2. 13. Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 3–4. 14. O’Reilly, “Introduction,” Maternal Theory, 1. 15. Ibid., 1. 16. Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 163. 17. Ibid., 165–67. 18. Ibid., 167. 19. Ibid., 4–5. 20. Daly and Reddy, Narrating Mothers, 1–2. 21. The exception is Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense, which I, too, examine in Chap. 2. 22. Van Buren, The Modernist Madonna, 1. 23. Ibid., 2. 24. Hill, Mothering Modernity, 3–4. 25. Ibid., 4. 26. Ibid., 6. 27. Schlossman, Objects of Desire, 3.

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28. A salient example is the comprehensive series The History of British Women’s Writing, especially Volumes 7 (1880–1920), 8 (1920–1945), and 9 (1945–1975). 29. Heilmann and Beetham, “Introduction,” New Woman Hybridities, 1. 30. Patterson, “Introduction,” The American New Woman Revisited, 2. 31. Heilmann, “Introduction,” Feminist Forerunners, 2. 32. Gilman, Women and Economics, 64–65. 33. Ibid., 65–66. 34. Ibid., 67. 35. Welter, Dimity Convictions, 21. 36. Ibid., 21. 37. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 1. 38. Ibid., 21. 39. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 11. 40. Ibid., 12. 41. Ibid., 228. 42. Pykett, The ‘Improper Feminine,’ 12 43. Ibid., 16. 44. Ibid., 12. 45. Ibid., 13. 46. Rich, Of Woman Born, 13. 47. Ibid., 14. 48. McMahon, “My Own Dear Sons,” 192–93. 49. Ibid., 194. 50. Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 2. 51. Ledger, The New Woman, 64. 52. Ibid., 68–69. 53. Ibid., 64. 54. Tate, Domestic Allegories, 3–4. 55. Ibid., 7–8. 56. Ibid., 5. 57. Stavney, “Mothers of Tomorrow,” 538. 58. Ibid., 538–39. 59. Quoted in ibid., 539. 60. Ibid., 539. 61. Berg, Mothering the Race, 9. 62. Ibid., 17–18. 63. Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 1. 64. Ibid., 9. 65. Ibid., 9. 66. Ibid., 11. 67. Ibid., 19.

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68. Ibid.,12. 69. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 22. 70. Pykett, The ‘Improper Feminine,’ 5. 71. Quoted in Tusan, “Inventing the New Woman,” 169. 72. Tusan, “Inventing the New Woman, 169–70. 73. Ibid., 170–71. 74. Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” 30. 75. Ibid., 33. 76. Ibid., 34, 30. 77. Ouida, “The New Woman,” 36. 78. Ibid., 38–39. 79. Tusan, “Inventing the New Woman,” 175. 80. Ibid., 175. 81. Willis, “Heaven Defend Me,” 56–57. 82. Patterson, “Introduction,” The American New Woman Revisited, 5. 83. Ibid., 1–2. 84. Schaffer, “Nothing But Foolscap and Ink,” 39. 85. Willis, “Heaven Defend Me,” 54. 86. Fawcett, “Romance, Glamour and the Exotic,” 145–46. 87. Patterson, “Introduction,” The American New Woman Revisited, 2. 88. See Fluhr 243; Ledger and Luckhurst (“The New Woman”) 75–76. 89. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 1. She borrows the phrase “sexual anarchy” from Showalter, Sexual Anarchy. 90. Ledger, The New Woman, 5. 91. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 2. 92. Ledger, The New Woman, 11. 93. Ibid., 10. 94. Ledger, The New Woman, 3–4. 95. Schaffer, “Nothing But Foolscap and Ink,” 45. 96. Ibid., 49. 97. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 5. 98. For example, the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act (1857); the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882); Cambridge University women’s colleges Girton (1869) and Newnhan (1871) and Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville (1879); suffrage campaigns (1860s on); birth control pamphlets (late-nineteenth century on). 99. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 8. 100. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 4. 101. Ibid., 9–10. 102. Ibid., 4–5.

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103. Cott traces the rise of the specific “woman movement” (3), a term I likewise employ; I use “women’s movements” when referring to more general and diverse forms of collective activism. 104. Ibid., 16. 105. Ibid., 18–19. 106. Ibid., 20. 107. Ibid., 13–14. 108. Ibid., 49. 109. Marsden, “Notes of the Week,” 3. 110. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 22. 111. Ibid., 22. 112. Ibid., 15. 113. Ibid 15; Kenton, “Feminism,” 17. 114. Kenton, “Feminism,” 17. 115. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 8. 116. Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World, 2. 117. Ibid., 6. 118. Ibid., 29. 119. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 8. 120. Ibid., 1, 2. 121. Ibid., 13. 122. Ibid., 63. 123. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 314. 124. Gilman, “As to ‘Feminism,’” 45. 125. Gilman, Women and Economics, 246. 126. Ibid., 16–17. 127. Ibid., 62. 128. Ibid., 148. The Gibson Girl refers to the pen-and-ink drawings made by Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944), American illustrator. As described by Patterson, “Tall, distant, elegant, and white, with a pert nose, voluminous upswept hair, corseted waist, and large bust, the Gibson Girl offered a popular version of the New Woman that both sanctioned and undermined women’s desire for progressive sociopolitical change and personal freedom” at the fin de siècle (“Introduction” 3). Mary, the Duchess of Tower, is the New Woman protagonist of George du Maurier’s novel Peter Ibbetson (1891). 129. Ibid., 178–79. 130. Gilman, “The New Motherhood,” 609. 131. Key, The Woman Movement, 173. 132. Ibid.,176. 133. Ibid., 181. 134. Ibid., 197.

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135. Ibid., 200. 136. Schreiner, Woman and Labour, np. 137. Quoted in Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 63. 138. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 63. 139. Anthony, “Diary.” 140. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 7. 141. The speech was published posthumously in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, 1942. Citing this talk, Maroula Joannou states: “Organizations such as the London and National Society for Women’s Service which sought to further the employment of women were important to those wishing to establish careers for themselves in the professions of medicine, teaching, the law, journalism, and local government” (“Introduction” 10). 142. Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 236–237. 143. Ibid., 237, 238. 144. Ibid., 241. 145. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 122. 146. Allen notes that between 1880 and 1930, “birthrates declined in England by 52%” (11). Moreover, “A task that in the nineteenth century had consumed much of a woman’s adult life was now compressed into a much shorter period: the number of children born to the average British woman had decreased from six in the mid-nineteenth century to about two a century later, and time spent in pregnancy and lactation fell from fifteen to four years” (14). 147. Wilson, Conceived in Modernism, 11. 148. Ibid., 10. 149. Craig, When Sex Changed, 5. 150. Ibid., 15–16. 151. Ibid., 10. 152. Turda, Modernism and Eugenics, 19. 153. Craig, When Sex Changed, 13. 154. “The New Motherhood,” 610. 155. Key, The Woman Movement, 187. 156. Ibid., 177. 157. Ibid., 192. 158. Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” 34. 159. Richardson and Willis, “Introduction,” The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact, 13. 160. Ledger, The New Woman, 18. 161. Quoted in Berg, Mothering the Race, 1. 162. Berg, Mothering the Race, 1. 163. Ibid., 2.

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164. Ibid., 110. 165. Stott, “‘Scaping the Body,” 150. 166. Ibid., 151. 167. Quoted in Stavney, “Mothers of Tomorrow,” 537. 168. Berg, Mothering the Race, 6. 169. Ibid., 146 note # 6.

CHAPTER 3

Mothers in New Woman Fiction: Mapping “the Terra Incognita of Herself”

Introduction: Epochs of the Vanguard In New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism, Ann Ardis documents that from 1883 to 1900, more than one hundred novels by both female and male writers featured the New Woman.1 Ardis finds that New Woman narratives instigated “ideological challenges […] to the bourgeois social and literary tradition.”2 As her book illuminates, against a backdrop of Victorian convention, many of these stories reject the endorsement of and narrative culmination in marriage; resist the binary of ‘pure’ and ‘fallen’ woman; explore erotics over romantic love; privilege female-centered friendships over female-male couplings; and recognize women’s career aspirations. More specific to motherhood, authors created heroines who registered and experimented with disruptive, radical, and transgressive maternal identities and experiences. Ardis offers a taxonomy of multiple and often-competing mother-driven themes in New Woman fiction wherein protagonists embrace unwed mothering; prefer non-­ biological over biological children; engage in (or desire) sexual activity; subscribe to eugenic principles for reproduction; demand control over their maternal bodies; and seek creative and professional fulfillment outside of their families. Such discourses co-exist with what Ardis calls a trope

Egerton, “A Keynote,” 58. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_3

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of “disempowerment” or “boomerang” plotting in which the New Woman’s political, social, and artistic activisms and ambitions are abandoned or failed, and the protagonist is punished for her derring-do by being called back to home, husband, and children; condemned to a lonely existence as a spinster; or killed off.3 In this chapter, I examine how diverse themes such as these are played out in the novels The Daughters of Danaus (1894) by Mona Caird, Gallia (1895) by Ménie Muriel Dowie, The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin, The Mother’s Recompense (1925) by Edith Wharton, The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield (1924), and Quicksand (1928) by Nella Larsen. This selection allows me to showcase a range of New Woman qualities in a series of texts from both the fin de siècle and the period around high modernism,4 and from British and American contexts. In arguing for an extension of New Woman’s periodization, I elucidate some of the ways first- and second-generation New Women protagonists exile themselves from institutions of patriarchal motherhood, and the consequences that obtain from their actions. As writers of New Woman fiction wrestled with ideologies of True Womanhood, Republican Motherhood, and the race mother, among others, they helped to initiate and perpetuate conceptions of new motherhood and maternal modernism. The pseudonymous George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) was one of the most prominent New Woman authors of the fin de siècle, gaining fame with Keynotes (1893), her first short-story collection. She likely spoke for many women in her now oft-cited agenda in her essay “A Keynote to Keynotes”: “I realised that in literature, everything had been better done by man than woman could hope to emulate. There was only one small plot left for her to tell: the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as man liked to imagine her—in a word to give herself away, as man had given himself in his writings.” She adds, “I would use situations or conflicts as I saw them with a total disregard of man’s opinions. I would unlock a closed door with a key of my own fashioning.”5 While many male authors created New Woman protagonists (i.e., George Gissing, Grant Allen, Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and H.  G. Wells), in line with Egerton’s privileging of women’s terra incognita, my chapter explores matricentric fiction produced specifically by female writers.

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New Modernism and “New” Realism I contextualize New Woman novels according to Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s theorizing of new modernist temporality, gender, and form.6 In easing the rigid demarcations of periodization, for instance, we can appreciate more nuanced relationships between literatures coming out of the Victorian and modernist periods. As Anne Besnault-Levita and Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada underscore, “the remapping of the turn of the century by insisting on continuities and interminglings across the centuries” encourages us to “think ‘beyond’ or ‘across’ the divide” and therefore “to think in terms of complexity and paradox.”7 Additionally, new modernism expands the field by moving “beyond such familiar figures as Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Woolf” to embrace “less widely known women writers, authors of mass cultural fiction, makers of the Harlem Renaissance, artists from outside Great Britain and the United States, and other cultural producers hitherto seen as neglecting or resisting modernist innovation.”8 These descriptions inform my approach to the New Woman authors and their novels listed above as contributing to modernism. In assessing why New Woman fiction was excluded from early studies of Anglo-American modernism, Ardis suggests that canonical modernism “‘explains’ itself as a formalism, an aesthetic centered on neutrality and apolitical objectivity.”9 In contrast, many New Woman narratives “highlight not women’s ambivalence toward a radical reordering of both gender and class relations, not self-repression, but rather the culture’s interest in curtailing or containing such socioliterary anarchy.” That is, “These writers do not use form to obscure, repress, or mute their controversial feminist content. They flaunt their anger. They proclaim their heresies in loud voices. They document the efforts made to silence them. And they produce an aesthetic of political engagement that is quite different from the (ostensibly) apolitical formalism of high modernism.”10 In foregrounding anger, raising one’s voice, and refusing to be silenced, Ardis calls to mind Susan Maushart’s insistence that mothers “strip off” the suffocating masks of patriarchal motherhood and articulate their truths “with open voices.”11 My analysis of the New Woman novels selected here is based on the notion that they are remarkable for being more innovative in content than in form.12 My position is inspired not only by Ardis but also by the essay collection Women’s Writing in Exile. Angela Ingram makes the case that many women’s texts are disqualified from (even feminist) revisions of literary history because a prevailing “hierarchy of genre” continues to value

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formal experimentation over material that was shocking or subversive.13 In her chapter “Exiled by Genre,” Celeste M.  Schenck exposes how poets like Anna Wickham, Charlotte Mew, and Alice Meynell were neglected in modernist studies because their traditional meter contravened the Poundian imperative to “make it new.” As she announces, “conventional form, although alive and well in genteel Georgian verse, was the bête noire of the Modernist movement in poetry”14—and, we can see, in prose as well. In the spirit of new modernism, Schenck aims to “roughen up the history of literary Modernism” by rethinking the relationship between structure and content. She queries that if “the radical poetics of Modernism often masks a deeply conservative politics, might it also possibly be true that the seemingly genteel, conservative poetics of women poets whose obscurity even feminists have overlooked might pitch a more radical politics than we had considered possible?”15 I contend that many New Woman novels that are not experimental in form nonetheless pitch a politics of unconventional, even radical, motherhood. Emphasizing that New Woman fiction challenged Victorian ideologies of womanhood, Ardis approaches these texts not as aesthetic objects but as narratives with “work to do,” that is, “cultural work.” She borrows the concept from Jane Tompkins “to refer to the way works of fiction attempt to ‘redefine the social order’ by offering their readers a ‘blueprint for survival under a specific set of political, economic, social, or religious conditions.’”16 Rather than pinpointing an origin novel or Ur-text, Ardis traces recurring elements that informed New Woman discourses, issues related to how the genre functioned as an alternative to or in resistance to classic or “old” English realism and French naturalism in the 1880s and 90s.17 At stake were contemporary debates about representation, which came to a head with the censoring of George Moore’s novel A Modern Lover in 1884, after “two little old ladies complained of its vulgarity.” As Ardis explains, when the offending novel was removed from Mudie’s circulating library in London, Moore demanded a “realer” realism that was not tempered by platitudinous morality, and that gave its readers a more direct and genuine account of all human nature and experience. His advocacy helped to inaugurate the “new” realism of the period.18 This “new” realism was inspired by French naturalism, whereby authors applied the objective standards of science to the observations of character to discern truths about human personality and behavior.19 Despite its intentions, though, naturalism failed—as had classic realism—to dismantle notions of idealized femininity.20 In contrast, the “new” realism of New Woman fiction

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sought to render heretofore unarticulated female desires, and to situate women in worlds of their own—not patriarchy’s—making.21 Indeed, “new” realism is reflected in the New Woman’s program of depicting the sexual validities of women’s lives22 and—as I emphasize here—maternal authenticities as well. The “new” realism is further linked to the demise of the three-volume novel borrowed from the library and to the rise of the single-volume book bought by customers in the rapidly expanding commercial literary marketplace. Due to its best-selling status, New Woman fiction was dismissed by critics for being a commodity, and a devalued feminine one at that, “simply faddishly up to date in its portrayal of women rebelling against the traditional code of ‘womanliness.’”23 At the same time, its supporters elevated the genre to the realms of high art, describing it as “the new fiction, the wave of the future.”24 New Woman writers who were women were especially empowered by the opportunities afforded by the more liberal “new” realism to ride this wave.25

Mother-Problem Novels Lyn Pykett summarizes how New Woman heroines and writers were alike regarded according to “a modernist discourse of rupture.”26 The “disruptive” New Woman protagonist heralded “a break with the past, with convention, and even with nature,” while the New Woman author “was seen (and often saw herself) as a revolting daughter, one who, like the modernists, was in revolt against established literary conventions and modes of representation.”27 Additionally, New Woman texts upended the notion, holding sway in Victorian literature, that identity was unified and stable. Consequently, ideologies like the womanly woman were “problematized, deconstructed, demystified, or rethought,” so that protagonists grappled with tensions between “the fixed identity imposed by conventional social gender roles” and subjectivity that is fluid and changing.28 Moreover, New Woman narratives reconfigured the mainstream Victorian plot of domestic realism. For example, where Victorian novels tend to culminate in marriage as a testament to the protagonist’s self-validation, in New Woman novels marriage serves as “both the origin of narrative and the source of the heroine’s problems.”29 Pykett labels these new stories “marriage-­ problem novels,”30 and I extend and apply her comments to what I call mother-problem novels.

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The New Woman who emerged in the late 1800s proved to be an enduring figure. She continued in the twentieth century to be celebrated and denigrated in periodicals; and was profiled in novels by both female and male authors like Arnold Bennett, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, and Rebecca West.31 These “self-consciously modern novelists,” as Pykett terms them, tackled the central themes of “late-Victorian dissolution”— including marriage, sexual desire, free love, and creative and professional ambitions—already taken up by New Woman writers.32 Given this resonance, Bonnie Kime Scott calls for a recuperation of the first-generation narratives, contending that historians have tended to overlook “an important transition, 1880–1910” in constructions of modernism, and that this period constitutes a significant “missing era.”33 Redressing these lacunae, Sally Ledger attests that the reclamation by feminist revisionists of New Woman authors as “proto-modernists” casts light on a genre too long neglected, “a victim of its awkward positioning between the literary grand narratives of Victorian realism and high modernism.” Through this revision, fin-de-siècle New Woman writers have “acquired a certain cachet as the literary ‘mothers’ of female modernists” such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Mary Butts, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf.34 Woolf herself avers, “we think back through our mothers if we are women.”35 Relatedly, for Jane Eldridge Miller, literatures of modernism (which she dates to post-1910) were preceded not by Victorian but by Edwardian writings. She stresses that “Edwardian novelists derived momentum from the content of their fiction, not from any desire to alter its form,” and therefore these narratives “should be considered examples of the modernism of content, an antecedent stage to the more familiar, canonized modernism of form.”36 While she suggests that formal experimentation signaled a peak of modernist achievement, in the spirit of new modernism I am interested in reading and valuing a “modernism of content” across a longer chronology. Either way, Edwardian novels “remind us that modernism, contrary to one of its key myths, did not suddenly burst forth but was part of a line of development that had its roots in the convergence of feminism and realism in the new fiction of the 1890s.”37 Many of Miller’s arguments about the Edwardian novel invoke—and can be applied to—New Woman fiction, as in the fact that both showcase protagonists who seek identities other than wife and mother. Although Edwardian women were more progressive than their nineteenth-century

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sisters, benefitting, for example, from greater educational and professional opportunities, and increased access to contraception, they remained inundated by rhetoric promoting domesticity.38 As a result, Edwardian women lived “a double life, one that was alternatively (or even simultaneously) Victorian and modern, repressive and liberating, traditional and radically new.”39 Many of the mothers in Maternal Modernism experience this duality. New Woman fiction renders New Womanhood as fraught or fluid through plots that range from the empowering to the disempowering. In her survey of this genre, Ardis presents a suite of texts by writers like Florence Dixie, Mary Cholmondeley, and Gertrude Dix that represent “women’s ‘monstrous’ ambitions to be something—anything—besides wives and mothers.”40 Novels like these inscribe a variety of New Woman successes and achievements in arenas that are creative, professional, sexual, social, and political. However, Ardis concomitantly finds narratives of failure and disappointment, especially “boomerang” plots that punish transgressive women. Referring to stories in which promised or hoped-for female rebellions did not materialize, she asks, “What happened to the New Woman’s sense of her power to change the world?” Ardis concludes, “the bourgeois social order survived the turn of the twentieth century” so that New Women, despite any personal and public gains, still had to contend with its forces.41 I theorize the tensions between the old and new orders through the concept of exile. Ingram categorizes exile as being either a metaphor or a material circumstance; involuntary or voluntary; and related to geography, nation, institution, community, race, gender, and or genre42—recall my discussion about Schenck, who describes modernist “content” exiled or excluded from the canon of experimentation. Exile is one of modernism’s central tenets, crystallized by Stephen Dedalus, who refuses to serve his family, nation, and religion as he flees his Irish homeland at the end of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Contributing to Ingram’s collection, Susan Stanford Friedman takes up the modernist theme in her essay on writer H. D. (Hilda Doolittle): “The prerequisite to adulthood is leaving home. The founding gesture of American Modernism seems to have been expatriatism, a self-imposed exile from the parochial and provincial for the cosmopolitan and international. The two are not so unrelated, for Victorianism in both its English and American forms is akin to parentalism, a cultural dominance, a parental superego prescribing duty over pleasure, obligation over freedom, social order over personal

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rebellion: a wet blanket over the fire and ice of desire. The young moderns growing up in the Victorian era had to leave home.” She adds, “Exile is flight—a double-word evoking both fleeing from oppression and flying in freedom.”43 Expatriation enabled the mind and spirit to be free “From convention, from the pressure to conform, to do the respectable, the proper, the expected.” For women, such release “meant above all freedom from family pressure to conform to conventional feminine norms.”44 Such a theme—and reality—informs the chapter “Expatriate Modernism” by Shari Benstock. Examining the impulse to flee one’s homeland for Europe, she asserts that for American women like Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and Djuna Barnes, what seemed oppressive “was the family, especially as it polarized (and paralyzed) the masculine and feminine. For these women the flight to freedom often meant a flight from the implicit expectation of marriage and motherhood.”45 Benstock finds that “Heterosexual and homosexual women expatriates, for instance, discovered sexualized writing identities in expatriation—and in doing so they changed the history of modern women’s writing, charting the terrain of female sexuality from female perspectives.”46 New Woman authors were similarly charting this terrain—their terra incognita. I posit that freedoms like these afforded women opportunities to experience and write about not only alternative sexual but also maternal desires and identities, and from specifically matrifocal perspectives. I apply concepts of expatriation and exile to New Woman protagonists who flee conventional expectations of mothering, and who articulate their refusals to serve the patriarchal institution of motherhood. In so doing, I illuminate Ingram’s definition of voluntary exile as being, “for a number of writers an escape from the entrapping domain of the silenced mother-­ under-­ patriarchy, the manifestation of women’s internalized exile/ estrangement.”47 Such rebellions were, to be sure, complicated. The Victorian maternal ideal persisted into the twentieth century, as demonstrated by Ardis and Miller. Additionally, Lucy Delap notes that while many Edwardian women were in mutual agreement that having fewer children was preferable, attempts by “‘advanced’ feminists” to “dethrone motherhood from its primary place in women’s lives did not find mass resonance.” Delap cites, for instance, the success and popularity of the Mother’s Union that out membered that of feminist or suffrage movements.48 An Anglican organization founded in 1876 by Mary Sumner in her Church of England parish, the Union, ongoing today, promotes motherhood as an ennobled Christian vocation.49

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However, just as Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver uncover Victorian “sites of instability,” so Scott finds a myriad of modernist texts delivering “Radical critiques of the patriarchal family” centered in part “on maternal relationships, and alternate familial forms.”50 Indeed, by employing the reverse discourses of the New Woman, authors create characters who become in their various states of exile ‘improperly’ maternal and ‘bad’ mothers of modernism.51 At the same time, for these figures, their voluntary exiles often run concurrently with, and are demarcated by, their own moral parameters, and by the physical and psychological prison-­ like conditions imposed upon them by the very family members and communities from which they seek release. These themes drive novels by Caird, Dowie, Chopin, Wharton, Canfield, and Larsen.

Wild Women Before turning to these stories, I want to contextualize them according to some of Caird’s non-fiction, especially as Caird responds to Eliza Lynn Linton, a vitriolic critic of the New Woman. Caird and Linton, among the most popular and provocative writers of the fin de siècle in Britain, expand our appreciation of prevailing dominant and reverse discourses surrounding maternity with which New Woman authors and their protagonists grappled. In a series of three articles in the periodical Nineteenth Century: a monthly review, published between 1891 and 1892, Linton coined the term “Wild Woman” in an antagonistic gesture of nomenclature. In “The Wild Women,” for example, Linton attacks New Women as being “insurgent wild women [who] are in a sense unnatural.” She sums up their seemingly contemptuous attitudes thus: “Marriage, in its old-­ fashioned aspect as the union of two lives, they repudiate as a one-sided tyranny; and maternity, for which, after all, women primarily exist, they regard as a degradation.”52 Celebrating the Republican Mother and race mother, Linton affirms, Be it pleasant or unpleasant, it is none the less an absolute truth—the raison d’être of a woman is maternity. For this and this alone nature has differentiated her from man, and built her up cell by cell and organ by organ. The continuance of the race in healthy reproduction, together with the fit nourishment and care of the young after birth, is the ultimate end of woman as such; and whatever tells against these functions, and reduces either her power or her perfectness, is an offence against nature and a wrong done to society.53

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In her second installment, “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents,” Linton describes the “Wild Woman of modern life” accordingly: “Aggressive, disturbing, officious, unquiet, rebellious to authority and tyrannous to those whom they can subdue, we say emphatically that they are about the most unlovely specimens the sex has yet produced.”54 Writing in direct reply to Linton, Caird rejected biological destiny in her 1892 polemic “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women.’” Caird queries, for example, “if woman’s functions are to be determined solely by a reference to what is called nature, how, from this point of view, are we to deal with the fact that she possesses a thousand emotional and intellectual attributes that are wholly superfluous to her merely maternal activities?”55 She charges: “Women have been forced, partly by their physical constitution, but more by the tyranny of society, to expend their whole energies in maternal cares, and this has been the origin of a thousand evils,” such as dangers to women’s health, potential harm to unwanted children, and depriving women of other kinds of occupations which they may prefer or for which they may be more qualified. For Caird, “It may seem paradoxical, but is none the less true, that we shall never have really good mothers until women cease to make their motherhood the central idea of their existence. The woman who has no interest larger than the affairs of her children is not a fit person to train them.”56 Wondering why men have not been subjected to the same arguments for fatherhood, she notes, “The suffering of women to-day is built upon their suffering of yesterday and its consequences,” and it is time to stop making “motherhood our chief duty.”57 Caird takes particular umbrage with women’s responsibilities to the nation, warning of Linton’s work that “The really grave question raised in these essays is that of the effect of the political and social freedom of women upon the physical well-being of the race.”58 She demands to know “If the generations of adults are going to renounce, age after age, their own chances of development—resigning, as so many mothers do, opportunities of intellectual progress and spiritual enlightenment for the sake of their children—how in the name of common sense will they benefit humanity?” Likewise, she urges women who want to enter the public arena to have fewer numbers of children, if any.59 Eschewing the essentialism of motherhood, Caird suggests that the quarrels related to maternity are those “between decaying institutions and the stirrings of a new social faith,”60 implicating the old and the new of the Victorian and modernist periods more generally, and the tensions and negotiations between them.

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Caird frequently draws on images and metaphors of feminist rebellion in her non-fiction. In her essay “The Emancipation of the Family,” she comments on “the tremendous rigour with which maternal duties are pressed upon a woman,” including “the demand that she shall surrender to her children health, happiness, and all hope of self-development,” along with “the unbounded, merciless condemnation which is heaped upon her if she prove a neglectful or unenthusiastic mother.”61 As a corrective, she calls for modern reform: “To bring the institution of the family up to date is among the next great tasks of progressive civilisation.” More pointedly, “When domestic life has thus been brought into harmony with civilisation, we shall have passed through a bloodless revolution. Then, and not till then, ought we to regard ourselves as having left behind us the shadows of the Dark Ages.”62 Caird reiterates these themes in her essay “The Morality of Marriage.” In the section “Motherhood Under Conditions of Dependence,” she appeals for “the creation of a new balance of power, of many varieties of feminine character and aptitude, and, through the consequent influx of new activities, a social revolution.”63 Caird’s theories inform not only her novel The Daughters of Danaus, but also stories by Dowie, Chopin, Wharton, Canfield, and Larsen. Protagonists struggle with reconciling the Dark Age ideals of maternity with their modernist New Woman exigencies to start “a bloodless” and “a social revolution.”

The Daughters of Danaus In The Daughters of Danaus, Hadria Fullerton is a well-off twenty-one-­ year-old living with her siblings and their parents in northern Scotland, where “society smiled upon conformity” (5). A non-conformist, Hadria has the hallmarks of Caird’s New Woman: from the get-go, she dismisses the idea of marriage, which she believes is an affront to female liberty. Her “originality” and “individuality” worry her mother (5), and her views are “distinctly shocking” (89). Hadria’s position as such is mocked through the commentary of “a callow youth” at a dinner party, “who found a fertile subject for his wit, in the follies and excesses of what he called the ‘new womanhood.’ […] He knew that this new womanhood business was only a phase, don’t you know, but upon his word, he was getting tired of it. Not that he had any objection to women being well educated (Hadria was glad of that), but he could not stand it when they went out of their sphere, and put themselves forward and tried to be emancipated, and all that sort of nonsense” (112).

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Hadria is courted by Hubert Temperley, and agrees to marry him only after he promises not to impede her autonomy. She quickly learns that he tricked her—he expects her to function as a conventional wife, after all— and she experiences the unhappy union as an imprisonment, one exacerbated by motherhood. While Hadria is fond of her two sons, she does not love them unconditionally: “They represent to me the insult of society— my own private and particular insult, the tribute exacted of my womanhood” (58). Hadria recognizes that her maternity symbolizes her acquiescence to a biological destiny. At the same time, upon learning that the town’s unmarried schoolmarm committed suicide after giving birth and being shamed by the neighbors, Hadria adopts the illegitimate Martha, setting her up with a caregiver in a nearby cottage. In mothering a non-biological child, Hadria battles institutional motherhood; she hopes to teach Martha “to strike a blow at the system which sent her mother to a dishonoured grave” (58). This anarchic gesture results in Hadria’s “more personal interest in her charge. She had taken it under care of her own choice, without the pressure of any social law or sentiment,” so that “She felt the relationship to be a true one” (73). Hadria affirms that unlike her sons, Martha represents a woman’s reproductive free will. In this way, in the spirit of Rosenman and Klaver, Hadria is an “other mother” who “defamiliarizes” mothering.64 Hadria offends her community by the adoption, and she further challenges convention in her aspirations to become a musician. Her music itself is the product of her modernist New Womanhood, for she “was disposed to daring innovation. Her bizarre compositions shocked [her husband] painfully” (51). The spirit of rebellion informing her rejection of normative maternity inspires her career-move: she leaves her husband and sons and exiles herself, with Martha and the caregiver, to Paris, to study at the School of Music. Traveling to France she senses, after seven “long” years of marriage, “The joy of freedom and its intoxication”; “It was sheer relief to be away, to stretch oneself in mental liberty and leisure” (91). For a time she thrives under the musical tutelage of Monsieur Jouffroy, but his warning that he had seen the “brilliant careers” of too many women ruined by motherhood—“the scourge of genius”—proves prescient (97). Hubert’s sister, Henriette, is dispatched to bring Hadria home and, in conversation with her, Hadria employs a reverse discourse of maternity: “I deny that motherhood has duties except when it is absolutely free” (103). Hadria assails its institutional restrictions: “No woman has yet experienced

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it apart from the enormous pressure of law and opinion that has, always, formed part of its inevitable conditions” (103). Ultimately, motherhood “represents a prostitution of the reproductive powers” (104). Despite this astonishing accusation, Hadria feels a “stormy inner debate” (107) as to her responsibilities toward not only her abandoned husband and sons, but her mother, who is dying of despair over Hadria’s actions. Bedridden, Mrs. Fullerton is the Victorian embodiment of a life predicated on patriarchy. In calling her rebellious daughter home, Mrs. Fullerton laments, “I have always done my duty,—I have sacrificed myself for the children,” and she expects Hadria to sacrifice herself in turn (110). The anxieties caused by the shifting spirit of the times are marked by Mrs. Fullerton, who confesses to her daughter, “I don’t understand all your modern notions” (12). The generational divisions between mother and daughter are further marked by Hadria’s New Woman friend Valeria, who recognizes the historical tensions informing Hadria’s sense of identity: “It was a pity that Hadria had not been born a generation later, but since she had come into the world at this time of transition, she must try to avoid the tragedy that threatens all spirits who are pointing towards the new order, while the old is still working out its unexhausted impetus” (34). Hadria is stymied by Mrs. Fullerton, who, as a bitter ambassador for Victorian order, obstructs her daughter’s vanguard mobility. Hadria’s reluctant return to Scotland is a voluntary exile in reverse, a flight not to freedom but to domestic entrapment once more. She takes up her place as nurse beside her invalid mother, resumes her life with Hubert for the sake of appearances, and accepts that she will never recover her musical talent. In consolation, she contemplates an affair with Professor Theobald; “There was something attractive to Hadria, in the idea of defying the world’s laws. It was not as the dutiful property of another, but as herself, a separate and responsible individual, that she would act and feel” (120). When she learns that Theobald is in fact Martha’s father, and recognizes that he is not worthy of her physical passion, she rejects him; he retaliates by taking the child away. Punished for her sexual and maternal risks, Hadria becomes suicidal, but then determines to use her experiences to advance an agenda of opposition. Henriette had earlier claimed that “it is not possible for any woman to resist the laws and beliefs of Society,” and that Hadria “can’t escape from the conditions of her epoch” (41). Hadria is a “boomerang” figure in a disempowering plot, but in her privileging of non-biological maternity she certainly resists “Society.” If she does not quite escape, she sets out a blueprint for others, informing her sister,

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Algitha: “The hope of the future lies in the rising generation. You can’t alter those who have matured in the old ideas. It is for us to warn.” She asserts, “The one thing I won’t do, is to be virtuously resigned. And I won’t ‘make the best of it’” (143). Hadria has come home, but she has not given in.

Gallia Dowie’s Gallia takes place in England contemporaneous to its publication in 1895. A narrative about reproductive power, it centers on the eponymous Gallia, the only child of Lord Gerald and Lady Julia Hamesthwaite, and her relationships with two men: Hubert Essex, an Oxford scholar whom Gallia loves; and Mark Gurdon, an aspiring Civil Servant whom Gallia does not love but will choose to father her children. The story opens in London with Gurdon in conversation with Gallia’s aunt, Mrs. Celia Leighton, and immediately establishes its imperialist backdrop. Having acquired “a much-yearned-for stool in the Colonial Office” (28), Gurdon is eager to attend to Mrs. Leighton because she “was a connection of the Secretary of State for the Colonies” (3). He “conscientiously read his Times” to learn about conditions in South Africa: “It was part of Gurdon’s daily routine to read first the news of the great Empire whose ends he was called upon in the humblest of fashions to serve” (32). Just as we have seen in Chap. 2 how Stott makes a direct link between the “Africa Question” and the “Woman Question,” so Gallia moves from issues of colonial governance to the politics of gender through its focus on the New Woman. We first meet Gallia indirectly, when her mother is conversing about her daughter with her step-sister, Mrs. Leighton. Gallia has clearly been in a state of self-imposed exile of the kinds identified by Friedman and Benstock, and in the media res of the story has just returned to her family home in London for an as-yet undecided amount of time. Lady Hamesthwaite, hoping for a permanent reunion, informs Mrs. Leighton: “I think Gallia will come home. My theory is that the modern girl has also a crop of wild oats to sow; not the usual sort, of course—Dieu soit béni [Blessed be God]—but wild oats nevertheless” (47–48). When Gallia enters the scene, she straightaway takes up the newspapers to read; her interest in a report on “an agitation about the State regulation of vice” (50) unnerves the two women, and Mrs. Leighton queries if the ‘lost’ Gallia can ever be repatriated to their respectable domestic fold.

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This brief episode establishes Gallia as one of Linton’s explicitly “insurgent wild women” who is worldly and attuned to sexual discourses of “vice.” Physically and intellectually imposing, “She was dark and tall and slender” (56). Her contemporaries are troubled by Gallia: “This girl’s free movements, free play of feature, free mode of thought, free mode of dress […] made up an enigma” (58). By age seventeen, “When femininity descended upon her” she resisted it, and consequently, by the time she was twenty and “a free-lance at Oxford,” no young man had whispered a “word of love” to her (59–60). As a student, she had spent time with Essex, who condemns her: “Your whole make-up is an egregious mistake—a complete waste of material. There is no place in all the world for you” (196). He accuses her of being “incapable of an ordinary feminine feeling” because she is “a misshapen woman” (198). Gallia is, it seems, what Linton calls one of “the most unlovely specimens the sex has yet produced.”65 Conversations between Gallia and Essex turned on debates about fin-­ de-­siècle gender. For Essex, “the old-fashioned style of woman was his ideal” (63). Resisting the advance of the New Woman, he “could not free his mind from the single and only conception of woman of which he was capable, and he looked on what are called, tiresomely enough, new developments in women as fresh forms of wiles, the arts of the nineteenth-­ century Eve. All this humbugging about at college and wrangling after ‘degrees and things’ was to him a part of the misguided artfulness of modern women” (64). Essex, like the “callow youth” who demeans Hadria, pits his Victorian theories against Gallia’s vanguard practices. When Gallia and Essex reconnect at a dinner party, Gallia is startled to realize that she is in love with him. Bolstered by her New Woman initiative and courage, she declares her feelings to him. When he fails to reciprocate, Gallia renounces romance forever, admitting, “Love did not seem to me a happy thing. It attacked my pride, my independence, the whole fabric of my character” (196). In losing Essex, Gallia gains the freedom to live as the very kind of “modern woman” so anathema to Essex. Rather than romantic love, Gallia decides to dedicate her life to motherhood, setting her course in a maternal direction following the death of her mother. Guiltily reflecting on the fact that she never really loved her mother, but that her mother adored her, Gallia contemplates maternity from the mother’s point of view: “The charm of motherhood must be innate: it has nothing to do with the child […] A mother has those feelings, which are more than mere love, because she has done something for

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the child, because she has borne it. She has performed a sort of self-­ sacrifice, which I have always thought the most subtle kind of selfishness in the world. Motherhood is selfish after all.” She concludes, “A woman gets a good deal out of motherhood; more than she does out of marriage: motherhood is, on the whole, better suited to her than marriage, I believe” (141). Gallia submits to ideologies of True Womanhood, while concomitantly resisting them as she privileges a feminist maternalism of choice, one that supersedes the institution of marriage. Gallia problematizes the marriage plot of Victorian fiction when she embarks on a quest not for a husband but for a man to father her baby. She subscribes to offensive eugenic principles as a means to ensuring that her aims will yield the ‘best’ child. When her friend Gertrude comments that domestic life “is beautifully easy now” because people can “get someone in” to do the housework, Gallia takes this proposition to its radical end by extending it to maternity: “We may live to see [a central cooking depôt] but we shan’t live to see the real advance; which will be the getting in of fathers and mothers, or rather husbands and wives to be fathers and mothers” (173–174). As Gallia rationalizes, “People are not above ‘getting in’ a wet-nurse nowadays, and in the most casual fashion; it seems to me this is only a step farther” (176). Gallia considers her experimental agenda to be “eminently rational,” insisting: “How can we wonder that only one person in ten is handsome and well-made, when you reflect that they were most likely haps of hazards, that they were unintended, the offspring of people quite unfitted to have children at all. There are people fitted, for instance, to be mothers, which every woman isn’t; there are women fitted to bring up children, who may not be mothers” (174–175). Gallia’s desire to be a mother fulfills traditional expectation for feminine behavior, just as promoting eugenics condones the patriarchal imperialism permeating the novel. Yet, Gallia’s proposal not only echoes Caird’s rejection of biological destiny but also makes her self-determined reproductive intercourse a politicized, avant-garde act. In her compelling reading of the novel, Gail Cunningham offsets the repugnancy of eugenics by arguing that Dowie’s eugenic theme is “comically brutal.”66 Dowie “systematically and satirically” inverts gendered constructions so that the “male body becomes the object of female scrutiny and evaluation, and manliness is comically reduced to the functional ability to breed.”67 Gallia’s search for a man to father her children is guided by these precepts. She finds the ideal in Gurdon, who meets her criteria thus: “His eyes were bright and clear—those curious ringed eyes of grey

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and hazel; his teeth were perfect; not too small, and very white. Gallia saw all these things rather as a dealer might notice the points in a horse than as a lady might perceive a young man’s claims to handsomeness” (187). When he falls in love with her she accepts his marriage proposal, but only because she recognizes his procreative value: “I want you to be my husband—or rather, the father of my child” (298). For Cunningham, the most radical aspect of the novel turns on these details as they intersect with the theme of abortion. When Gallia learns that Gurdon’s mistress had fallen ill after a self-induced abortion, rather than being angry at his infidelity Gallia is pleased because it confirms Gurdon’s fertility.68 For Gallia, it was “the knowledge of the illness of [his] mistress” (300) that ultimately swayed her decision to marry him. Cunningham’s statement that abortion was not a common topic “in Victorian fiction, even in the self-consciously shocking 1890s,”69 underscores how Gallia inscribes a modernism of content. Gurdon’s qualifications for fatherhood are measured against the unsuitability of Essex. Regarding the latter, “Gallia noted, with a feeling of dislike” that both his feet and hands “were too small. It was a blemish in so handsome a man; a blemish that gave her a feeling of discomfort” (259). By the end of the novel, it is evident that Gallia still loves Essex, and he in turn has fallen for her, but this “discomfort” precludes any move on her part to (re)claim him. When he reveals that he suffers from heart disease— which he emphasizes is hereditary—she realizes that he understands he would not make a ‘fit’ match for her. In Gurdon, Gallia has selected the best man for the paternal job. Ledger asserts that Gallia is transgressive, in that “Gallia’s rationale for marrying the ‘strong, manly man’ is at once socially reactionary and a remarkable statement of feminine assertiveness”; moreover, “basing her choice of marriage partner on the logistics of eugenics might seem preferable to the more generally accepted economic factors which influenced middle-class marriages” at the time.70 Gallia’s future as a wife and mother can be read in terms of Ardis’ notions of “disempowerment” and “boomerang” plotting. The question of whether the wandering, free-spirited Gallia will settle at home posed at the start of the novel is answered in the affirmative, as the exilic daughter commits to serve at her domestic station. However, she concomitantly defuses the power of institutionalized marriage and motherhood, claiming: “I shall marry solely with a view to the child I am going to live for” (200). Additionally, when she acknowledges, “If I were living fifty years hence, I should not probably have to

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marry at all” (203), she signals a modern advance to socially sanctioned single motherhood. Gurdon had sensed that concerning women, “some totally different spirit was abroad” (105), just as Gallia confesses, “I want to fight everything and have everything new and made new again” (254). Gallia is a rebellious New Woman pushing the boundaries of time and tradition. Becoming a mother on her own terms, she contributes to the zeitgeist of maternal modernism.

The Awakening Edna Pontellier is another protagonist who, in Gallia’s words, wants to “fight everything.” In Chopin’s The Awakening, a story set in and around New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century, Edna is twenty-eight years old, a wife of six years, and a mother of two boys. She is also another of Linton’s “insurgent wild women.” Edna’s husband, Léonce, tells their doctor that she is “odd”; that “She’s got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women”; and that she refuses to attend her sister’s wedding because she now rejects the institution of marriage (87, 88, 89). Edna drinks “liquor from the glass as a man would have done” (106); she admits that she is “a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex” (111); and in talking candidly with potential lover Robert Lebrun, notes, “I suppose this is what you would call unwomanly, but I have got into a habit of expressing myself. It doesn’t matter to me, and you may think me unwomanly if you like” (142). Edna’s “unwomanliness” extends to her mothering. Léonce judges her within the parameters of patriarchal motherhood: “He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother’s place to look after her children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business” (7). Consequently, he feels that she “failed in her duty toward their children” (10). Edna’s aberrant attitude is pitted against the normative behavior of the women in their vacationing sea-side community: “In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle.” These women “idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” (10). Edna is at times nurturing, but her overarching response to her children is ambivalence: “She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them” (24). When they are away visiting their grandmother, “Their

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absence was a sort of relief,” for it “seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her” (25). Edna’s condition echoes Caird’s warning in “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women’” that “Women have been forced […] to expend their whole energies in maternal cares, and this has been the origin of a thousand evils.”71 In Edna’s case, these “evils” will lead to her demise. The Awakening traces Edna’s increasing anarchic yearning for a life and identity beyond wifehood and motherhood. Her stirring sexual passion for Robert allows her to “recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (17) and, in order to harness this self fully, she plots her escape. She breaks the social rules by canceling her Tuesday nights at home, where she was to entertain her female cohort, alerting her disapproving husband, “I simply felt like going out, and I went out” (68). More dramatically, when Léonce leaves for New  York for an extended period of work, she takes the opportunity to move out of their large house and rents a much smaller one down the street, telling her friend Mademoiselle Reisz, “I know I shall like it, like the feeling of freedom and independence” (107). Edna exiles herself not only from her oppressive home, but also from her sons when she sends them away to their grandmother. In this state of liberation, Edna takes a lover, Alcée Arobin, an act that signals deviancy, in violation of the Victorian sexual codes of the True Woman. Additionally, she devotes herself, like Hadria, to creative expression. She had turned to painting, confiding to her friend Adèle that “I feel as if I wanted to be doing something” (74)—that is, something beyond mothering. Her husband had scolded her for her “folly” as “the mother of children” spending “in an atelier days which would be better employed contriving for the comfort of her family” (76). In her new cottage, however, Edna finds that her productivity increases in exile, and “Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual” (127). Her children are, of course, an obligation, but Edna feels only “depressed” after visiting Adèle, appreciating that Adèle’s “mother-­ woman” status “was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui” (75). Adèle thus perpetuates the old order that New Women are trying to disturb. Worried about Edna’s maternal detachment, Adèle implores her friend, “Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children!” (148). Edna’s maternal ennui intensifies with the imminent return of her husband, who informs her that

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he is planning, against her wishes, to take her abroad; and by her hopeless love for Robert. She travels alone to Grand Isle, and as she prepares to swim out into the Gulf of Mexico in her extreme act of exile, “The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them”; “She understood now clearly what she had meant long ago when she said to Adèle Ratignolle that she would give up the unessential, but she would never sacrifice herself for her children” (154). Further and further from the shore, “She thought of Léonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul” (155). Edna is an ‘unnatural’ mother who abandons her children, but as the narrative testifies, she does so because she is unable or unwilling to reconcile her autonomous needs with the relentless imperatives of ‘proper’ maternity. Described at the beginning by Adèle as an outsider from her community—“She is not one of us; she is not like us” (26)—Edna’s disruptive behavior renders her exilic from the institution of motherhood as well. She takes her life in what she regards as her ultimate gesture of self-­ determination, honoring her own resolution “never again to belong to another than herself” (107). Edna’s ‘improper’ maternal ambivalence highlights both the radical nature of her resistance to convention and the dangerous stakes of being a modern Wild Woman.

The Mother’s Recompense Having examined three novels from the 1890s, I turn to Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense, Canfield’s The Home-Maker, and Larsen’s Quicksand, all published in the 1920s during the period of so-called high modernism. While there is a quarter-century gap between the two sets of texts, we can appreciate the Victorian and modernist overlapping through E.  Ann Kaplan’s study of “‘Master’ mother discourses”72 in North American film and literature. Particularly relevant is Kaplan’s identification of what she terms the “‘high modernist’ mother,” a product of suffrage and the First World War when women defied gendered expectations by entering institutions of higher education and or the workforce, decided to remain childless, or rejected heteronormative mothering through lesbian relationships, for instance.73 Nonetheless, mother discourses reiterated Victorian eugenic and racial biases relegating the mother to the home for the survival of the species.74 Consequently, in the early and mid-twentieth century “the

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nuclear family remained intact and the mother was still central, but defensively so.”75 Delap likewise shows that avant-garde feminists had difficulty dethroning maternity in the early twentieth century. That said, Delap also notes that this cohort “explored the idea of a mother whose mothering role did not annul her individuality” and “sought to bring ‘private’ activities into the public domain.”76 The ‘improper’ maternal thus continued its threatening advance on what Pykett terms the “proper feminine.”77 As with the narratives by Caird, Dowie, and Chopin, themes of non-­normative mothering persist in those by Wharton, Canfield, and Larsen. Secondgeneration New Women protagonists utilize the dominant and reverse discourses noted by Ledger, and re-produce “fraught sites of instability” for the traditional family, operating “beyond the maternal ideal,” to borrow from Rosenman and Klaver.78 Like the former three, these latter three novels exemplify a modernism of content as they forge a new motherhood wrested from patriarchal control. In The Mother’s Recompense, Kate Clephane dramatizes the kind of life Chopin’s Edna Pontellier might have had if, instead of walking into the Gulf of Mexico, she had merely walked away. We meet Kate when she is in her early forties, although her New Woman credentials were established when she left her husband, John, and daughter, Anne, eighteen years earlier. Kate is, in effect, a contemporary of Hadria, Gallia, and Edna, who were in their twenties at the fin de siècle and would be roughly Kate’s age in the 1920s. Kate’s scandalous actions render her an aberrant mother, but it is essential to clarify that what she sought to escape was institutional marriage, not her child: “She had left Anne when Anne was a baby of three; left her with a dreadful pang, a rending of the inmost fibres, and yet a sense of unutterable relief, because to do so was to escape from the oppression of her married life”; “‘I couldn’t breathe’—that was all she had to say in her own defence” (13). Kate proves Adrienne Rich’s contention that there are “two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control.”79 Kate flees New York with her lover, headed for the West Indies, and after a series of affairs she winds up alone in a shabby hotel room on the French Riviera, where the novel opens in the medias res of her expatriation. Reflecting on her past, Kate recalls that when she tried to reclaim Anne a year after her departure, John prevented her from seeing the child, exiling Kate just as Kate had exiled herself. At the start of the novel, Kate

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learns that her mother-in-law, who had continued to deny Kate parental access following John’s death, has just died; and Kate is summoned home by a twenty-one-year-old Anne who wants a mother. The Mother’s Recompense documents Kate’s efforts to transition from a ‘bad’ to a ‘good’ mother while trying to maintain the spirit of individualism that drove her away in the first place. Reunited with Anne in New  York, Kate underscores that while the “Lawyers, judges, trustees, guardians, she supposed—all the natural enemies of woman” (8) had prevented her from seeing her daughter, the tyranny of conventional society could not destroy her maternal love. Kate embraces her new role as a physically omnipresent mother, settling comfortably back into her own marital mansion which Anne has inherited, and submitting her identity to that of her daughter: “To be with Anne, to play the part of Anne’s mother—the one part, she now saw, that fate had meant her for—that was what she wanted with all her starved and world-worn soul” (69). However, as Kate is unable to make friends—“was it because she was too much engrossed in her daughter to make any?”—she wonders, “had she been too suddenly changed from a self-centred woman, insatiable for personal excitements, into that new being, a mother, her centre of gravity in a life not hers?” (82–83). Throughout the narrative, Kate’s ‘improper’ mothering gives way to the dominant discourse as she seizes her second chance at self-sacrificing maternity. Her position is precarious, though, as she remains a New Woman outsider grappling with competing impulses to resist and conform. Kate struggles to preserve her independence under the weight of an all-consuming motherhood. Like Edna, Kate must negotiate maternal and sexual selfhoods. Kate’s seeming idyll with Anne is destroyed by Chris Fenno, her much younger ex-lover in Europe who had signaled her rebirth: “Life still dated” for her from the day they met; “At thirty-nine her real self had been born; without him she would never have had a self” (15). In a likely allusion to Chopin’s The Awakening, Kate still dreams of “Chris who had loved her and waked her” (my emphasis, 16)—and then left her. Although now “she didn’t love him any longer” (92), to her horror Kate learns that Anne and Chris (who knew nothing of Anne’s parentage) are engaged to be married. This plot twist sets up the central premise of the maternal moral dilemma: should Kate tell Anne about her ‘sordid’ past, shaming herself and destroying her daughter’s happiness? Or should Kate keep her secret and consign Anne to what the local Rector, who knows the truth, calls an “abomination” of a coupling (211)?

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Kate becomes suicidal when she learns that Chris determines to marry Anne. Kate resolves to remain silent and live only in the service of her daughter, yet after witnessing the couple exchange a caress, Kate “knew only that she must fly from it, fly as far as she could from the setting of these last indelible impressions” (221). While Kate is depicted as a fraught mother trying to (finally) do right by her child, equally at stake here is Kate’s sexual identity. The situation is of course extreme, but the plot is really just a shorthand for justifying the punishment of deviant mothers who, in contravention of True Womanhood, dare to seek erotic adventure and fulfillment. Indeed, as Kate knows, thinking of her daughter and lover at the same time was “as if she had committed a sort of profanation” (73). Kate sails for Europe immediately following the wedding, her secret intact. The novel ends as it began, with Kate ensconced on the Riviera with her former motley crowd, although she now enjoys an epistolary connection with Anne in another iteration of her compromised motherhood, or motherhood of compromise. The Mother’s Recompense spotlights the pressures attendant on New Women as they try to reconcile what Miller calls “a double life,” that is, “Victorian and modern, repressive and liberating, traditional and radically new.”80 The novel establishes that the world Kate has re-entered is a modern one: “it was a new, an absolutely new, Fifth Avenue” (32). Aware of a new ubiquity of divorce, Kate muses, “The new tolerance, she soon began to see, applied to everything,” such that “the lamb of pleasure lay down with the lion of propriety” (49–50). Concurrently, Kate yearns for re-­ acceptance by the society she disowned while simultaneously shrinking from that world. Eager to make a good impression for the sake of Anne, Kate becomes aware of “how quickly, unconsciously almost, she had slipped at last into the very attitude the Clephanes had so long tried to force upon her: the attitude of caution and conservatism” (74). Yet, at a New  York society party she witnesses her relatives and former friends “enveloping conformity”: “‘This is what I ran away from,’ she thought; and found more reasons than ever for her flight” (121). Kate further refuses to conform when she turns down her friend Fred’s marriage proposal, leaving us at the end of the novel just as we found her at the start: a woman in flight from wifehood. In exiling herself to France once more— “it had been her own choice to fly as she had” (262)—Kate is a liminal New Woman. Caught between Victorian and modern sensibilities, she finds in expatriation a space of maternal negotiation and resistance.

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The Home-Maker Eva Knapp, the protagonist of Canfield’s The Home-Maker, lives in a small town outside of New York City. She has been married to Lester for thirteen years, and they have three young children—Stephen, Helen, and Henry. She is a womanly woman who greets her husband and children at the door “fresh in a well-ironed, clean, gingham house-dress” (27), and who is a devoted and supremely capable parent: “Nobody could take care of you like Mother” (39). She complains, however, “children didn’t realize the sacrifices you made for them” (43). Her complete submersion of self to the drudgery of housework and the exhaustion of childcare leaves her in a state of physical and emotional distress, and she becomes a demonic mother when she takes out her frustrations on her children. She feels “resentment” toward Stephen, looks “sharply” at Helen, and hovers at the dining table “brooding over them” (36). Eva’s confinement to the private sphere takes its toll. She has “an hysteric breakdown” (36) and, like Hadria, Edna, and Kate, grows suicidal. For Eva, “A profound depression came upon her. These were the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence, the fine books and the speakers who had so much to say about the sacredness of maternity” (48). Eva delivers the reverse discourse of her own dominant one as she exposes the myths of motherhood. She resists the ideologies of successful femininity but simultaneously reveals their stranglehold. She is convinced that she was “fit for something better than scrubbing floors all her life,” and yet she prays, “O God, help me to be a good mother!” (50). Eva’s husband acknowledges her maternal ambivalence: “Lester never doubted that his wife loved her children with all the passion of her fiery heart, but there were times when it occurred to him that she did not like them very well” (71). He blames their predicament on himself for not making more money, and when he is fired from his job at Willing’s Emporium he too wishes to end his life. A botched suicide attempt leaves him paralyzed in a wheelchair, and Eva is forced into the public sphere to earn an income in his place. Hired to work in the Emporium’s Cloak-and-­ Suits department, Eva becomes a New Woman, just as Lester becomes a New Man as he delightedly assumes full-time care of the children (albeit with some assistance from the women’s Guild). Within the work force, Eva takes on the masculine characteristics associated with the New Woman. She eats her breakfast downtown “in a

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cafeteria like a traveling-man!” (152); “she folded her morning paper and put it under her arm with the exact gesture of any other business-man” (154); and she moves with “athletic certainty” (159). Eva is made the protégé of husband-and-wife partners Jerome and Nell, whose desire to build “a modern organization” (257) showcasing “the modern world at its best” (259) is paralleled in Eva’s modernized life. Not only does she excel at her tasks, earning a promotion to manager, but also she becomes a more liberated and thus more successful mother. With her attention turned to her career, she is more forgiving of her children. As Lester wonders, “Was this Eva the same as the old one? This Eva who came in every evening tired, physically tired as he had never seen her, but appeased, satisfied, fulfilled, having poured out in work she loved the furious splendor of her vigor” (221). Understanding that Eva is not suited to be a full-time, stay-at-­home parent, the whole family is happier by “the change in Mother which they all noticed (227). Eva evidences Caird’s argument that “It may seem paradoxical, but is none the less true, that we shall never have really good mothers until women cease to make their motherhood the central idea of their existence.”81 Having gained freedom from maternity, Eva is terrified that she will be exiled back to it if Lester should recover from his injury: “She did not want her husband to get well. She did not want to go home and live with her children” (287). The Willing business embraces modernity, but Eva’s community clings to Victorian spheres of separation: “If Lester got well, of course he could not stay at home and keep house and take care of the children … no able-bodied man ever did that. What would people say? It was out of the question. People would laugh at Lester. They would laugh at her” (287). Eva knows she is a “bad woman to rebel” against patriarchal motherhood (290), while Lester knows that she would return to being a miserable mother if she did not: “There was no sacrifice in the world which she would not joyfully make for her children except to live with them. They had tried that for fourteen dreadful years and knew what it brought them” (307). For his part, Lester thrives in his new role at home, but his thinking he could remain there as a healthy man “was heresy”; he “heard the threatening snarl of that unsuspected, unquestioned Tradition, amazed that any one dared so much as to conceive of an attack on it” (313). Unlike Hubert, who noted of his marriage to Hadria, “I could not endure that there should be any disturbance—any eccentricity—in our life” (Caird, Daughters 41), Lester embraces it. When he regains his ability to walk, he

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keeps the truth from Eva, choosing to feign paralysis as the only way they can both fulfill their reverse parental objectives. Lester personifies the New Man as described by Ann Heilmann: “fin-de-siècle feminists tended to create feminized and androgynous lovers whose ethereal bodies and spiritual frame of mind posed no threat to the New Woman.”82 Recall, too, from Chap. 2, Chris Willis’ statement that, “Punch joked about the New Man of the future as the anxious, downtrodden house-husband of an emancipated wife.”83 Lester worries about being perceived as such a feminized house-husband, but works with Eva to form a partnership based on mutual respect and empowerment. Eva and Lester embody what Delap identifies as the feminist avant-garde determination that “Parenting was to be a shared role.”84 Yet, if Eva and Lester have foiled the “boomerang” plot, the suppressed specter of Victorian ideology haunts their modern domestic arrangement.

Quicksand The novels examined so far have been written by white authors and feature white protagonists and communities. In looking now at Larsen’s Quicksand, I return to my earlier discussion of eugenics and racial motherhood, in Chap. 2, in order to situate Black mothering within New Woman discourse. As scholars attest, and as the example of Quicksand testifies, ideologies of Black womanhood problematize both the concept of the modernist mother and the stakes of trying to “make it new.” Recall the respective work of Allison Berg, Anne Stavney, and Claudia Tate, which illustrates how, at the moment when white women were disavowing feminine decorum, Black women were claiming it as a means to gaining middle-­class respectability. White women were seeking lifestyles and identities that were ‘new,’ while their Black sisters were just beginning to adopt the ‘old’; and yet, for the latter women, it was precisely by embracing this traditional order that they were granted unprecedented access to new modes of being and experiences that distanced them from the persisting stereotypes of ‘primitive,’ sexually voracious womanhood. The white New Woman was thus seemingly inconsistent or incompatible with the new Black woman or, as she came to be called in the 1920s, the New Negro Woman. The term comes from The New Negro Movement or Renaissance, or Harlem Renaissance, announced in Harlem literary publications like The Messenger’s 1923 special “New Negro Woman” issue, and Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation.

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Although the aim of the Renaissance was to publicize the artistic and intellectual accomplishments of its Black producers, it privileged the work by men while promoting the duty of women to serve as the (especially maternal) forces of racial uplift. Stavney traces how Harlem magazines like The Messenger and The Crisis perpetuated a “valence of the true black woman ideal and its attendant philosophy of moral motherhood among the urban black middle class of the modern era.”85 Locke’s collection of forty-eight poems, short stories, and essays contains only eight by women, and instead, as visualized by its original frontispiece titled Brown Madonna, endorsed “the true black woman devoted to mothering her infant, itself a synecdoche for future generations of African Americans.”86 However, we can see that the New Negro Woman inhabits “fraught sites of instability,”87 with her being at once, or at varying intervals, a New Negro Woman and a Black New Woman. It is in the spaces of resistance to prevailing ideologies of Black womanhood that we can situate Black protagonists within New Woman fiction. Jennifer M. Wilks provides helpful links between the two in her reading of the novel The Living is Easy (1948) by Harlem Renaissance figure Dorothy West. Wilks posits that protagonist Cleo Jericho Judson, an “empowered, independent woman,” registers “a significant break with the masculinist archetypes of canonical African American modernism. Indeed, one is more likely to locate this unconventional modernist subject in the company of another, more subversive, turn-of-the-century archetype: the New Woman.”88 Stories like The Living is Easy “demand a revised, modernist conception of political desire, one in which economically and socially privileged African American women struggle to come full circle, that is, to shed the constraints of a protected ‘lady-hood’ for the freedom of an empowered womanhood.”89 Wilks’ theorizing speaks to my own agenda of reading Larsen’s Quicksand as an example of a second-generation New Woman novel. By viewing it as such, we gain a greater appreciation of the genre’s capaciousness in its treatment of modernist mothering. The New Womanism of Helga Crane, the protagonist of Quicksand, can further be considered within the framework of the institution of Black motherhood. Patricia Hill Collins defines this institution as “a series of constantly renegotiated relationships that African-American women experience with one another, with Black children, with the larger African-­ American community, and with self.”90 Collins stresses that some women find motherhood “a truly burdensome condition that stifles their creativity, exploits their labor, and makes them partners in their own

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oppression,” while others use it as a foundation for their “self-­actualization, status in the Black community, and a catalyst for social activism.”91 Drawing on Collins, Licia Morrow Calloway suggests that maternal literatures of the Harlem Renaissance foreground motherhood as “a way of dealing with the host of issues facing the black populace, ranging from how to come to terms with the legacy of slavery, to strategies for responding productively to discrimination and prejudice, to the possibility of fostering a collective racial consciousness.”92 Calloway argues that in its exploration of such themes, Quicksand constructs Helga as a character who is ultimately oppressed by motherhood.93 From its opening pages, Quicksand establishes its New Woman contexts and controlling themes of exile, race, and reproduction. Helga is a twenty-two-year-old teacher at Naxos, a fictional boarding school for Blacks in the American South. She is eugenically sound: she exudes “an air of radiant, careless health”; “her nose was good, her ears delicately chiseled” (2); and the school’s principal, Robert Anderson, observes, “You have dignity and breeding” (20). Helga, however, balks at Anderson’s encouraging her, as a “lady,” to do her part for the uplift of her race (20). Helga experiences “maladjustment” and is “an outsider” (8) within her racialized community and, like the other ‘unnatural’ and Wild New Women discussed herein, she rejects the institution of marriage when she breaks off her engagement to James Vayle, an act she recognizes as “social suicide” (9). Feeling that she “could neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity,” in her “present new revolt” (7) and “rebellious state” (10) she quits her job and flees by train to Chicago. The novel thus lays out the racial and domestic ideologies Helga repudiates as she attempts to define herself as a modern, independent New Woman in the early twentieth century. The theme of exile is complicated by Helga’s lifelong quest for a home—in literal, psychological, and spiritual meanings. Her sense of homelessness is predicated on multiple factors, including her being of mixed race94 (her mother was white, her father Black); her father’s abandonment of her mother when she was young; her subsequent unhappy childhood with her mother’s hostile second (white) husband and stepsiblings; her mother’s death when she was fifteen; and her white Uncle Peter’s sending her away to a boarding school for Black students. Circumstances like these have left her a displaced and racially ambiguous wanderer. The novel presents Helga’s search for belonging in tandem with her acceptance and rejection of convention and conformity via the ceaseless pattern

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of flight and return. Thus, for a brief period, walking amidst the “multi-­ colored crowd” of the Chicago streets she feels “she had come home. She, Helga Crane, who had no home” (28). She becomes disillusioned with the city after realizing that the only employment on hand for a Black woman is domestic work. When she is hired as an assistant to the wealthy Mrs. Hayes-Rore, “a prominent ‘race’ woman and an authority on the problem,” she leaps at the opportunity. On the train to New York, where Hayes-Rore is to deliver speeches to “several meetings of the annual convention of the Negro Women’s League of Clubs” (35), Helga feels “reborn” (32). New York yields her a “magic sense of having come home. Harlem, teeming black Harlem, had welcomed her,” and she feels she had “found herself” (40). Mrs. Hayes-Rore secures her a job with an insurance company, and she develops a friendship with Hayes-Rore’s niece, the well-off widow Anne Grey. However, as both an insider and an outsider, she experiences tensions with Hayes-Rore and Anne, and she feels “shut in, trapped” (43). When her Uncle Peter unexpectedly sends her 5000 dollars, she gains a sense “of relief, of liberation” (50), and she again chooses to uproot herself. She travels to her mother’s home of Denmark, where her Aunt Katrina still resides. Sailing to Europe she is “like a released bird in her returned feeling of happiness and freedom, that blessed sense of belonging to herself alone and not to a race” (58). After two years abroad she longs for the Blacks of Harlem and repatriates to the United States. Helga’s rotation of exile and return underscores how her life is spent negotiating the tenets of the New Woman and the New Negro Woman. Racial ideologies are inflected with gendered ones, such that Helga’s efforts to come to terms with her racial identity are played out at the nexus of marriage and motherhood. Although she rejected fiancé Vayle, Helga is not averse to marriage and motherhood. Focusing on the economic benefits attendant on patriarchal wifehood, when she is in New  York with Anne she thinks: “Some day she intended to marry one of those alluring brown or yellow men who danced attendance on her. Already financially successful, any one of them could give to her the things which she had now come to desire, a home like Anne’s, cars of expensive makes such as lined the avenue, clothes and furs from Bendel’s and Revillion Frères’, servants, and leisure” (42). Acknowledging her attraction to Anderson, now relocated to New York, she contemplates motherhood with him at the helm: “Helga Crane meant, now, to have a home and perhaps laughing, appealing dark-eyed children in Harlem” (42).

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Helga’s positive sense of racialized maternity is negated when she confronts “the existence of ignominy which the New World of opportunity and promise forced upon Negroes” (68). Accordingly, “How stupid she had been ever to have thought that she could marry and perhaps have children in a land where every dark child was handicapped at the start by the shroud of color!” (68–69); “She saw, suddenly, the giving birth to little, helpless, unprotesting Negro children as a sin, an unforgivable outrage. More black folk to suffer indignities. More dark bodies for mobs to lynch” (69). Against the historical background of slavery and racist violence, the politics of maternity are debated by Helga and Vayle, who respectively articulate the opposing arguments of the New Woman and New Negro Woman. When Helga ponders, “Why do Negroes have children?” Vayle, a spokesman for racial uplift, is shocked: “But Helga! Good heavens! Don’t you see that if we—I mean people like us—don’t have children, the others will still have.” To his insistence that “We’re the ones who must have the children if the race is to get anywhere,” Helga rejects New Negro Womanhood: “Well, I for one don’t intend to contribute any to the cause” (96). Quicksand adheres to Ardis’ “disempowering” and “boomerang” plotting we have seen in other New Woman novels. Having failed to confront her sexual desire for Anderson, Helga moves from jealousy to near-suicidal despair when he winds up marrying Anne. On a stormy night she seeks shelter in a store’s make-shift church and, following a religious conversion there, gives herself sexually to the Black preacher, the repugnant Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, and then forces his hand in marriage. She moves with him to his impoverished church in Alabama, where her good intentions of serving him and the congregation collapse with the realization that she detests her husband, and has become burdened by maternity. The final pages of the novel indicate that for Helga, there can be no successes as either a New Negro mother or a New Woman; the “fraught sites of instability” lead to permanent sexual, physical, and psychical fracture. We learn that she has had three children “all born within the short space of twenty months” who have “used her up,” and she becomes reduced to her corporeal being. The maternal body, rife with “horrible nausea and hateful faintness,” overpowers her selfhood: “Always she felt extraordinarily and annoyingly ill, having forever to be sinking into chairs”; “The light, care-free days of the past, when she had not felt heavy and reluctant or weak and spent, receded more and more” (113–114). Relatedly, because her own children demand her full attention, she cannot

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achieve the broad aspirations of the New Negro Woman: “So there was no time for the pursuit of beauty, or for the uplifting of other harassed and teeming women, or for the instruction of their neglected children” (114). At the same time, although Helga expresses maternal “pride, tenderness, and exaltation” toward her children (114), when pregnant with a fourth she confronts her maternal ambivalence. In the process, she undermines Victorian myths of idealized maternity, experiencing parturition in all its ugliness, messiness, and agony. When her fourth baby is born, “It seemed, for some reason, not to go off just right. And when, after that long frightfulness, the fourth little dab of amber humanity which Helga had contributed to a despised race was held before her for maternal approval, she failed entirely to respond properly to this sop of consolation for the suffering and horror through which she had passed.” Indeed, “she deliberately closed her eyes, mutely shutting out the sickly infant” (117). Through its modernism of content, the novel makes explicit the reality of post-partum depression: “Nothing penetrated the kind darkness into which her bruised spirit had retreated” and she enters an “appalling blackness of pain” (118). Her maternal angst clarifies her racial condition while curing her religious fervor: “Life wasn’t a miracle, a wonder. It was, for Negroes at least, only a great disappointment” (120–121). Her ‘failure’ as a New Negro Woman is symbolized not only by her “Not so healthy” daughter (114) but also by the “last sickly infant” who, “born of such futile torture and lingering torment, had died after a short week of slight living” (121). Helga realizes she “had ruined her life” (123) in marrying Green, forsaking her New Woman lifestyle of which she can only now dream: “It was so easy and so pleasant to think about freedom and cities, about clothes and books, about the sweet mingled smell of Houbigant and cigarettes in softly lighted rooms filled with inconsequential chatter and laughter and sophisticated tuneless music” (125). In this spirit of autonomous longing, she plots her final exilic escape, for if she didn’t leave, “she would have to die. She couldn’t endure it. Her suffocation and shrinking loathing were too great” (124). And yet, unlike Edna and Kate, she cannot abandon her children: “She felt that through all the rest of her lifetime she would be hearing their cry of ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ through sleepless nights. No. She couldn’t desert them” (125). Although she imagines making some form of “arrangement” for independence when she regains her strength, the novel ends with Helga pregnant with her fifth child.

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Ironically, Helga told Vayle she would contribute no children to the racial “cause,” but she does. That said, the meaning of this contribution is called into question by her ambivalence, and by the fact that she has become, like the downtrodden mothers in her congregation, “always on the edge of health” and “worn out and apprehensive” (115). Motherhood motivated by political exigency is unhealthy for the tripartite of mother, children, and race. In negation of her New Woman desires for personal and sexual freedoms, Helga is a reluctant New Negro Woman imprisoned by maternity in a loveless marriage. The narrative offers neither racial uplift nor female advancement, as Helga lingers in the interstices of New Negro and New Woman motherhood. Quicksand disempowers its once-­ ambitious protagonist by condemning her to an isolated, conflicted maternity. However, in its modernism of content, the novel breaks ground in its graphic treatment of corporeal motherhood and the trauma of parturition, and for its matrifocal privileging of a racialized terra incognita.

Conclusion: Bad Mothers of Modernism Hadria, Gallia, Edna, Kate, Eva, and Helga are first- and second-­generation New Women protagonists in mother-problem novels. Revising the Victorian romance plot that culminates in marriage, these protagonists appear in stories that for the most part introduce—and undermine—marriage from the start. Edna, Kate, and Eva are unhappy wives from the opening pages. Hadria and Helga become miserable after marriage, and Gallia consents to marry at the end of the book but not out of matrimonial desire. Their lives unfold within the separate spheres of gender, where they are delimited by the expectations of wifehood and motherhood. In their modernism of content, the novels exemplify the psychological new realism of New Woman fiction, laying bare the terra incognita of matrifocal subjectivities. The characters are immersed in a death-in-life existence. To save themselves and to achieve independence, they leave home, fleeing, as Friedman puts it, “From convention, from the pressure to conform, to do the respectable, the proper, the expected.”95 Hadria, Kate, and Helga move to various new cities and countries; Gallia has been sowing wild oats; Edna rents a private cottage; and Eva escapes to Willing’s Emporium. These exilic women have limited triumphs. All the characters, with the exception of Gallia, contemplate suicide at some point in their adult lives, indicative of how their psychic well-being is haunted by ideologies of patriarchal

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motherhood. Edna takes her life in what she considers her only genuine means of release; Helga and Gallia return to domestic enclosures and take up their post as mothers; Kate voluntarily sends herself into an unwanted permanent expatriation; and Eva holds on to her career only at the cost of her husband fraudulently confining himself to a wheelchair. These protagonists are evidence of Miller’s assertion that Edwardian (and also, as we have seen, fin-de-siècle and post-Edwardian) women lived “a double life, one that was alternatively (or even simultaneously) Victorian and modern, repressive and liberating, traditional and radically new.”96 Outsiders in physical, emotional, communal, and geographic terms, our protagonists are described as, among other qualities, “odd,” “peculiar,” “maladjusted,” and “misshapen” women. In exiling themselves from their children and male partners; in craving intellectual, creative, and sexual stimulation; and in seeking alternate maternal arrangements, they are versions of the New Woman who is “dangerous, a threat to the status quo,” and who signifies a “distinctly modern ideal of self-refashioning.”97 In their attempts to make motherhood ‘new,’ they all take up arms against the “tyranny of society.”98 We can appreciate their battles in light of Sexual Anarchy, wherein Elaine Showalter attributes the fin-de-siècle “breaking down” of “all the laws that governed sexual identity and behavior” in part to transatlantic New Women. New Women could be deviant for taking on erotic lovers, and were disruptive for contemplating maternity outside of marriage or not even wanting children. In reaction, public and political discourses emphasized the centrality of the nuclear family to ensure the perpetuation of the rigid gendered spheres and the continuation of a strong (read: white) race.99 Showalter’s points recall the contentious ideologies of Republican Motherhood that hover in both the foreground and the background of white New Woman fictions, and resonate with discourses of racial uplift and the New Negro Woman informing literatures of the Harlem Renaissance. Just as we have seen how protagonists like Gallia “want to fight everything and have everything new and made new again” (254), so Showalter concurs that the “New Woman was an anarchic figure who threatened to turn the world upside down,” characterized in “the vocabulary of insurrection and apocalypse.”100 This vocabulary echoes the rhetoric of Mao and Walkowitz’s collection Bad Modernisms. Modernism is “bad” in part because of the “bad artistic behavior” that led to its formations, with artists and writers operating in opposition to established mores, and trading on shock, alienation, and

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subversion in their work reflective of the period which itself was in crisis and chaos.101 “Bad” modernisms therefore resonate with the seemingly ‘improper’ maternal behaviors of New Women. Hadria, Gallia, Edna, Kate, Eva, and Helga are, ultimately, “bad” mothers of modernism. They do not necessarily repudiate maternity, but in their own ways, they react against imperatives that make it—along with marriage—a requirement of womanhood. Through their mutual insurrections against idealized mothering, they are in the vanguard demanding a “new social faith”102 in the sovereignty of women. Patriarchal motherhood is predicated on women fulfilling a biological destiny. Discussing how her generation is suppressing, indeed killing, so-­ called maternal instinct, Hadria informs her friend Valeria that she believes that there are “ideas and emotions fermenting in people’s brains, quite different from those that they are supposed and ordered to cherish, and that these heresies go on working in secret for years before they become even suspected, and then suddenly the population exchange confessions” (53). Valeria observes to Hadria, “You describe the features of a great revolution” (53). Valeria echoes Caird’s own insistence that the family must be made new through a “bloodless” and “a social revolution.” The six novels examined in this chapter serve as a revolutionary locus where anarchic protagonists “exchange confessions” about mothering. Through a multiplicity of interconnected voices that testify to the diverse iterations of maternal modernism, Hadria, Gallia, Edna, Kate, Eva, and Helga defamiliarize maternity to each other and to their audiences within and beyond their texts.

Notes 1. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 4. 2. Ibid., 58. 3. Ibid. See for example 97, 139–40, 148. 4. High modernism is generally associated with the publication in 1922 of Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. 5. Egerton, “A Keynote,” 58. 6. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 737. 7. Besnault-Levita and Gillard-Estrada, “Introduction,”  Beyond  the Victorian/Modernist Divide , 6, 8. 8. Mao and Walkowitz, “Introduction,” Bad Modernisms, 1. 9. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 5. 10. Ibid., 170.

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11. Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood, xxi. 12. Ardis suggests that many New Woman writers also experimented with form, in terms of disrupting linearity, for example (169–170). Egerton, who wrote experimental, surrealist short stories (collected in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894)), is perhaps unsurprisingly regarded as the most “modernist” of New Woman authors. For a discussion on her formal innovations, see Ledger’s “Introduction” to her edition of Keynotes and Discords, pp. ix–xxvi. 13. Ingram, “Introduction,” 5–6. 14. Schenck, “Exiled by Genre,” 229. 15. Ibid., 230–31. 16. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 60, 29. 17. Ibid., 30–31. 18. Ibid., 31–32. 19. Ibid., 88. 20. Ibid., 37. 21. Ibid., 3. 22. Ibid., 37, 116. 23. Ibid., 42. 24. Ibid., 42. 25. Ibid., 45. 26. Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 57. 27. Ibid., 57. 28. Ibid., 57. 29. Ibid., 57. 30. Ibid., 57. 31. See, for example, Ardis, New  Women, New Novels, 169; Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 15; Ledger, The New Woman, 2. 32. Pykett, Engendering Fictions, 15. 33. Scott, “Introduction,” Gender in Modernism, 12–13. 34. Ledger, The New Woman, 180–81. 35. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 83. 36. Miller, Jane, Rebel Women, 7. 37. Ibid., 8. 38. Ibid., 41. 39. Ibid., 195. 40. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 134. 41. Ibid., 139. 42. Ingram, “Introduction,” Women’s Writing in Exile, 4–6. 43. Friedman, “Exile in the American Grain,” 88. 44. Ibid., 94–95. 45. Benstock, “Expatriate Modernism,” 28.

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46. Ibid., 28. 47. Ingram, “Introduction,” Women’s Writing in Exile, 5. 48. Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 16. 49. See A History of the Mothers’ Union by Cordelia Moyse. 50. Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,”  Other  Mothers, 9; Scott, “Introduction,” The Gender of Modernism, 14. 51. For Ledger’s use of the term “reverse discourses,” see Chap. 2; for my term “improper maternities,” as adapted from Pykett’s notion of “proper” and “improper” femininities, see Chap. 2. “Bad” modernism alludes to Mao and Walkowitz’s Bad Modernisms, which I turn to in this chapter’s conclusion. 52. Linton, “The Wild Women,” 79. 53. Ibid., 80. 54. Linton, “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents,” 596, 604. 55. Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 818. 56. Ibid., 819–20. 57. Ibid., 821. 58. Ibid., 824. 59. Ibid., 825–26. 60. Ibid., 828. 61. Caird, “The Emancipation of the Family,” 57. 62. Ibid., 58, 59. 63. Caird, “The Morality of Marriage,” 137. 64. Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 19. 65. Linton, “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents,” 604. 66. Cunningham, “He-Notes,” 97. 67. Ibid., 96. 68. Ibid., 99. 69. Ibid., 99. 70. Ledger, The New Woman, 70. 71. Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 819. 72. Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 19. 73. Ibid., 18. 74. Ibid., 20, 24–25. 75. Ibid., 18. 76. Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 211. 77. Pykett, The ‘Improper Feminine,’ 12 78. Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 9, 13. 79. Rich, Of Woman Born, 13. 80. Miller, Jane, Rebel Women, 195. 81. Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 819. 82. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 96. 83. Willis, “Heaven Defend Me,” 56–57.

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84. Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 211. 85. Stavney, “Mothers of Tomorrow,” 539. 86. Ibid., 545. 87. Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 9. 88. Wilks, “New Women,” 569. 89. Ibid., 570. 90. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 190. 91. Ibid., 191. 92. Calloway, Black Family (Dys)Function, 11. 93. Ibid., 16. 94. For a discussion of Helga’s biracial identity, see Calloway 81–83. 95. Friedman, “Exile in the American Grain,” 94. 96. Miller, Jane, Rebel Women, 195. 97. Ledger, The New Woman, 11; Patterson, “Introduction,” 2. 98. Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 819. 99. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 3. 100. Ibid., 38–39. 101. Mao and Walkowitz, “Introduction,” Bad Modernisms, 2–3. 102. Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 828.

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CHAPTER 4

“The ‘Momentousness’ of Motherhood”: Maternal Discourses and Debates in The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review and The Freewoman: A Weekly Humanist Review

Introduction: Bondwomen Versus Freewomen “As we are now living in a period which tends by general consent to apotheosise the ‘mother,’ it is necessary to say that, while we believe profoundly in the ‘momentousness’ of motherhood, we have no belief in its sacro-sanctity”; “Entered upon seriously, and under prepared conditions, motherhood for the woman should be a joy and a great adventure. If it is otherwise, a woman has no business to undertake it.” 1 So Dora Marsden proclaims in her editorial for the January 11, 1912, issue of The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review. From the launch of her magazine in London on November 23, 1911, Marsden signaled her focus on the status of women as mothers. Explaining the journal’s moniker in her opening piece, “Bondwomen,” she asserts that readers will “arrive at the conception of Freewomen by way of a description of Bondwomen”: “Bondwomen are distinguished from Freewomen by a spiritual distinction. Bondwomen are the women who are not separate spiritual entities—who are not individuals. They are complements merely.” Marsden emphasizes, “A morality Marsden, “The New Morality.—IV,” 142. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_4

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begotten in a community where one-half are born servants may glibly say that it is woman’s highest rôle to be the comforter of men and children; but it is the truth […] that while to be a human poultice is to have great utility, it does not offer the conditions under which vivid new life-manifestations are likely to show themselves, either in the ‘Comforter’ or the ‘Comforted.’”2 As I demonstrate in this chapter, by serving as a forum for dissention and debate about “woman’s highest rôle” as a nurturer, The Freewoman provided discursive space for the realization of “vivid new lifemanifestations” of maternity. Marsden (1882–1960) was in many ways a quintessential New Woman. A Queen’s Scholarship funded her studies at Owens College in Manchester, enabling her transition from her English working-class background in Yorkshire to middle-class status as a school teacher.3 Additionally, she was a radical suffragette, and she was single and childfree by choice. As such, she fits Ann Ardis’ description of the New Woman of fin-de-siècle fiction and periodicals who generated a “tremendous amount of polemic” for her decisions to forgo predictable and conventional marriage and motherhood.4 Where periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attacked the New Woman, Marsden created her own magazine in which the New Woman could find a voice. Wanting to overcome what she perceived were the limitations and failures of the Women’s Social and Political Union (1903–1918), the militant suffrage organization headed by Emmeline Pankhurst and daughters Christabel and Sylvia, Marsden founded The Freewoman.5 It was to be a site for rigorous and contentious dialogue about contemporary movements and issues extending beyond middle-class suffrage, like anarchism, socialism, syndicalism, feminism, and, of course, motherhood. The magazine reflected concerns with how women could achieve self-definition in relation to maternity, concerns already registered by Victorian fin-de-siècle New Women, as seen in Chaps. 2 and 3. Marsden brought her friend and fellow suffragette Mary Gawthorpe on as a nominal co-editor. Weakening health and difficulties working with Marsden led Gawthorpe to step down after the March 7, 1912, issue;6 even after Gawthorpe’s departure, though, Marsden continued to write in the plural “we.” As pitched in the first editorial, Marsden defines The Freewoman’s mandate as an “open paper”: We do not mean “open” in the sense that we have no editorial point of view, but “open” in the sense that we are prepared not only to accept, but to

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welcome opposing points of view. We are compelled to recognise that the changes implied in the acceptance of the theory of the Freewomen are so momentous that they may pass unchallenged on the authority of none. The evolution of Freewomen from Bondwomen is a change so great and revolutionary that by its side, a political and social Revolution, like that in France a century ago, or the industrial revolution in England, appear secondary in importance.7

The forty-seven installments of the periodical’s two-volume run—its last issue appeared on October 10, 1912—embody the revolutionary zeitgeist of modernism. Signing off in “Our Last Issue,” Marsden summarizes, “If we have waged a hostile war with total disbelievers, we have carried on many friendly duels with critics in the paper’s pages.”8 Given The Freewoman’s revolutionary impetus, and given women’s traditional service as Bondwomen in their capacity to mother both their children and the nation, it is unsurprising that the magazine is preoccupied with narratives of mothering within and against bourgeois scripts. The periodical treats topics like birth control, reproduction, sterilization, eugenics, enforced childbearing, maternal instinct, sexual activity, childhood education, parental training, single mothers, paternity and fatherhood, marriage, domestic labor, endowed motherhood, mothers in the workforce, and mothering the race. Like New Woman fiction with its diverse sets of protagonists, The Freewoman is a locus wherein contributors present polyvocal opinions about the numerous and prevailing maternal concerns of the day. As in Chap. 3, so here in Chap. 4 we meet New Women insurgents who challenge patriarchal motherhood and marriage. They stake their ground in The Freewoman out of their conviction that, as Mona Caird urged in 1897, “To bring the institution of the family up to date is among the next great tasks of progressive civilisation.”9 Caird’s New Woman mantra is echoed throughout The Freewoman, as in contributor Alice Melvin’s assertion that “the future of the mother is a matter for the immediate consideration of every thinking woman.”10 This notion of progress, grounded in women’s rights and liberties as intellectual, autonomous beings, informs the magazine’s overarching goals of promoting vanguard feminism. Marsden self-reflexively announces in the inaugural issue, “The chief event of this week is our own first appearance. The publication of THE FREEWOMAN11 marks an epoch. It marks the point at which Feminism in England ceases to be impulsive and unaware of its own features, and

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becomes definitely self-conscious and introspective. For the first time, feminists themselves make the attempt to reflect the feminist movement in the mirror of thought.”12 The mirror substantively reflected feminist motherhood.

Maternal Manifestoes As the first editorial, “Bondwomen” serves as a kind of modernist manifesto. Bruce Clarke labels it as such, positing that with this “debut manifesto” Marsden’s “provocations were indeed intentional” and “immediately placed the Freewoman on what we can recognize as a ‘modernist’ plane of iconoclastic innovation.”13 We can further approach Marsden’s declaration through Bonnie Kime Scott’s statement that “Typically, both the authors of original manifestos and the literary historians of modernism took as their norm a small set of its male participants, who were quoted, anthologized, taught, and consecrated as geniuses.”14 Scott asserts, however, “We suspect that modernism is not the aesthetic, directed, monological sort of phenomenon sought in their own ways by authors of now-famous manifestos” like T. S. Eliot, Eugene Jolas, and F. T. Marinetti, among others. Rather, “Modernism as caught in the mesh of gender is polyphonic, mobile, interactive, sexually charged.”15 Scott’s revisionism encourages us to review a text like The Freewoman as a corrective to a monological, masculinist modernism.16 Likewise, Janet Lyon samples what she calls manifestoes dealing with women’s roles in early twentieth-­ century Western Europe, which she reads “collectively as a modernist enterprise” due to their experimental nature and focus on “pressing political and cultural questions in late modernity.”17 Although Lyon does not discuss The Freewoman, we can include Marsden’s “Bondwomen”—and subsequent editorials of provocation—as contributions to this modernist program. The Freewoman as a platform for modernist feminist revolution is further contexualized by Lucy Delap. Looking at “those who called themselves the feminist ‘vanguard,’ ‘advanced feminists,’ or ‘modern feminists,’” she states, “Over the first ten years of the twentieth century, feminism came to occupy a similar space to the idea of the ‘new woman’ of the 1890s, signifying a radical, subversive grouping closely associated with the avant-garde and radical movements that flourished before World War One.”18 Delap explains, “Like the ‘new woman,’ ‘feminism’ was closely bound up with its representation in print”; and the term “‘avant-garde’

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usefully captures some characteristic features of feminist discourse: the idealisation of originality, rejection of forebears and sense of rupture with the past, the denial of essences and eternal truths, anti-conventionality, artistic experimentalism and so on.”19 As the first periodical in Britain or the United States to self-identify as feminist, The Freewoman was instrumental in shaping and responding to the intellectual climate of transatlantic vanguard feminism.20 I contend that The Freewoman’s reputation as an avant-garde feminist periodical is, in part, indebted to its coverage of maternity. The Freewoman presents the new mother as an extension of the Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman in the twentieth century. This new mother emanates from maternalism, an ideology related to Republican Motherhood and the True Woman that privileges motherhood as the highest of personal achievements and most vital public service, but that was revised in line with first-­ wave feminism. Ann Taylor Allen explains that “feminists who extolled motherhood as woman’s distinctive contribution to society—and they were many during the period from 1890 to 1914—had no intention of confining mothers to their conventional roles of dependent wife, domestic drudge, and sexual slave.” Women’s ambitions “included not only political rights and legal equality, but economic self-sufficiency that would enable them to live free of male control, freedom to develop their talents, and above all control over their reproductive lives.”21 These intersecting goals drive the rebellious discourses of The Freewoman. The magazine’s name itself resonates with feminist maternalist initiatives of the modernist era. For instance, further to my discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Chap. 2, in Women and Economics (1898) she refers to “The free woman” as one who has “room for full individual expression in her economic activities and in her social relation.”22 In “Our Androcentric Culture” (1910) Gilman expands, “The great woman’s movement and labor movement of to-day are parts of the same pressure, the same world-progress. An economic democracy must rest on a free womanhood; and a free womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy.”23 These ideas of freedom are linked to maternity: “The woman, free at last, intelligent, recognizing her real place and responsibility in life as a human being, will be not less, but more, efficient as a mother.”24 It is important to appreciate that while Freewomen were of course women, feminists could be both female and male. Men were regular contributors to and readers of the periodical, a fact reflecting Marsden’s

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conviction that The Freewoman’s mandate is “to show the two causes, man’s and woman’s, are one.”25 To prove her point, Marsden changed the name of her magazine’s subtitle from A Weekly Feminist Review, in place for Volume I, to A Weekly Humanist Review for Volume II. She informs her readers of the transition: “the most striking feature of THE FREEWOMAN is that the earnestness of the women contributors in seeking to comprehend the masculinist point of view has been equalled by a corresponding eagerness on the part of the men contributors to comprehend the feminist, an earnestness and eagerness which have not ruled out mutual criticism. That is, we think, as it should be, and is the basis of the dual interest which we should describe as humanist.”26 This duality resonates with how the New Man and new father were integral to women achieving feminist motherhood. Personal and intimate experiences and philosophies related to diverse iterations of maternal modernism crossed into the public domain through the various channels of The Freewoman. Published on Thursdays, every issue (save the final one) is twenty pages, beginning with an editorial and a “Notes of the Week” update; followed by content including articles, book reviews, and occasional creative pieces; and concluding with the correspondence.27 The Freewoman’s substantive concentration on maternity provides an unwieldy number of examples for analysis; in order to manage the material, I examine a few dialogic clusters treating some of the most prevalent and controversial topics related to mothering, such as endowment, co-operative child-rearing, marriage, reproductive control, and eugenics. I begin by looking at Marsden’s early editorials as a way of illustrating how the topic of maternal revolution was integral to The Freewoman’s ethos. My focus on these editorials substantiates Clarke’s suggestion that Marsden should be regarded “as a discursive artist in her own right, a modernist writer/editor shaping a complex textual field and responding to a complex audience.”28 At the same time, I diverge from Clarke’s insistence that “Although it enabled a significant multiplicity of radical discourses to interact, the Freewoman was ultimately the product not of a collective but of an individual editorial will.”29 I claim that the magazine became, almost immediately, a collaborative enterprise. From Number 2 on, letters to the editor began to proliferate to such a degree that Marsden, her feature writers, and their readers engaged with each other in exchanges that were often so heated they were sustained over many weekly installments. Consequently, these epistolary narratives became as central to The Freewoman’s corpus as

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the primary material itself. Indeed, as the correspondence section increased in status, at times it constituted up to ten of an issue’s twenty pages. Barbara Green notes that the magazine “staged letters as if they were signed articles, giving each one a title and individual presence in the table of contents,” underscoring how the magazine came to life through the participation of its audience.30 Using Green’s scholarship as a point of departure, I argue that part of what makes The Freewoman so transgressive is its concert of discordant voices and perspectives, especially as attuned to debates about maternity. In the second part of this chapter, I highlight examples of the feature content and the ongoing narrative exchanges it stimulated across multiple numbers of the magazine. First, though, I outline the critical and theoretical frameworks for my readings, touching on new periodical studies, new modernist studies, and intimate public spheres, among others.

New Women, New Periodical Studies, and New Modernism I contextualize The Freewoman and the New Woman mother within the new periodical studies and new modernism. Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham foreground intersections of the New Woman and the periodical press, explaining that the “relationship was never simple, static or one-­ dimensional.”31 I discussed the emergence of the New Woman at length in Chap. 2, but I want to add here Heilmann and Beetham’s comment that periodicals offered a space “in which women, not all of them professional writers, could find a voice even when they were derided as strident and unwomanly. New Women were thus the subjects as well as the objects of debate in the press and so were able to challenge the traditional discourses on femininity, masculinity, sex, marriage and the family.”32 We meet New Women such as these in the pages of The Freewoman. To be sure, as American writer Edna Kenton affirmed in 1913, “We are just beginning— thanks largely to Dora Marsden and The Freewoman—to perceive what the New Woman actually is, and what logically she is to be.”33 Contemporary (re-)readings of The Freewoman are facilitated by the new periodical studies, championed by Sean Latham and Robert Scholes in their 2006 article “The Rise of Periodical Studies.” They highlight that the turn in the humanities to periodicals has been especially predicated on the advance of digital humanities and the creation of digital archives.34

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Indeed, my research is aided by the invaluable digital resource The Modernist Journals Project (MJP), initially directed by Scholes and Latham as co-director, and which contains the complete two-volume series of The Freewoman.35 The MJP has been guided by the conviction that “Modernism began in the magazines,” the motto articulated by Scholes and Clifford Wulfman in Modernism in the Magazines.36 Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible examine the history of periodicals, specifically “little magazines” that “provide a record of the large-scale conversation that became modernism.”37 Although little magazines are, “like modernism itself, vexingly difficult to define,” Churchill and McKible offer a useful model for analysis. For instance, they demonstrate how the magazines are non-commercial and promote radical artistic and political tastes and movements to an elite audience. While “little” designates the size of the readership, not the magazines themselves, they are generally short-run enterprises; “Whatever the format, scope, or preferred topics of conversation, little magazines tend to share two features: a vexed relationship to a larger, mainstream public and an equally vexed relationship to money.”38 The Freewoman is a little magazine on many counts. Scholes and Wulfman appreciate Churchill and McKible’s demarcation of the genre, but the former pair qualify that not all little magazines were uninterested in making a profit; and not all were experimental.39 Of this latter fact, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker observe that The Freewoman’s format was conservative in the style of the Times Literary Supplement.40 Indeed, I argue that that The Freewoman constitutes a modernism of content (rather than experimental form). This content is in line with the New Woman novels examined in Chap. 3, evidenced in its radical treatment of sexual behavior and morality, as associated with topics like marriage, divorce, free love, unwed mothers, contraception, prostitution, autoeroticism, and Uranianism.41 However, no matter how much the magazine lauded experimental or unconventional familial relations, the norm remained heterosexual. Note, too, that many of the discussions in The Freewoman deal with issues related to the human race, as in its preservation and improvement, but this universalized race was an implied white one, as I discuss herein.42 Marsden deliberately aimed for an educated, intellectual audience distinct from that of typical women’s weeklies. The “high price, i.e., three-­ pence,” is justified by Marsden to readers who might question the cost: “Our reply must be that if women’s penny papers are wanted, these already

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exist in great numbers, and that we are not proposing writing for women whose highest journalist needs are realised at a penny.”43 At same time, the magazine clearly revealed a “vexed relationship to money,” to quote Churchill and McKible. It frequently bemoaned its own financial needs and difficulties within the pages, imploring readers to help boost sales. Its always low circulation, coupled with its highly controversial material (it was threatened with State prosecution44), rendered it a short-lived venture: it went bankrupt in just under a year, after its publisher, Swift, lost its distributive support from W.  H. Smith and Sons. (The Freewoman was subsequently reborn twice with Harriet Shaw Weaver’s financial backing: as the monthly The New Freewoman edited by Marsden (June-December, 1913); and as The Egoist, edited by Marsden (January–June, 1914) and then by Weaver (July 1914–December 1919)). The concentration on little magazines within the new periodical studies is enmeshed with new modernism. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz identify “transnational exchange” and “mass media rhetorics” as constitutive of this expanded field,45 both of which resonate with The Freewoman as a magazine produced in Britain and distributed by supporters in the United States, and which published authors within and beyond Anglo-­ American borders.46 Moreover, attention to the “age of mass persuasion” encapsulates a modernism generated by “the avalanche of reportage, the shaping of fact in propaganda, [and] the phenomenon of news.”47 Concurrently, Latham and Scholes “insist on the autonomy and distinctiveness of periodicals as cultural objects,”48 reflective of how The Freewoman is a repository of public responses to feminist issues within modernity’s bourgeoning print culture. New periodical studies intersects with gender. Jayne E. Marek stresses that, given the way women’s experiences have traditionally been delimited, it is remarkable that so many avant-garde magazines were edited by women; and yet, their contributions have not been meaningfully celebrated.49 While she does not examine Marsden in her corrective study of this cohort, Marek opens up a crucial restorative space for women who, like Marsden, were essential to the dissemination of modernism. 50 Similarly, Green asserts that periodicals constitute a valuable archive of early twentieth-century women’s productions, emphasizing that “Periodical culture encourages us to recover not the single woman writer, but the network, the dialogue, the conversation.”51 I situate my study within this collaborative context. Brooker and Thacker highlight that periodicals can be assessed varyingly in terms of their published material, types

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of paper and design, and elements of distribution.”52 I focus on how a selection of editorials, Notes of the Week, feature articles, and correspondence constitutes a modernism of content about New Woman maternity. In so doing, I widen the scope of maternal modernism within the expanding field of feminist periodical studies.

Talking the Talk: Modernist Salons Discursive and collaborative in nature, The Freewoman aligns with the modernist salon. Historically, a salon was a “French cultural institution consisting of a weekly social gathering at the private house of an aristocratic lady, at which social, artistic, and scientific questions” were discussed, from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.53 Marek moves the salon to the modernist era and connects it to the periodical. She describes how “The success of small magazines and presses was undergirded by the more ephemeral phenomenon of salons,” organized “for the express purpose of spreading new ideas, drawing attention to fresh and significant work, and (not least) of pleasing and stimulating the salonniers.”54 From the beginning, these hosts were often female, just as they continued to be into the twentieth century, evidenced by charismatic figures like Lady Ottoline Morrell in London, Mabel Dodge and Jessie Redmon Fauset, respectively, in New York, Georgia Douglas Johnson in Washington, D.C., and Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, respectively, in Paris. 55 At the same time, by the eighteenth century, the salon transitioned into the coffeehouse where “male merchants and intellectuals” discussed “literature, art, politics, and economic ideas.” 56 The debates that were generated at both the private salons and public coffee establishments led to “an explosion of publications that fundamentally linked commodity culture to an ideology that valued public opinion.”57 Of particular significance here is that the plethora of little magazines and small presses founded and run by modernist women served, like salons, as “direct links between ‘inspired conversation’ and the public dissemination of new ideas.”58 Churchill and McKible similarly position modernism as discursive, as they use periodicals to “read texts in the context of the lively, open-ended conversation in which they were first conceived and read.”59 In proposing a “conversational model for modernism,” they emphasize that talk was a hallmark of the early twentieth century, and that little magazines provided “a published record of the richness, variety, chaos, and exhilaration of modernist talk.”60 With Marsden in the role of salonnière, The Freewoman stimulated and recorded “modernist talk” in literal and metaphoric ways.

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The magazine inspired the formation of physical, in-person assemblies. In her piece “Freewoman Clubs,” Marsden announces: “It has been pointed out to us by friendly critics that THE FREEWOMAN contains each week matter so highly debatable, and of such serious human import, that it is difficult to digest all that it contains.” She approves the suggestion that “FREEWOMAN clubs, or informal gatherings of men and women, should be started for discussions, of which the weekly Freewoman would form the basis.”61 The first such meeting of what became a twice-monthly Discussion Circle took place at the International Suffrage Shop on London’s Strand, on April 25, 1912.62 The Discussion Circles, later held at various locations around the city, addressed topics raised in the magazine and, in turn, the magazine reported on and took thematic direction from the Circles.63 Delap posits that this symbiotic exchange of ideas between face-to-face meetings and weekly publication created a sense of “collective reading.” Additionally, the magazine was read aloud among groups, and copies were passed among friends, evidencing that “Interactivity and responsiveness represent important aspects of the experience of reading feminist and ‘advanced’ periodicals.”64 A study of Discussion Circles and reader experiences are outside the range of this chapter, but I propose that we view The Freewoman itself as a salon. Consider, for instance, Stein reminiscing in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas about her “Saturday evenings” salon that she began hosting at 27 rue de Fleurus in 1906: “The idea was that anybody could come,” and the guests included “an endless variety.”65 In like fashion, The Freewoman played textual host to its variety of collective contributors, who engaged in modernist talk about motherhood, among other things, as they interacted within the pages of the magazine every Thursday from November 1911 to October 1912.

Public and Counter-public Spheres, Discourses, and Intimacies A consideration of the discursive nature of The Freewoman draws attention to its role in, or relationship to, the public sphere, an important factor in thinking about the reach of the magazine’s subversive content. As Mark S. Morrisson states, “Unlike individual literary works, magazines are public forums.”66 More specifically, outlining that “cheaper printing and paper costs that made the mass market press possible also made small-scale

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magazine affordable,” he explains how little magazines—including The Freewoman, New Freewoman, and Egoist series—sought to appropriate “some of the institutions of the newly emerging mass publishing world to create counterpublicity, counterpublic spheres whose ultimate aim was to influence the dominant public sphere—of alternative institutions and varieties of publicity.”67 Green considers a specifically feminist counterpublic. Tracing the militant stage of England’s suffrage efforts circa 1905–1914, she finds that the public sphere became inundated with feminist rhetoric through means like marches, posters, and the selling of commodities such as tea sets and card games bearing the slogan “Votes for Women.” In turn, mainstream newspapers reported on these campaigns—in often sensationalist terms—leading to broader public debates about women’s issues related to suffrage and citizenship, as well as working outside the home, sexuality, and aesthetics. This discourse led to the creation of a “feminist ‘counter-public sphere,’” whereby “feminists developed and circulated gendered readings of modern everyday life in essays published in alternative publications, daily newspapers, and political pamphlets,” including little magazines like The Freewoman.68 Motherhood is certainly one of the most defining aspects of many women’s daily lives, and therefore unsurprisingly foregrounded in The Freewoman. A feminist counter-public discourse further resonates with what Sally Ledger refers to as the reverse discourse employed by New Women who challenged the dominant ones of their fin-de-siècle society.69 Green examines feminist periodicals through the concept of “domestic modernity,” whereby topics like “housekeeping, marriage, childrearing, and work” are illuminated as they intersect with feminism. She focuses on what she calls “a ‘feminist complaint,’ or rather a series of complaints” inscribed within the correspondence of these magazines. She details, “The complaint—and modern feminist periodical culture in general—can tell us a great deal about the rhythms of everyday life and representations of women’s labor in modern culture. It can also reveal the mechanisms of identification and dis-identification by which women connected themselves to the new feminist communities and identities of the early twentieth century.”70 Green is here drawing on The Female Complaint, wherein Lauren Berlant theorizes how the “female complaint” predicated on responses to women’s culture leads to a sense of belonging or community within an “intimate public sphere.” As Berlant defines, “A public is intimate when it foregrounds affective and emotional attachments located in fantasies of the common, the everyday, and a sense of ordinariness.”71

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Recall that Victorian fin-de-siècle periodicals are recognized as providing a forum where even non-professional (that is, ordinary) New Woman writers could express themselves.72 Correspondence columns are, for Green, a particular manifestation of an intimate public sphere, given the way they encouraged readers “to try on new identities, and engaged them in the debates of the public sphere.”73 Through letters to the editor that constitute “fragmented autobiographies and confessional gestures,” readers shared intimate details of their lives while relating their own domestic problems and concerns to the broader topics covered in the magazine.74 This intimate public sphere afforded the creation of “new (often politicized) subjectivities”75 that Green associates with what Delap describes as the “‘introspective turn’ in feminism.”76 Letter writers could use The Freewoman as “a testing ground for trying on, embracing, or sometimes rejecting the new identity of the ‘freewoman.’”77 I will illuminate how new and politicized subjectivities were considerably maternal. Marsden’s Freewoman philosophy is grounded in elitism. She informs her readers at the start of her second editorial, “Nor for one moment do we wish to support the view that all women will be free, any more than all men are free. It will be difficult enough for freewomen to be free, and to force women, who neither are nor wish to be free, into the responsibilities of freedom is as futile as endeavouring to make two and two into five. […] This explains why a feminist must make her appeal to freewomen, and not to ‘ordinary’ women.”78 Despite Marsden’s exclusivity, letters from readers testify that many “ordinary” women constitute her audience, like reader Jane Craig, who begins her letter by marking her position “As an ‘ordinary woman’ in the ‘rear guard.’”79 Craig represents the women who strive for inclusion in, and seek direction from, a Freewoman membership—indeed, it is often their shared aspirations for change that fosters their intimate public sphere. With so many subjectivities or voices in parlance throughout the magazine, there were necessarily disagreements—to be sure, debate and dissention were at the heart of the periodical’s mandate. In this sense, we can recall Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver’s point that Victorian texts critiquing conventional motherhood served as “fraught sites of instability,” in which “both anxieties and discursive possibility” were generated.80 The Freewoman likewise produced these anxieties and discursive possibilities through the textual comingling of committed Freewomen, potential Freewomen, and stalwart Bondwomen. In addition, the fact that

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the magazine is constituted of diverse points of view reminds us of Heilmann’s contention that the New Woman as category, meaning, and identity was polymorphous.81 I argue that the new subjectivities coming to textual light in The Freewoman are emblematic of the hybrid New Woman in the twentieth century. To appreciate this multiplicity of perspectives, and to push it further, I turn to Maria DiCenzo, Delap, and Leila Ryan, who contend that magazines like Votes for Women, the Englishwoman, and The Freewoman were predicated on conflicting or competing responses to new social movements of the day—suffrage being the focus of their study.82 While they appreciate the value of the terms “publics” and “counterpublics,” they stress that “public” has become too simplified in a binary of “public/private and public/domestic realms.”83 Instead, we must recognize that “Women were not only trying to gain access to the public sphere through political representation, but were also challenging the very definition of what constituted the public sphere of concern.”84 Further, “counterpublics,” a word too easily employed to convey opposition, fails to register possible divisions “within those publics”85—a point reminding us that feminism, too, defined women as a group both unified and diversified.86 Foregrounding alternative approaches to suffrage media history, DiCenzo, Delap, and Ryan employ social movement theory, that is, they consider how the media supports movements at both internal and external (public) levels.87 Although I am not adopting it as an overarching heuristic tool, aspects of social movement theory prove useful in thinking about The Freewoman as laid out by Delap. She acknowledges that The Freewoman “defied categorization as left or right, progressive or reactionary, utopian or defensive,” but if the journal “did not follow conventional social movement formulae of attempting to mobilize large numbers or influence the state, it offered a space to think about movement dynamics, and envisage new avenues of activism.”88 Specifically, it produced “two collective identity frames which proved to generate powerful loyalties and forms of selfidentity” amongst the readers: Freewoman and feminist, as made obvious by its first name, The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review.89 These two identities are evidenced throughout the correspondence sections. For example, reader Florence Harris congratulates the editors: “THE FREEWOMAN supplies a need of which we feminists were only subconscious until its appearance.”90 Edith A. Browne writes about motherhood from her standpoint “As a freewoman,”91 while another signs her letter “A

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Would-Be Freewoman,”92 reminding us that the magazine was just as much a testing ground for, as well as validation of, identity. A social movement will not only generate a collective identity but also “mobilize its constituency around a set of grievances.” 93 For The Freewoman, sexual reform proved a substantive initiative; the topic of sexuality was approached via a “contemporary intellectual concern or ‘frame’”—here, the frames of individuality (as a general characteristic of Marsden’s feminism) and introspection.94 Significantly, Delap connects women’s quest for individuality and independence to fin-de-siècle New Womanism. 95 I contend that the collective identity frames of feminist and Freewoman were mobilized by individuals with “grievances” about institutionalized motherhood, and who shared a New Womanist agenda to theorize and promote new models of maternity. Fostering collective identities within an intimate public sphere, The Freewoman recorded modernist talk about mothering, as I record below.

The Freewoman: Feminism and the Endowment of Motherhood Marsden made her gambit for Freewoman feminism from the get-go, establishing the contexts within which New Woman motherhood would be debated in counter-public and reverse discourses. In the magazine’s opening piece, “Bondwomen,” Marsden defines “Freewomen” in relation to “Bondwomen,” and while I touched on these distinctions earlier in this chapter, I want to elaborate on how she sets up a conception of feminism that accounts for motherhood. Just as Ardis summarizes that the transgressive New Woman “was accused of instigating the second fall of man,”96 so Marsden states: “The opponents of the Freewomen are not actuated by spleen or by stupidity, but by dread” of women seeking equality with men.97 To Marsden, “woman, if ever equal, must have sunk on the ground of inferiority. Whether this inferiority arose through the disabilities arising out of child-bearing, or whether it arose through women giving up the game—i.e., bartering themselves for the sake of the protection of men—it is difficult to say.” Either way, “At the present time,” woman must “take her place as a master. It is this effort to find her place among the masters which is behind the feminist movement.” Feminism requires that women consider “their sex just as much an incidental concern as men consider theirs.” A Bondwoman, in contrast, has secured the “‘protection’ of a

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man,” consequently ridding herself “of the responsibility of earning her own living,” and enjoying in compensation, among other “pleasures,” “the great adventure of having children.” Marsden cautions, “For this protected position,” women forsake all of their potential power. Women must, however, “learn that their freedom will consist in appraising their own worth, in setting up their own standards and living up to them, and putting behind them for ever their rôle of complacent self-sacrifice.”98 In her second editorial, “Commentary on Bondwomen,” Marsden continues to push wives and mothers to become self-reliant. She sets out what will be her controlling editorial position against the endowment of motherhood (payment by the State to mothers). Delap notes that “Anglo-­ American debates around endowment provide an opportunity to unpack the anti-statism of avant-garde feminists, in a period when many in the women’s movement felt positive about state action on women’s behalf,”99 as my own survey of the topic within The Freewoman reveals. In “Commentary on Bondwomen,” Marsden advocates that the Freewoman must support herself and her children through paid labor. She raises the question of men only to dismiss them: “What are the responsibilities of the father? Well, that is his business.” Women must not define any aspect of their lives by or through men; “the Freewoman’s concern is to see to it that she shall be in a position to bear children if she wants them without soliciting maintenance from any man.” Affirming “a growing number of women, while hoping to have children, refuse to sacrifice their career to domestic work,” she comments, “Feminism would hold that it is neither desirable nor necessary for women, when they are mothers, to leave their chosen, money-earning work for any length of time.” To ensure job security, “vast changes must take place in social conditions, in housing, nursing, kindergarten, education, cooking, cleaning, in the industrial world, and in the professions. These changes will have for their motive the accommodation of such conditions as will enable women to choose and follow a life-work, apart from, and in addition to, their natural function of reproduction.”100 Although not a mother herself, Marsden wrote through a matrifocal perspective in her privileging of maternal needs and subjectivities. The editorial “The New Morality—IV” is another of copious examples of the magazine foregrounding the topic of mothers working outside the home. Marsden posits, “to the door of the ‘legitimate mother,’ and to the ‘protection’ accorded her by popular sentiment, is to be traced the responsibility for most of the social ills from which we suffer.” In being exempt

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“from responsibility to earn her own livelihood in solid cash, in addition to her labours in giving birth to children,” women are unprepared for the work force. It is not until women “come to regard the ‘kept’ condition of the ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ with as much horror as they regard the other ‘kept’ women” that we can reach “the point when feminism will be sure of itself and its future.”101 Marsden’s urging that wives and mothers be financially independent and productive citizens further informs her editorial “The Drudge.” While the housewife in pre-industrialized times performed work that was “a sound financial asset,” the housewife of 1912 is “a drudge because she creates nothing.” To be sure, “With the advent of machinery and the factory, women got their marching orders, ‘Out of the home,’ exactly as did men,” but while the latter took flight, the former stayed put. Mothers were specifically confined to—and encouraged to celebrate—the domicile, valued for their ability to “replenish the species.” However, women must get out of the house, and their children must be sent out to make that happen. Given that the State demands children at age five attend school, Marsden reasons that “under proper care,” children can leave the home “at five weeks—or two weeks. It seems drastic, but it is the only way” for mothers to gain liberty.102 Marsden advocates for a crèche system, whereby a trained woman would be responsible for “eight or ten babies” during the day and even throughout the night as needed. Marsden is prepared for opposition: “Facing what will be a strong prejudice, i.e., that a mother’s early and exclusive influence is all important for her children, we can only say that it is not supported by proof.” She is convinced that by working outside the home, “the mother would cease to be a drudge, and would regain her human independence; the financial strain would slip from marriage, and motherhood would become the honourable province of all women, married and single.”103 With this last point, Marsden makes it clear that she is not challenging motherhood itself, but rather the hypocritical moral codes of patriarchy that, while demanding a woman procreate, values the progeny only of the ‘good’ wife. She advances a radical agenda by advocating for out-of-wedlock maternity and by rejecting the stigma of illegitimacy. This editorial generated, as per Marsden’s hopes, both endorsement and denunciation from her readers. Tracing the threads of discussion, we find in the next issue a response by a reader going by the moniker “Home-­ Worker,” a woman who stands outside the elite zone of the Freewoman: “I cannot see where I, and millions like me, ‘come in’ in your scheme.” “Home-Worker” wishes “to dissent fiercely from your general conclusion

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that the modern housewife […] must give way entirely to the ‘professional mother.’” The reader confesses: “To speak personally, I was never in love with children ‘as children’—I should never have regarded myself as your suitable crèche matron. Yet I am the ‘devoted’ and successful mother of five children, and would not dream of delegating my responsibility and giving up my child-delights to another person (if I could help it).” Rejecting the proposition that all babies be separated from mothers, she begs the editors to “Leave the ‘home’ in peace,” and to “leave your crèche to be run by the childless woman who loves children, for the benefit of the unsuitable or unwilling mother.”104 From her matrifocal perspective, “Home-Worker” embraces a maternalism predicated on motherhood as a personally fulfilling experience. This letter is accompanied by an immediate reply from Marsden, wherein she refutes the claims of “Home-Worker” and reaffirms her arguments articulated in “The Drudge.” Marsden’s response is then countered by another dissenting letter. The author, “A. F.,” like “Home-Worker,” speaks to the happiness that obtains from mothering. She supports women in the workforce, and suggests that “businesses which employ women should provide a crèche where the children could be left during work hours, and where the mothers could visit them at proper intervals.” She qualifies that institutions should supplement, not replace, the mother’s labor, and accuses the editors of having “overlooked the fact that women are fond of their children, and find intense pleasure in personal contact with them.”105 The modernist talk persists in the next issue, where “Home Worker” makes another appearance.106 Among other points, “Home Worker” argues, “‘restricted mother-love’ is a selfish thing. I am a Suffragist because I want to help improve the world for ‘other people’s children.’ But that does not imply that I am fitted, either by capacity or desire, for taking personal charge of a selection of them, as a life-profession.” She accepts “State Endowment or State Insurance—the name does not matter, so long as we secure to each mother who desires it the opportunity to tend her children in decent comfort,” while driving home her position: “There has up to now been a considerable amount of respect—both real and theoretical—for the mother. I say, let us strive for an ideal home-mother (a Free-mother, of course), not for a glorified Government official.” In closing, “Home Worker” writes: “May I thank ‘A. F.’ for saying so excellently much that I should like to have said?”107 Finding common ground, “Home Worker” builds an intimate public sphere with “A. F.”

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Alongside “Home Worker,” reader Florence Graham weighs in as being “thoroughly in sympathy with the idea of economic freedom for mothers, and also of choice of occupation.” She wonders, “Would State endowment for motherhood be advised? I am anxious to learn, and no doubt other readers of THE FREEWOMAN would also be glad of any practical ideas on this vitally important subject.”108 Just like the “Home Worker,” Graham speaks for the ‘ordinary’ woman. Graham is eager to test out the identity and maternal practice of a Freewoman. Willing as ever to engage, Marsden instantly replies, promising Graham that her queries will be addressed in the next week’s installment. Reader “M. S.” then joins the conversation, speaking about “The Drudge” from her matrifocal perspective: “I feel that the editorial leader in your issue of February 8th calls for a mother’s criticism, and as such I venture to proffer a more human point of view upon the subject.” “M. S.” admits that “in some few cases, the suggested system of ‘factory breeding’ might be of advantage,” yet she is “reluctant to advocate the separation of mother and babe in general.” “M. S.” reveals her values about nursing her own offspring: “I maintain that no healthy woman—and only such should have children—should shirk this duty, which is not only of benefit to the child, but an aid to her own spiritual development.” She advises that mothers receive some financial aid so that they have enough time at home with their babies.109 “Home Worker,” “A.  F.,” Florence Graham, and “M.  S.” prove how feminist maternalism is constituted of diverse approaches to motherhood, while their sequence of letters showcases how they and Marsden are connected in a discursive, salon-like community.

Endowment: Attacks and Counter-attacks The discussion persists on the front page of the issue for February 29, 1912, where Marsden reiterates her contempt for paid motherhood in the leader “Woman: Endowed or Free?” In thirty-one questions she poses about endowment, she denigrates its premises as absurd and insulting to women. She wonders, for instance, “For what period before birth is the grant to be in operation—nine months, six months, three months, or one?”; “Are all women to be eligible for motherhood?”; “Will the State require to exercise restricting rights over the selection of fathers?”; and “Would marriage be necessary as a qualification for endowment?” Marsden concludes by encouraging participation from her readers: “When these questions have been answered, we shall be able to state the case of

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Endowed Women versus Freewomen. We hope the enthusiasts for endowment will not shirk their preliminary catechism.”110 In the next installment, Marsden is delighted to announce that her call for debate has been taken up. In the leader “Mr. Wells to the Attack: Freewoman and Endowment,” she proclaims: “We have very great pleasure in bringing to the attention of our readers Mr. Wells’ reply to our challenge on ‘Woman: Endowed or Free?’ We hope that the attacks on the Freewoman’s position in this matter will increase and not decline.”111 By 1912, Wells was established as one of the most famous authors in England, celebrated for science fiction like The War of the Worlds and his New Woman novel Ann Veronica, about the eponymous rebellious suffragette. It is therefore not surprising that his reply to Marsden’s February 29 editorial is published on the front page, in lieu of an editorial for that week. With due respect to Marsden, Wells contends: “THE FREEWOMAN is too bright and intelligent a paper to indulge in wilful misrepresentation of a position she doesn’t approve of, but she is rather wickedly wrong about what she calls, begging the question to begin with, the State Endowment of Mothers. It’s the State Endowment of Motherhood she’s thinking of, which is a very different thing. It’s not human beings we want to buy and enslave, it’s a social service, a collective need, we want to sustain.” He then replies to the thirty-one questions from last week, answering from the perspective of “one who has staked his poor reputation for intelligence on the State Endowment of Motherhood.” Note that despite the seriousness of the topic and his convictions, Wells writes with at times a playful tone, suggestive of the repartee to be heard in the salon or coffee house. For instance, to Marsden’s question, “Is it to be a poll-tax on adult men and women, including bachelors and spinsters?” he replies: “Nonsense! Think! I’m surprised at you.” To her question, “Is it worth while taxing mothers in order to refund them their money?” he exasperates, “My dear lady! If you go on like this—!”112 Such banter can be understood according to Elizabeth Majerus, who argues that in the 1920s the magazine Vanity Fair inscribed “a dynamic, multifaceted, smart, and above all fun modern urban culture” in which irony and humor prevail as markers of popular modernism113—details that inform my reading of Photoplay in Chap. 5. While The Freewoman was published in 1911–1912 and is not a mass-market woman’s magazine, many of its contributors exuded this modern intellectual wit. Indeed, in her next editorial, “Women Endowed,” Marsden pokes fun at Wells and his supporters: “Where are the snows of yester year? Where

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are the State Endowmentists? Where are the contributors to THE FREEWOMAN who have each a thousand arguments in favour of the State Endowment of Motherhood? They doubtless feel their case is assured in the hands of Mr. Wells, and that he in himself represents a host.”114 Becoming more serious, though no less caustic, Marsden summarizes Wells’ arguments, as in the following: Mr. Wells’ State, then, will stand something like this. All children, male and female, will be State-maintained until they are eighteen. At this age girls will be ripe to specialise in motherhood, and will, therefore, begin receiving their £100 a year. As Mr. Wells sees no reason why women should not specialise in motherhood as a profession, it is to be presumed they will do so until the age of about forty, when Nature will affix her limit. At this age, not having received any other training, such women will have claims on the State for continued maintenance, which they would receive, according to Mr. Wells, from the State as a special form of old-age pension. So practically all females would be State maintained from birth till death.115

Marsden counters that motherhood is an individual, “not a collective affair.” Contra the sustained fears (as initially registered during the fin de siècle) that all New Women would refuse maternity, Marsden insists that “If every woman were sure of a job, and sure of a minimum wage of thirty shillings a week, probably ninety-nine per cent, of women, ‘married’ or ‘single,’ would have at least one child.” Advocating for paid maternity leave, Marsden confronts select readers: “To the woman who steps forward and says, ‘My work is going to be motherhood; I will achieve economic independence through that,’ women’s reply will be ready: ‘No motherhood for slackers. When you have proved you can provide for yourself, you will be in a fit position to contemplate providing for your offspring. Work and earn money, good woman. Cover the cost of your motherhood just as you would arrange for the cost of your holiday.”116 Marsden’s radical charge to women to assume full and independent economic provision for their maternity evidences Clarke’s view that Marsden operated on a “‘modernist’ plane of iconoclastic innovation.”117 Drawing on Delap’s point that a social movement can “mobilize its constituency around a set of grievances,”118 we can see how both Marsden and Wells mobilize readers around their respectively opposing grievances related to the cons and pros of endowed motherhood. Journalist Helen Hamilton, for instance, joins the conversation, employing the sarcastic

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tone of Marsden and Wells alike. Hamilton reproaches Marsden for demanding that she support herself and a child, if she were to have one: “Now I ask you how on earth could I do that when by the lavish sweat of my most miserable brow I can scarcely support myself? My children would ask me for bread, and I should give them a returned MS. I have yet to learn that paper, even when covered with great thoughts, is a suitable staple diet for the young. Madam, have mercy and grade aspiring Freewomen in order of merit; otherwise I must abandon all hope of becoming one.”119 Yearning to embody the collective identity of the Freewoman, Hamilton situates—and problematizes—her personal circumstances within the broader agenda of the magazine. Subscriber Rachel Graham writes in solidarity with The Freewoman and with Marsden against endowment. Being “particularly interested in the free and unconventional letters discussing sexual freedom, endowments of mothers, etc.,” she admits: “I have often felt the need to discuss these much avoided topics, and was delighted to find them so fitly expressed through your correspondence.”120 Graham’s nod to “unconventional” and “much avoided topics” signals how The Freewoman promotes the vanguard content of modernism. Graham references both an earlier letter by reader Russell Scott and Marsden’s reply, wherein Marsden affirms that “The difficult time is the present, and Freewoman mothers have to face the difficulties of pioneers.”121 As Graham then comments, “I agree entirely with your answer to letter signed ‘Russel [sic] Scott,’ in last week’s issue. It seems to me that every self-respecting person should be self-­ supporting, and such a woman must resent proposals of endowment of mothers.”122 Graham engages with Scott and Marsden in a discursive community, while affirming her loyalties to Marsden by rallying around their shared grievances. Graham contends, “The fallacy that motherhood is a handicap is easily exploded. We have only to look at the increasing number of working and professional mothers, compare them with other women, and see that it is not detrimental either to their work, their health, or their morals. We hear of many people who would be pleased to confine school teachers, etc., to their homes, but they never suggest that our leading actresses should deprive us of their talent and waste their lives. They are a splendid example of self-supporting mothers who are not handicapped by their children. They and their children are a credit to humanity.” (Graham’s reference to “leading actresses” anticipates Chap. 5 on film stars.) Graham’s autobiographical perspective affords insight: “My experience of nursing in

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children’s hospitals leads me to think your idea of the crèche most admirable.” She looks forward to the time “when a woman in the love and strength of her youth may have children without the risk of unemployment and destitution,” and offers Marsden “the success which ought to attend such an enterprising movement.”123 By citing her personal experiences, coupled with her championing of Marsden’s rebellious enterprise, Graham establishes her matrifocal sympathies with the collective identity frames of Freewoman and feminism. While not part of the specific chain above, an article entitled “A Freewoman’s Attitude to Motherhood” by Edith A. Browne extends our appreciation of the work/home dilemma. Writing “As a freewoman,” Browne attacks convention that punishes the unmarried mother: “To argue that a woman is fulfilling her highest purpose in producing a child provided she is married, but that she disgraces herself, her sex, her family, and society if she becomes a mother without being married, is illogical to a degree.” Moreover, exorcising the angel in the house that haunted fin-­ de-­siècle New Women, she states: “We are quickly exploding the old ideas about woman’s sphere in the labour market, and it is high time we began to explode the petty notions which demarcate the mother’s sphere in the home.” Browne privileges mothers who work outside the domicile and therefore preserve their “intellect and individuality.” She praises especially those women who are “successfully doubling the rôle of ideal mother and reformer, and to them I bend the knee.”124 Presenting a matrifocal rebuttal to Browne, reader “Militant Suffragist” explains, “It has occurred to me that, as the mother of a family, I ought to reply.” “Militant Suffragist” affirms, “I agreed heartily with the writer,” but offers her own opinions on a variety of topics raised by Browne. For instance, “Militant Suffragist” avers that a child should be nursed only by the biological mother, but concedes, “The ideal is—outside occupation for the mother for a few hours daily, efficient help, and smaller families.”125 Browne and “Militant Suffragist” contribute to discussions about mothers working outside the home, women’s self-development beyond maternity, and outsourcing child-rearing. In the next section, I focus more fully on how women’s economic and personal freedoms can be achieved through visionary schemes for co-operative childcare and co-operative housekeeping.

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Maternal Collaboration and Co-operatives Frequent Freewoman contributor Ada Nield Chew—from an English working-class background like Marsden, and a prominent advocate for suffrage—championed women’s economic independence from her matrifocal and class-conscious perspectives.126 In “The Economic Freedom of Women,” she dismisses “the pathetic appeals to women to go back thankfully and contentedly to the conditions of a hundred years ago; the solemn warnings of preachers and teachers of what they fear will result from the actions of free women.”127 Chew’s “free women” are versions of the Wild New Woman, whom fin-de-siècle anti-New Womanist Eliza Lynn Linton described as “Aggressive, disturbing, officious, unquiet, [and] rebellious to authority.”128 Chew observes, “It needs quite a gymnastic feat of the imagination, quite a revolutionary shock to the mind, to attempt to consider women apart from their actual or possible husbands and children, and apart from their ‘domestic duties’; and to see them in the light of economic factors in society.”129 This “revolutionary shock to the mind” echoes the rhetoric of revolution and shock as characteristics or functions of modernism,130 as well as qualities of the New Woman—recall in The Daughters of Danaus that Hadria’s opinions are viewed as “distinctly shocking” (89). Chew expands her polemic for “The Economic Freedom of Women” in the following issue, insisting that fathers join mothers in “the duty of maintaining children.”131 It must further be accepted that both babies and mothers benefit by the knowledge and assistance provided by experts trained in childcare. Such an admission allows mothers to escape domestic drudgery and earn their own livelihood “just as men do.”132 In another article, “Mother-Interest and Child-Training,” Chew frames debate in pointedly class terms. She advocates for children of the working classes to enjoy the privileges of the “well-to-do” like “specially selected rooms, gardens, and every other facility for healthy growth.” We must “make beautiful baby gardens, quite near to the homes of the parents, and gather in all the hungry motherwomen into this truly blessed State service, and let individual mothers, like individual fathers, follow whatever bent they are fitted for.” Chew speaks personally about the benefits of co-operative mothering: “My baby would have been as carefully looked after by my friend as by myself.” In closing, a mother “who stands free before the world, capable of providing for her own and her child’s needs, and therefore dependent on none; who has grasped the meaning of human

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motherhood—which is no less than the mothering of the human race; a mother who grows daily with her child’s growth—ah! what a mother the children of the future shall know!”133 Chew delivers a manifesto of intentional provocation in her combined call to action for and declaration of the rights of a New Woman mother. Chew’s proposals to solve some of the very practical challenges of child-­ rearing are addressed in a series of related articles by Alice Melvin, Secretary to the newly established Society for the Promotion of Co-operative Housekeeping and House-Service. Melvin’s maternal theories are particularly honed in “Co-operative Housekeeping and the Mother. III.” Putting the onus on “the modern mother” to be the force of women’s domestic revolution, she recommends the implementation of Co-operative Housekeeping for middle- and lower-class mothers. Multiple households could pool their resources to create a Co-operative Colony, one “equipped with a night and day nursery, and a children’s playground, together with a staff of trained nurses under an experienced matron.” Women will reap the benefits of autonomy while simultaneously becoming better parents. Likewise, home will be more desirable, for “Once the child of her body ceases to be an eternal drag on the mother, motherhood will be a happier and easier state of life.” Melvin concludes, “The restrictions and hardships attendant on motherhood under present conditions are not inherent in motherhood, but in the system under which the mothers live.”134 Melvin reflects Hadria’s sentiments about the institution of patriarchal motherhood in The Daughters of Danaus: “No woman has yet experienced it apart from the enormous pressure of law and opinion that has, always, formed part of its inevitable conditions” (103). Appearing in the same issue as Melvin’s piece is a review by (Dame) Rebecca West of Mrs. J. A. Hobson’s drama “A Modern Crusader.” The pseudonymous West (Cicily Isabel Fairfield, 1892–1983), British journalist, novelist, and travel writer, would become The Freewoman’s most famous (modernist) author. Although at the time of her involvement with the magazine she was not a mother, in 1912 she would begin a ten-year affair with the married Wells (they met through their work on The Freewoman) and subsequently give birth to their illegitimate child, Anthony West, in 1914. In “A Modern Crusader,” West anticipates her matrifocal stakes as she offers a highly negative review of Hobson’s play. West objects to Hobson’s promotion of “Home Schools” to be spread across the country: “These are cottages under the care of a ‘practical, sympathetic lady,’ where girls between sixteen and twenty-five would in six

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months learn how to be good wives and mothers by learning domestic economy and looking after a couple of resident babies.” West mocks the plan, which would involve the girls moving from job to job, as inducing the “crime” of “Baby-lingering.” 135 The recipient of West’s critique, author Florence Edgar Hobson, filed her reply to West in the letter “Woman and the House.” Hobson claims she has been misunderstood, countering that her home school scheme would enhance women’s lives. Hobson further assures West that the majority of women would chose to work in the home, “for the sheer joy of it and the opportunities it gives to make and extend happiness.”136 In her rejoinder, West refutes Hobson’s conclusion: “This is not true. The vast majority of women refuse domestic work.” West offers this parting shot: “All over the country gifted girls—who might have done their part in analysing food values or harnessing electricity to the home—are breaking their hearts for lack of University opportunities; the need for school clinics grows more crying every day; poor working women must walk the streets by night because there are no municipal lodging-houses for them. And Mrs. Hobson calmly allocates thousands to the condescending instruction of poor defenceless girls in the gentle art of sucking eggs!”137 Taken together, articles by Chew, Melvin, and West, along with letters from their readers, illuminate how strategies for new motherhood and new domesticity are, on one hand, promoted and developed; and, on the other hand, critiqued and rejected, in a cycle of participatory engagement. It is crucial to recognize that debates about modern domesticity, co-­ operative housekeeping, and collaborative child-rearing included, from the outset, the demand for increased participation from men and fathers. “Man at Home” by Fanny Johnson is an example of the many articles on this topic. Johnson argues for “the evolution of the New Housekeeping” through the rise of “the domestic man.” Johnson heralds the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a “voice crying in the wilderness,” though “we English are slow to enrol our selves as her disciples.” With attention to parenting, Johnson wonders: “Might not the advice, ‘to go home and mind the baby,’ sometimes be applied to the fathers?” For Johnson, “the divorce of men from the domestic hearth is a far more serious evil than the industrial employment of women.”138 Johnson’s advocacy invokes Women and Economics, wherein Gilman posits that with “noble-hearted, noble-­ minded, noble-bodied mothers, trained in the large wisdom of the new motherhood, and living freely in daily association with the best womanhood, a new kind of man can and will grow on earth.”139 We have seen

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how Gilman’s and Johnson’s praxis is modeled by Lester Knapp in the The Home-Maker, when he chooses to forego a return to the public sphere in order to remain in the private sphere as a committed, full-time father.

Individualism and Motherhood The preceding sections illuminate how debates about endowed motherhood—with their focus on women’s economic independence, human rights, and needs to engage in productive work outside the home—extend to solutions like paid maternity leave, a crèche system, and co-operative parenting and housekeeping. As further touched on, these discussions necessarily raise questions related to the State, that is, to women’s duties and identities as Republican or race mothers versus their responsibilities toward their sovereign selves. I now want to look at these latter themes more fully, showcasing how the eclectic modernist talk in The Freewoman about citizenship, marriage, race, birth control, and eugenics was inscribed with the rhetoric of individualism. I contextualize the term according to Cott’s definition of feminism as including the “aims for individual freedoms by mobilizing sex solidarity,”140 and Delap’s point that introspection is a “contemporary intellectual concern or ‘frame’” of The Freewoman.141 The fact that the concept of individualism was integral to both the fin-de-­ siècle woman movement and its shift to feminism reinforces my argument that the magazine is a site for twentieth-century continuities of Victorian New Woman motherhood. In her editorial “To What End in Life?” Marsden lays out a plan for feminist motherhood. For women to “advance in the realm of mind,” “They must do. They must create; and the activities which stand in the way of their creative powers must be arranged for or, if need be, put aside. If the activities relate to children, the woman has to answer faithfully this question: To whom is her first duty, herself or the coming generation?” In true Freewoman form, “We hold, her first, second, and third duty is to herself, and, that duty being fulfilled, she will have done her duty to the coming generation.” Marsden radically postulates that “if the feeding of babies is to interfere with the mental development of women, it is the feeding of the babes which will have to give way.” Women will have to adopt “the artificial feeding of children” as a necessary strategy to break “the interminable chain—never the female individual adult; always the babe merged into the mother, and the mother again in the babe.”142 Marsden echoes New Woman Mona Caird: “It may seem paradoxical, but

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is none the less true, that we shall never have really good mothers until women cease to make their motherhood the central idea of their existence.”143 The topic of individualism is registered in this same issue in a letter signed “A Grandmother.” Commenting on the “modern discussions on sex” in The Freewoman, she writes that we must distinguish intercourse as an expression of human love from the practical function of parenthood, which is “a public function” of “social value.”144 In response, reader Helen Winter proclaims: “Oh, had the gods but granted to me such a grandmother.” She admits, however, that “There is one point on which I totally disagree with her. ‘A Grandmother’ tells us that that will be the age of free women when ‘a woman will be able to choose whether she will bear her children to the State as a citizen, or to a man as his wife.’ A glorious ideal, indeed! A Freemother must therefore be either a good citizen or a good wife!” Instead, for Winter, “As a Freewoman, I refuse to bear children either to the State or to a man; I will bear them for myself and for my purpose!” She seeks “no aid from State or man. The more I can do unaided, the greater joy I will have in the doing. Such is the Motherhood of a Freewoman.”145 Winter not only embraces but also helps to define the collective identity frame of a Freewoman mother. A response appears by the reader “A Would-Be Freewoman” who commends Winter as a writer who “has grasped the whole of that vast question—the individualism of motherhood.” In solidarity with Winter, she exclaims: “Here is the real spirit of independence, of freedom, that a woman with a large and open mind really aspires after. It is what we all want, I am sure—not to be dependent on anyone but ourselves. Oh, for such glorious freedom!” The reader foregrounds her matrifocal and autobiographical investment, acknowledging not only that she has a child but also that she is stuck in “that most miserable of all conditions—an unhappy marriage.”146 Conflating the personal with the political, and drawing on the collective energies of Winter and like-minded women, “A Would-Be Freewoman” articulates her support for, just as she aspires toward, New Woman maternity.

Marriage, Motherhood, and Reproductive Agency From its inaugural issue, The Freewoman made it obvious that the topic of motherhood was inseparable from that of marriage. In “A Definition of Marriage,” British writer Edmund B. D’Auvergne, who would become a

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frequent contributor, helped to ignite the magazine through provocation, observing that when it comes to modern marriage, his English society is “grotesquely muddled” about its “current conceptions of sex morality.” He defines, or rather redefines, what marriage means specifically in terms of parenthood. He contends that couples not interested in having children should be free to live together but should not expect their partnership to be consecrated by Church or State. Focusing on mothers—both married and unmarried—he argues: “The institution of marriage was designed to protect mothers and their children. The voluntarily barren wife avails herself of the mother’s right without doing the mother’s work.”147 In light of the declining birth-rate148 and the State’s need for citizens, he proposes that marriages that fail to produce children “within seven or ten years” be annulled, and that “The birth of a child should ipso facto create a marriage between the parents.” He wants “to return to the foundations of the family, and to restore to marriage its dignity and to motherhood its rights,” asserting, “Abolish marriage altogether if you will, but do not consecrate deliberate sterility.”149 An extensive series of letters in response to D’Auvergne appears in the next eight correspondence sections, a few of which I cite here. In the second issue, I. D. Pearce rejects in mocking tones D’Auvergne’s arguments. She opines, “I for one must vigorously protest against his scheme for reducing the legalised marriage to the level of a mere State-licensed human incubating concern,” adding: “What a noble birthright for the children of the future!—to be produced and reared specially for the State market, like chickens for our food supply!” The stakes of maternal re-alignment are high: “And to me it is of more real value to the future of the human race as things are that women should be giving birth to new thoughts, new aspirations, and new ideals than that they should be wasting their creative forces on merely increasing a very mediocre population.”150 Pearce privileges a maternal individualism over women’s reproductive duty or biological destiny. “A ‘Varsity’ Woman” challenges Pearce through her matrifocal point of view. Taking pride in her maternity, she comments, “Some of your correspondents seem to think that women generally become mothers against their will simply to earn their board and lodging. I fail to see that motherhood is inimical to the creation of ‘new thoughts, new aspirations, and new ideals,’ to quote I. D. Pearce. Of course it would be hardly worth while producing ideas if there were no posterity to benefit by them. It seems to me a queer way of raising the standard of the race to sterilise the

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women of ideas.”151 Examples like these generated by D’Auvergne and his female respondents underscore Marsden’s vision for The Freewoman as a space wherein both masculinist and feminist points of view are articulated with opportunities for understanding and exchange. Concurrently and thematically interweaving with this narrative, Dr. Charles Vickery Drysdale, secretary of the Malthusian League, wrote a series of articles on race and eugenics as he sought to empower mothers by way of his advocacy for birth control, and in the process inspired a substantive body of letters to the editor.152 In the first article, “Freewomen and the Birth-Rate,” he recognizes that many people point “to the falling marriage and birth rates as an evil result of woman’s higher education and freedom.”153 Drysdale here raises the spectral menace of race suicide associated with the ‘unwomanly’ and ‘improperly’ maternal New Woman, as discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3. Recall the 1906 charges laid against the New Woman by US President Theodore Roosevelt, who accused middle-class, white women of the crime of “willful sterility … the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death.”154 We also saw these fears of reduced birth rates addressed from Black perspectives in Larsen’s Quicksand, through protagonist Helga, who resists (for much of the novel) contributing to racial uplift in her repudiation of becoming a so-called race mother. Drysdale avows that limiting reproduction benefits women. He asks “feminist leaders” to “openly confess and glory in” the declining birth-­ rate, which heralds the “magnificent future” for humanity that obtains “when women demand their right as the mothers of the race to regulate their families in accordance with the possibilities of giving their children the best possible physical, mental, and moral inheritance and environments.” Drysdale conflates the eugenic rhetoric associated with the Republican Mother or race mother with a woman’s duties to her sovereign self, as he champions the doctrines of Neo-Malthusianism: “the voluntary regulation of the number of children by the mother—is that which secures the domestic and social individuality of the woman.” 155 Drysdale celebrates the 1877 London trial of birth control advocates William Bradlaugh and Annie Besant as “the real signal for the advent of the Freewoman, who will use and control her maternity for the glory of herself and the race.”156 Reader Isabel Leatham responds in agreement with Drysdale “as to the need for bettering the quality rather than increasing the quantity of the population. The theory of Malthus (the first feminist, albeit an unconscious one) is the strongest possible argument for any reform which proposes, through the complete emancipation of woman, to abolish the

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fundamental tyranny from which all others spring.”157 In his second installment, “Freewomen and the Birth-Rate II,” Drysdale opens by complimenting Leatham’s statement about tyranny, adding, “I wish indeed that all Suffragists and Feminists would realise the truth of her excellent remark.”158 Drysdale goes on to encourage women to politicize maternity as a tactic for gaining the vote: if they “would only calmly refuse to be mothers until the State recognised them as citizens, their enfranchisement would be proffered them on bended knee.” 159 Entreating for smaller families and a reduced population, he urges suffragists to “come forward with new arguments, showing how the control of motherhood by Freewomen will really strike at the root of poverty, raise wages, and immensely improve the quality of the race by the refusal to propagate hereditary unfitness.” Such a goal would lead to “a moral advance and awakening such as the world has never yet experienced.”160 Passages like these illuminate Drysdale’s (and women like Leatham’s) vanguard advocacy of female individualism; but such support is mired by their invocation of what Layne Parish Craig calls the “unholy alliance” between contraception and eugenics, discussed in Chap. 2.161 As Craig outlines, early advocates of the birth control movement embraced the eugenic philosophy that “selective breeding of humans could achieve ‘improvement’ of ‘the race,’ usually coded as a group of Western European descent, physically healthy, and financially successful.”162 Inscriptions of eugenic rhetoric within The Freewoman reveals the privileging of whiteness in discourses of the Republican Mother and race mother. Leatham returns in another issue where she thanks Drysdale for his insights. She adds, “I certainly hope that Freewomen will not enter upon the sex relationship for any such conscious purpose as that of reproduction; but rather that they will find in passionate love between man and woman, even if that be transient, the only sanction for sex intimacy,” reinforcing her stand that women must separate sexual pleasure from reproductive goals.163 Leatham’s maternalism profoundly resists the notion of the mother as angel-like and sexless, instead regarding her as a complex individual whose nurturing is compatible with erotics. In this, we can recall Heilmann’s reference to the New Woman’s “sexual anarchy” that “exacerbated deep-seated anxieties about the shifting concepts of gender and sexuality.”164 The epistolary exchange between Drysdale and Leatham spotlights the breadth of the magazine’s content, and how maternal

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reform was predicated on and problematized by the intersection of such controversial topics like eugenics, birth control, and sexual freedom.

Conclusion Reflecting on her work in her final editorial, “Our Last Issue,” Marsden offers “very warm thanks to all who have helped THE FREEWOMAN,” and concludes, “We cannot believe that our common efforts have been wasted.”165 Indeed, they were not. Despite its limited run of twelve months, the magazine tackled the most urgent matters related to institutional and individual motherhood of the era. It illuminated theoretical and philosophical attitudes about and approaches to maternity, and its discourses contributed to, or were manifested in, issues facing real women and mothers. Some of these issues materialized as fact or policy, while others continue to be visions or goals for maternal feminists (as I discuss in Chap. 8). For example, while Endowment effectively became policy with the 1945 Family Allowances Act, Melvin’s Society for the Promotion of Co-operative Housekeeping was essentially utopian, with the model, limited to middle-class professional women in Hampstead City Garden, never fully taking off.166 Ongoing scientific research into and demand for contraception would lead to the opening of birth control clinics from the 1910s on, along with the birth control pill in 1960.167 Women in Britain and the United States gained suffrage in 1918 and 1920, respectively— without having to “calmly refuse to be mothers,” as suggested by Drysdale.168 The “common efforts,” as Marsden put it, of Freewoman contributors to advance maternal causes is heralded by New Woman icon Mona Caird in her 1890 essay “The Morality of Marriage.” Caird demands “the creation of a new balance of power, of many varieties of feminine character and aptitude, and, through the consequent influx of new activities, a social revolution.”169 This call for seismic change, proclaimed with the energy of modernist insurgency and in the rhetoric of Marsden’s own “Bondwomen” manifesto, was taken up in diverse ways by the contributors to The Freewoman. In this chapter, I have showcased material by only a handful of the figures who built the magazine’s content. Although Clarke believes that The Freewoman “was ultimately the product not of a collective but of an individual editorial will,”170 my chapter substantiates the degree to which authors and readers were mutually inspiring and interdependent.

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In her 1925 essay “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf urged authors to construct characters by thinking about “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” because “‘The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.”171 With its inscriptions of vanguard feminist philosophy alongside women’s everyday practices and experiences, The Freewoman applies Woolf’s mandate for modern fiction to journalism. Bondwomen’s attitudes to conventional maternity were expressed in tandem with Freewomen’s counter-public or reverse discourses about new motherhood. As we have seen, articles by prominent figures like Marsden, Wells, and Chew share textual space with letters from Florence Harris (speaking for “we feminists”); Edith A. Browne (“a freewoman”); “A Would-Be Freewoman”; and Jane Craig (“an ‘ordinary woman’ in the ‘rear guard’”). These voices remind us that competing ideas about maternity were democratized within the pages of the magazine; and that further, the magazine served as the site not only where feminist and Freewoman identities converged,172 but also where they could be tested.173 That said, where Woolf promised that “no perception comes amiss,” The Freewoman privileged white perspectives and identities. It is important to recognize that other periodicals of the era—notably from the United States—pushed comparable agendas for Black feminism and Black feminist maternalism, and did so under the leadership of Black New Woman journalists and editors. For example, Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), a mother of four who fought for anti-lynching laws and for suffrage, among other civil rights initiatives, was a groundbreaking journalist. She reports in her autobiography, “I was invited to be a writer on the Free Speech and Headlight of Memphis. This was in 1889. The paper was owned by Rev. F.  Nightingale, pastor of the largest Baptist church in town, and by J. L. Fleming. I refused to come in except as equal with themselves, and I bought a one-third interest. I was editor” (32). Declaring that “A woman editor and correspondent was a novelty” (35), Wells highlights her New Woman status. (I discuss her autobiography more fully in Chap. 6). Sabina Matter-Seibel historicizes that Black women had turned to African-American periodicals “to agitate against slavery and to work for racial uplift” since the mid-nineteenth century.174 Matter-Seibel showcases the contributions of Pauline E.  Hopkins (1859–1930) to one of these, The Colored American Magazine (1900–1909), published first out of Boston and then New  York. Portraying her as another trailblazing

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journalist in the spirit of Wells, Matter-Seibel details that Hopkins was involved with the magazine from its beginning, serving as editor of “The Women’s Department” and then as literary editor. During her involvement from 1900 to her departure in 1904,175 she was prolific: “in addition to articles on politics, business, education and religion, she publishes ten short stories and three novels in its pages. As the first black woman editor of a magazine she has the power to influence the magazine’s policies.” Profoundly, “Hopkins makes ‘a new race of colored women’ her cause.”176 Jill Bergman similarly regards Hopkins as an African-American New Woman. Referring to Hopkins’ series “Famous Women of the Negro Race” for The Colored American Magazine, Bergman explains how Hopkins “informs her readers of black women’s work and progress and appropriates the ideals of New Womanhood, claiming for the African-­ American daughters some of the same advancement enjoyed by their white sisters.”177 Bergman notes that Hopkins ascribed to the ideology of racial uplift, which she merged with the ideals of the bourgeois “glorified, redeeming mother,” consequently creating “a new race of black women who take a distinctly maternal approach to racial uplift.”178 Hopkins’ agenda balances, or counters, the maternal ‘uplifting’ of the privileged white Republican race prescribed by many contributors to The Freewoman. Barbara Bair focuses on another New Woman, the Jamaican-American activist and journalist Amy Jacques Garvey (1895–1973). Bair studies Jacques Garvey’s work as editor of the woman’s page for the New York publication Negro World (1918–1933), “Our Women and What They Think,” which ran from February 1924 to April 1927. According to Bair, Jacques Garvey “used the page to present a full range of feminist-­womanist and traditional perspectives”179—reminding us of the diverse Freewoman and Bondwoman identities debated in The Freewoman. The paper was the official organ of the influential Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), founded by her husband, Marcus Garvey. Jacques Garvey adopted a political agenda for her woman’s page, using it to highlighting that the UNIA was dedicated to representing not only male interests but “the New Negro Woman as well.”180 Bair summarizes that the page “had its recipe and home economic departments,” among other things, but more seriously it was “a platform for cultural debates about race pride, new roles and relationships for black men and women, and revised definitions of black manhood and womanhood.”181 Moreover, the page featured news of women who were, for instance, lawyers, doctors, politicians, inventors, and explorers, “all offered up for readers to

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emulate.”182 At the same time, “Marriage, motherhood, and child raising were popular topics,” and while maternal duty was often conflated with responsibilities to the Black population, “racial domesticity” was not privileged as the New Negro Woman’s sole destiny.183 As vanguard editors, journalists, and activists concerned with women’s professional, political, and maternal goals and identities, Wells, Hopkins, and Jacques Garvey provide significant points of intersection with editor Dora Marsden and her contributors, diversifying the discourses of New Womanism.  These points further resonate with the salons hosted by Harlem Renaissance figures like Jessie Redmon Fauset and Georgia Douglas Johnson, touched on earlier. As the examples above testify, motherhood was a central feature of periodical culture. Within The Freewoman, maternal definition was contested and debated. Contributors negotiated the multiple meanings of maternalism, the ideology promoting “the public importance of motherhood and child-rearing,”184 and regarded as being variously “feminist, antifeminist, conservative, progressive, radical, or some combination thereof.”185 With the magazine functioning like an open salon held every Thursday, Marsden’s editorial premise resembles Gertrude Stein’s welcoming agenda for her Saturday gatherings at 27 rue de Fleurus. This receptiveness reflects Marsden’s conviction that men are equally capable of, and are invited to engage in, feminist advocacy. As such, the magazine afforded the creation of an intimate public sphere wherein both female and male contributors forged alliances and rallied round their shared sets of maternalist concerns. Through autobiographical and especially matrifocal testimony, and in varyingly complimentary, respectful, playful, mocking, and ironic repartee, contributors made the personal political. Employing the discourses of maternalism, they sought to transform “motherhood from women’s primary private responsibility into public policy.”186 In turn, contributors extend our appreciation of new modernism’s valuing of public opinion, reportage, and mass media. Just as Scholes and Wulfman suggest that reading across a periodical’s serial narrative allows us to “perceive the issues of the day as live issues,”187 so my chapter traces the discursive threads of The Freewoman to reveal maternal talk in ‘real’ time. The Freewoman is driven not only by provocative feature content but also—and arguably even more so—by authors and readers in provocation with each other. The magazine’s lived immediacy is further evidenced by the fact that correspondence sections often published letters that are directly followed not only by responses from Marsden but also by responses from the letters’ addressees themselves. While the articles and letters are certainly carefully worded, we can concurrently regard

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the back and forth, or give and take, between authors and correspondents as an enactment of modernist talk, that free flow of ideas operating as organically, intuitively, and reciprocally as the conversations taking place at a salon or coffee house. Underpinning the nineteenth-century woman movement and subsequent developments in feminism, topics like mothers in the workforce, endowed motherhood, eugenics and birth control, reproductive versus passionate sex, co-operative domesticity, delegating childcare, and increased parenting by men informed discussions about, as well as the construction and promotion of, specifically new, modern motherhood. All of these topics are grounded in the overarching premise that motherhood should be, first and foremost, voluntary. As Marsden succinctly put it, “Entered upon seriously, and under prepared conditions, motherhood for the woman should be a joy and a great adventure. If it is otherwise, a woman has no business to undertake it.”188 Inspired by representations of the New Woman as a quintessential harbinger of the future, contributors to The Freewoman worked within and against ideologies of Republican Motherhood, the True Woman, and the race mother at the nexus of New Woman discourses related to women’s quests and demands for autonomous self-realization. In allowing for remarkably innovative, forthright, controversial, and discordant dialogues about mothering, The Freewoman stands as a groundbreaking text in the history of maternal modernism. The Freewoman provided ongoing momentum for the rebellions of fin-de-­ siècle and Edwardian New Women, and anticipated the efforts of feminist pioneers well into the twentieth century, as evidenced in the remaining chapters of this book.

Notes 1. Marsden, “The New Morality.—IV,” 142. 2. Marsden, “Bondwomen,” 1–2. 3. Garner, A Brave and Beautiful Spirit, 1, 12. 4. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 1. 5. See Garner, A Brave and Beautiful Spirit, 1. Garner notes, “In January 1911 Dora had no money, no job, no income” (51). The Freewoman was made possible by the financial backing of Charles Grenville, who owned the radical publishing house Stephen Swift (56). 6. Garner quotes Gawthorpe accusing Marsden (in a letter to her) as “bullying” (72), a behavior of which Gawthorpe frequently complained; the relationship was from the start of The Freewoman tense because of Gawthorpe’s ongoing retention of loyalties to the WSPU (Garner 57–59, 70–72).

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7. Marsden, “Bondwomen,” 3. 8. Marsden, “Our Last Issue,” 402. 9. Caird, “The Emancipation of the Family,” 58. 10. Melvin, “Co-operative Housekeeping and the Mother. III,” 15. 11. The periodical’s title is represented in all caps throughout the issues. I have retained this format. However, titles of articles and names of contributors are also rendered in all caps. For ease of reading, I have replaced the all caps with upper and lower case text. 12. Marsden, “Notes of the Week,” 3. 13. Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism, 60. 14. Scott, “Introduction,” The Gender of Modernism, 2. 15. Ibid., 4. 16. Scott does not include a chapter on Marsden in her anthology, but introduces and edits a chapter on Rebecca West’s writing (“Rebecca West (1892–1983”) in which Scott references Marsden and The Freewoman, to which West contributed. 17. Lyon, Janet,  “Manifestoes  from the Sex War,” 67. The manifestoes selected are by Emmeline Pankhurst, F. T. Marinetti, Valentine de Saint-­ Point, and Mina Loy. 18. Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 1–2. 19. Ibid., 4. 20. Ibid., 1, 21. 21. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 13. 22. Gilman, Women and Economics, 257. 23. Gilman, “Our Androcentric Culture,” 618. 24. Ibid., 613. 25. Marsden, “The Woman Movement,” 281. 26. Marsden, “The Freewoman,” 17. 27. The final issue is only eight pages. The last page of each issue (save the final issue) contains advertisements, with a few ads scattered throughout the volume as well. 28. Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism, 57–58. 29. Ibid., 57. 30. Green, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life, 150. 31. Heilmann and Beetham, “Introduction,” New Woman Hybridities, 2. 32. Ibid., 2–3. 33. Kenton, “A Study,” 154; quoted in Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 167. 34. Latham and Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” 517. 35. Scholes (1995–2012); Latham as co-director (2003–2014). 36. Scholes and Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines, 43. 37. Churchill and McKible, “Introduction,” Little Magazines and Modernism, 5. 38. Ibid., 6–7. 39. Scholes and Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines, 59.

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40. Brooker and Thacker, “General Introduction,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 14. 41. A nineteenth-century term for androgyny, third sex, or homosexual. 42. Regarding race, Delap illuminates, “Rather than imperial concerns with ‘lower’ and ‘savage’ races, The Freewoman hosted anti-Semitic debates, on the significance of ‘the Jew’ for English identity politics. This aspect of the journal has been curiously passed over by other commentators” (The Feminist Avant-Garde 275). 43. Marsden, “Notes of the Week,” 3. 44. See Garner, A Brave and Beautiful Spirit, 1. 45. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 738. 46. See Delap: “Well-known continental European feminist activists such as Helene Stocker and Madeleine Pelletier contributed, and strong links with Parisian intellectuals emerged. A file copy was also kept for public consultation at the Literature Department of the NAWSA [National American Women’s Suffrage Association] in New  York” (“Individualism” 174). 47. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 742, 745. 48. Latham and Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” 519. 49. Marek, Women Editing Modernism, 2–3. 50. Marek looks at Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (Poetry); Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap (Little Review); H.  D. and Bryher (Egoist and Close Up); and Marianne Moore (Dial) (20–21). 51. Green, “Recovering Feminist Criticism,” 54, 58. 52. Brooker and Thacker, “General Introduction,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 6. 53. Salon: the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 54. Marek, “Magazines, Presses, and Salons,” 62. 55. Ibid., 65–68. Marek highlights that with her salon, Fauset, “the literary editor for the NAACP’s journal The Crisis […] fostered the talents of many members of the New Negro, or Harlem, Renaissance.” Likewise, Johnson’s “regular gathering on Saturday nights” was considered the “most famous African American woman’s literary salon,” attracting writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Fauset, among others (68). 56. Ibid., 64. 57. Ibid., 64. 58. Ibid., 75. 59. Churchill and McKible,  “Introduction,”  Little Magazines and Modernism, 12. 60. Ibid., 12–13. 61. Marsden, “Freewoman Clubs,” 244. 62. As reported by Barbara Low, “The Discussion Circle,” 464.

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63. For more on Discussion Circles, see Green, Feminist Periodicals  and Daily Life, Chapter 4; Delap, “Individualism and Introspection,” pp. 184–191. For more on public conversation and debate within feminism, see Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, p. 51. 64. Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 54–55. 65. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 17, 135. 66. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism, 11. 67. Ibid., 11–12. 68. Green, “The New Woman’s Appetite,” 221–22. 69. Ledger, The New Woman, 10. 70. Green, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life, 147–48. 71. Green, Feminist  Periodicals and Daily Life, 152; Berlant, The Female Complaint, 10. 72. Heilmann and Beetham, “Introduction,” New Woman Hybridities, 2–3. 73. Green, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life, 148. 74. Ibid., 150. 75. Ibid., 154. 76. Green, Feminist  Periodicals and Daily Life, 165; Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 7. 77. Green, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life, 171. 78. Marsden, “Commentary on Bondwomen,” 21. 79. Craig, “To the Editors,” 152. 80. Rosenman and Klaver, “Introduction,” Other Mothers, 9. 81. Heilmann, “Introduction,” Feminist Forerunners, 1. 82. DiCenzo, with Delap and Ryan, “Introduction: The Challenges  and Contributions of Feminist Media History,” Feminist Media History, 3. 83. DiCenzo, with Delap and Ryan, “Part I: Publics, Social Movements, and Media History. Introduction,” Feminist Media History, 22. 84. DiCenzo, with Delap and Ryan, “Introduction: The Challenges  and Contributions of Feminist Media History,” Feminist Media History, 16. 85. DiCenzo, with Delap and Ryan, “Part I: Publics, Social Movements, and Media History. Introduction,” Feminist Media History, 27. 86. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 5. 87. DiCenzo, with Delap and Ryan, “Introduction: The Challenges  and Contributions of Feminist Media History,” Feminist Media History, 16. 88. Delap, “Individualism and Introspection,” 160, 159. 89. Ibid., 165. 90. Harris, “To the Editors,” 30. 91. Browne, “A Freewoman’s Attitude,” 153. 92. “A Would-Be Freewoman,” “To the Editor,” 353. 93. Delap, “Individualism and Introspection,” 180. 94. Ibid., 186. 95. Ibid., 186.

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96. Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 1. 97. Marsden, “Bondwomen,” 1. 98. Ibid., 2. 99. Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde, 181. 100. Marsden, “Commentary on Bondwomen,” 22. 101. Marsden, “The New Morality.—IV,” 141. 102. Marsden, “The Drudge,” 221–22. 103. Ibid., 222–23. 104. “Home-Worker,” “To the Editors,” 251. 105. “A. F.,” “To the Editors,” 252. 106. “Home Worker” has dropped the hyphen from her name. 107. “Home Worker,” “To the Editors,” 272. 108. Florence Graham, “To the Editors,” 272–73. 109. “M. S.,” “To the Editors,” 273. 110. Marsden, “Woman: Endowed or Free?” 282–83. 111. Marsden, “Mr. Wells,” 301. 112. Wells, “To the Editors,” 301–02. 113. Majerus, “‘Determined and Bigoted Feminists,” 626. 114. Marsden, “Women Endowed,” 321. 115. Ibid., 321–22. 116. Ibid., 323. 117. Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism, 60. 118. Delap, “Individualism and Introspection,” 180. 119. Hamilton, “To the Editor,” 352. 120. Rachel Graham, “To the Editor,” 418. 121. Marsden, “Endowment of Motherhood,” 396. 122. Rachel Graham, “To the Editor,” 418. 123. Ibid., 418. 124. Browne, “A Freewoman’s,” 153–55. 125. “Militant Suffragist,” “To the Editors,” 172. 126. Delap suggests that Chew “limited her family to one child perhaps in recognition of the impossibility of combining larger families with political activism” (The Feminist Avant-Garde 199); “What distinguishes her ideas from other critics of endowment within The Freewoman was that Chew saw the endowment debate as a class debate” (The  Feminist  AvantGarde 207). 127. Chew, “The Economic Freedom of Women,” No. 34, Vol. II, 149. 128. Linton, “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents,” 604. 129. Chew, “The Economic Freedom of Women,” No. 34, Vol. II, 150. 130. See, for example, Mao and Walkowitz in Bad Modernisms, wherein they trace how modernism trades on, among things, shock (3). 131. Chew, “The Economic Freedom of Women,” No. 35, Vol. II, 167. 132. Ibid., 169. 133. Chew, “Mother-Interest and Child-Training,” 271–72. 134. Melvin, “Co-Operative, Housekeeping” 15–16.

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135. West, “A Modern Crusader,” 8–9. 136. Hobson, “Woman and the House,” 56. 137. West, “A Reply,” 57. 138. Johnson, “Man at Home,” 45. 139. Gilman, Women and Economics, 316. 140. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 5. 141. Delap, “Individualism and Introspection,” 186. 142. Marsden, “To What End in Life?,” 262. Note she does not say what this artificial means might be. 143. Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 819. 144. “A Grandmother,” “To the Editors,” 270. 145. Winter, “To the Editors,” 312. 146. “A Would-Be Freewoman,” “To the Editor,” 353. 147. D’Auvergne, “A Definition of Marriage,” 5. 148. Between 1880 and 1930, England had a 52% reduction in birthrates (Allen, Feminism, 11). 149. D’Auvergne, “A Definition of Marriage,” 6. 150. Pearce, “To the Editors,” 32. 151. “A Varsity Woman,” “To the Editors,” 91. 152. Birth control became a topic of public advocacy with the formation of the Malthusian League in England in 1877, a group known as Neo-­ Malthusians taking its cue from Thomas Robert Malthus’ campaign, launched in 1798, to ensure that population growth and food supply were commensurate (Wilson, Conceived in Modernism, 16). While Malthus, a devout Christian cleric, was opposed to artificial means of contraception, Neo-Malthusians embraced them “as means by which to limit reproduction without the ill effects of abstinence or celibacy” (Wilson, Conceived in Modernism, 16–17). 153. Drysdale, “Freewomen and the Birth-Rate,” 35. 154. Quoted in Berg, Mothering the Race, 1. 155. Drysdale, “Freewomen and the Birth-Rate,” 37. 156. Ibid., 37. Bradlaugh and Besant were tried on charges of obscenity for selling a pamphlet on contraception; their ultimate acquittal led to the establishment of the Neo-Malthusian League and its promotion of birth control techniques (Allen, Feminism, 98). Drysdale erroneously cites the trial date as 1876. 157. Leatham, “To the Editors,” No. 3, Vol. 1, 51. 158. Drysdale, “Freewomen and the Birth-Rate II,” 89. 159. Ibid., 89. 160. Ibid., 89, 90. 161. Craig, When Sex Changed, 12. 162. Ibid., 13. 163. Leatham, “To the Editors,” No. 8, Vol. 1, 151. 164. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 1. 165. Marsden, “Our Last Issue,” 402.

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166. For the Family Allowances Act, see Delap, The  Feminist  Avant-Garde, 187; and Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 150. Regarding co-operatives, Allen notes that schemes in Germany and France were similarly unsuccessful: “The Berlin cooperatives soon fell into financial difficulties. In France, despite a high rate of employment among married women, communal living found few advocates” (77). 167. Craig, When Sex Changed, 2–3. 168. Drysdale, “Freewomen and the Birth-Rate II,” 89. Women in Britain over the age of thirty first gained suffrage in 1918; those over twenty-one, in 1928. In the United States, despite the 19th Amendment granting women the vote, many African-American women were prevented from exercising their rights due to restrictions placed on them, like literacy tests, poll taxes, and racist Southern state laws. It was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that all restrictions were removed. See Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All. 169. Caird, “The Morality of Marriage,” 137. 170. Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism, 57. 171. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 149, 154. 172. Delap, “Individualism and Introspection,” 165. 173. Green, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life, 171. 174. Matter-Seibel, “Pauline Hopkins’s  Portrayal of the African-American New Woman,” 80. 175. After the paper was bought by Fred R. Moore, Hopkins was effectively dismissed from her post. Moore was a good friend of Booker T.  Washington, who did not support Hopkins’ views: “Her outspoken radical ideas on race and gender were not in agreement with the accommodationist politics of Washington” (Matter-Seibel, “Pauline Hopkins’s Portrayal of the African-­American New Woman,” 84). 176. Ibid., 81. Matter-Seibel takes the phrase from Hopkins’ article “Higher Education of Colored Women in White Schools and Colleges,” Colored American Magazine, October 1902, pp. 446–7. 177. Bergman, “‘A New Race of Colored Women,’” 88. 178. Ibid., 89. 179. Bair, “‘Our Women and What They Think,’” 104. 180. Ibid., 109. 181. Ibid., 110. 182. Ibid., 112. 183. Ibid., 112–113. 184. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 2. 185. Weiner, “Maternalism,” 96. 186. Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World, 2 187. Scholes and Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines, 167. 188. Marsden, “The New Morality.—IV,” 142.

CHAPTER 5

“The Title Role of ‘Mother’”: Silent-Film Stardom and Celebrity Maternity in Photoplay Magazine

Introduction: “The World’s Greatest Motion Picture Publication” As we recall from Chap. 4, in her letter to the editor of The Freewoman Rachel Graham insists, “The fallacy that motherhood is a handicap is easily exploded. We have only to look at the increasing number of working and professional mothers, compare them with other women, and see that it is not detrimental either to their work, their health, or their morals. We hear of many people who would be pleased to confine school teachers, etc., to their homes, but they never suggest that our leading actresses should deprive us of their talent and waste their lives. They are a splendid example of self-supporting mothers who are not handicapped by their children. They and their children are a credit to humanity.”1 Graham’s shout-out to “leading actresses” echoes the sentiments of Photoplay, a fan magazine that extensively championed maternal stars of the cinema. Produced out of New York, Photoplay first appeared in August 1911, just a few months ahead of the November launch of The Freewoman across the pond.2 A close reading of Photoplay during the silent-film era reveals that topics about mothering related to employment, marriage, and sexual expression as covered by the radical feminist Freewoman were disseminated within

“Billie Burke in the Title Role of ‘Mother,’” 50. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_5

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mass culture as well. In this chapter, I examine how the new genre of the fan magazine, itself a product of the new medium of film, provided a forum for New Woman celebrities to model and define maternal modernism. The term “photoplay” was coined in 1910 as a singular word for “moving picture show,”3 which, from the rise of the commercial cinema in the nickelodeon era,4 had become the “preeminent entertainment of the time.”5 As audiences began to transfer their attention from the live theater stage to the screen, a periodical genre—the movie or fan magazine—was designed to serve their demands for information about the industry and its performers.6 The Motion Picture Story Magazine was the first of its kind, created by J.  Stuart Blackton and Eugene V.  Brewster, and released in February 1911.7 Motion Picture was followed by Photoplay that August. Photoplay’s surge in popularity is attributed to vice president, publisher, and editor James R.  Quirk, who had helmed the successful Popular Mechanics.8 Although other cinema periodicals entered the market—there were over a dozen by the early 1920s9—Photoplay was Motion Picture’s biggest competitor, soon superseding it in reputation to become “the yardstick by which all other fan magazines are judged.”10 This assessment was generated by the magazine itself: the April 1916 cover proclaims it “the World’s Greatest Motion Picture Publication.” Photoplay spans the twentieth century. Its final issue appeared in April 1980, at which point it was folded into Us magazine, the entertainment and celebrity weekly.11 My chapter surveys Photoplay published during the era of silent film, which ended with the release of the first talking film, The Jazz Singer, in October 1927.12 The late 1920s is an appropriate cut-off date given shifts in the fan magazine genre itself. Kathryn H.  Fuller explains that the “golden age” of the genre began to fade in the 1930s due to the Depression; the deaths of editors Brewster and Quirk; the stylistic turn toward scandal and salaciousness associated with tabloids; and the increasing coverage of similar content in mainstream magazines, newspapers, and new photo-journalism periodicals such as Life and Look.13 More practically, it was essential that I limit my research sample to a manageable number of installments, given that even within a two-decade span, each issue of the monthly Photoplay ranges in length from approximately 180 pages in the early 1910s to around 140 pages in the late 1910s and 1920s. My ability to locate these hundred-year-old magazines and efficiently search thousands of pages is enabled by the Media History Digital Library,

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established in 2011 by David Pierce and Eric Hoyt, which contains a full run of Photoplay from 1914 to 1963 in its Fan Magazine Collection.14 Asserting that the fan magazine “was very much a magazine genre in its own right,” Slide defines it as “fundamentally a film- and entertainment-­ related periodical aimed at a general fan, an average member of the moviegoing public who more often than not was female.”15 The genre is part of the broader field of celebrity journalism developing in the 1880s and 90s, which Charles L. Ponce de Leon calls “a new form of reportage that expressly focused on public figures, evoking interest in them as ‘personalities.’”16 Celebrity journalism is contemporaneous with the onset of modernism, as is the film industry, which bourgeoned from the late 1800s. While there is now a substantive body of scholarship on the intersections of modernism, film, and celebrity, to date the relationship between modernism and fan magazines remains under examined17; in like manner, there are recent studies on motherhood and popular/celebrity culture, but these are not grounded in modernism.18 Because Photoplay was recognized as the leading publication for industry news, film reviews, and celebrity profiles within a decade of its appearance, it is a salient resource for investigating how celebrities helped to construct and disseminate the new motherhood of the early twentieth century. In this regard, I showcase here the following actors who were mothers:19 Belle Bennett, Alice Brady, Billie Burke, Catherine Calvert, Alice Joyce, Barbara La Marr, Mae Marsh, Gloria Swanson, and Florence Vidor.

The New Woman and New Journalism Celebrity journalism is a branch of the so-called New Journalism, indicative of a shift from political news to human interest stories, and “a turning to shorter paragraphs and sentences, the use of pictures and headlines, and the courting by the daily press of new classes of readers.”20 While I discuss these features later in this chapter, I here want to touch on how the New Journalism was gendered, and how it emerged in direct relation to the New Woman. Just as we have seen in Chaps. 2 and 3 how periodicals mocked the New Woman, so culture critic Matthew Arnold coined the term New Journalism as a denigrating label in 1887: “It has much to recommend it; it is full of ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy, generous instincts; its one great fault is that it is featherbrained.”21 Margaret Beetham contends that the new press was equated with traditional feminine characteristics, “especially its tendency towards sensation and the

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personalising of information”; “The new press also defined women as central to its readership, both in general publications and through the development of an extensive sub-genre of specifically targeted journals. It was in these decades that the ‘woman’s magazine’ assumed the important place in publishing which it still has.”22 Beetham does not discuss the fan magazine, but given its primarily female audience we can appreciate how a text like Photoplay emerged out of or alongside of women’s magazines. As with the pull between conformity and rebellion we have seen inscribed in New Woman fiction and The Freewoman, women’s mass magazines “were in large part concerned with asserting ‘True Woman’ against the various deviant femininities subsumed under the labels ‘new’ or modern.’ However, the Truth of femininity proved difficult to pin down in these simple oppositions.”23 In noting that the “meanings of ‘New Journalism,’ like New Woman, were plural and contested,”24 Beetham encourages us to read these terms in relation to each other. Thus, we can see how a magazine like Photoplay registered the hybrid nature of the New Woman, whose emergence as “an unmistakably ‘modern’ figure” who was “committed to change and to the values of a projected future”25 stimulated excitement as well as anxiety. One version of this modern figure is the Jazz Age flapper. Joshua Zeitz historicizes the term to post-WWI, when flapper “came to designate young women in their teens and twenties who subscribed to the libertine principles” signaled in literature by authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and actors like Clara Bow.26 The flapper was an interwar phenomenon who earned her own living and who embraced the new consumer culture “that counseled indulgence and pleasure over restraint and asceticism.” This New Woman “boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date— to work, to own her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation.”27 The story of the sexually expressive flapper is “the story of America in the 1920s—the first ‘modern’ decade, when everyday life came under the full sway of mass media, celebrity, and consumerism.”28 In this chapter, I concentrate on mass media reportage of actor-mothers (who were heteronormative and almost all white), tracing inscriptions of maternal themes in advance of and during the quintessentially modern decade of the 1920s. We can read representations of actor-mothers in Photoplay in light of Ann Taylor Allen’s definition of feminist maternalists who “extolled motherhood as woman’s distinctive contribution to society” but who refused to be confined to “their conventional roles of dependent wife, domestic

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drudge, and sexual slave.”29 Feminist maternalism was embraced by women fighting for, among other things, “economic self-sufficiency that would enable them to live free of male control, [and] freedom to develop their talents”30—evidenced here by women’s successful film careers. Celebrities were a vital component of New Woman challenges to gendered domains. As Nancy F.  Cott describes manifestations of feminism in the 1910s, “Some women practiced law, voted, held political, judicial, and civic office; some women managed capital, explored the globe, held the highest academic degrees possible; some women smoked in public and others flaunted their sexuality on the silent screen, belonging to no man.”31 Later in this chapter, I look at how this flaunting of sexuality was performed by maternal figures. Textual and visual elements of Photoplay illuminate how the magazine contributes to our critical understanding of early twentieth-century depictions of mothering. The magazine foregrounds motherhood in countless short stories, film synopses, and reviews of films with maternal protagonists. Coverage of maternity further attends to actors and other women in the industry who were mothers in real life; celebrities who played mothers in film; children of the stars; child actors; mothers who managed the careers of their famous children; adult stars when they were babies; men in the industry who were fathers; and products and services directed at mothers and children through advertisements. A comprehensive treatment of each of these topics being beyond my purview, I focus on how actor-­ mothers were depicted in profiles, gossip columns, and photo spreads. Such attention allows me to make claims about how developments in celebrity journalism affected the construction and visibility of the New Woman mother within cinematic and consumerist spheres. My study reveals that Photoplay is a kaleidoscopic space of fluid and shifting resistance to and privileging of maternity. Images of Victorian “angels in the house” and stereotypes of femininity associated with domesticity, romance, fashion, beauty, and home décor dominate the pages. Yet they overlap with Victorian fin-de-siècle discourses of the New Woman and new mother. Photoplay did not engage in the heated, often contentious debates about issues like endowment, birth control, and childcare grounded in explicit feminist rhetoric in the manner of The Freewoman. However, the politically driven stance of the magazine, and of its matrifocal content, is signaled by the actors (along with directors, producers, photographers, screenplay writers, celebrity journalists, and the like) who experienced historically unprecedented feminist gains, like having their

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work in the public sphere promoted, and earning high salaries through their demanding and adventurous careers. These careers granted them physical freedoms as they traveled to set locations, performed feats of derring-­do for the camera, and purchased their own homes and automobiles. Significantly, many women challenged traditional maternity as they continued working outside the home after becoming a mother, reveled in their sexualized screen personae, normalized adoption, and parented as single mothers with careers after divorcing their husbands or becoming widowed. As such, we can read Photoplay as a modernist collage or, in cinematic terms, a montage of multiple points of view, wherein ‘mother’ is not only one of many possible identities for women but also itself a multivalent role. Before looking specifically at how Photoplay represents new maternal celebrities, in the next sections I first position the magazine within the broader contexts of new modernism, feminist film history, consumer culture, and celebrity journalism.

Popular Modernisms Photoplay is emblematic of new modernism. The expansionist agenda of new modernism as described by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz includes a shift to “mass media rhetorics” and to accounting for developments in “novel technologies for transmitting information: telegraph, radio, cinema, and new forms of journalism,”32 which open up spaces for situating Photoplay as a vital participant in a network of modernist mediations. As a text about film, and a new kind of journalism in and of itself, Photoplay is an exemplary “novel technology.” Further, Mao and Walkowitz’s call for vertical expansions that blur boundaries between high and popular forms of art and culture33 speaks to Photoplay. The twenty-­ first-­century scholarly turn to the cinema as both a complement to and an influence on literary modernism provides helpful context for my discussion here. For instance, Laura Marcus foregrounds “the significance of film’s newness for its early commentators,” and its eminence as a form of art.34 Similarly, Andrew Shail regards “cinema and its attendant institutions as a major cause for the emergence of modernism in literature in the United Kingdom.”35 Neither Marcus nor Shail examines fan magazines specifically, but they offer some observations on the genre that inform my own approach to Photoplay.

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Marcus analyzes Close Up, the cerebral periodical of film criticism, co-­ founded and co-edited by Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) in Switzerland from 1927 to 1933. With articles by modernists like Dorothy Richardson and H. D., Close Up is regarded as a modernist venture heralding “a moment in which new theories of psychoanalysis and educational theory met a new critical and analytical awareness of the filmic medium.”36 For Marcus, commentators theorizing film as an elevated art positioned themselves as writing in reaction against the ‘lower’ medium of fan magazines with their attendant focus on “the ‘star,’ ‘gossip,’ and ‘film plot.’” She concedes, crucially, that the “borders and boundaries between popular and elite were never entirely sealed,” evidenced by the work of Iris Barry, who contributed to diverse publications (‘high’ and ‘low’) as well as to the founding of the preeminent London Film Society.37 This blurring is characteristic of new modernism’s vertical expansion. Moreover, Shail cautions that to dismiss the mainstream film criticism of the 1910s “as inane chatter” misses “vital clues to the shape of cinema’s image-regime at the time of the emergence of literary modernism.”38 Instead of privileging an elitist program, then, we gain a better understanding of the aesthetic and cultural impact of the medium and institution of film by valuing a text like Photoplay. That said, the fan magazine remains neglected by modernist scholars. The genre did not warrant an entry in the hefty 1000-page-plus Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines.39 There is a chapter “Pulp Magazines and the Popular Press” by David M.  Earle, who contends that popular magazines are overlooked “as a depository of modernism, and no type of magazine has been as overlooked as the pulp magazine”40—a description which could equally be applied to fan magazines. In classifying Photoplay as a manifestation of popular modernism, I draw on Elizabeth Majerus’ definition of the term as, “forms of cultural and artistic modernism aimed at a wide and relatively heterogeneous public rather than a small and fairly exclusive modernist coterie.” Acknowledging that little magazines have garnered much academic attention of late—as I evidence in my chapter on The Freewoman—Majerus, like Earle, makes the case that “a number of magazines with wider popular appeal and less focused artistic agendas also played a role in the creation and development of modernism’s public identity.”41 According to Majerus, in the 1920s period of high modernism, “In New York City, magazines like Vanity Fair, the Smart Set, and the New Yorker offered mass versions of modernism that presented modernist

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aesthetics and ideas within a mix of highbrow and middlebrow art and elite, together with popular culture,”42 similar, I argue, to Photoplay. Popular magazines “served as accessible guides to modernity for the uninitiated, offering an introduction to modernism that many people—mainstream readers who were nonetheless interested in becoming sophisticated and modern—could understand and incorporate into their existing conceptions of art, literature, and culture.”43 In like manner, fans were initiated into cultural modernity as curated by Photoplay’s editors, writers, and photographers, and role-modeled by its featured celebrities. Sumiko Higashi gestures to a popular modernism in her study of how the urban demographic transformation of the American middle class at the start of the twentieth century led to “a salaried ‘new’ middle class,” and concomitant proliferation of a democratizing middlebrow culture.44 Middlebrow products like movies and their offshoot periodicals were increasingly consumed by “striving white-collar workers, including women,” such that “Cultural hierarchies, even for genteel readers, were increasingly difficult to sustain, as the very success of the middlebrow meant interpenetration of highbrow and lowbrow.” The merger is evidenced by the fact that editors like Blackton (of Motion Picture Story Magazine) were “successful in co-opting the sacrosanct language of Arnoldian highbrow culture to elevate and sell their goods”45—as was Quirk and his team at Photoplay, as I discuss below.

Between the High and the Low Where originality is equated with ‘high’ art, formulaic with ‘low,’ Photoplay was both, or rather, its inventiveness led to the solidification of its formulaic status. In February 1916, it suggests it is setting the standard: “Others are Endeavoring to Imitate Photoplay Magazine’s Matchless Departments,”46 and by March 1931, Quirk affirms, “Almost every department and new idea introduced by Photoplay has been speedily copied by others,” so that “until you get into the text, you can hardly tell one magazine from another. In the trade it is called ‘the Photoplay formula.’”47 This formula evolved over several years. The film reviews in Photoplay began in November 1915, and became a hallmark of the magazine. Additional key elements that were introduced during the 1910s and early 1920s include story adaptations of films and original short fiction; the editorial column “Close-Ups”; the gossip column “Plays and Players” by “Cal York” (the name conflating California and New York, the bicoastal springs of information); and the

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“Popular Photoplayers,” a sequence of glamorous, full-page photos of stars.48 Feature articles, interviews, and auto/biographical reflections provide information about the professional and personal lives of virtually everyone in the business—even the animals in movies—and are complemented by news and behind-the-scenes coverage about current and upcoming productions along with photos, illustrations, and stills. Photoplay is buttressed by advertisements: pages of brief front and larger back matter announce countless products and services like typewriters, cameras, bicycles, automobiles, jewelry, perfume, beauty products, fashion, and dating services, to name but a few, illuminating the market fluidity between the traditional ‘womanly woman’ and the emancipated New Woman. Readers were actively engaged with the magazine by way of the Letters to the Editor and the advice column “Miss Van Wyck Says,” and were invited to take part in contests involving puzzle solving, screenplay writing, and screen testing to become stars. These extensive games and activities reflect the popular modernism as applied by Majerus to Vanity Fair’s mixed content, which she sees as an “inclination to celebrate modernism as part of a dynamic, multifaceted, smart, and above all fun modern urban culture.”49 Relatedly, the diverse opportunities for reader participation reflect my discussion in Chap. 4, of how the Correspondence columns in The Freewoman imitated the modernist salon, generating modernism as “talk,” and leading to the formation of an “intimate public sphere.” An appreciation of topics like these is deepened by Matthew Hannah. He shows that Margaret Anderson, founder and editor (with Jane Heap) of the Chicago-based magazine The Little Review (1914–1929), was eager to boost her magazine’s brand as an influential intellectual periodical. To that end, she labeled her correspondence section “Reader Critic” to encourage her audience to see itself as participatory in elevating the status of the famous modernist authors appearing therein, like James Joyce, T.  S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Anderson also positioned her readers as members of fan clubs, enticing them “to get more involved by promoting social events around the magazine” as a way to access literary celebrity. Through her employment of Photoplay tactics, Anderson expands our understanding of the term popular modernism.50 Examining fan magazines of the early twentieth century, Fuller contends that Photoplay was “one of the most active sites of the legitimation of motion pictures as an art form, setting new standards for film criticism and audience education.”51 Slide acknowledges that superficially, the fan

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magazine served “as a publicity tool, a relatively pointless exercise in selfpromotion by the film industry” that was read by millions of moviegoers one day, then tossed in the waste bin the next.52 However, contrary to assumptions, fan magazines were typically printed on paper of good quality,53 while the covers—painted by illustrators who copied studio portrait photographs—were from the start in color, and by the late 1910s the magazines were recognized as having “developed an impressive use of cover art.”54 The articles and reviews were well written, and although the magazines carried gossip, “they never lowered themselves to the level of yellow journalism practiced by many contemporary American newspapers.”55 For Slide, overall the genre has value for being an arbiter of the tastes of and sources of information about modern American society.56 Photoplay itself conflates its grounding in modernity with modernism, the latter employed as a descriptor for the zeitgeist. For instance, actor Helen Jerome Eddy “dislikes home-work—cooking, house-keeping, sewing. Instead of being the simple, home type of girl, she is intellectually inclined, very much the modernist in thought and action. She discusses art schools, governmental problems, and social evolution much more readily than she does household economics.”57 Jerome is, to be sure, a modernist New Woman. Complementing Higashi’s work on the middlebrow reader, Fuller explains that Photoplay reflected the values of middle-class, small-town America, while also promoting “the new attitude toward leisure, pleasure, and spending associated with the urban middle class of the faster-paced big cities.”58 Quirk marketed the magazine to purveyors of film culture as simultaneously hungry for and susceptible to the promises of modern consumer culture, and knowledgeable about and eager for intelligent coverage of the movie industry. Moreover, Photoplay tapped into international and national sensibilities. As with little magazines like The Freewoman and The Little Review, fan magazines were transatlantic in spirit. Essays in American publications (including Photoplay) on film culture abroad “introduced the average American to a foreign lifestyle”; and Hollywood stars who were non-American, like the Polish-German Pola Negri, were profiled in Photoplay.59 That said, Photoplay reveals prevailing racial prejudices within the United States and the film industry: from 1914 to 1927 (the period of my study) not one cover features a racialized celebrity, and the majority of the articles within are dedicated to white actors. Slide contends, “Just as the motion picture is an American-created art form, similarly the fan magazine

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is a uniquely American literary form, without precedence in the history of literature and very much a cultural symbol of its time.”60 In terms of race, then, Photoplay symbolizes what Jennifer A. Bean exposes as “Hollywood’s tendency to embrace white American girls while expunging ethnic others” as both performers and spectators.61

Fandom and Feminism By gendering modernism, we can ascribe cultural and aesthetic significance to female-directed fan magazines and to their auto/biographical profiles of female celebrities. In showcasing Photoplay’s treatment of maternity, my work contributes to the feminist project advanced by Bean and Diane Negra, along with their contributors, in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, a book that, while not about modernism per se, invokes new modernist concerns. Bean acknowledges how factors such as the digitization of archival materials and a new attentiveness to the gendering of silent film has revealed the extensive degree to which women contributed to the development of early cinema’s “aesthetic, industrial, and cultural shape.”62 Their collection identifies a number of crucial sites constitutive of and integral to film culture study, including memoirs, audience reception, screenplays, advertisements, and, of relevance here, fan magazines.63 Relatedly, Fuller documents how periodicals like Photoplay have been gendered female and feminine from early on in their history.64 While men had responded to the genre’s initial broad treatment of acceptably “masculine” topics related to film production and technology, by around 1915—with the end of the nickelodeon era and the entry of the United States into WWI—content related to women expanded, and male fans, feeling marginalized, shifted their attention to “sporting events, wireless radio, and war news.”65 Such a swing was predicated on the increasing correlation of gender and consumer culture, such that women did more purchasing than men.66 This direction was driven by Quirk, who recognized how the movies advertised consumption and that his magazine could exploit the fans’ correlative wants and needs,67 a topic I discuss in more detail later in the chapter. Arguably, its association with women has rendered the fan magazines a critically neglected genre. Andreas Huyssen posits that “Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.”68 This mass culture, which includes popular and family

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periodicals, was equated with women: “In the age of nascent socialism and the first major women’s movement in Europe, the masses knocking at the gate were also women, knocking at the gate of a male-dominated culture.”69 Women were thus not only associated with mass culture but “with the masses as political threat.”70 Huyssen’s reference to first-wave feminism invokes the fin-de-siècle New Woman defined by Ann Heilmann as a menace to male hegemony: “Her political demands reflected the crisis of the ancien régime beleaguered by issues of class and race, authority and ideology, while her ‘sexual anarchy’ exacerbated deep-seated anxieties about the shifting concepts of gender and sexuality.”71 If canonical male modernism entailed a conscious exclusion of women, popular modernism was an embrace of them. Majerus finds that poplar magazines “affirmed that modernity was to a great extent about women’s large-scale entrance into public life and culture,” and that “modernist-­ oriented glossy magazines” foregrounded women’s participation in the modernist movement.72 Likewise, Earle indicates that despite their promise of salacious content, pulp magazines “often delivered surprising feminist tropes in the flapper and professional woman, a strong, independent figure, thoroughly modern through the challenging of old world conventions.”73 These points resonate with movie magazines as well. The majority of writers for fan magazines were female;74 and by putting close-ups of women on nearly every cover, Photoplay championed women not only as the literal faces of, but also as the marketing forces of, modernity, since they were clearly the ones being used to sell the magazine.75 Additionally, in giving at least as much inside coverage to women’s contributions to the film industry as those by men, Photoplay showcased the kinds of experiential modernisms described by Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers. That is, modernist women were innovative “in their emotional and sexual lives, in where they lived and how they earned,” such that for them, modernism “was not just a question of style; it was a way of life.”76 Echoing Huyssen, Gayln Studlar registers the political threat of the fan magazine, whose surging popularity in the 1920s “took place within a broader ideological framework marked by women’s growing economic and sexual emancipation and the widespread belief that changes in women’s behavior were contributing to a radical subversion of American gender ideals.”77 American women had been entering the workforce en masse since the First World War, and were granted suffrage in 1920 (following their British sisters in 1918); their bold demands for sexual gratification were deemed especially dangerous to American masculinity and to the

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institution of marriage.78 The increasing availability of dependable birth control, and a new model of “childless ‘companionate’” marriage predicated on sexual attraction and satisfaction (rather than biological reproduction) meant that “the Victorian models of woman as sacrificing mother or passively chaste maiden were eclipsed.”79 That said, patriarchal structures remained somewhat resistant to erosion by the transgressive forces of the New Woman, such that “fan magazine’s ideal new woman, like that of women’s magazines, vacillated constantly between asserting her newly realized social and sexual freedoms and retreating from her autonomy.”80 These vacillations are evident throughout Photoplay, where women’s roles are presented as numerous and often competing. In “A Jill of All Trades,” Nell Shipman is poeticized as a hybrid figure: “She vamps, and writes and lectures too, and sometimes she’s an ingenue  [sic].”81 The headline for a story on Doraldina (Dora Saunders) quotes her exclaiming, “I’m a Wild Woman!” but follows, “Not so wild—even in the jungle she stops to powder her nose.”82 The discourse of the New Woman as Wild is invoked as a sign of freedom and adventure, while the negative connotations we heard disseminated by Eliza Lynn Linton (Chap. 3)—that New Women are “insurgent wild women [who] are in a sense unnatural”83—are diffused by assurances that Doraldina is also a feminine woman. The article “The Battle of Bobbed Hair” turns the shorn tresses of the flapper into a war against Victorian (long-haired) femininity; Photoplay conducted a “national investigation of the problem” of short hair, and presented the pros and cons of this “emancipated” style.84 “Virginia from Kentucky,” about Virginia Parson, puns a woman’s economic success with baking: “Miss Parson can cook but doesn’t, to any great extent. She doesn’t have time. She makes so much ‘dough’ in her work that when she does so at home it is only from force of habit.”85 Examples like these announce the playful attitude that pervades Photoplay. While it may seem to trivialize women and their accomplishments, I read it as indicative of the magazine assuming an intelligent reader, one who is able to recognize—and laugh at—the underlying and prevailing stereotypes of gender at the moment they are being countered. Recall, too, Majerus’ comment that popular modernist periodicals inscribe a “smart, and above all fun modern urban culture.”86 According to scholar Nina Miller, periodicals like these “comprised the most prominent area in the 1920s for the negotiation of modern selfhood, a selfhood that came to be (and in many ways, still is) defined by irony, urbanity, and humor.”87

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Gendered negotiations extend to the magazine’s references to suffrage and feminism. In the 1918 piece “Olive Tells Her Secrets: A Dissertation on Face Creams, Athletics, Suffragism and Politics,” Harriette Underhill reports that actor Olive Tell “always has been beautiful but she has not always been a suffragist. It is one of the things which she has achieved— like Stardom, for instance.” Underhill admits that her fascination with Tell’s beauty “made it almost an impossibility for us to take the proper interest in her political views,” but that Tell “was not to be diverted.” Tell goes on to exclaim, “I’ll warrant you that every woman will vote, whether she worked to get that vote or not. Why shouldn’t we vote?”88 Elsewhere we learn that, in 1921, actor Helen Jerome Eddy “is, in character, distinctly a twentieth century evolution—the sort of young woman who a decade ago led the suffrage movement and today is rapidly succeeding in every line of business and profession.”89 British-American actor and screenwriter Olga Petrova proclaims, “I am a feminist,” insisting that women must “live their own lives, be themselves, with all the strength that is in them.”90 Photoplay’s invocation of beauty and femininity, coupled with political praxis, often in tandem with its trademark humor, is a strategic, even subversive technique. It diffuses the political anarchy associated with the New Woman, while simultaneously showcasing and therefore normalizing issues like suffrage and feminism for mass audiences.

Marketing Women’s Lives Competing conventional and unconventional approaches to womanhood were disseminated in fan magazines and celebrity profiles, genres of the New Journalism. I want to trace how press coverage of well-known figures along with the rise of cinema afforded women unprecedented access to the public sphere, revising conceptions not only of leisure and entertainment but also of femininity, domesticity, and motherhood. In so doing, I draw on Self-Exposure, wherein Ponce de Leon surveys the production of celebrity journalism by newspapers and mass-circulation magazines, predicated on a national media culture that gestated in the 1880s and 90s and matured in the 1920s and 30s. Charting developments of “new ideals of selfhood” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biography, Ponce de Leon testifies to how the “attainment of ‘character’” dominated personal and public aspirations of men who aspired to “industry, piety, thrift, sobriety, and self-improvement.”91 While biography as a genre privileged male subjects, by the mid-­nineteenth

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century reputable figures like Florence Nightingale and Harriet Beecher Stowe were profiled in short biographies. Although women had traditionally been confined to the private sphere, “elite and middle-class women found a variety of ways—as novelists, reformers, educators, even consumers—to enter and influence the public sphere.”92 Through their expanded visibility, they were taken up as appropriate subjects to be featured in newspaper profiles, where their “virtues of piety, selflessness, and moral purity” were championed.93 These qualities are the ideological constituents of True Womanhood and Republican Motherhood, which permitted women to retain their conventional womanliness yet participate in the public sphere, since such participation was for the moral benefit of the nation. Further to Ponce de Leon, Warren I. Susman distinguishes between a nineteenth-century notion of “character” and a twentieth-century conception of “personality.” The latter is predicated on a shift from self-­ sacrifice to self-realization.94 Significantly, the culture of personality had a special relationship to the cinema: prior to 1910, performers were anonymous, their identities veiled by the film studios; thereafter, the release of stars’ names and the marketing of actors led “to fan magazines and to a new consciousness of the importance of personality,” resulting in “a new profession—that of being a movie star or a celebrity.”95 This new profession offered unprecedented outlets for New Womanism. Fan magazines encouraged the identification of the readers with celebrities, especially through the commodification of both. Higashi suggests that “Consumption, as signified by stars, became the most visible mark of success for the striving ‘new’ middle class and involved not only acquiring goods but transforming selves.”96 Marsha Orgeron stresses that fan magazines fostered “a discourse that shaped fans’ perceptions of stars and made their personal lives appear accessible and real, however otherworldly and fantastic.”97 Moreover, “With increasing numbers of ‘New Women’ entering the job market and becoming wage earners, women were being taken seriously as economic forces, particularly by the movie industry.”98 Orgeron qualifies that ordinary women would never achieve the unique levels of wealth of the stars, and thus what the magazines pushed was “aspirational glamour.”99 Fan magazines inspired women to “negotiate their own identities beyond their everyday, lived experiences” and to “evaluate star reputations, and to consider their own existence in relation to the stars.” This relationality was fostered via the discourses that “situated stars as storytellers, confidants, advisers, and friends to their fans.”100

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These points have profound implications in terms of mothering: readers could not only model but also gauge their own maternal practices, identities, and ideologies on and against those of the stars. The development of celebrity journalism as a relational experience at the end of the nineteenth century was marked by the introduction of the interview, reflective of the desire by readers for more direct access to celebrities, and enhancing the authenticity and intimacy of the articles. The 1890s brought what Ponce de Leon calls “perhaps the most important species of celebrity journalism—the profile or sketch”—which appeared in newspaper weekend-supplements and mass-circulation magazines.101 These profiles inaugurated a novel method for representing celebrities based on combining “elements of the traditional hagiographic sketch, the newspaper interview, and the personalized feature story.”102 Of the diverse rhetorical strategies used in composing these profiles, the most common was for journalists to describe their visits to the homes of celebrities, the place where they were most likely to “let down their guard,” and to position the interview as a conversation between friends.103 Photoplay employed and honed tactics like these. On one hand, profiles were oftentimes conventional in approach, covering topics like romance, fashion, interior design, and motherhood. On the other hand, the profiles extolled new conceptions of womanhood, derived from the advent of the New Woman, especially “working girls.”104 Ponce de Leon concludes that in combining the old and the new, journalists could promote New Womanism without compromising the appeal of a magazine to its mass audience.105 It is this strategic negotiation that I explore in my reading of Photoplay mothers, below.

Role Mothers I want to begin my analysis of the profiles by looking at the editorial for December 1921—the first one wholly dedicated to the topic of mothering—because it reflects the patriarchal motherhood within and against which maternity was constructed throughout the magazine from the 1910s on. In his piece entitled “Mother-Love,” Quirk discusses the mother in terms of traditional assumptions about nurturing, purity, and self-sacrifice, and thus sets up a framework for our understanding not only of how True Woman ideologies were perpetuated but also of how celebrities measured their own behaviors as complicit with or resistant to them. Commenting on the success of cinematic storylines involving

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“mother-­love,” Quick avows that “mother-love is the greatest and most enduring argument for the existence of an all-seeing and all-kind Creator,” and that “Mother-love is the grand-humble answer to age-long faith; it is a living proof of the reality of religion.”106 In elevating motherhood to spiritual levels, he reinforces ideologies of the womanly woman and “angel in the house.” In the feature section accompanying the editorial, entitled “Mother O’ Mine,” the magazine spotlights seven actors who portray mothers on screen, utilizing the discourses of the maternal paragon set up by Quirk. Vera Gordon, for instance, represents the mother who is “wholly wrapped up in her children, and whose greatest joy lies in administering to their needs.” Mary Alden “has many traits and qualities in common with all real and lovable mothers”—that is, “a mother who instinctively understands the best way to raise children and to care for them.” Similarly, Mary Carr exudes “to the fullest degree that most beautiful of all qualities associated with motherhood—self-sacrifice.” The only unsympathetic mother is Sylvia Ashton, who is “generally selected for the cold and haughty society type of mother, who thinks children are more or less bothersome and ought to be turned over to a nurse.”107 This spread is noteworthy not only because it promotes idealized maternity, but also for its irony: all the mothers are actors, career women who have stepped outside the private sphere to work in the public sphere of industry and commerce. The tensions that are thus set up between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ mother on screen inform the lives of the real celebrities, whose matrifocal narratives articulate both dominant and reverse discourses of patriarchal motherhood.

Alice Joyce We can see these pressures in Photoplay’s treatment of star Alice Joyce (1890–1955). The first gossip column appeared in April 1916, and included the first celebrity birth announcement in the magazine’s history. “Plays and Players” columnist Cal York asks the fans: “Who has seen Alice Joyce’s baby? Have you?”; “The little stranger of the very wonderful mamma is said to have looked up into that mamma’s face for the first time about three months ago.”108 Two months later, the magazine published what was the first feature profile of a celebrity mother, including the first photos of a celebrity with her baby. There are two full-page images of Joyce (at the time married to actor Tom Moore) with her daughter, Alice Mary Moore. One is captioned “A New Little Queen of the Movies” and

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the other “Alice Joyce and Her Baby”—here, Joyce is described as “bending over her with such ill-concealed admiration.” On the next page, there are two pictures of Joyce, sewing and cooking respectively. The copy reads: “At the right above Mrs. Moore appears to be preparing little Alice’s lobster a la Newburg, certainly in the adjoining panel she is sewing something for the child—possibly a debutante frock.” The piece concludes, “Note that motherhood has added sweetness, but has robbed Alice Joyce of none of her girlish charm.”109 An accomplished actor who by 1916 had appeared in some 150 films, Joyce is here promoted in Photoplay in a manner that offsets her independent career with reassurances that she remains traditionally domestic. At the same time, the silly references to lobster a la Newburg and a debutante’s dress blatantly satirize the private, feminine sphere of ‘high’ society. A year later, in October 1917, the magazine’s first full-text article about celebrity motherhood appeared, entitled “Alice for Short: Miss Joyce talks of things in general and in particular of her tiny daughter, Alice.” Frederick James Smith reports: “Alice Joyce Moore, Sr., has some interesting thoughts on the subject of work for women in general—and Alice, Jr., in particular.” Joyce provides this matrifocal testament: “I could never be dependent”; “Never—I believe every woman should have some work in life. I feel that I must earn my pocket money. I could never see a gown in a Fifth Avenue shop window and then hurry home to ask the lord of the manor for the wherewithal to buy it. No, indeed, I must earn my own money. I want Alice to be self-supporting, too.” Smith emphasizes Joyce’s beauty, and that “Her personality is yielding and gentle,” suggesting the Victorian angel, but he counters with a nod to her feminism by telling us, “You would half expect her to be an old-fashioned girl. But she isn’t. No Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire is Miss Joyce.”110 In its ongoing portrait of the artist as mother, Photoplay deftly negotiates traditional and modern womanhood. Joyce divorced Moore in 1920, and married executive James B. Regan, with whom she had another daughter in 1921, as detailed in the May 1924 story “Alice where have you Been?” Visiting Joyce at her home, E.  V. Durling establishes her as the barometer for the aspirations of Photoplay’s readers; she is clearly a role model, since “Few actresses had or have the personal following of Alice Joyce.” What she models is a modern woman who has it all: “There are not many actresses like Alice Joyce. Not only has she remarkable talent, but she is an exceptionally charming woman” who has entered the lexicon thus: “Money can’t buy nor finishing schools bring the ease and grace of the Joycean type.” Joyce is

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photographed with her younger daughter, Peggy, at the piano, with a caption that she “is and always has been our favorite screen wife and mother.” With her career, new marriage, and two children, as well as her “social position, wealth and an altogether wonderful home life,” “it can be readily seen Alice Joyce has achieved the maximum of what every woman wants.” Although Joyce took some time off work to get re-married, honeymoon, and have her second child, she appeared in the 1923 film The Green Goddess, and “signed a contract to make several pictures.” She therefore implores Durling to “please correct the impression that I retired from the screen. I never did, and, what’s more, I never expect to,” underscoring her fusion of mothering and acting.111 One of the aims of Photoplay is to encourage ordinary readers to aspire to the heights achieved by the stars. The report “The Girl on the Cover”— Joyce appeared on the October 1926 cover—does just that. Cal York states, “the brooding beauty of the Paramount program began her career pushing plugs into the switchboard of New  York’s Gramercy exchange. The lovely lady of today, with her sparkling jewels and shadowed eyes, at sixteen was only one of the great mob of working girls.” Not only was Joyce a New Woman, traveling from Virginia to New York to earn a living, but also upon her discovery by the Kalem movie studio she became the protagonist in her own narrative arc “from telephone girl to aristocrat.” This arc includes marriage, motherhood, and career, leading Cal York to conclude, “And if that isn’t a success story, what is?”112 As an aspirational figure for her fans, Joyce uses her platform to normalize feminist maternalism.

Billie Burke Another actor repeatedly profiled is “Billie” Burke (Mary William Ethelbert Appleton, 1884–1970). Married to Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., of Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies, she made her first maternal appearance in Photoplay in February 1917, in the full-page photo with her baby, Florence Patricia Burke-Ziegfeld, with the headline “Billie Burke in the Title Role of ‘Mother.’”113 The reference to the maternal “role”—which is used to describe numerous celebrities who have embraced motherhood—conflates the performance of motherhood on screen and off, and suggests women were born to play the part of mother, especially as scripted by patriarchy. Conversely, “role” implies that motherhood is but one of many identities a woman can choose. In the December 1917 article “All

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Feminine Except the ‘Billie,’” Harriette Underhill makes it clear that “with an unwonted unanimity of opinion all of the women worship at the shrine of the fascinating, beautiful, red-haired, blue-eyed, pink and white, altogether adorable Billie Burke”—emphasizing, in rather infantilizing terms, her femininity. Underhill sets the scene of the interview, taking place at Burke’s “beautiful home up at Hastings-on-Hudson”: “Miss Burke wanted us to see the baby and we wanted to see the baby so to Hastings we went.” Underhill records Burke’s matrifocal confessions: “‘She is mine,’ and yet it seems so strange, and I think of all the years I wasted doing foolish, unimportant things, when I might have been a wife and mother, and I might have had half a dozen. Oh! I wish that I had if they would bring me six times the joy that this wonderful child has brought me.” Underhill laments, “What a pity, we thought that those who worshipped at the shrine of Billie Burke the actress could not see Billie Burke, the mother. We could think only of the ‘Madonna and the child’ as she might have been painted by Titian.”114 Having elevated Burke’s motherhood to its requisite religious plane, Underhill clears the way for the rest of the article to focus on her professional development and achievements. Like Joyce, Burke entered the lexicon, acknowledging she had become “a real star” when “I found out that they had coiffures named after me.” She asks Underhill: “Do you remember the vogue of those bunches of curls which everybody used to pin on their heads? […] I was in a hair dresser’s one day when an excited female rushed in exclaiming, ‘Have you got my Billie Burkes ready?’ And they brought out a big bunch of puffs and curls and things and pinned it on her head—I knew that I was famous.”115 Burke is, to reiterate from Underhill, “worshipped at the shrine” by women; fans who purchase her head of curls may also want to emulate her combined professional and maternal identities. Burke appeared on the May 1919 cover. In the feature story within, “Lending Enchantment to Distance,” she and her daughter are photographed with the caption, “on the sands at Palm Beach,” where Patricia sits in her mother’s lap, a small pail in front of her, emanating a loving, playful pair on vacation. Interviewing her over the phone from Chicago, journalist Julian Johnson probes her, “You sure you aren’t slacking on art to be a patriot in the household?” to which Burke vehemently replies: “No! No! Please tell Photoplay readers how important it is for a woman who has ever had a career to keep right on loving her work though she’s married. And by a career I don’t mean, necessarily and exclusively, a celebrated career. I mean a woman who has done any useful thing well.” She

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extends her philosophy to her child: “I want to help my little girl to the work she can and ought to do in the world, that’s all. Just now—and always—she is entranced with music. […] If she wishes to become a musician I shall help her in every way—but she must realize that it means work, not trifling play.” Burke positions herself as a woman with feminist maternal sensibilities, promoting her own industriousness—“next season I hope to do some real work—bigger, better work than I have ever done—on the stage. And I shall devote the summer to pictures”116—as well as the career goals of the next female generation.

Mae Marsh As with women employed in any field, Hollywood mothers debated whether to leave the work force permanently, take some time off to raise their children, or find a way to accommodate both. Photoplay documents many such stories, as illuminated by its treatment of Mae (Mary Wayne) Marsh (1894–1968), a film star since 1910. As the wife of publicity agent Louis Lee Arms and mother to Mary, Marsh is profiled in the feature “Another Girl Named Mary” (author unattributed) in October 1919. She is photographed holding her baby, with a blurb announcing that Marsh “absolutely refuses to think about going back to work—screen or stage— before November.”117 Given that Mary is only one month old here in October, a return date of November signals a very brief maternity leave. Indeed, only a few months later, we learn “Mae Marsh is Back” in a story accompanied by a photo of mother with baby (March 1920). The article democratizes maternity, quoting Marsh that having a baby “is just about the nicest thing that can happen to anyone, even a movie star.” Further, the article taps into the work-home debate that likely preoccupied many readers: Marsh “had a hard time making up her mind to leave [the baby] for even part of a day, which she would have to do if she signed a contract.” Work prevailed: “the ‘wont-you-come-backs’ were too insistent, and Mae finally agreed to cast her lot with the [director] Louis Gasnier interests.” Marsh, along with husband, baby, and nurse, moved from New  York to the west coast: “while [Marsh] works at the studio, Mary will attain the teeth and baby-talk period in a California bungalow and a California garden.” Rather than forsaking her career, Marsh was able to accommodate motherhood to it.118 It is important to note that casual references are made to a hired caregiver, like Mary’s nurse, underscoring how economic privilege is taken as a given for the celebrities, and

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complicate the career aspirations of readers who may not be able to afford such assistance. Some celebrities mention that their own mothers are helping out, a solution that fans might be more likely to emulate. Either way, though, the financial costs and practical realities of having and raising children are rarely addressed throughout the magazine. Over the next few years, with the birth of another child, Photoplay monitors how Marsh balances motherhood and acting. The caption for a fullpage photo of Marsh on August 1923 queries, “Will Mae Marsh Come Back? Photoplay asked some months ago, when she returned to work under the direction of David W. Griffith. Mae answered the question with one of the greatest come-backs in picture history in ‘The White Rose,’ in which she does the greatest work of her screen career.”119 A year later, on August 1924, a full-page photo of Mary is presented: “This little miss is the daughter of one of the screen’s first heroines who retired to marry shortly after making a bid for immortality in ‘The Birth of a Nation’ [1915] and has recently returned. Who? Mae Marsh, of course!”120 Then, in February 1926, referring to “the bouncing boy born on December 18th,” the column “Studio News and Gossip” implores, “We hope Mae Marsh comes back into pictures again as soon as the new baby is old enough to permit her to work.”121 Refusing to assign mothers to the private sphere, Photoplay and its readers encourage stars like Marsh to be publically active, visible, and prosperous.

Florence Vidor In seeking ways to advance a career with the desire to stay home with her children, Florence Vidor (1895–1977) appeals to her fans in similar ways to the women above. The birth of her first child, Suzanne Vidor, with her husband—director, producer, and screenwriter—King Vidor, was announced with accompanying photo in the “Plays and Players” column of May 1919.122 In April 1920, she subsequently retired, because she “is much more interested in being Mrs. King Vidor, her husband’s wife and her daughter Suzanne’s devoted mother, than in the film career she has ahead of her.” However, “Now that her husband is an independent producer and Suzanne older,” she will return to the screen.123 The following year, in the story “Old Lives for New,” Joan Jordan reports, “Florence Vidor demonstrates that the New Woman may do justice to both a home and a career.” Vidor “is interesting not only as a person, and not only because of her unusual beauty, but as a vital and definite development of Twentieth Century woman.” Jordan regards Vidor “as a supreme example

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of the struggle between the old and the new woman, more than as a screen star.”124 Vidor echoes these sentiments through her matrifocal account of her fractured gendered sensibilities: “My intelligence told me absolutely that I must go on with this work that is inside me—this thing that first led me to the screen and has made me love my work”; “Yet my heart, which is entirely bound up in my home and my husband and my baby, enforced by education and inherited instinct, told me a woman’s place was in the house and the home only, never separated from her baby or her husband.” Jordan reports: “as an example of the conflict between the old traditions and instincts of the past generation, and the equalizing instincts of the new,” Vidor has “reached an understanding that will enable her to continue her work with a clear conscience,” such that “she has determined that she would not be happy without her work.”125 Vidor herself explains: “I believe more than anything else in right mental atmosphere, right thinking, serenity and happiness of spirit,” and affirms that “It is more important to my home that my husband and my baby should have my happy, contented, upward-climbing thoughts than that they should have my constant bodily presence.” Vidor articulates her New Woman selfhood: “Today I believe absolutely that a woman who has a definite talent, a real, deep undeniable craving for a certain form of self-­ expression does more for her family by answering that call and working out her happiness, than by denying it.” Vidor is confident that such a practice in no way jeopardizes her maternal obligations and desires: “I feel that such a woman need not be deprived of her home life any more than a man. Though she may take time away from them, she makes up for it by her mental alertness, her increased understanding, her happiness and serenity of mind.”126 Vidor here echoes Mona Caird’s Victorian fin-de-­ siècle New Womanist assertions: “we shall never have really good mothers until women cease to make their motherhood the central idea of their existence.”127 Vidor is depicted as ‘having it all’—a wonderful husband, adored baby, and prominent career. However, by 1923 the marriage was over, a situation explored in “Why Did the Vidors Separate?” by Adela Rogers St. Johns, one of Photoplay’s most influential and prolific contributors. Several photographs accompany this piece. On one page, there are two large pictures. In one, Vidor sits on a chair embracing infant Suzanne in her lap, captioned: “Florence Vidor, screen colony’s favorite beauty—almost their idol—one woman about whom all other women agree as to her beauty,

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charm and sweetness of disposition.” The other photo is of Florence and King Vidor’s Hollywood mansion, described thus: “There was an air of southern hospitality within their home—the home they built together— where Florence now lives alone with little Suzanne.”128 Vidor’s maternity is staged via images and captions to insist that a single mother can also be an idol for her fans, lending dignity, not failure, to divorced women. The following year the divorced and single mother Vidor is re-­calibrated as another kind of role model. In the August 1924 piece, “Why Has Florence Vidor Become the Toast of Hollywood?” St. Johns notes that Vidor’s “reputation was a credit to the industry. Everybody liked her. You never heard a word against her. She was looked up to, respected, admired.” Yet, “It had become part of Hollywood tradition that Florence Vidor had none of the so-called screen sex appeal.” Now, post-divorce, “the most talked of event in Hollywood today, and one of its greatest surprises, is the transformation of placid, reserved Florence Vidor” into a figure more compelling than Helen of Troy: “overnight, she emerged” as one of “our best screen lovers,” such that “Her vogue is enormous,” and “She is more than a toast. She is a cult. Men ascend into a sort of spiritual ecstasy when they mention her name.” Significantly, while her previous appeal was linked to King Vidor, at this time “Her name is never connected with any man’s. She has managed to become the most sought after woman in Hollywood, and still maintain an unassailable reputation.”129 St. Johns reflects upon Vidor’s increased autonomy: “For the ten years of her marriage, she was a wife who deliberately closed the door upon her own personality.” Nonetheless, “all the time she was developing a tremendously forceful personality. One thing about the new Florence Vidor who has so conquered Hollywood, is that she has lost that saccharine sweetness that practically always denies character. Florence is very much herself now, a very strong and vital woman.”130 This complex portrait presents the ‘new’ Vidor as an eroticized “angel in the house,” a “lover” who generates a “spiritual ecstasy” in men. She has a “forceful personality” and is no longer “saccharine,” but her “unassailable reputation” is intact. Vidor is a sexualized divorced New Woman who concomitantly poses no overarching threat to the institution of marriage, evidencing Studlar’s point that the “ideal new woman” of fan magazines “vacillated” between liberating and confining definitions and possibilities of selfhood.131

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Alice Brady and Catherine Calvert Alice Brady (neé Mary Rose Brady, 1892–1939), appearing on the October 1922 cover, likewise upends convention. In the feature profile, “Sex Appeal, Babies and Alice Brady,” she is interviewed by Frederick James Smith at her Long Island summer residence. Smith explains, “Miss Brady has been living all alone in the bizarre Great Neck place since her married life went on the rocks. As her conversation ran rapidly across many topics, we caught a faint glimpse of the careful guard she had put around her own experiences.” However, if she was reticent to speak about marriage, “she spoke frankly of her baby boy, Donald Crane.” Discussing reality versus art, Brady muses: “I really think we humans have built up a stock set of conventional ways to portray life on the stage and in literature: marriage this way, birth so so, motherhood on its lofty pedestal, and so through the events of existence. These ways are all very nice. Poets and novelists have gilded them with Pollyanna touches to please us—but they aren’t very genuine.” She elaborates: “One thing the baby has taught me: that story-­ book motherhood either doesn’t really exist or I am terribly different. I look at my baby and wonder. I haven’t any of that maternal instinct you read about; the burning love, the all centering interest, the spirit of self sacrifice and all the rest. I look at my baby with a curious, almost impersonal, interest. I can hardly believe he is mine. Motherhood means just one big thing for me, a tremendous absorption in how he develops, how he grows day by day.”132 In taking motherhood off “its lofty pedestal,” Brady democratizes ‘mother’ as being only one of many possible experiences and identities for a woman. Moreover, by conceding that she responds to her child with practical and impersonal observation and not all-consuming emotional intensity, she debunks age-old myths about maternal instinct and self-sacrifice, sending a liberating message to women. The twentieth-century modern mother like Brady is further depicted in the May 1921 article “The Careers of Catherine Calvert,” in which the eponymous subject (Catherine Cassidy, 1890–1971) is introduced as the embodiment of the New Woman. Sydney Valentine begins by enumerating what Calvert is not: for instance, she is not one of the women “whose Place is in the Home. Women with quiet, well-appointed houses, well-­appointed children, and quiet, well-appointed husbands. Mother-women, of infinite understanding, depths of sympathy, gentleness of bearing, tact.” Valentine turns to what Calvert is: she is one of the more “interesting,” “more modern. Women who do things and think things for themselves. Women who

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work, who have a definite aim and a high ambition. Twentieth century women.”133 Calvert’s “modern” identity is predicated on her being a prominent actor as well as a mother to son, Paul Armstrong, Jr. Additionally, she lives in luxury in a New  York apartment, where her dressing-­room boasts “gleaming gold toilet articles, and many, many rows of crystal perfume containers, and frivolous silk hangings, and ivory furniture.”134 Valentine paints Calvert as a star worthy of envy, but in the penultimate paragraph he takes a dramatic turn: “She married [playwright] Paul Armstrong and for several years, appeared only in his plays. Their marriage was a very happy one. She was the original dramatic heroine of ‘The Deep Purple’ and ‘The Escape.’ When he died, an ideal artistic and personal alliance was cut short that must have brought even greater things to both of them.” Valentine has presented Calvert as a New Woman who is a wife and mother, savvy professional, and socially admired icon, a quintessential model of modern possibility. Her widowhood compromises her enviable status, to be sure, but Valentine highlights the twin saviors of Calvert’s life: “But there is Paul, Jr., who is the image of his father; and there is—the screen. Calvert has signed a long-term contract with Vitagraph, and she has already been the star in ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ and ‘The Heart of Maryland.’”135 Tragic as Armstrong’s passing was, Calvert is depicted as a resilient figure. In formidably taking on the new role of single mother alongside new professional challenges, Calvert testifies to the plurality of the article’s title—“The Careers of Catherine Calvert”—and to the complexity of being a “twentieth-century woman.”

Belle Bennett While Calvert became a widow, Belle Bennett (1891–1932) is profiled as a grieving mother. Bennett gained fame as the titular mother in Stella Dallas (1925), playing a woman who gives up her daughter so that the child can live a better life without her. Filming sadly coincided with the death of her real child, Billy (with ex-husband Howard Ralph Macy). In the September 1925 “Studio News and Gossip—East and West,” Cal York reports that as an actor, she “was working for her boy—her only son.” She landed the role of Stella, “And the day before they were to start shooting, her boy, then sixteen, died suddenly.” Cal York commiserates: “Belle Bennett is going to play the rôle of Stella Dallas, the greatest mother rôle ever written. He wanted her to play it, and she knows he still wants it.” Cal York adds, “we do hope that in time work will bring its inevitable

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consolation, and that something higher and better will bring her some comfort in the days to come.”136 A few months later, in “Billy Bennett’s Mother,” St. Johns elaborates on the narrative, conflating the real and filmic mother. St. Johns begins, “Billy Bennett’s mother. That is her proudest title. Those are the words she listens for above the empty plaudits of the multitude, just—Billy’s mother.” St. Johns—herself a mother of two—writes with matrifocal intimacy and direction: “It tears the very heart out of you to see Belle Bennett as Stella Dallas, that poor, cheap creature whose motherhood alone was great. It is the best mother story, the best mother part ever produced.” However, in asking what so moves the audience, St. Johns reasons: “It is something more than that that reaches out and stirs your very heart and soul to cry forth that no mother should be crucified, as all mothers are crucified, that makes you suffer when Stella Dallas gives up her daughter as though your own child had been torn from your breast. And that something is the sorrow of Billy Bennett’s mother. […] You feel the emptiness of her arms.”137 St. Johns provides a forum for Bennett’s matrifocal sorrow and strength, and in the process makes public the struggles of a mother driven by creative as well as financial needs. As Bennett explains of her earlier days in the theatre, “An actress with a baby—it’s hard sometimes. Whenever I could manage it, I made a home. That’s why I first went into pictures. I had Billy with me. He worked in pictures, too, when he was a little, little fellow.” Bennett goes on, “I did the best I could for him always. I travelled in dirty trains on Sundays to see him for an hour. I took bum engagements so I could have him with me. I worked eighty-six weeks on end in stock, so I could send him to the very best boys’ school there is.” Bennett articulates the pressures of the industry on mothers when she relays of her teenage son, “When he came to Hollywood after I got settled here to go back into pictures, he was six feet tall. Imagine! My baby—six feet tall. And they wouldn’t let me have my picture taken with him because I was playing leads and they thought people would think I was too old.” As the interview closes, “It’s a wonderful thing,” Bennett said, “to be a mother.” St. Johns concludes by conflating the real and the fictional: “It was not Belle Bennett, fine actress that she is, who played ‘Stella Dallas.’ It was Billy Bennett’s mother.”138 This article powerfully reveals how studios could, at times, try to negate the motherhood of their stars in the interests of public image. In this Photoplay piece, however, not only is Bennett’s motherhood lauded, but those who encouraged its erasure are held up for censure to a mass audience.

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Barbara La Marr Just as we saw in Chap. 3 how The Daughters of Danaus addressed adoption as an empowering act, so Photoplay reports on the many adoptions by celebrities. A case in point is the autobiographical story by Barbara La Marr (neé Reatha Dale Watson, 1896–1926). The headline on the May 1923 cover reads, “Why I Adopted a Baby—by Barbara La Marr,” and the article within—with the same title—provides her matrifocal reasoning. On the simplest level, “I adopted a baby because I wanted something to love. And the only thing I’ve found in this world that it’s at all satisfactory to love is a baby.” At this point in her life, La Marr was single but had already had four husbands. Rewriting the normative romance script, she scoffs: “Men—bah! I am sick of men,” adding, “Men’s love is most unsatisfactory, the most disillusioning thing in life.” In contrast, maternity promises her the emotional satisfaction for which she yearns. She positions herself as a selfless and generous figure while also acknowledging how the baby filled her own maternal and personal desires, elaborating: “When people ask me why I adopted a baby, I often wonder if they have any idea how lonely is the life of a woman like me. I didn’t have one soul in the whole, wide world that belonged to me.”139 La Marr recounts that at some undisclosed time past, she had a baby who died, the trauma of which haunts her. Exposing the wound of her loss, she democratizes both her pain and her maternal longing: They call me a vampire on the screen. Sometimes, in my life, I have been called something very like that off the screen. But you see, you can’t tell where you will find mother love, in this world. It doesn’t belong exclusively to any little circle of women who look blonde and spiritual and perfect. You can’t put a fence around mother love and say—this kind of women shall have it, and this shan’t. No. I’ve seen it in the gutter and I’ve seen it in palaces. I’ve seen it shining in the eyes of some worn, flat-chested spinster. I’ve seen it still glorified in the eyes of women who had sold or sacrificed or been robbed of every other glory.

She affirms, “I don’t want to be an ingenue. I just want to be a woman. I’m not an angel—I’m just a plain ordinary human being.” Here, she appeals directly to her fans, reminding them that her experiences and feelings could equally be theirs. At the same time, she refuses the ideological stereotypes of patriarchy that categorize and judge mothers, acknowledging: “I’m not willing to admit that because I’ve got black hair and green

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eyes and what they call beauty, I’m not going to make a good mother to my son.”140 La Marr clears a space for the positive conflation of erotics and maternity. Undermining assumptions that celebrities are enviable and glamorous, she recounts her life between her son’s death and the adoption: “Oh, I suppose my life sounds thrilling and romantic and interesting. Success and admiration and wealth. Servants to wait on me. Men who think they are in love with me. Clothes and jewels and finery. But—it was all ashes.” Her second child gave her life renewed purpose: “I saw this small son of mine. It was in a foundling home. In Texas. I was walking through the rooms, when suddenly this small atom smiled at me. Oh, it was just a baby smile. But it clutched my heart. […] I just picked him up and—he’s mine.” Reveling in her new motherhood, she pits ordinary domesticity over her luxurious lifestyle, again leveling the playing field with her audience: “If to-morrow, somebody said to me, ‘Bobby, you can’t have ‘em both, old dear. The baby and the career you love,” she insists, “it wouldn’t take me long to choose,” for she believes that nothing is more important than maternal love.141 Although La Marr reinscribes maternity as the imperative of ‘proper’ womanhood, she is a New Woman who problematizes patriarchal motherhood as a single mother and sexualized icon. La Marr’s confessional becomes even more charged when considered as a work of fiction. In her biography of La Marr, Sherri Snyder documents that La Marr gave birth to a son, Marvin Carville La Marr, out of wedlock some time in mid-1922 and, having hid her pregnancy from all but a few people, kept Marvin a secret, tucked away at her home and cared for by her maid-turned-nurse. Snyder affirms, “Fully aware that entering motherhood as a single parent could destroy her career, Barbara neither aborted nor relinquished her baby.”142 La Marr then staged a publicity tour of an orphan’s home in Dallas, established in 1918, “during an era when the disgrace of illegitimacy resulted in a distressing number of abandoned infants.”143 Here, La Marr came upon her son, strategically planted in a crib, and immediately decided to ‘adopt’ him. Moreover, she lied to the press about having a first baby who died in order to justify her seeming impetuousness. Although there were industry fears that her fans would no longer accept her as a vamp, in fact her standing was enhanced by her new maternity.144 This reality underscores the moral and ideological constraints imposed on women’s autonomy throughout the period (as we saw with Belle Bennett, not permitted to be photographed with her son), and how La

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Marr sought to thwart them. Fearing that the truth of illegitimacy could ruin her reputation, she overcompensated for her ‘bad’ motherhood by constructing herself as a woman driven by a mythic instinctual maternity. Yet in her narrative’s insistence about diverse kinds of mother-love—“It doesn’t belong exclusively to any little circle of women who look blonde and spiritual and perfect”—she encodes both a critique of society’s judgment against unwed mothers and a recuperation for her own image as a sexualized vamp. La Marr subversively consigns herself to playing multiple roles, demonstrating not only the performative nature of mothering but also that there are many ways to perform as a ‘good’ mother.

Gloria Swanson I want to close by looking at Photoplay’s treatment of Gloria Swanson (1899–1983), another sexualized mother and one of the magazine’s most reported-on actors of the silent era. One of the highest paid figures in Hollywood, and a style icon, Swanson held enormous influence over her fans. In “What Is IT?” by Dorothy Spensley, we learn that “Gloria Swanson is one of the only two actresses on the screen who has IT”145—“IT” being described accordingly: “Undeniably It is a product of this decade. Indeed, you might say It is a product of this hour”; “It is a sort of invisible aura that surrounds your being and bathes you in its effulgence.”146 Given Swanson’s cachet, inscriptions of her New Woman motherhood amount to significant cultural currency. Swanson was married to her second (of what would be six) husbands, Herbert K.  Somborn (president of Equity Pictures Corporation), when she gave birth to her first child, announced in “Plays and Players” in January 1921: “Gloria Swanson has the cutest baby girl you ever saw in your life. In fact, Gloria No. 2 in her bath lives up to everything you might expect of her mother’s daughter. The fair Gloria is a fond and doting mama, and interested in nothing but ‘baby.’ Gloria’s husband is Herbert K. Somborn, and the baby was born at the Somborn’s Hollywood home on October 10th. Miss Swanson will return to Paramount as a star about the first of the year.”147 Three months later there is a full-page photo of Swanson in profile, with the caption: “Gloria Swanson makes her first appearance since the arrival of Gloria the Second in a screen story [The Great Moment] written especially for her by Elinor Glyn. In it, for the first time, Miss Swanson assumes long-deserved individual honors.”148 The birth announcement, photo, and caption promote Swanson as blessed and

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glamorous in professional as well as domestic terms, and conflate her achievements in film and family. In December 1921, Photoplay reported that Swanson and Somborn were divorcing. Swanson testifies: “I shall never marry again. I am earnestly, terribly ambitious to succeed in my work. I want to do something really big and I am willing to devote my life to it. I have my beautiful little baby daughter to love and make a home for and she and my work will completely absorb me.”149 In “Gloria!” St. Johns reiterates the twin importance of career and children post-divorce for Swanson: “Her life is quite full enough without the extra care and demands of a husband. A complex creature. With unexpected shallows and unexpected depths. Moods that shimmer from gold to black. She is an ideal mother. Her devotion to her daughter is remarkable. And I have never in my life heard anyone talk more intelligently about child training or the development of a child’s nature and mind in the way they should go than Gloria Swanson.”150 Swanson thus approaches motherhood with the same professionalism as she does her acting career. Even as she was separated from Somborn, a single mother of an infant, and an in-demand actor, Swanson chose to become a mother for a second time, adopting a son, Joseph Swanson, in early 1923. In “There is no Formula for Success,” she recounts her life of hard work to realize her goal of becoming an actor: “I was brought up to believe in myself, to feel that whatever I desired I could do or get if I went after it the right way—and kept after it. I was educated by my father not to a disregard, but to an absolute ignorance of the possibility of failure.”151 She adds, “when anything important was at stake, no detail was too insignificant to deserve attention. I have always found that to be true in my work, in my home, in the care of my children, in my dress, in everything in life that is worth while.”152 In publicizing a work ethic more typically associated with masculinity and as passed from father to son, not daughter, and in applying that to her career as well as to childrearing, Swanson upends conventional ideologies of gender. Like all the actors examined in this chapter, Swanson embraces a diversity of roles both on and off the screen. St. Johns describes her shifting personae in “How They Do Grow Up!”: “I always think of Gloria Swanson as the ugly duckling who became a swan.” That is, “In a few years, she became the screen’s greatest clothes model. Exotic, glittering, exquisite. But always—for a long time—she suggested somehow a naughty lady—or rather, she never at any time suggested a lady at all. She was the glorified

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chorus girl, the Parisian coquette of the Longchamps race track, the ultra-­ vamp. Just lately, again, there has been another change in Gloria. She is beginning to be the real grande dame. She looks and acts like a particularly lovely young princess. Her grace and her manner are perfect, and the allure has gone up about fifty degrees in the social scale.”153 Relatedly, in “Vampires I have known” actor Ben Lyon recounts Swanson’s guises: “I have met, while I was being vamped by her, a thousand different Glorias.” He qualifies, “you are never quite sure which Gloria it is going to be today—the haughty queen, or the naughty imp, mischief dancing in her eyes, full of a delicious humor, ready for any prank, or the soft and gentle Gloria who is full of questions and of talk.” Beyond these versions, “there is the Gloria who is the mother of a child, and who treasures that as the crowning experience of womanhood.”154 Swanson married, divorced, gave birth, adopted a child, was a single mother, and played a range of characters on film, from ‘good girls’ to femme fatales, millionaires to shop workers. She embraced the performative nature of identity itself, as this 1923 caption for a photo summarizes: “Gloria in her favorite role as Gloria Swanson herself.”155 In navigating the unstable gendered terrain of her era, she is perhaps Photoplay’s most paradigmatic New Woman mother, fluid, multiple, and shifting. Her professional pronouncements and her matrifocal perspectives were filtered through each other. As the “IT” actor of the 1920s, she performed what was expected of her as a woman while manipulating and rewriting the scripts of those roles.

Conclusion In analyzing how actors were positioned as maternal figures for readers of Photoplay, I work from the premise of Richard Dyer, who studies Hollywood celebrities: “we are dealing with the stars in terms of their signification, not with them as real people. The fact that they are also real people is an important aspect of how they signify, but we never know them directly as real people, only as they are to be found in media texts.”156 At the same time, Dyer qualifies that “because one can see reality only through representation, it does not follow that one does not see reality at all.” Consequently, “representations here and now have real consequences for real people […] in terms of the way representations delimit and enable what people can be in any given society.”157 Similarly, for E. Ann Kaplan, the “real life” mother lies beyond the discursive arena of her monograph Motherhood and Representation, but she does examine the mother within

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the historical sphere, that is, “the mother in her socially constructed, institutional role (the mother that girls are socialized to become, and that historical or real mothers strive to embody).”158 She hopes the knowledge produced by her work will positively affect this real mother’s “often conflicted, difficult and marginalized life.”159 In the spirit of these perspectives, then, my chapter gestures to how the discourses of motherhood in Photoplay reflected and generated models for self-determination in the lives of its female readers. My analysis testifies to how pervasive Victorian fin-de-siècle maternal discourses were disseminated in Photoplay magazine, and how American celebrities negotiated traditional and New Woman sensibilities and behaviors that afforded them maternal fulfillment and career advancement. While the articles, columns, and photos do not delve into the very real intricacies and nuances of pregnancy, parturition, and childcare, they do offer meaningful auto/biographical statements and insights about how women regarded themselves as mothers; how they were constructed by the culture industry of celebrity journalism; and how they handled motherhood, marriage, and careers. The magazine, as much as the actors themselves, juxtapose normative and non-normative mothering. At times it reinforces age-old imperatives of nurturing, femininity, and domesticity. Alice Joyce, Billie Burke, and Florence Vidor, for instance, are “angels in the house” who revel in their motherhood. Simultaneously, they are eager to return to the screen after a period of maternity leave, all the while determined to instill in their children their feminism in support of women’s autonomy and self-fulfillment. As we have heard, within and against the many at-home tableaux, Joyce’s assertion, “I believe every woman should have some work in life” is echoed by the insistence of Burke, “Please tell Photoplay readers how important it is for a woman who has ever had a career to keep right on loving her work though she’s married.” Vidor, too, avers that the woman who seeks “self-­ expression does more for her family by answering that call and working out her happiness, than by denying it.” Likewise, the women empower their daughters. Where Joyce confirms, “I want Alice to be self-­supporting, too,” so Burke wants “to help my little girl to the work she can and ought to do.” Mothers and their daughters encourage a redefining of women’s roles and aspirations. The magazine further represents mothers in unconventional terms by addressing topics like divorce, single motherhood, adoption, and sex. Swanson, for example, embraced her divorce from Somborn by privileging

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her career and child over marriage. Single mothers proclaim their resilience, dedication, and capabilities as autonomous women to raise children, further illustrated by celebrities like Catherine Calvert, who supported her son following the death of her husband, and by Belle Bennett, who struggled to work “for her boy—her only son” post-divorce. Adoption, too, highlights non-biological reproduction as a maternal end for women, conflating the self-sacrifice of maternal duty typically ascribed to women with the more unconventional evasion of biological destiny, as seen with Swanson and (via fabrication) Barbara La Marr. Swanson and La Marr are particularly compelling figures here because of their screen personae as well as reputations for sex and scandal, what with their many real husbands and lovers. We are told that Swanson the siren “suggested somehow a naughty lady” while La Marr acknowledges of herself, “They call me a vampire on the screen. Sometimes, in my life, I have been called something very like that off the screen.” As Swanson is described as “an ideal mother,” so La Marr refuses to allow erotics to impinge on her maternal competencies. Moreover, Photoplay acknowledges how women traverse and triumph over sexual (double) standards, like the divorced but “reputable” Vidor being praised for her transformation into one of “our best screen lovers.” La Marr’s assertion, “But I’m not willing to admit that because I’ve got black hair and green eyes and what they call beauty, I’m not going to make a good mother to my son,” illuminates how Photoplay upsets assumptions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothering. Indeed, it promotes the many facets of motherhood, from actors who return from a period of maternity leave to the screen as soon as possible, to sexualized figures, to domestic and self-­ sacrificing women, to those like Alice Brady, who contends that “story-­ book motherhood […] doesn’t really exist.” Motherhood is one of many roles performed on screen and off, such that work and life conflate with women’s multiple possibilities for identity and experience. These points are manifested in quotations we have seen, like “It was not Belle Bennett, fine actress that she is, who played ‘Stella Dallas.’ It was Billy Bennett’s mother”; “Billie Burke in the Title Role of ‘Mother’”; and “Gloria in her favorite role of Gloria Swanson herself.” The greatest roles played by celebrities like these is that of role model. To be sure, Alice Joyce “has achieved the maximum of what every woman wants”; “all of the women worship at the shrine” of Billie Burke; Florence Vidor’s “vogue is enormous”; and Swanson is the “IT” woman of the

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1920s. In this capacity, the women are exemplars of modernity, with notions of Victorian propriety and femininity confronted and overrun by New Woman imperatives. Catherine Calvert is representative of those who are “more modern” and who are thus “Twentieth century women”; so too is Vidor, who is “a vital and definite development of Twentieth Century woman.” Vidor embodies the maternal modernism of Photoplay. The rhetoric of her coverage contextualizes her within the shifting grounds of gender during the Victorian fin de siècle and perpetuated in the first decades of the next century. She is “a supreme example of the struggle between the old and the new woman,” and as such, she “demonstrates that the New Woman may do justice to both a home and a career.”160 Photoplay offers a montage of celebrity mothers driven by their feminist maternalisms. Fans, then as now, regard famous figures as role models and seek to emulate their lifestyles and accomplishments. By examining how the magazine packaged and unpacked maternity, this chapter reveals some of the ways maternal discourses were shaped by the media—and by celebrities in the service of that media—for ordinary women in the early twentieth century.

Notes 1. Rachel Graham, “To the Editor,” 418. 2. Photoplay was printed out of Chicago, but its editorial offices were in New York (Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 47; 54). 3. Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 47. 4. Nickelodeons, so named for their five-cent or nickel admission price, were the first theaters dedicated to film exhibition in the United States, typically operating out of storefronts and saloons circa 1904–1915. As audiences grew and films became longer, these small spaces were gradually replaced by the grander cinema palaces (Fuller, At the Picture Show, 23; 48–49). 5. Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 13. 6. Fuller, At the Picture Show, 120–21. The American term “fan” originates as a short form of “fanatic.” It was first applied to baseball enthusiasts in the 1880s and, after becoming common in the early 1900s, entered the film lexicon in the September 1910 issue of the trade journal Nickelodeon, and in the May 1911 issue of The Motion Picture Story Magazine, which describes a devotee of film as a “Picture Fan” (Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 13; see also Fuller, At the Picture Show, 124). 7. Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 14.

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8. Ibid., 48–50. 9. Fuller, At the Picture Show, 150. 10. Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 47. 11. Ibid., 71. 12. During this period technology was advancing rapidly in terms of lighting, cameras, photography, and the like, but still contained within the category of ‘silent’ (non-synchronized recorded sound). 13. Fuller, At the Picture Show, 167. 14. Slide contends that Photoplay began in 1911, but that its first extant edition is for February 1912  (47). The first issue in the Media History Digital Library is for November 1914, thus determining the framework for my research. 15. Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 11. 16. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure, 43. 17. See Dettmar and Watt, Glass, Goldman, Jaffe, Marcus, McParland, Shail, and Turner. 18. See Addison, Goodwin-Kelly, Roth; Feasey; Hall and Bishop; Hallstein; Podnieks (Mediating Moms, “The Bump is Back”); Seidel. 19. Although Photoplay uses the gendered terms “actor” and “actress,” I use the gender-neutral “actor.” 20. Hampton, “Representing  the Public Sphere,” 26, note #2.  Note that while some scholars (i.e.,  Ledger and Luckhurst, “The New Woman,” xiii) refer to “new journalism,” I retain the capitalized “New Journalism” as coined by Arnold. 21. Arnold, “Up to Easter,” in Nineteenth Century (May 1887: 638–39); quoted in Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?, 119. 22. Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?, 118. 23. Ibid., 119. 24. Ibid., 119. 25. Ledger, The New Woman, 5. 26. Zeitz, Flapper, 5. 27. Ibid., 8. 28. Ibid., 9. 29. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 13. 30. Ibid.,13. 31. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 7. 32. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 738, 742. 33. Ibid., 737–38. 34. Marcus, The Tenth Muse, 1. 35. Shail, The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism, 1. 36. Marcus, The Tenth Muse, 16. 37. Ibid., 238.

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38. Shail, The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism, 34. 39. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume II, North America 1894–1960, edited Brooker and Thacker. 40. Earle, “Pulp Magazines and the Popular Press,” 198. 41. Majerus, “Determined and Bigoted Feminists,” 619–20. 42. Ibid., 620. 43. Ibid., 622. 44. Higashi, “Vitagraph Stardom,” 265, 282. 45. Ibid., 283. 46. “Others are Endeavoring,” Photoplay Magazine—Advertising Section, February 1916, 178. 47. Quirk, “Close-Ups and Long-Shots,” March 1931, 29. 48. Many of the regular columns were modified or renamed throughout the 1920s. For example, “Close-Ups” became “Close-Ups and Long Shots”; “Plays and Players” became “Gossip—East & West” and later “Studio News and Gossip”; “Popular Photoplayers” became “Rotogravure”; Letters to the Editor (“Rocks and Roses”) became “Brickbats and Bouquets,” among other shifts. 49. Majerus, “Determined and Bigoted Feminists,” 626. 50. Hannah, “Photoplay, Literary Celebrity, and The Little Review,” 226. 51. Fuller, At the Picture Show, 166. 52. Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 3. 53. Ibid., 10. 54. Ibid., 69. 55. Ibid., 6–7. 56. Ibid., 3. 57. Boone, “We’d Hate to Eat Her Biscuits!” 62. 58. Fuller, At the Picture Show, 154. 59. Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 5. Comparable periodicals like The Pictures: An Illustrated Weekly Magazine of Fiction for Lovers of Moving Pictures and Picturegoer: The Picture Theatre Magazine were released in Britain (Shail, The Cinema  and the Origins of Literary Modernism, 29). 60. Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 9. 61. Bean, “Introduction,” A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, 20. 62. Ibid., 2. 63. Ibid., 2–3. 64. Fuller, At the Picture  Show, 116. Similarly,  Studlar notes that in 1924, women made up 75% of the audience at American films; in 1927, 83% (“The Perils of Pleasure?,” 263). 65. Fuller, At the Picture Show, 116, 118. 66. Ibid., 154.

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67. Ibid., 151. 68. Huyssen, After the Great Divide, vii. 69. Ibid., 47. 70. Ibid., 50. 71. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 1. 72. Majerus, “Determined and Bigoted Feminists,” 622–23. 73. Earle, “Pulp Magazines and the Popular Press,” 208. 74. Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, 5. 75. Women appeared on every cover from 1914 to 1927 with the exception of four men: director D.  W. Griffith (June 1916) and actors Rudolph Valentino (July 1922), Douglas Fairbanks (January 1923), and Roman Navarro (May 1924); and child actor Jackie Coogan (November 1924). 76. Hanscombe and Smyers, Writing for their Lives, 10–11. 77. Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure?,” 268. 78. Ibid., 275–76. See Chap. 4 for more on suffrage and race. 79. Ibid., 275, 269. 80. Ibid., 278. 81. Anon., “A Jill of All Trades,” 38. 82. Handy, “I’m a Wild Woman!,” 59. 83. Linton, “The Wild Women,” 79. 84. Anon., “The Battle of Bobbed Hair,” 32–36. 85. Pike, “Virginia from Kentucky,” 17. 86. Majerus, “Determined and Bigoted Feminists,” 626. 87. Miller, Making Love Modern, 88; quoted in Majerus, “Determined,” 620. 88. Underhill, “Olive Tells Her Secrets,” 43–45. 89. Boone, “We’d Hate to Eat Her Biscuits!,” 62. 90. Bartlett, “Petrova—Prophetess,” 27. 91. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure, 22. 92. Ibid., 23. 93. Ibid., 23. 94. Susman, Culture as History, 273–75. 95. Ibid., 283. 96. Higashi, “Vitagraph Stardom,” 265. 97. Orgeron, Hollywood Ambitions, 102. 98. Ibid., 106. 99. Ibid., 109. 100. Ibid., 106–07. 101. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure, 56. 102. Ibid., 56. 103. Ibid., 57, 60. 104. Ibid., 66. 105. Ibid., 68–69.

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106. Quirk, “Mother-Love,” 19. 107. Anon., “Mother O’ Mine,” 20–21. 108. Cal York, “Who has seen,” 106. 109. Anon., “A New Little Queen of the Movies”; “Alice Joyce and Her Baby,” 37–39. 110. Smith, “Alice for Short,” 77–78. 111. Durling, “Alice where have you Been?” 72–73. 112. Cal York, “The Girl on the Cover,” 74. 113. Anon., “Billie Burke in the Title Role of ‘Mother,’” 50. 114. Underhill, “All Feminine Except the ‘Billie,’” 55–56. 115. Ibid., 58. 116. Johnson, Julian, “Lending Enchantment to Distance,” 105–06. 117. Anon., “Another Girl,” 56. 118. Anon., “Mae Marsh is Back,” 74. 119. Anon., “Will Mae,” 74. 120. Anon., “This little miss,” 20. 121. Cal York, “Studio News and Gossip,” “We hope Mae Marsh,” 114. 122. Cal York, “The latest arrival,” “Plays and Players,” 88. 123. Cal York, “Florence Vidor,” “Plays and Players,” 86. 124. Jordan, “Old Lives for New,” 45. 125. Ibid., 45–46. 126. Ibid., 46. 127. Caird, “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” 819. 128. St. Johns, “Why Did the Vidors Separate?,” 29. 129. St. Johns, “Why Has Florence Vidor Become the Toast of Hollywood?,” 63. 130. Ibid., 106. 131. Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure?,” 278. 132. Smith, “Sex Appeal, Babies and Alice Brady,” 21. 133. Valentine, “The Careers of Catherine Calvert,” 62. 134. Ibid., 90. 135. Ibid., 90. 136. Cal York, “This is just one,” “Studio News,” 98–99. 137. St. Johns, “Billy Bennett’s Mother,” 58. 138. Ibid., 111–12. 139. La Marr, “Why I Adopted a Baby,” 31. 140. Ibid., 31. 141. Ibid., 112. 142. Snyder, Barbara La Marr, 188. 143. Ibid., 209. 144. Ibid., 212. 145. The other is Vilma Banky. 146. Spensley, “What Is IT?” 30.

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147. Cal York, “Gloria Swanson has the cutest baby,” “Plays and Players,” 93. 148. Anon., “Gloria Swanson makes her first appearance,”18. 149. Cal York, “Gloria Swanson has announced,” Plays and Players,” 78. 150. St. Johns, “Gloria!” 105. 151. Swanson, “There is No Formula for Success,” 33. 152. Ibid., 118. 153. St. Johns, “How They Do Grow Up!” 113. 154. Lyon, Ben, “Vampires I Have Known,” 111. 155. St. Johns, “Gloria!” 29. 156. Dyer, Stars, 2. 157. Dyer, The Matter of Images, 3. 158. Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 6. 159. Ibid., 7. 160. Jordan, “Old Lives for New,” 45.

CHAPTER 6

“Freedom and Childbearing”: Prams, Politics, and Literary Life in New Woman Autobiographies of the Interwar Era

Introduction: Mothers on the National Arena Writing for the British newspaper The Nation & Athenaeum in 1931, Vera Brittain assessed “the present popularity of autobiographies, particularly when written by women.”1 Texts by Isadora Duncan, Ethel Mannin, and Sylvia Pankhurst are part of a body of “women’s ‘Lives’ too numerous to name” that “have appeared in the lists of ‘Books Demanded’ during the past two or three years.”2 Brittain emphasizes, “There has always, I suppose, been a large circle of fascinated readers for true human stories, but in few epochs can the history of women, at last breaking away from their age-long tradition of sheltered inconspicuousness, have been more interesting than during the last three decades. The vote and the war between them have touched with drama the story of every woman in whose life they have played their part.”3 Brittain returned to the subject in her 1959 article “Autobiography as History,” reiterating that autobiographies produced in the last few decades “may be revolutionary enough to change the thinking of an epoch.”4 In this chapter, I examine Brittain’s (1893–1970) own published autobiographies as well as those by her British compatriots (Margaret) Storm Jameson (1891–1986) and Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999). I draw on

Jameson, Autobiography (1: 310). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_6

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Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933), Testament of Friendship (1940), and Testament of Experience (1957); Jameson’s Autobiography of Storm Jameson: Journey from the North, Vol. 1 (1969) and Vol. 2 (1970); and Mitchison’s Small Talk … Memories of an Edwardian Childhood (1973), All Change Here: Girlhood and Marriage (1975), and You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920–1940 (1979). I illuminate how the authors represent themselves as public figures and how, through their matrifocal perspectives, they offer stories “revolutionary enough to change the thinking” about patriarchal motherhood. Although I touch on the early and later periods of their lives, my focus is on the years between the two World Wars, for it is during this time that the women became mothers and confronted the tensions arising from parenting while trying to establish themselves as writers in the marketplace. I examine two additional texts: The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935), written by the American Gilman (1860–1935) at the end of her life; and Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, begun by the African-American Wells (1862–1931) in 1928, left unfinished at her death, and posthumously published in 1970.5 Gilman and Wells are first-generation New Women whose maternal modernisms were paralleled by those of their second-generation sisters across the pond. Wells wrote sparingly about her motherhood, but even a brief consideration of Crusade for Justice illuminates how she broke ground through inscriptions of herself as a civil rights pioneer who negotiated ideologies of the New Negro Woman and Black New Woman.6 I approach these figures by way of scholars Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers, who assert that from 1910 to 1940, “What is most striking, both in itself and in relation to their writing, is the shared anti-­ conventionality of the personal lives” of so many female writers “at a time when the overwhelming social expectation was that a woman should marry, bear children, and remain both married and monogamous.”7 Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain were all wives who bore children, but they raised them in unconventional domestic arrangements. Gilman and Jameson both divorced their children’s fathers, respectively Charles Walter Stetson and Charles Douglas Clarke, and left their young children largely in the care of others. Wells married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, and became a mother of four, but continued her at-times dangerous work as an anti-lynching journalist, often out of town. Mitchison mothered her six children in the milieu of the radical open marriage she established with her husband, Dick Mitchison—they each had multiple lovers.8 Brittain

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lived in what she termed a “semi-detached” marriage with her husband, George Catlin, while her best friend, author and journalist Winifred Holtby (1898–1935), shared Brittain and Catlin’s London home, helping to raise their two children, John and Shirley, in an alternative to the parenting and marital dyad. Moreover, Gilman, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain (and to a far lesser extent Wells) used their autobiographies to unmask motherhood and to depict honest, often taboo content. They foreground maternal love and responsibility, but also address topics like maternal ambivalence, maternal guilt, the tedium of childcare and domestic labor, the pregnant body and parturition, post-partum depression and psychosis, maternal mourning, birth control, and their need for intellectual stimulation and economic independence. The personal lives of these women were inseparable from their professional ones. We can appreciate this fact through Brittain’s statement that “A phenomenon new to the twentieth century has been the publication of political memoirs by women, once discreetly industrious behind the scenes but now often conspicuous on the national arena.”9 Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain were likewise conspicuous. They enjoyed a range of best-seller successes and transnational reputations as authors of fiction, poetry, and journalism across Britain and the United States. They also they participated in diverse organizations, movements, and causes around the world (i.e., civil rights, feminism, suffrage, birth control advocacy, pacifism, and socialism, among others) through their lecture tours, war relief work, and party memberships which enhanced their status as visible, often provocative, public figures. We can interpret their lives and texts through the lens of new modernism’s interest in politics (rhetorics of citizenship and the state), concentrating on “modern subjects” as “citizens and voters and resident aliens” who are “in varying degrees conscious of themselves as embedded in political situations that they may in some way affect.”10 Indeed, the political autobiographies of these five women are manifestations of the new in modernism, in terms of both genre and content. These authors were New Woman mothers who rewrote familial scripts within their increasingly modernizing societies. They did so, however, while navigating dogmas of separate spheres, Republican maternalism, the New Negro Woman, and the race mother that informed the Victorian era. All five women were born during Victoria’s reign, where their sensibilities were shaped by the prevailing restrictive gender norms, ones that persisted into the twentieth century. Consider this 1938 description of the public

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and private divide by British writer Cyril Connolly: “Marriage can succeed for an artist” only when he has “a wife who is intelligent and unselfish enough to understand and respect the working of the unfriendly cycle of the creative imagination.” Among other things, she “will recognize that there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”11 For all their irreverence and iconoclasm, Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Brittain, and Mitchison at various times struggled to accommodate, let alone prioritize, their autonomous and professional needs over those of their husbands and children. That said, their autobiographies dramatize not only how “the pram in the hall” threatened their own art, but also how they maneuvered the pram to make room for experiences outside of motherhood and wifehood. Before turning to their autobiographies in the second half of this chapter, in the first half I consider pluralistic conceptions of modernism in terms of the genre of autobiography; theories of conservative modernism and intermodernism; and notions of the modern citizen subject as constitutive of political agency and engagement. By focusing on matrifocal themes and issues, I demonstrate how the personal is political, and how the political can be maternal.

Auto/biographies of Relational Motherhood My selection of Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain as central figures for my study is inspired by Catherine Clay, who positions them in a network of what she calls “biographies of friendship.”12 Clay also includes Holtby who, as the subject of Brittain’s Testament of Friendship, is necessarily an ‘other’ mother I examine herein.13 Clay predicates her relational thesis on the fact that these women were all involved with Time and Tide, the British feminist literary magazine founded by Lady Margaret Rondda in 1920.14 Correspondingly, Janet Montefiore clusters Jameson, Brittain, and Mitchison in her discussion of women’s autobiographically driven social realism novels. In so doing, she foregrounds that “All these women were part of the London-based network of English liberal intellectuals”; they all “held left-wing but not Communist views, [and] supported similar liberal causes such as the Peace Pledge Union.”15 Jameson and Mitchison were friends; Jameson and Brittain had been very close until disagreements about pacifism drove them apart in 1941; and Mitchison and Brittain knew each other but not intimately.16 Montefiore comments that “Like the male ‘Auden Generation’ writers, they were well-educated members of

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the professional middle class.”17 The invocation of the “Auden Generation” bears note: this set of writers, associated with the eponymous W. H. Auden along with Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, has long held court in the canon of interwar literary modernism, a status resting on “the unquestioned assumption” that the male and masculine points of view were universally representative of history, and a generation.18 Montefiore’s substantive attention to numerous female authors serves as a corrective.19 The work of Clay and Montefiore helps me theorize my approach to the autobiographies. For instance, in her case studies of the writings by as well as friendships (which could veer into competitiveness or rivalry) between Jameson, Brittain, et al., Clay contends that “each of these relationships was engaged in intense negotiations of homosexual desires and prohibitions, demanding more complex readings of British women writers’ professional work and friendship between the wars.”20 Clay’s research is vital and compelling, but it does not explore connections that were maternal. I read the literary and political life narratives of Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain as matrifocal autobiography, expanding Clay’s “biographies of friendship” to reveal a web of biographies—or rather, auto/biographies—of motherhood. The concept of “auto/biography” derives from life-writing scholarship. Philippe Lejeune defines autobiography as “the retrospective narrative in prose that someone makes of his own existence when he puts the principal accent upon his life, especially upon the story of his own personality.”21 While autobiography “makes the individual life central” and covers an entire life span or history, Helen M. Buss defines memoir as a genre that focuses “on the times in which the life is lived and the significant others of the memoirist’s world”; memoirs “personalize history and historicize the personal.”22 In outlining the difficulties in defining life-writing terms, Thomas G.  Couser proposes the best way to conceive of memoirs is to place them on an auto/biographical continuum ranging from a focus on the self to someone else.23 Further, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain that the slash mark in auto/biography “designates a mode of the autobiographical that inserts biography/ies within an autobiography, or the converse, a personal narrative within a biography,” intermixing them to create a ‘relational’ story.”24 These fluid terms inform my approach to entitled Autobiographies (Gilman, Wells, Jameson), Memoir (Mitchison), and Testaments (Brittain).

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The Personal, the Political, and the Collective The archives of these women include diaries, letters, and drafts of the autobiographies that may contradict or complicate the published material. My goal is not to compare such details or to challenge the veracity of the published accounts. Life-writing scholars now take it as a given that the textual self is constructed at the nexus of fact and imagination and thus potentially, or at least partially, fictive. Smith and Watson describe life-­ writers as narrators who “selectively engage their lived experience and situate their social identities through personal storytelling” and who confront “the processes and archives of memory.”25 Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain all composed their autobiographies years, even decades, after the periods they recall, underscoring the problematics of veracity. Consider, too, Jameson’s acknowledgment that “each page even of these memoirs has been rewritten at least four or five times” (2: 72). I privilege the published autobiographies as products of careful curation and revision (with the exception of Wells’ unfinished book), deliberately designed as the authorized versions of selfhood—and motherhood—that the authors wanted to disseminate.26 Writing in their present, the women reflect on—with varying degrees of celebration, acceptance, and regret— the consequences of their New Womanist actions and sensibilities on their lives as mothers, writers, and activists. Their intimate confessions in a public format afforded them opportunities to offer present and future generations an apologia for their unconventional choices. Attending to issues of memory leads me back to Montefiore, who finds that “much of the writing of and about the 1930s is a self-conscious literature of personal memory.”27 She approaches her research through frameworks of collective memory, a concept introduced in 1939 by French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs.28 As Montefiore summarizes, “memory is not, as is commonly thought, an individual phenomenon but a collective creation, whose patterns are defined by the interpretative frameworks of different social groups. Memory should thus be understood as, by definition, a social phenomenon. Individual remembrance is part of, and only made possible by, group memory.”29 Collective memory does not imply an “ideological consensus,” for as Montefiore clarifies, “the defining collective ‘frame of reference’ drawn on by the individual to make his or her past intelligible derives from a dialogue, actual or implied, within the group.”30 In addition to thinking about the autobiographies of Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain as a maternal network or web, I

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suggest that their books can be read as an intertextual dialogue with each other, and as constituting a body of political writings that inscribes a collective memory of New Woman motherhood. Brittain illuminates how the concept of collective memory informs life-­ writing and, by extension, the modernist drive for textual innovation. In her foreword to Testament of Youth, she outlines her search for a new form in which to recount her life before, during, and just after the First World War. Having been unsuccessful in writing the narrative as fiction, she tells us: “There was only one possible course left—to tell my own fairly typical story as truthfully as I could against the larger background, and take the risk of offending all those who believe that a personal story should be kept private, however great its significance and however wide its general application. In no other fashion, it seemed, could I carry out my endeavour to put the life of an ordinary individual into its niche in contemporary history, and thus illustrate the influence of world-wide events and movements upon the personal destinies of men and women” (xxvi). In her foreword to Testament of Experience, she similarly theorizes aesthetic design: “A quarter of a century ago John Grierson invented the word ‘documentary,’ which he later defined as ‘the creative treatment of actuality.’31 More recently, in his Study of History, Professor Arnold Toynbee wrote that ‘we find the novelist vying with the diarist, the biographer, and the letter-writer to determine whether ‘Fiction’ or ‘Fact’ is the more propitious medium for bringing out the poetry in the private affairs of ordinary people.” Her goal has been to “find and convey this poetry” (14). In Testament of Experience she comments on beginning Testament of Youth: “The kind of memoir that could only be written by a Prime Minister or an Ambassador was ceasing, I believed, to be popular. A new type of autobiography was coming into fashion, and I might, perhaps, speed its development” (TE 77). Brittain’s democratizing goal is to use the “new” form of documentary to register her perceptions as they relate not only to her own story but to the zeitgeist of her age. For Brittain, as for Gilman, Wells, Jameson, and Mitchison, personal maternity is always framed in social and political terms. Through their collective memory, they are in dialogue not only with their generation of mothers but with future ones as well. This generational conversation develops our thinking about how the autobiographies speak to first- and second-wave feminisms. My reading of these texts is informed by the concept “the personal is political,” as coined in the title of the 1969 essay by American feminist Carol Hanisch. Andrea O’Reilly and Silvia Caporale Bizzini signal their affinity with Hanisch by

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entitling their collection From the Personal to the Political: Toward a New Theory of Maternal Narrative, which I discussed in Chap. 1. Their focus on autobiography as a genre relaying “the polity of maternity” and that affords “a political resistance to institutionalized motherhood” is especially relevant to my analysis here.32 Relatedly, charting the rise of women’s autobiography, Catherine Riley suggests that “During feminism’s first wave, many women wrote their own life stories as a way of transmitting solidarity with other women, as well as claiming their experiences to be worthy of retelling”—she holds up Testament of Youth as one such example. Riley posits, “These first-wave autobiographies helped institute the idea that the personal was political,” and that “Reading women’s autobiographical writing was, in the same way, to form an important aspect of the consciousness-raising that was critical to early formulations of second-­ wave feminism.”33 We can connect these sentiments to Montefiore’s discussion of collective memory. Montefiore stresses that individuals “exist in the ‘present moment’ in which their past is recalled,” and therefore “their (re)constructions of that past must be profoundly affected by the ideas and values current at that present moment.” Conversely, “this process of understanding the past by drawing analogies with the present is of course the interpretation of new events in terms of the known past.”34 Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain foreground this interpretive process. Consider, too, that volume I of Jameson’s Autobiography was published in 1969 (the same year as Hanisch’s essay), Wells’ book in 1970, and Mitchison’s three volumes in the early 1970s. This chronology evidences how the autobiographies afford important insights into and continuities between first- and second-wave feminisms.

Women’s Autobiographical Traditions Gilman’s autobiography and Brittain’s first Testament were published in the 1930s. Windy Counsell Petrie helps me to gain a sense of the cultural and market forces of the genre’s production in this period. While her research applies to 1930s American books, she notes that their innovations inspired future generations of autobiographers as well,35 making her work equally applicable to my critical readings of the later life-writings of Brittain, Jameson, and Mitchison. Defining literary autobiography as “the official autobiography of a successful writer in other genres,”36 Petrie analyzes publications by women like Gilman, Gertrude Stein, Harriet Monroe,

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and Margaret Anderson, among others. Petrie underscores that the first literary autobiography published by an African-American woman is Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) by Zora Neale Hurston.37 (Wells’ autobiography, written on the cusp of 1930, posthumously appeared in 1970.) Hurston was not a mother and so beyond my purview, but I examine the autobiography of Nigerian British writer Buchi Emecheta, Head Above Water (1986), in Chap. 7. Petrie suggests that the proliferation of autobiographies in the 1930s was due to market trends emerging from the post-­WWI demand for narratives about the past, complemented by Depression-era valuing of “nonfiction, nostalgia, and self-help books and success stories.”38 There was a comparable rise of (white) autobiographical writing in Britain, as Montefiore describes how “the ‘thirties memoir’, whether overt or fictionalized, now amounts to a distinctive subspecies of twentieth-­ century autobiography.”39 The authors in Petrie’s study “lived in every kind of domestic arrangement, some remaining single, several marrying young and then divorcing their husbands, a few cherishing traditional nuclear families or long-term lesbian partnerships, and others celebrating peripatetic global lifestyles.”40 Whatever their situation, these women broke ground by writing their lives and opinions into public history within a realm of expression that had, until recently, remained a rather restricted one. Many of their Victorian predecessors had “recoiled from the idea of publishing their private lives,” evidenced by the fact that “none of the major nineteenth-century British or American woman novelists wrote official memoirs.”41 Petrie explains that even “first-wave feminists and women’s suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard wrote as ‘wives and mothers,’” and privileged identities that were feminine and domestic in accordance with the dictates of the cult of True Womanhood.42 I suggest, in contrast, that Gilman, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain politicized this position through their feminist maternalisms and maternal modernisms—that is, they (and to a lesser extent Wells) depicted mothers as issuing a “political resistance to institutionalized motherhood.”43 That said, there were necessarily hazards and hesitancies in self-­ revelation. With so few nineteenth-century models, and with shifting ideologies between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the women in Petrie’s study were conflicted about the form their stories should take. They could write through conceptions of the self as an autonomous, authoritative public figure adopted throughout history by (white) male autobiographers; they could recapitulate to the ‘womanly woman’

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expectations for docile femininity of their Victorian upbringings; or they could experiment with “riskier new options for self-exposure,”44 all approaches employed, at varying times, by Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain. Nellie Y. McKay foregrounds how race affected inscriptions of female subjectivity in a tradition of Black autobiography dating from the nineteenth century on. She highlights how authors used their narratives to counter white hegemony, to “fight their battle against chattel slavery and to engage in the search for political and psychological freedom for all black people.”45 For Black writers, self and community were inseparable, such that the genre “became a historical site on which aesthetics, self-­ confirmation of humanity, citizenship, and the significance of racial politics shaped African-American literary expression.”46 Black women had to contend doubly with sexual and racial oppressions from white women and Black men, given systemic valuing of “whiteness and maleness.”47 Consequently, a specifically Black female tradition emerged wherein writers sought to adapt ideologies of the True (white) woman to a “true black womanhood,” and did so “through race-centered analyses that promoted the ‘uplift’ for the entire black group.”48 McKay traces a line of female autobiographers who pointedly documented their “overt political activities on behalf of the black community,”49 including Wells, as we shall see. Returning to Petrie, we find that the rise of the female autobiographer coincided with the increasing interest of the public for information about the private lives of well-known personages. This interest went hand in hand with the rise of the celebrity profile in journalism, as I explored with Photoplay in Chap. 5. Petrie detects four patterns of discourse used to categorize women autobiographers: in addition to the celebrity, there is the artist or “serious” writer, the activist, and the professional.50 My study adds a fifth category, the mother.

Interwar Work, Motherhood, and Modernism In her introduction to Brittain’s Testament of Experience, Carolyn G. Heilbrun notes, “For women to lose themselves in marriage, particularly if there are children, is to lose their selves, probably beyond recall.”51 She heralds Brittain as one of those “Unravelers of experience” who “dare to live what is revolutionary,” but concedes that from her early adulthood on, Brittain consistently “found herself living two lives at once, the conventional and the revolutionary, the old life and the new”52—just as did

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Gilman, Wells, Jameson, and Mitchison. Several social and literary studies of the interwar period foreground women’s dichotomous realities. For example, Heather Ingman shows that during the First World War, middleclass women sought professional adventure.53 Indeed, Mitchison and Brittain served as Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurses, and Holtby became a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. Women experienced increased mobility in more basic ways, like being able to circulate without a chaperone.54 Deirdre Beddoe describes the increased presence of women in the workforce while men were fighting in WWI. However, it was assumed they would give jobs back to the returning men, and that they would raise children for their nation to compensate for the generation decimated by war. Consequently, “The single most arresting feature of the inter-war years was the strength of the notion that women’s place is in the home.”55 Additionally, by the early 1920s, with so many young men deceased, it became crucial that women of marriageable age support themselves financially.56 Ingman shows that both prior to and during the interwar years there was an unprecedented focus on mothers by governments worried by falling birthrates, as women opted to have smaller families. In response, “a substantial amount of legislation was passed that directly affected the position of mothers. These included the 1918 Maternity and Child Welfare Act requiring local authorities to appoint committees for maternity child welfare”; “the 1920 Maintenance Orders (Facilities for Enforcement) Act and the 1922 Married Women (Maintenance) Act making it easier for married women to gain maintenance for themselves and their children,” among many others.57 Legislations like these notwithstanding, women’s lives continued to be delimited by gender. For example, new inventions such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and refrigerators made housework easier, but they served deleteriously to increase domestic standards expected of women. Modern domestic science applied to mothering, too, as “Manuals on child-rearing written by psychologists and medical experts proliferated. Women were made to feel there was one right way of bringing up children.”58 Mitchison confirms how women like herself “had our book—in those days Truby King”—that is, the treatise Feeding and Care of Baby (1913) by health reformer (Sir) Frederic Truby King. Although she questioned some of his theories, Mitchison affirmed that “worried mothers […] have a habit of accepting authoritative books, by doctors” (You 33). With society’s renewed attention to motherhood and domesticity, perhaps unsurprisingly “Marriage was still the expectation of most women.”59

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How best to approach this and other issues were debated by opposing feminist groups of the interwar years.60 Old (or equal rights) feminism championed a woman’s ambition to work outside the domicile, whereas New feminism, foregrounding gender ‘difference,’ celebrated mothers in the home and sought protections and benefits on their behalf.61 Note that Lady Rhondda, founder of Time and Tide in 1920, was also the founder of The Six Point Group in 1921, an organization promoting equal rights feminism. Brittain and Holtby were members, and Jameson served as a vice president.62 In general, though, with suffrage achieved for women in Britain over the age of twenty-one in 1928, feminism in the 1930s dissipated, as pressing concerns with unemployment and the fear of Fascism took center stage.63 Within these contexts, among the careers most open to—and lucrative for—middle-class women were journalism and novel writing.64 Ingman describes how “novels even by conservative women tend to demolish the unrealistic and sentimental picture of the housewife’s life promoted by the media and advertising and thus make possible a feminist critique.”65 Such a critique drives Jameson’s narrative: “My hatred of a settled domestic life was, is, an instinct, and borders on mania” (1: 82). This resistance entailed, additionally, a new willingness to write openly about maternity, including “the misery of pregnancy,” and to address topics like marital sex and birth control, inspired, for instance, by the work of Marie Stopes.66 In 1918, Mitchison records reading Marie Stopes’ Married Love: “This was the first serious sex-instruction book for my generation and must have made an immense difference to the happiness and well-being of thousands of couples” (All 157). Alison Light similarly shows that interwar authors like Ivy Compton-­ Burnett, Agatha Christie, and Jan Struther wrote about the middle-class private sphere, but in doing so not only brought women and the home to the “centre of national life” but also afforded opportunities to dissent from patriarchy. Light coined the phrase “conservative modernism” to define “a contradictory and determining tension in English social life” in the interwar years: “Janus-faced, it could simultaneously look backwards and forwards; it could accommodate the past in the new forms of the present; it was a deferral of modernity and yet it also demanded a different sort of conservatism from that which had gone before.”67 This literature testifies in part to how women of the interwar generation “had been reluctantly and forcibly propelled into new ways of living after the war, and that it is this traumatised relation to modernity which produced new kinds of

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conservative as well as radical response.”68 Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain negotiated conservative modernism with their maternal modernisms, championing and enacting liberatory possibilities for women with the persistence of conventional gender norms. Kristin Bluemel’s concept of “intermodernism” is another useful framework for my analysis of the autobiographies in relation to gender, genre, and modernism. Bluemel “challenges readers to accept a new term, new critical category and new literary history for twentieth-century British literary culture” by way of “the fascinating, compelling and grossly neglected writing of the years of Depression and World War II.” She identifies, among others, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain as notable intermodernists, those who in general were committed to people as opposed to language, the concern of high modernists like T. S. Eliot. Bluemel classifies three features of intermodernist work: cultural (it represents working class and working middle classes), political (it is produced by authors who are “often politically radical, ‘radically eccentric’”), and literary (it is typically non-canonical, and regarded as middlebrow or literature for the masses).69 These features overlap with overarching themes like work, community, and war. Acknowledging that the word intermodernism invites an inevitable comparison with modernism, Bluemel aims to “disturb” the dominance of modernism and to resist the claims of new modernism to stand as a definitional label for all-encompassing revisions of the field.70 Intermodernism takes in multiple literary forms, popular genres, and media like film, radio, pamphlet journalism, and documentary produced “over a period of time that overlaps with all those periods described as ‘late modernist’, ‘outside’ or ‘after’ modernism”; and includes authors who engage with politics (“communists, socialists and feminists”).71 These claims, though, echo Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s theorizing of new modernist studies. Bluemel herself cites Susan Stanford Friedman’s new modernist work on periodization which serves, Bluemel accepts, “as a way of achieving deconstructive ends” comparable to those of intermodernism.72 Intermodernism is therefore compatible with the new modernisms guiding my readings throughout Maternal Modernism. Bluemel elaborates on her definition of intermodernism as being, like modernism, about period and style. Asserting that “intermodernism is revisionary, ‘radically eccentric,’” she posits that it is a functional, analytical tool for scholars eager to uncover writers “who were active during the interwar and war years and who, until now, have been treated as

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modernism’s others, if they were treated at all.”73 She urges that we engage in archival research, and develop critical and historical analyses “that can recreate the web of personal and professional relations that sustained Britain during the dark years of 1930s Depression, 1940s war and 1950s reconstruction.”74 Intermodernism reflects my approaches to autobiography, that is, my foregrounding of life-writing as constitutive of particular kinds of personal and professional webs, networks, and collective memories about motherhood. It is to these texts that I now turn.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman In her 1935 foreword to The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gilman’s friend and fellow author Zona Gale states: “In the long, slow development of our social consciousness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman has flamed like a torch.”75 Acknowledging that “already the air was being charged for the new day,” Gale affirms that Gilman was a “pioneer” and that “her mind was one of the first in America to catch the fire.”76 Thus ignited, Gilman was exceptionally prolific, as this enumeration proves: “eleven long nonfiction works, an autobiography, nine novels, nearly two hundred short stories, close to five hundred poems, seven years of her monthly magazine The Forerunner, several plays and dialogues, as well as innumerable articles, lectures, suffrage songs, and other short pieces.”77 In 1932, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and planned to end her life with chloroform when the time came, to avoid “a slow and horrible” death (Living 333). She completed revisions to her autobiography, begun in 1926, but she did not wait to see the book in print—she committed suicide on August 17, 1935; the book was published that October.78 Petrie suggests that the “text enacts a sort of double-activism: she not only recommits to her early reputation as a pioneering feminist but also becomes a pioneer in speaking out about depression.”79 Ann J. Lane contends that “marriage and motherhood provided the shape and content of her life and the autobiography,”80 and I would further argue, as is my focus here, that Gilman used the autobiography to reinscribe her theories of  what she called  “New Motherhood” (see Chap. 2). She promoted them in the service of a post-­ WWI call to maternal activism, and as an apologia for her maternal absence in the life of her daughter, Katharine. From the opening pages, Gilman establishes her New Woman pedigree. Her New England family included a progressive group of Beechers: Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin); Catherine Beecher,

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respected “for her wide influence in promoting the higher education of women”; and Isabella Beecher Hooker, “one of the able leaders in the demand for equal suffrage” (3). Her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, a librarian, abandoned his wife (Gilman’s mother), Mary Fitch Westcott Perkins, and son, Thomas, soon after Gilman’s birth in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3, 1860 (4–5). While Mrs. Perkins poured “all of duty, hope, ambition, love and joy” into her two children, as a consequence of her abandonment, “she heroically determined that her baby daughter should not so suffer if she could help it. Her method was to deny the child all expression of affection as far as possible, so that she should not be used to it or long for it” (10). In depicting her mother as a complex maternal figure, Gilman was perhaps setting up a context for her own often detached mothering. When Gilman was fifteen, a quarrel with her mother made Gilman relish her “first absolute rebellion,” leading her to query, “If I was a free agent what was I going to do with my freedom?” (34–35). Although Gilman had little formal education—“my total schooling covered four years, among seven different schools, ending when I was fifteen” (18)— her stringent, self-imposed reading program led to her intellectual maturation.81 By the time she was seventeen, she concludes, we must “find our places, our special work in the world, and when found, do it, do it at all costs” (43), an especially charged edict when children become part of those costs. Gilman attended the newly opened School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island,82 and upon turning twenty-one, relished becoming “My own mistress at last,” who was “self-supporting of course, a necessary base for freedom” (70).83 Gilman’s New Woman values were tested when she met the painter Charles Walter Stetson in January 1882. Although she worried about the impact of wifehood on her life of public service, she eventually married him in Providence in May 1884 (84). Domesticity immediately imposed itself as a strain, a situation exacerbated with the birth of Katharine on March 23, 1885. In raw and intimate language, Gilman bursts the myth that motherhood is necessarily instinctual, beatific, and fulfilling. She confesses: “We had attributed all my increasing weakness and depression to pregnancy, and looked forward to prompt recovery,” but after the birth she was “plunged into an extreme of nervous exhaustion which no one observed or understood in the least” (88–89). Gilman historicizes her condition to “a new disease [that] had dawned on the medical horizon. It was called ‘nervous prostration.’ No one knew much about it, and there were many

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who openly scoffed, saying it was only a new name for laziness” (90). Gilman elucidates, “This disorder involved a growing melancholia, and that, as those know who have tasted it, consists of every painful mental sensation, shame, fear, remorse, a blind oppressive confusion, utter weakness, a steady brain-ache that fills the conscious mind with crowding images of distress” (90). She further details: “I went to bed crying, woke in the night crying, sat on the edge of the bed in the morning and cried” (91). She reveals, “The baby? I nursed her for five months. I would hold her close—that lovely child!—and instead of love and happiness, feel only pain. The tears ran down on my breast …. Nothing was more utterly bitter than this, that even motherhood brought no joy” (91–92). Gilman’s narrative is radical for its shocking candor and ‘unwomanly’ depiction of her compromised maternity. Gilman was sent to a rest cure in Philadelphia, where she was warned by her physician, Dr. S. W. Mitchell, to “‘Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time.’ […] ‘Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live’” (96). Gilman duly updates: “I went home, followed those directions rigidly for months, and came perilously near to losing my mind” (96). She felt that to protect her mental health, she had to leave her marriage. In 1888, she and Katharine moved to Pasadena, California, where her friend Grace Channing was now living, and took up writing and journalism to support herself. Gilman and Stetson decided to divorce; after he filed the suit on the grounds of desertion, she was interviewed by a reporter eager to scandalize her actions (142).84 Indeed, “The result was a full page in the [San Francisco] Examiner” probing “the topic ‘Should Literary Women Marry,’” and Gilman’s “name became a football for all the papers on the coast” (143), proving the dire consequences for women who dare to step away from conventional domesticity. Gilman would generate even more intrusive and damaging scrutiny as a mother. For example, what she considered to be her modern approach to parenting was disparaged by her community: “The good mamas of Pasadena were extremely critical of my methods”; “They thought it scandalous that I should so frankly teach her the simple facts of sex” (160). She further allowed Katharine to wear boys’ clothes: “For all this I was harshly blamed, accused of ‘neglecting my child’” (161). In the early 1890s, Gilman moved to Oakland, operating a boarding house with her mother, who had traveled to be with her. Gilman and Katharine “had happy years together, nine of them” (162). However,

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following the death of Mrs. Perkins in 1893, Gilman could not sustain the house alone. She found new work in San Francisco, “but in a place unsuitable for a child,” and so, “It was arranged that [Katharine] should go to her father for a while, my father, going East, taking her with him” (162). Stetson had since married Channing, whom Katharine “had known and loved since babyhood, loved as another mother” (162). Gilman was confident they would make a successful family: “Since her second mother was fully as good as the first, better in some ways perhaps; since the father longed for his child and had a right to some of her society; and since the child had a right to know and love her father—I did not mean her to suffer the losses of my youth—this seemed the right thing to do.” Gilman qualifies, “No one suffered from it but myself. This, however, was entirely overlooked in the furious condemnation which followed. I had ‘given up my child’” (163). Gilman confronts the surging discourse of the ‘unnatural’ absentee mother: “To hear what was said and read what was printed one would think I had handed over a baby in a basket. In the years that followed she divided her time fairly equally between us, but in companionship with her beloved father she grew up to be the artist that she is, with advantages I could never have given her. I lived without her, temporarily, but why did they think I liked it? She was all I had” (163). Gilman offers a reverse discourse for her ‘bad’ mothering via a three-pronged justification. She explains that her decision to send Katharine away was based on the urge to protect her daughter from Gilman’s often debilitating bouts of depression; she relates that she suffered a lifetime of lingering trauma for her actions; and she contends that she implemented a rational alternative to existing parenting structures. Concomitantly, Gilman had to negotiate her motherhood with her ambitions for an independent intellectual and creative life. The autobiography consistently shifts between these narratives. It is when she leaves Stetson and moves to California that she notes, “With Pasadena begins my professional ‘living’” (107). Her “most outstanding piece of work of 1890 was ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (118), for which perhaps Gilman remains most famous.85 The story recounts Gilman’s experiences with post-partum psychosis, already narrated in the autobiography. She states, “the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways.” Years later, she learns that “he had changed his treatment of nervous prostration since reading ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ If this is a fact, I have not lived in vain” (121). In relaying these details here,

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Gilman shows us how both her fictional and non-fictional disclosures about her post-partum psychosis led not only to literary success but also to medical improvements for women. Gilman’s first book of poems, In This Our World, was published in 1893, bringing “small returns in cash but much in reputation” (169). She supplemented her income by lecturing to organizations like the Nationalist Club of Pasadena and the San Francisco Pacific Coast Woman’s Press Association (122, 130). Identifying with “Socialism,” Gilman summarizes, “My main interest then was in the position of women, and the need for more scientific care for young children. As to women, the basic need of economic independence seemed to me of far more importance than the ballot; though that of course was a belated and legitimate claim, for which I always worked as opportunity offered” (131). The scandals of her divorce and absentee mothering along with her often controversial talks took a toll; by 1885 Gilman felt that “the public verdict was utter condemnation” (176). At thirty-five she headed east, still feeling “hope and power” in being guided by her social philosophy (180). Several times, for instance, she lectured to audiences on “The New Motherhood.” As I discussed in Chap. 2, in works like Women and Economics and “The New Motherhood” Gilman championed maternity, but insisted that women be valued as individuals who must develop their faculties through social service. Gilman’s career unfolded in mobile and transatlantic contexts, such that her physical, geographic freedoms afforded her added liberation from the responsibilities of motherhood. She charts her exhaustive lecture itinerary: “Back and forth and up and down, from California to Maine, from Michigan to Texas, from Georgia to Oregon, twice to England, I wandered” (181). Her first trip to England was “to attend the International Socialist and Labor Congress of 1896, to which I was a delegate from California” (198). She returned in 1899, “this time to attend the Quinquennial Congress of The International Council of Women” (256). This council formed “an important part of the world-wide stir and getting-­ together of women which so characterizes the last century, representing millions of women, and the noblest upward movements of the age” (257). Gilman’s political and literary work is discussed in symbiosis with her updates on her relationship with Katharine. Thus, for instance, on her lecture tour in 1897, she reports, “By August 14th I was back in New York, met at the station by my Cousin Houghton and—Katharine! She was to be with me for a few days before starting for Europe with her father and second mother” (231). Upon her return from Europe, Katharine spent

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the summer with Gilman on Long Island: “Such a happy time! Katherine was delighted with the pond across the road. I taught her to swim, which she greatly enjoyed” (247). Examples like these depict Gilman as a loving mother and Katharine as a well-adjusted child. By the end of summer, Gilman was back in New  York; Katharine, her father, and Channing returned to Pasadena, with Gilman rationalizing: “If I had any settled home, any settled income, any settled health, it would have been ‘my turn’ now—how gladly my turn!” (248). Gilman follows this statement with a description of her giving “a pleasant little parlor talk” at a friend’s house in Boston (249). One of the attendees “owned that when she was left alone with her first baby there were times when she felt like saying, ‘Take it! Please take it for a little while—somebody, anybody!’” (249). Gilman shows that she was not alone in her seemingly unmaternal responses, thus providing groundbreaking critiques of ideologies of maternal self-sacrifice that threaten a mother’s mental health. We heard Gilman in 1897 refer to her cousin Houghton Gilman; in that year she reconnected with this childhood friend—he was now a lawyer on Wall Street (219). With almost no narrative backstory, Gilman announces to her readers that in June 1900, she and Houghton “were married—and lived happy ever after. If this were a novel, now, here’s the happy ending” (281). The “if” is, of course, ironic, for Gilman goes on to subvert the conventional romance plot that ends in the heroine’s marriage by re-directing her narrative back to her activism and writing. For example, Katharine came to live with her in New  York City for a time, but Gilman “kept on lecturing of course” (287), including three more European circuits. Katharine eventually returned to live with her father and step-mother in Italy for another few years (295), reinforcing that Gilman’s motherhood and wifehood were always carried out as a concession of presences and absences. By working and traveling, Gilman evaded home confinement; that Houghton supported her for almost four decades proves that she had found a New Man partner.86 Toward the close of her autobiography, Gilman provides a sweeping assessment of post-WWI society. She celebrates the advancement in early childhood education: “That intensely valuable period of life, the first four years, is at last recognized as deserving better care than can be given by solitary mothers and hired nurse-maids. We have a name for this young person, ‘the pre-school child,’ and under this title earnest study is now being given to those first years.” She adds, “I sit and chuckle to see the most conscientious mamas proudly doing to their children was I was called

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‘an unnatural mother’ for doing to mine. Maternal instinct is at last giving ground a little before the resistless march of knowledge and experience” (320). Gilman uses her autobiography to overturn the criticisms of her maternal practice that dogged her throughout her life, while simultaneously giving herself credit for her vanguard maternal thinking. At the end of her life (Houghton passed away in 1934), Gilman returned to Pasadena “to be near my daughter and grandchildren. Grace Channing, my lifelong friend, has come out to be with me. We two have a little house next door but one to my Katharine, who is a heavenly nurse and companion. Dorothy and Walter, her children, are a delight” (334).87 Gilman’s closing family portrait illuminates how she, Katharine, and Grace maintained a matrilineal bond. Gilman reinforces the notion for her readers, as much as for herself, that her experiments in motherhood had not caused the psychic harm of which she had been accused.88 Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler remark that Gilman’s oeuvre leaves “scholars in the ambivalent position of documenting Gilman’s ‘mixed legacy’ of ideas both abhorrent and visionary,”89 and this fact applies to the last pages of the autobiography where her opinions about children and the future descend into an untenable discourse of racism. In anti-immigration rhetoric, she notes that “we Americans” are “justly deprived of our country by fecund foreigners,” and she suggests, “With all its lamentable accompaniment of license and misbehavior, an intelligent limitation of a population to the resources of a country is one of the most essential requirements for any hope of world peace” (330). Gilman concludes with an invocation to mothers: “This is the woman’s century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place, her transcendent power to remake humanity, to rebuild the suffering world—and the world waits while she powders her nose” (331). Affirming, “Much, very much of what I have worked for has been attained,” she concedes: “Far more is waiting to be done” (331). The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a spur to maternal action, but Gilman’s eugenic diatribe coupled with her racist invocation to the clearly white race mother compromise her vision of a humanist polity of maternity.

Ida B. Wells During the exact time frame as Gilman’s, above, Ida B. Wells likewise traveled across the United States and to Britain gaining widespread recognition for her news reports and lectures; raised children in a satisfying and

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productive marriage; and promoted, by her own example, New Womanism and feminist maternalism.90 Contra Gilman, in Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, Wells privileges African-American identity. Wells was inspired to write her autobiography after conversing with a twenty-five-year-old Black woman eager to learn about the past: “It is therefore for the young people who have so little of our race’s history recorded that I am for the first time in my life writing about myself” (3). Wells evidences McKay’s argument that Black female autobiographers situated their political activities in communal, relational terms.91 There are instances in Crusade for Justice when Wells reflects personally on her maternity, but her overarching narrative treats her accomplishments as a Black female journalist and social reformer. When she does reference motherhood, it too is largely in the politicized service of uplifting her race. Wells operates within a tradition of Black motherhood theorized by Patricia Hill Collins, wherein many women regard mothering as a means to “self-actualization, status in the Black community, and a catalyst for social activism.”92 Wells was born during the Civil War (1861–1865) in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to parents “who had been slaves and married as such,” and who “were married again after freedom came”—her father, James Wells, was a carpenter; her mother, Elizabeth Warrenton, “a famous cook” (7). Her parents valued education, and thus ensured she and her siblings attended the local school for Blacks (8). After her parents died from yellow fever in 1878, Wells took charge of her five siblings, training as a schoolteacher to support them. Having relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1886 she became a paid correspondent for the American Baptist, and in the process established herself as a Black New Woman journalist: “I went to Louisville to the first press convention I had ever attended and was tickled pink over the attention I received from those veterans of the press. I suppose it was because I was their first woman representative. I also went as representative of this paper to the press convention in Washington, D.  C., in 1889, where I was elected secretary to  the National Press Association. I witnessed my first inauguration [President Benjamin Harrison] while there. I saw for the first time Frederick Douglass, Bishop Turner, Senator B. K. Bruce, and other important men of our race” (29). Wells proved early on Vera Brittain’s contention that political women were becoming “conspicuous on the national arena.”93 As noted in Chap. 4, Wells was part of a cohort of vanguard Black journalists including Pauline E. Hopkins and Amy Jacques Garvey. In 1889,

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Wells became a co-owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In March 1892, in response to the lynching of grocers Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, she published an editorial, condemning the attack, that “changed the whole course of [her] life” (42). In Philadelphia at the time of the brutal murders, she learned that her newspaper’s office was destroyed by a white mob, and that she herself was a target; she was urged not to return. Exiled from the South, and having given up teaching for full-time journalism, she dedicated her career to anti-lynching and anti-discrimination activism, working out of Philadelphia and New York before settling in Chicago. Wells addressed both Black and white audiences in her reporting and public speaking, fighting for political, legal, and economic rights and opportunities for African Americans. She documented, and demanded government intervention to stop, the shocking ongoing violence against Black men. Her groundbreaking books include Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) and The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895).94 Additionally, she participated in the club movement of the era that promoted Black women’s civic engagement. Among her many accomplishments, she founded the Chicago Women’s Club in 1893, whose members then honored her by renaming it the Ida B. Wells Club; and in 1913 helped to create the first Black women’s suffrage group, the Alpha Suffrage Club. Wells’ professional life was enhanced through her intellectual partnership with Ferdinand Lee Barnett, whom she married on June 27, 1895, in Chicago. Barnett was a lawyer, and founder of the first Black newspaper in Chicago, the Conservator. In their joint labor for civil rights, Barnett was a New Man complement to Wells. They had four children together (Charles Aked [1896]; Herman Kohlsaat [1897]; Ida B. Wells, Jr. [1901]; Alfreda M. [1904]).95 Wells was reticent about her maternity, but when she did raise it, she positioned it in relation to her career, itself framed as a service to her community. For example, she describes her first pregnancy accordingly: “I had already purchased the Conservator from Mr. Barnett and others who owned it, and the following Monday morning, after my marriage, I took charge of the Conservator office. My duties as editor, as president of the Ida B. Wells Woman’s Club, and as speaker in many white women’s clubs in and around Chicago kept me pretty busy. But I was not too busy to find time to give birth to a male child the following 25 March 1896” (205). Wells notes, “When the meeting of the Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, which had been founded in Boston the summer before, was called

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in Washington, I was present with my four-months-old baby. The Ida B.  Wells Club had sent me as a delegate, and my husband sent a nurse along to take care of the baby” (205).96 Wells updates that after the convention, “I had a visit from a member of our Women’s State Central Committee, who said that they wanted to arrange for me to travel throughout the state again, as I had done in 1894” (206). The committee arranged for local childcare so that “I started out with a six-month-old nursing baby and made trips to Decatur, Quincy, Springfield, Bloomington, and many other towns. At all of these places there was a nurse on hand to take care of the baby while I went to the hall and delivered the address.” Wells summarizes, “I have often referred to it in my meeting with the pioneer suffragists, as I honestly believe that I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches” (206), underscoring her status as a New Woman mother. Wells registers the challenges of work/life balance with her child: “Just as the time came for him to be weaned, I found that I was not to be emancipated from my duties in that respect; for eight months afterward I gave birth to another son” (209). She decided to retire for the present, justifying, “I have already found that motherhood was a profession by itself, just like school teaching and lecturing, and that once one was launched on such a career, she owed it to herself to become as expert as possible in the practice of her profession” (211). If Wells returned to the home, she did so on her own terms. By defining motherhood as a job predicated on expert training, like Gilman she challenged traditional assumptions that mothering requires only ‘natural’ qualifications. Confirming that she “gave up the newspaper and very shortly thereafter resigned from the presidency of the Ida B. Wells Club, after five years of service,” she highlights, “Before I did so, however, our club established an innovation in what was then the Negro district by opening a kindergarten at Bethel Church” (209). Wells reports on the success of the venture, such that the public school system eventually assumed responsibility for kindergarten, making it freely available to its students (210–211). Wells thus combined her desire to become as capable a mother as possible with advancing an educational program benefitting her larger Black community. She reminds us of Allison Berg’s assertion that, examining shifts “from the nineteenth-century True Mother to the twentieth-century New Mother” across both white and Black contexts, “while the True Mother’s cardinal virtue was self-sacrifice, the New Mother typically combined an

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instinctive desire for children with a scientific and/or civic interest in improving the race.”97 If Wells respected the science of new education, she confesses, “It may be that my early entrance into public life and the turning of my efforts, physical and mental, in that direction had something to do with smothering the mother instinct” (211). She also admits that with the death of her parents, “I had to become a mother before I realized what a wonderful place in the scheme of things the Creator has given woman. She it is upon whom rests the joint share of the work of creation, and I wonder if women who shirk their duties in that respect truly realize that they have not only deprived humanity of their contribution to perpetuity, but that they have robbed themselves of one of the most glorious advantages in the development of their own womanhood.” She registers relief: “how glad I was that I had not been swayed by advice given me on the night of my marriage which had for its object to teach me how to keep from having a baby” (212). Commending motherhood as women’s highest role, Wells subscribed to the ideology of the New Negro Woman as race mother. She rejected the science of birth control—the means of reproductive liberation for many New Women, as we saw articulated in The Freewoman—yet she represents herself as a feminist maternalist empowered through choice. Wells embraced motherhood, but consistently forsook domesticity. Shirley J. Carlson contextualizes this seeming contradiction in her research on Black womanhood in the period from 1880 to 1910. Carlson’s attention to the Black post-emancipation populace of Illinois makes her findings even more relevant to a discussion of the Chicago-residing Wells. Among this Black middle class, Carlson categorizes a central figure she calls the “Black Victoria” who, “like her white counterpart, was committed to the domestic sphere.”98 However, this “Black Victoria had other qualities,”99 those we associate with the New Woman. In line with the Black communal values of the day, which did not pit intelligence and femininity in opposition, Black Victoria was well educated, “outspoken, and activist, as appreciated by her own race.”100 Carlson holds up Wells as such a woman, whose life as a wife and mother went hand in hand with her service to racial uplift. Wells “represented the black ideal of womanhood on a national level,” whose public efforts were “commended” by the larger Black Illinois community.101 Carlson’s Black Victoria pushes our understanding of how the Black New Woman was constructed in negotiation with the New Negro Woman.

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Indeed, Wells concedes, “Even though I was quite content to be left within the four walls of my home, it seems that the needs of the work were so great that again I had to venture forth. Lynching continued ever and anon throughout the country” (212). Having not shirked her maternal duty, concurrently she refused to shirk her duty to her race: to report atrocities committed against it. Thus, for instance, following a lynching in South Carolina in the spring of 1898, her community raised the money to send her to Washington to urge government action (213); “Accordingly, again I took a nursing baby and fared forth to do the bidding of the colored citizens of Chicago” (213). This passage illuminates how Wells fused communal duties with her goals for autonomous, intellectual self-­ actualization. By insisting that she was “content” to be secluded in the private sphere as a womanly Black Victoria or New Negro Woman, Wells offset the ‘unwomanly’ exigencies of journalism that took her out of this sphere and into the unladylike, aggressive, and stirring environs of public, political life. Another time, in the fall of 1898, “a call was issued by Mr. T. Thomas Fortune of the New York Age to resurrect a national movement which he had started some years before under the head of the Afro-American League. I was especially urged by him as well as citizens of Chicago to attend that meeting [in Rochester]. This I very gladly did, as the second baby was just being weaned and I could safely leave him with his grandmother” (214–215). Wells relays that she stayed with her acquaintance Susan B. Anthony, famous proponent of suffrage, who registered criticism to Wells as mother: “you have a divided duty. You are here trying to help in the formation of this league and your eleven-month-old baby needs your attention at home” (215). Wells goes on to affirm the success of this Rochester meeting: “Bishop Walters became president of what was known as the Afro-American Council. Your humble servant was made secretary. So despite my best intentions, when I got back home to my family I was again launched in public movements” (216). Here, again, we can consider Wells as a strategic New Woman, affirming her “best intentions” to embrace domesticity yet lured by communal forces into the public service that so stimulated her. In this way, too, she countered the charge of Anthony by proving that motherhood had not compromised her professional energies. In fact, Wells offers an example of how her children inspired her to work. In response to a 1909 lynching in Cairo, Illinois, she writes that while her husband urged her to take the train there to “get the facts,” she

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was unprepared to leave home just then. After falling asleep with her baby, she was awoken by her ten-year-old son, who had been present during his parents’ earlier conversation. She narrates: “He stood by the bedside a little while and then said, ‘Mother if you don’t go nobody else will.’ I looked at my child standing there by the bed reminding me of my duty, and I thought of that passage of Scripture which tells of the wisdom from the mouths of babes and sucklings. I thought if my child wanted me to go that I ought not to fall by the wayside” (265). Wells duly boarded the train the next morning, illuminating the reciprocal contributions of mother and child to community empowerment. Elsewhere, Wells mentions her work with the Douglass Women’s Club in 1903,102 where she was invited to give a talk: “I prepared a symposium on ‘What It Means to Be a Mother’” (240).103 She explains, “It was my reentry into club life, and I felt that the experience I had gained as a mother should be passed on to the young women of our race who had the idea that they should not have children” (240). Wells did not elaborate on this episode, leaving her maternal experience largely undocumented here and throughout the text—although the Cairo episode provides a glimpse of meaning. Alfreda M. Duster, one of Wells’ daughters and the editor of Crusade for Justice, informs us that her mother began the book in 1928, but it was left unfinished at her death on March 25, 1931, of uremic poisoning.104 Duster notes, “In newspapers, magazines, journals, and books of the period from 1890 to 1931, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was described over and over again as militant, courageous, determined, impassioned, and aggressive,”105 qualities invoking the Wild New Woman. Recall from her preface that Wells began her autobiography for the youth of her race (3); she later specifies that her maternal knowledge “should be passed on to the young women of our race” (240). In her narrative, Wells prioritized an account of her civil rights activism, but she left enough of a record, however incomplete, testifying to how she negotiated imperatives for the New Negro Woman with the vanguard drive of a crusading Black New Woman mother.

Storm Jameson Writing in 1965  in the penultimate chapter of her two-volume Autobiography, Storm Jameson addresses her readers: “I am deeply convinced—so deeply that it will be no use citing against me married women who are famous scientists or architects or financiers—that a woman who

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wishes to be a creator of anything except children should be content to be a nun or a wanderer on the face of the earth” (2: 379–380). More pointedly, “She cannot be a writer and woman in the way a male writer can be also husband and father. The demands made on her as a woman are destructive in a peculiarly disintegrating way—if she consents to them. And if she does not consent, if she cheats … a sharp grain of guilt lodges itself in her, guilt, self-condemnation, regret, which may get smaller, but never dissolves” (2: 380). Jameson was a woman who cheats. In 1918, estranged from her husband, Charles (Karl) Clarke (referred to only as “K” in the autobiography), Jameson decided to move from Whitby, where she was temporarily living with her parents, to take up a job at an advertising firm in London. She left her young son, Charles William (Bill), behind, putting him in the care of a foster mother. By these actions, Jameson signaled that she would not consent to traditional wifehood and motherhood. At the same time, these actions provided the conditions for the grain of maternal guilt to fester within her for the rest of her life. Throughout that long life—she lived to be 95—Jameson was a feminist, socialist, and left-wing activist, all the while producing hundreds of texts, including novels, plays, criticism, journalism, and, of course, her autobiographies. Maroula Joannou contends that Jameson used autobiography to relay “the tensions arising from the autobiographer’s sense of herself as both a writer and a political activist.”106 Joannou hopes to stimulate further research on “Jameson’s life in relation to women’s participation in the cultural history of the left and also in relation to women’s contribution to autobiography as a literary and historical genre.”107 Here, I explore an additional point of autobiographical tension and significance: Jameson’s mothering. Jameson was born and raised in Whitby, a coastal town in Yorkshire, England. With her sea-captain father, William Storm Jameson, away for long periods of time, Jameson’s childhood and adolescence—like that of her younger siblings Winifred, Harold, and Dorothy—unfolded in the presence of her unhappily married mother, Hannah Margaret Galilee. Jameson “began to dream feverishly of getting away” and by age thirteen, “was determined to get myself to a university” (1: 42). She won a scholarship to Leeds University (1909–1912), where she majored in English literature; a second scholarship enabled her to attend King’s College in London, where she earned a Master’s Degree in modern European drama (1912–1914). In London, she reconnected with her Whitby friends, the Harland brothers,108 with whom she honed her New Woman sensibilities,

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believing that they “were at the frontier of a new age” (1: 65). The men, part of a small group called the Eikonoklasts, allowed her to join as the only female member. In the spirit of modernist rebellion, “Our freedom intoxicated us; there was nothing we should not be able to attempt, no road not open to us” (1: 66). In this euphoric state, she launched her literary career. Referring to the influential left-wing arts and political magazine edited by A. R. Orage, Jameson reports that in 1913, “I had a moment of triumph. Orage’s New Age was our Bible […] On the 20th of March it published an essay by an unknown writer, Storm Jameson, on George Bernard Shaw, a joyous exercise in iconoclasm” (1: 67).109 Jameson’s iconoclastic run was halted by wifehood and motherhood. At Leeds, she had met “K,” a classics major, whom she eventually married in London in 1913. Miserable, and constantly quarreling with Clarke, she swallowed pills in an attempt to end her life. She quickly sought help, and Clarke rushed for a doctor; the couple then separated, each returning to their respective parents’ home (1: 74–75).110 Performing as the expected dutiful wife, Jameson reluctantly rejoined Clarke, employed as a schoolmaster, first in the Midlands town of Kettering, and then Liverpool. She became further confined by motherhood: “in 1915 I was, all else apart, biologically trapped” (1: 88). Out of boredom in Kettering, Jameson had begun to write a novel (1: 84), but she now confronted the physiological consequences of pregnancy: “My mind had lost its power to concentrate: the energy was still there, but the sap did not run” (1: 90–91). Jameson, like Gilman, broke taboos by registering the trauma of corporeal maternity. Announcing, “My son was born in Whitby, in my mother’s house, a little after eleven o’clock on the morning of Sunday the 20th of June, 1915” (1: 91), she acknowledges the cause of her “day and night of agony”: “I was unlucky, it is true; I had the misfortune to fall into the hands of a conceited midwife whose boast was that she needed neither anaesthetics nor a doctor to bring ‘her’ children into the world” (1: 91–92). Jameson initially portrays herself as a nurturing mother, a strategy, I suggest, that both offsets and prepares the reader for the coming episode of her leaving her son. In the first months of motherhood, she details, “From the moment, before six, when I tore my eyelids open on another day, to the moment of dropping headlong into sleep […] I cleaned, washed linen and clothes, prepared the child’s barley water, fed him, [and] pushed him in his carriage the long walk to the shops” (1: 93). Back in Liverpool, “I had no purpose more avid than my will, ferocious, to get my son the best of everything,” so much so that “Possibly K. resented my

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silliness—to an unbeliever a religion must always seem grotesque” (1: 95–96), a description illuminating Jameson’s adoption of maternalist ideology. Bill became the “fixed centre” of her life: “In the first instant I set eyes on him […] my son became its only complete passion, its final meaning” (1: 96). The fault lines of maternalism had been cracking, though. With the onset of motherhood, “my restlessness, my insane ambition, had been pushed out of sight,” but “they had sharp teeth” and “waited their time”; “After a few months they began to prick me” (1: 95). Indeed they did. By 1916 she had returned to her novel, The Pot Boils (1919), writing when Bill was sleeping. Meanwhile, Bill could fly into a “rage,” and “No doubt he was as bored as I was” by their routine (1: 111). At some point during this period, feeling “desperate,” she deliberately brought on a miscarriage (1: 94).111 These details illuminate her unwillingness to extend the duration of her maternity. When Clarke was selected to train as an Equipment Officer for the Royal Flying Corps, she was delighted to give up the “detested” Liverpool house and take a “reckless anarchic plunge forward, with a child less than two years old, into a future of which I saw nothing beyond the first step” (1: 105–106). Jameson relocated with Clarke to his various postings, but when he went ahead to Canterbury, and failed to communicate or send money, she took another “anarchic plunge”: she sought employment at the Carlton Agency in London, without her three-­ year-­old son. Jameson confesses, “It is difficult to write, without distorting it, about a decision which, now, seems to me coldly unforgivable” (1: 133). Marking the locus at which the tensions between self-sacrificial motherhood and desire for personal and professional fulfillment erupted, the autobiography returns, again and again, to this site of maternal trauma. Jameson recounts in detail her inner struggles. Having written a letter of inquiry about the advertising job, she feels, “Horror at the thought of leaving Bill—where? how?—wrenched the nerves of my chest in the very instant of writing to the Agency. It was a sharp pain, purely physical. I carried the letter to the post, refusing to think what I was about” (1: 133). Jameson experiences what Ann Taylor Allen calls the “maternal dilemma”112 when she is offered the position of copywriter: “I tried to think clearly. From a single moment of exultance in having landed the job I dropped into the blackest pit. To give up my child in return for four pounds a week in an advertising office was plain madness, a folly for which there was no rag of excuse” (1: 135).

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In her dilemma, Jameson battles economic as well as spiritual forces: “My poverty and insecurity were a torment, and my blind wish to do the best I could for my son”; “By keeping mum about my ambition, boredom, restlessness, I could make out an excellent case for myself. Any sensible jury would applaud it, and it would be a lie” (1: 135). Jameson lays bare her autobiographical intentions when she admits, “The truth is—is it the truth?—I was in the claws of a raging want” (1: 136). Jameson makes the heretical confession that motherhood was not enough to fulfill her “wants,” and further, that she could offer more as a mother if she gave in to them: “I thought: I can’t go. Behind everything I was doing, the senseless dialogue went on … I can’t go, I must go. What thanks will he give you for staying with him, when he is older and you have no money to spend on him?” (1: 133). Jameson raises the narrative to its emotional pitch. She secured residency for Bill with “Miss Geeson, a woman in her forties who ran a small morning school for very young children and was said to be kind and good,” and tells her Bill “must have the best of everything, the best milk, the best soap” (1: 135), proving that with her economic freedoms she will indeed, as was her justification, have the funds to improve his life.113 The evening before departing, “I began for the first time to cry” (1: 136). Observing Bill in the garden as her cab pulls away from the house the next morning—“I sat with a hand pressed to my throat”—Jameson admits, “To write this makes me feel ill” (1:137). Feelings of loss are relentless: “Hell, says Sartre, is the others. Nonsense. […] Hell is five or six memories which are able occasionally to enter the intestines through the mind and tear them” (1: 141). Through her sustained account of maternal trauma, she inserts her private experiences into a larger—and largely unspoken—cultural narrative about the profound costs of motherhood to women’s lives and identities. With Jameson released into freedom in London, the autobiography alternates between her long-distance parenting and her increasing literary and activist pursuits. In addition to the agency—she stayed less than a year—during the 1920s and 30s she worked as an editor of the New Commonwealth magazine, a researcher for American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, a London representative for American publisher Alfred Knopf, and a journalist, among other jobs.114 She was all the while producing fiction at an astonishing rate, publishing more than twenty novels in these two decades. Her writing, and life, became politicized as democracy was increasingly threatened by the authoritarianism of Franco

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and Hitler, and the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War: “By coming to London when I did, I moved from the margin into the centre at the very moment when the current dragging writers into active politics was gathering force” (1: 293). She assessed the interregnum accordingly: “The twenties, for all their disorder, were lively with ideas, dreams, hopes, experiments. The illusion of freedom was intoxicating”; however, “Almost before they knew what was happening to them, writers found themselves being summoned on to platforms and into committee-rooms to defend society against its enemies. Writers in Defence of Freedom, Writers’ Committee of the Anti-War Council, Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture, Writers’ Sections of the World Council against Fascism” (1: 292). From 1932 on, Jameson notes, “I began to construct myself as a writer,” predicated on her theorizing that the “modern novelist’s country” must reflect the “disorder” of the age (1: 301). Having no prams to push, her professional life was all-­ encompassing. In 1933, as the Whitby delegate she attended the Labour Party’s conference at Hastings (1: 321), among other conventions, and most significantly in 1938, “became president of the English Centre of P. E. N.,” serving for six years (2: 17–18). Believing it was “the duty of writers to abhor racial intolerance” (2: 18), she devoted herself especially to the cause of refugees. Concurrent with her ceaseless political activity, Jameson continued to politicize the personal in her treatment of domesticity and maternity. In 1924, she fell in love with the publisher Guy Chapman; they lived together in various flats until they both secured a divorce from their respective first spouses, and married in February 1926.115 However, she again experienced an “ungovernable terror that submerged” her as a wife (2: 261), and was additionally plagued by motherhood. From the moment she left Bill in Whitby, she struggled to find her way back to him. She recounts taking the night train from London in order to “spend two days with him in my mother’s house, and be at my desk, heavy-eyed, on Monday morning” (1: 145). In 1924, when Bill was eight, she moved with him to the town of Weybridge; she placed Bill in a school there and commuted to the city but found it hard to manage. When Chapman entered her life, she moved back to London to be with her lover, while Bill stayed on as a boarder at his Weybridge school. Bill’s pleading, “Don’t go,” agonized her (1: 227). In privileging Chapman over her son, Jameson admonished herself as a “wicked woman” (2: 227)—highlighting how motherhood has been deemed incompatible with a woman’s sexual needs.

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The narrative continues with the back and forth of her visits from her various residences in and around London. Bill attended Cambridge University in 1934, joined the Air Squadron in 1935, and eventually became a commercial pilot (1: 306, 357). Wearing the mantle of ‘bad’ mother, Jameson used the autobiography to find absolution for leaving Bill. Following surgery for a lung embolism in 1955, she lay in the hospital recalling her actions, “for which there is no forgiveness, no redemption” (2: 311). Another time, as Bill prepared to depart on a yachting adventure, she was engulfed by guilt: “Then, very distinctly, as if I had only to reach an arm out to touch him, I saw my son as a young child, perhaps two: he was smiling, his hair a yellow cloud round his head, his eyes widely-open and brilliant. If you cry it will be for yourself, I thought. I said, ‘Forgive me.’ He had already gone. With despair, such despair, I thought: Who will forgive me?” (2: 349). Certainly not Jameson. Toward the end of her narrative, she queries of herself as a mother with ambitions beyond motherhood, “Why don’t I forgive that restless young woman?” (2: 382). Perhaps, though, with this text she hoped her readers might.

Naomi Mitchison In her interwar memoir You May Well Ask, Naomi Mitchison charted her routine in her London neighborhood of Chelsea in the early 1920s: “There was a little garden between Cheyne Walk and the Embankment, already fairly full of traffic. Here I used to push the pram, for it was assumed that if one had a baby and a pram one had to push it. I had a big notebook, probably one of the Royal Commission ones which I had liberated from my father, and I used to have this opened out at my end of the pram so that I could write my book while I went on slowly pushing” (162). The baby proved a distraction but, “Still, I got a good deal written in this way” (162). Mitchison certainly wrote a lot as a mother. Between 1918 and 1940, she gave birth to seven children: Geoffrey, Denis (Denny), Murdoch, Avrion, Sonja Lois, Valentine, and Clemency.116 From 1923— the year her first novel, The Conquered, was published—to the 1990s she produced hundreds of pieces of journalism and over eighty books of provocative fiction, non-fiction, and life-writings, including her autobiographies Small Talk, All Change Here, and You May Well Ask. Biographer Jenni Calder describes how Mitchison went about her life “adventuring, protesting, galvanising others, often shouting, crying and stamping her foot, never accepting if it did not seem right to accept,

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making her voice heard in love, anger and the taking of risks.”117 Mitchison used her autobiographies to give voice to herself as a New Woman whose roles as an unconventional mother, wife, and author intersected with her activism as a feminist, birth control advocate, socialist, Scottish Nationalist, and Labour representative, among many other things during her lifetime of remarkably 101 years. As a young girl, Mitchison recounts: “At a jumble sale I bought a small jug for a penny. It had ‘Adventure to the Adventurous’ written on it. That, some day, was to be my motto” (All 12). In like manner, while “virgin daughters” like herself were reined in by chaperones, “our plans for the future always included more freedom” (All 88). It was in this mood of adventure and agitation that she shaped her New Woman identities as wife, mother, and activist. Mitchison was born in Edinburgh to upper-class Scottish parents Louisa Kathleen Trotter and John Scott Haldane, but was raised in Oxford, with her older brother, Jack, where their father, a physiologist and philosopher, was a Fellow of New College (All 9–10).118 Mitchison attended Oxford’s prestigious Dragon School, at the time a boys’ school,119 but with the onset of puberty she was pulled out, and educated at home with a governess. Mitchison went on to study science at Oxford University, her arrival there coinciding with the start of WWI. She became engaged to Dick Mitchison, an Oxford graduate, who had joined the British cavalry regiment of Queen’s Bays; when he was briefly on leave from the Front, they married in February 1916 (131–132). In 1915, Mitchison had gone to London with a friend to work as a Volunteer Aid Detachment nurse in St. Thomas’ hospital. Too young to work in France, though, she returned to her academic studies (she never completed a degree) (129). Her experiences as a VAD tending to wounded soldiers profoundly impacted her literary development: “becoming acquainted with all that pain did something so drastic that I had to write about it, to externalise it on to paper, in order to get it out of my mind: hence the blood and pain in The Conquered and my earlier stories” (127–128). Her exposure to the consequences of war likewise stimulated her activism. She recounts how, “our friends went on getting killed and I saw my father and mother both weeping for them” (135). Her brother, Jack, survived his tour of duty, but Dick Mitchison’s younger brother, Willie, was killed in 1916 (109). Dick Mitchison himself suffered a near-­ fatal skull injury in France. In response to the trauma around her, Mitchison asked, “What was it all for? The younger people at least had begun to discount the patriotic rubbish which we had fed on at the beginning”

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(135). She joined the antiwar League of Nations Society and began writing letters on its behalf for the Oxford Times (153). In December 1917, expecting her first baby in February, Mitchison gave up her work for the League because of health concerns: “Owing to my riding accident at nine I had a somewhat twisted pelvis which was liable to make birth more difficult” (154). She unmasked the realities of parturition: “Well, dangerous and painful it was. I had plenty of lovely chloroform but even so it was worse than I had imagined possible. I must have had some infection which should have been speedily dealt with at a later stage either by sulfonamides or antibiotics. But at this period all that could be used must have been antiseptic douches” (154). She happily reports, “the baby [Geoff] was after all surprising and delightful” (154), but she felt maternally trapped. She rendered her fantasy of flight in a poem: “Tonight, if I was free, I’d go/Out of the house, into the rain, […] Down to the station—to a train,/And get somewhere, away, away,/Oh anywhere, but not to stay” (156). Mitchison did, however, “at least manage one escape” (156)  when she traveled to Italy to visit her husband. As a Wild New Woman she ditched her chaperone on the boat crossing to Dieppe, and alone on the train to Italy, “felt suddenly and gorgeously free and grownup” (158). All Change Here ends with a convergence of private and national freedoms, for soon after her liberatory journey, the war ended. In You May Well Ask, the third and final autobiography, Mitchison quickly established a maternal focus. After setting up their post-WWI domestic scene—her husband passed his Bar exams and they purchased a house in Chelsea—Mitchison relays that in early 1919, “I was pregnant again on purpose but with some discomfort” (14). Following the birth of Denny that year, Murdoch arrived in 1922. Mitchison sums up this period: “For me it was attempting to be a competent wife and mother according to the ideas of the time, but above all it was the intense inward excitement out of which I wrote my first book, The Conquered” (15). She thus exhibits that she fulfilled her conventional duty as mother in tandem with satisfying her professional goals. These goals were made possible by childcare: “The Twenties and Thirties were a curious transitional period for women who were for a few decades free of the household chores which had been thought for so long to be women’s work. Quite a number of women took advantage of this new freedom to write, paint, do scientific or historical research, become doctors, lawyers and so on. I was one. Clearly without domestic help I could not have had a family and been a successful writer” (27). She rationalized that her and her husband’s “social conscience” did

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not extend to giving up their staff of “nurse, cook, housemaid and the rest,” but at least they adopted “a frame of mind where the class structure began to look very unreal” (28). Domestic assistance notwithstanding, Mitchison’s negotiation of motherhood and writing was an ongoing effort. In 1923, the family moved to a larger house, called River Court, in Hammersmith. While “Nurse” often tended to the children, Mitchison would take them “to get shoes, or perhaps to the dentist or to afternoon classes,” explaining: “And all the time the book or poem I was writing would be flowering at the back of my mind, a tasting of words, a slow-motion film waiting only to be written down. And I wrote anywhere: in the Underground—sometimes I took a turn round the Circle Line if I wanted to finish something uninterrupted. In the British Museum or at the dentist’s. Or of course at home, where there were constant interruptions” (37–38). More profoundly, Mitchison confronted the taboo truths of maternal trauma and guilt. She confides, “In 1927, when he was nine, our eldest son Geoff died of meningitis in a London nursing home.” She opposed the tragedy to post-war optimism: “Before that there had been, for me at least, a kind of security and comfort of mind, taken for granted. Life would have its ups and downs but the war was over and things were getting better everywhere—or so it appeared.” While “Progress would go on steadily,” it “had not got to the stage of antibiotics, and the specialists brought desperately in could do nothing.” Mitchison admits, “One recovers in a sense but never completely.” Confronting her grief, she wonders, “With antibiotics Geoff might have been alive today, thinking, presumably about his retirement plans after a life of—what? I still wince away, inevitably blaming myself, thinking if I had taken more trouble at the beginning when he first got ear-ache. If only. If only” (30). Mitchison offers further raw truths about the corporeal, psychological, and physiological consequences of maternity. In writing the maternal body, she tells us that “After my first child in 1918 I was in bed for nearly a fortnight, but I’d had a rather alarming ante-partum haemorrhage and afterwards mastitis with a good deal of fever and pain” (32). For her three births to date, she suffered “fits of post-natal depression” (31); elsewhere she refers to a “wretched miscarriage” (24) and to a “post-miscarriage depression” (78). Relatedly, she describes, “In spite of having babies, which is commonly supposed to tidy things up, I went on having menstrual pain and excessive bleeding. It was not taken seriously in those days,” being “a mere female problem” (34). Mitchison brought into view

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the messy and silenced aspects of pregnancy and parturition, proving that women’s maternal bodies are worthy of literary treatment. Her maternal modernism extends to birth control. She chronicles, “after the birth of our second child, I went and got fitted with a Dutch cap used with an ointment or pessary. For me this was easy and effective. It was the main method used at the North Kensington Clinic.” Her personal experience led to maternal activism: “I was on the committee of the clinic, the first to be started after Marie Stopes’s own” (34).120 Not only did Mitchison “volunteer for tests and information” and help with “interviews and filling in forms” at the clinic, but also she hosted a “fancy dress ball” to raise money for the clinic (34–35). Birth control led to dramatic sexual transformations: “Social patterns usually get changed by technological progress—here by effective contraception, which was itself part of women’s emancipation.” To be sure, “it was probably the main reason why the accepted ideas and practice of marriage and of extra-marital relationships altered so much between 1920 and 1940” (69). Realizing that their sex life was not as fulfilling as they hoped, the Mitchisons agreed to an open marriage. She viewed her personal rebellion as a feminist one: “I sometimes hoped I was fighting for more freedom, for a whole generation of women. My daughters perhaps? Who, I dreamed, would be able to have children by several chosen fathers, uncensored. That was the kind of dream many of us had” (73). Modern sexual and maternal politics informed Mitchison’s fiction like The Conquered (1923) and The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931). She was a best-selling although controversial author, as her “books were thought of as a possible menace to the respectable reader” (171). For instance, her novel about Labour politics We Have Been Warned (1935) ran into “serious trouble” with her editor, Edward Garnett, given that “There is a seduction, a rape, much intimate marital chat, an abortion scene in the Soviet Union (straight from the diary of my visit there in 1932) and so on” (172). She reports of Garnett, “Some bits had definitely shocked him, especially anything about contraceptives: I don’t suppose any reputable writer before my time had mentioned the unpleasantness of the touch of rubber” (173). As the novel depicts such topics from the woman’s point of view, she resented that content about “a normal feminine sensibility” was “thought to be obscene” (175).121 In spotlighting examples like this within her autobiography, Mitchison perpetuated her radical agenda.

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Mitchison’s literary career was consistently conflated with mothering. She describes, with a touch of the absurd: “While I was writing Cloud Cuckoo Land and later The Corn King, which overlapped the birth of two children and the death of one, there was a continuous spin-off of stories, poems, biography, children’s stories and occasional articles. I also did regular novel reviewing for a time, convenient when nursing babies. If the books were not very good, I could manage two at a feed, one for each side, though as the babies got old enough to realise I was not paying total attention, they would get annoyed, let go and protest, or bite” (168). Her growing activism is similarly contextualized by maternity. For instance, she became close with Margery Spring Rice, a social reformer, peace activist, and birth control advocate whom she had met at the Women’s International League; they spent a few evenings a week “talking politics and the arts and of course children” (183). Mitchison became especially involved in politics when her husband ran for the Labour seat for the district of King’s Norton in Warwickshire in the 1931 and 1935 general elections. She too joined the Labour Party, and campaigned for her him (he lost both times) (184). She traveled to the Soviet Union with a group from the British socialist Fabian Society in 1932 in order to learn about the functioning of Communist society (187). In other instances of political activity, Mitchison journeyed to Vienna in 1934 following the defeat of socialism by the dictatorial Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria. She documented the situation, including her surreptitiously “carrying papers from socialist friends to their British comrades” (195). Upon her return to England, she gave a talk to the Fabian Society; thus launched as a public speaker, she “spoke afterwards at all sorts of meetings” for the cause (196). In 1935, she “made another political journey, to America,” with Labour Party friend Zita Baker, to spread the socialist word to impoverished groups like the sharecroppers in Memphis (199). The polity of maternity informs the final section of the autobiography. Under the threat of another war, in the late 1930s the Mitchisons began welcoming “refugees from Nazi Germany and Czechoslovakia who crowded increasingly into River Court,” their London home (214). In 1939, the couple purchased Carradale House, an estate in the village of Carradale in Kintyre, Scotland, where they established a branch of the Labour Party. With war declared on September 1, the Mitchisons prepared to billet children from Glasgow. Terrified of invasion, she worried how to protect “the evacuated children for whom I was responsible” from

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the Germans (234). She took solace in the fact that Denny was now engaged to a fellow-medical student at Cambridge University: “They came up after term and it made all the difference to me having Ruth there and a wedding in the air, some tangible bit of the future to hold on to” (234). Most significantly, Mitchison announces, “I had been so happy to be pregnant again; that too was the future” (234). The narrative closes with Mitchison conflating maternal and national urgencies. She reports, “I had intended to have my confinement in Glasgow though Aunt Edith had kindly offered to take me in at Cloan. But that seemed increasingly pointless and the specialist—I’d had some difficulties during the pregnancy—offered to come over to Carradale” (234). She then shifts: “And meanwhile in and around Kintyre, war preparations went on, road blocks planned and the blowing up of bridges. Signposts were taken down and even place names from buses or carts. The news got worse and worse. Narvik. The old place names from World War I began to come back. Sedan. Dunkirk. Saint Valéry. Paris. In mid-June my diary says ‘What will happen to us all in another fortnight?’ At the beginning of July the specialist duly came over and everything went ahead. But my baby died” (235). Through this jarring final line of the book, Mitchison makes the personal political as she fuses maternal and historical trauma.

Vera Brittain At the close of Testament of Youth, author and pacifist Vera Brittain wrote in 1925 to her fiancé, political scientist George Catlin, about their upcoming marriage. She was eager “to solve the problem of how a married woman, without being inordinately rich, can have children and yet maintain her intellectual and spiritual independence as well as having … time for the pursuit of her own career.” For her, the “problem—that of the woman with children—remains the most vital. I am not sure that by refusing to have children one even solves the problem for one’s self; and one certainly does not solve it for the coming womanhood of the race” (600–601). Brittain documented and explored solutions to this problem in her extensive oeuvre, including, among others, several novels; hundreds of articles, reviews, and columns for periodicals; non-fiction treatises; and her three autobiographies totaling more than 1500 pages. Her writings both informed and were driven by her imperative to find ways to reconcile her career with her roles of wife to Catlin and mother to John and Shirley.

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Biographer Deborah Gorham asserts that Brittain “came to perceive the challenge of combining professional work with marriage and motherhood and of creating feminist marriages as the most important feminist task” of the post-WWI era.122 Testament of Youth and Testament of Experience focus on the years leading up to and following WWI and WWII, respectively; the texts showcase how Brittain, speaking for her generation, bears witness to specific atrocities in history. However, these books, along with Testament of Friendship—her tribute to Winifred Holtby—deal just as much with the personal and universal convergence of issues related to marriage and motherhood. Brittain staged a double coup against a masculine tradition of war literature: she wrote about war itself from a woman’s point of view; and by theorizing a feminist motherhood through the rhetoric of battle, duty, and revolution, she politicized maternity. Brittain constructs herself as a New Woman. We meet her in Testament of Youth growing up, with her brother, Edward, in the provincial upper-­ middle-­class town of Buxton, England. Her father manufactured paper; her mother was a homemaker. When she was thirteen, Brittain was sent to St. Monica’s boarding school in Surrey, where her teacher introduced her to Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour (1911). Brittain praised the book as “that ‘Bible of the Woman’s Movement’ which sounded to the world of 1911 as insistent and inspiring as a trumpet-call summoning the faithful to a vital crusade”; it led to her “acceptance of feminism” (TY 25). Quoting lines like “We take all labour for our province!” Brittain reminisces how she “first visualised in rapt childish ecstasy a world in which women would no longer be the second-rate, unimportant creatures that they were now considered, but the equal and respected companions of men” (TY 26). In Woman and Labour (mentioned in Chap. 2) Schreiner envisioned the “New Man” standing “Side by side with the ‘New Woman,’” and it was just such a union she sought with Catlin. Moreover, Schreiner’s incitement for women’s equality—“We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less. This is our ‘Woman’s Right!’”123—reminds us of Janet Lyon’s argument that feminist manifestoes of the early twentieth century can be read “collectively as a modernist enterprise.”124 We can appreciate how Brittain, via Schreiner, invoked the energy of the modernist revolutionary drive to “make it new.” In 1914, Brittain attended Somerville College, Oxford, on scholarship, but interrupted her studies in 1915 to serve as a Volunteer Aid Detachment nurse, working variously in Buxton, London, Malta, and France. Having become engaged to Roland Leighton, who was fighting in France, she

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experienced her first call to motherhood. She tells us, “I had never much cared for babies or had anything to do with them; before that time I had always been too ambitious, too much interested in too many projects, to become acutely conscious of a maternal instinct” (TY 208). However, fearing for Leighton’s safety, she confesses: “‘Oh, God!’ my half-articulate thoughts would run, ‘do let us get married and let me have a baby—something that is Roland’s very own, something of himself to remember him by if he goes’” (TY 208). This episode marks Brittain’s maternal sense of service to both self and nation. As she would later reflect on Leighton along with her brother and many of their close friends who were killed in the war, men like these represented “the first-rate [who] were gone from a whole generation” (TY 232).125 These sentiments informed her decision to marry and have children with Catlin a decade later. In rhetoric steeped in the eugenics of the race mother, she invokes Leighton and his cohort, wondering, “surely, too, a nation from which the men who excelled in mind and body were mostly vanished into oblivion had never so much required its more vigorous and intelligent women to be the mothers of the generation to come?” (TY 561). Brittain stakes her contentious claim that the “best women” who will repopulate “the finest flowers of English manhood” are those who are “both mothers and professional workers” (TY 561). When the war ended, Brittain returned to Oxford to complete her studies. There she met Catlin (identified only as “G.” in the trilogy126), the future author of books like The Science and Method of Politics (1926) and member of the British Labour Party. They wed in June 1925 and, since Catlin had begun an academic appointment at Cornell University in Ithaca, they settled in New  York, where Brittain had every expectation that she would use her time abroad to advance her career. To date she had published two novels, The Dark Tide (1923) and Not Without Honour (1925), and had acquired a “precarious foothold” in “London journalism” (TE 33). She had been trying to solve the marriage and motherhood problem “in articles and on the public platforms of feminist organisations” (TY 561) like the Six Point Group and its organ Time and Tide (TY 535). However, celebrating their first anniversary at the end of the academic year, she lamented that she was little more than a “Faculty wife” (TE 38). Her sacrifices no longer tenable, she conceived their “semi-detached marriage,” upon which she relocated to London and he was to join her off-term (TE 39). The new arrangement strained the marriage. Catlin was

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bitter about the separation, while Brittain in turn resented his frustrations, especially his sexual ones.127 Brittain was reticent in publishing intimate details about their marriage, but Gorham documents that Catlin engaged in multiple extra-marital affairs that had significant “emotional costs” for Brittain.128 Gorham makes the convincing suggestion that Brittain withheld public commentary on her family problems because she “had an investment in presenting her own marriage as a successful experiment in the project of creating new feminist forms for heterosexual relationships.”129 Brittain thus suppressed personal failure to promote domestic modernism. Back in London in 1926, Brittain published in periodicals like the Manchester Guardian, The Nation, and Time and Tide (TE 43). She soon became pregnant and worried that “motherhood would inevitably double the obstacles which had still to be overcome in the struggle to be both a wife and a writer” (TE 50). However, while pregnant she finished her book Women’s Work in Modern England (1928), and was invited by the London office of the Yorkshire Post to write a leader on American President Calvin Coolidge’s decision not to run for reelection. Brittain calls this “request from Fleet Street […] an epoch-making event” because, “In 1927 young women were not asked to write top-flight editorials […] on major political declarations” (TE 53). Brittain proved that pregnancy and politics could be combined. John was born prematurely on December 21, 1927.130 Brittain refers to his “catastrophic arrival,” due in part to the “mistake” that she was “given no alleviation for the pain” of birth, leading to post-partum depression that “bleak spring” (TE 51–52). She politicized her trauma, protesting the lack of adequate maternal care for “nine-tenths of the mothers in this country”: “And government after government insists that we can’t afford a national maternity service—we who spend millions a year on armaments to destroy the bodies which are produced at such cost’” (TE 51–52). Feeling such “vehement anger” toward the government, she wanted to “batter down the solid walls of the Ministry of Health” and to give the Minister “a woman’s inside, and compel him to have six babies, all without anaesthetics” (TE 52). Brittain employed her autobiography to privilege, and to demand that others adopt, a matrifocal perspective, while insisting that female and domestic issues like mothering are political and of national significance. Although Brittain was largely focused in her work on middle-class professional women, aligning her with Old feminism, her concern for “nine-tenths” of the country’s mothers spotlights her

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attention to lower and working-classes as well. Indeed, biographers Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge note that Brittain was sympathetic to New feminist initiatives to provide not only family allowances but also access to birth control information and training in mothercraft, for instance.131 Brittain was financially dependent on her writing, and therefore she returned to work shortly after giving birth (TE 54). She was able to achieve her goals in large measure due to Holtby, the third adult member of Brittain’s household, described by Brittain as “my second self” (TE 29). The two women met at Oxford in 1920: like Brittain, who returned to Somerville College in 1919, Holtby had similarly interrupted her studies to serve in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in England and France in 1918, returning to university in 1919. Graduating together in 1921, they planned to support themselves through writing. In the spirit of modernism, they “agreed to share … the adventurous, experimental London life” (TF 108) where they set up a studio in the neighborhood of “intellectual Bloomsbury” (TF 113).132 They lived together until Brittain married and transferred to the United States with Catlin. Within a year, though, as mentioned, Brittain formulated her semi-detached plan that would restore her “joint existence” with Holtby (TF 144): Brittain would live with Holtby upon her return to England, and Catlin would join them on his teaching breaks. With Brittain’s second pregnancy, they moved to Chelsea. The trio’s situation was viewed as scandalous by some, for it was assumed that Brittain and Holtby must be lovers. Brittain reveals: “The unusual domestic arrangement which suited us so well gave rise, I was assured, to a plentiful crop of rumours. Chelsea is notoriously the home of the unconventional, but if most of its myths have as innocent an origin as those circulated about ourselves they are indeed tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury” (TF 291–292). While scholars debate the likelihood that Brittain and Holtby engaged in a lesbian relationship, such speculation is beyond my scope.133 The issue does bear note, though, in so far as it roused not only Brittain’s indignation but Catlin’s, as he wrote to her, “You preferred her to me … It humiliated me and ate me up.”134 Brittain’s efforts to find alternative kinship systems to accommodate her progressive initiatives for career-family balance came at multiple costs to herself and those around her. Testament of Friendship recounts the ongoing mothering of Brittain’s children by Holtby, who cared for them at home for upward of several months at a time while Brittain and Catlin traveled around the world on lecture and writing tours. After Holtby’s untimely death from Bright’s

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disease in 1935, Brittain lamented of herself and friends: “We all exploited her” (TF 441).135 Brittain was unable to wholly undermine—and indeed benefitted from—the Victorian “angel in the house,” Holtby, although Brittain used her narrative to offer a critique of the domestic structures they both tried to redesign. Brittain’s and Holtby’s mothering must be contextualized by class. After the birth of Shirley on July 27, 1930, Brittain confesses, “Sometimes I felt appalled by the load of domestic detail which two small children involved,” and understood in the face of such interruptions “why no woman has ever achieved the concentration demanded by the work of a Shakespeare or a Bernard Shaw” (TE 63). Yet, even when they functioned as stay-at-home or hands-on parents, Brittain and Holtby were supported by paid caregivers. At the same time, Brittain reproached Catlin’s limited involvement with the children.136 Brittain experienced a maternal dilemma in choosing between children and career. With the publication of Testament of Youth in 1933, she was elevated to a new level of celebrity and became an in-demand public figure. As she prepared to leave on her first tour to the United States in 1934 to promote the book, she felt the imbalanced weight of leaving her children: “Why was a professional job, regarded as meritorious when performed by a man, so often made by circumstances to appear selfish and callous when done by a woman?” The day before she left, “At midnight, when I went upstairs for a final look at the sleeping children, [Shirley] woke up and put her arms round my neck, and my resolution to fulfil my engagements, come what might, almost broke down” (TE 111). Brittain does offer images of a moment’s respite in which she has glimpses of ‘having it all’ (TE 45–46). She exclaims upon her book’s publication, “How golden the world seemed now that Testament of Youth was finished and accepted! How wonderful it was to have produced such a large book and brought up John and Shirley too!” (TE 87). In addition to the maternal dilemma of the workforce, the autobiographies illustrate how motherhood was impacted by, or fused with, war and politics. Brittain’s feminism was complemented by her socialism and pacifism, which directed her writings and work for organizations like the antiwar League of Nations Union, the Peace Pledge Union, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.137 Throughout the interwar years she traveled around Europe and the United States, “talking on books and authors, war and peace, or social revolution” (TE 182). Relatedly, she enumerated current events in tandem with news about her children. For

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instance, she merged Shirley’s need for an operation on her tonsils with Hitler’s March 15, 1939, aggression: “I had just arranged for this to be done […] when Hitler marched into Prague” (TE 196). She updates, “Two days after her operation, on a Good Friday which had seemed so peaceful […], the six o’clock broadcast news reported that Italy had invaded Albania” (TE 199). Brittain illuminates how the broad events of history necessarily fuse with those of the daily, the mundane, and the maternal. The most profound impact of the war on Brittain’s family occurred when, “A fortnight after the children’s return to school the Nazis marched into Holland and Belgium, thus initiating the period of acute danger which was to change history for John and Shirley and their generation” (TE 249). Terrified of a British invasion, Catlin and Brittain made the painful decision to send their children alone to the United States, where friends in Minnesota had offered refuge. Brittain declined the invitation to go with them, refusing to abandon “the obligation to record these days” which she deemed her “real war-work” (TE 261). She sensed the absence of the children as “a double amputation” (TE 311), and when they returned after three years abroad, Brittain was shocked not to recognize them. She mourned, “the lost years of their childhood are lost to me still” (TE 257), but assumed that “hundreds of other mothers” who similarly evacuated their children “must have experienced” similar upheavals (TE 316). Brittain thus formed a web of attachment between herself and other mothers, merging motherhood into the traumas of communal history. Testament of Experience closes post-WWII, in 1950, with Brittain reflecting that her work “had played a small part in creating the mental revolution through which [she] had lived” (TE 472). Brittain in fact played a large part in creating a maternal revolution. Looking ahead to the future of her daughter and others, she anticipates the prize of victory: “Shirley, I believed, would no more find marriage an end in itself than I had done, but in the process of becoming a complete human being she would not meet with the criticisms, the obstacles, and the traditional assumptions which had handicapped my generation. Except for a period deliberately set aside for bearing and rearing children, the luxury of ‘checking out’ at will from the world’s work into private life would soon be as little expected from wives as it had always been from husbands” (TE 474). Brittain implies that the message from Schreiner’s New Woman manifesto—“We take all labour for our province!”—has been heard. As I discuss in Chap. 8, Brittain’s optimism may have been premature.

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Conclusion Heilbrun posits that Brittain “does not emerge from her Testaments as wholly lovable,” but that “A woman less controversial would have accomplished nothing that remains to us of her efforts, least of all her record of them.”138 Brittain, Jameson, and Mitchison, as well as their New Woman predecessors Gilman and Wells, were all controversial figures, as evidenced by their autobiographies. In living “the conventional and the revolutionary, the old life and the new,”139 they negotiated prams, politics, and writing. As young mothers Gilman and Jameson both divorced their first husbands, but went on to have second marriages that lasted nearly forty and fifty years respectively; Wells, Mitchison, and Brittain remained married for over thirty, fifty, and forty years respectively, unions ended only by death. By these statistics, and by the fact that they all had children, the women could be considered conventional wives and mothers. However, as we have seen, they resisted conformity in diverse ways. Whether it be through a semi-detached or open marriage, or marriage predicated on long absences from the home, the women upended traditional matrimony. Concurrently, in their raw accounts of maternal love, duty, and ambivalence, and taboo references to the maternal body and post-partum depression, they unmasked motherhood. Moreover, Gilman, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain were remarkably prolific in their literary output and, with Wells, responded with passion and conviction to the most pressing issues of their day. They wrote socially minded novels and treatises, worked as Volunteer Aid Detachment nurses, served on organizations and committees, and embarked on regional, national, and international lecture tours addressing topics like feminism, suffrage, racial violence, domestic reform, labor and economics, eugenics, pacifism, and authoritarianism, among so many others. They were Wild New Women on the move, “often politically radical, ‘radically eccentric.’”140 It was through a fusion of the personal and the political that they approached and experienced maternity. They shared Brittain’s drive to solve “the problem” of how a woman could achieve career-family balance, articulating a politics grounded in their ongoing conflation of home and state, motherhood and citizenship. They spent decades advocating for societal, political, and economic changes so that women should never be called on to make professional sacrifices in the name of maternal goals, or to accept that a woman’s only option was to choose between them. Brittain, Jameson, and Mitchison were in part indebted to their first-­ generation sisters like Gilman and Wells. Gilman closes her autobiography

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by returning to the mantra that guided her as a young woman: “The one predominant duty is to find one’s work and do it” (335). Racism led to Gilman’s “mixed legacy,”141 and a eugenic privileging of the “best” mothers (TY 561) render Brittain an alienating figure. Wells offers a corrective to such views. They all share, however, the persona of the rebellious New Woman. They theorized and practiced innovative and controversial ways of combining motherhood and wifehood with autonomous self-­realization, in conjunction with a commitment to one’s wider social communities. Their maternal decisions came with profound costs. Functioning to varying degrees as absentee mothers, they often faced long-term guilt, stigmatization, and even psychic trauma for heeding their ceaseless yearning for personal, professional, and physical freedoms. They made the personal political within their narratives of broader generational suffering, and wrote their autobiographies not only to depict what they had witnessed, but also to warn their contemporaries about the consequences of racism and war. Wells, for instance, seeks to “fire the race pride of all our young people” (4), while Jameson presses her readers to appreciate that “we have barely emerged from the smoke of burning flesh hanging over Auschwitz into the shadow of the nuclear age” (1: 302). Joannou comments that Jameson composed her autobiography during “the sexual and political radicalism of the 1960s. That decade saw a revival of interest in socialist politics on the part of a new generation who had been radicalised by opposition to the war in Vietnam, the events of May 1968 in France, and the movements for women’s liberation and gay liberation.”142 Further, though, Jameson—like Gilman, Mitchison, and Brittain—wrote her autobiographies to elucidate the very real delimiting and debilitating consequences of motherhood, both conventional and unconventional, for women. To be sure, in contrast to Brittain’s hopefulness, Jameson is cynical to those riding the second wave of a sexual revolution: “a woman who wishes to be a creator of anything except children should be content to be a nun or a wanderer on the face of the earth” (2: 379–380). Jameson contends, “The condition of genius may begin to be as common in women as in men only after several generations in which enough women renounce their biological functions. (I offer the idea to feminists.)” (1: 199). That said, “A race of free women would be the end of humanity, since freedom and childbearing are incompatible” (1: 310). Jameson, Gilman, Mitchison, and Brittain all send messages—optimistic and pessimistic—to audiences in the present of their writing, forging

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connections between past, present, and future generations via their critiques of institutional motherhood. In A Room of One’s Own, attending to the question “What were the conditions in which women lived?” Virginia Woolf asserts: “fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” It is “when the web is pulled askew” that “one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.143 Light suggests that “between the wars a sense of that other history, a history from inside, gained new significance, that the place of private life and what it represented became the subject of new kinds of national and public interest and found new literary forms.”144 These forms include, I argue, women’s political autobiography. Montefiore shows us that collective memory “dissolves the rigid conventional distinction between things inside the psyche (thoughts) and things outside (material realities).”145 Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain depict the material conditions of their lives, while foregrounding their collective memories as mothers, wives, authors, and activists on intimate, communal, and national levels. Their texts themselves create a web, a network, a dialogue between the women and, by extension, their readers. Their autobiographies inscribe New Womanism through conservative modernism and intermodernism, wherein issues like the home, war, community, and work forge maternal modernisms. Matrifocal autobiographers make the personal political as they offer windows into their rooms furnished with their collective experiences. As political citizens who politicized maternity, Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain are intermodernist mothers who chose to share their renegade stories on their own terms.

Notes 1. Brittain, “A Woman’s Notebook,” 663. Quotations from published and unpublished work by Brittain in this book are included by permission of Mark Bostridge and T.  J. Brittain-Catlin, Literary Executors for the Estate of Vera Brittain 1970. I am most grateful for their support. The unpublished materials are housed in the Vera Brittain Archive (VBA), William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Series G, and identified in the Bibliography as VBA. I greatly appreciate the assistance of Bev Bayzat, McMaster Library Assistant.

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2. Ibid., 663. Duncan, My Life (1927); Mannin, Confessions and Impressions (1930). Brittain does not specify the Pankhurst text but it could be either My Own Story (1914) or The Suffragette Movement (1931). 3. Ibid., 663. 4. Brittain, “Autobiography as History,” 190. 5. Page references to these primary texts will be included in the body of the chapter, identified accordingly: TY, TF, and TE for Brittain’s Testaments of Youth, Friendship, Experience; 1 and 2 for Jameson’s two volumes; Small, All, and You for Mitchison’s Small Talk, All Change Here, and You May Well Ask; Living for The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman; and Crusade for Wells’ Crusade for Justice. 6. For more on these terms, see my discussions in Chaps. 2 and 3. 7. Hanscombe and Smyers, Writing for their Lives, 12. 8. Mitchison was mother to seven children. Her eldest, Geoffrey, born 1918, passed away from meningitis when he was nine, in 1927; Clemency, born in July 1940, suffered heart disease and survived only one day. 9. Brittain, “Autobiography as History,” 191. Brittain cites Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s My Part in a Changing World, and Beatrice Webb’s My Apprenticeship and Our Partnership. 10. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” 745. 11. Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 127. 12. Clay, British Women Writers, 2. 13. Clay also includes Stella Benson, Lady Margaret Rondda, and Laura Hutton in her network. 14. Ibid., 1. 15. Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s, 52–53. 16. Ibid., 53. 17. Ibid., 52. 18. Ibid., 21. 19. In addition to Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain, Montefiore lists, among many authors, Valentine Ackland, Stella Benson, Nancy Cunard, Winifred Holtby, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf. 20. Clay, British Women Writers, 15. 21. Lejeune, quoted in Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 1. 22. Buss, “Memoir,” 595. 23. Couser, Memoir, 20. 24. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 256. 25. Ibid., 18. 26. Even though Wells’ autobiography was left unfinished, editor Alfreda M. Duster notes that during the writing, Wells “wrote, rewrote, revised, and corrected the manuscript” (xxx). 27. Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s, 2. 28. Ibid., 8. See his book On Collective Memory (1939).

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29. Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s, 8. 30. Ibid., 9. 31. Grierson (1898–1972) was a Scottish filmmaker.  In A New History of Documentary Film, Betsy A. McLane states, “the English-language documentary is said to start with American Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, shot in Canada and released in the United States in 1922” (4). Depicting Inuit life in the Canadian North, Flaherty “fashioned a new form of filmmaking”; “His second film, Moana (1926), prompted John Grierson—then a young Scot on an extended visit to the United States— to devise a new use for the word documentary. Grierson introduced the word, as an adjective” in his February 8, 1926 review for The New York Sun: “Of course, Moana being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value” (4). McLane notes, “After meeting Flaherty, Grierson carried the word and his developing aesthetic  theory and sense of social purpose back to Great Britain” (6). 32. O’Reilly and Bizzini, “Introduction,” From the Personal to the Political, 16. 33. Riley, Feminism and Women’s Writing, 161–62. 34. Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s, 9–10. 35. Petrie, Templates for Authorship, 41. 36. Ibid., 2. 37. Ibid., 8. 38. Ibid., 3. 39. Montefiore, Men  and Women Writers of the 1930s, 2; cited in Petrie, Templates for Authorship, 4. 40. Petrie, Templates for Authorship, 7–8. 41. Ibid., 11. 42. Ibid., 12. 43. O’Reilly and Bizzini, “Introduction,” From the Personal to the Political, 16. 44. Petrie, Templates for Authorship, 18. 45. McKay, “The Narrative Self,” 96. 46. Ibid., 96. 47. Ibid., 97. 48. Ibid., 100. McKay cites Harriet Jacobs, Nancy Prince, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others. 49. McKay, “Race, Gender, and Cultural Context,” 178. McKay also cites the 1940 autobiography by Mary Church Terrell, as well as later twentieth-­ century examples by Zora Neale Hurston, Daisy Bates, and Angela Davis, among others. 50. Petrie, Templates for Authorship, 28. 51. Heilbrun, “Introduction,” Feminist Forerunners, 6. 52. Ibid., 7, 4. 53. Ingman, Women’s Fiction Between the Wars, 7. 54. Ibid., 8.

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55. Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty, 3–4. 56. Joannou, “Introduction,” The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945, 10. 57. Ingman, Women’s Fiction Between the Wars, 14. 58. Ibid., 14, 15. 59. Ibid., 11. 60. Ibid., 18. 61. Ibid., 18. 62. Maslen notes that Jameson agreed to serve in the late 1930s (Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson, 224). 63. Ingman, Women’s Fiction Between the Wars, 18. 64. Ibid., 9. 65. Ibid., 12. 66. Ibid., 16–17. 67. Light, Forever England, 10–11. 68. Ibid., 11. 69. Bluemel, Intermodernism, 1. 70. Ibid., 2–3. 71. Ibid., 4–5. 72. Ibid., 15, note #4. See Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism.” 73. Ibid., 5–6. 74. Ibid., 14. 75. Gale, “Foreword,” The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, xxvii. 76. Ibid., xxxvii. 77. Tuttle and Kessler, “Introduction,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 4. 78. Lane, “Introduction,” The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, xix. 79. Petrie, Templates for Authorship, 118. 80. Lane, “Introduction,” The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, xxii. 81. She read broadly, including biology, sociology, and religion (36–37). 82. Her father paid the fees (45). 83. Gilman supported herself by selling her art and teaching. 84. They decided to divorce in 1880, but due to complicated laws the final decree was granted in April 1894 (167). 85. Although Gilman notes the story was first published in the May 1891 issue of The New England Magazine, the story was published in the January 1892 issue of the journal (119). See “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman A Dual-Text Critical Edition edited by Shawn St. Jean (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006). 86. Petrie remarks that Houghton is a cipher in the text, a sign of Gilman’s inability to focus on happiness at the expense of her dedication to social service (Templates for Authorship, 140). Lane posits that Gilman did not focus on the “intense, passionate, loving courtship and marriage” because

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“it was too private and too special” (“Introduction,” The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, xxiv). 87. Katharine, an artist, married fellow artist F. Tolles Chamberlin (296–297) 88. See Cynthia Davis (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 151) and Charlotte Rich (“An ‘Absent Mother,’” 91–92) for their research which reveals Katharine resented and suffered from Gilman’s absences. 89. Tuttle and Kessler, “Introduction,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2. 90. Despite so many similarities and intersections in their living and working lives, neither Gilman nor Wells references the other in their autobiographies. 91. McKay, “The Narrative,” 96. 92. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 191. 93. Brittain, “Autobiography as History,” 191. 94. Recall from Chap. 3 that Nella Larsen’s protagonist Helga Crane cites lynching as her rationale for rejecting motherhood: “More dark bodies for mobs to lynch” (69). 95. A widower, Barnett was also the father of two sons from his first marriage. 96. Wells describes, “It was a famous gathering of famous women,” including “Mrs. Rosa Douglass Sprague, only daughter of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, famous antislavery worker” and “Mrs. Booker T.  Washington, who was doing her maiden work as a presiding officer” (205) 97. As discussed in Chap. 2: Berg, Mothering the Race, 6, 146 (note #6). 98. Carlson, “Black Ideals of Womanhood in the Late Victorian Era,” 61. 99. Ibid., 62. 100. Ibid., 70. 101. Ibid., 67. 102. The club was named in honor of famed abolitionist and reformer, and close friend, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895). 103. I have not been able to find a copy of this talk. Editor Duster notes that many of Wells’ “pamphlets and other letters and documents gathered during her long and eventful career were lost in a fire in her home, and efforts to find copies have proved fruitless” (“Introduction,” Crusade for Justice, xxvii). 104. Duster, “Introduction,” Crusade for Justice, xxx. The book literally stops in mid-sentence: “I also received some beautiful letters from members of the board of directors thanking us for calling attention to what was go […]” (361). 105. Duster, “Introduction,” Crusade for Justice, xv. 106. Joannou, “Storm Jameson’s Journey from the North,” 148. 107. Ibid., 161. 108. Sydney became a geneticist, Oswald, a novelist.

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109. Jameson cites the ending of this article: “In Mr. Shaw’s work there are no others—from the annoying Candida to the futile Tanner they belong to an age that is passing and will pass with it. To create them their author has spent much wit and little humour, much mockery and little irony; much intellectual sky-rocketing and little truth; no beauty, and hardly anything of inspiration” (1: 67–68). 110. At this time, Jameson became involved with Dora Marsden, whose Freewoman was now renamed The Egoist: “When I was in London, I had written two pieces of dramatic criticism for The Egoist, and met its founder, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and that remarkable woman, her friend Dora Marsden” (1: 77). Jameson explains that after she returned to Whitby, Weaver offered her a job on The Egoist, and although Jameson was eager to accept, she turned it down upon the request of her mother, who wanted her to remain at home with her. Rebecca West accepted the position instead (1: 79). 111. Jameson explains that she brought on the miscarriage “by inconceivable means: I remember sharply what I did, but I am not going to tell: I don’t want either to harm some other young woman, as desperate as I was, who may read this book, or to pass for insane” (I: 94). 112. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 1. 113. Clarke, estranged in Canterbury, had no interest in her arrangements for Bill or assisting with the child (1: 136). He did, however, regard her decision as self-centered: “You did it entirely to please yourself” (1: 145). 114. She describes her work for Sanger in 1921: “in July I was offered fifty pounds for what was to be a month’s research, but turned out to be much more exacting. Mrs. Margaret Sanger, an American crusader for birth control, had written a book filled with statistics—of population, incomes, venereal disease, births per age, per profession per year, I forget what more. They were all to do with the United States, and she wanted them replaced by the corresponding English figures for an English publisher”; “More than half the statistics did not exist in England, and had to be made out by i­nference—invention is the correct term—from such facts as were on record” (1: 171). 115. See Maslen, Life  in the Writings of Storm Jameson, 70–71; Birkett, Margaret Storm Jameson, 78–80. 116. Geoffrey, born 1918, passed away from meningitis when he was nine, in 1927 (You, 30); see also Calder, The Burning Glass, 112. Clemency, born in July 1940, suffered heart disease and survived only one day (Calder, The Burning Glass, 210). 117. Calder, The Burning Glass, 2. 118. All Change Here 9. Until otherwise noted, all quotations are from All Change Here.  For a detailed portrait of her early years, see Mitchison’s Small Talk. 119. See Calder, The Burning Glass, 23–24.

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120. Mitchison notes, “Marie Stopes was quite often at my parents’ house, discussing the coal measures with my father. She was a colleague, a good palaeobotanist” (34). 121. The novel was turned down by Garnett at Jonathan Cape publishers, and by others. Mitchison reluctantly agreed to some changes, and the novel was eventually accepted by Constable and published in 1935 (see, i.e., You May, 175). 122. Gorham, Vera Brittain, 179. 123. Schreiner, Woman and Labour, np. 124. Lyon, Janet, “Manifestoes from the Sex War,” 67. 125. Leighton was killed on December 23, 1915; her brother, Edward, on June 15, 1918. 126. Catlin asked to remain anonymous. According to Gorham, as Brittain was completing the manuscript of Testament of Youth, she and Catlin “quarrelled bitterly over her treatment of their relationship and she reluctantly agreed to cut much of the material, leaving only the truncated account that appears in the published version” (Vera Brittain, 188). 127. Gorham, Vera Brittain, 194. 128. Ibid., 198–99. 129. Ibid., 189. 130. She gave birth in the Chelsea Nursing Home (Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain, 226). 131. Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain, 177. 132. Bloomsbury was one of the key districts of modernism, evidenced by the eponymous Bloomsbury Group that included, among others, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster. 133. For a discussion of their relationship, see Clay (British  Women Writers,  37–50); Gorham (Vera  Brittain, 149–165); and Berry and Bostridge (Vera Brittain, 274–75). 134. Quoted from a 1937 letter from Catlin to Brittain, following Holtby’s death (Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain, 342). 135. Berry and Bostridge trace how following Hotlby’s death, Brittain turned increasingly to Storm Jameson for the kinds of professional and emotional support she had received from Holtby, “seeking to mould her as a substitute friend and confidante” (Vera  Brittain,  360), and had even appointed Jameson her literary executor and one of John and Shirley’s guardians in her will (Vera Brittain, 360,  390). Growing conflicts between the two were exacerbated in early 1940 when Jameson resigned from the Peace Pledge Union, and the relationship was permanently ended; neither gives space to the other in their respective autobiographies. See Berry and Bostridge (Vera Brittain, 413–418). See also Clay’s chapter on the relationship, and biographies of Jameson by Maslen and Birkett.

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136. See, for example, TF 351; TE 51, 227. 137. For details on these organizations see Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain, 351–52. 138. Heilbrun, “Introduction,” Testament of Experience, 11. 139. Ibid., 4. 140. Bluemel, Intermodernism, 1. 141. Tuttle and Kessler, “Introduction,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2. 142. Joannou, “Storm Jameson’s Journey from the North,” 150. 143. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 47. 144. Light, Forever England, 5. 145. Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s, 8.

CHAPTER 7

“A Mother, a Wife, a Worker and a Wonder-­Woman”: Matroethnography, Black Feminism, and Postcolonial New Womanhood in Buchi Emecheta’s London Narratives

Introduction: A Hybrid Trilogy In 1972, Nigerian-born British author Florence “Buchi” Emecheta (1944–2017) published her first book, In the Ditch. It was first serialized in 1971 as Life in the Ditch in the New Statesman, which Emecheta tells us was “the Socialist paper and well respected in English sociological discipline” (Head 67). The autobiographical novel depicts the experiences of protagonist Adah (Emecheta’s persona), an immigrant coping as a single mother of five children in London during the late 1960s. As described by Emecheta in her autobiography Head Above Water, In the Ditch “is a documentary novel of the daily happenings of my life when I was living in the place officially known as ‘Montagu Tibbles’ off Prince of Wales Road in North The original version of the chapter has been revised with errors corrected at pages 225 and 236. A correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_9 Emecheta, Head Above Water, 228. The following abbreviations will be used for Emecheta’s texts: Head Above Water (Head), Second Class Citizen (Second), and In the Ditch (In). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2023 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_7

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London”—referred to locally as Pussy Cat Mansions (66). Adah explains of these council flats that “the Mansions were a unique place, a separate place individualised for ‘problem families.’ Problem families with real problems were placed in a problem place. So even if one lived at the Mansions and had no problems the set-up would create problems” (In 17). During this time, Emecheta was pursuing a BSc in sociology from the University of London, remarking, “My life was strictly determined by my family and my degree course.” She discovers, “The more I went into sociological theories the more I could find their equivalent or what I termed their interpretation in real life,” and consequently, she decided, “to start writing again about my social reality” (Head 57–58). The result was In the Ditch, which many critics pointed out “was the first book they had read about the English working class written by a foreigner living among them” (Head 71). Coming off the success of In the Ditch, Emecheta was, she tells us, “determined to write another book in which I would trace Adah’s life from Nigeria and explain why she had to be where she was, in the ditch” (Head 72). This novel, Second Class Citizen (1974), charts the younger Adah’s growing up in British colonial Nigeria in the 1940s and, following Nigeria’s independence on October 1, 1960, her subsequent move to England in 1962 with her husband, Francis Obi, and two children. Emecheta underscores how these two stories are reflective of her life. With In the Ditch, “I decided to use the fictitious African name of Adah, meaning ‘daughter’” but “People could tell straightaway that Adah’s life was over fifty per cent mine” (Head 58); and she refers to Second Class Citizen as a “self-documentary” novel (Head 60). A third text, Head Above Water (1986), is Emecheta’s formal autobiography. It traces the same chronology as Second Class Citizen and In the Ditch within the first several chapters, and then extends the narrative through the 1970s and early 1980s. It follows Emecheta’s continuing MPhil and DPhil studies in sociology, her various jobs as a social worker, and her development as a writer, all while raising her children as a single parent. Head Above Water ultimately champions Emecheta’s rise from poverty to middle-class status, setting her up to become one of the most famous Nigerian-British writers of the twentieth century. She produced, among her many accomplishments, sixteen novels, three children’s stories, and television scripts; served as a lecturer and visiting professor in Europe, the United States, and Nigeria; and was made an Officer of the British Empire in 2005.1 Ashley Dawson regards In the Ditch, Second Class Citizen, and Head Above Water as Emecheta’s London trilogy, signaling a critique of “double colonization” by which women like Emecheta were oppressed by both African traditions and British racism, the latter including discrimination

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emanating from the post-1945 welfare system.2 Emecheta’s narratives, censuring the institutions of family and state, anticipate “black feminist theory and activism in subsequent decades,” rendering Emecheta “a pioneering figure in overcoming the invisibility to which black British women were relegated.”3 In particular, the books exhibit “three important stages that are often cited as the classic path toward women’s empowerment: discovering voice; establishing forms of collective solidarity; and engaging in political activism.”4 Drawing on Dawson’s theorizing of In the Ditch and Second Class Citizen—he refers to, but does not engage with, Head Above Water—in this chapter I regard these three texts as Emecheta’s London matrifocal trilogy. I read them through a unique kaleidoscopic lens of new modernism that expands periodization to include postcolonial eras, and that views the social sciences as constitutive of modernism. Elsewhere I have coined the term “matroethnography” as a genre that foregrounds maternal subjectivities that are individual and collective, personal and communal.5 The term combines the Latin root for mater, matro, with ethnography, and alludes to the auto (autobiography) in autoethnography, itself a generic composite from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and life-writing. I employ it here to categorize Emecheta’s trilogy, produced by Emecheta as a trained sociologist. At the same time, I view Emecheta and Adah as rebellious wives, mothers, and authors in New Woman versions of the Künstlerroman, the novel of an artist’s maturation. Taken together, I argue that Emecheta blends creative storytelling with ethnographic observation to produce innovative, hybrid narratives about race, class, and gender, imbricated with maternal modernisms.

Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Periodization In mapping Emecheta’s writing at the intersection of postcolonialism and modernism, I turn to recent studies in new modernism that afford such a confluence through their expansions in the field that are both temporal and spatial. For instance, in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism, editors Richard Began and Michael Valdez Moses highlight the significant extent to which their titular themes are in dialogue with each other. They query, “To what extent did post-1950 Anglophone literature grow out of what for postcolonial writers was the sometimes alien and exotic soil of Euromodernism?” Began and Moses find that many postcolonial authors viewed modernism “as enabling, not only because its adversarial and iconoclastic ethos appealed to artists eager to break with the past, but also

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because its forward-looking emphasis on ‘making it new’ was of a piece with the establishment of new nations.”6 Began and Moses’ essay collection contributes to “canonical realignments” falling under the rubrics of “Geomodernisms, Transnational Modernism, Global Modernisms and Planetary Modernisms.”7 These expansive turns are manifested in studies by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, Jahan Ramazani, Matt Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, and Susan Stanford Friedman, among others.8 Begam and Moses foreground that for their contributors, modernism generally stands for Euro-American literatures produced from around the mid-to-late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, but they also showcase modernists like Olive Schreiner, Mulk Raj Anand, and Rabindranath Tagore who operated outside of this geographical frame.9 Relatedly, postcolonial refers to texts “largely produced in the second half of the century—during the period of decolonization, the breakup of empires, and the emergence of newly independent nations— which is to say in the aftermath of some of the most influential modernist writings of the first half of the century.”10 That said, periodization is complicated, being determined by the unique situations of disparate countries. For instance, the British Empire was dismantled largely in the wake of World War II, from within India, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, while countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand obtained self-rule earlier, “with their independence being formally ratified by the Statute of Westminster in 1931.”11 Overall, Begam and Moses’ collection provides a global perspective on the ways “Anglophone writers engaged with the literary, intellectual, and cultural heritage of modernism” from the 1950s on.12 Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms additionally expands the spatialization and periodization of modernism. Friedman’s extension beyond the typical cut-off range of the 1940s provides me with a particularly useful framework for reading Emecheta’s postcolonial gendered rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s in relation to the colonial New Womanism of the Victorian fin de siècle, at the nexus of modernism and modernity. Friedman seeks “a fundamental rethinking of modernity that posits it as a geohistorical condition that is multiple, contradictory, interconnected, polycentric, and recurrent for millennia and across the globe.”13 Modernism is the “domain of creative expressivity within modernity’s dynamic of rapid change, a domain that interacts with the other arenas of rupture such as technology, trade, migration, state formation, societal institutions, and so forth.”14 Where “Multiple and recurrent modernities produce their own

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particular multiple and recurrent modernisms,” so “Across the globe and through time, these modernisms are not only distinctive but also linked to other modernisms in vast relational networks.”15 Friedman pushes the field “in new directions by focusing on other modernisms in non-Western parts of the world” by way of what she calls “the planetary turn.”16 For Friedman, “a planetary modernist studies necessarily draws upon colonial and postcolonial geohistories—that is, the period of early-­ twentieth-­century imperial power (European, American, Turkish, Russian, Japanese), its dissolution in the context of world war, and the emergence of new nation-states in Africa and Asia.”17 Of special relevance is her assertion that “the turbulence of modernity” is a catalyst for migration,18 leading to diasporas that “involve a personally felt experience of communal exile that simultaneously includes the sense of being cut off from the past and past home/lands and the necessity to forge new, often imaginary home/lands for the future. Consequently, memory and creativity are constitutive dimensions of diasporic modernities.”19 The dislocations brought on by these modernities “become a potential site of creative agency.”20 Emecheta’s writings can be considered within these contexts, as Second Class Citizen, In the Ditch, and Head Above Water treat, in varying ways, what Emecheta calls “the conflict of two cultures” (Head 105). More fully, they can be assessed in terms of a spatialized modernism spanning the 1940s to the early 1960s in colonized Nigeria, and then a postcolonial Nigeria following its 1960 independence; and from 1962 to the early 1980s in (post)colonizing England. Scottish and Sierra Leonean author Aminatta Forna helps us to appreciate the impact of a newly spatialized modernism for Emecheta’s work. She describes Emecheta as “one of [Wole] Soyinka’s so-called ‘Renaissance generation,’ those Africans who came of age at the same time as their countries. She and other writers all over the continent had both the challenge and the joy that comes with being first, of writing Africa and Africans into literary existence.”21 On a more personal level, as Adah begins increasingly to claim autonomy for herself as a migrant woman and oppressed wife and mother in London, she implicitly conjoins her self-determination—“She had to act for herself” (Second 122)—with national liberation from colonialism: she is proud to wear her Ibo lappa with “‘Nigerian Independence, 1960’ written all over it. She was going to show people that she came from Nigeria and that Nigeria was an independent republic. Not that the other women did not know, but Adah felt that she would like to remember it always, that she came from Nigeria, and that Nigeria was independent” (Second 124).

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Emphasizing the benefits to scholarship when researchers act collaboratively to enlarge the field, Friedman outlines four separate but intersecting critical practices. The first two are Re-vision, “defamiliarizing the familiar archive by looking anew through a different lens”; and Recovery, “creating an archaeology of new archives.”22 More salient to my consideration of Emecheta are Circulation and Collage. Circulation, predicated on mobility, seeks to identify “linkages, networks, conjunctures, creolizations, intertextualities, travels, and transplantations connecting modernisms from different part of the planet.”23 Circulation is often mapped by “the routes born of colonialism: passages to India or Africa or the Caribbean by Western writers like Forster or Conrad; passages to the colonizers’ metropole by writers like Jean Rhys, Mulk Raj Anand, or Tayeb Salih”24—and, I would add, Emecheta’s passage to the London metropole. Relatedly, Collage entails “radical juxtaposition, the scholar’s act of paratactic cutting and pasting. It establishes a montage of differences where the putting side by side illuminates those differences at the same time that it spotlights commonalities. Ideally, collage is a nonhierarchical act of comparison.”25 Friedman collages paired authors—Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih; E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy; and Virginia Woolf with Rabindranath Tagore and Swarnakumari Devi—in order to uncover “the creative agencies of affiliations that reinvigorate the fiery core of a transcontinental selection of modernist fictions in the long twentieth century.” 26 While many of these affiliations are predicated on empire, connections are also rendered at the intersections of “gender, race, caste, and sexuality.”27 These points resonate with my approach to Emecheta’s texts at the nexus of postcolonialism and motherhood. While a detailed comparison of Emecheta’s texts with those of others examined in Maternal Modernism is beyond my scope, in my conclusion to this chapter I gesture to possibilities for circulation and collage. Reading Emecheta through the lens of planetary modernisms allows us to view her manifestations of New Womanism as evidence of postcolonial maternal modernisms. Such a position adheres to Friedman’s valuing of gender, for as she informs us, “A spotlight on gender is especially telling because gender relations are an intense flashpoint for conflict during periods of rapid change.” Specifically, “Women—especially bodies of women— are often the battleground between modernizing and traditionalizing forces as constitutive of a particular modernity, often intensely so in the context of empire, where women’s bodies frequently stand in symbolically for both colonizing and colonized nations.”28 This notion is borne out by

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Adah’s recognition that she is oppressed as both a Black immigrant and a woman. Her husband, Francis, tells her, “the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen” (Second 39), just as “To him, a woman was a second-class human” (Second 164). In characterizing Emecheta and Adah as postcolonial New Women, I am inspired by the collection New Woman Hybridities, which I have touched on in earlier chapters. As editors Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham outline, the book offers advances in scholarship for its international breadth, such that contributors find representations of the New Woman in contexts of geography and culture afar from predominant Anglo-American ones, additionally covering locations like Hungary, Japan, Canada, and Germany.29 I extend this scope to Nigerian-British contexts, and further move beyond the 1880–1930 timeframe of New Woman Hybridities into the 1960s–1980s. Heilmann and Beetham state: “The common feature which recurs again and again in different cultures is the identification of the New Woman with the modern and with the disruptive, that is with challenges to existing structures of gendered identity.”30 These challenges are rendered by Emecheta and Adah as they disrupt traditional Igbo roles of wife and mother in both Lagos and London. Heilmann and Beetham link the New Woman to the concept of postcolonial hybridity. Referring to Homi K. Bhabha’s theorizing of hybridity in The Location of Culture (1994), they explain that “The term literally refers to plants or animals which are the products of cross-breeding or mixed inheritance. In postcolonial work, hybridity has been used to refer to the new kinds of identity which arise from migration and within diaspora communities. The unsettling of fixed identities based on gender, class, or race can lead, according to Bhabha and others, to a creativity which is made possible precisely by inhabiting the spaces between the old fixed categories.”31 The reference to new diasporic creativities echoes Friedman’s insistence that “diasporic modernities become a potential site of creative agency.”32 Emecheta and Adah form new hybrid selfhoods not only through their hyphenated Nigerian-British citizenship status but also as they combine identities of wife and mother with student and author. Further, through her hybrid identities of novelist, autobiographer, and ethnographic participant-observer, Emecheta constructs hybrid narratives—merging matroethnography and the Künstlerroman, for instance— in her textual re-construction of those identities.

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Modernism and the Social Sciences In addition to postcolonialism, new modernism has embraced the social sciences. As I have indicated, it is the confluence of these three areas that informs my approach to Emecheta’s innovative, hybrid narratives—an approach supported by persuasive interdisciplinary scholarship in these fields. Before turning to some of this work, I want to define briefly the social science terminology underpinning my discussion of Emecheta’s texts: ethnography, anthropology, and sociology; a consideration of autoethnography will follow later in this section. Ethnography is “The study of the culture and social organization of a particular group or community, as well as the published result of such study (an ethnography). Ethnography refers to both the data-gathering of anthropology and the development of analyses of specific peoples, settings, or ways of life.”33 Anthropology “has its roots in the explosion of interest in ‘primitive’ societies encountered in the course of European exploration, conquest, and colonial rule.” Anthropology was “institutionalized around a range of inquiries into tribal cultures—a process that in Britain, France, and the United States occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century.”34 Anthropology arises from two late nineteenth-century ethnographic methodologies: “one based on survey and travel data gathered by missionaries and other amateur observers; and another based on direct observation by the trained anthropologist. […] As anthropologists were trained in universities, grew in number, and improved standards of research, the direct model largely replaced the indirect one, and the speculative, comparative, ‘armchair’ approach was discredited.”35 This “armchair” method was practiced, for example, by Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough (1890), a study of comparative religion. By the 1920s, the concept of participant observation that prioritized immersion in a particular culture was promoted as the ideal by British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, among others. Franz Boas, an equally important force in the United States, “argued for abandoning the universal and often racist evolutionary models that dominated nineteenth-century anthropology.”36 Sociology, a “close relative” of anthropology, is “The scientific study of society, including patterns of social relationships, social action, and culture” developing in the 1890s. Focusing on “exploration and colonization, and the industrial revolution,” practitioners were “driven by their

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own curiosities and concerns to develop deeper understanding of the nature of modern society.”37 These definitions underscore how developments in ethnography, anthropology, and sociology were coterminous with those of literary modernisms, as addressed in recent scholarship. For example, Paul Peppis maps what he calls the “open traffic between science and nonscientific discourses” at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “especially between literature and the newer, modernizing ‘human’ sciences of ethnography, sexology, and psychology.”38 Likewise, Marc Manganaro contends, “there are strong influences at work in the relation between modern anthropology and modernist literature: the impact of Frazer’s The Golden Bough upon works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses is a reminder of that borrowing.” In particular, “1922, the year of the publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, also marks the advent of literary high modernism, for it was in that year that The Waste Land and Ulysses exploded upon the cultural scene.”39 Manganaro asserts, “so symbiotic has the relationship become between artistic theory and anthropology that a focus upon modernism can no longer be seen as simply the privileging of literature, say, over social science.”40 Echoing Friedman and other new modernists reframing periodization, Manganaro acknowledges that the term modernism is used in diverse meanings “to define a variety of cultural manifestations that are not even necessarily bound to the first half of the twentieth century.”41 Such a consideration opens up a space for reading Emecheta’s writings of the 1970s and 80s at the nexus of the planetary modernisms of both literature and the social sciences. Writing about modernism and anthropology, David Mills foregrounds how “anthropological ideas fueled the anxieties and experimentation of the broader modernist movement.” He explains: “Artists, writers and the avant-garde sought out the origins of culture, using primitivism as a foil against which to define the modern.” Consequently, “The fascination with ‘primitive’ logics of creative expression crisscrossed between literature, art, music and theory, from Yeats to Conrad, Picasso to Gauguin, Kandinsky to Stravinsky and Jung to Freud.”42 Mills concludes, “Anthropology’s methodological modernists [like Malinowski] were skillful bricoleurs,” who constructed a new empirical science out of a fusion of “method and writing” alongside “extended fieldwork and literary technique.”43 I suggest that Emecheta was a bricoleur as well, creating hybrid texts about hybrid New Womanism.

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James Clifford details that between 1920 and 1950, “the authority of the academic fieldworker-theorist was established,” predicated on “an outsider entering a culture, undergoing a kind of initiation leading to ‘rapport’” and culminating in “a representational text written by the participant-­observer.”44 However, since the 1950s, postcolonial criticism has been underscoring that “neither the experience nor the interpretive activity of the scientific researcher can be considered innocent,”45 leading to the emergence of the “indigenous ethnographer”: “Insiders studying their own cultures,” illuminating how anthropology “no longer speaks with automatic authority for others defined as unable to speak for themselves (‘primitive,’ ‘pre-literate,’ ‘without history’).”46 The “indigenous ethnographer” is a kind of autoethnographer. As a method and genre, autoethnography is practiced by anthropologists and sociologists alike, as well as by authors of literary non-fiction. Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis summarize the qualitative research methods of autoethnography. Practitioners “study and write culture from the perspective of the self”: “we look inward—into our identities, thoughts, feelings and experiences—and outward—into our relationships, communities, and cultures.”47 Autoethnography does the following: it relies on a researcher’s self-reflection “to name and interrogate the intersections between self and society, the particular and the general, the personal and the political”; it depicts “people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles”; and it aims “for social justice and to make life better.”48 Adams, Jones, and Ellis ask, “Why Do Autoethnography?” and reply: “To disrupt taboos, break silences, and reclaim lost and disregarded voices.”49 I contend that Emecheta, as a trained sociologist, employed these autoethnographical methods in constructing and interrogating her individual and communal identities. More specifically, I apply the concept of matroethnography to her work for its overarching inscription of maternal subjectivities. James Buzard detects what he calls a “metropolitan autoethnography,” that is, an autoethnographic focus on “the imperial center” enacted by authors of British Victorian fiction like Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and William Morris.50 The classic participant-observer of anthropology adopted the perspective of “an outsider’s insideness” by way of “a ‘simulated membership’ or ‘membership without commitment to membership’ in the visited culture.”51 In contrast, the novel of metropolitan autoethnography “anticipates modern fieldworking ethnography in reverse, by construing its narrator’s (and many characters’) desired position vis-à-vis

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the fictional world it depicts as that of an insider’s outsideness—‘outside enough’ to apprehend the shape of the culture (and its possibilities of reform), yet insistently positioned as the outsideness of a particular inside.”52 Emecheta offers a metropolitan autoethnography from the imperial center of London, where she varyingly assumes the position of insider’s outsideness when she observes and interrogates her family structure, her communities, and England’s welfare system from both her subjective and objective perspectives as a social scientist. Peppis heralds a modernist autoethnography when he describes how “The narrator of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway moves rapidly in and out of the minds of a range of 1920s Londoners, in a kind of autoethnographic shuttling, sometimes pausing, as in her scathing reflections on modern culture.” Likewise, Joyce’s Ulysses is “arguably the greatest modernist (literary) autoethnography” for the way in which the narrative consistently moves through the “culture and lifeways of Dublin’s denizens in June 1904.”53 Peppis connects novels like these to the 1901 monograph Head-­ Hunters: Black, White, and Brown, wherein British anthropologist Alfred C. Haddon offers an account of his exploration of the Torres Strait Islands, among other locales, from the perspective of his own community of white missionaries and colonial administrators.54 Harlem Renaissance figure Zora Neale Hurston is arguably the most famous modernist who was both a novelist and a qualified ethnographer. Hybrid skills are on display in her fiction like Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her ethnography Mules and Men (1935), and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). In Dust Tracks, Hurston recounts that as an undergraduate student at Barnard College, she began working with anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Boas; and as a graduate student with Boas at Columbia University, she took on a research fellowship “to go south and collect Negro folk-lore.”55 Françoise Lionnet contends that Hurston’s “training as an anthropologist influences the way she looks at the complex system of human relations that constitute culture. Her autobiography makes use of the formal descriptive paradigms of anthropological research, becoming a self-portrait of the fieldworker in search of her own roots, her own siblings, her lost ancestral traditions, her veiled maternal heritage.”56 Hurston’s position as an insider parallels that not only of Emecheta but also of Ida B. Wells; as highlighted in Chap. 6, Wells wrote Crusade for Justice to record the facts of her race’s history “which only the participants can give” (5). Hurston and Wells thus both provide a planetary bridge to Emecheta. While a collaging of their works is not my aim

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here, we can certainly appreciate their mutual foregrounding of race and gender as constitutive of their modernisms. Like Hurston and Wells, Emecheta textually inscribes Black identity and culture through creative expression informed by ethnographic study and autoethnographic practice.

Black Feminism and the Institution of Black Motherhood In 1973, African-American author and activist Alice Walker went on a quest to find Hurston, a journey documented in her 1983 collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. In the chapter “Looking for Zora,” Walker tells how she traveled to Hurston’s birth state of Florida to locate Hurston’s heretofore-unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce. Recounting how Hurston died alone and impoverished in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in 1960, Walker marked Hurston’s burial ground with the headstone inscribed “ZORA NEALE HURSTON/‘A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH’/NOVELIST FOLKLORIST/ANTHROPOLOGIST 1901–1960.”57 Walker’s symbolic gesture of recovering Black literary role models like Hurston was coterminous with the emergence of Emecheta as herself a literary ‘mother’ to a new generation of racialized women in the 1970s. In this and the following two sections, I discuss the intersections of Black feminisms with a bourgeoning postcolonial African literary tradition. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins seeks to empower contemporary African-American women by tracing the development of Black feminism. Just as Walker looked back to Hurston, so Collins reflects on the Black intellectual Maria W.  Stewart, who, in 1831, queried: “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”58 Collins identifies Stewart as “the first American woman to lecture in public on political issues and to leave copies of her texts”; Stewart exemplifies how “Black women intellectuals have laid a vital analytical foundation for a distinctive standpoint on self, community, and society and, in doing so, created a multifaceted, African-American women’s intellectual tradition.”59 While Collins focuses on the United States, her theories extend to “Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and other places where Black women now live.” In addition to citing Americans like Sojourner Truth, Ida B.  Wells, and Toni Morrison, among others, Collins evidences African women like Emecheta, as well as Ama Ata Aidoo and Ellen Kuzwayo, who

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have similarly “used their voices to raise important issues that affect Black African women.”60 This point reflects the initiative of autoethnography to “disrupt taboos, break silences, and reclaim lost and disregarded voices.”61 For Collins, a “dialectic of oppression and activism, the tension between the suppression of African-American women’s ideas and our intellectual activism in the face of that suppression, constitutes the politics of U.S. Black feminist thought”62—and, I would add, a politics of African-British feminist thought as well. Collins crucially distinguishes Black feminism from Western feminism that has marginalized Black women’s realities through being “racist and overly concerned with White, middle-class women’s issues.”63 Emecheta articulates comparable ideas in her essay “Feminism with a Small ‘f’!” She claims, “Being a woman, and African born, I see things through an African woman’s eyes. I chronicle the little happenings in the lives of the African women I know. I did not know that by doing so I was going to be called a feminist. But if I am now a feminist then I am an African feminist with a small f.”64 Emecheta resists being categorized according to assumptions about, or made by, white Western feminisms, and thus she contributes to advancing a politics of Black feminist thought. Collins privileges what she specifies as “The institution of Black motherhood,” vitally undoing universalist notions of patriarchal motherhood inscribed with whiteness. This Black institution “consists of a series of constantly renegotiated relationships” between African-American women with each other and with their children and broader communities.65 Further, this institution is “dynamic and dialectical. Ongoing tensions characterize efforts to mold the institution of Black motherhood to benefit intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation and efforts by African-American women to define and value our own experiences with motherhood.”66 Where “controlling images of the mammy, the matriarch, and the welfare mother and the practices they justify are designed to oppress,” motherhood can, instead, “serve as a site where Black women express and learn the power of self-definition, the importance of valuing and respecting ourselves, the necessity of self-­ reliance and independence, and a belief in Black women’s empowerment.”67 Collins insists that “Black motherhood is a fundamentally contradictory institution” that can yield rewards but “also extract high personal costs.”68 These tensions and contradictions inform the narratives of Emecheta and Adah, who document how their motherhood impedes yet inspires their personal and professional sensibilities and goals.

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Collins elsewhere problematizes differences between Western and Black institutions of motherhood.69 While “the archetypal white middle-class nuclear family” subscribes to the separate spheres of the public (men work outside the home) and the private (women work inside the home), these divisions are not representative of the lives of women of color.70 Collins employs the concept of “motherwork to soften the dichotomies in feminist theorizing about motherhood that posit rigid distinctions between private and public, family and work, the individual and the collective, identity as individual autonomy and identity growing from the collective self-­ determination of one’s group. Racial ethnic women’s mothering and work experiences occur at the boundaries demarking these dualities.” For Collins, “the space that this motherwork occupies promises to shift our thinking about motherhood itself.”71 It is in this space that we find Emecheta and Adah. Collins urges us to “distinguish between what has been said about subordinated groups in the dominant discourse, and what such groups might say about themselves if given the opportunity.”72 This detail resonates with Sally Ledger’s contention that the fin-de-siècle New Woman employed reverse discourses to challenge dominant ones as he “began to speak on her own behalf.”73 To be sure, Collins notes that women of color offer self-representations of maternity via “Personal narratives, autobiographical statements, poetry, fiction, and other personalized statements,”74 precisely Emecheta’s agenda. Collins posits that “Issues of survival, power, and identity” are three themes informing “the bedrock of women of color’s motherwork.”75 Emecheta’s texts are evidence of the power that obtains from giving voice to real and fictional Black mothers like Emecheta and Adah. Relatedly, Christina Davis reflects on how Emecheta negotiates Adah’s geographical (dis)locations between Lagos and London. Adah adopts a “tentative attitude” toward her Nigerian past and her British present, rendering her one of Emecheta’s heroines who are “real women who both conform and rebel, move forward and doubt, adapt and invent,”76 qualities we have seen as constitutive of the Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman. This negotiation is enacted by the artistic mother: “Raising children becomes an integral part of artistic creativity, rather than the enforced ‘underachievement’ many Western mothers are obliged to accept because of the falsely premised expectation that, as mothers, they will not reach their full potential elsewhere.”77 These ideas are likewise expressed by Dawson in his discussion of motherhood and Black recuperative feminism.

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Referring to Second Class Citizen, Dawson notes of Adah: “since her conception of writing explicitly parallels the act of intellectual creation to childbirth, her self-discovery takes place through development of her caring powers. By emphasizing this maternal creativity, Emecheta’s protagonist explicitly repudiates the denigration of black women’s life-giving capacity that characterizes social relations in contemporary Britain.”78 These points underscore how white Western models of mothering are not reflective of Emecheta’s and Adah’s experiences. Amina Sail examines how Emecheta’s feminism is both individually and culturally determined. While African and Western feminisms share a mandate to obtain gender equality, “white feminism which calls for the liberation of women is in itself part of the western world that oppressed other women.” Unsurprisingly, then, African women writers feel greater affiliation with African-American feminism.79 That said, Emecheta, for example, was “divided between her respect for her African cultural heritage and her desire to discard traditions that may subjugate Nigerian women.”80 It is the balancing, or conflation, of self and ethno that supports my reading of Emecheta’s texts as matroethnography.

Traditions of African Women’s Writing The relationship between feminisms, motherhood, and postcolonial contexts is further explored by Gina Wisker. She acknowledges that authors like Hurston, through participation in the Harlem Renaissance, provided blueprints for new modes of African-American women’s literatures that would inspire Walker, Toni Morrison, and others. In contrast, African women’s traditions are more recent formations, with Nigerian writers among the most prominent because, having been educated in and published in English, they can reach a large English-speaking audience.81 These figures include Emecheta, Aidoo, and Flora Nwapa—whose 1966 novel, Efuru, is the first English-language international novel by an African woman. Wisker stresses, “many of the tensions in writing by contemporary African women novelists are located in the relations between colonialism, post-colonialism and feminism.”82 In particular, given the significance of motherhood to African women’s self-valuation and to African nationalism, maternity is a central feature of African women’s writings.83 Emecheta and others “enable revisionist subversions of women’s roles,”84 and it is in this subversive realm that we can situate Emechea’s maternal modernisms. Wisker finds that “For many

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African women motherhood is a site for debates about power, pain, social links, reproductive issues and identity, and writing about it is seizing power, redefining and valuing it their own way.”85 In so doing, these literary women affect a “new kind of mothering, the act of producing writing.” Such an act “allows women to seek a voice,” one that articulates “the minutiae of the difficulties of being women, and mothers.”86 These concepts align with the initiatives of Victorian fin-de-siècle New Women to reconstitute motherhood in fundamental ways, and to explore via text what New Woman author George Egerton calls “the terra incognita of herself.”87 Like Wisker charting the rise of African women’s writing, Pauline Ada Uwakweh celebrates an increasingly rich diasporic tradition, in which African immigrant stories are narrated for global readers. Given the privileging of men “by the political, cultural, and educational systems” of both colonial and postcolonial African societies, it is unsurprising that the literary productions by and experiential activities of African men, especially in the diaspora, were the first to be heard and recorded, by authors like Tayeb Salih and Achebe. Women’s voices gained audience only from the 1970s on (as evidenced by Emecheta and Aidoo) in direct correlation to women’s migratory experiences. That is, before the 1960s, men typically emigrated to countries like England for education, while women followed as wives; since then, the “increasing participation of African women in educational and professional pursuits has brought visibility to their experiences.”88 Emecheta had dreamed of migrating to the United Kingdom as a child, and as a teenager was eager to relocate to further her career goals, but it was only as a wife that she was able to make the move in 1962. Once in London, however, she helped to establish a literary tradition wherein women’s transnational experiences of gender and race could be articulated.89 The family is a particularly contested site in this discourse. African marriage, founded on patriarchal ideology, constitutes “the bedrock of gendered identity formation,” and “successful” marriage is equated with children who permit “the continuance of lineage and tradition.”90 While beliefs like these are carried over with migratory communities, “new space dynamics impact these filial ties and gender hierarchies, and often times lead to conflict. Thus, reconstructing the traditional gendered roles creates tensions that invariably put immigrant marriages at risk or lead to outright disaster,”91 as proven by Emecheta’s traumatizing ordeals with her violent husband. Uwakweh concludes that in their stories of the

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African Diaspora, writers like Emecheta “offer insights to the challenges attending migration with regard to motherhood, wifehood, and parenting,”92 as seen upon close reading of Emecheta’s trilogy. Sandra Courtman states that, while “very real divisions between indigenous women writers and those of a different nation, ethnicity, class, culture and linguistic tradition must be acknowledged,” so too must the fact that “women writers born in faraway continents had a transformative impact on the field of British literary studies.”93 This point helps to connect Emecheta with the maternal modernisms traced through Anglo—and American—contexts throughout Maternal Modernism. With attention to Emecheta as well as other authors working between 1945 and 1975 like Nwapa, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Han Suyin, and Louise Bennett, Courtman states, “Coming from Africa, India, China and the Caribbean, they sought a space for creative development and an appropriate form to express what often had gone unexpressed.” Courtman suggests that “their work often resists formal and genre categorisation,”94 a description aligning with my assertion that Emecheta’s texts can be regarded as hybrid narratives filtered through her hybrid New Woman identity. Although these women were, unlike male writers from Africa and the West Indies, “largely absent from an emerging black European canon” in the 1950s and 60s, as they emerged into diasporic visibility they became, in the spirit of modernism, “agents for change.”95 They “not only produced their own ground-breaking work but inspired a second generation of British-African, British-Caribbean and British-Asian children” to become writers.96 As a postcolonial New Woman, Emecheta served as a vanguard literary foremother to a new generation of racialized women.

The New Woman Künstlerroman Emecheta’s diasporic narratives inscribe tropes of Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman fiction. Ann Heilmann postulates that “The most typical subgenres of New Woman fiction are the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman,” the novel of a protagonist’s coming-of-age and artistic growth, respectively.97 The Künstlerroman typically traces how the hero rebels against society on a journey of self-discovery. Notably, for male protagonists, whatever form the rebellion takes, they operate within the strictures of prevailing patriarchal ideologies.98 For female artist-heroes, however, it is precisely “the clash with and rejection of social norms” that define her narrative arc, such that “it is a girl or woman’s very striving for

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independent thought that is considered deviant.”99 New Women rework the genre from their own female and feminist points of view,100 an agenda adhering to Egerton’s directive to chart “the terra incognita of herself,” and to issuing reverse discourses of self-authorization.101 In reconstructing the Künstlerroman from her Black feminist perspective, Emecheta articulates a reverse discourse of both male artistic privilege and white Western feminism. New Woman writers dramatize the challenges facing women who are artists, reflective of women more generally who are silenced by patriarchal processes emanating “from both without (society) and within (the woman’s psyche).”102 Creativity is explicitly imbricated with motherhood. Heilmann stresses, “New Woman fiction drew on a complex system of extended mothering and childbirth metaphors to link what Victorian patriarchy perceived to be women’s ‘natural function’ with cultural and literary production, from which this function seemed so often to exclude them.” The theme of “mothering-as-creating” appears in metaphors of death and life.103 The former can be rendered if the artist dies or if her work is destroyed by antagonistic male forces,104 as we witness when Adah’s husband burns the manuscript of her first novel. The latter is evidenced by New Women who fuse creation and mothering and thus override assumptions that art is a masculine domain.105 Emecheta, for instance, tells us in Head Above Water: “my books are akin to my children” (189). For Heilmann, the metaphor of birth, signaling creation, “was often encoded in the image of a room which symbolized the maternal body, a metaphorical womb into which the protagonist withdrew to emerge a new-born artist.” This womb is an advance on Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” a spatial hub for women’s creative freedoms and self-discoveries.106 In New Woman narratives, this empowerment pit “individual female rebellion against the patriarchal family as a first step towards setting up an alternative political community.”107 Note that within these stories, the protagonists may be trying to build an artistic reputation but more generally are in pursuit of an education or profession.108 This point reflects Emecheta’s and Adah’s stories, which are focused not only on the women’s literary development but also on their academic studies in sociology and careers in librarianship and social work. Below, I offer a close reading of Emecheta’s London trilogy, demonstrating how she employs hybrid elements of matroethnography and the Künstlerroman in the service of her narrative of postcolonial New Womanhood.

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Second Class Citizen Second Class Citizen introduces us to eight-year-old Adah, “born during the Second World War” in Lagos, in British colonial Nigeria. As a girl, Adah “was such a disappointment to her parents, to her immediate family, to her tribe” (7). While Adah longs to be educated, “Boys were the ones usually given preference” in being sent to school by their families, including hers (9). She secretly enters—and wins—a competition for a scholarship to the local Methodist Girls’ High School, where she spends the next five years. Although Adah has New Woman aspirations to pursue higher learning at Nigeria’s Ibadan University, her community decrees that she must marry instead, so at age sixteen she becomes wife to Francis Obi, an accounting student. Likewise, Adah was required to fulfill her biological destiny. She soon gives birth to her first child, Titi. Given that “work and family have rarely functioned as dichotomous spheres for women of color,”109 Adah, even though a new mother, searches for a job and lands a lucrative position as a librarian at the American Consulate Library. Adah’s employment is celebrated by her husband and his parents (hers are deceased), just as she continues to succeed within her nation’s patriarchal institution of motherhood when she gives birth to her second child, son Vicky: as a mother, Adah “was very prolific which, among the Ibos, is still the greatest asset a woman can have” (26). Examining West African authors like Emecheta, Delphine Fongang illuminates that “Pro-natal ability confers on West African women social status and power in society,” in recognition of their roles perpetuating cultural heritage and kinship lineage.110 However, while motherhood and mothering yield power, at stake in women’s success “is how they use that power to achieve greater things for themselves; and resist patriarchal control.”111 Affirming, “Motherhood is intrinsically and intimately linked to every aspect of African women’s life and defines their worldview,” Fongang cites Emecheta as an exemplary figure who, by way of (rather than despite) her maternity, achieved varying degrees of autonomy via “agency and resistance,”112 as my analysis of her trilogy proves. Indeed, despite her outward achievements, Adah is discontented. She resists being under the control of her in-laws, and she yearns to go to England. In line with modernism’s mantra to “make it new,” Adah wants to migrate to Britain to find “new surroundings, a new country and [be] among new people” (27). Funded by her own financial earnings, Adah and her two children sail to meet Francis in England, where he had gone

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ahead to continue his studies. Upon her arrival, “England gave Adah a cold welcome” (36) in terms of its climate and racism, while Francis greets her with animosity. In some ways Adah “simply accepted her role as defined for her by her husband” (95), one predicated on the fact that “his outlook on life was pure African,” such that “to him, he was the male, and he was right to tell her what she was going to do” (28). Although he repeatedly fails his accounting exams, he refuses to get a job or to help Adah with the children, demanding that Adah assume all their financial and parenting responsibilities. Adah secures daycare with the government-approved caregiver Trudy, but upon learning that she is negligent, and is having an affair with Francis, she threatens him: “If anything happens to my son, I am going to kill you and that prostitute.” She insists, “I must have my children whole and perfect. The only thing I get from this slavish marriage is the children” (64), underscoring that her power derives from her matricentric identity. Adah moves the children to a nursery school, and continues to serve as the sole breadwinner, taking on a position as a senior library assistant at the North Finchley Library and pursuing a course on librarianship. As Adah begins to challenge Francis’ authority over her, his anger rises: “Somebody had warned him that the greatest mistake an African could make was to bring an educated girl to London and let her mix with middle-­ class English women. They soon know their rights” (64). Adah is subjected not only to Francis’ general disrespect and contempt, but also to his relentless physical and sexual assaults on her, evidencing how “new space dynamics” problematize traditional hierarchies of gender that can create conflict and “invariably put immigrant marriages at risk or lead to outright disaster.”113 Francis’ response to Adah within a postcolonial diaspora resonates with fin-de-siècle concepts that regard the New Woman as “dangerous, a threat to the status quo,” and who was consequently denigrated by a dominant misogynistic discourse in retaliation.114 Just as the New Woman employed reverse discourses, so Black feminism empowers women to “forge self-definitions of self-reliance and independence.”115 In negotiating these dominant and reverse discourses, Adah reveals how she was torn between duty to African customs and her refusal to be oppressed by them. We can see these themes play out in Adah’s quest for control over her reproductive body. After the birth of her third child, son Bubu, Adah is certain that she does not want any more children. Without telling Francis, she visits the Family Planning Clinic, where she is “loaded with masses of

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literature. She had read about the jelly, the Pill, the cap and so many other things” (141). Requesting assistance, Adah confides in the nurse: “You see, I am not twenty-one yet and if I had another child it would be my fourth, and I originally came here to study and bring up the two babies I brought from home” (142). Adah is furious to learn that in order to obtain birth control, she needs her husband’s signature on a form116: “Could not the woman be given the opportunity of exercising her own will? Whatever happened, she was not going to have any more children” (142). She forges Francis’ signature, knowing she could be sent to jail, becoming a rebel against patriarchal interference in women’s reproductive autonomy, and committed to her own well-being as both a mother and a professional. Adah is fitted for a cap, and when Francis discovers the truth, he is enraged, beating her so that “she was dizzy with pain and her head throbbed. Her mouth was bleeding” (147). When the cap fails and Adah finds herself pregnant with her fourth child, she seeks out another doctor for pills to terminate the pregnancy. Trying once again to control her reproduction, Adah thinks, “She now saw this situation as a challenge, a new challenge. When she was little and alone, the challenge had been that of educating herself, existing through it all, alone, all by herself. […] Now she was alone again with this new challenge that included her children as well. She was going to live, to survive to exist through it all” (150). In the spirit of both New Women and African women writers of the diaspora who “were agents for change,”117 Adah fights literally and psychologically for the survival of herself and her children. We can further consider how these themes inform Adah’s experiences in the maternity ward at the London University College Hospital, where Adah, twenty years old, recovers following an emergency Caesarian delivery of Bubu. Immersed in a community of women, Adah becomes a kind of matroethnographer who looks “inward—into our identities, thoughts, feelings and experiences—and outward—into our relationships, communities, and cultures.”118 Adah is described as “a good watcher” of and listener to all the women on the ward (116). She is an ethnographer who gathers and analyzes data on a particular group’s culture, in this case, maternal stories of life, pregnancy, and parturition. Through her observations of this maternal collective, Adah compares and critiques her marriage, seeing clearly Francis’ neglect of her as a wife and mother, so that she becomes a matroethnographer who is “in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of [her] struggles.”119

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For instance, Adah notes that unlike herself, all the women on the ward received gifts and visits from husbands. She laments, their “son was going to carry his name, not hers, even though she was to carry the ugly Caesarean scars all her life. And what of the pain she was still going through? Yes, she deserved a present from Francis” (117–118). Where Dawson argues that Emecheta’s novels present Black women “discovering voice; establishing forms of collective solidarity; and engaging in political activism,”120 so Adah begins to empower herself through these other women: “Coming to have her baby in this hospital had opened her eyes a good deal. Why, many English men took home their wives’ nightdresses to wash them. She was determined to try it all on Francis” (120). When Francis makes it obvious that he has no interest in her feminism, she proclaims in resistance, “My sons will learn to treat their wives as people, individuals, not like goats that have been taught to talk”; her daughters “will marry because they love and respect their men, not because they are looking for the highest bidder or because they are looking for a home” (121–122). Privileging her maternal identity, she is grateful to Francis for fathering her children, but recognizing that he was “a dangerous man to live with,” she determines she will no longer serve as “a willing victim” (122). As a consequence of “staying together with other women for thirteen days” in the ward, Adah learns a “new code of conduct” that “was to be with her for a long time” (126). Indeed, “this new code” would be manifested in her subsequent text: if in Second Class Citizen Adah is a matroethnographer on the outside looking in, in In the Ditch she becomes an insider looking out at the Pussy Cat Mansions. Circling back to Adah’s efforts to end her fourth pregnancy via abortion pills, we can see that her stay in the maternity ward with Bubu has affected her Black woman’s “motherwork” in terms of “survival, power, and identity.”121 The pills fail, and Adah, facing another birth, determines, “Her baby [Dada] was going to arrive in style. She knitted and sewed, and this time her maternity grant was not going to Francis. She was buying a brand-new pram, a new shawl and a new outfit for herself when she came out of the hospital” (159). Adah insists that Francis finally find a job, and she stakes a claim to economic liberation by refusing to support him: “She would only be responsible for her children, their clothes, the nursery fees and anything else the children needed” (162). Adah’s motherhood thus continues to function as a site for empowering Black women, promoting was Collins calls self-definition and self-reliance.122

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Financial autonomy is made possible by the fact that throughout the novel Adah has worked at a succession of middle-class jobs in librarianship. At the time of Bubu’s and Dada’s births, she was employed at the Chalk Farm Library. After the birth of Dada, Adah “did not rush back to work”: “she had told her husband that with four children under five, she could not bear to leave them” in childcare (163). Her decision is in part based on her creative aspirations: “Why not attempt writing? She had always wanted to write. Why not? She ran to Foyle’s and bought herself a copy of Teach Yourself to Write and sat down throughout all those months when she was nursing Dada and wrote the manuscript of a book she was going to call The Bride Price” (162), a novel depicting the tragic fate of a young modern woman in postcolonial Nigeria. Second Class Citizen is a New Woman Künstlerroman emerging from and contributing to a tradition of postcolonial African literatures. Struggling with her domestic situation after Bubu’s birth, Adah had “concentrated on working and enjoying her new job” at the library (151). Here, one of her colleagues, Bill, advances Adah’s artistic education. As a mother, Adah had sought to counter the racism she encountered in London by taking pride in her African heritage: her children “were going to enjoy being black, be proud of being black” (141). Bill helps Adah to link this maternal pride to literature: Bill “liked black writers. Adah did not know any black writers apart from the few Nigerian ones, like Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa, and she did not know that there were any other black writers.” Bill introduced her to James Baldwin; “She came to believe, through reading Baldwin, that black was beautiful” (152). Additionally, “She even started reading Marx and was often quoting to herself that if the worst came to the very worst she would leave Francis with her children since she had nothing to lose but her chains” (152). Adah’s bourgeoning independence emerges from her sense of group solidarity and embracing of maternal power as fundamental to Black feminism. In this frame of mind, Adah writes her first novel. Just as New Woman fiction conflates metaphors of creativity and birth, so for Adah reproduction and production become twin accomplishments: “I felt so fulfilled when I finished it, just as if I had just made another baby” (166). Adah muses about her craft: “She could not write in any African language, so it must be English although English was not her mother tongue. Yes, it was the English language she was going to use. But she could not write those big long twisting words. Well, she might not be able to do those long difficult words, but she was going to do her own phrases her

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own way. Adah’s phrases, that’s what they were going to be” (166). Adah adopts a kind of avant-garde approach to literature, making it “new” on her own aesthetic terms. England provides Adah with more than a literary language; it serves as the space wherein her artistic potential is realized. However, in his rage, Francis burns Adah’s manuscript, enacting the metaphor of death for the mother as creator. While the Künstlerroman thus seems a failed narrative, Adah secures a new job as a library officer at the British Museum, attesting to the continuation of her quest for professional development. Adah, again pregnant, finally takes Francis to court following another vicious assault, and when the magistrate grants her custody of the children, he disowns both her and them. As the narrator reports, “Something happened to Adah then. It was like a big hope and a kind of energy charging into her, giving her so much strength even though she was physically ill with her fifth child. Then she said very loud and very clear, ‘Don’t worry, sir. The children are mine, and that is enough. I shall never let them down as long as I am alive’” (174). In such a sate, “Adah walked to freedom, with nothing but four babies, her new job and a box of rags [her children’s clothes]” (171). Adah’s actions evidence how for African women, motherhood can be a means to empowerment.123 Adah exemplifies the New Woman protagonist who “posited individual female rebellion against the patriarchal family as a first step towards setting up an alternative political community.”124 This community is established in In The Ditch. In the Ditch At the start of In the Ditch, twenty-five-year-old Adah muses, “I may still become a writer, a writer of a best-selling book, I may still become a qualified social scientist” (34). She thus spotlights how the Künstlerroman and ethnography operate in tandem as aesthetic forms and practices shaping her narrative identities. While Second Class Citizen is focused more on Adah’s literary quest, In the Ditch documents her positioning as what Buzard calls “an insider’s outsideness,”125 leading to the creation of her matroethnography. It is precisely by working as a trained social scientist that Emecheta gathers material for the texts that will make her name as a best-selling author. Having left Francis, Adah and her five children are now residing in a rat- and cockroach-infested flat in north-west London. Her landlord, a

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fellow Nigerian, resents her complaints about the filth, and is trying to scare her with African magic to drive her away. The New Woman gains she made in Second Class Citizen fortify her against him: “But I am tough and free, she thought, free, she repeated to herself. In England she was free to keep her job, keep her kids, do her studies” (3–4). More specific to her role as wife and mother, she realizes, “Igbo people seldom separate from their husbands after the birth of five children. But in England, anything could be tried, and even done. It’s a free country” (5). Adah is reconstituting the family structure, operating under the aegis of a postcolonial planetary modernism in which “gender relations are an intense flashpoint for conflict during periods of rapid change.”126 She subversively overrides her status as a member of a traditional Nigerian community with her female independence,127 representing the New Woman who connotes “a distinctly modern ideal of self-refashioning.”128 Adah is offered a council flat at the “Pussy Mansions” nearby. Her neighbor, Mrs Devlin, encourages Adah to refuse the “Godforsaken” accommodations, but Adah thinks, “you cannot dream what independence it is to have your own front door, your own toilet and bath, just for you and your family” (11–12). The block of flats “looked like a prison” with its barbed-wire exterior (14) and exuded a “lavatorial stink” (17), illuminating the extent to which the welfare system humiliates its clients. Yet, Adah accepts it immediately: “There were three important things she knew she had acquired that night, her independence, her freedom, and peace of mind” (15). Adah’s motherwork unfolds within a Woolfian “room of one’s own” at the Mansions as Adah’s selfhood merges with a community of women, especially of other single mothers. Initially, Adah is determined that she “was not going to be like the other separated mums. At the Mansions, women with kids and no husbands did not go out to work. It was just not done” (21–22). Adah not only is employed at the British Museum during the day, but also attends classes for her sociology degree at night. Informing Carol, her Family Advisor, that her children look after themselves in the evening, Carol chastises: “I know that in Africa neighbours are free to come and go,” but, citing safety concerns, children cannot be left alone—“Not in London” (27). Carol again visits to inform Adah that “The schoolmistress complained to me that the children are being left in the school sheds at eight in the morning and that you don’t come for them until five o’clock” (30). Although well-meaning, Carol exhibits a paternalistic display of power over Adah, and is unable to appreciate how profoundly Adah is affected by

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her loss of what Collins classifies as “fictive kin” or “othermothers” who are vital traditional components of the institution of Black motherhood.129 Adah is forced into resigning from her job and becoming exactly what she fought not to be: a separated mum on government welfare assistance. Ironically, though, once Adah commits to being a stay-at-home mother, she (re)gains an othermother network and assumes the position of “an insider’s outsideness.”130 Having decided that she “had to belong, socialise, participate in the goings-on” at the block (22), after the loss of employment, “Her socialisation was complete” (31). With the closing of her “middle-class chapter,” Adah and her children become “a complete problem family. Joblessness baptised her into the Mansions’ society” (31). In this newly immersive state Adah becomes a participant-observer of life at the Mansions. For example, Adah “was introduced to Whoopey and her mother. Mrs O’Brien and the Princess smiled their welcome into the ditch-dwellers’ cult. She joined the ditch-dwellers’ association. She joined the mothers’ local socials” (32). The matrifocal community is especially active when “the kids had all gone to school,” and the “mums were free to chat on the balconies with bunches of curlers on their heads, old tattered slippers on their feet” (52). The women “talked, gossiped and laughed; all were happy. The found joy in communal sorrow” (61). Adah makes explicit how this network of othermothers resembles Nigerian kinship systems: “Mrs Cox became the ‘Mum’ for everybody”; she “reminded Adah of most African matrons—you don’t ask them to help you, they just do it. They, like Mrs Cox, have that sense of mutual help that is ingrained in people who have known a communal rather than an individualistic way of life” (65). Adah’s literary journey is put on hold: “She had dreamt that she would be writing African short stories, but her attempts in the past weeks had resulted in nothing but the constant appearance of rejection slips” so that “her dream of being an author had vaporised” (33). However, as she collects the stories of her north-London community and shares them with us through the text of In the Ditch, Adah succeeds as a writer. As a member of the Mansion’s cohort, Adah “was beginning to feel like a human being again with a definite role to perform—even though the role was in no other place but the ditch” (61). I would argue that her role includes that of the autoethnographer, as she names the conditions under which the tenants are oppressed. Beyond material indignities like mold on the walls, lack of heat, and dogs defecating in the stairwells, the women are subjected to intrusive government regulations. “Separated women”

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who had sexual relationships with “men friends” ran the risk of having their dole reduced, on the assumption that the man could help with financial support. Such a situation “usually drove the fancy men away. The women not only had to be poor, but had to be sex-starved too” (60). The rationale for this “social argument” is that “if any of these women were allowed to have sex with their men friends, there would always be unwanted babies” (60). For women in the ditch, “To be deprived sexually, especially for women in their twenties who had once been married, was probably one of the reasons why places like the Pussy Cat Mansions were usually a fertile ground for breeding hooligans and generations of unmarried mums” (61). This passage accentuates how the state’s beneficence is compromised by its imposition of paternalistic control on Black and impoverished women like Adah.131 Mrs Ashley advises Adah to join the Tenants’ Association to complain about the terrible conditions at the Mansions; and Whoopey encourages Adah to withhold her rent until the dog problem is addressed. At the Rent Office, Adah “found her tongue” and refuses to pay (70), proving how autoethnography serves to “disrupt taboos, break silences, and reclaim lost and disregarded voices.”132 Flanked by Whoopey and Billy’s mother, Adah stands her ground so that “The other clerks had now stopped work and simply stared at the two white women with a black one sandwiched in between like a good sponge cake.” Adah feels that “It is a curse to be an orphan, a double curse to be a black one in a white country, an unforgivable calamity to be a woman with five kids but without a husband,” yet at the Mansions she benefits from “solidarity against any foe” (71). Adah’s personal and public rebellions against the government welfare agency testifies to her New Womanism. The tenants of Pussy Mansions are eventually informed that they are to be rehoused. Despite yearning for a better situation, Adah is reluctant to move: “Were the damp wet walls of the Mansions any worse than fine dry walls of a new council flat in Godknowswhere if she was to be enclosed in them without friends to support and amuse her? Would better-off, working-­class neighbours try to humiliate her because she was black? Could she be black and proud when she had so little of which to be proud except her race and her children?” (74). In In the Ditch her traditional Igbo maternal pride merges with her satisfaction of being a member of the Pussy Mansions collective. Through her ethnographic lens, Adah reflects on being “a regular reader of New Society, and some other social science magazines. She was not unaware of a few social theories. But the situation

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that was working itself out at the Pussy Cat Mansions fitted into no such theories” (87–88). As a participant-observer, she relays how “a sort of community had worked itself into being, everybody knew the business of everybody else” (88). Adah filters her feelings through her diasporic sensibilities: “To go to a new area now seemed as formidable as going to a new country” (88). She accepts an offer of a council maisonette in the middle-class neighborhood of Regent’s Park, but disparages, “In flats like those, you couldn’t holler to your neighbours in the mornings when you were hanging the babies’ nappies out to dry” (128–129). Migrating to a new neighborhood emptied of othermother networks, Adah is positioned to experience a kind of racialized dislocation and loneliness that Collins asserts can threaten Black women.133 However, at the Mansions Adah had in fact “started to yearn for a little privacy” (100) and sensed that “It was time she became an individual” (127). In her new room/womb in Regent’s Park, Adah is a rebellious New Woman preparing for the next stage of her journey of self-growth. Head Above Water: An Autobiography With the transition from the autobiographical fiction of Second Class Citizen and In the Ditch to the formal autobiography of Head Above Water, Adah Obi becomes Buchi Emecheta. The text merges the themes and mandates of matroethnography and the Künstlerroman; Emecheta continues her academic and experiential work in sociology concurrent with her becoming a published author, while raising her children, here identified by their real names: Chiedu/Florence, Ik/Sylvester, Jake, Christy, and Alice. Head Above Water documents how motherhood and social work impacted the production of Second Class Citizen and In the Ditch, as well as other novels like The Bride Price and The Joys of Motherhood. Emecheta employs an innovative approach to the genre by writing episodically rather than chronologically, focusing “on the little happenings that I think helped to mould and shape me into a fairly prolific writer” (1). In Head Above Water she reports: “As for my survival for the past twenty years in England, from when I was a little over twenty, dragging four cold and dripping babies with me and pregnant with a fifth one—that is a miracle” (5). Emecheta thus inscribes “the bedrock of women of color’s motherwork” which includes “survival, power, and identity.”134

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Emecheta links these themes to New Womanism, modernity, and (post) colonialism. Of her singing class at the Methodist Girls’ High School in Lagos, under the direction of the Welsh Miss Davies, Emecheta describes, “Until a few generations back the voices of their grandparents were used in musical village calls, in singing ballads and telling stories in songs, in forest calls and in enhancing the vibrating rhythms of cone-shaped talking drums. Now these girls, the modern girls of twentieth-century Africa, still possess such voices, still with the same strength, still with the same vigour, but now with that added hope and pride, the pride that they were going to be the new women of the new Africa” (15). In particular, the girls “had been told that their position was unique in history,” for “they were going to rub shoulders” with teachers like Miss Davies and “many other white missionaries who had left their different countries to come to Lagos in Nigeria to teach the girls to value their own importance” (15). Western colonial education is here presented as offering an intervention in a patriarchal nation in order to counter its traditional devaluing of girls. Emecheta makes clear not only how this intervention itself is problematic, but also how it is undermined by the white missionaries themselves. The young Emecheta, inspired by Wordsworth, Byron, and Shakespeare, confesses to her English Literature teacher, Miss Humble, that she wants to be a writer when she grows up. Miss Humble admonishes her, “Pride goeth before a fall!” and expels her to the chapel to “pray for God’s forgiveness” (21). Emecheta is a rebellious New Woman, for she refuses to obey Miss Humble; privileging the voice of her Chi, or African spiritual guide, Emecheta does not go to chapel. She justifies, “I came to the conclusion that Miss Humble probably felt that her language was too good for the likes of me to want to use as a means of expression. But that was the only language I was being taught to write. If I spoke my Igbo language or any other Nigerian one in the school compound, I would be given a bad mark or asked to pay a fine. And why did she take the trouble to leave her island home and come and teach us her language in the first place?” (22). Notions of female gender valuation are compromised as they intersect with colonial oppression, and render the “new women of the new Africa” contested figures. Emecheta uses the language of the dominant discourse—English—to register her reverse discourse of anti-colonialism. At the same time, she problematizes her position when she acknowledges how her scholarship-funded education at the Methodist school enabled the postcolonial fulfillment of her literary dreams. At the close of the book, she returns to the issue: “All I ever wanted was to tell my stories

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from my own home, just like my big mother [Aunt] Nwakwaluzo used to tell her stories in her very own compound with her back leaning against the ukwa tree. The only difference was that instead of using the moonlight and her own emotional language as her tools, I have to use electricity, a typewriter and a language that belonged to those who once colonized the country of my birth. But I am happy I mastered the language enough to enable me to work with it, for if not I would have been telling my stories only to those women and children in Umuezeokolo, Ibusa” (227–228). Emecheta’s global reach and reputation are thus indebted to the English language and the tools of modernity—electricity and the typewriter. Drawing on these markers of colonialism, she disseminates her pre-­colonial heritage to her postcolonial readers. Emecheta’s academic credentials give her an advantage in London, though as an educated New Woman she is an outsider within her migrant community. At her first lodgings, a rooming house, she observes, “All the Nigerian women in the house worked at a shirt factory in Camden Town and they had taken the trouble to reserve a position for me there, but I refused because I knew I could get something better. I had already decided on a profession, and had started taking correspondence courses at home in Nigeria on British librarianship. I intended to continue it here” (28). After a series of library jobs, though, she reports on having to resign from the British Museum to care for her children, a situation that shifts her insider-­ outsider position as she descends, like many of her diasporic compatriots, into poverty and second-class citizenship. Empowering herself by and for her children—“I had to pull myself out of the ditch for their sake” (39)—she relays, “I began to write about our plight in the local papers like the Ham and High” (40).135 She merges her maternal goals with her literary and ethnographic ones. Tired of librarianship, Emecheta decides to pursue a degree in sociology because, “I did not want to study for money alone. I wanted the type of discipline that would help me to be a good writer when I was forty, and the type of study that would allow me to be there at the door to welcome my kids when they returned from school” (47). Pursuing a degree in sociology at London University, when applying for a grant she reports, “Many of the officials kept wondering why I had delayed my university education until I had five children. I cannot remember how many times I said, ‘But look, Madam, when we scream in labour pains in the wards, we do not scream away our brains. The brains are still there intact. We have babies with another part

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of our anatomy, not through our brains, and having education does not mean that one has to be child-free’” (52). Emecheta invokes the strategy employed by New Woman writers who “explore the precarious balancing act women artists have to perform between conforming to traditional notions of feminine morality and securing their individual professional survival.”136As a racialized mother, Emecheta performs motherwork that blurs the boundaries between the conventional gendered spheres of public industry and private domesticity and that “promises to shift our thinking about motherhood itself.”137 As her studies progress, she notes, “The more I went into sociological theories the more I could find their equivalent or what I termed their interpretation in real life,” and she connects this thinking to herself: “My life at Pussy Cat Mansions only a few months back could be regarded as ‘anomie’ or classlessness. I found I could relate my lack of any hope for the future and near personal despair to the same concept” (57–58). She plans to write about her own experiences, inspired by her reading of British texts like the memoirs One Pair of Hands (1939) and One Pair of Feet (1942) by Monica Dickens, and novel Poor Cow (1967) by Nell Dunn, books based on ‘social reality’” (58). She becomes immersed in this tradition of “social reality” which produces what she calls “documentary novels” (58), reminding us of Vera Brittain’s excitement (seen in Chap. 6) for the new genre of autobiography as documentary. The first product of Emecheta’s labor is In the Ditch. In rereading it, Emecheta notes, “The language was simple and to give it weight I sprinkled a lot of sociological phrases here and there” (58–59). She further explains: “I saw that using the fictitious name Adah instead of Buchi gave the book a kind of distance, and the distance gave the book the impression of being written by an observer. I was writing about myself as if I was outside me, looking at my friends and fellow sufferers as if I was not one of them” (58). At the same time, she calls the book her “diary” (59), underscoring its autobiographical nature. As such, she illuminates how the book is a metropolitan matroethnography inscribing an “insider’s outsideness.”138 In the Ditch originated as a series of articles serialized in the New Statesman in 1971. Emecheta recounts that as they began to appear, she was suddenly, at age twenty-two, in demand to give interviews for journalists and talks on the radio. She secured an agent, and the publishing firm Barrie and Jenkins brought out the material in book form. Her prominence as such is enhanced by the fact that soon after the novel’s publication, Emecheta learns that the periodical Nova will serialize the book. She

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explains: “It was a very glossy high-class magazine for the liberated woman” (72). In circulation from 1965 to 1975, Nova was initially  subtitled “A new kind of magazine for the new kind of woman.”139 As described by journalist David Gibbs in 2019, Nova offered “something that had never been seen before, a mixture of daring and artistic imagery with unconstrained writing that were always at the edge of current taste and acceptability. The issues and causes of gender, race, sexuality and individual rights, so familiar today but then just whispered, were blazed and table-thumped by Nova with wit, boldness and panache.”140 Nova was “well in advance of its time” and “characterised by an invigorating freedom and breaking of establishment rules.”141 I highlight this account because it resonates with notions of modernism as an avant-garde aesthetic and practice; with the thematic of radical feminist periodicals like The Freewoman; and with the moniker of the New Woman herself—“for the new kind of woman.” Through her appearance in Nova, Emecheta and her work became associated with modernism’s extended reach to “make it new.” Recognizing the difficulty of earning a living by her pen, Emecheta enrolls in the MPhil program at the London University Institute of Education. She also takes a job as a social worker at The Seventies, a center for Black youths on Social Security. The Seventies, she realizes, “would provide an ideal situation to allow me to be a participant observer for my research. (I was then toying with the idea of doing a doctorate on the plight of black youth in London)” (111). As a participant-observer, she again adopts the position of an “insider’s outsideness,” situating herself and the young men at the center in terms of race and class at the nexus of (post)colonialism. She raises the specter of anti-immigration Conservative Member of Parliament Enoch Powell, who blamed Blacks for the nation’s general strikes and unemployment, whom he insisted “should be sent home” (109). Emecheta critiques the colonial contexts of this racism: “Most of these young people at The Seventies had been brainwashed into thinking that England was their mother country, that England belonged to them. At the time when the myth of the ‘mother country’ was being perpetuated, it was beyond the imaginings of the white colonials that one day the blacks would turn round and say to them, ‘Fulfil your promise’” (137). When Emecheta’s daughter experiences racism as the only Black student in her class, Emecheta “kept writing about Powell in [her] essays and howling abuse at him during seminars” (110). She accepts the job at The Seventies because, “I must improve the lot of these young people” (132), a conviction that renders her an othermother to this group.

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Emecheta’s nurturing of both her children and The Seventies’ youths demonstrates Fongang’s claim that “Motherhood is intrinsically and intimately linked to every aspect of African women’s life and defines their worldview.”142 Her motherwork evidences Black women fighting “for the physical survival of children and community” and proving “a catalyst for social activism.”143 Emecheta is subjected to gendered hostility by the men who resent her efforts, and she is forced to resign. However, she testifies, “If I could not help them, I could at least write about them and let the world know that some black youngsters went through that phase in the mid-1970s” (147). Head Above Water is the space wherein she fulfills this goal. More broadly, she explains that not only were her first two novels “shaped sociologically” (104), but she begins to rewrite The Bride Price, the novel her husband burns in Second Class Citizen: “The plot would be exactly the same, but now, having read Sociology, it would have a new depth” (153). Emecheta went on to work as an educational programmer for homeless Black youths, and as a supply teacher for underprivileged boys. Meanwhile, her literary career flourished, as she enumerates of 1975: “I had a full-time job almost the whole year, I rewrote The Bride Price […], I finished The Moonlight Bride, worked a little on The Scapegoat, and finished writing The Slave Girl. By the end of the year, I had written and had approved a BBC play, A Kind of Marriage” (172). Rapidly gaining fame within the context of women’s postcolonial writing, she tells us: “1975 was International Women’s Year. I had never heard the word ‘feminism’ before then. I was writing my books from the experiences of my own life and from watching and studying the lives of those around me in general” (177)—a description highlighting autoethnographic praxis. Having been invited to give a speech to the International Women’s League, she notes, “Before I spoke, the general talk was drifting to women’s emancipation, birth control in the Third World, and how the Third World women were suffering.” Angered by the white women’s paternalism, “I got up and shocked all those ladies, telling them to mind their own business and leave us Third World women alone” (177). The outcome was that “all the black women and men present, and some thinking white women, cheered and applauded my speech!” such that “I think that talk really put me on the map as an international author” (178). Self-distancing from Western feminism, Emecheta promoted her Black feminist politics, while testifying to how “diasporic modernities become a potential site of creative agency.”144

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Emecheta’s feminism was, as we have seen, matricentric. She believed that “people who deliberately choose not to have children do miss out on a great deal” (78). Where her children consistently served as empowering forces on her own personal and professional choices, so she parented them to be empowered: “I have encouraged my children to speak their minds about almost everything. I have consulted them on where we went and what they wore. This I knew was very un-Nigerian, but I thought I was bringing the children up to be confident people” (87). Emecheta’s rise in celebrity is predicated on her status as a role model for “other women, married, single and widowed,” who “were all interested in hearing about the boring way [she] coped with five children single-handed” (174). Rather than “boring,” though, mothering in Head Above Water is depicted as a series of immense and fraught challenges. Having to “be a mother, a wife, a worker and a wonder-woman” constituted at times “an earthly hell” (228), and after she left her husband, she describes the overwhelming “lot of one-parent families like ours. The lone parent is the bread-winner, the mother, the father, the counsellor, the comforter” (157). She endures bouts of being “ill from sheer fatigue” (41). Negotiating motherhood with her degree program, she confesses: “Only God knows how I coped with my family. I think I made a big pot of Nigerian stew akin to an English casserole, and froze it. I defrosted a block for the children’s supper every evening, to be eaten either with rice or potatoes” (96). Her reality is such that “even though I was in my mid-­ twenties, I still had the five of them to worry about,” leaving her no time to relax between the hours spent on school and writing (97). Like many of the mothers in Maternal Modernism, Emecheta wrestled with self-perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothering, particularly as rendered in her quarrels with her teenaged daughter. During one argument, Emecheta tells us that Chiedu “said I was not the good mother I thought I was” (223), leaving Emecheta to lament, “This was going to be my lot. I was going to give all I had to my children, only for them to spit on my face and tell me that I was a bad mother and then leave and run to a father who had never in all his life bought them a pair of pants” (224). Moments like this are offset when Chiedu returned to Emecheta, professing love; or when she receives from her children a bouquet of flowers at the book launch for The Bride Price, “signed ‘Good Luck Mum, we are proud of you’” (217). Emecheta signals her complicated response to mothering during an episode when, unable to cope, she goes out alone on an adventure, pretending to be a tourist. Returning home in the evening, she is met

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by police, brought in by her worried children: “I don’t think those policemen understood that I love my family very, very much, but that I needed time to escape. If not I would have drowned. Doing things like that, rather impulsive to them, kept me afloat, kept my head above water” (184–185). Emecheta attests to the tensions inherent in Black motherhood such that it can be both rewarding and debilitating.145 Emecheta’s quest for self-definition is further rendered as she extracts herself from the institution of marriage. When her husband, Sylvester Onwordi, re-enters her life, demanding that she take him back (so as to take care of him), she privileges her sovereign self and refuses. She queries of her vanguard sensibilities, “Why did I want a man whose ideas I could listen to and who would listen to mine, who would regard me as a person, a companion, a wife, yes, and would do his own share of the housework?” (155). She concludes with New Woman sentiment, “Maybe I was ahead of my time” (155). Indeed, “The depth of my rebellion surprised me” (87). Additionally, scant reference is made to Chidi, an Igbo man Emecheta had known as a child in Lagos and with whom she reconnects in London. She tells us, for instance, that he had encouraged her to pursue her sociology studies, but after she is accepted for her doctorate, she relays that he believed “taking on a serious project like a PhD should be for men only” (222). She turns down his many marriage proposals, in part because “with our people, marriage means more children. I did not want any more” (222). When he moves to the United States to do his own PhD, she feels liberated: “I strictly weaned myself from emotional dependence on him or anybody else. Suddenly I found that I was becoming a new person” (228). In situating herself as an independent woman and accomplished author, she rounds the arc of her Künstlerroman. Emecheta’s New Womanhood is ultimately materialized when she purchases her first house in 1976, a long-held dream. Throughout Second Class Citizen, In the Ditch, and Head Above Water, Adah and Emecheta experienced multiple counts of racism by landlords who either refused to rent to them or abused their powers over them as tenants. Through her relentless efforts to make a living as a social worker and writer, in Head Above Water Emecheta is finally able to secure a home of her own. Her personal earnings further allow her to devote herself full-time to writing, so that she gains “a new kind of mental independence” (221). In the spirit of Woolf, Emecheta’s freedom is predicated on her having “money and a room of her own.”146 At the close of Head Above Water, Emecheta secures not just a room but the whole house, wherein she will continue to raise

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her children as a proud Black mother, and commit herself to creativity in this expansive room/womb. As she affirms, “All I ever wanted was to tell my stories from my own home” (227).

Conclusion The London trilogy illuminates how Emecheta is a matroethnographer who performs motherwork in ways that dismantle normative motherhood. In “Feminism with a Small ‘f’!” she recounts, “I had my photograph taken once in my office where I do my writing. The photo-journalist was a staunch feminist, and she was so angry that my office was in my kitchen and a package of cereal was in the background. I was letting the woman’s movement down by allowing such a photograph to be taken, she cried. But that was where I worked. Because it was warmer and more convenient for me to see my family while I put my typewriter to one side.”147 These sentiments inform Emecheta’s dedication in Second Class Citizen: “To my dear children, Florence, Sylvester, Jake, Christy and Alice, without whose sweet background noises this book would not have been written.” Walker reflects on this dedication in her chapter on Emecheta, “A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children.” Commenting on Second Class Citizen, Walker confesses, “It was the dedication page of this novel that made me read it, because it is exactly the kind of dedication I could not imagine making myself.”148 Querying, “What kind of woman would think the ‘background noises’ of five children ‘sweet’?”149 Walker acknowledges that Emecheta’s merging of motherhood with writing “causes a rethinking of traditional Western ideas about how art is produced. Our culture separates the duties of raising children from those of creative work. I have, myself, always required an absolutely quiet and private place to work (preferably with a view of a garden). Others have required various versions of an ivory tower, a Yaddo, a MacDowell Colony.” For Walker, Emecheta’s novel “raises fundamental questions about how creative and prosaic life is to be lived and to what purpose, which is more than some books, written while one’s children are banished from one’s life, do.”150 Emecheta explains in Head Above Water that “Critics have since doubted the sincerity of this dedication, saying, ‘How could the noises of five young children be sweet?’ But they forget many things. They forget that when I was that age, I did not have a place I could call my home” (60). That is, in contrast to her impoverished and lonely adolescence in Nigeria following the deaths of her parents, Emecheta takes comfort and

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inspiration from having her children with her as a (single) mother in her twenties in London, and from the fact that they “had a home, a proper breakfast, [and] clean clothes on their backs” (60). Additionally, she reports, “Then critics have asked, ‘But how can you write with the children?’ Again, I have to write because of them” (60). Indeed, throughout their lives she has been the sole provider. Statements like these prove how Emecheta’s labor engages in what Collins labels “Issues of survival, power, and identity” as thematics informing the motherwork of Black women.151 In discussing her dedication, Emecheta foregrounds how her work shifts the parameters of gender. She qualifies of her work: “I don’t deal with great ideological issues. […] I chronicle the little happenings in the lives of the African women I know.”152 Emecheta focuses her writing on topics like motherhood, marriage, and communal nurturing, topics traditionally associated with femininity, the mundane, and the devalued. In one sense, by authenticating them, she offers a domestic modernism in line with Woolf’s insistence in “Modern Fiction” that “Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”153 In another sense, though, Emecheta undermines her agenda by dismissing the concerns of herself and others as “little.” Given my argument that the personal and the maternal are political, contrary to her statement she does indeed deal “with great ideological issues.” Dawson concurs that the London trilogy “offers important insights into the way in which the political and theoretical priorities of black feminism emerged from the quotidian concerns of diasporic women in Britain.”154 Emecheta is not only a mother who writes, but a creating mother in her Künstlerroman, situating herself as an artistic New Woman protagonist at the intersections of postcolonialism and Black feminism. Wisker affirms that for African women, writing about motherhood is equated with “seizing power, redefining and valuing it their own way,” leading to a “new kind of mothering, the act of producing writing.”155 I argue that matroethnography is an expression of this new maternal writing. With its explicitly matrifocal points of view, it shares with autoethnography a researcher’s agenda “to name and interrogate the intersections between self and society, the particular and the general, the personal and the political”; and, in its quest for social justice, it reveals “people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles.”156 In this role, Adah and Emecheta perform what Susan Maushart calls the unmasking of motherhood:157 they remove the masks that have kept them silenced within both Nigerian and

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British patriarchal systems, and articulate the lived realities of Black mothers from racialized, class-driven, and diasporic perspectives. As rebellious wives, university students, autonomous professionals, and independent financial earners, Adah and Emecheta are New Women who “enable revisionist subversions of women’s roles.”158 Emecheta likewise contributes to a revisionist conception of modernism. As we have heard her frequently describe, her documentary writing is infused with “sociological theories,” rendering it “half academic and half literary” (Head 57, 147). She thus aligns herself with modernist anthropologists, those “skillful bricoleurs” who combined “method and writing” with “extended fieldwork and literary technique.”159 Merging her talent as a creative writer and training as a social scientist, she crafted a ground-breaking portrait of an African woman as artist. Her postcolonial trilogy is a hybrid matroethnography and New Woman Künstlerroman, constitutive of new modernism’s expanded suite of innovative themes, aesthetics, and practices. Additionally, Emecheta’s texts contribute to modernism as revisioned by feminists promoting vital female voices. As Dawson notes, “Even as feminists in Britain began to recuperate the life histories of important foremothers such as Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Rosa Luxemburg, scant attention was paid to the plight of less illustrious women.”160 Emecheta’s trilogy creates “important new lines of feminist inquiry”161 into its foregrounding of poverty at the nexus of race and motherhood. In considering how this trilogy enhances our understanding of maternal modernism, I return to Friedman and Planetary Modernisms. Utilizing her praxis of circulation and collage, I want to posit how Emecheta’s texts can be read in relation to others showcased throughout the chapters in Maternal Modernism. For example, the chapters on New Woman fiction, Photoplay, and interwar autobiography feature women on quests for artistic fulfillment (be it through writing, painting, music, or acting) and thus as heroines of their disparate iterations of the Künstlerroman. Pairing Adah and Emecheta with protagonists of New Woman fiction like Hadria, Edna, and Kate could focus on themes of personal and professional freedom to be gained through exile, expatriation, and flight from one’s family, home, and nation. Collaging Adah and Emecheta with Helga could amplify discourses of the New Negro Woman and mother, African-­ American and African literary renaissances, and Black feminism. A further link can be made between New Negro womanhood and the empowering site of the metropolis, evidenced by Ida B. Wells and Helga in Chicago and New York, and Adah and Emecheta in London.

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A comparison of Adah and Emecheta with the contributors to The Freewoman could look at how debates about topics like marital status, domestic reform, birth control, and endowed motherhood affect women’s abilities to transform from Bondwomen into Freewomen. Bringing Emecheta into dialogue with Photoplay mothers could consider New Womanism in relation to demands for companionate marriage, gaining financial independence through artistic success, and navigating celebrity and the media. Pairing Emecheta as a postcolonial matroethnographer with Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, and Vera Brittain could dramatize the intersections of traumatic and violent histories on personal and collective identities, the gendering of autobiography and documentary, and how the personal is always political. Pairing Emecheta with these life-writers as well as New Woman protagonists like Hadria, Edna, Eva, and Helga could further expose commonalities about unprecedented attention to the maternal body and women’s mental health issues from a woman’s point of view. Ultimately, collaging would provide opportunities to map the “circulations back and forth”162 of maternal modernisms. While Emecheta’s texts were emergent during the second wave of feminism, collaging brings them into contact with New Woman narratives of the first wave, whose engagement with ideologies like Republican Motherhood, maternalism, and the race mother shaped modern and modernist conceptions of motherhood. Expanding the periodization and spatialization of modernism reveals cross-currents, as we have seen, between white and racialized mothers from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. In negotiating and challenging individual and societal expectations of maternity, Emecheta proves, in the spirit of all the mothers featured within Maternal Modernism, “Maybe I was ahead of my time” (Head 155).

Notes 1. See, for example, Busby  (“Buchi Emecheta Obituary”); Kean  (“Buchi Emecheta, Pioneering Nigerian Novelist, Dies Aged 72”). 2. Dawson, Mongrel Nation, 97–98. 3. Ibid., 98, 117. 4. Ibid., 117–18. 5. See Podnieks, “‘The Synergy Between You.’” 6. Began and Moses, “Introduction,” Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism, 2–3. 7. Ibid., 8.

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8. Ibid., 9–10. (See also Mark Bevir's Modernism and the Social Sciences.) 9. Ibid., 14. 10. Ibid., 12. 11. Ibid., 16. 12. Ibid., 19. 13. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 4. 14. Ibid., 52. 15. Ibid., 215–16. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. Ibid., 12–13. 18. Ibid., 283. 19. Ibid., 284. 20. Ibid., 286. 21. Quoted in Kean, “Buchi Emecheta,” np. Nigerian author Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. 22. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 76. 23. Ibid., 77. 24. Ibid., 77. 25. Ibid., 77. 26. Ibid., 218, 221. 27. Ibid., 221. 28. Ibid., 256. 29. Heilmann and Beetham, “Introduction,” New Woman Hybridities, 1. 30. Ibid., 2. 31. Ibid., 3. 32. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 286. 33. Ethnography, Dictionary of the Social Sciences. 34. Anthropology, Dictionary of the Social Sciences. 35. Ethnography, Dictionary of the Social Sciences. 36. Ethnography and Anthropology, Dictionary of the Social Sciences. 37. Sociology, Dictionary of the Social Sciences. 38. Peppis, Sciences of Modernism, 4. 39. Manganaro, “Textual Play, Power, and Cultural Critique,” 4–5. 40. Ibid., 5. 41. Ibid., 6. 42. Mills, “Anthropology,” 231. 43. Ibid., 249. 44. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 34–35. 45. Ibid., 41. 46. Clifford, “Introduction,” Writing Culture, 9–10. 47. Adams, Jones, and Ellis, Autoethnography, 46.

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48. Ibid., 2. 49. Ibid., 36. 50. Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 15. 51. Ibid., 10. 52. Ibid., 12. 53. Peppis, Sciences of Modernism, 44. 54. Ibid., 44. 55. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 141. 56. Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices, 94. 57. Walker, “Looking for Zora,” 107. 58. Quoted in Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 3. 59. Ibid., 3, 5. 60. Ibid., 5–6. 61. Adams, Jones, and Ellis, Autoethnography, 36. 62. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 6. 63. Ibid., 8. 64. Emecheta, “Feminism with a Small ‘f’!” 175. 65. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 190. 66. Ibid., 190–91. 67. Ibid., 191. 68. Ibid., 211. 69. Collins, “Shifting the Center.” 70. Ibid., 58. 71. Ibid., 58. 72. Ibid., 60. 73. Ledger, The New Woman, 10. 74. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 60. 75. Ibid., 61. 76. Davis, Christina, “Mother and Writer,” 14. 77. Ibid., 21. 78. Dawson, Mongrel Nation, 106. 79. Sail, “Feminism with a Small ‘f’ in Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch,” 32. 80. Ibid., 34. 81. Wisker, Post-Colonial and African American Women’s Writing, 131. 82. Ibid., 132. 83. Ibid., 140. 84. Ibid., 134. 85. Ibid., 142. 86. Ibid., 143. 87. Egerton, “A Keynote,” 58. 88. Uwakweh, “Negotiating Marriage and Motherhood,” 1. 89. Ibid., 2.

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90. Ibid., 5. 91. Ibid., 5. 92. Ibid., 15. 93. Courtman, “The Transcultural Tryst in Migration, Exile and Diaspora,” 192. 94. Ibid., 192. 95. Ibid., 193. 96. Ibid., 205. 97. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 72. 98. Ibid., 159–60. 99. Ibid., 161. 100. Ibid., 159. 101. Egerton, “A Keynote,” 58; Ledger, The New Woman, 10. 102. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 159. 103. Ibid., 155. 104. Ibid., 157. 105. Ibid., 192. 106. Ibid., 155–56. 107. Ibid., 167. 108. Ibid., 178. 109. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 58. 110. Fongang, “Motherhood and Empowerment in West Africa,” 88, 89. 111. Ibid., 90. 112. Ibid., 90. 113. Uwakweh, “Negotiating Marriage and Motherhood,” 5. 114. Ledger, The New Woman, 11. 115. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 3. 116. “This apparently bizarre state practice is a product of the long-standing British legal principle of coverture, which specifies that women legally owe both their domestic and their reproductive labor to men” (Dawson, Mongrel Nation, 105). 117. Courtman, “The Transcultural Tryst in Migration, Exile and Diaspora,” 193. 118. Adams, Jones, and Ellis, Autoethnography, 46. 119. Ibid., 2. 120. Dawson, Mongrel Nation, 117–18. 121. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 61. 122. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 191. 123. Fongang, “Motherhood and Empowerment in West Africa,” 90. 124. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 167. 125. Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 12. 126. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 256. 127. Sail, “Feminism with a Small ‘f’ in Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch,” 34. 128. Patterson, “Introduction,” The American New Woman Revisited, 2.

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129. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 193. 130. Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 12. 131. Dawson, Mongrel Nation, 97–98. 132. Adams, Jones, and Ellis, Autoethnography, 36. 133. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 196. 134. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 61. 135. The British weekly covering news in the neighborhoods of Hampstead and Highgate. 136. Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 159. 137. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 59. 138. Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 12. 139. Gibbs, “Introduction,” 8. 140. Gibbs, “Introduction,” 10. 141. Ibid., 8, 13. 142. Fongang, “Motherhood, and Empowerment in West Africa” 90. 143. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 61; Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 191. 144. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 286. 145. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 211. 146. Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 7. 147. Emecheta, “Feminism with a Small ‘f’!” 179–80. 148. Walker, “A Writer Because of, Not in Spite of, Her Children,” 66. 149. Ibid., 67. 150. Ibid., 69–70. 151. Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 61. 152. Emecheta, “Feminism with a Small ‘f’!” 175. 153. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 150. 154. Dawson, Mongrel Nation, 98. 155. Wisker, Post-Colonial and African American Women’s Writing, 142–43. 156. Adams, Jones, Ellis, Autoethnography, 2. 157. Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood, xxi. 158. Wisker, Post-Colonial and African American Women’s Writing, 134. 159. Mills, “Anthropology,” 249. 160. Dawson, Mongrel Nation, 108. 161. Ibid., 108. 162. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 278.

CHAPTER 8

Coda: New Womanism in the Twenty-First Century

“The New Woman was born in the Eighteen Nineties, and she is the mother and grandmother of us all.”1 So Margaret Drabble declares in her 1991 introduction to the exhibition catalogue Women Writers of the 1890’s. She relays, “All periods of history are transitional, but some are perhaps more transitional than others, and for women this decade was both transitional and seminal.”2 Ultimately, “we can look back at these extraordinary predecessors, and find in them connections and continuities” to our present day.3 Likewise, Sally Ledger comments, “the concerns of the New Woman have an extraordinary resonance with the concerns of the late twentieth-century women’s movement: employment and education opportunities for women; the competing demands of wage-earning work and motherhood; sexual morality and ‘freedom’; the feminist interrogation of socialism and other political creeds—all these issues speak as loudly to us today […] as they did one hundred years ago.”4 In Maternal Modernism I have traced how innovative and radical maternal discourses of the 1880s were expanded and disseminated in modernism’s long twentieth century. At the end of Chap. 7, drawing on Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms, I offered numerous ways that we could collage Buchi Emecheta’s narratives from the 1970s and early 1980s with Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman fiction, early twentieth-century periodicals, and interwar women’s political life-writings. Here, I want to gesture to how we can view iterations of New Woman motherhood as circulating across a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_8

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span of more than a century, from the 1880s to our present in the 2020s, observing how they intersect, differ, and ‘talk’ to each other. Overarching themes of Maternal Modernism include mother love and maternal satisfaction; women trying to negotiate motherhood with paid employment, artistic activity, and sexual expression; women seeking freedom from children, marriage, and domesticity; maternal politics and activism; reproductive ‘duty’ over choice; and mothers as public and celebrated figures. Themes like these speak to women’s needs for self-fulfillment through, alongside of, or beyond motherhood. In Chap. 2, I cited Mabel Atkinson’s 1914 claim in The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement that “What women who have fully thought out the position want, is not this forced alternative between activity in the human world, and control of their own economic position on the one hand, and marriage and children on the other, but both.”5 I closed Chap. 6 by placing Vera Brittain’s optimism against Storm Jameson’s pessimism. That is, Brittain looks forward to post-1950s victories for her daughter: “Except for a period deliberately set aside for bearing and rearing children, the luxury of ‘checking out’ at will from the world’s work into private life would soon be as little expected from wives as it had always been from husbands” (TE 474). In contrast, Jameson is caustic about the future: “A race of free women would be the end of humanity, since freedom and childbearing are incompatible” (1: 310). From another perspective, as we heard in Chap. 7, Emecheta laments, “I had felt that to be a full human being, I had to be a mother, a wife, a worker and a wonder-woman.” To that, she adds, “I now realized that what I was doing then was condemning myself to an earthly hell” (Head 228). Diverse and competing attitudes like these evidence debates about what women want for themselves and society by way of maternity; and signal how notions like ‘doing it all’ and ‘having it all’ are embraced or rejected as viable or desirable means to empowered motherhood.

Opposing Camps Throughout Maternal Modernism we have seen how these attitudes and debates have put women in conflict with each other. In The Awakening, Edna’s yearning for a creative and erotic life sets her apart from the “mother-women” in her community who “idolized their children” (10). Contributors to The Freewoman engage in their opinionated parry and ripostes about a range of issues like endowment for mothers, women’s

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employment, and reproductive choice. In Photoplay, actor Barbara La Marr, a “vamp” on the screen, claps back at those who question her capabilities: “I’m not willing to admit that because I’ve got black hair and green eyes and what they call beauty, I’m not going to make a good mother to my son.”6 In her autobiography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman resents how “The good mamas of Pasadena were extremely critical” of her parenting methods (160). After Emecheta purchased her own home in Head Above Water, she is judged negatively by her diasporic community, “who felt that single women should not be able to afford such things: they should be the ‘preserve’ of women who stuck to and survived in their marriages”; “This was one of my reasons for shying away from married Nigerian women” (207). The divergent attitudes elicited by and toward New Women are reflective of the contradictory meanings of the concept of maternalism, defined by Ann Taylor Allen as an ideology advocating for “the public importance of motherhood and child-rearing.”7 As imbricated with the rhetoric of feminism, feminist maternalism was adopted by women who “aspired to be both mothers and human beings”; “feminists who extolled motherhood as woman’s distinctive contribution to society—and they were many during  the period from 1890  to 1914—had no intention of confining mothers to their conventional roles of dependent wife, domestic drudge, and sexual slave.”8 Lynn Y.  Weiner attests that maternalism is regarded “variously as feminist, antifeminist, conservative, progressive, radical, or some combination thereof.”9 This description aligns with Talia Schaffer’s observation that the figure of the New Woman was deployed to arouse “an extraordinary range of emotional associations, a flood of feelings which can powerfully support whatever goal the writer has channelled it towards.”10 That is, in their “rejecting, affirming, decrying, or defining the ‘New Woman,” authors and journalists may have contributed to the establishment of “‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ camps” in Europe and North America.11 The diffuse meanings of maternalism, along with the creation of separate female camps, were constructed in and promoted by periodicals that championed or mocked the New Woman. As we have seen, debates about the New Woman were staged in the March and May 1894 issues of the North American Review, with Irish feminist Sarah Grand advocating for the New Woman, and English anti-feminist Ouida denigrating her.12 Novelists Mona Caird and Eliza Lynn Linton similarly faced off in the periodical press. Between 1891 and 1892, Linton wrote a series of articles

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for Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, wherein she attacked the New Woman as “Wild” and dangerous to society for her presumed repudiation of maternity.13 In the May 1892 issue, Caird responded with “A Defence of the So-Called ‘Wild Women,’” demanding that women no longer be defined and delimited by motherhood. Examples like these extend to more recent clashes waged in the media, classified in our popular culture as the “mommy wars.”14 Felice N. Schwartz helped to draw the battle lines between what she terms “the career-­primary woman and the career-and-family woman.” In her 1989 article “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” she posits that if corporations want to retain their talented female employees—and she urges them to want to—then said corporations must create more flexible and hospitable arrangements and opportunities for women with children.15 Points like these were raised long ago, as Maternal Modernism showcases vanguard figures voicing their rebel yell for familial reform. In The Freewoman, for instance, in 1911, editor Dora Marsden writes, “we think some arrangement will have to be made for providing for the mother at a time when her work is temporarily suspended.”16 In her 1912 letter to the editor, reader “A. F.” worries that “wage-earning mothers have not time and strength to enjoy their children.” She suggests, “The remedy for this lies in shorter hours and less work, not in taking the children away from the mother”; and further, that we should “insist that businesses which employ women should provide a crèche where the children could be left during work hours, and where the mothers could visit them at proper intervals.”17 Tamar Lewin, responding to Schwartz, introduced the derogatory phrase “mommy track,” arguing that Schwartz was relegating mothers with careers to maternal ghettoes within the workplace, shunting them “into dead-end, lower paying jobs.”18 Lewin also gives voice to the other side, quoting sources who contend that Schwartz’s article “could also encourage a coming of age for working women and a new flexibility among employers in dealing with maternity and child care,” and that it represents “a historical turning point in the discussion of women in business.”19 Schwartz’s “Management Women” was followed, in 1990, by “Mommy Vs. Mommy,” wherein Nina Darnton defined the “mommy wars” as a pitting of the mother who works outside the home against the mother who stays home with children. She notes, “Both sides have explicit political agendas. Working moms are fighting for all day kindergarten, guaranteed leave for new parents, improved day care and better tax breaks to deflect the cost. At-home mothers argue against using their tax money

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for full-day kindergartens they don’t need. They want tax breaks to help them stay home and raise their own kids.”20 Similar opinions dominated The Freewoman as contributors argued for or against state endowment for mothers, or proposed co-operative housekeeping and childcare arrangements. Brittain made her allegiance to mothers in the workplace explicit. In her 1928 article “What Does Motherhood Mean?” she provokes accordingly: “Unlike those who would deny motherhood to the professional woman, I believe that any mother who plays her part in the life of the community, who retains some practical acquaintance with its habits and fashions, and who, above all, keeps in touch with its changing ideas gives more to her children than the stay-at-home type, for the simple reason that she has more to give.”21 Sentiments like these inform the praxis of Brittain’s and other New Women’s successors. In 1992, Hillary Clinton— lawyer, mother, and then-First Lady of Arkansas—contentiously informed a reporter: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession.”22 Journalist Amy Chozick, revisiting this episode in 2016, states, “With a single response in 1992 to a question about her legal career, Hillary Clinton became a radical feminist in her critics’ imagination, the Lady Macbeth who was an affront to the choices so many other women had made.” Reporting on Clinton’s campaigning to become the first female US president, Chozick foregrounds how Clinton “reclaimed the cookies line”: “In a multimedia explosion of hip-hop and girl power, with Beyoncé performing with a gaggle of backup dancers in blue pantsuits, Mrs. Clinton’s words from 24 years ago appeared on a giant screen above the stage.”23 Like her Victorian fin-de-siècle sisters, Clinton signaled the ongoing provocations of iconic New Women.

Leaning Out and Opting In A number of contemporary publications reflect the conflicts above. In the 2012 feature “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, a married mother and Princeton University professor, made headlines with her confession that she quit her job as the first female director of policy planning at the US State Department in order to be more available to her teenaged children. Having spent her career “telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in,” she had to admit a kind of defeat: “I still strongly believe that

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women can ‘have it all’ (and that men can too). I believe that we can ‘have it all at the same time.’ But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured.”24 The response generated by the article was so enormous that Slaughter expanded it into the monograph Unfinished Business. While she earned much praise and support, she was also censured: “I was accused of perpetuating ‘plutocrat’ feminism— that I’m only concerned with the high-class problems of powerful women like myself. Some critics took issue with the entire concept of ‘having it all,’ calling it perfectionistic folly to imagine that we can have big careers and be highly devoted parents at the same time. Other critics claimed that my article would undermine the  years of historic, hard-won gains of women in the workplace.”25 Like Slaughter, Sheryl Sandberg—mother and Chief Operating Officer of Facebook—generated controversy with her 2013 treatise Lean In. From her obviously elitist stance, she applies blame to women for their predicament. Addressing how there are still so few women in positions of power today, Sandberg avows, “In addition to the external barriers erected by society, women are hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves. We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.”26 In part in response to Slaughter and Sandberg, Lisa Miller wrote “The Retro Wife,” about “Feminists who say they’re having its all—by choosing to stay home.” She explores a new kind of woman, the neo-­ traditionalists who are “untouched” by the idea of “having it all” because they are “too busy mining their grandmothers’ old-fashioned lives for values they can appropriate like heirlooms, then wear proudly as their own.”27 These “grandmothers” are the very figures whom the New Women in Maternal Modernism were opposing. Miller focuses on the stance adopted by countless middle-class women for whom “Feminism has fizzled, its promise only half-fulfilled.”28 They have taken a step back in time, becoming “The Retro Wife” or, as the magazine’s cover calls her, “The Feminist Housewife.” Miller identifies a group who “offer a silent rejoinder to Sandberg’s manifesto, raising the possibility that the best way for some mothers (and their loved ones) to have a happy life is to make home their highest achievement.”29 Miller’s cohort reminds us of The Freewoman reader “Home-Worker,” who in 1912 had to “dissent fiercely” from Marsden’s advice to “the modern housewife”: “I am the ‘devoted’ and successful mother of five children,

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and would not dream of delegating my responsibility and giving up my child-delights to another person.”30 Miller’s piece echoes the 2003 article “The Opt-Out Revolution.” Lisa Belkin interviewed a group of women with a cache of impressive undergraduate and graduate degrees between them, and who in the 1990s began leaving high-salaried, prestigious jobs for full-time motherhood. As her subjects describe their decisions to step away from their careers, she queries of feminism, “Is this a movement that failed, or one reborn?” That is, “Women today have the equal right to make the same bargain that men have made for centuries—to take time from their family in pursuit of success. Instead, women are redefining success. And in doing so, they are redefining work.”31 Ten years later, The New York Times Magazine published “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In.” Tracing the impact of giving up careers and incomes on mothers, Judith Warner finds that, of the women she interviewed, most indicated “that the perils of leaving the work force were counterbalanced by the pleasures of being able to experience motherhood on their own terms.”32 However, while many affirmed their satisfaction with their decisions in relation to time with their children, many others experienced marital problems and reduced self-worth in light of losing their financial independence. The women had all returned or were planning to return to the workforce, and all faced hurdles in doing so. Elisabeth Badinter takes up related themes in The Conflict. She describes a late twentieth-century shift away from 1970s feminism that emerged from “a movement dressed in the guise of a modern, moral cause that worships all things natural,” like maternal instinct, epidural-free birth, breast-feeding on demand, cloth diapers, and co-sleeping.33 Discussing her book with The Globe and Mail’s Ingrid Peritz, Badinter maintains that what we today refer to as “modern motherhood” in fact “reminds me of the motherhood of my great grandmother’s generation. It’s the model of motherhood as a full-time job.” This movement is “a step backwards, simply because if it carries the day, then I don’t see how we’ll attain equality between the sexes, or equal salaries, or the independence of women.” While some women embrace this new mode of parenting, those who reject it should not feel like “bad mothers.”34 Badinter in 2011 sounds like Hadria in 1894  in The Daughters of Danaus: “Throughout history, she reflected, children had been the unfailing means of bringing women into line with tradition. […] An appeal to the maternal instinct had quenched the hardiest spirit of revolt. No wonder the instinct had been so

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trumpeted and exalted!” (57). But Hadria did revolt: “I deny that motherhood has duties except when it is absolutely free” (103). Like Badinter, in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood Sharon Hays focuses on white, middle-class women who, despite having made gains in the workforce during the Second World War, were—and still are—urged to adopt an all-consuming parenting strategy of “intensive mothering.” This method is a “gendered model that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children.”35 Hays’ description in 1996 echoes nearly exactly the observation made by Brittain in 1928: “Motherhood of late years has become a subject of controversy, which grows acute as soon as anyone ventures to suggest that for some women being a mother may not be sufficient to occupy the whole of their time, thoughts, and energy.”36 Hays outlines the onerous tenets of today’s culturally constructed motherhood, emphasizing that “If you are a good mother, you must be an intensive one. The only ‘choice’ involved is whether you add the role of paid working woman.” In this scenario, the maternal options are either the “traditional” stay-at-home mother or the “supermom” who “effortlessly” juggles family and career. Both types of women “make use of available cultural indictments to condemn the opposing group. Supermoms, according to this portrait, regularly describe stay-at-home mothers as lazy and boring, while traditional moms regularly accuse employed mothers of selfishly neglecting their children.”37 This group mentality was recognized by Hadria back in the 1890s. Discussing how Victorian society judges women as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ Hadria posits that such categorization has been internalized by and directed from within the sisterhood as well: Hadria believes, “the women who are called good have much to do with the making of those that are called bad. […] We shall never get out of the difficulty till they frankly shake hands, and admit that they are all playing the same game” (129). Hadria links the moralizing strictures of patriarchy with the divisive tenets of the mommy wars.

Media, Myths, and Fantasies Following Hays, Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels argue in The Mommy Myth that women from the 1980s on have been embracing what they term the “new momism.” This ideology posits that despite the gains of second-wave feminism, the only “right” choice a woman can make is to have children. The new momism is therefore “deeply contradictory: It

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both draws from and repudiates feminism.”38 Contemporary women are framed by the new momist myth, leading to the proliferation of the “supermom,” that is, the liberated professional who intensively mothers and thus ‘does it all’ and ‘has it all.’ However, this expectation of ‘good’ motherhood only burdens and oppresses real or ‘ordinary’ women who cannot possibly live up to the fantasy.39 Recall Emecheta’s traumatic recognition of how women are held to impossible standards: “I had to be a mother, a wife, a worker and a wonder-woman. I now realized that what I was doing then was condemning myself to an earthly hell” (Head 228). The cohort most associated with the fantasy is unsurprisingly celebrity mothers, with the celebrity mother profile serving as the prime incubator and disseminator of new momism.40 These profiles spread in the United States during the early-to-mid-1980s of the Ronald Reagan era, with its “unembarrassed celebration of wealth.”41 At the same time, when women with children began entering the workforce en masse in the 1970s, they were lacking in role models. The media seized on celebrity mothers who “represented the feminist dream of women being able to have a family and a job outside the home without being branded traitors to true womanhood. Beneficiaries of wealth, fame, and craven publicists, they could be what no ordinary mother, even a supermom, could be: a highly successful professional with often grueling hours who also excelled at intensive mothering.”42 The profiles “are carefully packaged fantasies, but they ask readers to approach them as if they were real,” the paradox being that the celebrity “is above the herd but is also so much like you, especially because she is a mother.”43 These descriptions equally apply to the maternal stars and their messaging that we saw in Photoplay decades earlier. Douglas and Michaels rightly deride the new momism and its intensive praxis, but I would also argue that the celebrity profiles from the 1910s and 1920s in Photoplay, wherein the genre was developed, must be appreciated within their historical context. That is, the genre fostered the radical acknowledgment of women accessing and thriving in the traditionally male public sphere of the early twentieth century. Coverage of stars like Billie Burke, Alice Joyce, Gloria Swanson, and Florence Vidor testify to what Allen calls feminist maternalism, practiced by pioneering women seeking “economic self-sufficiency that would enable them to live free of male control, [and] freedom to develop their talents.”44 On a different note, as with my research on Photoplay, Douglas and Michaels find that women of color were largely absent from fan magazines. Racialized stars began making appearances throughout the 1990s,

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with the May 2001 issue of Ebony indicative of increased representation.45 This particular edition fuses the rhetoric of New Womanism with new momism. The cover, announcing “The New Motherhood,” has photos of celebrities Tammy Franklin, Yolanda Adams, and Jasmine Guy beside their respective children. Inside, content includes “Bouncing Back After Pregnancy” in the Beauty and Style section “For the New Black Woman,” “The Joys of Being a Stay-at-Home-Mom” by Zondra Hughes, and “The New Motherhood” by Joy Bennett Kinnon. Kinnon writes about how “Hollywood is leading the way to active pregnancy and child-rearing trends,” and how “Today’s new working mothers” are inspired by them.46 Reviewing the articles, Douglas and Michaels query: “Now, should African American women be gratified that finally their roles as mothers are celebrated and they are being depicted in such glamorized ways instead of only as welfare mothers? Or should African American women be concerned that the same kind of postfeminist sculch being directed at white women is now being turned on them too?”47 This point reminds us of Quicksand’s Helga, who grappled with feelings of acceptance and rejection from both white and Black communities; and of scholarship by Allison Berg, Anne Stavney, and Claudia Tate on how Black women in the early twentieth century were struggling to negotiate the New Womanism of white women with the New Negro emphasis on True Womanhood and racial uplift. As a counter to new momism, Douglas and Michaels find that many women “talked back” to the media,48 and in this way took up a “call to arms” to reject unrealistic directives for mothers49—this “call” is reminiscent of modernist manifestoes and matrifocal activisms documented throughout Maternal Modernism. Today’s celebrities are among these politicized women, evidenced, for example, in their candid confessions about maternal health. Brooke Shields published Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, and Amy Schumer documented her struggles with hyperemesis gravidarum (debilitating morning sickness) on Instagram.50 Serena Williams wrote about her life-threatening post-partum pulmonary embolism for CNN, while Beyoncé discussed in Vogue how toxemia, or high blood pressure, led to an emergency Caesarian section,51 facts that are especially vital for increasing the visibility and medical needs of racialized mothers. In another example, People.com launched in 2021 the podcast Me Becoming Mom, in which the magazine’s editor Zoë Ruderman talks with actors, politicians, journalists, and athletes “about everything from trying to conceive for years to surprise

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pregnancies, IVF to surrogacy, adoption to unexpected home births. Nothing is off limits in these emotional, candid, sometimes heartbreaking but always heartwarming interviews.”52 This agenda draws on the foundational, albeit restrained format of Photoplay interviews—pushing them into taboo-breaking territories—while invoking the raw revelations about topics like post-partum depression and miscarriage we heard from protagonist Helga and autobiographers Gilman, Jameson, Brittain, and Naomi Mitchison.

New Matrifocal Genres Like earlier New Women, many rebellious mothers in the twenty-first century are countering the dominant discourses of society and media with their own reverse discourses, and shattering the masks of maternal silence as they articulate their truths about mothering. Such actions have led to more authentic celebrity portraits, as seen above, as well as to the development of new matrifocal genres, whereby women continue the project advanced by Victorian New Woman George Egerton: “I realised that in literature, everything had been better done by man than woman could hope to emulate. There was only one small plot left for her to tell: the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be.”53 Thus, for instance, Heather Hewett turns to what has been dubbed in the media as Mommy or Mum’s Lit, launched in 2002 with Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It, a novel that reignited “Decades-long debates about motherhood and work” in Britain and the United States.54 The genre is often associated with self-deprecation and satire, emergent from the 1940s to the 1970s when writers like Shirley Jackson and Erma Bombeck wrote stories, articles, and columns humorously criticizing conventional edicts for motherhood and wifehood.55 Strategies like these were used to entertain but also to unveil cultural ideologies that drive  parenting.56 More broadly, the genre of maternal literature refers to narratives that illuminate “the ‘real’ experience of motherhood honestly, without sentimentality or idealization or judgment, from the point of view of the mother.”57 Hewett further cites non-fiction texts like Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott as contributing to matrifocal literature. Given the autobiographies by Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, Brittain, and Emecheta showcased herein, maternal life writings are certainly not new. However, the genre of motherhood memoir has proliferated in the last few decades, covering seemingly every topic

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related to maternity. Surveying the field in Motherhood Memoirs, Justine Dymond and Nicole Willey comment, “The voices that surface in motherhood memoir reveal a community that gives shape to the struggles, pitfalls, revelations, and joys of motherhood,”58 similar to the collective history assembled in Maternal Modernism. Emerging out of the impulses that generate memoir, and encompassing the same limitless range of subject matter, the motherhood blog is a phenomenon ongoing from the 2000s. In Mothering and Blogging, May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte acknowledge that stories from the mamasphere “might yet lack the capacity to thoroughly refute critiques focusing on solipsism and self-­ absorption.”59 Overall, though, mommy blogs create an “extraordinary terrain” inscribing “a version of motherhood more honest and raw than any representation of motherhood found elsewhere.”60 This “terrain” is another region of the New Woman’s terra incognita, and it promises to map a new collective digital history of maternity. The blogs function, too, like the salon of The Freewoman, providing a dialogic space where contributors meet to share and debate their respective opinions. Note that men have taken their cue from motherhood memoirs and blogs. In The Freewoman article “Man at Home,” we heard Fanny Johnson in 1911 articulate the New Woman demand for engaged fatherhood: “Might not the advice, ‘to go home and mind the baby,’ sometimes be applied to the fathers?”61 We can see this advice taken up by New Man authors of twenty-first-century fatherhood memoirs like Hear Me Roar: The Story of a Stay-at-Home Dad by Ben Robertson, and daddy blogs like The Good-Bad Dad and Woke Daddy.62 Friedman and Calixte recognize that the mamasphere can contribute to “oppressive hierarchies, where the voices of the white, the able, the middle class and the heterosexual are often heard first and most often.”63 Similarly, Hewett finds a dearth of examples of matrifocal fiction outside of white, middle-class contexts, while Dymond and Willey identify “the relative paucity of published memoirs by African American mothers.”64 Books like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin, An Autoethnography of African American Motherhood by Renata Harden Ferdinand, and I Am Not Your Baby Mother by Candice Brathwaite signal a bourgeoning corrective with their inscriptions of mothering from diverse racial, ethnic, and class perspectives, and underscore how third-wave feminisms attend to intersectional identities and non-Western institutions of motherhood.

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Brathwaite informs us, “This book will be part memoir and part manifesto, a tell-all and self-help book combined,” and that she hopes it “helps black British mothers feel validated and encouraged to take up space. For all others reading it, I hope I’m able to help accurately describe the many hurdles black British mothers are up against.”65 She thus continues the project of Emecheta, who transcribed her motherhood into hybrid narratives infused with sociological observation and documentary story telling. Brathwaite is a co-founder of Make Motherhood Diverse, a social media forum designed as “an act of inclusion.” As she explains its rationale, “when we look at representations of motherhood in our society awareness demands we ask, where are the black mums, the brown mums, the differently-­abled mums? Where are those caring for children with additional needs? Where are those with tattoos and piercings, pink hair or those who just don’t care about their appearance? Where are the gay mums, the plus sized mums, the working class mums?” Brathwaite calls on these non-normative mothers to “speak for yourselves.”66 We can find mothers speaking for themselves in the numerous memoirs exploring the previously unmapped terra incognita of LGBTQ+ parenting, like Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood by Cherrie L. Moraga, She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Nonbiological Lesbian) Motherhood by Amie Klempnauer Miller, and Pregnant Butch by A. K. Summers. In Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders, Jennifer Finney Boylan affirms, “as the meanings of male and female have shifted from something firm and unwavering into something more versatile and inconstant, so too have the terms mother and father become more permeable and open-ended.”67 Wondering, “How many different kinds of fathers and mothers are there?”68 she celebrates her identity as a transgender mother. Narratives like these are a crucial testament to the fraught but empowering experiences of those in LGBTQ+ communities. Indeed, in Queering Motherhood, Margaret F. Gibson contends, “Through the voices of queer-identified parents we can hear stories and insights that might otherwise be drowned out by the din of cisnormative and heteronormative ‘tradition.’ Such stories expand our notions of the possible, and create connections between individuals across time and space”69—a description reflective of planetary modernisms. More expansively, Gibson indicates that “it is a mistake to think that queering motherhood is only and inevitably a matter of addition, of bringing parents who identify as ‘queer’ and/or ‘trans’ into existing, unyielding frameworks.” Thus, “The parenting experiences and insights of those who

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do not identify as ‘queer’ can also queer motherhood.” “Queering” can “start where any of the central gendered, sexual, relational, political, and/ or symbolic components of ‘expected’ motherhood are challenged.”70 Gibson’s theorizing makes room for the texts examined in Maternal Modernism, which depict women grappling with heterosexual marriage and how to mother inside, outside, or around it. These women challenged the conventional family in terms of how they conceptualized, experienced, and represented motherhood. They courageously rewrote domestic scripts as they lived apart from their children for extended periods of time; established alternative domestic structures through semi-detached or open marriages; sought personal autonomy and economic liberation as creative and professional individuals; and parented as single, divorced, or adoptive mothers. By these revolutionary efforts, they helped to queer motherhood. Of all the women featured herein, Brittain and Winifred Holtby are perhaps the most explicitly linked to lesbianism by the gossip of their day. Brittain was reticent to discuss their relationship, dismissing the “plentiful crop of rumours” attendant on their living arrangement (TF 291), but through Gibson we can regard their approach to motherhood as a queering of the patriarchal institution.71 Additionally, Brittain and Holtby’s mothering in friendship has gained a new kind of traction today. In “Meet the Platonic Parents Who Are Redefining What It Means to Be a Family in Canada,” Megan Jones profiles Canadian law professors Lynda Collins and Natasha Bakht who “are friends, colleagues and platonic parents.” As Jones relays, “the two women have never been romantic partners. Instead, the ‘co-mamas,’ as they call themselves, have redefined what an institutionally recognized family can look like in Canada.” Collins adopted Bakht’s son, conceived via an anonymous sperm donor, and “After an Ontario court granted them a legal declaration of parentage in November 2016, they became the first two people in the country to officially co-­ parent a child platonically.”72 Vittoria Traverso and Jake Robbins expanded the conversation in their article “Is ‘Platonic Parenting’ the Relationship of the Future?” They quote Rachel Hope, author of Family By Choice: Platonic Partnered Parenting, who posits that in order to accommodate these evolving shifts in traditional family structures, “we may need new communal space, like compounds where platonic parents can co-exist in close proximity to collectively raise children.”73 Points like these resonate with how Holtby took up permanent residence in the marital home of Brittain and George Catlin. Additionally, as Patricia Hill Collins stresses, the notion of communal

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parenting in the form of “fictive kin” or “othermothers” has always been a component of Black mothering.74 This fact is evidenced by Emecheta’s lauding of her maternal cohort at the Pussy Cat Mansions. Further, in “They’re Single. They’re Straight. They’re Friends. And They’re Having a Baby,” Sarah Treleaven reminds us that “Unconventional as they might be,” families formed by best friends as parents reflect the fact that families have always been “rooted in a timeless tradition of women helping women raise children.” Treleavan adds, though, “there’s also something thoroughly modern about them.” Co-parenting has become a means for women who “have long given up the fantasy of ‘having it all,’” yet who “still want a family and don’t particularly want to do it alone.” In the spirit of New Womanism, “Co-mom relationships” offer women “fulfillment through a pact that feels both revolutionary and like a total no-­ brainer.”75 In eschewing conventional marriage, and in redefining options for mothering, co-mothers—and their potential platonic male partners— who are straight or queer continue the queering of motherhood practiced by many New Women herein.

Childfree by Choice and Maternal Regret Topics opened up by contemporary maternal literatures, and widely discussed in blogs and chat rooms, are generative of new understandings, representations, and practices of mothering. Two of the most controversial topics lead away from motherhood: childfree by choice and maternal regret. For example, the August 12, 2013, issue of Time magazine announces on its cover, “The Childfree Life: When Having It All Means Not Having Children,” and features the story “None Is Enough” by Lauren Sandler. In Childfree by Choice, Amy Blackstone traces how options for birth control coupled with second-wave feminism gave women more freedom to “choose whether, when, how, and to how many children they would become mothers.”76 However, women are still castigated if they forego children. Motherhood not only confers stereotypical requisite femininity on women but also serves the state’s pronatalist agenda for population growth in light of pervasive and global declining birth rates. Blackstone evidences how, for instance, forty-three countries, largely in Europe, had in 2009 designated fertility policies aimed at increasing the population.77 Such concerns intersect with those voiced throughout Maternal Modernism. Consider Gilman’s and protagonist Gallia’s objectionable eugenic interests in reproducing the ‘best’ citizens; Wells’

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invocation to her Black sisters to perform their “joint share of the work of creation” and thus contribute to humanity’s “perpetuity” (212); Helga’s resistance to the New Negro Woman’s ‘duty’ for racial uplift; and The Freewoman’s I. D. Pearce finding the “prevailing horror of a decreasing birth-rate” to be “distinctly humorous,” and her sarcastically wondering at “all this insane concern for the continuation of the race?”78 Affirming that historically of course not all women choose to be mothers, Blackstone invokes one iteration of the New Woman: “Today, self-­ proclaimed spinsters have much of the same awareness about the freedom of staying unhitched—and similar motivations for their choice—as the voluntary single and childless women of one hundred years ago.”79 Recall Marsden’s proclamation in 1912 that if a woman is not prepared for or desirous of motherhood, she “has no business to undertake it.”80 For Blackstone, “What is new is both the increasing numbers of women who eschew motherhood and that increasingly they are able to articulate their rejection in ways not generally available to previous generations of women.”81 As she explains, “Though cultural lore suggests regret is a likely consequence, more common is an awareness of the stigma of choosing the path less travelled, an acceptance that not everyone will understand, and also the joy of arranging one’s life in the way that feels most right.”82 Such a description matches the avant-garde path of many New Women. While women may not regret the decision to be child free, there is a contingent that regrets the decision to have children, one that has become increasingly vocal as well. The recent proliferation of studies makes this position clear: No Kids: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children by Corinne Maier; “Inside the Growing Movement of Women Who Wish They’d Never Had Kids” by Sarah Treleaven; Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath; “I Regret Having Children” by Anne Kingston; and Maternal Regret edited by Andrea O’Reilly. Kingston, for instance, recognizes that “In pushing the boundaries of accepted maternal response, women are challenging an explosive taboo—and reframing motherhood in the process.”83 O’Reilly underscores how regret “may be both a critique of the assumptions and expectations of normative motherhood as well as a lament when mothering does not go as planned.”84 Donath finds that women in pronatal countries—like Israel, the center of her study—who confess regret are branded as “selfish, hedonistic, childish, disreputable, impaired, dangerous, and of questionable sanity.”85 Such branding reminds us of Eliza Lynn Linton’s enumeration of New Women’s sins in her 1891

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article “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents”: New Women are “Aggressive, disturbing, officious, unquiet, rebellious to authority and tyrannous to those whom they can subdue.”86 The Wild mothers in Maternal Modernism do not profess regret, but many of them register varying degrees of ambivalence. They may be loving and committed nurturers who gain emotional fulfillment through mothering, yet who concurrently admit that motherhood can make them frustrated, dislocated, bored, and even depressed. We saw how The Awakening’s Edna with her sons “would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them” (24). Thinking of Eva in The Home-Maker, “Lester never doubted that his wife loved her children with all the passion of her fiery heart, but there were times when it occurred to him that she did not like them very well” (71). For Jameson, her son became her life’s “only complete passion, its final meaning” (1: 96), but she also grew “bored” by the routine of mothering (1: 111). Donath posits that “If we think of emotions as a means to demonstrate against systems of power, then regret is an alarm bell that not only should alert societies that we need to make it easier for mothers to be mothers, but that invites us to rethink the politics of reproduction and the very obligation to become mothers at all.”87 Ambivalence conveyed by Edna, Eva, and Jameson align with this argument, for they exemplify women trapped by institutional motherhood as their families and societies have made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to satisfactorily combine motherhood with their quests for fulfillment outside the home. Loathe to leave her daughter, Gilman testifies to this institutional failure: “why did they think I liked it? She was all I had” (Living 163), explaining, “If I had any settled home, any settled income, any settled health, it would have been ‘my turn’ now—how gladly my turn!” to help raise Katharine with her ex-husband (Living 248). Similarly, Emecheta emphasizes, “I love my family very, very much,” but concedes that, exhausted from a life of single mothering, she sometimes needed “to escape” her children; “If not I would have drowned” (Head 184).

Continuing Crusades Donath’s reference to protesting against powerful systems brings me to the last topic I want to consider here: maternal activism. In one sense, we have seen how women like Gilman, Wells, Jameson, Mitchison, and Brittain were engaged in explicitly political activities and organizations

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involving the woman’s movement, feminism, suffrage, civil rights, socialism, and pacifism. They traveled locally, nationally, and internationally giving speeches and lectures, and wrote treatises and pamphlets decrying injustices and promoting diverse causes. Not only were they mothers who were activists, but their activisms involved securing rights and freedoms for women, including mothers. Likewise, Emecheta fought the welfare state in the interests of herself and other single and racialized mothers at the Pussy Cat Mansions, and she applied her nurturing capacities to the underprivileged Black youth at The Seventies shelter, fusing personal and communal motherwork. Contributors to The Freewoman were associated with the Society for the Promotion of Co-operative Housekeeping and House-Service, the Malthusian League, and birth control movements, among others. We can consider that all the women featured in Maternal Modernism are activists in terms of how—implicitly and explicitly, privately and publically—they advocated for the self-determination and independence of women inside and outside of motherhood. In 1897, in the section “Motherhood Under Conditions of Dependence” (in the chapter “The Morality of Marriage”), Mona Caird sought “the creation of a new balance of power, of many varieties of feminine character and aptitude, and, through the consequent influx of new activities, a social revolution.”88 In 1911, seeking women’s equality in the workforce, Olive Schreiner exclaimed, “We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less. This is our ‘Woman’s Right!’”89 Revolutionary pledges like these inform the essay collection The 21st Century Motherhood Movement. In her introduction, O’Reilly enumerates that to date, the movement includes over eighty organizations. Some were established in the last few decades of the twentieth century but the majority were formed in the twenty-first; while mainly North American, many are also global in scope. Examples include the Motherhood Project, Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights, Mothers Movement Online, and The International Mothers and Mothering Network. O’Reilly explains that maternal activism “emerges as a specific mode of feminist theory and practice” that she calls “matricentric feminism.” The term functions “to remind and emphasize that the category of mother is distinct from the category of woman, and that many of the problems mothers face—socially, economically, politically, culturally, psychologically and so forth—are specific to women’s role and identity as mothers.”90 She concludes that “the organizations develop a plethora of theories and strategies that accord to mothers what is denied to them in patriarchal societies: agency, authority,

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authenticity, autonomy, advocacy and activism.91 These are the “A’s of empowered mothering”92 that I touched on in Chap. 1, alongside Olivia Heal’s definition of “matricritics” as a “matricentric feminist criticism concerned with mother as writer and the attendant subjects,”93 undertaken by authors who “do not so much inhabit as occupy a maternal first person.”94 These concepts, akin to manifestoes, have stimulated my analyses in Maternal Modernism. As I have highlighted, through their fiction, autobiographies, journalism, and celebrity interviews, modernist mothers deployed matrifocal perspectives and arguments to counter dominant imperatives with their own reverse discourses. In confronting, challenging, and rejecting their restrictive conventional families, cultures, and institutions, they sought and fought for new ways of defining, practicing, and experiencing maternity. In so doing, these disparate transatlantic groups of New Women, both real and textual, created matrifocal networks or webs of connection, providing us with their innovative and iconoclastic narratives that are constitutive of a collective memory of modern motherhood. I noted earlier Drabble’s comment that “we can look back at these extraordinary predecessors, and find in them connections and continuities”95 to our present day. To be sure, twenty-first-century women who navigate and negotiate multiple and competing roles and identities, including maternal ones, owe much gratitude to the New Woman rebels who advanced before us, and who have provided us with confessions, cautionary tales, inspiration, and blueprints for self-realization. We can consider them as being, in literal and figurative terms, the models to whom Virginia Woolf gestured: “we think back through our mothers if we are women.”96 And yet, the fact that there are so many “connections and continuities”—ones I have traced here—is also a measure of disappointment, of a revolution not won but ongoing. Allen stresses that over the past hundred years or so, feminists have “proposed a host of solutions to the maternal dilemma, including new forms of social support for mothers, collective child-care, new forms of the family and household, the enhancement of the father’s role in child-rearing, the sequencing of childbearing and career obligations, and many others.”97 These topics inform Maternal Modernism. Allen adds, “The difficulty of reconciling maternal and familial responsibilities with individual aspirations is still a major obstacle to the equality of women in Western Europe and elsewhere.” Indeed, the “maternal dilemma” remains “intractable,”98 as we have seen with contemporary issues like the mommy wars, the opt-out and opt-back-in revolutions, and new momism. More pointedly, “The ‘maternal dilemma’ is not only still

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present, but is experienced by an increasing number of women. For the near future, at least, it will continue, for both women’s desire for children and their drive for individual self-realization” remain pressing realities.99 In her article “Why I Think Mothers Can Have Careers,” Brittain cautions that just because women have won the vote, society must not lapse into complacency by thinking that “the long battle is over” and “there is no feminist crusade any more,” for as she argues, “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Rather, “The crusade continues; it is only that the crusaders are different, and are fighting on quite another front.” This front is a maternal one, for the new line of recruits are “the women who are endeavouring to solve the problem of combining marriage and motherhood with paid employment.”100 Brittain was addressing her audience in 1930; she proved prescient, for as we know in the 2020s, “the long battle” for women to achieve satisfying balances between their maternal, professional, artistic, and sexual longings is far from over. Buttressed by New Women of the past, today’s New Women continue the crusade.

Notes 1. Drabble, “Introduction,” Women Writers of the 1890’s, ix. I was alerted to this valuable text by Heilmann, who partly quotes from it in New Woman Fiction 11. 2. Ibid., xii. 3. Ibid., xii. 4. Ledger, The New Woman, 6. 5. Quoted in Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 63. 6. La Marr, “Why I Adopted a Baby,” 31. 7. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 2. 8. Ibid., 13. 9. Weiner, “Maternalism, 96. 10. Schaffer, “Noting But Foolscap and Ink,” 45. 11. Ibid., 49. 12. Grand, “The New Aspect  of the Woman Question”; Ouida, “The New Woman.” 13. See, for example, “The Wild Women” and “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents.” 14. Terms like mommy wars, mommy track, and, later discussed here, Mommy Lit and mommy blogs signal how the media trivializes women by viewing them from the position of their children. For more on the topic of the mommy wars, see Douglas and Michaels, Steiner, Peskowitz, and Napierski-Prancl.

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15. Schwartz, “Management Women and the New Facts of Life.” 16. Marsden, “The Editor’s Reply,” 73. 17. “A. F.,” “To the Editors,” 252. 18. Lewin, “‘Mommy Career Track’ Sets Off a Furor.” 19. Ibid. 20. Darnton, “Mommy Vs. Mommy.” 21. Brittain, “What Does Motherhood Mean?” 22. Quoted in Walter, “Working  Moms, First Ladies and Recalling Hillary Clinton’s ‘Baking Cookies’ Comment.” 23. Chozick, “Hillary Clinton and the Return of the (Unbaked) Cookies.” 24. Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” 86–87. 25. Slaughter, Unfinished Business, xxi. 26. Sandberg, Lean In, 8. 27. Lisa Miller, “The Retro Wife,” 22. 28. Ibid., 22. 29. Ibid., 23. 30. “Home-Worker, “To the Editors,” 251. 31. Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” 46–47, 45. 32. Warner, “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In.” 33. Badinter, The Conflict, 4. 34. Badinter, quoted in Peritz, “The Good Mother Doesn’t Exist.” 35. Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, x. 36. Brittain, “What Does Motherhood Mean?” 37. Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, 131–32. 38. Douglas and Michaels, The Mommy Myth, 5. 39. Ibid. See, for instance, pp. 83–84; and chapters “Attack of the Celebrity Moms” and “The ‘Mommy Wars.’” 40. Ibid., 113. For more on celebrity mother profiles, see Lynn O’Brien Hallstein; and Podnieks (“The Bump is Back”). 41. Ibid., 116. 42. Ibid., 118. 43. Ibid., 123. 44. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 13. 45. Douglas and Michaels, The Mommy Myth, 124. 46. Kinnon, “The New Motherhood,” 149. 47. Douglas and Michaels, The Mommy Myth, 125. 48. Ibid., 13. 49. Ibid., 26. 50. On Schumer, see, for example, Grose, “The Celebrity Activism Industrial Complex.” 51. Williams, “Serena”; Beyoncé, “Beyoncé”; see also Chiu, “Beyoncé, Serena.”

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52. “Introducing: Me Becoming Mom,” Me Becoming Mom.  Celebrities include, among others, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Senator Tammy Duckworth, Hoda Kotb, and Allyson Felix. 53. Egerton: “A Keynote,” 58. 54. Hewett, “You are Not Alone,” 119. 55. Ibid., 127. 56. Ibid., 130. 57. Ibid., 121. 58. Dymond and Willey, “Introduction,” Motherhood Memoirs, 21. 59. Friedman and Calixte, “Introduction,” Mothering and Blogging, 31. 60. Ibid., 31, 22. Acknowledging the problematics of the infantilizing term “mommy,” Friedman and Calixte state that they continue to employ it with a sense of irony and reclamation to give women power in their status as a mommy blogger—“a choice compliment rather than a damning epithet” (“Introduction,” Mothering and Blogging, 25). 61. Fanny Johnson, “Man at Home,” 45. 62. For more on the daddy blog, see May  Friedman (“Daddyblogs  Know Best”); for the fatherhood memoir, see Podnieks (“Daddy Time  All the Time”). 63. Friedman and Calixte, “Introduction,” Mothering and Blogging, 29. 64. Dymond and Willey, “Introduction,” Motherhood Memoirs, 21. 65. Brathwaite, I Am Not Your Baby Mother, 5–6. 66. Brathwaite, “Make Motherhood Diverse.” 67. Boylan, Stuck in the Middle with You, 204. 68. Ibid., 205. 69. Gibson, “Introduction,” Queering Motherhood, 5. 70. Ibid., 5–6. 71. As noted in Chap. 6, Brittain and Holtby’s relationship is explored by scholars like Clay, Gorham, and Berry and Bostridge. 72. Megan Jones, “Meet the Platonic Parents Who Are Redefining What it Means to be a Family in Canada.” 73. Traverso and Robbins, “Is ‘Platonic’  Parenting the Relationship of the Future?” 74. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 193. 75. Treleavan, “They’re Single.” 76. Blackstone, Childfree, 3. 77. Ibid., 43. 78. I. D. Pearce, “To the Editors,” 31. 79. Blackstone, Childfree, 21–22. 80. Marsden, “The New Morality,” 142. 81. Blackstone, Childfree by Choice, 21. 82. Ibid., xvi.

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83. Kingston, “I Regret Having Children.” 84. O’Reilly, “Introduction,” Maternal Regret, 14. 85. Donath, Regretting Motherhood, 6. 86. Linton, “The Wild Women,” 604. 87. Donath, Regretting Motherhood, xvii. 88. Caird, “The Morality of Marriage,” 137. 89. Schreiner, Woman and Labour, np. 90. O’Reilly, “Introduction,” The 21st Century Motherhood Movement, 24–25. 91. Ibid., 29. 92. O’Reilly, “Preface,” Matricentric Feminism, 11. 93. Heal, “Towards a Matricentric Feminist Poetics,” 118. 94. Ibid., 120. 95. Drabble, “Introduction,” ix. 96. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 83. 97. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 236–237. 98. Ibid., 235. 99. Ibid., 241. 100. Brittain, “Why I Think Mothers Can Have Careers.”

Correction to: “A Mother, a Wife, a Worker and a Wonder-­Woman”: Matroethnography, Black Feminism, and Postcolonial New Womanhood in Buchi Emecheta’s London Narratives

Correction to: Chapter 7 in: E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_7 The original version of the chapter was inadvertently published with two errors. A scholar has been referred to ‘she’ instead of ‘he’ at pages 225 and 236. The chapter has now been corrected.

The updated original version for this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­08911-­4_7 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4_9

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Index1

A Abolition, 33 Abortion, 65, 204, 244 Absentee mothering, 186 Absentee mothers, 214 Achebe, Chinua, 238, 245 Activism, 225, 255, 268 Actor-mothers, 133 Adams, Tony E., 232 Adams, Yolanda, 276 Addison, Heather, 164n18 Adoption, 60, 134, 156, 160–162, 277 Adoptive mothers, 280 African American, 25, 26 African American modernism, 75 African American mothers, 278 Africa Question, 42, 62 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 234, 237, 238 Alcott, Louisa May, 19 Alden, Mary, 145

All Change Here: Girlhood and Marriage (1975), 170, 200, 202 Allen, Ann Taylor, 4, 5, 12, 15, 35, 38, 91, 132, 197, 269, 275, 285 Alpha Suffrage Club, 190 Amaternal theory, 37 Ambivalence, 213, 283 American Baptist, 189 Ammons, Elizabeth, 42 Anand, Mulk Raj, 226, 228 Anderson, Margaret, 137, 177 “Angel in the house,” 2, 13n10, 20, 24, 39, 109, 133, 145, 146, 152, 161, 211 Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, 8 Anthony, Susan B., 38, 193 Anthropology, 11, 230–232, 260 Ardis, Ann L., 6, 23, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56, 65, 78, 88, 101 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 231 Arnold, Matthew, 131, 136

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Podnieks, Maternal Modernism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08911-4

315

316 

INDEX

Artistic mother, 236 Ashton, Sylvia, 145 Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 190 Atkinson, Mabel, 38, 268 Auclert, Hubertine, 34 Auden Generation, 172 Austin, Nefertiti, 278 Auto/biography, 173 Autobiography of Storm Jameson: Journey from the North, Vol. 1 (1969) and Vol. 2 (1970), 170 Autoethnographer, 232, 248 Autoethnographic praxis, 255 Autoethnography, 230, 232, 235, 249, 259 An Autoethnography of African American Motherhood (Ferdinand), 278 Avant-garde feminists, 69, 91, 102 The Awakening (1899), 50, 66–68, 70, 268, 283 B Bad Modernisms, 81, 82 Bad motherhood, 158, 185 Bad mothers, 200, 273 “Bad” mothers of modernism, 57, 82 Badinter, Elisabeth, 273, 274 Bair, Barbara, 120 Baker, Zita, 205 Bakht, Natasha, 280 Baldwin, James, 245 Barnes, Djuna, 17, 54, 56 Barnett, Ferdinand Lee, 170, 190 Barry, Iris, 135 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, 278 Baudelaire, Charles, 21 Beach, Sylvia, 56 Bean, Jennifer A., 139 Beckett, Samuel, 21 Beddoe, Deirdre, 179 Beecher, Catherine, 182

Beetham, Margaret, 21, 22, 93, 131, 132, 229 Began, Richard, 225 Belkin, Lisa, 273 Benedict, Ruth, 233 Bennett, Arnold, 54 Bennett, Belle, 10, 131, 154, 155, 157, 162 Bennett, Louise, 239 Benstock, Shari, 56, 62 Berg, Allison, 26, 41, 42, 74, 191, 276 Bergman, Jill, 120 Berlant, Lauren, 98 Berry, Paul, 210, 221n135 Besant, Annie, 116 Besnault-Levita, Anne, 8, 51 Beyoncé, 271, 276 Bhabha, Homi K., 229 Bill, Charles William, 195, 197–200 Biological destinies, 2, 41, 60, 64, 82, 115, 162, 241 Birth control, 8, 10, 19, 32, 39–41, 89, 113, 116, 118, 122, 133, 141, 171, 180, 192, 204, 210, 243, 255, 261, 281, 284 Bishop, Mardia J., 164n18 Bizzini, Silvia Caporale, 175 Black autobiography, 178 Black British mothers, 279 Black female autobiographers, 189 Black feminism, 3, 4, 32, 119, 234–237, 242, 245, 259, 260 Black feminist, 255 Black feminist maternalism, 119 Black institutions of motherhood, 236 Black motherhood, 3, 4, 189, 235 Black mothering, 74, 281 Black New Woman, 75, 119, 170, 189, 192 Black New Woman mother, 194 Blackstone, Amy, 281 Black Victoria, 192, 193

 INDEX 

Black womanhood, 42, 74, 75, 192 Blackton, J. Stuart, 130, 136 Bloomsbury Group, 210, 221n132 Bluemel, Kristin, 181 Boas, Franz, 230, 233 Bombeck, Erma, 277 Bondwoman, 87, 89, 99, 101, 120, 261 Bostridge, Mark, 210, 215n1, 221n135 Bow, Clara, 132 Boylan, Jennifer Finney, 279 Bradlaugh, William, 116 Brady, Alice, 10, 131, 153, 162 Brathwaite, Candice, 278, 279 Breast-feeding on demand, 273 Brewster, Eugene V., 130 The Bride Price, 245, 250, 255, 256 British Empire, 25 Brittain, Vera, 1, 10, 11, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177–181, 189, 206, 209, 210, 212, 213, 253, 261, 268, 271, 274, 277, 280, 283, 286 Brittain-Catlin, John Edward, 209, 211, 212 Brittain-Catlin, T. J., 215n1 Brooker, Peter, 94, 95 Brown Madonna, 75 Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), 135 Burke, Billie, 10, 131, 147–149, 161, 162, 275 Buss, Helen M., 173 Butts, Mary, 16, 54 Buzard, James, 232, 246 C Caird, Mona, 9, 50, 57, 58, 67, 69, 73, 82, 89, 113, 118, 151, 269, 284 Calder, Jenni, 200 Calixte, Shana L., 278

317

Calloway, Licia Morrow, 76 Calvert, Catherine, 10, 131, 153, 154, 162, 163 Canfield, Dorothy, 9, 50, 57, 59, 68, 69, 72 Caporale Bizzini, Silvia, 6 Carlson, Shirley J., 192 Carr, Mary, 145 Cassatt, Mary, 19 Catlin, George, 171, 206–208, 210–212, 280 Childfree by choice, 281 Counter-publics, 100 Celebrity, 261 journalism, 131, 133, 134, 142, 144, 161 maternity, 129–163 motherhood, 146 mother profile, 275 mothers, 145, 275 profiles, 131, 142, 178, 275 Channing, Grace, 184, 185, 188 Chapman, Guy, 199 Chew, Ada Neild, 10, 110–112, 119 Chicago Women’s Club, 190 Childcare, 133, 171, 202 Childfree, 88 Childfree by Choice, 281–283 Childrearing, 98 Cholmondeley, Mary, 55 Chopin, Kate, 9, 50, 57, 59, 66, 69, 70 Chozick, Amy, 271 Christie, Agatha, 180 Chua, Amy, 278 Churchill, Suzanne W., 94–96 Civil rights, 170, 171, 190, 284 Clarke, Bruce, 90, 92, 107, 118 Clarke, Charles Douglas, 170, 196, 197 Clay, Catherine, 172, 173 Clifford, James, 232

318 

INDEX

Clinton, Hillary, 271 Close Up, 135 Cloud Cuckoo Land, 205 Club movement, 190 Colette, 19 Collective memory, 174–176, 215, 285 Collins, Lynda, 280 Collins, Patricia Hill, 3, 32, 75, 76, 189, 234, 235, 244, 248, 250, 259, 280 The Colored American Magazine (1900–1909), 119, 120 Companionate marriage, 141, 261 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 180 The Conflict, 273 Connolly, Cyril, 172 The Conquered (1923), 200–202, 204 Conrad, Joseph, 228 Conservative modernism, 172, 180, 215 Conservator, 190 Contraception, 117 Co-operative childcare, 109 Co-operative child-rearing, 92 Co-operative housekeeping, 109, 111 Co-operative housekeeping and childcare, 271 Co-operative mothering, 110 Co-operative parenting and housekeeping, 113 Co-parenting, 280, 281 The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), 204, 205 Cott, Nancy F., 32, 34, 113, 133 Counterpublics, 98, 101 Courtman, Sandra, 239 Couser, Thomas G., 173 Craig, Layne Parish, 39, 117 Creating mother, 259 Crèche system, 103, 104, 109, 113, 270

The Crisis, 75 Crusade For Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), 170, 189, 194, 233 Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 8 The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, 274 Cunard, Nancy, 17 Cunningham, Gail, 64, 65 D Daly, Brenda, 19 The Dark Tide (1923), 208 Darnton, Nina, 270 Daughter-centricity, 19, 20 The Daughters of Danaus (1894), 50, 59–62, 73, 110, 111, 156, 273 D’Auvergne, Edmund B., 114–116 Davis, Christina, 236 Dawson, Ashley, 224, 225, 236, 244, 259, 260 “A Defence of the So-Called Wild Women,” 58, 67, 270 Delap, Lucy, 56, 69, 74, 90, 97, 99–102, 107, 113 Depression, 182, 183, 185, 277 Desai, Anita, 239 Devi, Swarnakumari, 228 DiCenzo, Maria, 100 Dickens, Monica, 253 Divorce, 161, 186, 280 Dix, Gertrude, 55 Dixie, Florence, 55 Documentary, 175, 223, 253, 260, 261 Domestic drudge, 36, 91, 132–133, 269 Domestic drudgery, 110 Domesticity, 55, 268 Domestic labor, 89, 171 Domestic modernism, 209, 259 Domestic modernity, 98

 INDEX 

Domestic reform, 213, 261 Donath, Orna, 282, 283 Doraldina (Dora Saunders), 141 Douglas, Susan J., 274–276, 286n14 Douglass, Frederick, 189 Douglass Women’s Club, 194 Dowie, Ménie Muriel, 9, 39, 50, 57, 59, 62, 64, 69 Down Came the Rain, 276 Doyle, Laura, 226 Drabble, Margaret, 267, 285 Drudge, 103, 105 Drysdale, Charles Vickery, 116, 117 Du Bois, W. E. B., 26 Dunn, Nell, 253 Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), 177, 233 Duster, Alfreda M., 194, 216n26 Dyer, Richard, 160 Dymond, Justine, 278 E Earle, David M., 135, 140 Early childhood education, 187 Eatough, Matt, 226 Ebony, 276 The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement (1914), 38, 268 Economic independence, 91, 107, 110, 113, 133, 171, 186 Economic liberation, 244 Eddy, Helen Jerome, 138, 142 Edwardian, 8, 54–56, 81 Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), 50, 83n12, 238, 240, 277 The Egoist, 95, 98, 220n110 Eliot, T. S., 16, 51, 90, 137, 181, 231 Ellis, Carolyn, 232 Ellis, Havelock, 40 Ellmann, Richard, 16

319

The Emancipation of the Family, 59 Emecheta, Buchi, 11, 39, 177, 223–261, 267–269, 275, 277, 279, 281, 283, 284 Empire, 62, 228 Employment, 269 Empowered motherhood, 3, 268, 285 Endowed motherhood, 3, 10, 89, 92, 102, 104–108, 113, 118, 122, 133, 261, 268, 271 Erotics, 117, 157, 162, 268 Ethnographer, 233 Ethnography, 230, 231, 246 Eugenics, 2, 7, 10, 15, 39–41, 64, 65, 74, 89, 92, 113, 116–118, 122, 208, 213, 281 Exile, 9, 50, 55–57, 60–62, 65, 67–69, 71, 73, 76, 77, 79–81, 227, 260 Expatriate, 55, 56, 69, 71, 81, 260 Extra-marital relationships, 204 F Fabian Society, 205 Fan magazines, 10, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137–143, 152, 275 Fatherhood, 5, 89, 278 Fatherhood memoirs, 278 Fathers, 65, 105, 110, 112, 133, 195, 204, 256, 278, 285 Fawcett, Hilary, 30 Feasey, Rebecca, 164n18 Feeding and Care of Baby (1913), 179 Feidelson, Charles, 16 The Female Complaint, 98 Feminisms, 4, 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, 28, 32, 34–36, 41, 88–90, 98–100, 102, 103, 113, 122, 133, 140, 142, 171, 175, 176, 207, 213, 237, 255, 261, 272–274, 278, 281, 284

320 

INDEX

“Feminism with a Small ‘f’!,” 235, 258 Feminist Housewife, 272 Feminists, 7, 25, 30, 32, 38, 56, 91, 100, 133, 140, 142 avant-garde, 74 manifestoes, 207 maternalism, 64, 91, 105, 132, 133, 147, 163, 189, 192, 269, 275 maternal sensibilities, 149 motherhood, 90, 92, 113, 207 mothering, 32 movement, 101 periodicals, 98 periodical studies, 96 Ferdinand, Renata Harden, 278 Fin de siècle, 8 First-wave feminism, 91 First World War, 68, 175, 179 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 132 Flaherty, Robert, 217n31 Flapper, 29, 30, 132, 140, 141 Flaubert, Gustave, 21 Fluhr, Nicole M., 6 Fongang, Delphine, 241, 255 Ford, Ford Madox, 54 The Forerunner, 182 Forna, Aminatta, 227 Forster, E. M., 20, 54, 228 Franklin, Tammy, 276 Frazer, Sir James, 230, 231 Free Speech and Headlight, 190 Freewoman, 87, 89, 91, 99–101, 108, 109, 113, 116, 120, 220n110, 261 The Freewoman, 10, 34, 39, 88–97, 99, 100, 106, 113, 114, 119, 129, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 192, 254, 261, 268, 270–272, 278, 282, 284 The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review, 87–122

The Freewoman: A Weekly Humanist Review, 87–122 French naturalism, 52 Friedman, May, 278 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 11, 55, 62, 80, 181, 226, 228, 229, 231, 260, 267 Fuller, Kathryn H., 130, 137–139 G Gale, Zona, 182 Galilee, Hannah Margaret, 195 Gallia (1895), 39, 50, 62–66 Galton, Francis, 40 Garnett, Edward, 204 Garvey, Amy Jacques, 120, 121, 189 Gawthorpe, Mary, 88 Gay, Peter, 1 Gibbs, David, 254 The Gibson Girl, 37, 46n128 Gibson, Margaret F., 279, 280 Giles, Judy, 17 Gillard-Estrada, Anne-Florence, 51 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 10, 12, 22, 36–38, 40, 91, 112, 170–172, 174–177, 182–188, 191, 196, 213, 261, 269, 277, 281, 283 Gilman, Houghton, 186–188 Gilman, Katharine, 182–184, 186, 187 Gissing, George, 50 The Golden Bough (1890), 230, 231 Good and bad mothering, 145, 162, 256 The Good-Bad Dad, 278 Good mother, 6, 70, 72, 158 Good versus bad mothering, 2 Goodwin-Kelly, Mary Kate, 164n18 Gordon, Vera, 145 Gorham, Deborah, 207, 209 Grand, Sarah (Frances Bellenden-­ Clarke), 28, 29, 41, 269

 INDEX 

Grant, Allen, 50 Green, Barbara, 93, 95, 98, 99 Grierson, John, 175, 217n31 Grimké, Angela Weld, 42 Guy, Jasmine, 276 H Haddon, Alfred C., 233 Halbwachs, Maurice, 174 Haldane, John Scott, 201 Hall, Ann C., 164n18 Hall, Radclyffe, 20 Hallstein, Lynn O’Brien, 287n40 Hanisch, Carol, 175 Hannah, Matthew, 137 Hanscombe, Gillian, 16, 140, 170 Hardy, Thomas, 50 Harlem Renaissance, 26, 42, 51, 74–76, 81, 233, 237 Hays, Sharon, 274 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 16, 55, 135 Head Above Water (1986), 177, 223, 224, 227, 240, 250, 255–258, 269 Head-Hunters: Black, White, and Brown (1901), 233 Heal, Olivia, 5, 6, 285 Heap, Jane, 137 Hear Me Roar, 278 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 213 Heilbrun, Carolyn G., 178 Heilmann, Ann, 7, 21, 22, 30, 31, 74, 93, 100, 117, 140, 229, 239, 240, 286n1 Heteronormative mothering, 68 Hewett, Heather, 277, 278 Higashi, Sumiko, 136, 138, 143 High modernism, 68, 135, 181, 231 High modernist mother, 68 Hill, Marylu, 20 Hirsh, Marianne, 18, 19

321

Hobson, Florence Edgar, 112 Hobson, J. A., 111 Holtby, Winifred, 10, 171, 172, 179, 180, 207, 210, 221n135, 280 The Home-Maker (1924), 50, 68, 72–74, 113, 283 Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 183 Hope, Rachel, 280 Hopkins, Pauline E., 119–121, 189 Hoyt, Eric, 131 Hughes, Zondra, 276 Hurston, Zora Neale, 177, 233, 234, 237 Huyssen, Andreas, 139, 140 I I Am Not Your Baby Mother (2020), 278 Ibsen, Henrik, 50 Ida B. Wells Woman’s Club, 190, 191 Idealized maternity, 145 Ideal mother, 159 I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), 277 Illegitimacy, 3, 103, 111, 157, 158 Improperly feminine, 29 Improper maternal, 69, 82, 116 Improper mothering, 70 Individualism, 101, 113–114 Individualism of motherhood, 114 Ingman, Heather, 179, 180 Ingram, Angela, 51, 55, 56 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), 234 Institution, 3, 4, 24 of Black motherhood, 32, 75, 234–237, 248 of marriage, 76, 257 of motherhood, 24, 68, 101, 176, 215, 278, 283 Intensive mothering, 274, 275

322 

INDEX

Intermodernism, 172, 181, 215 The International Mothers and Mothering Network, 284 Interwar, 169–215 autobiography, 260 women’s political life-writings, 267 In the Ditch (1972), 223, 224, 227, 244, 246, 248–250, 253, 257 Intimate public spheres, 93, 98, 99, 121, 137 IVF, 277 J Jackson, Shirley, 277 Jameson, Storm, 10, 11, 169, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 180, 181, 194–196, 198, 199, 213, 221n135, 261, 268, 277, 283 Joannou, Maroula, 47n141, 195, 214 Jocasta, 18 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 42 Jones, Martha S., 128n168 Jones, Stacy Holman, 232 Joyce, Alice, 10, 131, 145–148, 161, 162, 275 Joyce, James, 16, 17, 21, 51, 55, 137, 231, 233 The Joys of Motherhood, 250 K Kane, Louise, 14n41 Kaplan, E. Ann, 68, 160 Kenner, Hugh, 16 Kenton, Edna, 34, 35, 93 Kerber, Linda K., 23, 26 Kessler, Carol Farley, 188 Key, Ellen, 15, 36–38, 40 A Kind of Marriage, 255 King, Truby, 179 Kingston, Anne, 282

Kinnon, Joy Bennett, 276 Klaver, Claudia C., 3, 25, 27, 57, 60, 69, 99 Koven, Seth, 35 Krafft-Ebing, Richard Freiherr von, 40 Künstlerroman, 11, 225, 229, 239, 240, 245, 246, 250, 257, 259, 260 Kuzwayo, Ellen, 234 L La Marr, Barbara, 10, 131, 156, 162, 269 La Marr, Marvin Carville, 157 Lamott, Anne, 277 Lane, Ann J., 182 Larsen, Nella, 9, 42, 50, 57, 59, 68, 69, 74, 75, 116 Latham, Sean, 93, 95 Lawrence, D. H., 16, 54 League of Nations Society, 202 League of Nations Union, 211 Lean In, 272 Ledger, Sally, 7, 25, 26, 31, 41, 54, 65, 69, 98, 236, 267 Leighton, Roland, 207, 208 Lejeune, Philippe, 173 Lewin, Tamar, 270 Lewis, Wyndham, 16 Light, Alison, 180, 215 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 57, 58, 63, 66, 110, 141, 269, 282 Lionnet, Françoise, 233 Literary modernism, 173 Little magazines, 94–96, 98, 135, 138 The Little Review (1914–1929), 137, 138 The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935), 36, 170, 182 Locke, Alain, 74, 75

 INDEX 

Loy, Mina, 16 Luckhurst, Roger, 7 Luxemburg, Rosa, 260 Lyon, Janet, 90, 207 M Macpherson, Kenneth, 135 Maier, Corinne, 282 Majerus, Elizabeth, 106, 135, 137, 140, 141 Make Motherhood Diverse, 279 Making it new, 1, 52, 74, 207, 226, 241, 254 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 230, 231 Malthus, 116 Malthusian League, 116, 284 Mammy, 235 “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” 270 Manganaro, Marc, 231 Manifestoes, 212, 285 Mao, Douglas, 9, 51, 81, 95, 134, 181 Marcus, Laura, 134, 135 Marek, Jayne E., 95 Markandaya, Kamala, 239 Marriage, 49, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 64, 66, 114, 141 Marriage plot, 64 Marriage-problem novels, 53 Married Love (1918), 180 Marsden, Dora, 10, 87–90, 92–96, 99, 101–103, 105–107, 110, 113, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 220n110, 270, 272, 282 Marsh, Mae (Mary Wayne), 10, 131, 149–150 Martell, James, 20 Maternal activism, 182, 204, 283, 284 Maternal ambivalence, 3, 68, 72, 79, 171

323

Maternal body, 203, 213, 240, 261 Maternal creativity, 237 Maternal dilemma, 5, 15, 197, 211, 285 Maternal duty, 193 Maternal guilt, 171, 195, 203 Maternal health, 276 Maternal instinct, 3, 82, 89, 151, 153, 188, 208, 273 Maternalism, 4, 35, 39, 91, 104, 121, 197, 261, 269 Maternal life writings, 277 Maternal love, 157, 171, 213 Maternal modernisms, 2, 21, 50, 66, 82, 92, 122, 130, 163, 170, 181, 204, 215, 225, 228, 237, 239, 260, 261 Maternal mourning, 171 Maternal network, 174 Maternal regret, 281–283 Maternal star, 129 Maternal trauma, 197, 198, 203 Maternal welfare, 32 Maternity leave, 107, 113, 149, 161, 162 Matricentric feminism, 3, 284 Matricritics, 5, 285 Matrifocal, 5, 20, 31, 56 activisms, 276 autobiography, 173 networks, 285 testimony, 121 Matroethnographer, 243, 258 Matroethnography, 11, 225, 229, 232, 240, 246, 250, 259 Matter-Seibel, Sabina, 119 Matus, Jill, 27 Maushart, Susan, 5, 51, 259 McDowell, Calvin, 190 McKay, Nellie Y., 178, 189 McKible, Adam, 94–96 McLane, Betsy A., 217n31

324 

INDEX

McMahon, Deirdre H., 24 Me Becoming Mom, 276 Media History Digital Library, 130 Melvin, Alice, 89, 111, 112, 118 Memoir, 173 The Messenger, 75 Michaels, Meredith W., 274–276, 286n14 Michel, Sonya, 35 Miller, Aime Klempnauer, 279 Miller, Jane Eldridge, 54, 56, 71, 81 Miller, Lisa, 272 Miller, Nina, 141 Mills, David, 231 Miscarriage, 197, 203, 277 Mitchison, Dick, 170, 201 Mitchison, Naomi, 10, 11, 169, 172, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181, 200, 202, 213, 261, 277, 283 Modern, 7, 30, 37, 55, 62, 63, 71, 73–75, 81, 98, 106, 132, 137, 138, 140, 141, 153, 184, 229, 251, 261, 273, 281 housewife, 272 mother, 111 motherhood, 273, 285 Modern Fiction, 119, 259 Modernism, 1, 8, 16, 19, 34, 39, 50, 55, 89, 90, 94, 95, 110, 131, 135, 138–140, 181, 210, 225–228, 231, 234, 239, 254, 260, 267 Modernism of content, 54, 65, 69, 79, 80, 94, 96, 108 The Modernist Journals Project (MJP), 94 Modernists, 8, 38, 51, 53, 68, 138, 175, 207, 233, 261 manifestoes, 90, 276 maternities, 7 mothering, 74, 75, 285 salon, 96, 137 talk, 96, 97, 101, 104, 113, 122

Modernity, 34, 73, 136, 138, 140, 163, 180, 226–228, 251, 252 The Mommy Myth, 274 Mommy or Mum’s Lit, 277 Mommy track, 270 “Mommy vs. Mommy,” 270 Mommy wars, 11, 270, 274, 285 Monroe, Harriet, 176 Montefiore, Janet, 172–174, 176, 177, 215 The Moonlight Bride, 255 Moore, Alice Joyce, 146 Moore, Alice Mary, 145 Moore, George, 52 Moraga, Cherrie L., 279 “The Morality of Marriage,” 59, 118 Morrison, Toni, 234, 237 Morrisson, Mark S., 97 Moses, Michael Valdez, 225 Moss, Thomas, 190 Mother, 1, 54 instinct, 192 love, 104, 145, 156, 158, 268 Motherhood, 1, 2, 49, 56 blog, 278 memoirs, 277, 278 studies, 17 Motherhood of a Freewoman, 114 Motherhood Problem, 24 Motherhood Project, 284 Motherhood Question, 24 Motherhood So White, 278 “Motherhood Under Conditions of Dependence,” 59, 284 Mothering, 2 Mothering-as-creating, 240 Mothering the race, 89 Mother-problem novels, 53, 80 Mothers, 2, 55 Mothers in the workforce, 89, 122 Mothers Movement Online, 284 Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights, 284

 INDEX 

The Mother’s Recompense (1925), 50, 68–71 Motherwork, 4, 236, 244, 247, 250, 253, 255, 258, 259, 284 The Motion Picture Story Magazine (1911), 130, 136 Mrs. Dalloway, 233 Mules and Men (1935), 233 N Napierski-Prancl, Michelle, 286n14 Negra, Diane, 139 Negro World (1918–1933), 120 New Africa, 251 New Age, 196 The New Aspects of the Woman Question, 28 New Commonwealth magazine, 198 New father, 92 New feminism, 180 The New Freewoman (1913), 95, 98 New Journalism, 7, 131–134, 142 New Man, 29, 72, 74, 92, 187, 190, 207, 278 New maternal celebrities, 134 New modernisms, 2, 6–9, 16, 52, 54, 93, 95, 121, 134, 135, 171, 181, 225, 230, 260 New modernists, 11, 51, 139, 231 New modernist studies, 93 New momism, 274–276, 285 New mother, 38, 42, 91, 133, 191 New motherhood, 37, 40, 50, 69, 112, 119, 131, 182, 186, 276 New Negro, 276 The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), 74 New Negro Man, 42 New Negro mother, 78 The New Negro Movement, 74

325

New Negro Woman, 22, 26, 41, 74, 75, 77–81, 120, 121, 170, 171, 192–194, 260, 282 New periodical studies, 93, 95 New realism, 7, 52, 53, 80 New Woman, 6, 7, 10, 20–22, 26–32, 34, 37, 38, 41, 49, 54–57, 59, 61, 63, 69, 70, 72, 74–81, 88, 90, 93, 99, 100, 109, 110, 116, 117, 122, 130–134, 137, 138, 140–144, 147, 150–154, 157, 161, 163, 170, 171, 182, 183, 192, 193, 195, 201, 207, 212–214, 225, 229, 236, 238–242, 245, 247, 250–254, 257, 259–261, 267, 269, 272, 277, 278, 282, 285, 286 fictions, 49–82, 89, 132, 239, 240, 245, 260, 267 maternity, 96 mother, 111, 133, 160, 191 motherhood, 101, 113, 158, 175, 267 novels, 94, 106 New Womanhood, 257 New Womanism, 215, 226, 228, 231, 249, 251, 276, 281 New Womanist, 174 Nickelodeon, 130, 139 Nightingale, Florence, 143 Non-normative, 2 maternity, 2 mothering, 161 mothers, 2, 279 Normative maternity, 2 Normative motherhood, 258, 282 Normative mothering, 161 Normative mothers, 2 North, Michael, 13n5 Not Without Honour (1925), 208 Nova, 253, 254 Nwapa, Flora, 237, 239, 245

326 

INDEX

O Old (or equal rights) feminism, 180, 209 Olson, Liesl, 17 Onwordi, Sylvester, 257 Open marriages, 170, 204, 280 Operating Instructions, 277 Opt-back-in, 285 Opt-out, 285 The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In, 273 The Opt-Out Revolution, 273 Orage, A. R., 196 O’Reilly, Andrea, 2–4, 6, 17, 175, 282, 284 Orgeron, Marsha, 143 Othermothers, 248, 250, 254, 281 Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé), 28, 29, 269 P Pacifism, 171, 211, 213, 284 The Pall Mall Gazette, 29 Pankhurst, Christabel, 88 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 88, 123n17 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 88, 169, 260 Parson, Virginia, 141 Patriarchal motherhood, 2, 50, 51, 66, 73, 80–82, 89, 111, 144, 145, 157, 170, 235 Patriarchy, 3, 61 Patricia Burke-Ziegfeld, Florence, 147 Patriotic mother, 4, 41 Patterson, Martha H., 22, 29, 30 Peace Pledge Union, 211, 221n135 Pearson, Allison, 277 Peppis, Paul, 231, 233 Peritz, Ingrid, 273 Perkins, Frederick Beecher, 183 Perkins, Mary Fitch Westcott, 183

Peskowitz, Miriam, 286n14 Petrie, Windy Counsell, 176, 178, 182 Petrova, Olga, 142 Photoplay, 10, 30, 106, 129–163, 260, 261, 269, 275, 277 Pierce, David, 131 Planetary Modernisms, 226, 228, 247, 279 Planetary turn, 11, 227 Platonic Parenting, 280 Podnieks, Elizabeth, 287n40 Ponce de Leon, Charles L., 131, 142–144 Poovey, Mary, 27 Poplar magazine, 140 Popular modernism, 106, 135–137, 140 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 55 Postcolonial, 11, 19, 22, 226, 227 Postcolonial hybridity, 229 Postcolonialism, 225, 228, 230, 237, 251, 259 Postcolonial New Woman, 229, 239, 240 Post-modernism, 19 Post-natal depression, 203 Post-partum, 277 depression, 79, 171, 209, 213 psychosis, 185, 186 The Pot Boils (1919), 197 Pound, Ezra, 1, 13n5, 16, 51, 137 Powell, Enoch, 254 Pregnant Butch, 279 “Professions for Women,” 39 ‘Proper’ and ‘improper’ maternities, 24, 68 Proper feminine, 23 Pulp magazine, 135, 140 Punch, 29, 74 Pykett, Lyn, 23, 26, 53, 54, 69

 INDEX 

Q Queer, 2 motherhood, 280 lesbian, and transgender parenting, 279 Queering motherhood, 279 Quicksand (1928), 50, 68, 74–80, 116, 276 Quirk, James R., 130, 136, 138, 139, 144, 145 R Race, 3, 76 Race mothers, 22, 26, 41, 50, 57, 113, 116, 117, 122, 171, 188, 192, 208, 261 Racial motherhood, 25, 74 Racial uplift, 2, 78, 80, 81, 116, 120, 192, 276, 282 Racial violence, 213 Racism, 188, 214, 224, 235, 257 Ramazani, Jahan, 226 Realism, 19 Reddy, Maureen T., 19 The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895), 190 Reproduction, 89, 102 Reproductive body, 242 Reproductive choice, 269 Reproductive control, 92 Republican, 113 Republican maternalism, 171 Republican Mother, 57, 116, 117 Republican Motherhood, 3, 4, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 35, 41, 50, 81, 91, 122, 143, 261 “The Retro Wife,” 272 Rhondda, Lady, 180 Rhys, Jean, 17, 54, 228 Rich, Adrienne, 3, 12, 18, 24, 69 Richardson, Dorothy, 20, 41, 54, 135

327

Riley, Catherine, 176 Robbins, Jake, 280 Robertson, Ben, 278 Rondda, Lady Margaret, 172 A Room of One’s Own (1929), 38, 39, 215 Roosevelt, Theodore, 41, 116 Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, 3, 25, 27, 57, 60, 69, 99 Rosner, Victoria, 17 Roth, Elaine, 164n18 Roy, Arundhati, 228 Ruddick, Sara, 4 Ruderman, Zoë, 276 Ryan, Leila, 100 S Sacrificing mother, 141 Sail, Amina, 237 St. Johns, Adela Rogers, 151, 152, 155, 159 Salih, Tayeb, 228, 238 Sandberg, Sheryl, 272 Sandler, Lauren, 281 Sanger, Margaret, 40, 198, 220n114 The Scapegoat, 255 Schaffer, Talia, 30, 32, 269 Schenck, Celeste M., 52, 55 Schlossman, Beryl, 20 Scholes, Robert, 93–95, 121 Schreiner, Olive, 38, 42, 207, 212, 226, 284 Schumer, Amy, 276 Schwartz, Felice N., 270 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 2, 16, 17, 54, 57, 90 Second Class Citizen (1974), 224, 227, 237, 241, 244–247, 250, 255, 257, 258 Second World War, 199 Self-sacrifice, 144, 145, 153, 191 Self-sacrificial motherhood, 197 Semi-detached, 280

328 

INDEX

Semi-detached marriage, 171, 208 Sex, 161, 180 Sex appeal, 152, 153 Sexology, 7, 40, 231 Sexual, 81 activity, 89 anarchy, 31, 45n89, 117, 140 Sexual Anarchy, 81 Sexual behavior, 94 Sexual desire, 3, 78 Sexual emancipation, 140 Sexual expression, 268 Sexual freedoms, 118, 141 Sexuality, 133, 235 Sexualized mother, 158 Sexual morality, 267 Sexual purity, 28 Sexual relationships, 249 Shail, Andrew, 134, 135 Shaw, George Bernard, 50, 196, 211 She Looks Just Like You, 279 Shields, Brooke, 276 Shipman, Nell, 141 Showalter, Elaine, 45n89, 81 Shuttleworth, Sally, 27 Silent film, 130 Sinclair, May, 54 Single, 88, 107, 156, 280 mother, 89, 134, 152, 154, 157, 159, 160, 223, 247, 259 motherhood, 161 mothering, 283 Six Point Group, 180, 208 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 271, 272 The Slave Girl, 255 Slide, Anthony, 131, 137, 138 Small Talk … Memories of an Edwardian Childhood (1973), 170, 200 Smith, Sidonie, 173, 174 Smyers, Virginia L., 16, 170 Snyder, Sherri, 157 Socialism, 10, 88, 140, 171, 205, 211, 267, 284

Social movement theory, 100 Social realism, 172 Social sciences, 230, 231 Social scientist, 260 Society for the Promotion of Co-operative Housekeeping and House-Service, 111, 118, 284 Sociology, 11, 224, 230, 231, 250, 252, 255 Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), 190 Soyinka, Wole, 227, 262n21 Spring Rice, Margery, 205 Stavney, Anne, 26, 42, 74, 75, 276 Stay-at-home, 271 Stay-at-home mothers, 274 Stein, Gertrude, 54, 56, 96, 97, 121, 176 Steiner, Leslie Morgan, 286n14 Stetson, Charles Walter, 170, 183–185 Stewart, Henry, 190 Stewart, Maria W., 234 Stopes, Marie, 40, 180, 204 Story-book motherhood, 153 Stott, Rebecca, 42 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 19, 143, 182 Struther, Jan, 180 Stubbings, Diane, 20 Stuck in the Middle with You, 279 Studlar, Gayln, 140, 152 Suffrage, 1, 8, 19, 32, 33, 35, 38, 56, 68, 88, 98, 100, 110, 118, 119, 140, 142, 171, 180, 183, 193, 213, 284 Suffragette, 30, 88 Suffragists, 104, 117, 142, 177, 191 Summers, A. K., 279 Supermom, 274, 275 Surrogacy, 277 Susman, Warren I., 143 Suyin, Han, 239 Swanson, Gloria, 10, 131, 158, 159, 161, 162, 275

 INDEX 

T Tagore, Rabindranath, 226, 228 Tate, Claudia, 3, 25, 26, 42, 74, 276 Tell, Olive, 142 Terra incognita, 49–82, 238, 240, 277–279 Testament of Experience (1957), 170, 175, 178, 207, 212 Testament of Friendship (1940), 170, 172, 207, 210 Testament of Youth (1933), 170, 175, 176, 206, 207, 211 Thacker, Andrew, 94, 95 Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), 233 Time and Tide (1920), 172, 180, 208 Tompkins, Jane, 52 Trans, 2 Transatlantic, 4, 32, 40, 91, 138 Transatlantic contexts, 186 Transatlantic New Women, 81 Transgender mother, 279 Transnational experiences, 238 Traverso, Vittoria, 280 Treleaven, Sarah, 281, 282 Trotter, Louisa Kathleen, 201 True Black woman, 26, 75 True Mother, 42, 191 True Woman, 3, 4, 21–23, 25, 26, 28, 31, 35, 41, 50, 64, 67, 71, 91, 122, 132, 143, 144, 177, 275, 276 True womanliness, 28 Truth, Sojourner, 234 Turda, Marius, 39 Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth, 28, 29 Tuttle, Jennifer S., 188 Twentieth Century woman, 150, 154, 163 The 21st Century Motherhood Movement, 284

329

U Ulysses, 231, 233 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 182 Underhill, Harriette, 142, 148 Unfinished Business, 272 Unmarried mother, 109 Unmasking motherhood, 5, 171, 213, 259 Unnatural absentee mother, 185 Unnatural mothering, 27, 68, 188 Unwomanly, 27, 41, 66, 93, 193 Uwakweh, Pauline Ada, 238 V Vamp, 29, 157, 158, 160, 269 Vampire, 156, 162 Van Buren, Jane Silverman, 19 Vanguard feminism, 89, 91 Vanity Fair, 106, 135, 137 Victorian, 7, 8, 24, 26, 27, 51, 54–56, 61, 63, 68, 71, 73, 74, 81, 133, 141, 161, 226, 274 Victorian era, 171 Victorian texts, 99 Vidor, Florence, 10, 131, 150–152, 161–163, 275 Vidor, Suzanne, 150, 151 W Waiting in the Wings, 279 Walker, Alice, 234, 237, 258 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 9, 51, 81, 95, 134, 181 War, 169, 171, 181, 201–203, 205, 206, 208, 211, 214, 227 Warner, Judith, 273 Warrenton, Elizabeth, 189 The Waste Land, 231 Watson, Julia, 173, 174 We Have Been Warned (1935), 204 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 95, 220n110

330 

INDEX

Weiner, Lynn Y., 4, 269 Welfare, 247, 248, 284 Welfare mothers, 235, 276 Wells, H. G., 10, 50, 106, 107, 111, 119, 170–172, 174, 175, 178, 213, 277, 281, 283 Wells, Ida B., 10, 119–121, 188–190, 192–194, 213, 233, 234, 260, 261 Wells, James, 189 Welter, Barbara, 22, 23, 26 West, Dorothy, 75 West, Rebecca, 10, 54, 111, 112, 123n16, 220n110 Wharton, Edith, 9, 19, 50, 57, 59, 68, 69 “What Does Motherhood Mean?,” 271 White, Antonia, 17 “Why I think Mothers Can Have Careers,” 286 “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” 271 Wild New Woman, 76, 110, 194, 202, 213 “The Wild Women” as Social Insurgents, 58, 283 “The Wild Women,” 6, 57, 63, 66, 68, 141 Wilde, Oscar, 31 Wilks, Jennifer M., 75 Willey, Nicole, 278 Williams, Serena, 276 Williams, Shirley (née Catlin), 211, 212 Willis, Chris, 29, 30, 41, 74 Wilson, Aimee Armande, 39 Winkiel, Laura, 226 Wisker, Gina, 237, 259 Wives, 23, 28, 36, 54, 55 Woke Daddy, 278 Wollaeger, Matt, 226

Women and Economics (1898), 12, 22, 36, 91, 112, 186 Woman and Labour (1911), 38, 207 Womanliness, 23, 53 Womanly woman, 2, 35, 42, 53, 72, 137, 145, 177 Woman movement, 15, 31, 33–35, 37, 91, 113, 122, 140, 207, 267, 284 The Woman Movement (1909), 15, 37 Woman Problem, 23 Woman Question, 23, 28, 29, 42, 62 Woman’s magazine, 132 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 205, 211 Women’s magazines, 141 Women’s Social and Political Union, 88 Women’s Work in Modern England (1928), 209 Woolf, Virginia, 16, 17, 19, 20, 38, 39, 51, 54, 119, 215, 228, 233, 240, 257, 259, 260, 285 Work-family balance, 213 Work-home debate, 149 Working girl, 144 Work/life balance, 191 World War I, 201 World War II, 181 Wulfman, Clifford, 94, 121 Y Yeats, W. B., 21 The Yellow Wallpaper, 185 You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920–1940 (1979), 170, 200, 202 Z Zeitz, Joshua, 132