Transcending the New Woman : Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era [1 ed.] 9780826266637, 9780826218261

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Transcending the New Woman Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era

Charlotte J. Rich

s University of Missouri Press

Columbia and London

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Copyright © 2009 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09 Rich, Charlotte J. Transcending the new woman : multiethnic narratives in the Progressive Era / Charlotte J. Rich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines multiethnic women writers' responses to the ideal of the New Woman in America at the dawn of the twentieth century, opening up a world of literary texts that lend new insight, revealing how these authors articulated the contradictions of the American New Woman, and how social class, race, or ethnicity impacted women's experiences”—Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-0-8262-1826-1 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction—Minority authors—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature—United States— History—20th century. 5. Minorities in literature. 6. Ethnicity in literature. 7. Feminism in literature. I. Title. PS153.M56R55 2009 810.9'928709041—dc22 2008028284 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: BookComp, Inc. Printer and Binder: The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Typefaces: Palatino and Sabon

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction The New Woman and Progressive America

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1. Suffragist or “Squaw”? S. Alice Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s Mediations of Feminism and Indian Rights

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2. From Race Women to an Erased Woman Pauline Hopkins’s Nonfiction Polemic and Novelistic Ambivalence

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3. A View from the Border Sui Sin Far’s Interrogation of the Progressive New Woman

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4. “The Highly Original Country of the Yanquis” María Cristina Mena and American Womanhood

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5. Escaping the “Torah-Made World” The Fiction of Anzia Yezierska

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

There are many individuals to thank whose support and inspiration made this book possible. I am deeply grateful for the institutional support for research and writing that I received from Eastern Kentucky University, both a College of Arts and Sciences Research Award course release in the spring of 2007 and especially the sabbatical leave I was granted this past year. Also, working with the University of Missouri Press on this project has been a pleasure. I appreciate the encouragement of Clair Willcox, and I thank Beverly Jarrett, the director of the Press, for her support of my work. Sara Davis and Karen Renner were helpful in guiding the project toward publication, and Annette Wenda has been a meticulous and thoughtful editor. I furthermore appreciate the insightful suggestions for my manuscript from the anonymous readers whom the press selected. I am greatly indebted to several scholars for their own inspiring work and their mentorship. Catherine Golden, who urged me in the nicest way to complete this book, generously provided much thoughtful feedback and advice. Molly Crumpton Winter also gave me valuable guidance and inspiration. Dale Bauer, an esteemed mentor, encouraged me to pursue this project. Cynthia Davis, Denise Knight, and Jennifer Tuttle have in many ways helped my growth as a scholar and a member of this profession. And I thank James Nagel, my former major professor and a continued adviser and friend, for inspiring my enthusiasm for the era of American realism and for his endlessly generous encouragement. I am profoundly grateful to my parents, Charles and Wanda, for everything that they have done for me. My appreciation extends to my parents-in-law, Frank and Carolyn, for their constant support and

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interest. The good wishes of my brother, Geoff, and brother- and sisterin-law, Ed and Diana, have meant a great deal. Finally, my husband, Frank, has been an endless source of support, affection, and perspective, while my children, Sophia and Alex, who arrived at different points in the long gestation of this project, have brought me enduring joy and have kept my priorities straight. I would like to thank Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, published by the University of Nebraska Press, for permission to reprint in revised form “‘The Highly Original Country of the Yanquis’: Dramatic Irony and Double-Voicing as Cultural Critique in María Cristina Mena’s Fiction,” which appeared in Legacy 18, no. 2 (Fall 2001).

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Introduction The New Woman and Progressive America

The New Woman was a social and literary phenomenon rooted in British and American culture that flourished from the 1890s through the 1910s, offering a liberatory new concept of womanhood that departed from Victorian propriety. Defined by her commitment to various types of independence, the stereotypical American New Woman was college educated and believed in women’s right to work in professions traditionally reserved for men; she often sought a public role in occupations that would putatively improve society. Assertive and outspoken, the New Woman championed women’s right to political selfhood through the vote, to economic autonomy, and to prioritize intellectual or artistic aspirations over domestic concerns—which earned her both scorn and praise in the popular press. She was frequently depicted as physically active and thus an advocate of “rational dress.” The New Woman was often wary of marriage, but if she wed, she was linked with the concept of companionate marriage, in which husband and wife regarded each other with equal respect and shared responsibilities; after the turn of the century, she began to be associated with greater sexual freedom.1 1. For this generalized sketch of the American New Woman, I draw on descriptions in Rosalind Lee Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism, 54; Lois Rudnick, “The New Woman”; Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider, American Women in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920, 16–17; Carroll SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, 176; and Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 269–71. For more on the phenomenon

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Scholarly interest in the New Woman has grown steadily since the 1980s, initially conceiving her as a reaction to the “Old” or True Woman of the Victorian era, as defined in Barbara Welter’s classic argument; she replaced the purity, piety, domesticity, and obedience of that figure with a model of womanhood committed to women’s social, political, and sexual equality.2 In American literary studies, critics have widely analyzed the ideological impact of the New Woman in the work of canonical white authors including Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather, often in celebratory terms that were themselves a reflection of the era of feminist scholarship of the 1980s.3 However, female American authors from various ethnicities and economic classes also wrote about feminist concerns in this era, publishing their fiction—sometimes alongside their better-known peers—in periodicals as respected and widely circulated as Century, New England Magazine, Cosmopolitan, the New Republic, and Scribner’s.4 In their texts, these multiethnic authors invoke or valorize

of the New Woman in her transatlantic and even global context, see Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism; Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel; Lloyd Fernando, “New Women” in the Late Victorian Novel; Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham, eds., New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930; Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle; and Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, eds., The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms. 2. See Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860.” 3. See, for example, Cecelia Tichi, “Women Writers and the New Woman,” who asserts that “from the 1890s on the new woman—independent, outspoken, iconoclastic—empowered the work of Kate Chopin, Alice James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, and the young Gertrude Stein” (589). An important early complication of such celebratory treatments is Elizabeth Ammons’s Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, which holds that Wharton’s work demonstrates women’s need for greater agency in turn-of-thecentury America yet suggests that the New Woman’s agenda is truly open to very few women—even those at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy rather than the bottom. Ammons argues that “the liberation, the ‘progress’ that America boasted for women was, in [Wharton’s] view, a mirage” (48–49). However, with the exceptions of Wharton’s novellas Bunner Sisters (completed in 1892, published in 1916) and Summer (1917), which concern economically marginalized protagonists, her critique of the New Woman’s ideals does not transcend the location of class and racial privilege from which it originates. 4. Sui Sin Far, María Cristina Mena, and Anzia Yezierska all published fiction in Century magazine, as did Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin. Sui Sin Far also had four stories appear in New England Magazine, in which Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wall-Paper” appeared. Mena published a story and Yezierska an essay in Cosmopolitan, where some of Wharton’s essays appeared. Anzia Yezierska also

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the ideals of the New Woman at the same time as they show the limitations of her agenda for those who contended with racial and economic constraints as well as gender oppression. The presence of such commentary by multiethnic writers on the New Woman demands a closer look at the inherent complexity of that figure herself. In particular, how does the American instantiation of this transatlantic ideal reflect the Progressive Era, a phase in American life that, for minorities and the lower classes, often did not live up to the optimistic rhetoric that adherents of Progressivism espoused? Indeed, although the New Woman has often been regarded sympathetically by scholars as an “iconoclastic” figure, to use Cecelia Tichi’s term, particularly in her original associations with the Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the 1890s, it is important to note that, in American culture, the New Woman’s goals and aims were increasingly mainstreamed within the Progressive movement.5 During this era, considered to have intellectual roots in the 1880s and 1890s but most commonly treated as extending from roughly 1900 to 1920, higher education for women and their entrance into professions received increasing support. Female suffrage became a more and more socially accepted goal, building a broad base of supporters throughout the 1910s and garnering endorsement by President Woodrow Wilson privately by 1916, and officially in Congress in 1918, though the Nineteenth Amendment was not ratified until 1920. With the exception of the New Woman’s association with the unpunished expression of sexuality, which remained controversial to many Americans outside of liberal social environments at the time such as Greenwich Village, the American New Woman can be seen to embody the forward-looking, idealistic rhetoric of Progressivism. However, that same ideology that promised so much to so many Americans in fact restricted opportunities for many. Despite the

published fiction in the New Republic and in Scribner’s Magazine, the latter of which Edith Wharton had a decades-long publishing relationship with, including serialization of her best-seller The House of Mirth (1905). Of course, it is significant that the authors considered in this study also sought out regional or niche publications for their writing, such as Hopkins’s work with Colored American Magazine and Sui Sin Far’s alliance with the California-focused Land of Sunshine, reflecting both the authors’ marginalized positions in relation to the literary marketplace of the era and the way in which their fiction’s concerns and themes were sometimes difficult to reconcile with mainstream reading tastes. 5. See Tichi, “Women Writers.”

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optimistic discourse of this political era, and its undeniable improvements in many Americans’ quality of life through seeking to regulate the excesses of rampant capitalism, these years also saw the legalization of the practice of racial segregation, the growth of nativist sentiments that led to immigration restrictions, and widespread efforts to assimilate both immigrants and Native Americans in ways that were well intentioned but nonetheless classist and ethnocentric. Reflecting this atmosphere, the rhetoric of American feminism at the time as articulated by its largest constituency—middle-class white women— seemed emancipatory yet upheld the hegemonic constructions of American culture. Much Progressive feminist discourse preached equality yet was exclusive, leaving little room for those outside the white middle class to participate. In many ways an emblem of Progressive philosophies, the figure of the New Woman, championing women’s empowerment yet often blind to the privilege that allowed her to pursue that goal without first surmounting racial and economic oppression, epitomizes the contradictory nature of Progressive Era feminism. Arguably for this very reason, multiethnic women writers at the turn of the twentieth century, though sometimes upholding the New Woman’s independent values, could see and critique in particularly trenchant ways the limitations of this ideal. The writings of Native American authors S. Alice Callahan and Mourning Dove, African American author Pauline Hopkins, Chinese American author Sui Sin Far, Mexican American author María Cristina Mena, and Jewish American author Anzia Yezierska meaningfully differ in reflecting the respective cultures of these individuals. However, these writers share an important bond in contending with a dominant culture that, while newly praising widened opportunities for their gender, often viewed their ethnicity or race as problematic and, in typical Progressive manner, in need of a social “solution.” In exploring these writers’ engagements with the feminism of their day, I build on a legacy of feminist analysis of turn-of-the-century women authors. Critical discussion of the New Woman and her relationship to American literature has evolved markedly in recent decades, with scholars increasingly acknowledging the contingencies of race and class on turn-of-the-century American women’s writing.6 6. Such approaches to American women’s writing at the turn of the twentieth century reflect closer attention to race or ethnicity and canonicity in the general era of American realism in recent years. Scholarship prioritizing such concerns

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Elizabeth Ammons’s Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1991) illuminated a more complex and accurate picture of American literature in that era, exploring connections among eighteen writers across ethnic and class lines. More recently, Martha H. Patterson’s Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915 (2005) similarly juxtaposes the work of authors ranging from Edith Wharton and Willa Cather to the lesserknown Margaret Murray Washington and Mary Johnston to explore how they “deploy . . . strategically” the figure of the New Woman, “playing on its ability to evoke a host of cultural anxieties and modern desires.”7 Both Ammons and Patterson importantly assert the middleclass orientation of the New Woman, which understandably makes this figure’s priorities less meaningful or more difficult to achieve for women on the socioeconomic margins. However, the wide-ranging approach of Ammons’s study disallows deeper consideration of the contributions of minority women’s voices to dialogues about feminism at the turn of the century, obscuring their complex relationship to that movement and, more broadly, the contested positions they held in relation to Progressive Era culture itself.8 Patterson’s emphasis on the New Woman’s incorporation of specific discourses of modernity, such as those of corporate culture, along with her interest in regionalizing the New Woman, leads her also to juxtapose white middle- or leisure-class authors and multiethnic authors, again forgoing an exclusive focus on the writings of the latter group, whose uniquely vexed relationship to this seemingly liberatory figure—and to the Progressivism she often embodied—merits further consideration. Other studies have focused solely on the work of women writers of color in this era, but with different emphases than the impact of the

includes Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, eds., American Realism and the Canon: A Collection of Essays, and Molly Crumpton Winter, American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism. See also Elizabeth Ammons, “Expanding the Canon of American Realism.” The Portable American Realism Reader, ed. James Nagel and Tom Quirk, reflects this trend in its juxtaposition of many multiethnic writers alongside long-canonized realists. 7. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 2. 8. As Patterson has noted, Ammons’s principle of artistic agency as a means of connecting the writers in Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century downplays circumstances that made it more difficult for women writers of color at this time to identify themselves primarily as artists (ibid., 18).

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New Woman ideal on their fiction. Carol J. Batker’s Reforming Fictions: Native, African, and Jewish American Women’s Literature and Journalism in the Progressive Era (2000) valuably explores the political networks of women writers in these ethnic groups but is primarily interested in its subjects as political activists, treats some women who solely wrote nonfiction journalism, and does not include Asian American or Mexican American writers. Mary V. Dearborn’s Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (1986) considers several multiethnic turn-of-the-century and early-twentieth-century women writers, but Dearborn’s argument prioritizes the notion of ethnicity, emphasizing such issues as inheritance, intermarriage, and alienation in arguing that “difference or ‘otherness’ has always been an integral part of American culture.”9 Several now classic studies consider turnof-the-century feminist writings from a specific minority group, particularly African American women.10 Yet these studies do not show the synergistic effects that come to the fore when examining ethnic authors across various cultures; when studied alongside each other, these multiethnic women writers emerge as a community with views that are both surprisingly congruent and provocatively distinct in their textual engagements with the New Woman. This introduction historicizes the New Woman as a cultural and literary phenomenon with which the writers in this study engaged in their nonfiction prose and fiction. Tracing the development of the New Woman and demonstrating her prevalence in the contemporary literature, I then explore the complicity of this female ideal with dimensions of the Progressive Era that, in reality, often belied its emancipatory discourse: the eugenics movement, and its reliance on rhetorics of reproduction that invoked the responsibilities of “advanced” women; the growth of nativism, and the dependence of suffrage-movement rhetoric on nativist or racist arguments, as well as Americanization efforts for immigrants; and the legalization of segregation, seen by one historian as the price paid to continue the Progressives’ project of “transforming people” safely, an objective that

9. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters, 4. 10. Representative texts include Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist; Ann DuCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction; and Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century.

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many reformist New Women eagerly pursued.11 Motivating this book is my conviction that, despite her liberatory ideals, the New Woman’s linkages with these conservative elements of Progressivism rendered her particularly vulnerable to the critical gaze of American women writers of color. Though women who challenged Victorian cultural assumptions about gender had existed since the beginning of that era, the term New Woman did not officially exist until 1894, when British novelist Sarah Grand used it to describe those who were dissatisfied with nineteenthcentury prescriptions of femininity.12 In her essay “The New Aspects of the Woman Question,” Grand wrote that “the new woman” is one who “has been sitting apart in silent contemplation all these years thinking and thinking, until at last she solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with the Home-is-the-Woman’sSphere, and prescribed the remedy.” The popular novelist Ouida selected and capitalized the phrase in her rebuttal of May 1894, leading to widespread usage of the term: “In the English language there are conspicuous at the present moment two words which designate two unmitigated bores: The Workingman and the Woman. The Workingman and the Woman, the New Woman, be it remembered, meet us at every page of literature written in the English tongue, and each is convinced that on its own especial W hangs the future of the world.”13 Whether such female characters in the fiction of the 1890s would feel that the “future of the world” hinged on them is debatable, but their prevalence reflected a newly questioning attitude toward the socialization of women that carried well into the twentieth century. However, the New Woman stood for more than merely a critique of dominant Victorian ideas about marriage, and, though her name might indicate otherwise, the principles underlying this cultural phenomenon extend well back before the 1890s. The social conditions presaging the New Woman’s inception were the industrialization, urbanization, and massive growth of the middle 11. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920, 184. 12. For further discussion of the naming of the New Woman, see Ellen Jordan, “The Christening of the New Woman: May 1894”; and Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 10–20. 13. Grand, “New Aspects,” 271; Ouida [Marie Louise de la Ramée], “The New Woman,” 610.

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class in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States. Industrialization and technological advances both challenged and reified homecentered female roles, depending on one’s social class. Poor women who had long been laboring in whatever way they could to make their livings or supplement their husbands’ incomes began working outside the home more than ever in new jobs created by industrial progress, especially the textile industry. For many middle- and upperclass women, such changes initially led to increasingly distinct realms of gender behavior, although industrialization and the creation of new appliances such as the sewing machine, as well as continued reliance on domestic help, also streamlined the household duties of middleclass women, giving them time to look outside the home for amusement, education, and professional pursuits. Indeed, as scholars including editors Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher have demonstrated, the notion of “separate spheres” of gender in this era oversimplifies the often fluid boundary between public and private life in the nineteenth century, while also effacing attention to how social class and race impacted women’s relative experiences of public life in that era, issues that are at the core of this study.14 In addition to—and at least partly because of—such changes prompted by industrialization and socioeconomic shifts, by the second half of the nineteenth century a new spirit of questioning arose in Britain and the United States concerning gender roles in marriage and society, as well as the assumptions underlying them. In Britain intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill influenced thought on women’s roles through works including The Subjection of Women (1869), a text that drew on the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and anticipated thinkers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman in condemning the sex-role conditioning of society and the economic dependence of women upon men. Moreover, Mill advocated women’s right to rigorous education and professional work and was the first member of Parliament to initiate debate on female suffrage. Due to the impact of Mill and others, several decades of activism for the women’s vote in England followed, providing inspiration for the American suffrage movement. Moreover, although suffrage in 14. See Davidson and Hatcher, No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader, which grew out of a special issue of American Literature in 1998. More recently, see Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America.

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England was not adopted until 1918, activists brought about other parliamentary actions in the late nineteenth century that questioned Victorian gender ideology and mirrored or influenced corresponding legislation in the United States. For example, echoing similar laws passed at the state level in America, the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 first established the right of wives to own their incomes and inherit property, and later protected their right to buy, sell, or own such property. British activists also achieved suspension of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1883, followed by their repeal in 1886. Mirroring the work of the Social Purity movement in America, such efforts focused on the Victorian sexual double standard that winked at the male patronage of prostitution while stigmatizing those who provided the service.15 In the United States, other nineteenth-century thinkers both influenced and reflected this new spirit of questioning patriarchal culture, spurring similar forms of activism. As far back as 1838, Sarah Moore Grimké, who with sister Angelina Emily Grimké Weld worked in the women’s rights and abolition movements, had published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, in which she was concerned by women’s legal inequity, the stunting effects of women’s lack of education, and their socialization that encouraged dependence on men. Moreover, her essay “Marriage” (1857) argued for women’s control over their bodies, asserting that unwanted pregnancies were a chief cause of subjugation and that the sexual double standard and prostitution were connected to this state of inequity. Desiring to keep the women’s rights cause distinct from controversial ideas that would later be called the “free love movement,” Grimké asserted that chastity was the answer to these social evils, while she also presciently observed that this equality cannot—will not be conceded until [woman] too grows out of that stratum of development in which she now is. Her imperfect education unfits her for acquiring that pecuniary independence which would lift her above the temptation to marry for a home. . . . But be not discouraged sisters—Is not a dinner of herbs and simple apparel such as you can provide, infinitely better than sumptuous

15. For more on the Contagious Diseases Acts and the campaign to overturn them, see Fernando, “New Women,” 7–8. See also Sally Mitchell, ed., Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, s.v. “Prostitution.”

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fare, costly attire, elegant furniture and equipage received in exchange for freedom and personal purity.16

In sensing the detrimental effects of sex-role indoctrination and in encouraging independent ideals for women, Grimké anticipated the rhetoric of the New Woman several decades later, and she foreshadowed Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s turn-of-the-century arguments against the economic dependence of women on men. Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller also emerged as a feminist voice in mid-nineteenth-century America, anticipating many ideals of the New Woman. Fuller’s own life demonstrated a willingness to defy received notions of gender, from her work as a foreign political correspondent for the New York Tribune to her extramarital affair with Count Giovanni Ossoli, while her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) set forth many revolutionary ideas. Taking as given the concept that some women are moving out of the sphere of “the cradle and the kitchen hearth,” Fuller addressed and critiqued male fears through the persona of an “irritated trader,” a mouthpiece for the conservative middle class who feared that if women began to “vote at polls” and “preach at the pulpit,” they would be able to voice their dissatisfaction with domestic life and might even destroy the family unit. Fuller also critiques the form of bourgeois Victorian marriage, asserting that those unions based on household partnership and intellectual companionship will create “the higher grade of marriage union . . . pilgrimage towards a common shrine.” She thus foresees the companionatemarriage ideal associated with the New Woman at the end of the century, and she notes that it is “the very fault of . . . the present relation between the sexes, that the woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him.”17 Fuller anticipates Progressive feminist Gilman’s oft-made argument that many New Women relied on to stake their claim to earn and control their own money: that a wife’s economic dependence on her husband perpetuated her sense of helplessness and inferiority in the marriage relation. Debate about the issues Fuller addressed led to the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where delegates adopted a Declaration of Sentiments asserting that man has “withheld

16. Grimké, “Marriage,” 96. 17. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 18, 69, 162.

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from [women] rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners” (in an early instance of the nativism that clouded much later suffrage rhetoric), has “made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead,” has thus “taken from her all rights in property, even to the wages she earns,” and has “denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education.” The document also criticized how man has barred women’s entrance into professions and has “[given] to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.”18 The growing willingness to organize for women’s rights that this event reflects was followed by two other trends that gave rise to the New Woman. The first was the rapid growth of female higher education in the United States, a response to the socioeconomic developments and shifting cultural attitudes outlined above. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the number of American women obtaining undergraduate and advanced degrees increased dramatically, with the dual effects of allowing entrance into professions previously dominated by men and of delaying marriage and childbearing for this cohort of women.19 The second trend was the growth of various social movements largely organized by, and for, women: female suffrage, Social Purity, women’s clubs, and settlement houses. In the United States, opposition to votes for women was initially so great that before the 1890s only one state or territory, Wyoming, permanently granted suffrage to women.20 The seventy-two years after 18. Declaration of Sentiments quoted in Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 185–86. 19. For data on the growth in women’s higher education between 1870 and 1920, see S. J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830–1945, 156–57. On the increase between 1900 and 1920, see Elizabeth Ammons, “The New Woman as Cultural Symbol and Social Reality: Six Women Writers’ Perspectives,” 82. See also Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1–51. 20. For classic discussions of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American suffrage movement, see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 13– 34; Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present, 328–61; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States; Kraditor, Woman Suffrage Movement; Gerda Lerner, The Woman in American History, 90–106, 159–71; William O’Neill, Feminism in America: A History, 49–76; and Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 307–62. Recent studies that consider more fully the relationship of race to this movement include Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States.

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Seneca Falls that it took for suffrage to be adopted nationwide testifies to the forces operating against the movement. Among them was the brewing establishment, which feared that women voters would immediately bring about Prohibition. Although there was legitimate concern due to women’s powerful organization through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1919 clearly showed women not to be the sole supporters of Prohibition. Opposition also came from the American South, where the Democratic Party, which did not support female suffrage nationally before 1916, was dominant, and where some feared that such a change would further agitate the race question. On the other hand, southern and northern textile interests feared that women voters would enact profit-harming regulatory legislation such as child-labor laws. Most important, women’s suffrage posed a threat to the general population in challenging long-entrenched ideologies of gender, and perhaps for this reason many women opposed the suffrage movement.21 Though votes for women might not improve society as dramatically as the movement’s most idealistic advocates prophesied, this practice would, for better or worse, undermine gender prescriptions in the middle and upper classes throughout the nineteenth century. On a parallel front women’s activism for what was euphemistically termed Social Purity was developing. Sexual purity, like temperance, was a virtue lauded within the middle-class nineteenth-century home and seen to be threatened by the world outside it, particularly through exposure in the public realm to prostitution. This cause challenged the sexual double standard, its agenda predicated on the concepts that men’s sexuality might be controlled as women’s was, that sexual relations were to be confined to marriage, and that wives’ preferences should influence how often sexual activity occurred. Begun in the 1830s, the movement worked to suppress prostitution throughout the nineteenth century. Although Social Purity activism reified the putative ideology of separate spheres, situating married women as the moral preceptors of families and defending its cause in the name of preserving home and family, the movement also gave women opportunities to speak openly about issues that would continue to concern the New Woman. Moreover, Social Purity activists made other strides

21. On female opposition to suffrage, see Degler, At Odds, 342–50; Newman, White Women’s Rights, 69–85; and O’Neill, Feminism in America, 57–59.

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in women’s rights: in the 1890s, they successfully campaigned to raise the age of consent for sexual activity by girls, which in many states was only ten years, to ages ranging from fourteen to eighteen.22 Also, many of these activists defended women’s right to be educated and to work outside the home. In general, Social Purity activists initiated a way of seeing the marriage relation that was important to New Women of the turn of the century, one in which the sexual and emotional satisfaction of both members was of equal concern. Growing out of the roots of the temperance, abolition, and Social Purity crusades, two other movements of the late nineteenth century established arenas of independent female work and activity in which the New Woman flourished: the club and settlement-house movements. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) formed in 1890, merging hundreds of local clubs that had flourished since the Civil War; its membership grew to nearly a million throughout the Progressive Era.23 Although for some these clubs constituted little more than social diversion, for many women such organizations provided intellectual development, while the federation’s first president asserted that they were a “training ground where [women] could get the experience and education necessary for their new roles” in social activism.24 However, the federation’s interests often stayed within the range of traditional female concerns, such as philanthropies for working women and children, and it endorsed women’s suffrage only in the final years before nationwide ratification. The settlement-house movement coincided with the era of women’s clubs in extending the middle-class Victorian concept of women’s domestic leadership to a wider sphere, combining the worlds of public work and home for many New Women. Beginning in 1889, settlement houses based on models in London slums sprang up in low-income areas of American cities, most notably Jane Addams’s Hull-House in Chicago. These establishments were usually operated by women with college degrees who sought work with a social purpose, hoping to aid poor and often immigrant urban citizens by living among them and

22. Degler, At Odds, 288. 23. For further discussion of the women’s club movement, see O’Neill, Feminism in America, 84–90. See also discussion of the club and settlement movements in Camilla Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women: Constructing Public Administration in the Progressive Era, esp. “The Other Side of Reform,” 47–64. 24. O’Neill, Feminism in America, 86.

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offering instruction, recreation, and cultural activities. Settlement work resembled the club movement in its interest in the conditions of poor women and children, and in that sense its members generally did not challenge status quo notions of gender in their activism.25 Indeed, the movement essentially created social work as an authentic profession for women from what had long been considered domestic duties. However, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued, these reformers also created a new alternative for women who did not wish to marry: female communities that “[fostered] women’s autonomy and creative productivity.”26 Overall, the relative conservatism of these late-nineteenthcentury forms of women’s activism has been considered a regression from the human rights–based, and thus more radical, mid-nineteenthcentury feminism embodied in the rhetoric of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Social feminism, as the feminism of this period has been called for its orientation toward public improvement, usually did not challenge widely held nineteenth-century notions of middleclass female propriety. Despite the protective coloration that social feminism adopted, however, great expansion in women’s public roles occurred in the early twentieth century, of which national ratification of suffrage in 1920 was only one part. Indeed, the label “New Woman” continued to be applied to many women in the decades following the 1890s, though with different implications than the term originally held. One milieu in which women voiced independent ideals in the early twentieth century was Greenwich Village, where they participated in the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the bohemian movement of the 1910s. Greenwich Village became the center for radical feminism in the United States before World War I, and, indeed, the term feminism finally came into wide usage in the 1910s, as with the formation of the Feminist Party in 1913. Writers and activists Mabel Dodge, Neith Boyce, and their acquaintances shared an atmosphere of radical politics, cultural critique, and unconventional lifestyles with colleagues Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed, and others. The Heterodoxy Club, which included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, labor journalist and Provincetown Player Mary Heaton Vorse, and socialist trade unionist Rose Pastor Stokes among its members, organized in 1912 and began holding mass

25. On this view of settlement-house work, see Degler, At Odds, 321. 26. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 255.

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meetings with well-known speakers, including Gilman and Eastman.27 In this way, feminism became connected with two characteristics of American society on the eve of World War I: a new politics of the Left, including socialism, and a revolutionary critique of assumptions about such aspects of culture as sexuality and art. Other forums of public activity for women in the early twentieth century included union organization and other forms of labor activism, giving the New Woman ever greater opportunities to define herself through political and professional agency rather than through domesticity, marriage, and motherhood. The National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL), founded in 1903, organized women workers for improved status and occupational conditions. Initially, like most women’s organizations of this era, the NWTUL was composed of middle- and upper-class women, but it sought to transcend class barriers, and soon working-class women such as Rose Schneiderman and Leonora O’Reilly took leadership roles. Schneiderman, a garment worker in New York City, was prompted to a life of union activism after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in which 146 women died. O’Reilly, a factory worker since age eleven, had at sixteen organized the Working Women’s Society, and she later chaired the industrial committee of the New York City Woman Suffrage Party and represented the NWTUL at the International Congress of Women.28 Along with historical evidence of the increasingly public roles of women, another gauge of the atmosphere that both influenced and reflected the rise of the New Woman is English and American literature at the turn of the twentieth century, while the popular press was also filled with representations of this figure. Novels and short stories of this time abound with female characters who are discontented with patriarchal marriage or in search of professional, political, or artistic expression. In English literature, several novels of the last decade of the nineteenth century question Victorian ideals of marriage. A critical view of bourgeois gender relations had begun with the work of earlier British writers including Mary Wollstonecraft, the Brontës, and George Eliot, and of European authors such as Henrik Ibsen. As British

27. For more on the Heterodoxy Club, see Judith Schwartz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village, 1912–1940. Although Gilman was a member from the club’s inception, she later resigned in disagreement with both the club’s pacifist stance toward World War I and its embrace of more open sexual values. 28. Schneider and Schneider, American Women, 62–64.

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writers in the 1890s increasingly depicted female characters who showed dissatisfaction in traditional marriages, had “advanced ideas” of careers, or sought extramarital relationships, outcry arose over the threat that such literature posed to the status quo. British “New Woman fiction” was a prolific genre, with authors including George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, Sarah Grand, Grant Allen, Iota (Kathleen Mannington Caffyn), and Mary Cholmondeley, whose works dealt with such issues in a candid manner.29 Across the Atlantic, American writers were similarly engaging with the Woman Question. From the post–Civil War years through the era of World War I, many American authors strove to represent their world in a realistic manner, providing authentically detailed settings and shaping characters with human fallibilities who confronted the social realities of their day—including gender prescriptions. Reflecting a landscape changed by industrialization and urbanization, they also portrayed women in nondomestic contexts, working in occupations resulting from these influences. Authors such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps were among the first Americans to treat the topic of women at work outside the home, with publications from the 1860s through the 1880s that illuminated issues confronting female wage earners at the time.30 Furthermore, newly candid portrayals of matrimony emerged in the period of American realism in contrast to the marriage plots of many mid-nineteenth-century women’s novels. Harriet Beecher Stowe began engaging with the marriage question in works published in the 1870s,31 and she was followed by writers including Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, and Kate Chopin, whose texts variously indicated that wedlock was not necessarily a fate lived happily

29. For further discussion of British New Woman fiction, see Ardis, New Women, New Novels; Cunningham, New Woman; Fernando, “New Women”; Heilmann and Beetham, New Woman Hybridities; Ledger, New Woman; and Richardson and Willis, Fiction and Fact. 30. See, for example, Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience (1873); Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861) and Margaret Howth (1862); and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novel The Silent Partner (1871) and short story “The Tenth of January” (1868). 31. See Stowe’s novel Pink and White Tyranny: A Society Novel (1871), as well as her championing of one woman’s right to divorce an unfaithful husband in her nonfiction text Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy, from Its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Time (1870).

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ever after. At the same time, some of these writers were hardly advocates of revolutionizing marriage or society in the ways that the New Woman emblematized. For example, James responded negatively to the women’s rights movement itself and the preponderance of women writers in the 1890s treating feminism in their fiction.32 Such authors were accompanied by others who placed at the forefront of their fiction the New Woman’s objectives. The belief in women’s need for economic independence was taken up by Ellen Glasgow, whose protagonists in Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman’s Courage (1916) and Barren Ground (1925) overcome many obstacles to achieve this goal, while several of Mary Wilkins Freeman’s stories pessimistically portray the challenges faced by economically marginalized women maintaining their own livelihoods. On the other hand, authors of this era treated extensively the right of women to pursue professions for reasons of intellectual satisfaction or social purpose. Several novels in the 1880s and 1890s portray female physicians, reflecting the increasing numbers of women at this time pursuing medical careers, a phenomenon soon after curtailed by an emphasis on stricter forms of licensure. Howells’s Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881), Phelps’s Doctor Zay (1882), Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country Doctor (1884), and Annie Nathan Meyer’s Helen Brent, M.D.: A Social Study (1892) feature protagonists who struggle to balance their careers with marriage.33 Other novels present female physicians as influential minor characters, including Hamlin Garland’s Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895), James’s Bostonians (1886), Gilman’s Crux (1911), and Wharton’s Summer (1917), while several short stories by Gilman contain portraits of women doctors.34

32. Alfred Habegger argues that James’s critical views of women’s rights are reflected in his appropriation and distortion of the traditions of mid-nineteenthcentury women’s fiction in his own work, with the ironic result that initially strong female characters in his texts such as Isabel Archer and Daisy Miller are ultimately defeated (Henry James and the “Woman Business,” 26). Also, Ann Ardis discusses James’s negative reaction to the trend of feminist women writers in the 1890s (New Women, New Novels, 47). 33. For discussion of these novels featuring female physicians, see Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett, “The Power of Professionalism,” in Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, 130–54. 34. For more on this short fiction, see Frederick Wegener, “What a Comfort a Woman Doctor Is!’: Medical Women in the Life and Writing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”

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The figure of the New Woman as social reformer or philanthropic worker also pervades American fiction of this period, with novels such as Phelps’s Silent Partner (1871), Howells’s A Modern Instance (1882) and Annie Kilburn (1888), and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) providing both sympathetic and critical portraits of such individuals, as well as the works of three authors in this study, S. Alice Callahan, Sui Sin Far, and Anzia Yezierska. Suffragists are another type of activist to appear in the literature of this period, including James’s Bostonians, Elizabeth Robins’s Convert (1907), and Sui Sin Far’s tale “The Inferior Woman” (1912), as well as works by Lillie Devereux Blake, Hamlin Garland, and Marjorie Shuler.35 Still other novels published at the turn of the century deal with women who pursue artistic careers in the tradition of the Künstlerroman. Phelps’s Story of Avis (1877), Glasgow’s Wheel of Life (1906), Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark (1915), Garland’s Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924) variously portray women who seek careers as visual artists, musicians, poets, or dancers. Several authors of this period take on perhaps the most controversial value associated with the New Woman: the right to an unpunished expression of sexuality, both in- and outside of marriage. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911), as well as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), interrogate or revise the trope of the fallen woman. And the institution of marriage itself is taken to task; female characters who suffer unfulfilling unions but fear the social repercussions of leaving their husbands appear in James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881), Phelps’s Story of Avis, Howells’s Modern Instance, Glasgow’s Virginia (1913), and Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles (1916), while women who disregard popular reverence for the institution of marriage, and even seek sexual fulfillment outside of it, are featured in Chopin’s Awakening (1899) and Mary Austin’s Woman of Genius (1912). Such examples of the prevalence of New Woman themes in American fiction are merely representative; many other works could share these categories. But taken together, the preponderance of American fiction treating issues associated with the New Woman indicates the highly charged atmosphere of dialogue concerning this figure in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. 35. Leslie Petty explores several suffrage-themed works in Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870–1920.

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Despite the recurring themes associated with the New Woman noted above, she was less a monolithic and more a protean figure, sometimes appearing as a nonconformist through her sexual assertiveness or bohemian lifestyle, while in other instances complicit with the Progressive desire to normalize middle-class lifestyles for all. She appeared at times as “forward,” smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, wearing cosmetics, or flirting openly or engaging in sexual affairs, whereas in other contexts the New Woman was an earnest crusader, assuming a public role to fight injustices against women, children, and the poor, even if the changes she advocated might not restructure the conditions that perpetuated such inequality. This diversity has been theorized as “generations” of New Women by Carroll SmithRosenberg, who posits that the first cohort of such individuals “flourished professionally between the 1880s and the First World War,” and though “outspoken feminists . . . [t]hey continued to accept many of the bourgeois values and genteel habits of [small-town America].” A second generation coming of age following World War I “placed more emphasis on self-fulfillment, a bit less on social service, and a great deal more on the flamboyant presentation of self.”36 Such a theory does not always correspond temporally to historical or literary examples, however. Although some of her activity precedes the era of the New Woman proper, first female presidential candidate and free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull’s public flamboyance in the 1870s seems more characteristic of World War I–era New Women than of her typically staid contemporaries. In literature, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920), set in the 1870s, likewise suggests that heroine Ellen Olenska possesses the bohemian qualities often linked with later New Women through her cigarette smoking, “French Sundays,” and past extramarital affair. Conversely, Anzia Yezierska’s fiction, set in the 1910s and 1920s, is replete with examples of middle-class philanthropic New Women who epitomize Smith-Rosenberg’s first generation of “bourgeois matrons.” Nonetheless, the paradigm of generations of the New Woman is useful in examining how the authors in this study invoke her varying manifestations for their own purposes. 36. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 176–77. Similarly, Lois Rudnick describes a cohort of New Women in the late nineteenth century who “entered professional fields that they helped to pioneer,” citing Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whereas a second wave of New Women “included many of the Greenwich Village Bohemians and radicals” in the years surrounding World War I (“The New Woman,” 71).

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For example, María Cristina Mena’s characterization of the “modern” American women in her stories “The Gold Vanity Set” (1913) and “The Education of Popo” (1914) relies on the New Woman’s more transgressive associations with wearing cosmetics, dying one’s hair, divorcing a husband, and flirting, qualities that would be most shocking to the conservative Catholic culture of Mexico at the turn of the century. On the other hand, Sui Sin Far depicts white New Women characters as the philanthropically oriented, privileged individuals typical of Smith-Rosenberg’s first-generation New Women who, with good if sometimes vexed intentions, attempt to bring the gospel of Progressive Era reform to immigrant communities. More important, though the generational theory of New Women implies that the second generation was more unconventional than the first, an idea that accords with the narrow conception of the 1910s New Woman as Greenwich Village bohemian, this figure may be seen as becoming in fact less revolutionary, as her major precepts, such as suffrage or women’s access to the professions, were incorporated into the ideology of Progressivism, itself a movement that praised and promised life-improving social changes for all Americans yet in practice often restricted such opportunities for the less “desirable” members of society. In the introduction to their volume exploring the various facets of the “New” in Progressive America, 1915, the Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America, editors Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick agree that “mainstream American culture has an almost infinite capacity to absorb—some would say co-opt—the radical edge of any new social, political, or cultural movement that comes our way,” noting that “the New Woman of Greenwich Village who dreamed of a socialist-feminist revolution was a much tamer figure when she graced the pages of middle-class women’s magazines.” Indeed, Maureen Honey offers additional evidence of the New Woman’s gradual dissemination into mainstream American culture by citing a whole new genre of middlebrow fiction flourishing by 1915, the “New Woman romance.”37 When thus seen as reflective of the status quo in Progressive America rather than a renegade against it, the New Woman becomes a figure more open to the critique of authors who wrote from marginalized perspectives. 37. Heller and Rudnick, introduction to 1915, the Cultural Moment, 8; Honey, introduction to Breaking the Ties That Bind: Popular Stories of the New Woman, 1915– 1930, 6.

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Indeed, despite these varying manifestations of the New Woman, one constant remains: her tendency to be represented, in the dominant culture at least, in socioeconomically and racially exclusive ways. The concept of the New Woman, often normalized as white, did not easily accommodate women of ethnic minorities, a fact illustrated by the frequent phenomenon of segregation within the women’s club and reform movements in the United States at the turn of the century. African American women were also active in such movements, establishing clubs throughout the 1890s, including the Colored Women’s Progressive Association, the New York–based Women’s Loyal Union, the Boston-based Woman’s Era Club, and the Washington, D.C.–based National League of Colored Women. However, these clubs were excluded from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, compelling African American women to create their own National Association of Colored Women in 1896.38 This association was moreover barred from the GFWC’s national convention in 1902, prompting Pauline Hopkins to publish angry editorials on the subject in Colored American Magazine. Of course, black women often organized separately, and by choice, at the turn of the century for different reasons than white women, prioritizing the race question as “New Negro Women,” and their accomplishments within a segregated environment are not to be underestimated. However, as Jill Bergman has explored, the fact that black women were often excluded from membership in historically white club networks suggests the racialized conception, for white Americans, of the activist New Woman at that time.39 Furthermore, long-canonized literary representations of the New Woman often reify the racial and socioeconomic normalizations of this ideal, as the survey of turn-of-the-century American fiction above suggests. Such works do not cumulatively endorse the New Woman; some canonical writers portray this figure in a critical light at the same time that others affirm her desire for a profession or portray sympathetically her resistance to patriarchal marriage. Nonetheless, most of the authors mentioned above do not attend to the way in which their female characters are able to prioritize such concerns because of their

38. For more on black women’s clubs at the turn of the century, see Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 95–120; and Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, 95–117. 39. See Bergman, “‘Natural’ Divisions/National Divisions: Whiteness and the American New Woman in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.”

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economic and racial privilege, whereas some of them indeed reflect the racialized thinking of their day. As one of the primary feminist thinkers of the Progressive Era, for example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman in many ways epitomizes the New Woman’s goals, but not only did her writings consistently present this figure as white and usually as middle class but, throughout the course of her career, they also increasingly revealed nativist or racist sentiments by today’s standards that indicate how enmeshed she was in the social thought of her era.40 Though the fiction of Gilman’s contemporaries such as Pauline Hopkins can be seen to contain African American women who champion New Womanly ideals, the latter characters’ emphases on racial uplift and rights, and in particular empowerment as black women, put them at odds with the iconic New Woman’s stereotypical preoccupation with empowering a universalized notion of “woman.” Visualizations of the New Woman in the popular press of this era, which portrayed her in both sympathetic and parodic ways, likewise indicate a racially and economically exclusionary concept of the figure. The New Woman consistently appears in turn-of-the-century newspapers and periodicals such as Life, Puck, and Vogue as white and generally as middle- or upper-class, whether she is portrayed satirically with such clichéd trappings as a bicycle or a cigarette, or more reverently as the statuesque, goddess-like Gibson girl.41 As Martha H. Patterson notes, a few depictions of black New Women appeared in the popular press, but they were usually in order to burlesque the idea of black women taking on this role.42 In other words, the New Woman

40. For explorations of racism in Gilman’s writings, see, for example, Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, “The Intellectualism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Evolutionary Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Class”; Catherine J. Golden and Joanna S. Zangrando, introduction to The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Denise D. Knight, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Shadow of Racism”; Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 17–18, 255–56, 294, 337; and Gary Scharnhorst, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 65–66, 108–9. 41. For discussion of visual and textual treatments of the New Woman in the popular press in England and the United States, see Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press. 42. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 45–46. Such caricatured depictions of black women pursuing the New Woman’s ideals are a specific example of the prevalence of ethnic caricature in turn-of-the-century art, especially periodical illustrations, as Henry B. Wonham demonstrates in Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism. The widespread phenomenon of such reductive depictions of ethnic minorities, which Wonham shows to be not contradictory to but in

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as visually represented in popular culture was one whose position was socially secure enough that she could afford to become bored in her domestic role. Women already laboring outside the home out of economic necessity may have looked on such disenchanted middle- or leisure-class women who desired a “profession” with amusement and bitterness. Similarly, women of color likely regarded these New Women with ambivalence, perhaps admiring their revolutionary values but recognizing the exclusionary nature of this phenomenon. These limitations of the New Woman become more understandable through examination of how her ideals coincide with those of Progressivism in the United States. The Progressive Era was characterized by an ethos of optimism, with strong beliefs in the attainability of civic improvement, peace, and prosperity; it evidenced faith in both the Protestant social gospel and the increasing specialization and professionalization of various disciplines, from medicine and social work to domestic science.43 As author and editor Herbert Croly, a major voice of American Progressivism, put it in his influential 1909 treatise The Promise of American Life, the potential of the Progressive agenda lay in “an improving popular economic condition, guaranteed by democratic political institutions, and resulting in moral and social amelioration.” Despite the implication of wide-reaching social change suggested by this language, Croly’s vision was not truly revolutionary. As John William Ward’s introduction to The Promise of American Life notes, Croly persuades his audience that “the reform he is about to call for is not radical but is, instead, deeply conservative.” Croly does so by asserting that “the tradition in American life is the rejection of tradition. . . . The American who does not have a ‘prophetic’ outlook on the future . . . is un-American.” And as Eldon J. Eisenach has observed, a preoccupation with “Americanness” or nationalism that often took on disturbing overtones is another keynote of the Progressive Era, one

fact intricately related to the principles of American realism, is another barometer of the atmosphere in which writers of ethnic minorities worked during the Progressive Era. 43. These “keynotes” of Progressivism are cited by Schneider and Schneider in American Women, 11–13. For more on the social gospel movement, see Donald K. Gorrell, The Age of Social Responsibility: The Social Gospel in the Progressive Era, 1900– 1920. Concerning the work of public intellectuals in this age to bring about civic improvement, see Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment.

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that in unveiling white anxieties about the increasingly diverse American population indicates the conservatism of the movement.44 Moreover, a defining characteristic of the Progressive period was women’s greater participation in public American life, through a conviction in their ability “to cleanse their municipal, state, and federal houses to upgrade the quality of life.” Activists and thinkers such as Jane Addams, whose settlement-house initiatives extended women’s traditional domestic duties into community-improving work, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who relied on the rhetoric of “social motherhood” to explain women’s unique justification for publicly participating in efforts to improve society, epitomize the strong relationship between women who desired broader social and political roles and the Progressive agenda. As Eisenach has noted, “If any group in American society saw itself as enthusiastically committed to modernization and economic development along Progressive lines, it was the new feminist intellectuals” such as these. In her study of the turn-of-thecentury New Thought movement, Beryl Satter also asserts the link between New Womanhood and the Progressive desire to improve society, observing that “the New Woman could help redeem a race and a nation now threatened with moral dissolution. Instead of representing laissez-faire practices that sanctioned selfishness and greed, she stood for social scientific or sociological efforts to rationally understand and altruistically improve society.”45 However, the links between the agenda of the New Woman, in her most widely understood form, and Progressive ideals extend beyond a mutual awareness of women’s right to public work, in the dual senses of contributing to both economic development and social amelioration. Progressive ideals of personal freedom also shared reasoning with the reconceptualizations of marriage and arguments for the female vote put forth by earlier thinkers such as John Stuart Mill. Eisenach asserts that “[Progressive] American feminist intellectuals and their male allies knew that the prevailing political economy of marriage would forever frustrate the achievement of the society they envisioned. . . . Within the context of the implicit exchange of sex for

44. Croly, Promise of American Life, 22, xiii–xiv; Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism, 6. 45. Schneider and Schneider, American Women, 12; Eisenach, Lost Promise, 182; Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920, 12.

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support and all of the competition for wives and husbands, the family that occurred was . . . ‘a school of despotism’ that undermines and distorts the better lessons taught in the larger society and culture.” Moreover, many Progressives, including Gilman, believed that extending suffrage to women would “correct the distortions in political practices and institutions caused by male monopoly of them,” and in so doing drew on the precedent of women’s activism throughout the nineteenth century for such goals as temperance, abolition, and the suppression of prostitution.46 The New Woman, with her belief in transcending domesticity and economic dependence to contribute to public life, to earn her own living, and to attain a political voice, may thus be seen as closely linked with many of the goals of Progressivism. As Croly’s Promise of American Life indicated, however, despite the Progressive movement’s optimistic and emancipatory rhetoric, it did not fundamentally reenvision what American society could become. Katherine Stubbs observes that Progressivism . . . can be interpreted as an essentially conservative response to Establishment anxieties about the threat of labor radicalism, the rise of socialism, and the growing power of groups such as the International Workers of the World. Progressivism introduced reformist adjustments of the status quo that failed to touch the basic inequalities of the capitalist system while seeking to pacify those elements of the American population—the working class and immigrants—that agitated for change.47

For the authors in this study, the Progressive Era’s concurrence with not only such class anxieties but also nativist and racist fears about “undesirable” and possibly insurgent elements of American society is significant, leading to phenomena from the intellectual realm of eugenic thought to the passage of federal legislation that negatively affected various minority groups in the United States. As several works of recent scholarship have shown, the connections between American feminist thought at the turn of the century and these darker elements of Progressive ideology are manifold.48

46. Eisenach, Lost Promise, 199, 198. 47. Stubbs, introduction to Arrogant Beggar, by Yezierska, xiv–xv. 48. For example, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of

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The eugenics movement, with roots in the work of Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, and led by intellectuals in the United States including Charles Davenport, Madison Grant, M. S. Iseman, David Starr Jordan, Lothrop Stoddard, and Albert Edward Wiggam, held as its goal the improvement of society by advocating reproduction for some and discouraging or disallowing reproduction for others.49 Although this movement also resulted in policy such as the sterilization laws for mentally disabled individuals that were passed in several states in this era, not surprisingly those whose reproduction was often deemed most in need of curtailment were the “darker races,” which were viewed within the racist evolutionary rhetoric of the time as less advanced. The titles of these thinkers’ books are representative of their racialized views, including Davenport’s Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), Grant’s Passing of the Great Race (1916), Iseman’s Race Suicide (1912), Jordan’s Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of the Races through the Survival of the Unfit (1902), Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1922), and Wiggam’s Fruit of the Family Tree (1924). In an indication of the pervasiveness and credibility of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, historian Thomas Schlereth offers a telling description of the exhibits for the Race Betterment Foundation at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco: “Here eugenicists, through the use of large plaster casts of Atlas, Venus, and Apollo and printed materials espousing IQ tests, advertised their ‘scientific judgment for the human race at its best.’ Pictures of the foundation’s supporters—among them Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, conservationist Gifford Pinchot, and John H. Kellogg—attested to the movement’s influence among Progressive reformers.”50 In addition to the negative eugenic theory of restricting procreation were the positive eugenics of advocating procreation among those deemed most fit to improve society, and in light of fears over “race suicide” articulated by public figures as influential as President Theodore Roosevelt, Caucasian and native-born (and, by implication, middleclass) women were urgently called on to reproduce in order to match the

Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture; Newman, White Women’s Rights; Petty, Romancing the Vote; and Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom. 49. For more on the eugenics movement and its popularity in Progressive America, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity; and Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives. 50. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876–1915, 298.

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birthrates of minority and immigrant populations. Although New Women, as females more likely to delay or eschew marriage for higher education or career goals, were the very cohort Roosevelt feared were not upholding their duty, as reflected in the falling white birthrate, such “advanced” women, perceived by the white establishment as the pinnacle of race evolution, were also specifically linked to Roosevelt’s objective of “keeping up.” Indeed, as Angelique Richardson has discussed, many white New Women on both sides of the Atlantic eagerly subscribed to eugenic thought. Furthermore, as Martha H. Patterson notes, the Gibson girl, a popular visual manifestation of the New Woman, was sometimes depicted as threatening to masculinity, but more generally functioned to assure magazine readers of her future as wife and, by implication, mother, thereby easing (white) anxieties about race suicide.51 Indeed, it is no coincidence that the interrelated phenomena of eugenic and nativist thought during the Progressive Era were concurrent with the popularity of this attractive visual representation of the New Woman, who appeared in illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson in the pages of magazines including Life, Collier’s, and McClure’s. Lois Rudnick notes that the statuesque, socially privileged, and white Gibson girl, a version of the New Woman intended to appeal to wide audiences, “came into prominence during the peak time of mass immigration to the United States when many Americans were particularly anxious to define an ‘all-American girl’ as a way of staving off the threatened mongrelization of the ‘pure’ Anglo-Saxon race.”52 The popularity of this attractive mass-culture image of the New Woman suggests that, despite the forward-looking optimism of Progressivism that this figure so often echoed, she largely represented an affirmation of the American status quo, content with her privileged position within its economic and racial hierarchies. Further evidence of the unsettling alliance between (white) feminism at the turn of the century and the eugenics movement is demonstrated in how one New Woman activist and the founder of the birth

51. Richardson, “The Birth of National Hygiene and Efficiency: Women and Eugenics in Britain and America, 1865–1915”; Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 37. 52. Rudnick, “The New Woman,” 73. Consideration of the Gibson girl as a “popular, consumable image” of the American New Woman is also central to Patterson’s thesis in Beyond the Gibson Girl, 27–49.

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control movement, Margaret Sanger, relied on the rhetoric of eugenics in order to argue for women’s rights to contraception. Her purposes in broadening access to contraception were in fact to help immigrant and poor women, who suffered most as a result of many pregnancies, and Sanger bravely crusaded for the right to reproductive choice on their behalf, serving prison time for her attempt to establish a family planning clinic in Brooklyn in 1916.53 However, Sanger nonetheless relied on eugenic thought in many of her speeches and writings, and she founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 along with wellknown advocates of eugenics Lothrop Stoddard and C. C. Little. Allison Berg observes that Sanger’s “profoundly conflicted rhetoric at once insisted on women’s right to birth control—drawing on the particularly moving stories of poor women worn out by maternity—and justified this right in terms of the middle-class imperatives of race progress and national advancement.” Gloria Steinem also acknowledges that “though [Sanger’s] own work was directed toward voluntary birth control and public health programs, her use of eugenics language probably helped justify sterilization abuse. Her misjudgments should cause us . . . to question any tactics that fail to embody the ends we hope to achieve.”54 An interrelated ideological trend of the Progressive Era that, despite (or because of) belying that movement’s liberatory rhetoric, shares connections with feminist thought of the time was nativism. The impact of social views that privileged native-born Americans over immigrants may be seen throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in midcentury anti-Irish sentiments that led to formation of the “American Party,” as well as resistance to Chinese immigrants that resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. With the rapidly increasing influx of immigrants to the United States after the turn of the twentieth century, white fears about losing social and political prominence were reflected in acts of legislation like that passed by Congress in 1924, which established quotas to markedly reduce immigration from 53. For more on Sanger’s life, see William M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger; and, more recently, Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. 54. Berg, Mothering the Race: Women’s Narratives of Reproduction, 1890–1930, 80; Steinem, “Margaret Sanger: Her Crusade to Legalize Birth Control Spurred the Movement for Women’s Liberation,” 95. 55. On immigration restrictions, see Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, 307. Takaki also discusses anti-Chinese sentiment and the

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southern and eastern Europe.55 But nativist fears did not stop there. Chicano history scholar George J. Sanchez notes that, even after passage of such legislation, “nativists were dismayed to discover that immigration law still allowed for the widespread introduction of ‘foreigners’ who they considered just as, if not more, unassimilable and undesirable. These nativists called for restriction on racial grounds centered on the ‘Indian’ or ‘Negro’ makeup of the Mexican, the social threat to ‘American standards of living,’ and arguments based on a view of the Mexican as an unstable citizen in a democracy.”56 As with the case of Margaret Sanger’s alliance with academic eugenicists, some prominent New Woman intellectuals were influenced by nativist thought. Perhaps most notably, Charlotte Perkins Gilman had an enduring friendship with influential sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, author of works including The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (1914), who had coined the term race suicide in 1901.57 Also, Frances Kellor, a prominent Progressive social scientist at the University of Chicago, was a key figure in the movement to Americanize immigrants. She advised Theodore Roosevelt on immigration policy, and her theories reflected his New Nationalist emphases on social research and centralized federal action to address the consequences of immigration. As historian John Higham has shown, with the outbreak of World War I, the Americanization movement increasingly reflected national anxieties that immigrants be fully assimilated and no longer “foreign.” Kellor’s Committee for Immigrants in America, though initially based on a liberal focus of advocating protective legislation for immigrants and supporting educational initiatives, soon morphed into a more conservative form: Still led by Frances Kellor, the group never entirely abandoned a humanitarian sympathy for the alien, but after the summer of 1915 it shifted its emphasis to a program of stimulating naturalization, breaking the immigrant’s ties with the Old World, and teaching him

Chinese Exclusion Act (195–209) and anti-Irish sentiment in the United States (139–65). For a comprehensive study of nativism in nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century America, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. 56. Sanchez, “‘Go after the Women’: Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915–1929,” 253. 57. Newman, White Women’s Rights, 145.

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an American culture. The earlier social objectives faded into the background. Loyalty was contrasted with “dual citizenship.” The slogan “Many peoples, But One Nation” gave way to a new one, “America First.”

Ellen Fitzpatrick concurs, noting that in the wake of World War I’s outbreak, “Suddenly the unthinking faith that immigrants would somehow naturally become Americans one day gave way to aggressive assertions that the foreign-born required ‘immediate Americanization.’” She continues, “Where Kellor had once made her case for these reforms [including employment, housing, and education for immigrants] by stressing their inherent justice, she now pandered to the growing public fear of the unassimilated foreign-born.”58 The relationship between the New Woman’s ideals and the nativist or racist thought that sometimes underlay Progressive projects may be most broadly seen, however, in the suffrage movement, one of the key forums of activity for the New Woman. Indeed, one of the traits most commonly associated with this figure is the desire for political representation through the vote. Linda Gordon Kuzmack underscores the intimate connection between the suffrage movement and Progressivism by about 1910: A steady flow of progressive issues made “votes for women” appear relatively less radical and more acceptable to the popular view. Social reform became respectable after the adoption of direct election of senators and the graduated income tax, railroad regulation, workmen’s compensation, and pure food and drug laws. In many states, particularly in the West, suffrage and progressive legislation went hand in hand. The interaction between women’s rights and progressivism was heightened when the Progressive Party endorsed suffrage in 1912 and Jane Addams seconded Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for president on the Progressive ticket.

Furthermore, as Louise Michele Newman has observed, the rationale of white suffragists at this time for the vote “made use of older beliefs in white women’s moral superiority but also drew on a growing conviction that white women’s special racial qualities were needed to

58. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 243; Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform, 160–61.

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counteract the influence of the immigrant and African American men who had just been enfranchised.” As far back as 1869, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had declared, “‘Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who can not read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s Spelling-Book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose and Anna E. Dickinson.’” By the turn of the century, Newman contends, “white women had become fully conversant in the newly emerging languages of evolution and ethnology” and relied on such rhetoric to assert their own superiority and their corresponding right to the vote. Though the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s (NAWSA) “southern strategy,” which attempted to gain support for its cause by pandering to southern white racism toward African Americans, was generally deemed ineffective around 1900, examples of racist or nativist reasoning for female suffrage still persisted. In 1906 one suffragist speaking for the NAWSA claimed that “the National has always recognized the usefulness of woman suffrage as a counterbalance to the foreign vote, and as a means of legally preserving White supremacy in the South. In the campaign in South Carolina we . . . never hesitated to show that the White women’s vote would give supremacy to the White race. And we have also freely used the same argument to the foreign-born vote.”59 Finally, the legalization and expansion of racial segregation during this era reflects Progressive perspectives that saw this practice as a means of stabilizing race relations so that the work of uplift and assimilation of various nonwhite or non-middle-class “Others” (in this case, African Americans) could continue, an objective with which the reformist New Woman was often affiliated. During these years, continued African American activism for more equitable status fostered white racial fears that found expression outside the legal system in vigilante violence and popular culture.60 But more comprehensively,

59. Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause: The Jewish Woman’s Movement in England and the United States, 1881–1933, 143; Newman, White Women’s Rights, 56, 5 (Stanton quote), 7; Kraditor, Woman Suffrage Movement, 138. 60. Such fears found expression in the activity of the Ku Klux Klan (which also based its agenda on nativist rhetoric), especially in the staggering numbers of African American lynchings during this time, and in the popularity of Thomas Dixon’s Klan-themed novels and D. W. Griffith’s film based on them, The Birth of a Nation (1915).

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the practice of segregation, confirmed at the highest level of government after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, created a profound barrier between black and white life in the United States. Indeed, both the extralegal and the legal dimensions of this period epitomize Rayford Logan’s summation of the turn of the twentieth century as the “nadir” of black life in America.61 Elite African Americans, as historian Michael McGerr has noted, initially adhered to broad tenets of Progressive thinking in their work to “uplift” the race, with elite black women playing a key role through their club activity and philanthropic work. However, many African Americans eventually parted ways with Progressive thought, understandably feeling little stake in the ability of the U.S. government to legislate in ways that would improve their lives.62 The expansion of legalized segregation throughout this era may indeed be seen, as McGerr concludes, as a fundamental paradox of Progressive politics: the claim of increasing political power and the opportunity for middle-class life for “the people,” even as such power and opportunity were essentially restricted to white Americans. Whereas Progressivism, then, largely heralded a breakdown of gender segregation and inequality, supporting the efforts of women to gain greater public roles and political agency, most Progressives not only were unwilling to dismantle barriers of race but indeed reinforced such barriers. Women of ethnic minorities were perforce caught in the middle, seeing new avenues open up for their gender while simultaneously witnessing the enactment of policies that restricted their race. Responding to the iconic figure of the New Woman as an embodiment of both the promise and the limitations of Progressive thought, the authors in this study uniquely record the paradox of this cultural moment. Although the concept of the New Woman is useful in theorizing the prevalence of feminist themes in American literature at the turn of the twentieth century, this figure’s limitations emerge when considering women who wrote from positions of greater social marginality than

61. See Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901, later expanded as The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. For more on the difficult conditions many African Americans faced in the postReconstruction era, see Kevin Gaines, introduction to Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. 62. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 201.

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authors such as Edith Wharton or Kate Chopin, but who also interrogate patriarchal gender ideology in their fictions. The authors considered here also depict more autonomous ideals for women than those of the nineteenth-century True Woman, but not necessarily in order to valorize the New Woman. Indeed, their fiction often invokes this figure in order to expose her flaws or to suggest that other struggles are more important than her crusade for the empowerment of a universalized “Woman.” The first three authors in this study, S. Alice Callahan, Mourning Dove, and Pauline Hopkins, do not directly portray examples of white New Women in their fictions in order to critique that figure (Callahan’s Wynema does include a white New Woman, but she is generally depicted sympathetically). Instead, these authors introduce their Native American or African American female protagonists as possessing similar objectives to the iconic New Woman, but ultimately highlight the paradox of her values by subordinating such concerns to the more urgent need for racial empowerment. On the other hand, the final three authors in this study, Sui Sin Far, María Cristina Mena, and Anzia Yezierska, depict empowered, “modern” white or Gentile women in their texts—as well as interactions between such women and their Chinese American, Mexican, or Jewish American protagonists—in order to suggest the cultural blinders or even the outright ethnocentrism of this feminist ideal of the Progressive Era. Chapter 1 draws together two novels by turn-of-the-century Native American writers. Both Muscogee author S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891) and Salishan author Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (composed between 1912 and 1914 but not published until 1927) reflect their nascence in turn-of-the-century America by incorporating feminist ideals of that era, alluding to the suffrage movement or to the agenda of the New Woman. Although many fictions by white contemporaries treat similar issues, these novels by and about Native American women also participate in, and ultimately privilege, dialogues about the conditions of Native Americans at the turn of the century. The protagonists’ references to typical New Woman values such as careers for women or gender equality are challenged by concerns about equal rights for Native Americans, the urgent need for which is made clear by acts of racially motivated violence in each text. The analogous tensions between discourses of feminism and ethnicity in these two novels suggest the challenges that Callahan and Mourning Dove faced as Native American women authors in this era. Whereas texts by

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authors such as Kate Chopin might foreground women’s inequality in the patriarchal culture of that time, Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s texts reflect the complex, yet productive, competition of gender and racial concerns in representing Native American women’s experiences at the turn of the century. Chapter 2 explores the nonfiction and fiction of Pauline Hopkins, who edited Colored American Magazine at the turn of the century and published her work in that and other periodicals directed toward African Americans. Essays Hopkins published in the magazine reveal her strong belief in black women’s participation in public affairs, particularly in political activism for their race, as well as their unrestricted access to professional and educational opportunities. These writings also criticize instances of the white women’s club movement denying access to black women, showing that Hopkins was aware of the ironies in the mainstream women’s movement at that time. The heroine of her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), is presented sympathetically as an independent New Negro Woman, but the novel’s feminist discourse is largely subordinated to dialogues about racism and the need for racial empowerment. Moreover, Hopkins’s text criticizes or parodies stereotypical aspects of the iconic New Woman in ways that illuminate the novel’s atypical feminist heroine. Hopkins’s other novels, Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (1901–1902), Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1903), continue to engage with the intersections of gender, race, and power in provocative ways, but the fates of their heroines also trace an increasingly pessimistic trajectory, suggesting the cynical conclusions Hopkins was drawing about black women’s ability to thrive in a prejudiced and sexist American society. Chapter 3 examines the literature of biracial author Sui Sin Far, who, though assimilated to Western culture and able to pass for white, chose to assert her Chinese heritage in a time of great sinophobia and to engage with vexed issues of racism, cultural and gender differences, and ethnic hybridity in her writing. Her journalism and fiction may be seen to explore women’s roles in Chinese and Anglo-American cultures from a multivalent “border” position, as biographer Annette White-Parks has noted of her autobiographical writings. Though Sui Sin Far’s stories affirm the increasing social freedom of white American women at the turn of the century, they also question ethnocentrism and classism within the phenomenon of middle-class American

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New Womanhood, and they reflect a growing interest in the conditions and rights of women in China that was supported by many Chinese Americans at the time. Also, Sui Sin Far’s works present alternative models of female empowerment in syncretic Chinese American characters who are able to cross or reconcile literal and figurative borders. Chapter 4 explores the fiction of María Cristina Mena, who emigrated to the United States shortly before the Mexican Revolution. Her stories, published in magazines including American, Century, and Cosmopolitan, depict life in Mexico for a white American readership. However, some of her stories also portray early-twentieth-century cultural influences from the United States through the presence of American visitors to Mexico, employing dramatic irony to suggest that the ways such characters represent, particularly the behavior of young American New Women and the valorization of Anglo-Saxon ideals of beauty, are not worthy of the respect they receive there. Rather, these influences are presented as problematic forms of cultural colonialism from the United States, especially through the carefully controlled ironic tone of Mena’s narrators. Mena also turns a critical eye on the patriarchal nature of Mexican society, but her stories clearly contest the values of American culture in the early twentieth century, and she offers alternative examples of politically active Mexican women who support the Mexican Revolution. As such, Mena’s works, commissioned by magazines as “charming” portraits of Mexican life, can be seen as complex, double-voiced critiques, particularly of the independent ideal of womanhood emerging in early-twentieth-century America, from the perspective of an author who lived both within and outside of it. Chapter 5 considers the work of Jewish American Anzia Yezierska, who emigrated to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side. Her short fiction depicts several examples of ambitious immigrant women who long to escape patriarchal family environments through the greater opportunities that American life offers. At the same time, these texts question the philanthropy of socially privileged Progressive female reformers with whom these women interact. The idealistic rhetoric of independence associated with the New Woman pervades Yezierska’s texts, but upper-class women who appear as “lady reformer” manifestations of the New Woman are criticized for their insensitivity to immigrants’ needs, as in Sui Sin Far’s stories. In Yezierska’s novels of the

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1920s, her simultaneous praise for the greater opportunities of American women and critique of the reform-oriented Progressive New Woman are further developed. Salome of the Tenements (1922) features a heroine who ultimately establishes a successful career rather than relying on marrying “well,” while condemning the settlement-house movement with which her husband (whom she eventually leaves) is associated. Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New (1925) charts its heroine’s coming of age and attainment of the New Woman’s goal of a fulfilling vocation, as well her rebellion against her tyrannical Orthodox father. She does not completely assimilate into the hegemonic ideal of the New Woman, however, but retains ties to her ethnic heritage while thriving within American society, offering a syncretic ideal. Arrogant Beggar (1927) is Yezierska’s most outspoken critique of Progressive immigrant uplift efforts, also offering in its heroine a hybridized example of New Jewish Womanhood who selectively co-opts traits of the iconic New Woman while rejecting her complicity with Progressive social thought that engineered “Americanization” for immigrants. The notion of the New Woman, then, can and should be seen in newly complicated ways when viewed through the writings of the authors in this study, who share a vexed relationship with that ideal due to their racial, and also often socioeconomic, marginality. These authors’ lives often embody the emancipatory goals of the New Woman, and their fiction affirms such aspirations. However, they also articulate the limitations of this figure, particularly in her reformist manifestation, and they approach the cultural dialogue of turn-of-thecentury feminism with priorities tied to their own experiences of race and class. Finally, these authors’ texts offer alternative examples of female empowerment either outside of white middle-class norms altogether or through syncretic characters who move successfully between hegemonic American culture and their own ethnic traditions. In so doing, the authors in this study offer multiple ways of transcending the ideal of the New Woman in the Progressive Era, one that was valuable in prioritizing greater freedoms for women but was also problematic in its exclusivity.

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Suffragist or “Squaw”? S. Alice Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s Mediations of Feminism and Indian Rights

Both of the heroines of the first two novels by Native American women writers, S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest and Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, are likened to suffragists in the course of these narratives. When Wynema Harjo, the highly assimilated Muscogee heroine of Callahan’s text, is claimed a “‘regular suffragist’” by her suitor, after proclaiming the desire to vote to help bring about Prohibition, she proudly agrees, “‘So I am,’” and she defends her interest in women’s political rights as spurred not only by exposure to the reform-oriented ideas of her white friend Genevieve Weir but also by her own interest in freedom and liberty that she shares with “‘the women of [my] country.’” In Cogewea, after making an eloquent speech, the heroine is told somewhat cryptically by a ranch-hand acquaintance that she would “‘make a good preacher woman. . . . [T]hem there wimmin what go out an’ make speeches an’ everything else. . . . Ev’ry paper a feller parooses says somethin’ ’bout people a throwin’ rotten aigs at ’em,’” which she rightly concludes to mean “‘Suffragettes.’” Although Cogewea does not specifically concur with her friend’s categorization, she is repeatedly described in Mourning

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Dove’s novel as desirous of acting in the public sphere, “forward,” and full of “independence of action and speech.”1 The context of each of these suffrage allusions reflects the moment in which that work appeared: Callahan’s novel, published in a decade in which the varied reform movements of the nineteenth century coalesced into guiding principles of public thought in the Progressive Era, shows the alliance between many suffragists and the long-standing, often female-driven temperance movement, whereas Mourning Dove’s novel, written two decades later, indicates the high level of publicity surrounding the dramatic tactics adopted by suffragists in the 1910s.2 Nonetheless, both authors’ interest in claiming space for their Native American heroines within a primary locus of the New Woman, the suffrage movement, suggests how pervasive that movement had become by the turn of the twentieth century. It is a testament to the growing familiarity of the New Woman and her ideals in the Progressive Era that, as minority writers attempting to reach a broad audience, both these authors would choose to align their heroines with this emerging model of womanhood. However, whereas many novels and stories by white American authors of that time similarly treat women’s changing status in Progressive Era American society, these novels by and about Native American women also participate in, and ultimately foreground, dialogues about the conditions of Native Americans at the turn of the century. Both Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s heroines’ references to gender equality, to the suffrage fight, or to careers for women—staple discursive practices of literary treatments of the New Woman—are challenged by concerns about equal rights for Native Americans, the dire need for which is made clear by acts of racially motivated violence: in the earlier novel, the public spectacle and horror of the Wounded Knee massacre, and in the latter, a private act of violence against the heroine. Despite the differing nature of these violent acts, the analogous tensions between discourses of feminism and ethnic activism in these two novels suggest the challenges that Callahan and Mourning Dove faced in publishing texts commenting on the status of

1. Callahan, Wynema, 45; Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 42–43. Future quotations from both sources will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. For more on the suffrage movement’s interest in using public space for spectacles, pageants, and parades during the 1910s, see Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women, 77–110.

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women and Native Americans at that time. Whereas texts by peers such as Kate Chopin or Edith Wharton foreground white women’s inequality in the patriarchal culture of that era, Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s texts reflect the complex relationship of gender and racial concerns in representing Native American women’s experiences at the turn of the twentieth century. They thereby call attention to the limitations of the ideal of the New Woman as an embodiment of the Progressive Era, a time that for Native Americans encompassed many of their greatest losses, from land to political power to culture.3 Despite their texts’ mutual concerns with both feminism and ethnic activism, the authors of these novels have little in common, one living a life of relative affluence and status in the Muscogee country of what is now Oklahoma, the other growing up in poverty in Washington State, receiving sporadic education and working much of her adult life as a migrant agricultural laborer. Relatively little is known about Sophia Alice Callahan (1868–1894), whose father, Samuel, was oneeighth Creek or Muscogee, a group designated one of the Five Civilized Tribes.4 When he was a child, his family migrated from Alabama to Indian Territory and then to Texas; as an adult, he established a cattle ranch near Okmulgee, in Indian Territory, where he maintained an aristocratic lifestyle, including owning slaves. After enlisting in the

3. The era 1890–1925 for Native Americans has often been seen as a low point in terms of cultural and literal losses. Following passage of the General Allotment, or Dawes, Act in 1887, which established the granting of individual plots of land, as well as citizenship, to families in place of communal landownership (and in hopes of assimilating Indians to white American lifestyles), large tracts of Indian lands were opened up for white purchase and settlement. The massacre of Sioux by federal troops at Wounded Knee, which occurred in 1890 near Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, has been regarded as the bitter end of military resistance to the U.S. government. In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt secured passage of the Burke Act, which reversed the policy of granting citizenship to Indians along with allotment of land, delaying the opportunity to become a citizen for twenty-five years (McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 207). For discussion of the emphasis during this era on Indian assimilation to white ways as the “solution” to the Indian Question, see Frederick Hoxie, The Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920. At the same time, a substantial body of Indian writing from this era questioned such policies and the white attitudes that underlay them, as shown in Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era. Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s fictional texts, though most significant here for their response to the ideal of the New Woman, may be seen as part of that larger phenomenon. 4. The terms Creek and Muscogee are both used to refer to this tribe. I follow the usage of Callahan scholar A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff in using the latter term.

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Confederate army during the Civil War, he moved his family permanently to Indian Territory and worked in the Muscogee Nation court system, eventually promoted to a justice of the court. S. Alice Callahan spent most of her formative years in Sulphur Springs, Texas, and attended the Wesleyan Female Institute in Staunton, Virginia, before returning west to teach in Indian Territory. She took a position at Harrell International Institute, a Methodist high school for Indian and white students, where she edited the school’s journal, Our Brother in Red. In the spring of 1891 Callahan published Wynema with H. J. Smith and Company in Chicago. Callahan continued to teach, hoping to return east to pursue more schooling, but suffered an attack of pleurisy and died in January 1894, at twenty-six years old.5 The recovery of Wynema: A Child of the Forest by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff in the 1990s has fostered critical debate about the novel’s relative worth on both aesthetic and political grounds. Allegations of the novel’s assimilationist stance and criticism of its misrepresentation of Muscogee culture by Craig S. Womack have been countered by arguments for the novel’s broader historical significance. Siobhan Senier, though acknowledging its failure to offer a “tribal discourse as an alternative to assimilation,” has praised its “rare and radical critique of allotment,” and Lisa Tatonetti has explored its significance as the first fictional treatment of the Ghost Dance movement and of the Wounded Knee massacre.6 Although these are indeed worthwhile debates concerning the novel, I would like to shift the terms of discussion to its representation of New Woman figures and themes, exploring how the novel raises, but ultimately effaces, feminist discourse in its prioritization of Indian rights—and in so doing anticipates a significantly similar shift in the next Native American woman’s novel. Wynema, set in a period from the 1880s through the beginning of the 1890s, deals with central events in Native American life during those years, particularly the land-allotment movement and the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee. However, the first several chapters of 5. All biographical information on Callahan comes from Ruoff’s introduction to Wynema. 6. Womack, “Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Fledgling Attempt,” in Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism; Senier, “Allotment Protest and Tribal Discourse: Reading Wynema’s Successes and Shortcomings,” 423; Tatonetti, “Behind the Shadows of Wounded Knee: The Slippage of Imagination in Wynema: A Child of the Forest.”

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Callahan’s novel treat the arrival of Genevieve Weir, the idealistic daughter of a wealthy white southern family, at the Muscogee Nation to teach at an Indian school. This choice to focus on and encourage readers’ empathy with the white heroine at the outset of the novel rather than her Indian counterpart, Wynema, is an early instance of how Callahan negotiated writing for a largely white audience. However, Genevieve’s position as teacher and Methodist missionary to the Indians also draws on Callahan’s own life, as well as reflecting the historical reality of Indian educational efforts in that era, particularly through the work of the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA). This white women’s organization, founded in 1879, pursued varied philanthropies related to American Indians, often providing teachers for mission-affiliated schools.7 Thus, Genevieve Weir may be seen as typical of the educated, idealistic, reform-oriented New Women of the final years of the nineteenth century. Callahan’s white heroine moves in with the family of Wynema Harjo, a precocious and friendly Muscogee girl, and the opening chapters of the novel appear to orient the reader to Muscogee culture through Genevieve’s experience of events such as the Green Corn festival and the ministrations of a medicine man. When Genevieve, though well intentioned, registers hesitancy or dislike for some of these rites, she is encouraged to shed her cultural blinders by Gerald Keithly, a white missionary who runs a school nearby and who defends the Indians’ ways; as he reminds her, albeit in a Eurocentric metaphor, “‘If you dwell among the Romans, you must abide by their laws and follow their customs wherever practicable’” (18). However, Callahan idealizes Genevieve’s mostly pleasant experiences in teaching and living among the Indians. She apparently wishes to present a romantic precontact vision of Muscogee existence by placing Wynema and her community in “tepees” in contrast to historical data about their homes, as scholars have noted.8 Callahan moreover provides a rose-tinted vision of Genevieve’s work among the Indians, as Angie Debo’s history of the Muscogee describes more realistically the challenges faced by such teachers:

7. For more information on the formation and activities of the WNIA, see V. S. Mathes, “Nineteenth-Century Women and Reform: The Women’s National Indian Association”; and Newman, White Women’s Rights, 116–31. 8. This misrepresentation of Muscogee homes is discussed in Ruoff, introduction to Wynema, xxxiv; and Womack, Red on Red, 115–16.

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White girls from the railroad towns and Creek girls from the boarding schools showed great hardihood in teaching in the full-blood settlements. They lived in Creek families where they did not hear a word of English, submitted to the conglomerate sleeping arrangements of a fullblood home, ate sofkey and blue dumplings, walked two or three miles to their work, cut the wood to warm the muddaubed cabin, and taught twenty-five or thirty shy young Indians from six to twenty years old, with whom it was impossible to exchange one word. But they always found kindliness and hospitality, and a genuine, if uncritical, interest in their school.9

Indeed, in the likely desire to present the Muscogee in the most nonthreatening manner possible to white readers, Callahan’s text effaces many of these challenges, implying that Wynema’s family already speaks fluent English and rendering Genevieve’s first day in the classroom a success—she simply decides to share the gospel and her own prayers with the non-English-speaking students, who “understood no word of it, but the tone went straight to each one’s heart and found lodgment there” (6). Callahan’s novel thus relies on evangelical Christian discourse, which, as Jane Tompkins has observed, appealed to a wide late-nineteenth-century readership.10 Callahan’s use of this discourse, in addition to making her feminist white heroine appeal to a broad audience in her day, fosters white readers’ empathy with the Indians by implying their innate openness to Christian spirituality, which requires only the touch of a Christian woman to set into practice. Admittedly vexed, this technique does create a sympathetic bond between readers and the Indian subjects in the first half of the novel that allows Callahan to turn to more overt political commentary and protest on behalf of Indians in the second half. The novel’s focus shifts from putative Muscogee ethnography to questions of women’s roles and rights when Genevieve invites Wynema to visit her home in the South, the same region from which the Muscogee were forcibly removed in the 1830s. Wynema has now grown into a charming young woman, a crowning example of the assimilative educational philosophy of the time who is well versed in Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and Shakespeare and has taken a teaching position in the Indian school where Genevieve teaches. 9. Debo, The Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Indians, 309. 10. See Tompkins’s discussion of evangelical Christian discourse in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860, esp. 147–60.

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Wynema has also imbibed in the process the largely white, middleclass female discourses of Indian reform and of women’s rights, which are revealed in her interactions with Genevieve’s family. Callahan thus situates her Native American heroine in the context of women’s reform movements that gave rise to the New Woman and were associated with her through the turn of the twentieth century. For example, in the scene mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, a conversation between Genevieve’s brother, Robin, and Wynema asserts the latter’s alignment with the temperance movement. Wynema decries the problem of alcoholism among her people, noting the exploitative sale of liquor to Indians on their lands, though prohibited by federal law,11 and adding, “‘The only way I can see, of exterminating the evil is to pull it up by the roots; stop the manufacture and of necessity the sale of [alcohol] will be stopped’” (44). When Robin replies that she would make a staunch Women’s Christian Temperance Unionist, she answers, “‘Indeed, I am a member of that union. We . . . do all we can against the great evil—intemperance; but what can a little band of women, prohibited from voting against the ruin of their husbands, sons and firesides, do, when even the great government of Uncle Sam is set at defiance?’” (45). The WCTU, established in 1874, had more than 150,000 members by 1900, and was one of the first organizations to teach activism skills that would be used in the suffrage movement. By affiliating Wynema with the WCTU (to which the author belonged), despite its members’ initial reluctance to endorse suffrage,12 Callahan locates her Native American heroine in the realm of women’s activism in the late nineteenth century and highlights the WCTU’s coalition with benevolent reform activity for Native Americans pursued by the Women’s National Indian Association; several WCTU members were also involved with the WNIA, which had a department devoted to temperance issues. Wynema’s feminism further emerges as she proudly acknowledges her prosuffrage views and asserts that “‘one day, the “inferior of man,” 11. For more on federal prohibition laws concerning Indian country, as well as how they were often circumvented, see Debo, Road to Disappearance, 327. 12. The WCTU agreed to formally endorse the vote for women in 1880, but before then many of its members were unwilling to support the more “radical” cause of suffrage. Exceptions to this trend exist, however, including the president of the WCTU from 1879 to 1897, Frances E. Willard, who enthusiastically supported suffrage. For more on the WCTU, see Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 288–89; and Degler, At Odds, 315–19.

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the “weaker vessel” shall stand grandly by the side of that “noble lord of creation,” his equal in every respect’” (45). Her avowal, significantly, does not reflect any recorded Native American women’s involvement in the suffrage cause at that point.13 In claiming a space for her heroine in the white, middle-class context of the late-nineteenth-century suffrage movement, Callahan may suggest that Indian women should become more involved in this cause. Indeed, when Robin asks, “‘Didn’t sister teach you all this along with the rest? I think you must have imbibed those strong suffrage principles and ideas from her,’” Wynema proudly acknowledges that although she may have gotten some ideas from Genevieve, “‘the idea of freedom and liberty was born in me. It is true the women of my country have no voice in the councils; we do not speak in any public gathering, not even in our churches; but we are waiting for our more civilized white sisters to gain their liberty, and thus set us an example which we shall not be slow to follow’” (45). Wynema’s comment is another instance of Callahan’s use of stereotypes to appeal to white readers, but is more subversive than it first appears. Her response seems to affirm clichés of Native American women as degraded, holding an oppressed position within the family and the broader community. However, even though Muscogee culture relied on a paradigm of separate spheres of gender activity and par-

13. Though it had the support of many black women, the suffrage cause in the 1880s was still a largely a white middle-class movement. A 1913 news article reports that Native American suffragettes marched in Washington, D.C., that year (Batker, Reforming Fictions: Native, African, and Jewish American Women’s Literature and Journalism in the Progressive Era, 144n17), but there is no historical documentation of Native American women’s formal participation in the suffrage movement in the 1880s. Indeed, most of the evidence indicating Native American women’s participation in other reform movements, as well, dates from the early twentieth century. As Carol Batker has noted, some Native American women were affiliated with established women’s organizations; for example, author and activist ZitkalaŠa (Yankton Sioux; also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) and activist Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud (Chippewa) were both active in the Indian Welfare Committee (later the Indian Affairs Committee) of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (ibid., 33). However, the Indian Welfare Committee was not formed until 1921 (Ruth Spack, “Re-visioning Sioux Women: Zitkala-Ša’s Revolutionary American Indian Stories,” 38). In addition to these examples of Native women joining traditionally white women’s reform organizations, there is also ample evidence of Native women organizing on their own in the early twentieth century. Zitkala-Ša was involved in the first secular Pan-Indian organization, the Society of American Indians, whereas Mourning Dove helped to found a local Native women’s organization, the Eagle Feathers Club, in 1928 (Batker, Reforming Fictions, 33).

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ticipation in tribal councils was limited to men, privileges were granted to women as well. For example, Muscogee genealogy was determined matrilineally, as Craig S. Womack notes. Furthermore, marriage practices allowed women more agency than those of white Christian culture. Matrimony began with a period of “incomplete marriage” for several months. During this trial phase, the woman could end the marriage if she desired. Even after this period, if a husband failed to provide adequately for his wife, she could be released from the marriage. Also, divorce could be sought and obtained by husband or wife, and in that event, the children and property remained in the possession of the wife.14 Comparing these practices against the stigma of divorce and women’s difficulty in retaining property or children after divorce in the white community at this time reveals that Muscogee women enjoyed some freedoms that their white peers did not. Womack asserts that, in this admittedly selective depiction of her peers, Wynema “cannot see the power of Creek women that already surrounds her and surpasses the rights of the white women in the Methodist circles in which she worships,” thus misrepresenting her culture.15 However, it is possible that Callahan chose to downplay such examples of Muscogee women’s agency in order to suggest the real political power of suffrage for all women, not just white women. Also, Wynema’s assertion that Native American women will quickly follow their “more civilized white sisters” in gaining the vote invokes a familiar and vexed dichotomy of “primitive” Indian versus “civilized” white culture employed to appeal to the white audience of her day. But what Wynema appears to say here is that she and her Indian sisters eagerly anticipate greater rights as Indian women, suggesting a desire to use such political agency to advocate for their people. However, the focus of this conversation between Wynema and Robin changes as he pleads his support for her cause, asserting the equality of women to men “‘in every respect, except political liberty,’” adding, “‘And not alone in an intellectual sense are you women our equals, but you have the energy and ambition, and far more morality than we can claim.’” Robin invokes pervasive nineteenth-century views of gender that held that women—at least, the right kind—were more moral than men, a concept used as a platform for suffrage by individuals including Harriet Beecher Stowe on the basis that women could thereby “clean up 14. Debo, Road to Disappearance, 17. 15. Womack, Red on Red, 118.

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the house” of society, rather than on the human-rights basis that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony argued. However, Wynema does not address Robin’s gender essentialism but instead begins to flirt with him: “‘It seems to me somebody else would make a splendid lecturer on Woman’s Rights. You had better enlist,’ tauntingly. ‘By taking one of the women? I should like to,’ and he looked into her eyes his deep meaning” (46). This dialogue that has opened up the complicated relations between women’s rights and the position of Indian women steers back to the safer waters of the romance genre; Callahan here subordinates gender politics for the conventions of sentimental romance. Moreover, the fact that the novel shortly after refocuses on racial rather than gender politics also appears to undermine the importance of suffrage, and in so doing suggests the limitations of the New Woman’s priorities for ethnically marginalized women. The next chapter continues the romance plot emphasis as well as the women’s rights theme by juxtaposing Wynema’s courtship with that of Genevieve. In contrast to the friendly banter of Wynema and Robin is Genevieve’s reunion with Maurice Mauran, whom she left in the South upon her move to Indian Territory. Maurice reveals his conservatism, condemning both Indian reform and women’s rights: “‘I fear you are a “real live,” suffragist! . . . As for woman’s rights, I don’t want my little wife to bother her head about that, for it is immodest and unwomanly’” (47). Genevieve’s rebuttal, though angrier than Wynema’s replies to Robin, similarly defends her feminism by couching it in safe manifestations of women’s activism, temperance and mission work, and citing notable exemplars: “The idea of a woman being unwomanly and immodest because she happens to be thoughtful and to have ‘two ideas above an oyster,’ to know a little beyond and above house and dress is perfectly absurd and untrue. Is Mrs. Hayes, wife of ex-president Hayes, and president of the Woman’s Mission Board immodest because she does not devote her time to cleaning house or planning dresses, but prefers doing missionary work? And is the great leader of temperance work, Frances E. Willard . . . unwomanly because she prefers to devote her life to temperance work instead of keeping house for some man for her ‘victuals and clothes’?” (48)16 16. Genevieve cites women who forged influential public roles through their activism: Lucy Hayes, in addition to her missions work, was a mouthpiece for the temperance cause, noted for her policy of hosting alcohol-free events at the White

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The scene concludes with Genevieve’s acknowledgement that Gerald Keithly, though “buried among the Indians where it would be thought he had no opportunity for keeping up with the times” (49), is more supportive of women’s rights than her suitor. Her reflection, its problematic centering of white subjectivity and marginalization of Indian life aside, foreshadows her choice to marry Keithly instead of Mauran, but it also equates Genevieve with Wynema in their desire for husbands who support women’s rights. This theme also links Callahan’s text to several New Woman novels, wherein a common plotline is the heroine’s difficulties in finding a suitor or husband who is supportive of her feminism.17 The focus of Callahan’s text at this point appears to be women’s rights, with various ideals of the New Woman, particularly her work in the public sphere and political representation through the vote, championed through both the white and the Native American heroines. However, with the chapter “Shall We Allot?” the novel markedly changes focus. Coming upon a news article about allotment, Wynema and Genevieve replicate opposing views in discussing the proposed policy, passed as the General Allotment, or Dawes, Act in 1887. Its advocates argued that Indians were best aided by assimilation to a lifestyle of individual landownership and cultivation through allotments of land to each Indian family.18 The process also allowed for white settlement on unallotted tracts, resulting in great losses of land originally part of reservations. Wynema at first supports the idea of allotment, believing that it would solve problems of unequal land division and instill pride in Indians to “‘cultivate their land and build up their homes’” (51). Genevieve sees the proposal in a different light, believing that it will be devastating to the so-called wild tribes: “‘It will do very well for the civilized tribes, but they should never do it

House, whereas WCTU president Willard superintended the largest women’s organization in the United States at that time and defended the female vote. 17. For discussion of ways in which several British New Woman novels innovate upon the “marriage plot,” see Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 59–82. Several American works with New Woman protagonists also mine the subject of their seeking a husband who will support their feminist beliefs or their desire to maintain a profession after marriage, including Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark, Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country Doctor, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Doctor Zay, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s What Diantha Did. 18. For more on the land-allotment movement and its effects, see Hoxie, Final Promise, 71–81; and Takaki, Different Mirror, 234–38.

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until their weaker brothers are willing and able.’” Although her language is condescending, Genevieve’s fears were often realized by the ensuing history of white purchases of allotted Indian lands: “‘Were the land divided, these poor, ignorant, improvident, short-sighted Indians would be persuaded and threatened into selling their homes, piece by piece, perhaps, until finally they would be homeless outcasts’” (52). Wynema is quickly convinced of this point of view, and the novel’s consequent antiallotment stance, shared by Wynema and Genevieve as well as Gerald Keithly, who vows to help fight allotment as “‘Byron fought for the emancipation of Greece and gave his life for the cause’” (58), coincides with the Five Tribes’ resistance to passage of the Dawes Act, particularly Muscogee resistance efforts led by Chitto Harjo, or Crazy Snake.19 Indeed, the only character in the novel to support allotment is Maurice Mauran, who believes that “‘if by constant contact and intercourse with white people the Indians do not become civilized, why, let them go to the dogs, I say’” (54), prompting Genevieve to break off their courtship. Despite the novel’s demonstrations of how the challenges faced by women and by American Indians at the turn of the century are quite different, by locating antifeminist and racist attitudes in the same antagonist, Callahan implies that these two groups share the project of fighting against those in traditional positions of social and political power. Alongside Genevieve’s struggle to find a suitor who is supportive of feminism and sensitive to the concerns of Native people, Wynema and Robin’s romance resurfaces in the middle third of the novel, implying the challenges they face as an interracial couple. When Robin discovers her in a tree, reading poetry, Wynema playfully asks, “‘Did you never read that Pocahontas could leap from one tree to another like a squirrel?’” As scholars including Mary Dearborn and Rayna Green have observed, Pocahontas remains a powerful figure in the American imaginary, memorialized by colonist John Smith as the eroticized, ethnic female Other.20 However, in equating herself with this familiar signifier, Wynema instead emphasizes the Indian maiden’s strength and fearlessness. Robin nonetheless invokes the conventional wisdom of the myth: “‘Yes, but you are not Pocahontas, and I am not John Smith, though I wish I were. . . . For then you would 19. Ruoff, introduction to Wynema, xxxiv–xxxv. 20. See Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters, esp. 12, 16–17; and Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture.”

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jump down and save me—from toiling up this tree’” (61). Their banter turns serious, as Robin declares his love and asks for Wynema’s hand, and her response underscores the racial divide between them, invoking a scenario closer to home than that of mythic Pocahontas: “‘Robin[,] what would our parents say? Would your mother accept a little black Indian for a daughter?’” As Susan Bernardin has explored, Wynema’s choice of the word black to describe herself points to tensions in their immediate setting of the South, both prejudice toward African Americans and the perceived threat of miscegenation.21 Robin’s dismissive reply, “‘My sweetheart must not call herself names’” (62), suggests the limitations of this otherwise sympathetic character to realize the significance of such labels for nonwhite individuals. Although Callahan in general downplays the realistic obstacles to an interracial union in this novel, in alluding here to the challenges faced by this interracial couple, her text anticipates the focus of Canadian Mohawk author E. Pauline Johnson’s 1893 story “A Red Girl’s Reasoning.”22 In contrast to the ongoing challenge of interracial romance for the novel’s Native heroine, the urgent need for equitable solutions to the Indian Question becomes apparent with the novel’s shift in focus to the Ghost Dance movement and the Wounded Knee massacre.23 As in

21. See Bernardin, “On the Meeting Grounds of Sentiment: S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest,” 216–17. 22. Johnson’s story was first published in Dominion Magazine in February 1893 and later collected in her volume The Moccasin Maker (1913). It concerns a mixedblood Canadian woman who ends her marriage to a white man after he, learning that her parents’ marriage was conducted by tribal rites rather than a priest or magistrate, declares that union to have been illegitimate and accuses her of having disgraced him. 23. In 1889 Paiute prophet Wovoka, believing himself the Messiah returned to earth as an Indian, began preaching a Christian ethic of nonviolence and ethical conduct toward others and instructed Indians to dance the Ghost Dance, after which white communities would perish, the buffalo would return, and the Indians would reinherit the land. Despite the movement’s nonviolence and its Christian basis, it was increasingly perceived as a threat as it spread throughout reservations in the West. Among the congregations of Native people for these performances was one at Pine Ridge agency, causing fears among reservation agents who requested federal troops to be sent in. On December 29, 1890, the panic escalated into the killing by soldiers of between 150 and 300 Indians at an encampment at Wounded Knee Creek, the majority of them women and children. Twenty-five soldiers were also killed, largely by friendly fire amid the smoke and confusion. For more on the Ghost Dance and on Wounded Knee, see Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West; and Takaki, Different Mirror. In her

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its treatment of the allotment debate, the novel sympathizes with the Indians on the matter of the Ghost Dance by privileging the perspectives of their advocates. Gerald Keithly quotes from an angry editorial on the so-called Messiah Craze that recommends, “‘If the United States army would kill a few thousand or so of the dancing Indians there would be no more trouble,’” but follows by reading aloud a rebuttal by “Old Masse Hadjo.” In comments that recall one of the first written calls for equal rights by a Native American, “The Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” by William Apess (1833), Hadjo points out how many white “Christians” have used their religion for bad ends: “‘The code of morals practiced by the white race will not compare with the morals of the Indians. . . . If our Messiah does not come, we will not try to force you into our belief. We will never burn innocent women at the stake, or pull men to pieces with horses because they refuse to join with us in our ghost dances’” (73). As Lisa Tatonetti has noted, Callahan’s willingness to indict Christianity through this editorial is significant, its fictive author perhaps constituting “what [Anishinaabe theorist and critic Gerald] Vizenor would call her ‘antiself,’ the repressed Native voice that compels Callahan to authorize a denunciation of her own religion so that she might tell the story of Wounded Knee.”24 Callahan further privileges Native American perspectives on the Ghost Dance conflict by taking the novel’s action directly into the middle of it. Carl Peterson, a missionary to the Muscogee who previously worked among the Sioux, returns to Pine Ridge accompanied by Robin Weir, and he meets with the leaders of the “hostile” Indians, determined to talk them out of resisting the government. When Carl advocates their surrender, a young chief named Wildfire respects his arguments but cannot agree, telling Carl, “‘You are kind, and you mean well, but you can never understand these things as I do. You have never been oppressed.’” Despite their difference of opinions, the text again idealistically suggests the power of Christian prayer to unite white men and Indians, when Carl kneels to pray for God’s guidance

discussion of Wynema, Lisa Tatonetti notes long-standing tendencies to meld the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee together in a single inevitable cause-and-effect narrative, suggesting that Callahan’s novel, as the first fictional re-creation of these two historical moments, offers new ways of examining “Native visions of American Indian identities in the late nineteenth century” (“Behind the Shadows,” 2). 24. Tatonetti, “Behind the Shadows,” 12.

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for the Indians, and he follows by reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Lakota: “He repeated the prayer taught by the ‘Prince of Peace,’ which he had translated into the Sioux language, and the Indians with one accord joined with him and closed with a fervent ‘Amen’” (85). As in the early scene in which Genevieve inspires a classroom of non-Englishspeaking Muscogee children by reading the gospel, this passage is unrealistic, but it suggests Callahan’s likely desire to represent the Indians appealingly for white readers and reflects her participation in the pervasive discourse of evangelical Christianity in nineteenthcentury America. However, the ensuing chapter, “Civilization or Savage Barbarity,” reveals a more polemical stance in recounting (if inaccurately) the slaughter at Wounded Knee itself,25 and as its title suggests, it destabilizes hegemonic notions of white “civilization” and Indian “savagery.” Carl and Robin, visiting the site the day after the massacre, discover an old Sioux woman tending to the dead and dying. When Chikena laments, “‘Here lies the dead body of brave Great Wind, and yonder lies his son. Dead! Dead! I am all alone in the world—the only one left of my tribe’” (91), she echoes the well-worn rhetoric of the vanishing Indian, a construct of Native Americans as a race doomed to extinction that was pervasive in writing about Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States. Such rhetoric exemplifies what Renato Rosaldo has termed “imperialist nostalgia” for the loss of the very cultural practices that colonization has negated.26 Even more ironically, such language was often ascribed to the Indians by white authors or interpreters,27 and Callahan’s choice to have Chikena employ this rhetoric suggests that, despite her text’s advocacy for Native Americans, Callahan also relied on dominant discourses about them. Despite the complicity with stereotype suggested by Chikena’s rhetoric, the close of this chapter is more overtly polemical about Indian 25. See ibid. for a discussion of how Callahan’s fictive account of Wounded Knee, likely informed by newspaper accounts shortly after the event that were themselves “wildly contradictory,” diverges from the historical record (16). 26. See Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, 69–70. Exploring the relationship between Mourning Dove and her mentor, Lucullus McWhorter, Kathleen M. Donovan also draws on Rosaldo’s theory (“Owning Mourning Dove,” 109). 27. Two notable examples of such rhetoric are Thomas Jefferson’s transcription of the speech of Logan, an Indian whose family was killed by white men, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1804), and the comments of Chingachgook at the end of James Fenimore Cooper’s significantly titled The Last of the Mohicans (1827).

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rights than any other portion of the novel. Callahan’s narrator addresses the reader in a hortative mode that recalls protest literature such as slave narratives and antislavery fiction: “But,” you ask, my reader, “did not the white people undergo any privations? Did not the United States army lose two brave commanders and a number of privates?” Oh, yes. So the papers tell us; but I am not relating the brave (?) deeds of the white soldier. They are already flashed over the world by electricity; great writers have burned the midnight oil telling their story to the world. It is not my province to show how brave it was for a great, strong nation to quell a riot caused by the dancing of a few “bucks”—for civilized soldiers to slaughter indiscriminately, Indian women and children. Doubtless it was brave, for so public opinion tells us, and it cannot err. But what will the annals of history handed down to future generations disclose to them? (92–93)

This passage engages with questions inherent in the transcribing of history and the role of the media therein: whose side of the story is told, and through what structures of power and articulation? The narrator concludes by answering her own question about the annals of history: “Ah, but that does not affect my story! It is the Indian’s story— his chapter of wrongs and oppression” (93). Her acknowledgment of how easy it is to find oneself speaking for an oppressed group illuminates the complexities of advocacy and humanitarian activism, as Gayatri Spivak has noted.28 Moreover, this realization of the narrator, who here locates herself outside Native American culture, occurs with our awareness of Callahan’s relationship to the Muscogee tribe. Her assimilative upbringing and small amount of Native American blood—similar to Sui Sin Far’s passably Caucasian appearance and her attendant anxieties over acceptance in the Chinese American community—perhaps made Callahan feel like an outsider at times as well. Callahan’s use of sarcasm to critique treatment of the Indians recurs when Wynema summarizes and praises a news editorial in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal”: “[The author commends] the Government on its slaughter of the Indians, and [recommends] that the dead bodies of the savages be used for fertilizers instead of the costly guano Mr. Blaine has been 28. See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

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importing. . . . The Indians alive were troublesome and expensive, for they would persist in getting hungry and cold; but the Indians slaughtered would be useful, for besides using their carcasses for fertilizers, the land they are now occupying could then be given as homes to the ‘homeless whites.’” (97)

This editorial co-opts the satirical method of Swift, a member of a population similarly regarded by their colonizers as childlike, savage, and difficult to assimilate to middle-class values and work habits.29 This passage, along with Callahan’s previous address to readers, renders the novel’s evolution in tone and topical focus particularly palpable. The evangelical idealism, sentimentalism, and focus on the New Woman’s ideals of its early chapters have given way to a vituperative commentary on racial politics written in the weeks or months following the Wounded Knee massacre. In contrast to the racial polemics of the last third of Callahan’s novel, the final chapter retreats to less controversial material, but with continued political implications. Callahan again invokes the rhetoric of the vanishing Indian with the dying prophecy of Chikena, who has come to live in Muscogee country. She bids Wynema farewell, imploring her to “‘make haste and seek with me the happy hunting-grounds of our fathers, for not many years of oppressions can your people stand. Not many years will elapse until the Indian will be a people of the past.’” Chikena appears to affirm this elegiac idea of Native Americans, but what follows problematizes taking such rhetoric at face value. The close of the novel relies on conventions of sentimental fiction through a look into the future, as the narrator recounts how three Sioux children rescued from Wounded Knee and adopted by Wynema’s and Genevieve’s families “grew up and prospered in the schools and colleges around them,” becoming a famous musician, an Indian missionary, and a reservation doctor. The narrator mentions Chikena’s prophecy as if to comment on its accuracy, but interrupts herself: “But why prolong this look into the future, when the present is so fair? The seer withdraws her gaze and looks once more on the happy families nestling in their villages, near together. There they are, the Caucasian and the American, the white and the Indian; and not the meanest, not the most ignorant, not the despised; but the intelligent, 29. For more on English attitudes toward the Irish as “savage,” see Takaki, Different Mirror, 26–29.

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happy, beloved wife is Wynema, a child of the forest” (104). This passage recalls the idealistic vision at the close of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Work: A Story of Experience (1873), wherein the heroine is surrounded with “a loving league of sisters, old and young, black and white, rich and poor.”30 Here, Callahan’s scenario similarly juxtaposes racial differences in peaceful harmony, though her use of language is at the same time subversive, locating the Indian and not the Caucasian as the true “American.” But this vision also complicates Chikena’s prophecy, for in addition to the thriving adopted Sioux children, Wynema, now the “happy, beloved wife” of sentimental domestic fiction—if also an “intelligent” one—has borne a daughter to Robin Weir. This new generation of Indians will be more assimilated to white culture than their parents, but they do exist. Thus, Callahan’s text may in the end undermine the rhetoric of the vanishing Indian, implying the possibility of continued survival through partial, if not complete, assimilation.31 In the end, the discursive ambivalence of Callahan’s intriguing but uneven novel Wynema, shifting between modes of ethnography, sentimental romance, women’s rights rhetoric, and political discourse on Indian affairs, suggests the ambivalence of America in 1891 concern30. Alcott, Work, 349. 31. In having the three Sioux children grow up to be a musician, a missionary, and a reservation doctor, Callahan’s text interestingly anticipates leading figures in the Progressive Era Indian movement, the kind of individuals who formed the Society of American Indians organization in 1911 and whose texts are featured in Hoxie’s collection Talking Back to Civilization. For example, Charles Alexander Eastman (Santee Sioux), after graduating from Boston University’s medical school, became a reservation doctor at Pine Ridge and witnessed the aftermath of Wounded Knee, as recorded in his From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian (1916). Zitkala-Ša was a musician, writer, and activist, studying violin at the Boston Conservatory of Music and cocomposing an opera, publishing essays in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 and story collections in 1901 and 1921, and working extensively with the Society of American Indians and, later, the National Council of American Indians, which she founded in 1926 (David L. Johnson and Raymond Wilson, “Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, 1876–1938: ‘Americanize the First American,’” 36). As Hoxie has argued, these figures, many of them the products of well-intentioned but nonetheless destructive assimilative education, indeed “spoke back” to American society in their era: “Rather than embrace the idea that tribal communities could return to the past or accept the invitation to abandon their heritage and take on the trappings of American civilization, Eastman and his contemporaries defined a middle position between those extremes. They believed indigenous values and traditions gave them the strength to resist federal policies and restore the confidence of Native people in their cultures without retreating to the past” (Talking Back to Civilization, 4).

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ing both the Woman Question and the Indian Question. Susan Bernardin rightly notes that foundational Native women writers like Callahan “call attention to the era’s often unmarked intersections of Euroamerican women’s reform culture, Native women, and national Indian policies.”32 In its ultimate emphasis on the Indian Question, Callahan’s text illuminates the dialogue in which American society was engaged about several dimensions of this question—land policy, the Ghost Dance movement, and the ethics (or lack thereof) of government violence against Indians. Furthermore, the way in which the novel initially centers on women’s rights discourse but refocuses on Indian concerns, both the ongoing debate over allotment and the critical moment of Wounded Knee, suggests that, for Callahan, gender politics needed to be subordinated to the racial politics of attaining an equitable Indian policy, as urgently demonstrated by the tragedy that occurred in 1890. As such, her novel suggests the limitations of the New Woman’s agenda for those for whom more urgent matters of racial survival came first. The variety of discursive strategies through which Callahan’s novel responded to the Woman Question and the Indian Question is echoed in the generic diversity of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range. As with S. Alice Callahan, regrettably few facts about the author are available. She was born in Idaho sometime between 1882 and 1888 to an Okanogan father and Colville mother, possibly with a white ancestor on her father’s side.33 She was given the English name Christine Quintasket; records do not indicate whether she was also given the Indian name Hum-ishu-ma, or Mourning Dove, at birth, but as an adult she identified herself by and published under her Indian name and its English translation. She attended missionary- or Bureau of Indian Affairs–sponsored schools, including intermittent study at the Sacred Heart Convent School in Ward, Washington, and in her early twenties enrolled in business school to learn typing and improve her English. After a brief and 32. Bernardin, “On the Meeting Grounds,” 210. 33. Concerning Mourning Dove’s claim of having a white grandfather, which her siblings denied, see Jay Miller, introduction to Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography. Biographical information about Mourning Dove comes from Alanna Kathleen Brown, “Mourning Dove (Humishuma)”; Dexter Fisher, introduction to Cogewea; McWhorter’s note “To the Reader” that accompanied the original publication of the novel, reproduced in Fisher’s edition; and Miller, Mourning Dove.

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unhappy marriage in 1909 to a mixed-blood Flathead Indian, Hector McCleod, in 1919 she married a Wenatchee, Fred Galler, and remained with him until her death in 1936, although the marriage was apparently compromised by her husband’s alcoholism (as with her first marriage) and physical abuse. She and Galler worked as migrant agricultural laborers in Washington, and Mourning Dove wrote after hours in the fields, carrying a typewriter as they traveled from camp to camp. In 1914 she met white author and historian Lucullus McWhorter, who encouraged her to continue a project she had begun of transcribing her tribe’s folklore, and who helped her to bring out the collection Coyote Stories in 1933. She also shared with him a novel she had composed between 1912 and 1914. Before Cogewea was finally published in 1927, the manuscript was heavily revised, and several scholars have documented how McWhorter altered her text by creating high-flown language for the heroine and adding poetic epigrams to chapters and passages throughout the narrative, including ethnographic asides and polemical reflections on Indian rights.34 The final product has been termed “schizophrenic,” a text that combines elements of the popular western romance genre with historical and political commentary.35 However, few scholars have noted that the text also invokes Progressive Era discourses of women’s rights. As in Callahan’s novel, the Indian heroine is initially linked with ideals of the middle-class New Woman in a likely bid to make her appeal to white audiences. However, as in Wynema, the thematic focus turns to more urgent problems of Indian rights, as reflected in struggles over property and violence against Indians, this time against the heroine herself. Mourning Dove likewise relies on conventions of sentimental romance to drive the plot, but her protagonist must choose between a white, middle-class suitor from the East and a mixed-blood cowboy from the West. When, after betrayal and abuse by her white suitor, Cogewea chooses her fel-

34. For McWhorter’s revision of and additions to Mourning Dove’s manuscript, see A. Brown, “Mourning Dove (Humishuma),” 190, 193; Fisher, introduction to Cogewea, xii–xvii; and Louis Owens, “Origin Mists: John Rollin Ridge’s Masquerade and Mourning Dove’s Mixedbloods,” 43. For discussion of the implications of their collaboration, see Donovan, “Owning Mourning Dove”; and Linda K. Karell, “‘This Story I Am Telling You Is True’: Collaboration and Literary Authority in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea.” 35. Dearborn, Pocahontas’ Daughters, 20.

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low “half-breed” and life in the West, her choice is perhaps also a metaphoric response to the discourses of white feminism. Her renunciation of Alfred Densmore and eastern white culture is a choice to turn away from hegemonic feminism at that time, as manifested in the usually white, middle-class, and largely urban phenomenon of New Womanhood. Cogewea remains closer to her own true identity by remaining among her people in the West. As Louis Owens has put it, Cogewea’s turn is “back toward the mixedblood Indian world, where a greater opportunity for coherence and self-knowledge exists.”36 The novel opens with a description of Cogewea at the Montana ranch of her sister, the narrator dwelling on the exotic beauty that marks her “proud descent from the only true American—the Indian” (15). This comment initiates the text’s claim for a central position for Native Americans within American culture; like the conclusion of Wynema, it appropriates the term American for the Indian rather than the Caucasian, countering widespread perspectives at the turn of the century that normalized “American” as “white.” The narrator offers an account of Cogewea’s difficult childhood: after her Indian mother’s death and abandonment by her white father, the independent-spirited girl was raised by her grandmother Stemteemä, who sent Cogewea to convent school and later to the famed, highly assimilationist Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, from which she has recently graduated with honors.37 Cogewea now questions what to do with her life: “What had the future in store for her? What would it bring? Would it, through her, illuminate the pathway of others? Could she fill any sphere of usefulness[?] . . . She had struggled hard to equip herself for a useful career, but seemingly there was but one trail for her—that of

36. Owens, “Origin Mists,” 47. 37. Mourning Dove herself well knew the experiences of assimilative education. In addition to her years of schooling in convent- and Bureau of Indian Affairs–sponsored schools, which she critiqued for their “strict discipline” in Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography (28), she worked as a matron in exchange for room and board and the chance to take classes at the Fort Shaw Indian School in Montana. Alanna Kathleen Brown notes, “While at Fort Shaw she signed her name as Christine Haines, and she spent four years not only assimilating herself but also helping other Indian children assimilate” (“Mourning Dove [Humishuma],” 188). Though “Quintasket” was her father’s last name, the surname “Haines” was one that the author often went by in her younger years; it appears as her father’s surname on allotment records and may allude to Joseph Quintasket’s father’s name (ibid.).

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mediocrity and obscurity” (17). Her desire to fill a “sphere of usefulness” echoes that of many women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who wished to perform socially beneficial work. Individuals such as settlement founder Jane Addams recorded the malaise they felt as young women in being prepared for a public career by their educations yet facing a future of familial duties within the domestic sphere. In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams noted that when many a daughter “comes back from college and begins to recognize her social claim to the ‘submerged tenth’ . . . the family claim is strenuously asserted; she is told that she is unjustified, ill-advised in her efforts.”38 Addams’s comment articulates the sense of social purpose common among Progressive women that Mourning Dove’s heroine also feels at the outset of the novel. Other details in early chapters imply Cogewea’s connection with broad representations of turn-of-the-century feminism, such as her reluctance to marry. When a conversation with her sister about a horse roundup playfully turns to the man Cogewea herself might “rope” as a life partner, Cogewea firmly tells Julia, “‘Well, I am not yet riding in the matrimonial roundup . . . nor am I still-hunting for any “maverick“ ‘ ” (21). Her attitudes reflect a trend in the turn-of-the-century America of women choosing to delay marriage or not to marry at all, particularly those who enjoyed broadened opportunities for higher education and were prepared for a career beyond the home. This representation is affirmed when her friend Jim LaGrinder later remarks on the growing population of “‘old maids’” in the West; Cogewea defends them as “‘an industrious class of women and mostly schoolmarms all making their own living’” (113). And when a conversation with Alfred Densmore turns to the subject of marriage, she propounds a cynical view of the institution—at least as practiced by Christians— for despite the solemn vows given, as she notes, many of those same marriages end in divorce. She concludes, “‘I would prefer remaining an old maid, although the Indians do not approve of bachelor-girls running loose about the country’” (102). To underscore this representation of Cogewea as would-be New Woman, the narrator also offers a telling comment: “Cogewea could not understand herself. She could find no place in life. Her mind burned with an undefinable restlessness. Her longings were vague

38. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (with Autobiographical Notes), 71.

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and shadowy; as something not to be attained within the narrow limits of her prescribed sphere” (22). Though analyses of this text have often focused on Cogewea’s identity as a “half-blood,” and the restlessness described here might be seen to imply the dislocation she feels as a result of her ethnic hybridity, the language of this passage also echoes many turn-of-the-century fictive explorations of the New Woman’s yearnings for a broader life. Texts by contemporaries of Mourning Dove such as Chopin’s Awakening (1899) or Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) contain similar expressions of their female protagonists’ desires for a more fulfilling existence than what patriarchal marriage offers them. Another scene implies Cogewea’s desire for meaningful intellectual work—and echoes Mourning Dove’s experiences—as she considers a career as an author. Realizing that she is connected to “the primitive Indian nature, absorbed from the centuries-old legends as told [to her] by the Stemteemä,” she acknowledges that “these threads in the woof of her people’s philosophy must be irretrievably lost unless speedily placed on record” (33). When she tells Jim LaGrinder that she is considering writing such a book, he gently teases her, and she responds, “‘I may surprise you yet, James LaGrinder! Even if I am a ‘squaw’ as you call me . . . I may use the pen!’” (34). Her defense of pursuing a writing career connects her with female protagonists of several other turn-of-the-century texts, including Betsey Dole in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “Poetess” (1891), Rose Dutcher in Hamlin Garland’s Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895), and Laura Wilde in Ellen Glasgow’s Wheel of Life (1906). However, Cogewea is specifically championing an Indian woman’s right to the pen. As at least a half-”insider” to Native American culture, Cogewea wishes to record the folklore of her people, countering how such work was often performed by an “outsider” ethnographer. Of course, the dynamics underlying such relationships were complicated. Kathleen Donovan’s discussion of Mourning Dove’s relationship with McWhorter demonstrates that he problematically relied on nostalgic views of the “vanishing Indian” to convince Mourning Dove of the necessity of recording her tribal folklore— rhetoric that seems to intrude here in Cogewea’s reasoning for her project.39 But in the Native individual’s choice to perform such work, there remains a degree of authenticity not present when a foreign

39. Donovan, “Owning Mourning Dove,” 106–7.

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ethnographer goes into a Native community to transcribe its oral culture. Cogewea expresses this view later on when she comments, “‘I contend that the whites cannot authentically chronicle our habits and customs. They can hardly get at the truth. . . . I have heard the Indian boast of the absurdities told to the white “investigator.” It is practically impossible for an alien to get at our correct legendary lore’” (94). Furthermore, as the author of her own text about the Indians, Cogewea will have the ability to correct outsiders’ stereotypes. Cogewea is incensed after reading a novel titled The Brand, “an unjust presentation of Indian sentiment and racial traits.” In her view, “the writer, wholly ignorant of her subject, instead of extending a helping hand, had dealt her unfortunate hero a ruthless blow” (88), characterizing him as so ashamed of his mixed blood that he denounces his Indian mother in order to marry a white woman and “slave” for her for the rest of his life. In a conclusion recalling the plots of many tragic mulatto narratives, the protagonist dies tragically, and Cogewea is so angered by the book that she incinerates it in the kitchen stove. As Peter Beidler has discussed, the offensive text was a real novel, Therese Broderick’s Brand: A Tale of the Flathead Reservation (1909), which perpetuated stereotypes about Native Americans and was full of inaccuracies.40 In proposing to write her own book about the Indians, Cogewea reclaims subject matter too often appropriated by others to provide exotic commodities for white American consumers, and she simultaneously asserts a woman’s right to pursue a writing career. Aside from Cogewea’s literary aspirations, Mourning Dove most clearly aligns her heroine with ideas of Progressive feminism in the popular consciousness in the scene mentioned earlier, as Cogewea is likened to a suffragette by the ranch hand “Silent Bob.” As Bob’s comments indicate, by the years 1912 to 1916, when Mourning Dove composed and began revising the novel, the activities of suffragists were very much in the public eye: their March 3, 1913, march in Washington, D.C., one day before President Wilson’s inauguration, drew thousands of spectators and turned into a riot, and media coverage of their speeches, public meetings, and protests was widespread. When she asks playfully, “‘And that is why you want me to turn suffragette, so you can pelt me with stale eggs?’” he shyly replies that he was “‘jes’ a kiddin’,’” and the narrator asserts the man’s sympathetic view of 40. See Beidler, “Literary Criticism in Cogewea: Mourning Dove’s Protagonist Reads The Brand.”

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Cogewea: “Bob understood her, perhaps, better than did any of his companions. He knew that the girl meant right, despite her odd, ‘forward’ ways” (42–43). The narrator ironically affirms Cogewea’s feminist values and behaviors through the perspective of her unlikely supporter, a “crude, manly” (43) cowboy on the H-B ranch. The fact that Silent Bob understands and champions Cogewea’s “forward” ways seems to be a means by which Mourning Dove supports the feminist cause, implying that its advocates can win respect from even the most unexpected quarters. Indeed, though his initial attempt to refer to suffragists appears as though it might be critical, in his second comment Bob describes them impartially, as women who “go out an’ make speeches,” instead emphasizing the great deal of media attention toward them, particularly when they are harassed for their activities. Though the novel thus establishes a clear link between its Native American heroine and broad understandings of feminism in the Progressive Era, like Callahan’s novel, it shifts to focus on racial issues, downplaying the New Woman’s agenda in favor of a more urgent need for racial equality for Native Americans. The thematic move from the challenges Cogewea faces as a woman to those that she faces as an Indian woman occurs with the chapter “The ‘Ladies’ and the ‘Squaw’ Races.” Invoked in several analyses of the novel focusing on Cogewea’s position as a “half-blood,” this episode may also be seen as initiating the theme of the unique struggles she faces as a biracial woman—both from white society and from the particular white man who attempts to take advantage of her sexually and materially. When Cogewea appears in Native attire and pays her entrance fee for the “squaw” race at a Fourth of July celebration, the white judge, assuming she does not speak English, remarks to his friend, “‘Some swell looker for a Kootenai squaw, eh? Mighty good pickin’ for a young feller like you. . . . [T]he Missus would raise a hurry-Cain if she knowed that I rather like some of the squaws around here.’” As he and the other man continue to discuss her physical attractions, Cogewea turns away, “brooding over the constantly light spoken words of the ‘higher’ race regarding her people, of the constant insult offered the Indian women by the ‘gentleman’ whites” (65). The man who expresses this exploitative view is the same judge who then denies Cogewea her prize money for winning both the “ladies’” and the “squaws’” races, by having worn “white” clothing to compete in the first and Indian attire for the second. Together, the two insults that Cogewea faces here indicate how Indian women were uniquely vulnerable to both sexual and economic exploitation.

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The intertwining of these themes builds through the easterner Alfred Densmore’s plan to take advantage of Cogewea. Having come ostensibly to seek work on the ranch, his exploitative view emerges as he acknowledges his sexual attraction to her, reflecting that such women “are all right as objects of amusement and pleasure, but there it must halt. Fairly educated, she can show refinement when the mood strikes her, but she makes easy to fall into the rough, uncouth ways of her associates. . . . [S]he is no mate for a gentleman of the upper society. Had she strings to a good mine there would be an inducement, but a squaw without compensation . . . bah!” (81). Densmore’s interest in her moves beyond the sexual as he resolves to exploit her intimate knowledge of the landscape for material gain. After Cogewea mentions her father’s search for gold in the Yukon, Densmore reflects, “There must be wealth somewhere in this new country—mines of it among the Indians. . . . He had discovered that this romantic girl was a nature’s religionist. He would court her ideals, but it would be for a purpose. He would amass this fortune” (84). In the easterner’s acquisitive colonialist perspective, she, as an indigenous woman, is as subject to his exploitative instincts as the land itself. The text’s representation of Cogewea as the sexual prey of the false “city slicker” Densmore is magnified as Stemteemä warns the young woman repeatedly not to respond to his attentions. The older woman has sensed the easterner’s motives, and she cautions her granddaughter, “‘If his intentions were good, he would want to take you to the priest and marry you. All that the pale faces desire of Indian women, is pleasure and riches. When they get these, they marry back among their own race’” (103). Stemteemä’s warning resembles that of Winona’s adoptive older brother, Judah, to his sister in Pauline Hopkins’s novel Winona, similarly acknowledging the latter’s vulnerability as a black woman to the exploitations of white men. In both cases, these novels signify the need for a different kind of feminism than that which gained currency at the turn of the century. With its largely white, middle-class constituency and emphasis on suffrage, the dominant form of Progressive feminism did not address fully the needs of women of color, as reflected in these narratives—particularly their need to avoid both sexual and economic exploitation. Despite Stemteemä’s attempts to warn her of the dangers of marrying Densmore, Cogewea is convinced by the easterner to elope. In the climactic scene of the narrative, she withdraws a large sum of money from her account at Densmore’s request and meets him in a neighbor-

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ing settlement. When Densmore inquires further into her financial resources and learns that the tales of her thousands of cattle and horses were jests made by the ranch hands, he is enraged. He wrongly accuses her of having asked the cowboys to create such lies, and he takes the one thousand dollars she has withdrawn, answering her resistance with a brutal blow to the face. When Cogewea protests that she will have him arrested, he laughingly reminds her, “‘The law is of the white man’s make, interpreted by the white man, made to talk by the white man’s money. . . . It would be my word against yours; a white gentleman’s against an Injun squaw’s’” (264). Striking her in the face a second time, Densmore gags Cogewea, ties her to a tree, and leaves her in a deserted area, riding off with her money. Whereas on its simplest level, this scene reveals the villain’s true colors, it carries out the thematic equation of Cogewea’s physical and material vulnerability as an Indian woman. Though the text does not indicate that Densmore rapes Cogewea, his taking of her money and physical brutality, though important as literal acts, suggest metaphorically her sexual vulnerability to his desire to degrade and humiliate her. Indeed, in an earlier moment of rage at being turned out of Stemteemä’s tepee, he tells the old woman, “‘I will yet pluck your dear fledgling and return it to you so soiled that your own foul wing will refuse it shelter,’” metaphorically threatening Cogewea’s violation, and adding, “‘You have yet to learn that the master courts not the favor of his slaves!’” (249), alluding to the tragically real vulnerability of slaves to their masters in antebellum America. Densmore’s robbing and beating Cogewea may function in the manner that Hazel V. Carby has argued the whipping of Grace Montfort does in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces.41 Like the racist Anson Pollack’s brutality toward that woman of apparently mixed black and white blood, Densmore’s actions toward Cogewea suggest in displaced form the lesson she must learn about her mixed-blood unfitness for the same sexual code of honor by which white women are protected. Cogewea is rescued by the faithful Jim LaGrinder, whom she dissuades from pursuing Densmore, pointing out the likelihood of the latter’s acquittal in a legal system preferential to whites. Jim eventually gathers the courage to propose marriage to Cogewea a second time; having realized her love for him and, in an experience underscoring her

41. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 132.

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Indian identity, hearing a mystical affirmation voiced from a buffalo skull on the butte that is her favorite haunt, she accepts his proposal. Cogewea will remain in the West, free to work alongside the men on the ranch, to explore the mountains on her horse, to maintain her “forward” and self-reliant ways, and, perhaps most important, to accept both halves of her mixed origins. It is significant that, as Kathleen Donovan notes, Lucullus McWhorter wanted Mourning Dove to conclude the novel with Cogewea’s death, “befitting her status as a member of a ‘dying’ race,” but she held her ground, offering instead a vision of her heroine’s survival and fulfillment.42 Ironically, their disagreement recapitulates the essence of Cogewea’s objection to The Brand, and Mourning Dove herself enacts a counternarrative to that overdetermined, tragic script through her chosen conclusion. Furthermore, in another passage at the end of the novel, an impoverished Alfred Densmore reads in a newspaper of Cogewea inheriting a great sum of money from her long-lost father. This detail nicely punishes the villain of the novel. However, as Pauline Hopkins also used the plot device of surprise wealth at the close of her novel Contending Forces, this revelation presents an image of economic power in the hands of a marginalized American that is both inspiring and, for white readers, perhaps also discomfiting. Cogewea’s decision to marry Jim and stay in the rural West is also a choice to turn away from the predominantly white, middle-class, and urban feminism of the turn of the century, which has not been of particular advantage to her. Her linkage with suffragists or her talk of seeking fulfilling work beyond the domestic sphere has not prevented her, as an Indian woman, from exploitation by a manipulative white man. Cogewea’s future life will still embody the ideals of physical independence and participation in public life that defined the New Woman, but her concluding choice suggests a self-knowledge and a self-acceptance that are more fundamental than outward appurtenances of feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. Although Mourning Dove’s means of portraying the urgency of greater Native American rights in this novel is less dramatic than Callahan’s use of the Wounded Knee tragedy in Wynema, her text has similarly demonstrated that, for Native American women in that era, the iconic New Woman’s priorities were insufficient.

42. Donovan, “Owning Mourning Dove,” 117.

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Other similarities between these novels illuminate how their authors attempted both to connect with their audiences through familiar formulas and to advocate for women’s rights and, even more urgently, for Native American rights in the Progressive Era. In both texts, an older female character repeats the problematic rhetoric of the vanishing Indian, but with mixed effect, initially appearing to affirm the cliché yet providing evidence to the contrary. Like Chikena in Callahan’s novel, Stemteemä, as Carol Batker has noted, also voices this discourse.43 As she begins one of the tribal stories that she tells Cogewea in the effort to warn her not to marry Densmore, she recalls that her race “‘has died from the pestilences [the white man] brought. Even the buffalo are no more; gone to the shadowy Hunting Grounds of the hereafter, with the warriors of old’” (123). She similarly uses such rhetoric in regard to herself, telling her granddaughters, “‘My grandchildren! I am now old and cannot stay with you many more snows. The story I am telling is true and I want you to keep it after I am gone’” (165). However, Mourning Dove’s invocation of this rhetoric is even more ambivalent than Callahan’s, for Stemteemä, despite her age, is a powerful female figure, wise and accurate in her predictions about Densmore, and profoundly in touch with the powers of nature—indeed, perhaps, a nonwhite vision of female empowerment of the same kind that Sui Sin Far offers with the trickster figure Fin Fan in her story “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit” (1912). Also, both Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s novels invoke temperance discourse in order to situate their Indian heroines within familiar forms of turn-of-the-century women’s activism. Cogewea criticizes the “‘rum-fogged ideals’” of the racist white judge at the horse races (70), laments her people’s ruin by an “‘alien, rum-flavored civilization’” (98), and questions the smoking of cigarettes, which are “‘coffinnails . . . of the white man’s inception, along with his multitudinous diseased adjuncts of civilization: whiskey, beer, wine and opium’” (121). As with Callahan’s Indian heroine, these comments clearly link Cogewea with Progressive discourses of women’s activism that by the early twentieth century were widely accepted in the American mainstream. They are likely included with similar dual intentions of claiming ground for this heroine of color in the popular space of white, middle-class women’s activism, and at the same time depicting that character’s feminism as palatably as possible to a white readership.

43. Batker, Reforming Fictions, 45.

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Perhaps most interestingly, the villain in each of these novels is an antagonist to both women’s rights and Indian rights. In Cogewea, Densmore admits that he also does not think it right for women to remain “bachelor-girls” (102), and he is in favor of Indian assimilation and the opening of reservations to white settlement: “The day has come when the Indian must desist from his wild, savage life. The Government is working hard for his betterment, and he should respond with a willingness to advance by adjusting himself to the new order of things’” (143). He thus echoes Genevieve’s antisuffrage suitor in Wynema, who also praised allotment and assimilation as the only means of getting the Indian to give up his “uncivilized” ways. Though both novels explore the differing challenges faced by women and by Native Americans in this era (and ultimately imply greater immediacy of the Indian Question), by locating antifeminist views and racist, colonialist attitudes in analogous villains, they suggest that women and Native Americans share the work of challenging those in power in a white patriarchal hegemony. Wynema: A Child of the Forest and Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range stand as testaments to the challenges that Native American women authors faced in writing about both women’s and Indians’ experiences at the turn of the century. Both texts, lost for decades after their initial publications, were considered unworthy of inclusion in the Native American canon for their aesthetic unevenness and, even recently, still face critical dismissal for that and other reasons. But that very quality calls attention to the competing tasks their authors were attempting to fulfill. Many works that were traditionally denied canonical status for perceived aesthetic weaknesses may be seen, upon closer examination, to perform significant cultural work, educating audiences about important topical debates of the era in which they were written. In these two novels, the parallel ways in which women’s rights discourses are introduced yet superseded by discussions of Native American rights illuminate these authors’ recognition of how the New Woman’s priorities, though commendable, were ultimately less important than racial empowerment for Native American women in the Progressive Era.

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From Race Women to an Erased Woman Pauline Hopkins’s Nonfiction Polemic and Novelistic Ambivalence

Pauline Hopkins, like S. Alice Callahan and Mourning Dove, faced considerable obstacles to write about both race questions and women’s rights at the turn of the twentieth century. However, as an African American woman, her position was distinct. The Native American women faced the pervasive rhetoric of a “vanishing breed” applied to their race—a construction of Indians that served well the blossoming discipline of ethnography—at the same time as confronting widespread views of their people as needing to be separated from the general American populace on reservations. However, African Americans in the Progressive Era instead contended with white views of their race that acknowledged they were not going anywhere yet saw them as an intrinsically inferior race, and wondered what to do with them. The environment in which Hopkins labored to make her voice heard is illuminated in an essay published by her contemporary Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the American Journal of Sociology in 1908, “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem.” Starting from the premise that white Americans owe it to their black countrymen to “promote the development of a backward race so that it may become an advantageous element in the community,” Gilman argues for the

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creation of a black industrial army of “the whole body of negroes who do not progress, who are not self-supporting, who are degenerating into an increasing percentage of social burdens or actual criminals.” Assuring her readers that “this proposed organization is not enslavement, but enlistment,” Gilman outlines a system of largely agricultural and manufacturing work, with a “training-school for domestic service . . . part of each stationary base.” In its hope of making “the whole race rise in social evolution,” Gilman’s proposal, with its paradigmatic Progressive rhetoric, demonstrates the irony of her eloquent arguments elsewhere for the advancement of women alongside a scheme that would keep black Americans in a position of second-class status.1 Though Hopkins would agree with the advocacy of women’s economic and professional independence for which Gilman was best known, she would likely find this proposal disturbingly akin to the system of industrial education for which turn-of-the-century race leader Booker T. Washington stood, and the racial politics underlying it, with which Hopkins strongly—and fatefully—disagreed. Such statements by Gilman, a New Woman par excellence, indicate the blind spots in the feminist movement of their day with which Hopkins contended. Hopkins’s writing, even while relying at times on stereotypes and conventions that might seem unsuited to her activist purposes, uniquely illuminated the gap between the Progressive New Woman’s rhetoric and the realities of black women’s experience in turn-of-the-century America. Indeed, outside of the fiction for which she is best known, Hopkins clearly and repeatedly expressed a critique of the largely white women’s club movement as well as championing an alternative racially specific feminine ideal, that of the New Negro Woman. In “Higher Education of Colored Women in White Schools and Colleges,” published in Colored American Magazine in October 1902, she asserted, “It seems almost as if the inspiration of the times had created 1. Gilman, “Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” 178, 179, 183. As an indication of the growing nativism in Gilman’s later work, Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams observes that she proposed an analogous mechanism for immigrants in her 1914 article, “Immigration, Importation, and Our Fathers”: a compulsory National Training School of Citizenship that would produce assimilated workers. GanobcsikWilliams notes, “Immigrants [would] have no input into the programme; instead, it [was] to be managed by social scientific experts” (“Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Forerunner: A New Woman’s Changing Perspective on American Immigration,” 50).

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a new race of colored women, a new tide had set in, new forces called into play, a new era in the world’s history and through all this the moral and social regeneration of a race. The command of God to the woman of color is: ‘Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.’ So, let us press forward in faith believing.”2 In this essay, part of her Famous Women of the Negro Race series for that magazine, her vision of a “new race of colored women” draws on Margaret Murray Washington’s concept coined in 1895 of the New Negro Woman,3 and suggests Hopkins’s strong belief in black women’s participation in public life, particularly in race activism, as well as their access to professional and educational opportunities. This essay series also criticizes the white club movement’s denying access to black women, showing Hopkins’s awareness of ironies in the larger women’s movement. A theme emerges that recurs, in muted form, in Hopkins’s fiction: an advocacy for women’s access to professional opportunity and public life that echoed the general Progressive women’s movement, at the same time as a racially conscious assertion of the need for black women’s empowerment. In particular, Hopkins argues that women of her race must have opportunities to overcome the stereotype of moral laxity that is their burden and demonstrate their strengths as Christian women, as well as proving their talents through professional achievement. However, whereas Hopkins’s first novel, Contending Forces, anticipates the optimism of these essays, her subsequent novels present a more mixed picture of their heroines’ ability to achieve such ideals. By her final novel, Of One Blood, the heroine, initially presented as a highly educated, professionally successful, and artistically talented woman, is ultimately reduced to a cipher, and the only optimistic alternative that Hopkins offers is a secret civilization in, tellingly, Africa. Hopkins’s own difficulties during this time, being forced to leave Colored American Magazine over her differences with Booker T. Washington’s politics, may have informed the increasing cynicism in her novels about African American women’s ability to lead empowered lives. However, the bleak trajectory of Hopkins’s novelistic depictions of such women in the Progressive Era may also reflect a disillusion with dominant ideologies that inflected the iconic New Woman’s ideals, making them problematic or even irrelevant for black women. 2. Hopkins, “Higher Education of Colored Women,” 195. 3. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 58.

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The details of Hopkins’s life underscore the tensions between her commitment to women’s progress and her specific advocacy of black women’s race activism. Born in Maine in 1859, Hopkins lived in Massachusetts throughout most of her life. Educated in the Boston public schools, she developed an early talent for writing, winning an essay contest at fifteen and composing a play about the Underground Railroad that was performed in 1880 by a theater group to which she belonged. Her interest in public performance and speaking continued with employment in the 1890s as a lecturer on black history in the Boston area. While working as a stenographer, she began writing fiction, publishing her first story in the newly formed Colored American Magazine in 1900. The same black-owned publishing house that issued this periodical brought out Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South in 1900, and she serialized three other novels—Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (1901), Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1903)—in the magazine, as well as publishing several stories and dozens of essays therein, occasionally under two pseudonyms, Sarah A. Allen and J. Shirley Shadrach. She was also literary editor at Colored American Magazine from mid-1903 until mid1904, when the magazine was bought by businessman Fred R. Moore, who was supported by Booker T. Washington. Hopkins’s politics as reflected in her editorial work were not considered “conciliatory enough,” according to W. E. B. Du Bois, and she departed the magazine, publishing several essays in 1905 in a more radical forum, The Voice of the Negro.4 Hopkins also formed her own publishing company that year to issue a book she had written about African history. Several years later, in 1916, she and a partner founded a magazine titled the New Era, but it ran for only two issues, and her writing faded from the public eye as well. She worked as a stenographer for the remainder of her life, dying after an accident in which she was severely burned in 1930.5 The difficulties she endured to make a living through writing, 4. Du Bois quoted in Richard Yarborough, introduction to Contending Forces, xliii. 5. All biographical information comes from Hanna Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Other biographical sources include Jane Campbell, “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins”; Ira Dworkin, introduction to Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins; Nellie Y. McKay, introduction to The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins; and Yarborough, introduction to Contending Forces.

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experiencing prejudice as a female and an African American, informed Hopkins’s overwhelming concern with the status of black women. Moreover, her challenges are echoed in the lives of other authors in this study, particularly Sui Sin Far, who also supported herself through stenography.6 The irony of both authors resorting out of economic necessity to transcribing others’ words, rather than expressing their own, is an apt indication of the realities with which they contended. Hopkins’s Famous Women of the Negro Race essays in Colored American Magazine from November 1901 through October 1902 provide an important context for her novels and give a more direct indication of her views on black women’s roles in her era than does her fiction, which often filters such discussion through the concerns of the domestic novel, including courtship, marriage, and motherhood.7 In the essay series, Hopkins significantly uses this forum to discuss not only the famous figures that her title implies but also general issues of the day affecting African American women, including prejudice within the women’s movement. Like her fiction, which contains passages in which Hopkins’s polemical voice directly addresses the reader, her essays, ostensibly biographical sketches about such topics as “educators” or “club life among colored women,” segue into editorials about female suffrage, the policies of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, or resistance to women’s intellectual achievement. While fulfilling the objective of providing inspiring reading about respectable black women to the elite audience of Colored American Magazine, a feminist voice also emerges in these essays that, despite its commitment to women’s progress in general, specifically asserts the need for black women in turn-of-the-century America to attain equality, and thereby calls attention to the iconic New Woman’s blindness to the contingencies of race and class on her priorities. “Some Literary Workers,” published in March 1902, demonstrates how Hopkins fulfills her dual writing intentions with a blend of biography and polemic. Although the article contains sketches of poets 6. Stenography was also a discipline in which Hopkins’s contemporary Charles W. Chesnutt worked and to which he returned after his successful years as a writer (including owning his own stenography business), suggesting its appeal as respectable work for ethnic minorities in this era. 7. For discussion of how Hopkins’s novels rely on conventional discourses of domesticity in order to convey political messages about the advancement of African Americans, see Tate, Domestic Allegories, esp. chaps. 6–7.

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Phillis Wheatley and Gertrude Grimké, as well as of the less literary and more activist figure of Hopkins’s contemporary Ida B. Wells (or Wells-Barnett), it is largely devoted to editorializing about the need for women to take a voice in public affairs, particularly in fighting the oppression of African Americans. Hopkins criticizes those who argue that the race question should not be raised in club or society meetings, asserting that this question is far from resolved. She notes the longstanding prejudice against women speaking and writing about political oppression, but argues that it is in fact the Negro woman’s duty to be educated on political issues, to help “broaden and deepen” the people of her race, to teach them Christian morality, and to “study and discuss all phases of the race question.”8 Hopkins thus speaks to conventional patriarchal resistance to women’s involvement in politics, and to the particular need of black women to play a central part in race activism. Interestingly, such advocacy of black women’s involvement in political discourse is not fully borne out in her best-known work, Contending Forces. In that novel, at a meeting of the American Colored League called to discuss a recent lynching, the debate is carried on exclusively by men, and the tragic history of the novel’s heroine, Sappho Clark, is revealed to the assemblage not by herself but by a man. The women characters discuss politics only among themselves under the protective coloration of domesticity, in the “Sewing Circle.” This is one instance of the way in which Hopkins’s fiction was often more conservative in its depictions of black women’s activism in comparison with her Famous Women essay series, suggesting the author’s need to accommodate the bourgeois tastes of her fiction-reading audiences at the time. Hopkins’s essay of July 1902, the final portion of a three-part series titled “Educators,” again demonstrates her ability to achieve dual purposes in combining sketches of actual educators with an opinionated account of the barring of the black Woman’s Era Club from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ convention in 1902. Her column begins with biographies of educators Dr. Edwin Howard, Adeline Turpin Howard, and Joan Imogen Howard, the accomplished siblings of a prominent Boston family. After listing honors bestowed upon the sisters, Hopkins observes, “Apropos of the fact that numbers of famous Negro women have been signally honored by white institutions of

8. Hopkins, “Some Literary Workers,” 142.

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renown in various communities, it is profitable to pause a moment and consider the position taken by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in its recent convention at Los Angeles.” Warming to her topic, Hopkins recounts the difficulties that the Boston-based Woman’s Era Club has faced in being accepted into the federation since 1900, and states that the club’s recent rebuff in Los Angeles represents a crowning success to the efforts of “Southern women and their Northern sympathizers” wishing to “keep out the colored sisters.” She concludes with a tart observation: “The power of organization among women is a sociological study. Women were narrow mentally; it is supposed that they have been broadened by their educational opportunities and their growing influence which has, hitherto, commanded the respect of the world. We had hoped that as a race, we should receive the fair treatment, the sympathy, the loyalty that their reputation guaranteed, but the Biennial at Los Angeles has given us a rude awakening.”9 Hopkins acknowledges the club movement’s benefits in fostering women’s intellectual growth and their increasing social influence. However, she asserts that the enlightenment of white women has not included an awareness of the need for the same opportunities among black women. That enlightenment is worth very little after all, if it comes as such a price. This dual stance also informs Hopkins’s response to the woman suffrage question, which she next confronts in this essay. Her statement interestingly employs the first-person plural pronoun, as if to extend her views to all black women: “We have felt and argued always against unrestricted and universal suffrage, feeling that mentally woman is as narrow to-day as ever, that behind windy, grandiloquent speeches of belief in the equality of the human species, dwelt a spirit of perverseness that might at any moment break forth to our undoing.” For Hopkins, supporting the vote for women is meaningless, and indeed dangerous, if white women use that newfound power to enforce oppression of the black race. Although, as Vashti Crutcher Lewis has concluded, Hopkins apparently believed that the franchise for women should be restricted to “questions of property rights, a wife’s personal rights, the rights of her children, and public schooling,” it is important to note how Hopkins clarifies her opinion. She cites the words of Frances Harper in a speech to the Women’s Congress of 1892:

9. Hopkins, “Educators (Concluded),” 174, 175.

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I do not believe in unrestricted and universal suffrage for either men or women. . . . I do not believe that the most ignorant and brutal man is better prepared to add value to the strength and durability of the government than the most cultured and upright woman. . . . The ballot in the hands of woman means power added to influence. How well she will use that power I cannot foretell. Great evils stare us in the face that need to be throttled by the combined power of an upright manhood and an enlightened womanhood.10

Harper’s words suggest that it is the best kind of men and women who should use the vote responsibly to improve the conditions of American society. Although Harper’s quoted speech makes clear that she “[believes] in moral and educational tests” to bestow voting rights on men and women of both races, she does not indicate whether she also advocates such a selective mechanism. All the same, Hopkins’s invocation of these words suggests that her position on suffrage is similar; aware of its potential for ill use toward African Americans, Hopkins wishes to see the vote used by responsible, enlightened individuals of both genders. In an essay ostensibly devoted to providing biographies of educators, Hopkins has taken on a range of essential issues for black women, presenting a critical view of prejudice within the women’s club movement, and showing the complexities of the suffrage question for black women. Hopkins’s interest in black women’s participation in collective action is the focus of the following month’s essay, “Club Life among Colored Women,” published in August 1902. This essay describes the history of the women’s club movement in the United States, including the forming the Woman’s Era Club of Boston by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (though Hopkins incorrectly gives its inaugural year as 1873 rather than 1894). Hopkins then turns to the same controversy at the GFWC’s biennial meeting discussed in the previous month’s essay, recounting the statements of various representatives at the convention and the eventual decision to pass an amendment that would bar the Woman’s Era Club from participation. This extensive editorial treatment of what Hopkins significantly calls the “high-water mark of the race battle in women’s clubs” asserts even more strongly than her pre-

10. Ibid., 177; Lewis, “Worldview and the Use of the Near-White Heroine in Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces,” 624; Harper quoted in Hopkins, “Educators (Concluded),” 177.

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vious commentary the opinion that northern representatives at the convention capitulated to southern women’s racism in passing the amendment. However, Hopkins, in a statement reflecting her typical sectionalism, optimistically concludes that such weakness cannot continue: “All this is but renewing the old conflict. Thrice before in the history of our country the ‘spaniel’ North has grovelled before the South, but thank God, the time came when the old New England spirit of Puritanism arose and shook its mane and flung off the shackles of conservatism. So it will be this time.” Hopkins also theorizes the basis for white southern women’s continued prejudice against their black peers—the legacy of sexual exploitation of black women involving white women’s husbands and sons: Granted that the conditions are hard for a certain class of Southern white women; but the results of profligacy are the same in any case no matter whether white or black are the partners. . . . [I]f this thing be true, and pity ‘tis true, it is but the result of conditions forced upon a helpless people, and not their choice. . . . Meanwhile, tears and sorrow and heart-burning are the Southern white woman’s portion and like Sarah of old, she wreaks her vengeance on helpless Hagar. Club life has but rendered her disposition more intolerable toward the victims of her husband’s and son’s evil passions.11

Hopkins’s candid analysis of southern white club women’s racism further qualifies her general support of the club movement. As with her position on the vote for women, she recognizes that such opportunities are not unconditional goods; the club movement does not represent a true step forward for women if they carry with them the prejudices of a painful past. Indeed, Hopkins implies, the club movement may actually worsen race relations between black and white women unless such prejudices are challenged directly. Hopkins’s final essay in her Famous Women series, “Higher Education of Colored Women in White Schools and Colleges,” published in October 1902, is perhaps her strongest articulation of the need for educational and professional opportunities for black women, framed within an assertion of the general intellectual progress of women. Opening her essay with a list of historical barriers to African American women’s intellectual development, she invokes again the recent 11. Hopkins, “Club Life,” 179, 183, 184.

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decision of the GFWC: “We have seen, too, that the Anglo-Saxon woman, in convention assembled, has sought to place the indelible stamp of hopeless intellectual inferiority upon the Negro race.” That Hopkins was angered enough by that event to mention it three times in this essay series suggests her preoccupation with this paradox of Progressive Era feminism. In keeping with her characteristic embrace of Christian principles, Hopkins also critiques the GFWC’s course of action as un-Christian, and she notes that “in denying the intellectual capacity of the Negro woman, our fair-skinned sisters have forgotten that they themselves have but just gained intellectual equality in the great world of endeavor.” Hopkins’s appeal to her readers through Christian rhetoric, which recurs in her fiction and recalls S. Alice Callahan’s use of such discourse in Wynema, continues in her following historical outline of women’s intellectual achievement. Noting women’s suffering in slavelike conditions in ancient Roman and Judaic cultures, she asserts, “The advent of Christianity exerted a favorable influence on the condition of women throughout all countries. . . . From that time until now we date her elevation.”12 Enumerating examples of women’s intellectual and political leadership in ensuing centuries, Hopkins optimistically concludes that the nineteenth century has “[witnessed] the higher and much fuller development of the female intellect”: “This century gave the world Queen Victoria who may be considered the leading figure in the advancement of all womanly excellence. In literature woman has achieved a high position. In science a few great names demonstrate the capacity for the sex for high attainments in astronomy, mathematics, political economy, psychology and moral philosophy. . . . [I]n the Crimean War, the Civil War and the war in Germany, the remarkable executive ability of woman was fully demonstrated on the battlefield and in hospitals.”13 Hopkins’s list of nineteenth-century female achievements is formidably wide-ranging. Significantly, she venerates Queen Victoria, whose regime signified the triumphant imperial conquest of many lands of the “darker races” of the globe. Hopkins elsewhere takes up debates over imperialism—for example, in her story “Talma Gordon” (published in Colored American Magazine in October 1900)—to imply the ethnocentrism of white colonialists, whereas both her fiction and nonfiction celebrate the achievements of African cultures as fundamental 12. Hopkins, “Higher Education of Colored Women,” 193, 194. 13. Ibid., 194.

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seats of civilization rather than ignorant peoples ripe for the conquering. However, her praise for Victoria may arise from the desire to provide a well-known example of female leadership whose regime, despite colonialist associations, connoted social stability, philanthropic reform, and scientific advancement—bourgeois values to which uplift-oriented African Americans at the turn of the century subscribed. Hopkins’s discussion then turns to black women, noting that recent debate over their position constitutes two points: “First, the question as to the right of the woman of color to live in the world on the same terms as a white woman does . . . and, second, the question as to the colored woman’s competency so to do.” As for the first question, Hopkins asserts, “That we have the right is a self-evident truth,” citing John Stuart Mill’s argument from The Subjection of Women (1869) that “the a priori presumption is in favor of freedom and impartiality,” significantly invoking the authority of one of the Victorian age’s most revered thinkers to illuminate her situation as a black woman. The second question, that of the black woman’s competency, Hopkins believes, “must be settled by the law of natural selection and the application of the same practical tests that settle this question for the AngloSaxon woman.”14 In so believing, Hopkins echoes her view on female suffrage: may the best women, black or white, enjoy the fruits of their achievements. Hopkins’s assumption here of the right of black women to the same employment options, pay, and opportunities for intellectual and social advancement as white women is the most overt articulation of her race feminism in her oeuvre, and it is partly carried out in her fiction. The ideal of social elevation is asserted when Sappho Clark of Contending Forces overcomes her “fallen” past to marry Will Smith, a black man who has recently been awarded a massive inheritance and has discovered ties to British aristocracy. Moreover, the end of Hopkins’s second novel implies that the newly gentrified heroine Winona will marry the lawyer Warren Maxwell, although the fact that both of these women are headed to Europe at the novels’ conclusions (temporarily in Sappho’s case, permanently in Winona’s) suggests Hopkins’s cynicism about America’s ability to accommodate her egalitarian vision. Also, Hopkins’s critique of the prejudice Sappho encounters in her work as a stenographer in Contending Forces bears out her point that 14. Ibid., 195.

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black women deserve the same professional opportunities as white women. However, Hopkins’s novels, often portraying black women in the domestic contexts of marriage and motherhood, thereby make their feminist claims in more subtle ways. Moreover, her fiction does not depict interactions between black and white women to dramatize the former’s need for equal opportunity asserted here. Rather, her fiction tends to focus on relationships between women within the black community (as in Contending Forces and her 1901 story “Bro’r Abr’m Jimson’s Wedding”), on interactions between black women and black men, or on interactions between black women knowingly or unknowingly passing for white and white men (as in Hagar’s Daughter, Of One Blood, Winona, and “Talma Gordon”). Hopkins’s Famous Women of the Negro Race essays, then, clarify her feminist positioning, showing Hopkins to be more overtly committed to black women’s empowerment in the Progressive Era than her fiction sometimes suggests. In particular, her repeated critiques of the white club movement with which the New Woman was strongly associated illustrate Hopkins’s point that feminism must exist without qualifications, through her simultaneous optimism for women’s intellectual growth and her cynicism over the prejudice persisting in that movement. Hopkins might have profitably drawn on the event that so captured her attention in 1902, the barring of the Woman’s Era Club from the GFWC convention, to write a story treating black women’s need for the same avenues of empowerment as white women, but the realities of that event may have been too disheartening. Though Hopkins’s fiction sometimes offers visions of a more equitable society, in this case, it may have been too difficult to imagine a happier ending. Turning to Hopkins’s long fiction, we can see how the simultaneous praise and critique of Progressive feminism voiced in her nonfiction appear in muted form, likely through the desire both to create appealing heroines for her bourgeois black reading audience and to dramatize the need for empowerment for her whole race. Contending Forces is most relevant to considering Hopkins in relation to the ideal of the New Woman, as it features female characters of that era who support themselves financially, engage in political discussion, and are involved with the black women’s club movement. It is arguably also the most hopeful of her novelistic treatments of black women’s experience, allowing its heroine to triumph over great odds. Hopkins’s subsequent three novels are less concerned with portraying their heroines as independent or progressive women than with situating them as the ingenues of romance

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plots, whereas Winona and Of One Blood largely rely on temporal or geographic settings removed from 1890s America, making them less relevant to historicizing within the moment of turn-of-the-century American feminism. Nonetheless, by critiquing American racism and showing how black women are most victimized by it, the later novels question the optimistic cultural moment of the New Woman. Contending Forces shares themes with contemporary Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) in their mutual critiques of the sexual exploitation of black women. However, whereas Harper’s novel is set during the Civil War and Reconstruction years, the majority of Contending Forces is set in the New Woman’s milieu of the 1890s, and its two leading female characters, Sappho and Dora, are presented sympathetically as independent, politically aware women of that era. Nonetheless, the feminist discourses of this novel are bound up in articulations of the experience of African American women, and, as in S. Alice Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s novels, such discourses are soon subordinated to dialogues about racism and the need for racial empowerment, suggesting that the ideals of the mainstream women’s movement, though important, did not address the specific concerns of women of color. Indeed, to argue that texts concerning African American women’s experience at the turn of the century complicate or transcend the concerns of the New Woman is perhaps even more to the point than for texts about Native American women’s experiences. Because of the distinctly pejorative way African American women were inscribed by the dominant culture as a result of their sexual victimization in slavery, it was difficult for them to participate in New Womanhood in the first place, as that phenomenon constituted less a radical rupture than an outgrowth from True Womanhood in the American imagination.15 However, Hopkins’s racially conscious engagement with widespread understandings of turn-of-thecentury feminism in Contending Forces also serves to throw into relief her unorthodox feminist heroine, Sappho Clark, and thereby suggests a model of feminism that transcends the stereotypical trappings of the New Woman. Hopkins’s own challenges as a black woman to earn a living at the turn of the twentieth century are relevant to the two major female characters of Contending Forces, who are similarly making their livings 15. Kate McCullough, “Slavery, Sexuality, and Genre: Pauline Hopkins and the Representation of Female Desire,” 22.

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through the limited avenues available to black women at that time. However, Hopkins begins the novel with a prehistory concerning the ancestors of these characters that allows her to criticize more generally the oppression of women within slavery and white supremacy. Moreover, the resemblance of events in this prehistory to the heroine’s experiences of the 1890s plot allows Hopkins to show that, far from being limited to the slavery era, white men’s exploitation of black women was a continuing injustice that urgently needed action. The opening of the novel concerns a Bermuda planter, Charles Montfort, who has emigrated to North Carolina, hoping to avoid the financial losses of emancipating his slaves as mandated by a new imperial law. Reestablishing his plantation with an intention to free his slaves in five years, he encounters suspicion from the community both for his emancipationist plans and for his beautiful wife, Grace, who is suspected to have African blood. One man, Anson Pollock, is sexually attracted to her and, when she spurns his advances, vows to possess her at all costs. After Charles Montfort insults a man connected with the insidious local “committee on public safety,” a posse arrives at the plantation, Montfort is shot to death, and Grace is bound and whipped by two of the men in a scene that, as Hazel Carby argues, represents in displaced form a sexual assault.16 Grace becomes sexual chattel to Anson Pollock and drowns herself shortly after; the fates of her two sons, one taken in by an Englishman, the other left to grow up a slave and escape to freedom, link to the main action of the novel, which is set in 1896. The second plot concerns a middle-class African American family in Boston, the Smiths, who are descended from the younger Montfort son, Jesse. A widow, Mrs. Smith rents rooms in their house for extra income, and her daughter, Dora, has recently taken over the boardinghouse enterprise. Dora befriends a new boarder, a beautiful woman named Sappho Clark who works as a stenographer. Hopkins quickly establishes Dora and Sappho as progressive black women of their day, interested in issues beyond home and hearth, and thereby provides readers with fictional models of enlightened black womanhood, just as her many profiles of real women in the pages of Colored American Magazine function. Several details in an early conversation between Dora and Sappho contribute to this effect. For example, when speaking of

16. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 132.

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her engagement to John Langley, Dora, like many heroines in New Woman–themed novels, confides her misgivings about marriage: “‘I dread to think of being tied to John for good and all.’”17 Also, the two women discuss politics, debating Dora’s friend Arthur Lewis’s Booker T. Washington–esque agenda that urges economic opportunity for blacks rather than political equality. Sappho, having lived in the South, disagrees with Dr. Lewis’s views, asserting that “‘if our men are deprived of the franchise, we become aliens in the very land of our birth’” (125). When Dora observes that “‘Arthur thinks that women should be seen and not heard, when politics is under discussion,’” Sappho spiritedly declares him an “‘insufferable prig!’” (126). The friends also discuss the difficulties that educated black women encounter in seeking employment, such as Sappho’s stenography work. She lists the various deterrents she has faced, from unwanted sexual advances to being fired when it was discovered that she was black, which historian Paula Giddings has confirmed and Hopkins herself likely encountered in this profession. By their interest in such issues, Sappho and Dora show themselves to be politically aware, the type of “race women” who formed black clubs nationwide at the turn of the twentieth century. And indeed, despite their formation for reasons unique to the needs of black women, these organizations often voiced sentiments germane to the hegemonic figure of the New Woman. For example, the Woman’s Era, the periodical issued by the Boston club of that name, in 1894 proclaimed that “not all women are intended for mothers. Some of us have not the temperament for family life. . . . Clubs will make women think seriously of their future lives, and not make girls think their only alternative is to marry.”18 Such clubs become the focus of Hopkins’s novel in a chapter titled “The Sewing Circle,” which describes such an organization in both complimentary and problematic terms. The Sewing Circle, whose stated purpose is to sew items for a church fund-raiser, is also a forum for political discussion “of events of interest to the Negro race which had transpired during the week throughout the country” (143). The club is run by Mrs. Willis, whom Hanna Wallinger notes may be modeled on Woman’s Era Club leader Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin.19 The 17. Hopkins, Contending Forces, 122. Future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text. 18. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 77–78, 108 (quote). 19. Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins, 106.

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widow of an uplift-oriented politician who, despite her scanty formal education, is knowledgeable on many subjects, Mrs. Willis is shrewd in business affairs and “keen in her analysis of human nature” (144). She is also interested in women’s rights, but not for the noblest of reasons; she believes that being a speaker and activist on this issue will most effectively allow her to make a living: “The best opening, she decided . . . was in the great cause of the evolution of true womanhood in the work of the ‘Woman Question’ as embodied in marriage and suffrage” (146). Despite her commendable desire to focus on black women’s concerns in the context of women’s rights, Mrs. Willis’s motivations are more pecuniary than political: “The advancement of the colored woman should be the new problem in the woman question that should float her upon its tide into the prosperity she desired” (146–47). The narrator concedes that although “her plans . . . were conceived in selfishness, they yet bore glorious fruit in the formation of clubs of colored women banded together for charity, for study, for every reason under God’s glorious heavens that can better the condition of mankind” (147). Clearly, the narrator approves of the outcome—increasing numbers of black women organizing for their own and others’ benefit—even if Mrs. Willis’s reasons for establishing such a club are selfish ones. The title of Mrs. Willis’s lecture that evening, “The place which the virtuous woman occupies in upbuilding a race” (148), implies her interest in claiming space for black women within Progressive definitions of womanhood at the turn of the century. Her argument that her peers must reclaim the womanly virtue denied them by the institution of slavery echoes those of activists such as Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, epitomized in Cooper’s 1892 statement that “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole . . . race enters with me.’” The pervasive rhetoric on which Mrs. Willis relies is also illustrated by the title of a speech that Mary Church Terrell gave in 1902: “What Role Is the Educated Negro Woman to Play in the Uplifting of Her Race?”20 Mrs. Willis further asserts that “womanly” virtue is intrinsic to black women, informing her audience, “‘Travelers tell us that the native African woman is impregnable in her

20. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 13, 367n13.

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virtue. . . . [Such virtue was] pushed aside by the force of circumstances. . . . [It is] a racial characteristic which is slumbering but not lost’” (149).21 In doing so, Mrs. Willis upholds Hopkins’s larger agenda of celebrating their race’s African origins at the same time that she claims for black women the virtue essential to rendering nineteenthcentury women worthy of respect. However, Hopkins complicates her picture of this black women’s club leader. After listening to Mrs. Willis, Sappho feels drawn to share her own history, but at the last minute she is overcome by a sense of the woman’s falseness: “Just as the barriers of Sappho’s reserve seemed about to be swept away, there followed, almost instantly, a wave of repulsion toward this woman and her effusiveness, so forced and insincere” (155). Hopkins implies that, although this woman represents publicly sanctioned leadership in the black women’s movement, she does not truly care about the cases of individual black women who have suffered the effects of white supremacy and patriarchy. This is a curious gesture in a text that otherwise praises and fosters support for the work of racial uplift and equality for black women. However, through its portrait of Mrs. Willis, Hopkins’s text suggests that the organized feminism of black women at the turn of the century was not an intrinsic, unqualified good; it could be as vulnerable to exploitation by individuals seeking their own private gain as was the white women’s movement. In this sense, the novel shares with two texts by white contemporaries of Hopkins a critique of the dynamics of powerful, socially secure women over their more vulnerable or socially marginal peers. In Henry James’s Bostonians (1886), the calculating suffrage activist Olive Chancellor manipulates the innocent Verena Tarrant for her own ends. In Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), the pregnant adolescent Charity Royall seeks the help of a female doctor who performs abortions, and though one might expect Dr. Merkle to positively reflect women’s progress through her profession, Dr. Merkle is false and exploitative. In these texts, James, Wharton, and Hopkins complicate the picture of feminism in this era, suggesting that those in positions of leadership or prestige do not always advocate or represent what is best for their peers—a 21. Hopkins similarly asserts the innate virtue and morality of young African women in her essay “Mrs. Jane E. Sharp’s School for African Girls,” published under the pseudonym J. Shirley Shadrach in Colored American Magazine in March 1904.

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point Hopkins also makes in her journalistic criticism of the white women’s movement. This theme is also explored by Sui Sin Far and Anzia Yezierska, dramatizing the well-intentioned but often destructive efforts of philanthropic white women in Chinese American and Jewish American immigrant communities. In Hopkins’s novel, ensuing scenes suggest that Sappho’s act of survival in the face of great obstacles constitutes a more authentic, tangible kind of feminism than Mrs. Willis’s manipulation of committees and giving of speeches. The way in which Hopkins’s depiction of Mrs. Willis problematizes widespread understandings of turn-of-the-century feminism is supplemented by her portrait of another character who appropriates popular trappings of turn-of-the-century New Womanhood with a comically undermining effect. Ophelia Davis, a cook desirous of being her own manager, has begun a successful laundry business that she operates out of Mrs. Smith’s boardinghouse. She soon announces that she has agreed to marry a seminary student twenty years her junior. When asked by Ma Smith what brought them together, she answers: “‘The first [time] I noticed [him] was the night you had that swaree here last winter. Some o’ the men got to talkin’ ‘bout ‘ooman bein’ the weaker vessel, an’ subjugatin’ theirself to be led by men an’ not go perspirin’ after work an’ sech likes which belongs to men. Mr. Jeemes he held to it thet ‘ooman’s all right to ejecate herself even to be a minister, fer no man could be suferior to ‘ooman, ‘cause she was his rib’” (366). Like the heroine of many New Woman novels, Ophelia will only marry a man who supports her feminist views. She and her suitor also pursue the stereotypical New Woman’s pastime, riding bicycles around Boston, and she even wears bangs, a hairstyle often associated with the New Woman in popular images of this figure.22 However, Ophelia’s tale of their dashing outings ends in a slapstick bicycle crash, complete with Ophelia losing her false bangs and bursting her corsets. The clownishness of Ophelia’s performance of New Womanhood, though significant in reducing the New Woman to the type of caricature through which she was often represented in the popular press, functions similarly to Hopkins’s characterization of Mrs. Willis.23 By carnivalizing or mocking the well-known rhetoric or paraphernalia of 22. For a discussion of the New Woman’s association with bicycles and bangs in popular culture, see Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers. 23. Jill Bergman makes a similar point in “‘A New Race of Colored Women’: Pauline Hopkins at the Colored American Magazine”: “By linking Ophelia, a well-

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turn-of-the-century feminism, Hopkins turns readers’ attention to the true feminism of her unorthodox heroine, Sappho. The gravity of the obstacles Sappho has faced becomes apparent when her past is finally revealed. During a meeting of the Colored League in response to news of another lynching in the South, a man tells the assembly a horrific tale of how the fourteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do mulatto family in Louisiana was abducted and raped by her white half-uncle, then left in a brothel for three weeks before her family was able to locate her. She gave birth to a son in a convent and then apparently died. The girl in the story, Mabelle Beaubean, is Sappho, who has started her life over in Boston. The novel’s villain, John Langley, who is engaged to Dora but sexually attracted to Sappho, ascertains her identity and threatens her with blackmail, whereupon she flees to New Orleans and takes a post as a governess. Dora’s brother, Will, in love with Sappho, is heartbroken by her flight. However, after three years (during which the Smith family also miraculously comes into great wealth as a result of discovering their Montfort family ties) he finds her and, pledging his love and acceptance of her past, takes her as his wife. This plot concerning Sappho reveals several themes: the continued vulnerability of black or mixed-race women to sexual assault after the end of slavery, the immense personal strength of Sappho in surviving her horrific past, and, importantly, Hopkins’s rescripting of the novelistic conventions of both the fallen woman and the tragic mulatta in allowing Sappho not only to live but to marry into an affluent and respectable family as well. In her revision of the fallen woman plot, Hopkins’s text echoes other novels at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly New Woman novels, that revise the traditional death-for-the-fallen-woman denouement.24 However, Hopkins’s alternative fate for Sappho has particular political import. That a black woman can transcend a legacy of outrage tied to her status as a black woman, and go on to become happily, respectably married—and meaning but silly character, with the bicycle fad, Hopkins draws attention to frivolous aspects of New Womanhood and provides a sharp contrast to the important race work to be done” (93). 24. For example, see Mary Austin’s Woman of Genius (1912) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Also, for further discussion of Contending Forces as a revision of the typical fallen-woman plot in nineteenth-century texts, see Kristina Brooks, “New Woman, Fallen Woman: The Crisis of Reputation in Turn-of-theCentury Novels by Pauline Hopkins and Edith Wharton.”

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immensely wealthy—is a profound challenge to a dominant ideology that, thirty-five years after the end of slavery, continued to define black women as lacking in the virtue associated with True Womanhood. Indeed, in direct contrast to Grace Montfort’s suicide, which invokes the significantly analogous nineteenth-century novelistic traditions of “fallen” women dying as punishment for their sins and mulattas perishing after the revelation of their mixed blood, Sappho’s very survival constitutes a radical act. Hopkins’s novel also implies Sappho as a feminist heroine by signifying upon the relationships of race leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to the black women’s movement at the turn of the century. In the novel, Dora, having broken her engagement to villain John Langley, marries Dr. Lewis. Her choice to wed a man who reflects the accommodationist politics of Washington, in contrast to Sappho’s choice to marry Will Smith, whose more assertive views on achieving black equality parallel those of Du Bois, highlights the two leaders’ affiliations with black race women at the time. Washington’s highly successful political machine was supported by some members of the black women’s movement; for example, Washington, D.C.–based activist Mary Church Terrell was supportive his views, at least through 1902, and Washington’s third wife, Margaret Murray Washington, held various important positions within the National Association of Colored Women. However, black club women did not unconditionally advocate Washington’s accommodationism and emphasis on industrial education. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was disgruntled when Washington refused to use his influence in her aid when she was denied admission to the 1900 Milwaukee convention of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.25 And some female activists of this era who achieved advanced educations, such as Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper, took issue with Washington’s criticism of studying the liberal arts. Others were drawn to the more radical politics of Du Bois, such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and when Mary Church Terrell’s sympathies shifted to Du Bois’s camp after 1902, she joined the executive committee of his organization, the NAACP. In general, Washington’s success and influence made him a powerful ally for black club women, but his political stance disappointed the more radical among them. Du Bois, on the other hand, was supportive of black

25. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 105.

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women’s feminism, as evidenced by the sentiments of his newspaper columns while a student at Fisk University, his later friendship with Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and the themes of his 1911 novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece.26 Thus, Sappho’s choice to marry a character who represents the politics of Du Bois is another indication of her feminism. Furthermore, the fact that the manipulative Mrs. Willis is supportive of Washington’s ideas (152) adds to the sense that the novel privileges the more revolutionary racial and gender politics of Du Bois. In line with her choice of husband, the way in which Dora is characterized in the final pages of the novel also illuminates Sappho’s feminism. Despite Dora’s early spiritedness and independence, after marrying Lewis she becomes the conventional heroine of nineteenthcentury domestic fiction, “a contented young matron, her own individuality swallowed up in love for her husband and child” (389–90). In contrast, though Sappho marries Will Smith along with joyfully reclaiming her son, Alphonse, it is implied that their marriage will be one of joint work for racial uplift: the narrator notes that “Sappho was happy in contemplating the life of promise which was before her. . . . [H]e and she planned to work together to bring joy to hearts crushed by despair” (401). It seems clear that their partnership will move beyond patriarchy. As Hazel Carby has observed, “The reunited Mabelle/Sappho was a representation of a womanhood in which motherhood was not contingent upon wifehood, and Will was a representation of a black manhood that did not demand that women be a medium of economic exchange between men.”27 Indeed, Hopkins implies early on that Will’s relation to Sappho will not be a patriarchal one; in one scene, she is amused to discover Will in her room cleaning her stove while wearing his mother’s apron and smudged with blacking, comically reducing him to a feminized figure (172). The implication that Sappho and Will’s marriage will transcend a patriarchal model also anticipates that of Sara Smolinsky at the end of Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925), wherein she has also escaped the woman-as-commodity model of the Jewish matchmakers and found a husband who supports her career-oriented values. Thus, with Contending Forces, Hopkins provides a detailed and sympathetic glimpse of the milieu of Progressive black womanhood at the 26. On Du Bois’s feminism, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 74, 104–5, 449–50. 27. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 144.

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turn of the century, yet she complicates that picture in valorizing the lived feminism of her unorthodox heroine. She illuminates this quality of Sappho by contrasting her with two other women of African blood. Grace Montfort, Sappho’s symbolic foremother, suffers the same racially based victimization, but in committing suicide upholds both a nineteenth-century ideal of self-effacing, virtuous womanhood and the tragic mulatta tradition. Dora Smith, on the other hand, initially shares the Progressive views of Sappho, but after marriage retreats into the stereotypical female role of nineteenth-century fiction. Sappho, in contrast to these women, both survives her tragic circumstances and forges a satisfying, respectable, and egalitarian marriage. Moreover, whereas Hopkins’s association of Dora and Sappho with turn-of-the-century black feminism is sympathetic, affirming their interest in uplifting their race and black women’s rights as commendable, her use of the characters of Mrs. Willis and Ophelia Davis also complicates that movement, implying its susceptibility to selfish manipulation or superficial frivolity. Thus, although Contending Forces calls attention to the ways in which mainstream feminism did not serve the unique concerns of black women at the turn of the century, Hopkins’s text does not represent the black club women’s movement as an unconditional good. Rather, she suggests that uplift-oriented “race women” themselves may need to better understand those among their peers who have endured racialized sexual violence—and comprehend that the latter’s acts of survival are valuable feminist gestures. Finally, through Sappho’s survival, Hopkins also suggests the limits of the tragic mulatta tradition in an era of expanding black feminism, one that she continues to signify upon in succeeding novels. Despite their occurrence in the era of American literary realism, Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice, Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self rely to an even greater degree than Contending Forces on melodramatic and Gothic narrative modes or occult discourses in order to investigate both racial and gender concerns.28 Moreover, the

28. On Hopkins’s reliance on melodrama, the Gothic, or the occult in these novels, see, for example, Eugenia DeLamotte, “‘Collusions of the Mystery’: Ideology and the Gothic in Hagar’s Daughter”; Susan Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences”; and Sean McCann, “‘Bonds of Brotherhood’: Pauline Hopkins and the Work of Melodrama.”

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latter two novels are also distanced from the social fabric of turn-ofthe-century America by their settings; though Hagar’s Daughter is largely concerned with late-nineteenth-century American society, Winona takes place in 1854, whereas Of One Blood, partially set in turnof-the-century Boston, is also largely set in Africa, including a hidden, ancient Ethiopian city named Telassar. Nonetheless, all three novels to varying degrees continue to dramatize black women’s need for social equality, though they chart an increasingly bleak trajectory of the possibility for its attainment in the United States at the turn of the century. Hagar’s Daughter’s positive enactment of its mixed-race heroine’s survival in the face of victimization and tragedy is tempered by the death of her daughter, Jewel. On the other hand, the heroine’s happy ending in Winona requires her to live with her husband in England, a fact not mitigated by the kind of egalitarian marriage that is implied in Contending Forces. The heroine of Of One Blood, initially portrayed as an educated and talented female artist, is rendered increasingly passive and ultimately destroyed by the forces of patriarchy and racism. In light of Hopkins’s more affirmative portrait of black feminism in Contending Forces and her calls for black female empowerment in her contemporaneous essays, these novels suggest the author’s increasing ambivalence about the potential for the achievement of black women’s equality in turn-of-the-century America. In the same way that many African Americans increasingly parted ways with mainstream Progressivism throughout that era, these later novels suggest that Hopkins may have found the ideal of the New Woman, as an embodiment of Progressive thought, less and less attainable among black women in America. Hopkins continues to dramatize the unique concerns of black women and to present feminist heroines in Hagar’s Daughter, serialized in Colored American Magazine from March 1901 to March 1902. Echoing Contending Forces in treating the tragic mulatta figure, in this novel she depicts various women’s responses to revelations concerning their racial identity, and through their relative survival or demise provocatively questions that literary convention in an era of new agency and opportunity for black women. The novel’s titular heroine discovers her quadroon status when traders attempt to remand her into slavery, but escapes her captors to survive and marry into wealth and political power. However, Hagar’s daughter, Jewel, dies in accord with the tragic mulatta tradition after discovering her racial origins. On the other hand, the character of Aurelia Madison, upon learning

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her similar history, instead endures, her survival made the more radical by the fact that she is also a “fallen,” or sexualized, female figure. Furthermore, Hopkins elevates a supporting character, a black maid named Venus, to a feminist role in the narrative as she performs detective work to solve the novel’s mystery, ensuring that the villains are punished. Through this range of characters, Hopkins continues her work of complicating the tragic mulatta tradition and offering alternative fictions of empowered survival, while she also suggests a black domestic’s potential to be a figure of agency rather than marginality. As in Contending Forces, Hopkins relies on conventions of Victorian melodrama in order to write a novel of racial and gender critique. The novels are similar in their use of linked double plots, Hagar’s Daughter’s first plot taking place from 1860 to 1862 and its subsequent action set in the 1880s. A major difference, however, is the survival of the victimized female protagonist of the initial plot of Hopkins’s 1901 novel, in contrast to Grace Montfort’s death in Contending Forces. The initial action of Hagar’s Daughter concerns Ellis Enson, a plantation owner who marries Hagar Sargeant, a neighbor’s adopted daughter. However, his brother, St. Clair Enson, conspires with a slave trader named Walker to steal the family inheritance. Upon learning that St. Clair and Walker intend to remand his wife into slavery, as they hold proof of her quadroon status, Ellis pays the men off and resolves to take his family abroad. However, he is soon after reportedly found dead, murdered by St. Clair and Walker, whereupon Hagar escapes being sold by jumping into a river with her baby. Her leap seems an act of suicide, particularly as the chain of events here is borrowed from William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter,29 but it turns out to be an act of survival. The novel’s second plot, set in 1880s Washington, D.C., involves Senator Zenas Bowen, a self-made millionaire, his wife, “Estelle” (actually Hagar), and his adopted daughter, Jewel (actually Hagar’s daughter, although even Hagar does not know this yet). Cuthbert Sumner, a young New England politician, is engaged to marry Jewel, but Aurelia Madison, a woman with a romantic past with Cuthbert, enters into a plot to break the engagement so that General Benson (who is really St. Clair Enson) may marry Jewel for her wealth. When Jewel refuses Benson’s advances, he has her abducted, but her maid,

29. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 146–47.

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Venus, facilitates her escape. In a criminal trial, all true identities are revealed—including the mixed racial origins of the seemingly “white” Estelle, Jewel, and Aurelia—and Benson is convicted of the murder of Cuthbert’s secretary, who threatened to expose Benson’s false identity. Moreover, Estelle/Hagar discovers artifacts in her husband Zenas’s house that prove his adopted daughter to be in fact the baby she was forced to abandon on a log in the Potomac River twenty years before. Although its plot twists, unbelievable coincidences, and heavy use of sentiment link the novel more to Victorian melodrama than to the realist mode of writing through which the New Woman was often treated, the commentary that Hopkins’s text offers on black women’s survival in a racist society suggests the unique challenges that such women faced within turn-of-the-century American dialogues on feminism. One way Hopkins explores this issue is through the contrast between Hagar’s act of survival and her daughter Jewel’s death. Through the figure of Hagar, Hopkins reverses the convention of the tragic mulatta in texts such as Brown’s Clotel, George Washington Cable’s Grandissimes (1880), and Kate Chopin’s story “La Belle Zoraïde” (1894).30 Like Sappho in Contending Forces, who survives her tragic past and marries into prosperity and aristocratic British connections, Hagar resurfaces as the respectable wife of a senator and millionaire, one whose genteel ways and political savvy have helped to advance his career. However, one important difference is that the heroine of Hopkins’s first novel lives openly as a black woman (albeit a light-skinned one), whereas Hagar is at this point passing for white. In suggesting that a woman must “pass” in order to attain such social prominence, her second novel dramatizes the racial climate in America that necessitates the arguments in Hopkins’s essay “Higher Education of Colored Women in White Schools and Colleges” for black women’s equal opportunity for economic and social mobility as other Americans. Hopkins’s treatment of Hagar after her biraciality is revealed simultaneously offers a positive image of her survival and further delineates the atmosphere of “color-line” America. Now a widow, Hagar reunites with the unprejudiced man who truly loves her, Ellis Enson (who was not murdered after all), and the narrator asserts that, although “no callers begged admittance into the grand

30. For more on the tragic mulatto, see Judith Berzon, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction, 99–118.

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mansion, no cards overflowed the receivers in the spacious entrance hall . . . the fact did not disconcert her in the least.”31 Despite this allusion to white resistance to racial intermarriage, in offering a positive vision of a marriage between a white man and a mixed-race woman, this novel echoes Hopkins’s 1900 story “Talma Gordon.” In contrast to the way in which the latter revelation of Hagar’s mixed blood is treated, Jewel’s death more conservatively suggests that although one’s racial identity might be obscured for a time, sooner or later the truth will come out, with conventionally tragic consequences. Hopkins’s choice for Jewel’s fate is somewhat perplexing, as she did not suffer directly (as did her mother) the effects of slavery, and she is characterized as an independent-minded young woman. It is significant that Jewel was raised in the West, traditionally a place of greater freedom for women in late-nineteenth-century America: she is described as “a Western girl with all the independence that the term implies” (118); she confesses that while in Washington, she “[misses] the freedom of the ranch, [and] the wild flight at dawn over the prairie in the saddle” (119); and she even carries a gun (210). Moreover, Jewel’s repulsion of General Benson’s advances and her decision to secretly marry Cuthbert while he is incarcerated as a murder suspect indicate her spirit and determination. However, her fate is abruptly revealed at the end of the novel when Cuthbert, having repented of his racist response to the revelation of her identity, seeks her out at the Enson family plantation, only to learn that Jewel “died abroad of Roman Fever” (283). The cause of Jewel’s death (a common name at the time for malaria) is one that Hopkins’s contemporaries Henry James and Edith Wharton both referenced to treat themes of young women’s sexual transgression and the cultural beliefs employed to control their behavior. The protagonist of James’s Daisy Miller (1878) is misjudged as immoral by her would-be suitor after going to the Roman Colosseum at night with another man. She contracts the fever and soon dies, at the same time as Winterbourne comes to regret his dismissal of her, in a psychological process analogous to Cuthbert’s at the end of this text. On the other hand, Wharton’s late tale “Roman Fever” (1934) indicates how the threat of this disease was used to control young women in the latter nineteenth century. The two main characters of the story, look-

31. Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter, 273–74. Future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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ing back on their youth, recall how fear of contracting the ailment was invoked to prevent their going out after nightfall to meet suitors while in Europe. Such injunctions did not keep one of the women from an assignation with the other’s fiancé that produced a child, a fact that she now reveals to her friend. In the context of these connotations of sexuality and rebellious behavior surrounding the disease of “Roman Fever,” Hopkins’s choice to have Jewel die from the ailment is significant. Although this gesture could undermine Jewel’s association with a “fair, fragrant lily” and “good angel” (103) in the text, Hopkins more likely uses this signifier to illuminate the irony of Cuthbert’s prejudiced dismissal of her. All the same, her death complicates the otherwise revisionary way in which Hopkins treats the tragic mulatta tradition in this text, echoing the novel’s ambivalence on other issues such as racial difference that critics have explored.32 Finally, in having Hagar survive the revelation of her mixed race and its attendant injustices while her daughter does not, Hopkins reverses her treatment of this topic in Contending Forces, wherein Sappho’s survival, in contrast to Grace Montfort’s death, might be attributed to Sappho’s living in era with greater opportunity to seek justice for such sufferings. Hopkins’s reversal of that paradigm in this novel may function to remind readers that the greater freedom with which many black women of the 1880s lived, relative to their ancestors in the antebellum era, did not necessarily mean that they were more capable of enduring the continued dehumanizing effects of racism than the latter. In contrast to her reliance on a stock treatment of Jewel’s fate, Hopkins also rescripts the conventions of the tragic mulatta and the fallen woman through the survival of Aurelia Madison. As Hazel V. Carby has noted, Aurelia can be seen to possess “masculine” traits, engaging in drinking, smoking, and card games with male associates of her father.33 However, these behaviors also inscribe the seemingly white Aurelia with signifiers of the New Woman, often depicted in popular culture as smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, or loitering in environments resembling a traditional gentlemen’s club.34 Whereas her

32. See, for example, discussion of Hopkins’s complex use of minstrelsy in Kristina Brooks, “Mammies, Bucks, and Wenches: Minstrelsy, Racial Pornography, and Racial Politics in Pauline Hopkins’ Hagar’s Daughter.” 33. Carby, introduction to The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, xxxix. 34. See Marks’s discussion of popular images of the New Woman smoking, drinking, or in gentlemen’s-style clubs (Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers, 124–27).

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survival of the mulatta’s and fallen woman’s conventional fates links her with Sappho Clark, Aurelia’s example is unique, for, unlike Sappho, who despite her economic independence and political opinions essentially possessed the virtues of True Womanhood and motherhood, Aurelia is instead linked with more transgressive manifestations of the New Woman. Indeed, an aura of sexual experience surrounds Aurelia, and it is acknowledged that she has used her allure to aid her father’s enterprises, as “she viewed [honesty] as a luxury for the wealthy to enjoy” (92). Upon the revelation of her mixed blood, like Hagar, Aurelia does not quail; when Cuthbert Sumner disparages her octoroon status, she responds, “‘I will not fly—I will brave you to the last! If the world is to condemn me as the descendant of a race that I abhor, it shall never condemn me as a coward!’” Whereas Aurelia’s admission that she “abhors” the black race might seem an example of what some critics have seen as Hopkins’s acceptance of white supremacy, Hopkins’s work in fact demonstrates the precarious nature of making racial distinctions and preferences based on appearance; indeed, we do not learn that several “white” female characters are in fact of mixed race until the end of this novel.35 The narrator also notes, “There was something . . . that compelled admiration in [Aurelia’s] resolute standing to her guns with the determination to face the worst that fate might have in store for her,” implying a strength of spirit that her innocent counterpart Jewel does not possess (238). At the same time as Aurelia’s experience deconstructs the tragic mulatta tradition, Hopkins also revises the fallen woman’s fate, echoing contemporary literary treatments of the New Woman wherein those who have transgressed the bounds of propriety do not perish for their sins. However, Aurelia’s survival has an additional significance to that of Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber or Mary Austin’s Olivia Lattimore, for she is also partly black—and therefore more vulnerable to sexual exploitation than her white peers. Yet the narrator’s praise for her determination suggests that Aurelia will be a survivor rather than a victim. As with Hagar’s survival, Hopkins’s implication that Aurelia will survive as not only a black but also a sexualized woman opens up an alternative prescription for her culture. Aurelia’s linkage 35. This criticism of Hopkins’s work has been made, for example, by Houston Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing, 24–30, and answered by critics including Tate, in Domestic Allegories, and DuCille, in Coupling Convention.

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with signifiers of the New Woman enriches this implication, for neither is she punished for her rebellious, “masculine” behaviors. Finally, in contrast to the ambiguity with which Hopkins both uses and revises the tragic mulatta tradition to offer visions of black women’s survival through her genteel, nearly white characters, Hopkins offers an example of feminist agency in Jewel’s black maid, Venus Johnson. Kristina Brooks notes that despite Hopkins’s occasional reliance on stereotype in characterizing Venus, she “stands out as an African American woman who can think, speak, and act as a full subject,” in opposition to caricatured portraits of characters such as Aunt Henny and Marthy in the text.36 This quality is shown from the description of her as “a young colored girl with an extremely intelligent, wide-awake expression” (223), and we learn that Venus, who has a brother of great intellect, “‘has given up her hopes of becoming a school teacher among her people to earn money to help develop his talents’” (89), suggesting her own intellectual ability and selflessness. Her resourcefulness and courage are best shown when she dresses as a boy to help rescue the abducted Jewel and her own grandmother from the Enson plantation. Her cross-dressing echoes instances in other works such as Sui Sin Far’s story “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit” and Hopkins’s novel Winona, implying the agency of the female protagonists who masquerade in men’s clothes in order to achieve their own goals. Dressed as “Billy,” Venus infiltrates the Enson plantation community to learn of Jewel and Aunt Henny’s whereabouts and facilitate their escape. Her act is central to the novel’s resolution, for she foils the plans of the antagonists, upholding her vow to herself: “‘Let’s see if this one little black girl can’t get the best of as mean a set of villains as ever was born’” (221). Venus’s actions suggest that workingclass black women, rather than playing peripheral, stock roles as domestics, can play central parts in a new kind of narrative, even acting as agents of justice. Venus’s morality, moreover, undermines the continued charges of the moral laxness of black women that white Americans invoked in order to perpetuate racist practices. In this sense, she provides an object lesson in Hopkins’s work of reclaiming the virtue and morality to black women long denied them by white America, a recurrent theme in her Famous Women of the Negro Race essays.

36. Brooks, “Mammies, Buck, and Wenches,” 147.

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With Hagar’s Daughter, Hopkins continues to provide examples of how black women can triumph over their difficult conditions in latenineteenth-century America. This text does not specifically invoke discourses of the New Woman or the black women’s movement as Contending Forces does, other than to link Aurelia Madison with popular ideas of that figure. However, Hopkins’s novel envisions a society where women like Hagar, or even a sexualized figure like Aurelia, transcend the revelation of their mixed race, though she qualifies this vision through Jewel’s demise. Moreover, Hopkins revises the often comical stock figure of the black female domestic as a resourceful agent for justice. In a larger view, Hagar’s Daughter draws even more than does Contending Forces on paradigms of nineteenth-century women’s fiction—questions of courtship, marriage, and motherhood—to build critiques of racial injustice and advocate for black women.37 Hopkins’s next novel, Winona, moves further away from turn-ofthe-century discourses of feminism as it is set in the 1850s and largely delineates its heroine as the pious, self-effacing ingenue of nineteenthcentury sentimental romance. However, the struggles that Winona undergoes nonetheless illuminate black women’s continuing need for equal rights in American society. Initially living with her adoptive older brother, Judah, among a Native American tribe in upstate New York, the orphan of a runaway slave, Winona apparently becomes a victim of sexual exploitation when she is remanded into slavery. Though that experience is not explicitly treated, what she has suffered is inferred when the slave-trader who kidnapped her later confesses, “‘I done the girl worse’n dirt,’” and Winona at one point laments that “‘the degradation of the two years just passed can never leave me.’”38 Also, despite Winona’s limited role as the romantic interest of the hero, Warren Maxwell, she performs key actions in the novel. She saves the gravely ill Maxwell’s life while he is held in prison by masquerading as a boy, “Allen Pinks,” in order to nurse him, and she furthermore participates in John Brown’s army in battle against the proslavery Kansas Rangers. As Nicole Tonkovich has noted, such acts by the hero-

37. Hopkins’s writerly use of motherhood, in particular, for political purposes has been noted by Bergman, who asserts that Hopkins embraced the ideal of the glorified mother in her writing in order to serve racial progress (“‘New Race of Colored Women,’” 88–89). 38. Hopkins, Winona, 425, 406.

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ine “challenge the legal erasure of black women under white domestic law,” and they suggest that black women can and should have the agency to act in the public sphere.39 Moreover, the novel reflects the feminism of the moment in which it was written in criticizing the universal vulnerability of women to sexual assault. Echoing the speech of Luke Sawyer in Contending Forces, who recounted in the Colored League meeting his tragic witnessing of his father’s lynching and his mother’s rape, in this novel one character illuminates the villainy of the Kansas Rangers through the horrific tale of a woman who wrote a letter to Massachusetts relatives criticizing the actions of the Rangers: “‘Her folks let the newspapers have the whole story. My soul! The Rangers came over . . . and one mornin’ when Bud was gone they went to the house an’ took his ol’ woman inter the woods an’ pulled her tongue out as far as possible an’ tied it to a sapling. Well, I won’t pain yer feelin’s by recountering the rest o’ the po’ critter’s sufferin’s, but they was the mos’ dreadfulles’ that you can imagine, until she mercifully gave up the ghos’ and ex-pired.’”40 The anecdote protests against rape as an instrument of terror against all women, black and white, particularly when they express political opinions. However, aside from these feminist elements, Hopkins’s thematic priority in Winona is not to argue for black women’s equality in American society, but rather to mount a critique of prejudice against her race. For example, the conclusion of the novel suggests that the heroine and her white husband must leave and resettle in England in order to find a fulfilled life “where American caste prejudice could not touch them.”41 Although the novel’s antebellum historical setting makes this conclusion understandable, perhaps Hopkins’s choice to end the novel this way was also a response to her own context in 1902, disillusioned as she was by the recent actions of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the countless other indicators of continuing

39. Tonkovich, “Guiding Angels and Missing Mothers: Race and Domesticity in Winona and Deadwood Dick on Deck,” 245. 40. Hopkins, Winona, 339. 41. Ibid., 435. Hopkins’s conclusion is not the first to suggest such a couple’s response to white racism in America. In William Dean Howells’s 1891 novel An Imperative Duty, the mixed-race heroine marries a white husband, and they move to Italy, where “she is thought to look so very Italian that you would really take her for an Italian” (149–50). Although Hopkins’s novel does not similarly suggest that Winona will attempt to pass for white in England, both authors’ implications solidify the sense of white resistance in the United States to interracial marriage.

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racism within the United States. Moreover, though Winona and Warren Maxwell’s marriage may constitute a triumph over the conventional fallen woman’s fate similar to Sappho and Will’s marriage in Contending Forces, the novel does not imply that Winona and Maxwell’s union will be as egalitarian as is the other couple’s. Again, this implication could be attributed to the earlier historical setting of the novel, but Hopkins’s more conventional portrait of marriage here possibly reflects a growing cynicism about black women’s potential to truly transcend oppression of various types. As Claudia Tate has argued, by the turn of the century black women had to contend not only with broad social prejudice but also with black men’s lack of support for their feminist activism, since in many of the men’s minds, expecting the women of their race to take up the role of domestic matrons was another way of demonstrating attainment of the white bourgeois ideal to which many uplift-oriented African Americans at the turn of the century aspired.42 Hopkins’s final serialized novel, Of One Blood, reiterates the critique of racial oppression, and particularly black women’s sufferings within it, taken up in her previous novels. However, the dizzying narrative of Of One Blood, incorporating decidedly antirealist elements of the Gothic, the supernatural, and science fiction, is also concerned with a unique cluster of issues including incest, trauma, mesmerism, and the celebration of ancient African civilizations.43 This text invokes women’s changing roles in Hopkins’s time in depicting a successful black woman artist living in turn-of-the-century Boston, but Of One Blood ultimately constitutes the darkest vision in Hopkins’s fiction of the inescapability for African American women of a traumatized past. Despite the uplifting feminist rhetoric of her essays the previous year in Colored American Magazine, with Of One Blood, which she began serializing just one month after the final essay in her Famous Women of the Negro Race series, Hopkins appears to retreat from such optimism. The difficulties Hopkins began undergoing at this time that ultimately ended her editorial position at Colored American Magazine—a move perhaps related to the fact that she was a woman as well as to her “unc-

42. See Tate, Domestic Allegories. 43. For further discussion of how Of One Blood employs antirealist genres while still aspiring to the qualities of veracity associated with realism, and therefore confounds traditional literary history, see Valerie Rohy, “Time Lines: Pauline Hopkins’ Literary History.”

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onciliatory” stance on racial activism, as Nellie Y. McKay has suggested—may have informed the grim perspective on black American women’s potential for equality that Of One Blood evidences.44 Of One Blood’s heroine is the beautiful Dianthe Lusk, a skilled lead soloist with the Fisk Jubilee singers who seems full of potential to be an affirmative example of black women’s self-actualization at the turn of the century. A prizewinning former student at Fisk University, she has traveled abroad to Florence and Rome to further her musical studies and earned the acclaim of “wondering critics” and “worldadmiring crowds.” When the male protagonist of the novel, medical student Reuel Briggs, first comes to know her, he is enchanted by her beauty and musical talent. Though Briggs himself has obscured his racial origins by passing for white, he is deeply moved by her masterful stage performance of the slave spiritual “Go Down, Moses”: “All the horror, all the degradation from which a race had been delivered were in the pleading strains of the singer’s voice. . . . It pictured to that self-possessed, highly-cultured New England assemblage as nothing else ever had, the awfulness of the hell from which a people had been happily plucked.”45 Despite this auspicious beginning, in an indication that the degradation of slavery that her art connotes is in fact not yet over for Dianthe, she soon becomes the passive instrument of a cycle of treachery, violence, and injustice. After nearly dying in a railway accident, she is miraculously restored to life by Briggs’s mysterious methods. Dianthe suffers total amnesia, and although Briggs knows her true identity, he and the villain of the novel, the racist white southerner Aubrey Livingston, keep it a secret from her and allow her to think she is white. Aubrey, jealous of Briggs’s ensuing courtship and marriage with Dianthe because of his own attraction to her, uses the threat of exposing her blackness to force her to marry him while Briggs is on an archaeological expedition in Africa. Tragic coincidences build as it is revealed that not only are Dianthe and Reuel brother and sister, but so are Dianthe and Aubrey, all linked through the sordid legacy of slavery. The novel concludes with the death of the devastated, heart-

44. McKay, introduction to Unruly Voice, 10. Hanna Wallinger’s recent biography offers the most illuminating and thorough discussion to date of the factors precipitating Hopkins’s departure from Colored American Magazine, including the role of John C. Freund, a white patron backed by Booker T. Washington, in criticizing Hopkins’s writing therein (Pauline E. Hopkins, 79–86). 45. Hopkins, Of One Blood, 608, 454.

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broken Dianthe, a nearly hyperbolic vision of the tragic mulatta, as she is forced by Aubrey to drink the poison she attempted to give him in revenge for his multiple betrayals of her. Throughout it all, in ironic contrast to her artistic talents and accomplishments, Dianthe is repeatedly characterized as a passive victim, as in the scene when she agrees to marry Aubrey: “Sick at heart, bending beneath the blight that thus unexpectedly fell upon her, the girl gave herself up to grief, and weary of the buffets of Fate, yielded to Aubrey’s persuasions.”46 In her eventual erasure, Dianthe is ultimately the weakest of Hopkins’s novelistic heroines, seemingly unable to act for herself but acted upon by the manipulations of the two men, a phenomenon embodied in the novel’s thematic preoccupation with mesmerism. Far from being a woman who supports herself and survives in the face of past tragedy and victimization like Sappho Clark, Dianthe is finally the pawn of a patriarchal and racist system. The one mitigating example to the grim vision of black womanhood in Hopkins’s final novel is the minor character of Candace, the queen of the hidden African city of Telassar that Reuel discovers on his archaeological expedition. However, the fact that such an empowered black woman can exist only within a marginal, hidden civilization ultimately suggests Hopkins’s cynicism about the potential for such empowerment for black women in American society. In so characterizing its would-be heroine, the final novel in Hopkins’s canon suggests the cynical conclusions she was drawing about black women’s ability to thrive in a racially prejudiced and patriarchal society. Indeed, a problematic element of the novel that has generally been downplayed in scholarship is the black hero’s instigation of the lie of Dianthe’s identity.47 Admittedly, Reuel initiates this falsehood while passing for white himself, and he ultimately accepts his African heritage, recognizing and accepting his destiny as sovereign of the ancient Ethiopian kingdom of Meroe and marrying its black queen (though it is problematic that they reign over the marginalized Hidden City of Telassar). But during the portion of the novel in which Reuel is assimilating to the values of a racist and patriarchal society, he imposes

46. Ibid., 597. 47. That it is Reuel who instigates the lie can been seen when Aubrey suggests that they “search out [Dianthe’s] friends” while they are restoring her to health after her railway accident; Reuel “[pleads] . . . anxiously,” “‘Is there any hurry, Aubrey? . . . Why not wait until her memory returns’” (ibid., 472).

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those values on Dianthe in ways that contribute to her demise.48 The novel’s villain, Aubrey Livingston, is the most obvious architect of Dianthe’s tragedy, embodying the forces of white racism and patriarchy past and present. But Reuel’s effacement of Dianthe’s past in the service of controlling her future can also be seen as a metaphor for the patriarchy that Hopkins faced in the turn-of-the-century racial uplift movement at large and, more specifically, in changes at Colored American Magazine that soon contributed to Hopkins’s departure from it. Hopkins’s final novel, with its promising heroine ultimately reduced to a passive cipher, particularly marks a retreat from her earlier optimistic call for a “new race of colored women.” Dianthe’s fate suggests cynical conclusions about black women’s ability to live in a triply repressive culture, impinged on not only by the racism of postReconstruction America and the exclusionary practices of the women’s movement but also, perhaps, by the sexism within the black uplift community at the turn of the century that privileged the accomplishments of race men over those of race women. In surveying Hopkins’s career as a whole, the sense emerges of a body of work in argument with itself about the degree to which black women could transcend both the racism and the sexism of their era in order to attain the freedoms and opportunities for which the New Woman stood. Hopkins’s journalistic essay series about black women, though containing unalloyed criticism of prejudice in the white women’s movement, is optimistic about the vistas open to black women in the future for various forms of achievement, and these writings are more overtly feminist than her fiction in their focus on the public activist roles of black women. Building on her journalistic critique of the white women’s movement for its racism, while still advocating the access to professional attainment for which white women were fighting, Hopkins’s novels dramatize the reasons black women deserve and must pursue empowered lives at the turn of the century, even if they do not always portray that pursuit as successful. Contending Forces anticipates the ethos of Hopkins’s Colored American Magazine

48. Wallinger similarly notes that “one of Reuel’s shortcomings is his paternalistic attitudes toward women” and that he “does not acknowledge [Dianthe’s] right to determine her fate herself” (Pauline E. Hopkins, 219, 220). Also, see Debra Bernardi’s discussion of Reuel’s physical and psychological control over Dianthe in “Narratives of Domestic Imperialism: The African-American Home in the Colored American Magazine and the Novels of Pauline Hopkins, 1900–1903” (220).

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essays in presenting a politically enlightened black woman conquering the legacy of victimization in order to establish an egalitarian union and a happy future. Her subsequent novels, though less directly relevant to turn-of-the-century feminist discourse, make arguments for black women’s empowerment that are embedded within more conventional and increasingly pessimistic narratives. Hagar’s Daughter presents a more mixed view of the tragic mulatta tradition than Contending Forces’ clear rescripting of it, its confirming instance outweighed by examples of women who subvert that legacy. Winona largely affirms conventional gender ideology in its reliance on the nineteenth-century domestic romance formula, though it foregrounds black women’s victimization and the need to overcome it. Of One Blood, however, presents a bleak view of a turn-of-the-century black woman’s ability to survive the continuing legacy of sexual and racial oppression imposed on her. The increasing conventionality and cynicism of her fiction suggest that while Pauline Hopkins may have hoped for a “new race of colored women” to infiltrate American society, proving once and for all the dignity and equality of the black race, she grew less and less certain of such success. Although the New Woman’s vaunted ideals of economic independence, access to advanced education, and professional opportunity clearly appealed to her, as her nonfiction writings reveal, Hopkins was all too aware of the unique oppressions that black women had to overcome that made their attainment of those goals that much more difficult than for white women.

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3

A View from the Border Sui Sin Far’s Interrogation of the Progressive New Woman

Sui Sin Far begins and ends her essay “The Chinese Woman in America,” published in January 1897 in Charles F. Lummis’s California monthly, Land of Sunshine, by invoking the term New Woman in two very different senses. In the first paragraph, she alludes to the emerging Western ideal of emancipated womanhood when describing the Chinese American woman’s persistence in wearing traditional Chinese dress, which included trousers: “A Chinese woman in a remote age invented the divided skirt, so it is not a ‘New Woman’ phenomenon.” However, in the final sentence of her essay, when asserting that most Chinese women living in America are indeed married (likely in order to protest their stereotype as Chinatown prostitutes), Sui Sin Far invokes the term as traditionally used to refer to Chinese wives: “The majority [of these women], however, are brides; or as the Chinese call young married women, ‘New Women.’”1 Her second use of the term, 1. Sui Seen Far, “Chinese Woman in America,” 59, 64. As with a few of Sui Sin Far’s early publications, her name appears on this piece as “Sui Seen Far” rather than “Sui Sin Far” (another early variant of her name in publications is “Sui Sin Fah”). For the sake of consistency, I will refer to her by the spelling of her name she used most frequently.

103

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though culturally distinct from the first, echoes the earlier usage, asserting that the phrase indeed has different meanings depending on the cultural context in which it appears. Her deliberately multivalent use of a term that carried significant and specific connotations in Progressive Era America is a fitting keynote for Sui Sin Far’s approach to examining women’s experiences in her fictional and nonfictional writings. Just as she linguistically complicates the notion of “New Woman” here, her writings thematically suggest that one’s vantage point—whether a Western perspective, an Eastern perspective, or somewhere in between—inflects how one views Western ideals, particularly women’s roles in an era of emergent feminism. Though assimilated to Western culture and able to pass for white, the half-Chinese, half-Caucasian Sui Sin Far chose to assert her Chinese heritage in a time of great sinophobia and to engage openly in her writing with issues of racism, cultural and gender differences, and ethnic hybridity. Biographer Annette White-Parks has noted that, because of her own transcultural perspective, Sui Sin Far’s autobiographical writings speak from a complex, ambivalent “border” position and this concept is equally applicable to her fictional treatment of women’s roles in Chinese and Anglo-American cultures at the turn of the twentieth century. As Elizabeth Ammons and Sean McCann have observed, her fiction speaks from this perspective to question the ethnocentrism and classism of middle-class Progressive Era New Women, particularly in the manifestation of the philanthropic worker. Others of her stories praise the growing social freedom of American women at this time, as Martha H. Patterson affirms in concluding that for Sui Sin Far, the “New” is “an important site of performative possibility with ultimately more options than pitfalls.”2 Nonetheless, Sui Sin Far’s views may have been more influenced than previously recognized by a growing interest in improving the conditions and rights of women in China that was publicized and supported by many Chinese Americans in that era.3 Also, Sui Sin Far’s engagement with women’s issues in early journal2. White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, 52; Ammons, Conflicting Stories and “New Woman”; McCann, “Connecting Links: The AntiProgressivism of Sui Sin Far”; Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 124. 3. See Judy Yung, “The Social Awakening of Chinese American Women as Reported in Chung Sai Yat Po, 1900–1911,” who argues that this Chinese-language American newspaper reveals that, during these years, “the role and status of Chinese American women were indeed beginning to change and . . . women, especially among the literate, were being influenced more by women’s issues and

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istic pieces and in less considered stories provides further evidence of the author’s multivalent perspective on New Womanhood. Such fuller consideration of her work shows how Sui Sin Far presents hybrid Chinese American female characters who are able to cross or reconcile literal and figurative borders as a corrective to the limitations of the iconic American New Woman. These characters, often echoing Sui Sin Far’s self-characterization in autobiographical writings, perhaps best articulate the often liberatory liminal subjectivity from which she writes concerning women’s roles at the turn of the century. Sui Sin Far’s own life evidences the struggles faced by talented working-class women of color who sought successful careers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in 1865 in England to a Caucasian father and Chinese mother, she was christened Edith Maude Eaton but was called Sui Sin Far by her family, a name she later adopted under which to publish most of her writing.4 The Eaton family emigrated to North America because of the prejudice against interracial marriage they encountered in England, and she spent most of her formative years in Canada, though that locale did not prove significantly more tolerant than the family’s previous environment. In a family of fourteen children, the Eatons suffered poverty but were also encouraged in the arts and professions, partly because of their father’s artistic leanings. As Amy Ling notes, three of the children wrote poetry, one daughter became the first Chinese American woman lawyer in Chicago, two daughters became painters, and both Sui Sin Far and her sister Winnifred experienced success as journalists and creative writers.5 Though impelled by economic need rather than the agenda of the New Woman, Sui Sin Far began working outside the home while very events in China than in the United States” (196). Yung also notes that “the issue of women’s rights as covered by CSYP indicates clearly the detachment Chinese women felt toward the women’s suffrage movement in America and their identification with women’s emancipation in China” (201). Although Sui Sin Far spoke little Chinese herself and therefore could not have read this newspaper directly, she was very involved in the various Chinatown communities in which she lived during these years, and she surely would have been exposed to the content of this leading newspaper’s coverage and the discussions that it prompted. 4. Critics have variously referred to this author as “Sui Sin Far,” “Edith Maude Eaton,” or “Edith Eaton.” I will concur with the judgment of biographer Annette White-Parks, who refers to her as Sui Sin Far “to underline the personal choice she made to distinguish herself from the English Canadian identity that most of her family maintained and to help make visible the Chinese heritage for which she fought throughout her life” (Sui Sin Far, xvi). 5. Ling, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry, 27.

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young. When her formal education was discontinued at age eleven, she sold handmade lace and her father’s paintings door-to-door. She began full-time employment at eighteen, first in the composing room of the Montreal Daily Star, then as a stenographer and freelance journalist. Relocating to various cities on the West Coast and later to Boston, Sui Sin Far supported herself and her family throughout her life by writing, teaching English, and stenography; she found placing her own stories and essays for publication difficult, despite the fact that she was able to publish several works in such well-known periodicals as Century and New England Magazine. Though Sui Sin Far collected several new and previously published pieces in the story volume Mrs. Spring Fragrance, brought out by A. C. McClurg in 1912, and apparently was working on a novel at the time of her death in 1914, Annette White-Parks’s biography of Sui Sin Far indicates the careful, often submissive negotiations she conducted with white editors in order to place her work.6 Like many New Women, Sui Sin Far chose not to marry, a decision she references obliquely in her autobiographical essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909). Plagued by persistent health problems that were likely exacerbated by her poverty and her continual relocation in search of employment, she died at the age of forty-nine. As with most of the other writers in this study, information about Sui Sin Far’s life—and her writings, some of which likely remain to be rediscovered—is limited. However, both her fiction and her nonfiction clearly reveal an enduring concern with issues of freedom and empowerment in women’s lives, both Chinese American and white, at a time when emerging models of feminism had a broad impact on American culture. Sui Sin Far’s works composed during the 1890s and the earliest years of the twentieth century reveal a persistent interest in women’s issues, particularly Chinese women’s roles within the patriarchal culture of their homeland, as well as the relative benefits and detriments of Chinese women’s assimilation to Western society. Through these earlier works is woven Sui Sin Far’s nascent feminism, one that draws on the ideals of Western feminists but asserts the particular concerns of Chinese women, in keeping with a growing interest in the rights of this group among Chinese Americans at the turn of the 6. For more on Sui Sin Far’s negotiations with her publishers, see White-Parks, Sui Sin Far, 41–42.

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century.7 For example, an essay published in the Montreal Daily Witness in 1894, “Girl Slave in Montreal,” questions the practice of female enslavement and critically examines the cultural expectation of Chinese women’s obedience. Dominika Ferens and Lori Jirousek have noted that Sui Sin Far often appropriated the techniques of ethnography while registering a more ambiguous relationship to that discipline’s underlying assumptions about “foreign” cultures, and this essay is an early example of that tendency.8 With regard to the ideal of the New Woman, however, this essay invokes the Western notion of “women’s rights” in a deliberately ambivalent way. The essay describes two women and a girl who are the only females in Montreal’s Chinese community at the time, in keeping with Chinese cultural expectations and Canadian legislation that allowed male emigration but discouraged female emigration. Mrs. Wing Sing and Mrs. Sam Kee are the wives of men who own a hotel, while the other female is a ten-year-old slave. In contrast to the elegant clothes and physical beauty of Mrs. Wing Sing, which are described in detail, little is said about the slave girl: “Well, poor little thing; her face is by no means her fortune. She belongs to Mrs. Sam Kee, and came over with her from China. She is treated more like a sister than a slave, indeed it is the custom in China to look upon slaves as family, and they are treated accordingly.”9 Despite the positive latter remark, it is clear that the girl’s status renders her less than human—she is not named and, tellingly, though the girl is much younger than the others, the second subtitle to the essay is “Only Two Women from the Flowery Land in Town.” Sui Sin Far’s critique here of the practice of enslaving girls is prescient, anticipating by several years the national interest in eradicating female slavery that began as part of the 1898 reform movement in China.10 7. See Yung, “Social Awakening” and “Unbound Feet: Chinese Women in the Public Sphere.” In the latter, Yung notes that “the intense nationalistic spirit that took hold in the early twentieth century also affected Chinese women in farreaching ways. Not only did the call for modernization include the need to improve conditions for Chinese women, but reformers solicited women’s active participation in national salvation work” through such means as fund-raising, political activism, and charity work, in which Chinese American women became increasingly active participants during this time (261). 8. See Ferens, “Subjects of the Gaze,” in Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances; and Jirousek, “Spectacle Ethnography and Immigrant Resistance: Sui Sin Far and Anzia Yezierska.” 9. Sui Sin Far, “Girl Slave in Montreal,” 182. 10. For further discussion of the movement to eradicate enslavement of girls in China that began in 1898, see Yung, “Social Awakening,” 199.

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While Mrs. Wing Sing and Mrs. Sam Kee seem privileged by comparison to the slave girl, Sui Sin Far also notes the married women’s virtual enslavement. She comments, “I looked around the four walls within which [Mrs. Wing Sing’s] life is spent and I wondered how it was she could laugh and be merry. Is it custom or nature that makes her contented with a life that to the daughters of Europe and America seems worse than death?” This passage anticipates Edith Wharton’s discussion of the women in harems she visited in her 1920 travel volume In Morocco, indicating how Sui Sin Far’s writings sometimes align with those of her better-known white peers in adopting the ethnographer’s gaze to explore issues of gender.11 However, Sui Sin Far’s perspective here is unique, for although she locates herself outside of the Chinese culture that is stultifying to women, neither does she clearly align herself with the Euro-American perspective to which she alludes. This essay thus initiates the complex border subjectivity from which her writings often speak. Sui Sin Far’s following observations about the “Chinese woman” also seem to speak in the generalizing mode of the ethnographer’s voice, yet deliver more ambiguous conclusions: “Obedience, never-failing obedience, is the characteristic of the Chinese woman. She loves her parents and those who are put in authority over her because she is taught to do so; she loves her husband because she has been given to him to be his wife; she comes when she’s called and does what she’s bid. No question of ‘women’s rights’ perplexes her little brains. She takes no responsibilities upon herself, and wishes for none.” These observations seem to answer Sui Sin Far’s previous question—whether it is “custom” or “nature” that makes the Chinese woman subservient—with the idea that custom is the source; the woman has been taught to submit to parents and other authorities. In so doing, Sui Sin Far suggests that Chinese women have the potential to be other than the models of submissiveness that Confucian philosophy prescribed for them, an idea reiterated in stories including “A Love Story from the Rice Fields of China” (1911) and those treating the figure of Mrs. Spring Fragrance.12

11. Sui Sin Far, “Girl Slave in Montreal,” 182–83. See Wharton’s discussion in chap. 5 of In Morocco, “Harems and Ceremonies,” esp. 170–95. 12. Sui Sin Far, “Girl Slave in Montreal,” 183. Amy Ling discusses Confucius’s beliefs about women, as well as those of his followers, all of whom stipulated women’s submission and lower status than that of males (Between Worlds, 3).

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However, the import of her observation that “no question of ‘women’s rights’ perplexes [the Chinese woman’s] little brains” is less clear. The phrase “little brains” seems patronizing to Mrs. Wing Sing, and could imply that the Chinese woman’s limited intellect leads her to accept her place, but more likely suggests that the woman’s brains are small because of her restricted upbringing. After all, it is clear from her previous comments that Sui Sin Far finds the existence of such women problematic, as she wonders how Mrs. Wing Sing can be merry in her virtual prison. On the other hand, this comment could be taken ironically; Sui Sin Far’s very use of quotation marks around the phrase “women’s rights” literalizes the ironic practice of doublevoicing that Mikhail Bakhtin observed of novelistic discourse, but which could apply to the social commentary here.13 Sui Sin Far may be suggesting that the Western question of women’s rights, often monopolized by white, middle-class women at the turn of the century, is something of limited value or interest to a Chinese woman. Although the final meaning of her comment about the woman’s “little brains” is ambiguous, it is clear that Sui Sin Far appropriates a unique perspective to speak of such women’s subjugation, whether through literal enslavement or more subtle cultural practices. Her perspective shows awareness of, and perhaps even respect for, the ways of the “daughters of Europe and America,” indicating Sui Sin Far’s familiarity with and interest in the contemporaneous Western women’s movement, yet her reflection leads to a reference to “women’s rights” that implies the cultural exclusivity—and perhaps irrelevance, for non-Western cultures—of this movement. As such, this essay is a significant antecedent to several of Sui Sin Far’s later fictions such as “The Inferior Woman” (1912), which both see value in the work of Western feminism and critique its ethnocentricity or classism. In a similar fashion to this essay, her article “Half-Chinese Children” (1895), published in the Montreal Daily Star, offers a deeper analysis of gender concerns than its title would suggest. Though this essay is partly about the challenges faced by the children of white and Chinese intermarriage, it ultimately makes Chinese matrimonial practices the focus of its discussion, examining these rites through a feminist lens that suggests Sui Sin Far’s exposure to the Western women’s movement. However, the article’s initial section also explores the phenomenon of 13. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, esp. 324–25.

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marriage between Chinese men and white women, commenting critically on the mercenary purposes of most of such women: “There are a great many [such] women whose characters would not stand much investigation, and who have married Chinamen simply for their money”; perhaps worse, “they do not seem to feel any maternal tenderness for their little ones and are only too glad to give them away or sell them for adoption whenever they have the chance.”14 This criticism indicates Sui Sin Far’s willingness to take journalistic risks in exploring issues of culture, gender, and race; her stripping these women of an essential quality of nineteenth-century (white) womanhood, the maternal instinct, interrogates a hegemony that assumed such qualities in white women but denied them to women of other races. In her turning the tables by questioning the morality of white women in a cultural context that inscribed women of color as lacking the virtue possessed by their white counterparts (or at least middle-class ones), we see the unique position from which Sui Sin Far interrogates ideals of womanhood at the turn of the century. In a fitting segue from the first section of the essay to the second, “Chinese Marriages,” Sui Sin Far contrasts the marriage practices of the male versus female progeny of such interracial unions. Whereas the sons of these families “often drift away from parental influence in American cities and marry American women,” she observes that “the daughters are usually married to Chinamen, sons of friends of the father.” Thus, she notes the double standard of how these young men enjoy greater freedoms in America, whereas their female counterparts, no matter how “American” their upbringing may have been, are subject to the practice of arranged marriage that their fathers’ culture demands—an irony mined further in her later story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” She goes on to offer an example: “Lee Fee’s daughter was handsome and intelligent. She had been brought up very much like an ordinary American girl in the land of the free, but she was married with all the rites and ceremonies of her father’s country to a Chinaman.” Thus, we are encouraged to see as regrettable the continuing power of the Chinese father—who “orders [his children’s] life as he pleases and disposes of them whenever so inclined”—over these young biracial women.15

14. Sui Sin Far, “Half-Chinese Children,” 187. 15. Ibid., 189.

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The latter part of the essay observes the patriarchal nature of Chinese marriage conventions even when practiced in “the land of the free,” emphasizing women’s treatment as a means of displaying wealth in a manner that shows the arguments of such theorists as Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) or Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898) to be applicable not only to Western women. She observes that before the wedding, the bride’s dowry is “carried through the streets with as much parade as possible. . . . [E]verything is designed to ‘show off’ a la, some Westerners.” The bride thus functions to demonstrate her father’s financial success; Sui Sin Far’s linking of this practice with that of the American bourgeoisie suggests the ubiquity of the “sexuoeconomic” significance of women that Gilman asserted. Furthermore, Sui Sin Far notes that, in accordance with the convention that the bridegroom not see his new wife’s face until the marriage dinner, the bride remains shrouded until the moment of unveiling. Then, while the groom partakes of the repast, the ornately bedecked young woman must sit “quiet and still,” “not touch a particle of food,” and endure one more test: “All the neighbors, guest[s] who were not invited and strangers even, are allowed to enter the house and stare at her. She is obliged to stand and bear with composure all sorts of criticism. She dares not laugh nor give the slightest evidence of anger. Her duty is to be quiet, pleasant looking and calm—even when at her expense jokes and impertinences are indulged in.”16 Sui Sin Far critiques the oppressive nature of the bride’s role, both as a bejeweled display of her father’s affluence and as a sexual object whose beauty (or lack thereof) is subjected to the critical gaze of others. Moreover, the bride’s ability to endure this process without complaint signifies her capacity to uphold the Confucian injunction to obedience, an important test of her future excellence as a wife. One can imagine how restrictive such practices might seem to young Chinese American women brought up in turn-of-the-century North America, and Sui Sin Far’s sympathetic account suggests her feminist perspective on such matters. Sui Sin Far’s aforementioned essay “The Chinese Woman in America” (1897) further illuminates this theme, both textually and visually representing the degree to which Chinese women in America are

16. Ibid., 191.

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expected to adhere to the often oppressive cultural expectations of their homeland. Between her multivalent usages of the phrase “New Woman” in the introduction and conclusion to the essay is Sui Sin Far’s argument that such women, despite living on American soil, remain unassimilated to American ways. For example, she writes that the Chinese woman in America “makes no attempt to know us, adopts not our ways and needs not our customs. She lives among us, but is as isolated as if she and the few Chinese relations who may happen to live here were the only human beings in the world.” These immigrant wives do not go outdoors, she asserts, but stay in the home and receive only other Chinese women as visitors. Further on, Sui Sin Far notes, “[The Chinese woman in America] will acknowledge the American dress is prettier than her own, but you could not persuade her to adopt it. She is interested in all you may tell her about America and Americans . . . but nothing can change her reverence for the customs and manners of her own country.”17 The point is significant, for in several of Sui Sin Far’s stories, Chinese immigrant women’s willingness or unwillingness to adopt Western dress signifies their readiness to accept other facets of American culture, particularly the roles of women therein. As if to bear out such assertions, alongside Sui Sin Far’s essay are included two photographs, “A Chinese Bride in America” and “Chinese Mothers in California.” The first woman seems an embodiment of the long-suffering, ornately decorated bride described in “HalfChinese Children,” sitting stiffly in a chair and draped in heavy, sumptuously embroidered silks. The second portrait shows two mothers, similarly attired, posed alongside their two young sons, who are also dressed in elaborate Chinese clothing. The human subjects are framed in a setting of Chinese scrolls hung from the walls, an elaborately carved clock, and a table set with a Chinese vase and teacups. The two boys occupy the center of this setting, while the women are on the edges, suggesting their peripheral status alongside the male children in keeping with traditional Chinese views of male superiority. The women in both photographs reify an exoticized view of Chinese women in America as unassimilated Others, as Martha H. Patterson has noted.18 In fact, the only distinction the essay draws between such

17. Sui Seen Far, “Chinese Woman in America,” 59, 64. 18. Although I agree with this part of Patterson’s argument, I disagree with her contention that the essay also “constructs the Chinese woman in America as a ver-

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women’s lives in Western society and those of their counterparts in China is in discussing the former’s relationships with their mothersin-law. Whereas in China a wife “is obliged to live with her husband’s parents and obey them as a daughter,” the Chinese wife in America “does not become subject to her husband’s mother.”19 This one greater freedom in America for Chinese immigrant women, though significant, is nonetheless dwarfed by the essay’s assertions of the overwhelming adherence to Chinese custom that such women represent. “The Chinese Woman in America” is furthermore significant for its reiteration of the ambiguously “outsider” ethnographic perspective used by Sui Sin Far in “A Girl Slave in Montreal.” As in the previous essay, she resorts to seemingly patronizing terms to describe the women; echoing the earlier piece’s reference to the Chinese woman’s “little brains,” she states, “[The Chinese husband] looks well after her comfort and provides all her little mind can wish.” One reflection in “The Chinese Woman in America” repeats almost exactly the abovequoted passage in the previous essay, asserting that this individual does not share the Western interest in feminism: “No question of ‘woman’s rights’ perplexes her. She takes no responsibility upon herself and wishes for none. She has perfect confidence in her man.”20 This comment may be seen as less a Western criticism of the subject’s lack of interest in “woman’s rights” than it is an indictment of how Western feminism may have held little meaning for those who were not white and middle-class. But the fact that Sui Sin Far chose to repeat these statements in a subsequent editorial piece about Chinese women suggests several possible interpretations. In the three years between publishing these pieces in the Montreal Daily Witness and in Land of Sunshine, perhaps Sui Sin Far was affirmed in thinking that such generalizations held true for immigrant Chinese women, whether in Canada or California. More likely, Sui Sin Far may have felt pressure to continue invoking such stereotypical, exoticizing ideas about Chinese women in order to make her writings palatable for publication in

sion of the most popular conception of the New Woman, the Gibson Girl” (Beyond the Gibson Girl, 102). Rather, the essay serves to affirm the notion that the Chinese woman in America at this time was typically unassimilated to its ways and led a sequestered, domestic life, a phenomenon confirmed by Yung (“Social Awakening,” 196). 19. Sui Seen Far, “Chinese Woman in America,” 60. 20. Ibid., 62 (emphasis added), 64.

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journals for primarily white audiences. After all, the Land of Sunshine, initially funded by representatives of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, was largely devoted to promoting the state of California in order to encourage settlement, and Sui Sin Far likely found it expedient to rely on commonly held and therefore comfortable (white) notions about the Chinese in such a forum. As Dominika Ferens has noted, if Sui Sin Far, in writing for the Land of Sunshine, was perceived by its editor “as a native informant/ethnographer rather than a woman of letters, it is easier to understand why . . . she rarely overstepped the boundaries of her narrowly defined ‘field.’”21 Indeed, other aspects of this article serve to locate its narrator even more than in the previous essay as an outsider gazing in at these curious, sheltered spectacles of Chinese immigrant women. For example, the narrator’s belief that the Chinese woman “makes no attempt to know us” and “adopts not our ways and heeds not our customs,” in contrast to the more liminal position of the narrator in the previous piece, more explicitly frames the narrator of this piece as “American.” Moreover, Sui Sin Far’s discussion of the Chinese woman’s appearance seems unabashedly Eurocentric: “Her tresses are shining, black and abundant, and if dressed becomingly would be attractive; but the manner in which she plasters them back from her forehead would spoil the prettiest face. While there are some truly pleasant to behold, with their little soft faces, oval eyes, small round mouths and raven hair, the ordinary Chinese woman does not strike an observer as lovely. She is, however, always odd and interesting.” As with the seemingly condescending statements in her previous essay, Sui Sin Far may indeed be invoking stereotypes about the Chinese ironically in order to expose their arguability, as her Mexican American contemporary María Cristina Mena does in her fictions about Mexican life. It is quite plausible to see Sui Sin Far as relying on these stereotypes, as Lori Jirousek observes, “to entice an audience already primed for such discourse so that ultimately she can undermine it.”22 All the same, this essay nonetheless affirms the degree to which young Chinese women

21. Ferens, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, 94. The background and purposes of the periodical the Land of Sunshine and its editor, Charles F. Lummis, are discussed in ibid., 82–86; and Charles Johanningsmeier, “Two Spirited Defenses of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” 22. Sui Seen Far, “Chinese Woman in America,” 59 (emphasis added), 62–63; Jirousek, “Spectacle Ethnography,” 32.

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in America are expected to adhere to the oppressive cultural expectations of their homeland. As such, it is another demonstration of how Sui Sin Far’s feminism transcends that of her white American contemporaries, concerning itself with oppressions that occur in diverse settings. Moreover, in contrast to the images presented in “The Chinese Woman in America,” two other essays by Sui Sin Far resist the characterization of sequestered, silent Chinese American wives. Her October 1903 essay in the Los Angeles Express, “Chinatown Needs a School,” asserts one woman’s public activist role in her community, as well as offering a positive example of a Chinese woman’s reconciliation of Progressive American middle-class values with those of her homeland. Brought to the United States as a slave, Mrs. Sing was taken in by a white benefactress and put through mission schools, receiving a “liberal education.” Sui Sin Far recounts how she married an Americanized Chinese man and now has a “bright, happy little flock” of children who represent a synthesis of West and East—they bear English names yet wear “the comfortable Chinese dress,” and they “speak both Chinese and English fluently.” Mrs. Sing is an early example of the felicitous bridging of cultures that Sui Sin Far’s later character Mrs. Spring Fragrance embodies, a quality even symbolized by Mrs. Sing’s house, which is “furnished tastefully in a semi-eastern, semi-western style.”23 Despite Mrs. Sing’s Americanization, Sui Sin Far tells us that she is “loyal to her own country” and that “she and her husband always have worked for the good of the Chinese with whom they come in contact.” In particular, Mrs. Sing has been working for the establishment of a government school in Chinatown, for the Chinese children cannot attend the American schools unless they wear American dress, and “this is a great hardship and inconvenience to Chinese mothers who in many cases are unable to make their children’s clothes in the American style and occasionally are too poor to afford the change.” Mrs. Sing is thus an advocate for her people, articulating the wrongs of an educational system that forces immigrant children to assimilate to American practices, even when it is economically impossible for them to do so. Though with ten children, Mrs. Sing must be consumed with the domestic child-care duties traditionally ascribed to women, she is

23. Sui Sin Far, “Chinatown Needs a School,” 202, 203.

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also aware of political issues beyond the home and is working to correct such social injustices, as were many women at the turn of the twentieth century in America. Through this example, Sui Sin Far suggests the value of public activism associated with the New Woman, an ideal that Mrs. Sing may have imbibed along with her Western education or, as Judy Yung has suggested, may have been inspired by changing gender attitudes in China at this time.24 This alternative image of a Chinese wife as a politically aware and active individual, one that transcends the stereotype of the muted, submissive slave of her husband, is reiterated in another Los Angeles Express piece, “Leung Ki Chu and His Wife,” published in October 1903. Sui Sin Far here profiles the wife of the exiled leader of China’s reform party. A “charming woman” who endures without complaint her husband’s long absences for his work, she “devotes her life to her children, to whom she daily teaches the lessons of patience and fortitude.” However, Sui Sin Far notes that “when her children are in bed and her husband over the sea,” Mrs. Leung may be envisioned “stretching her arms Chinaward” and speaking passionately of her homeland: “Oh, China! Unhappy country! What would I not sacrifice to see thee uphold thyself among the nations! . . . Thou wert the birthplace of the arts and the sciences. Thy princes rested in benevolence, thy wise men were revered, thy people happy. And now, the empire, which is the oldest under the heavens, is falling and other nations stand ready to smite the nation that first smote itself. Truly Mencius said, ‘The losing of empires comes through losing the people.’ The government, being foolish and correct, has lost the hearts of the people.”25 In Sui Sin Far’s vision, the otherwise conventional Mrs. Leung is politically outspoken. Like the fictional Mrs. Spring Fragrance, who criticizes American immigration policies, she is cognizant of the political injustices of her day—in this case, the wrongs of her homeland’s government as well as the imperialistic designs that other countries have on China. That this woman would express an opinion on such matters again demonstrates how Sui Sin Far implies that Chinese women have the potential to transcend the models of silent obedience that Confucian philosophy prescribed for them. This is underscored by the fact that the same speech is uttered by a Chinese male immi-

24. Ibid., 203. See also Yung, “Unbound Feet.” 25. Sui Sin Far, “Leung Ki Chu,” 207–8.

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grant (in the form of a poem) in her later story “Chan Han Yen, Chinese Student” (1912).26 In addition to her nonfiction, one piece of Sui Sin Far’s earlier fiction also illustrates her interest in women’s ability to resist their roles within patriarchal Chinese culture, as well as the benefits of their exposure to the greater degree of agency for women in Western society. “The Sing Song Woman,” published in the Land of Sunshine in October 1898, initiates a theme reiterated in her essay “The Chinese in America, Part III: Like the American” (1909) and the story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1910) by depicting women collaborating in order to circumvent the practice of arranged marriage and forge unions of their own choosing, suggesting that their exposure to the Western ideal of marital choice is liberating. In the tale, Chinatown actress Ah Oi helps an unhappy friend, Mag-gee, escape such a marriage by secretly taking her friend’s place during the wedding ceremony. Though both women are represented as deviant from the obedient, submissive Confucian ideal of the Chinese woman, their reasons for entering into the conspiracy are quite different. Ah Oi, characterized as defiant and mischievous, is “not as other Chinese women, who all their lives have been sheltered by a husband or father’s care,” and the chance to stand in for Mag-gee seems to her a delicious practical joke. At the same time, though, she harbors a secret wish to return to her homeland, with the implication that she does not really enjoy her life as a “despised [Chinatown] actress.” Perhaps the implication is that her means of supporting herself, as an actress on the stage where she is subjected to the objectifying gaze of males both Chinese and white, is not satisfying, despite the freedoms that living in America may otherwise have afforded her. Mag-gee, on the other hand, views the prospect of an arranged marriage and a return to China very differently. Half-white and half-Chinese, born and raised in America, and in love with another man, Mag-gee protests her “Americanness” at the same time that she sees marriage to an un-Westernized “Chinaman” as a fate worse than death: “See! My eyes are blue and there is gold in my hair; and I love potatoes and beef, and every time I eat rice it makes me sick. . . . [N]ow everything is fixed and I’m going away forever to live

26. Sui Sin Far, “Chan Han Yen,” 284. This fact is also noted by Annette WhiteParks in “‘We Wear the Mask’: Sui Sin Far as One Example of Trickster Authorship,” 9.

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in China. I shall be a Chinese woman next year—I commenced to be one today, when father made me put the paint and powder on my face, and dress in Chinese clothes. Oh! I never want anyone to feel as I do.”27 Mag-gee’s father forcing her to assume the clothing and makeup of Chinese women is significant, for other of Sui Sin Far’s characters’ choices to retain Chinese dress or put on Western clothing indicate their relative ability or willingness to incorporate Western ideals of womanhood into their lives. When the moment of her unveiling comes at the wedding, the “bride,” Ah Oi, is delighted by the shocked, angry reactions of the assemblage, particularly Mag-gee’s father. However, Ke Leang, the bridegroom, is less quick to pass judgment; he sees the good intentions behind Ah Oi’s mischievous means of helping her friend, and he defends her act. Moreover, charmed by her beauty, he resolves to marry her again legitimately and take her to China, a promise that makes Ah Oi’s heart, long “as hard as stone,” fill with joy. Although the romantic happy ending of this story is a bit trite—and likely written in order to fulfill the Land of Sunshine readers’ expectations for a pleasing Chinatown tale—”The Sing Song Woman” nonetheless offers a feminist sense of possibility for circumventing patriarchal practices. Along with “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” in which the title character facilitates a friend’s elopement, and her essay “The Chinese in America,” wherein a woman arranges a proxy bride to take her place in an undesired marriage, this story valorizes American women’s freedom to choose whom to marry, and it demonstrates Chinese American women acting as empowered agents. Although the individuals in these works do not transcend altogether the patriarchal expectation of marriage for women, the texts portray individuals subverting that system from within to forge unions of their choosing, and they illustrate examples of women collaborating to achieve such goals. In this sense, “The Sing Song Woman,” along with Sui Sin Far’s other pieces concerning women’s subversion of arranged marriage, suggests that Chinese women’s exposure both to Western marital choice and to examples of women’s organization for social change is indeed a liberatory process. Turning from Sui Sin Far’s earlier prose and fiction to her autobiographical statements reveals a continued preoccupation with the conditions and subjectivity of Chinese or Chinese American women,

27. Sui Sin Far, “The Sing Song Woman,” 126.

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particularly as their choices deviate from traditional cultural expectations. Moreover, Sui Sin Far’s unique brand of feminism, inflected by the Western ideals of the New Woman but also developed out of her position as a Chinese American woman interested in both the growing rights of Chinese women and the welfare of Chinese Americans in an atmosphere of racism and nativism, underscores both these texts. Both “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909) and “Sui Sin Far, the Half-Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career” (1912) illuminate the author’s personal beliefs, reflected in such matters as her refusal to marry and desire to support herself, as well as her interest in using writing as a voice for ethnic activism and to advocate for women. “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” published in the New York Independent in January 1909, is an autobiographical tour de force, transcribing the challenges of growing up as a biracial child in North America and attacking white racism at the turn of the twentieth century. This text also emphasizes Sui Sin Far’s position as a minority woman, exploring how the double indemnity of that position renders her particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation, as also seen with several characters in Pauline Hopkins’s fiction and the heroine of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea. Furthermore, Sui Sin Far conveys the unique difficulties she faced when considering a marriage proposal, being encouraged to “pass”—in this case, as another minority rather than a white woman. Through these themes, Sui Sin Far delineates the unique concerns of women of color attempting to live independent lives at the turn of the century, ones that transcended the concerns of white, middle-class women. The formative years Sui Sin Far describes in this essay are underscored by poverty and racial discrimination, but also by awareness of the particular oppressions of women. One passage highlights her sympathetic identification with her mother’s pain during the many childbirths, often only a year apart, that Sui Sin Far witnessed within the close quarters of their household: “My mother’s screams of agony when a baby is born almost drive me wild, and long after her pangs have subsided I feel them in my own body. Sometimes it is a week before I can get to sleep after such an experience.”28 The trauma of her mother’s pain, which Sui Sin Far internalizes, echoes the emotional

28. Sui Sin Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio,” 221. Future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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trauma she describes suffering throughout her youth over both her anxiety about her biracial identity and her sense of inferiority within her family, being constantly compared to her “stronger” younger sister, Winnifred. Nonetheless, Sui Sin Far’s description of her repeated witness of her mother’s painful childbearing suggests a dramatic initiation into the biological burdens of marriage, and it is not surprising that she later considers the prospect of matrimony with trepidation, for this reason as well as others. “Leaves” demonstrates the unique concerns of women of color, however, in critiquing their heightened sexual vulnerability. Recounting a stay in Jamaica for a journalistic assignment, she bemusedly observes the racism of whites toward blacks there, but she herself is soon involved in the dynamics of white hegemony: “When it begins to be whispered about the place that I am not all white, some of the ‘sporty’ people seek my acquaintance. . . . When, however they discover that I am a very serious and sober-minded spinster indeed, they retire quite gracefully, leaving me a few amusing reflections.” Sui Sin Far offers an example of such sexual advances, telling of a naval officer—“a big, blond, handsome fellow, several years younger than I”— who sends her his card. She meets with him, thinking he may have an item for the newspaper, but learns of his interest merely in having “good times” with her, as he suggestively explains: “‘I came just because I had an idea that you might like to know me. I would like to know you. You look such a nice little body. Say, wouldn’t you like to go for a sail this lovely night? I will tell you all about the sweet little Chinese girls I met when we were at Hong Kong. They’re not so shy!” (226). Despite the wry quality of Sui Sin Far’s self-characterization as a “very serious and sober-minded spinster indeed,” the anecdote has a darker undertone, from the officer’s objectifying scrutiny to his unpleasant, “silly and offensive” laugh. One of the New Woman’s ideals was freedom from sexual exploitation, as reflected in organized campaigns against prostitution and sexual assault and for higher ages of consent in the late nineteenth century.29 However, Sui Sin Far here points out the special vulnerability of women of color to such wrongs, as they were often denied the sexual virtue assumed inherent in their white peers, and in so doing she echoes the critiques of such exploitation in Mourning Dove’s and Pauline Hopkins’s writings. 29. See Degler, At Odds, esp. chap. 12, “Organizing to Control Sexuality,” 279– 97.

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“Leaves” also conveys the unique challenges faced by a biracial woman contemplating marriage. Not only did such women face the patriarchal nature of that institution that progressive white women also had to consider, but they also often confronted pressure to deny one side of their ethnic identity. Sui Sin Far writes of a half-Chinese, half-white woman who ultimately accepts a proposal from a white man, after criticism from her family for persisting in her “independent manner of living” (228). The woman breaks off the engagement upon realizing her fiancé’s embarrassment about her biracial identity, after he requests, “‘Wouldn’t it be just a little pleasanter for us if, after we are married, we allowed it to be presumed that you were—er— Japanese?’” (229). This was a pressure that Sui Sin Far assuredly encountered in her own life, as she speaks elsewhere of the many half-Chinese, half-white people who have chosen to pass as Japanese (228), and her sister Winnifred’s assumption of the public identity of “Onoto Watanna” is well documented. After breaking the engagement, the woman’s diary records her relief: “‘Joy, oh, joy! I’m free once more. Never again shall I be untrue to my own heart. Never again will I allow any one to ‘hound’ or ‘sneer’ me into matrimony’” (230). These Charlotte Perkins Gilman–esque sentiments about marriage, though attributed to a hypothetical acquaintance, are assumed to refer to Sui Sin Far’s own life,30 and they suggest her resistance to the expectation that women marry. Yet for Sui Sin Far, the situation is more complex than for a white woman with hesitations about matrimony; not only must a potential mate be willing to share an egalitarian marriage, but he must also fully accept her ethnic identity, even in an era of rampant sinophobia. In her autobiographical piece for the Boston Globe in 1912, “Sui Sin Far, the Half-Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career,” the author further illuminates such lines of thought by asserting her dedication to forging a satisfying career, as well as reiterating her allegiance to a liberated Western view of womanhood. The first idea is expressed when she reflects on the unhappiness of her childhood, constantly consumed with the care of siblings in her crowded household, and looks forward to the “room of her own” in which to write that Virginia Woolf would later describe: “The only content I experienced was when I peeped into the future and saw all the family grown and settled down 30. See Amy Ling, “Reading Her/Stories against His/Stories in Early Chinese American Literature,” 79.

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and myself, far away from all the noise and confusion, with nothing to do but write a book.” This creative urge is reiterated as she describes her first employment as a stenographer, noting that such work “is torturing to one whose mind must create its own images.”31 Like Pauline Hopkins, who also supported herself by transcribing others’ words and made the heroine of her best-known work a stenographer— though her name connotes a poet—Sui Sin Far suggests the challenges that turn-of-the-century women, particularly those of color, faced in obtaining remunerative yet satisfying employment. The essay also reiterates Sui Sin Far’s respect for progressive American women. She notes with pride that while living in Seattle, “I . . . formed friendships with women who braced and enlightened me, women to whom the things of the mind and the heart appealed; who were individuals, not merely the daughters of their parents, the wives of their husbands.” She adds that they taught her “that nationality was no bar to friendship with those whose friendship was worthwhile,” implying that these women were (white) Americans, and thus complicating the conclusion that some critics have reached regarding Sui Sin Far’s attitudes toward progressive white women—for example, Sean McCann’s assertion that “in her stories . . . feminists are shallow and unhappy,” and Elizabeth Ammons’s argument that Sui Sin Far “obviously resented white feminists’ presumption of authority when it came to defining women’s issues.”32 Indeed, although several of her texts do register the critical view of Western women that McCann and Ammons have noted, it must be acknowledged that her oeuvre also praises the values that such women represent, if at times in misguided ways. As such, Sui Sin Far inhabits a liminal position in relation to the New Woman, both recognizing the value of many of her ideals for all women and criticizing her complicity with hegemonic structures of socioeconomic privilege and racial prejudice. Sui Sin Far captures the contradictory nature of the New Woman, affirming what made her liberatory while criticizing what made her, from a different perspective, conservative. Sui Sin Far’s later fictional works most fully represent her engagement with Chinese, Chinese American, and white women’s experiences in the context of the New Woman’s moment in Progressive Era 31. Sui Sin Far, “Sui Sin Far,” 291, 292. 32. Ibid., 294; McCann, “Connecting Links,” 79; Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 110.

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America. These texts return to themes she previously treated, such as Chinese or Chinese American women’s desire to speak as authentic subjects and their ability to negotiate limitations to achieve their own ends. However, these stories also introduce new themes, such as the insensitivity with which Chinese immigrant women could be treated by well-meaning white women philanthropists or missionaries. Some of these works furthermore imply the exclusionary nature of the New Woman’s brand of feminism for white working-class women, suggesting that her ideals were difficult to achieve—or even undesirable—for women outside of both the socioeconomic and the racial defaults of the American middle class. Several of Sui Sin Far’s works of fiction published between 1910 and 1912 engage with these themes and others, ranging from the cultural misapprehensions that can occur in overseas missionary work to white American women’s economic exploitation of Chinese immigrant men. For example, “The Sugar Cane Baby,” published in Good Housekeeping in 1910, critiques Catholic missionaries’ lack of understanding of indigenous cultures, as well as employing a New Woman– like figure to resolve the story’s conflict through her anticolonialist perspective. The story is set in a tropical country, likely the Jamaica of Sui Sin Far’s 1897–1898 sojourn, and it opens with a bucolic description of a dark-skinned baby napping in the shade while his mother works in an adjacent cane field. A beautiful snake coiled nearby delights and apparently guards him, darting forward when a butterfly lands on the child. This peaceful scene is disrupted by the passing by of two Sisters of Mercy who are alarmed to spot the snake, exclaiming, “‘Oh, these mothers, these mothers! What love have they for their children when they leave them like this?’”33 Sui Sin Far thus depicts the (white) assumption that women of color did not feel the maternal instinct for their children so often attributed to white women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the same perspective she deconstructed in her portrait of markedly unmaternal white women in interracial marriages in “Half-Chinese Children.” The remainder of this story further undercuts the sisters’ illinformed perspective on parenting practices in the indigenous culture. They keep the child at their orphanage, but he refuses to eat, a fact noticed with alarm by an American visitor, journalist Leila Carroll. She

33. Sui Sin Far, “The Sugar Cane Baby,” 259.

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demands to see the mother superior of the mission and asserts that the baby’s family had trained the snake to guard him, implying both that the child should be returned to his parents, who can better care for him than the sisters, and that the latter are incorrect in their assumptions about the native population. After the mother superior hesitantly agrees, Leila produces the child’s mother, who has been waiting outside. The baby joyfully reunites with his mother, and the mother superior tearfully acknowledges the rightness of Leila Carroll’s instincts. On the one hand, this brief story seems simple, full of elements to appeal to the broad audience for a periodical like Good Housekeeping: a charming baby, an elevation of the maternal bond, and lavish descriptions of the beautiful landscape of the tropics. But the story also contains a forceful critique of the mission work to convert indigenous populations to Christianity that often went hand in hand with the political and economic dimensions of European and American colonialism. While this child fortunately escapes the Catholic orphanage, a sobering sense remains that the others will not. Indeed, the very existence of these orphans signifies the effects of colonial domination, for “most of them were pure pickaninnies, but not a few bore the mark of the white man in complexion and feature.” This remark’s implied criticism of white men’s exploitation of women of color echoes Sui Sin Far’s anecdote about her experience in Jamaica in “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” as well as an underlying theme of her recently discovered story “Away Down in Jamaica.”34 Of significance as well is Sui Sin Far’s choice to make the child in the story a “Hindu,” rather than a black or mulatto child like the others in the sisters’ care; he is “the only little native of Asia” among the children at the orphanage.35 His suffering the same harsh treatment that the black and mulatto Jamaican infants do suggests the mutual vulnerability of members of these cultural groups to the well-intentioned but destructive tendencies of religious imperialism. Moreover, in “The Sugar Cane Baby” Sui Sin Far introduces an assertive female figure to solve the story’s conflict, as she does in stories featuring Mrs. Spring Fragrance. In this case, Leila Carroll’s race

34. See Martha Cutter, “Sex, Love, Revenge, and Murder in ‘Away Down in Jamaica’: A Lost Story by Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton),” which notes the story’s critique of how its “brown” (Jamaican) female character, after being seduced by a white man, is cast off by him in favor of a white woman (88). 35. Sui Sin Far, “The Sugar Cane Baby,” 260.

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is not indicated, but the “American” (which Sui Sin Far usually used to mean “white”) woman is characterized as possessing a commendable ability to advocate for others and mediate between differing cultural perspectives. When Leila has secured the mother superior’s agreement to relinquish the baby, she triumphantly reveals that she has brought his mother along. The mother superior’s response, “‘Oh, you people of the North! To speak of a thing is to do it with you, is it not?’” and Leila’s proud reply, “‘I hope so,’” suggest that the latter’s independent thought and assertiveness are a product of her “northern” upbringing.36 In this case, Sui Sin Far praises the self-sufficient qualities produced by the socialization of American women in the era of the New Woman. Though some of her tales criticize the behaviors of autonomous women, such as Adah Raymond in “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” (1912) and Adah Charlton in “The Wisdom of the New” (1912), here she implies that the forthright ways of the American woman resolve a tragic conflict. Nonetheless, the story’s critique of the cultural misapprehensions of missionaries is somewhat at odds with its elevation of a New Woman figure, as the preoccupations of the women’s movement of this time were built on assumptions of white racial superiority that supported Western colonialism and, by extension, the missions’ work that relied on colonizers’ protection. Another of Sui Sin Far’s later stories, “A Love Story from the Rice Fields of China,” published in New England Magazine in 1911, similarly praises qualities of American womanhood at the turn of the century, as the protagonist describes how she was inspired by an American woman to be “brave” and forge financial independence for herself, a key goal of the New Woman. Ah Sue, a Westernized Chinese woman, recounts her story to “a friend who was both Chinese and American” named, significantly, Sui Sin Far. Ah Sue relates how she fell in love with Chow Han, who went to work in the United States and promised to return for her in a few years. He was reportedly killed in a train accident, and Ah Sue was pressured by family members to marry another man. However, recalling a Western woman who befriended her in Canton, she resolved “to remain single, as the American woman,” rather than following the dictates of her family and marrying a man she did not love. With the help of this friend, Ah Sue opened a successful flower shop in Canton, and though she was occasionally sad,

36. Ibid., 261.

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her “‘heart was serene.’”37 In an idealistic ending, Ah Sue relates how Chow Han miraculously returned and they were married. Again, the story evidences the formulaic tendencies—in this case the marriage plot—that constrained Sui Sin Far in her attempts to appeal to broad American reading audiences. However, “A Love Story from the Rice Fields of China” does offer liberatory possibilities; in modeling how a woman can establish financial independence and personal fulfillment outside of marriage, this story follows a paradigm similar to many of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s stories, and it again suggests that Sui Sin Far respected the growing willingness in American women at the turn of the century to pursue independent lives beyond wedlock. On the other hand, a more threatening picture of white American womanhood emerges in “Chan Han Yen, Chinese Student,” published in New England Magazine the following year, which anticipates the way in which Sui Sin Far’s contemporary María Cristina Mena treated such subjects in her fiction. Recalling the criticism of white women who marry Chinese men for their money in her article “Half-Chinese Children,” this story relates how an opportunistic American woman, goaded by her mother, pursues marriage with a naive Chinese student for his suspected wealth. Carrie Bray, whose mother runs a boardinghouse for Chinese students, begins taking an interest in Chan Han Yen, who has been led to believe innocently that “chatting with members of the fair sex, even though folly was their theme, should be part of the Chinese student’s American curriculum,” as much as his study of mathematics or history. He soon finds himself enamored of Carrie and jealous of her friendly attentions to the other boarders. In defending his affections for this white woman to a cousin, he romantically declares, “‘Love is more than all.’”38 However, in a similar fashion to the protagonist of Mena’s tale “The Education of Popo,” Chan Han Yen is soon disabused of idealistic notions about his American sweetheart. When he informs Carrie that he must stay in the United States several more years in order to earn his living, she is shocked and quickly abandons him, telling her mother, “‘What do you think? Yen’s people are poor and after we are married, he will have to stay in America and live and work here just like a common Chinaman.’” She sends him a letter avowing that she can no longer see him because he is not a Christian, which the dis37. Sui Sin Far, “Love Story,” 266, 268, 269. 38. Sui Sin Far, “Chan Han Yen,” 282, 284.

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traught Chan knows is not the real reason, and the story concludes as he bitterly tells himself that “‘the Lesson of the Woman is over.’”39 His language echoes that of the title of Mena’s story, wherein the Mexican boy Popo receives an unsentimental education into the opportunism of an American woman—in that case, using Popo as leverage to rekindle the interests of the American husband whom she recently divorced. In both Sui Sin Far’s and Mena’s stories, the American girl of the turn of the century comes across as worldly and predatory, schooling an innocent, nonwhite male in a way that reverses the script wherein a white Western male takes advantage of a sexually vulnerable, often exoticized female of color—a scenario treated critically by most of the authors in this study. In reversing this cliché, Sui Sin Far, like Mena, suggests that one must look beyond it to see that the operations of sexual power are more complicated—that women as well as men with a sense of cultural entitlement may regard individuals of color as sexually available, regardless of the emotional cost to the latter. Moreover, in this story, as in Mena’s, Sui Sin Far appears to criticize the very quality of American New Womanhood—assertiveness, though in this case sexual assertiveness—that she praises in other works. Carrie’s confident pursuit of Chan, asking him to accompany her to mission meetings and flirtatiously predicting that he will be her future husband, anticipates the portrait of the sexually forward Alicia Cherry in Mena’s tale. Perhaps this characterization suggests that, although Sui Sin Far admired many qualities of progressive American women at the turn of the century whom she befriended, the new sexual candor that arose in this period was a dimension of the New Woman that she was unwilling to endorse. Though echoing some of these themes from her later magazine fiction, the tales in Sui Sin Far’s volume Mrs. Spring Fragrance often share a unique thematic preoccupation, indicating the author’s reservations concerning middle-class American womanhood, especially the reformminded manifestation of the New Woman.40 As Elizabeth Ammons and Martha Patterson have demonstrated, stories including “The Inferior Woman,” “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” “Her Chinese Husband,” and “The Wisdom of the New” 39. Ibid., 287, 288. 40. For further discussion of this theme in Sui Sin Far’s stories, see Ammons, “New Woman,” 92–95.

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demonstrate her cynical perspective on Progressive discourses of Americanization, as well as the New Woman’s embodiment of such philosophies.41 However, other tales, including “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” and “The Prize China Baby,” also present well-meaning but insensitive white women who interact with Chinese American immigrants, interrogating their worth as models to which Chinese women are expected to adapt, or implying the misguidedness of missionary or philanthropic women’s efforts in these communities. The first of these tales signifies on this theme while still acknowledging the value of Western women’s experience. Pau Tsu comes to America to join her husband, Wan Lin Fo; having already adopted American dress and language himself, he wishes her to “‘learn to speak like . . . and be like’” an independent-minded woman he admires, Adah Raymond. However, Pau Tsu resists his efforts to have her learn English and wear American fashions. When he requires her to see a male doctor, she is so humiliated that, in a paradoxically “American” move, she leaves him. Adah criticizes Lin Fo’s treatment of his wife, pointing out the hypocrisy in his desire for Pau Tsu to become like the enlightened American women he praises and his simultaneous reliance on Chinese expectations of wifely obedience to force her to do so: “‘You wanted your wife to be an American woman while you remained a Chinaman. . . . Do you think an American would dare treat his wife as you have treated yours?’”42 Adah also helps effect a reconciliation between the Chinese couple, but it is only then that she learns that Pau Tsu’s unhappiness was largely caused by her belief that Lin Fo was in love with Adah. As Ammons has noted, although the philanthropic white woman appears well meaning in this story, she is also shown as culturally insensitive, blind to the differences between Chinese and American perceptions of male-female friendship. However, the narrative perspective of “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” is not wholly critical of the philanthropic New Woman: Adah Raymond is perceptive enough to see the double standard in Wan’s treatment of his wife, causing him to acknowledge his wrongdoing and seek the latter’s forgiveness. Also, the story implies that Pau Tsu’s exposure to Western gender relations enables her to impel the reformation of Wan Lin Fo by leaving him, as 41. See Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 112–15; and Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl. 42. Sui Sin Far, “Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” 85, 91.

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she would likely have been unable to do in China. Pau Tsu shows how aware of these practices she is, sarcastically invoking American gender relations in a letter to him: “Your unworthy Pau Tsu lacks the courage to face the ordeal before her. She has, therefore, left you and prays you to obtain a divorce, as is the custom in America, so that you may be happy with the Beautiful One, who is so much your Pau Tsu’s superior.’”43 Thus, rather than constituting a unified critique of white progressive American womanhood at the turn of the century, this text registers a more ambivalent stance. The story indeed suggests that it is Pau Tsu’s right not to wish to “while in Rome, do as the Romans do,” as her husband urges, and thereby become the simulacrum of an assertive young American woman. However, the story also implies that without awareness of the possibilities available to American women, Pau Tsu would have been unable to resist an ironically oppressive attempt to “liberate” her, if only in outward ways. “The Prize China Baby” is a more pessimistic depiction of the devastating unintended effects of philanthropic Progressive women’s work in Chinatowns. Fin Fan, the slave wife of an immigrant tobacco factory owner, has given birth to a baby girl whom her husband resents for taking time away from his wife’s tobacco-winding duties, but “by dint of getting up very early in the morning and retiring very late at night,” the submissive Fin Fan is able to complete her work and care for the baby. When a white woman from the Presbyterian Mission encourages her to enter the infant in a “Chinese baby show” there, she resolves to do so, hoping that if the baby wins a prize, her husband will stop threatening to give the child away. Jessamine Flower does win a prize at the contest, but Fin Fan and the baby, hurrying home to make up lost work time, are struck by a cart and killed. Although the missionary worker appears only briefly in this story, her behavior is significant. Speaking with a sense of authority, she tells Fin Fan that her baby is likely to get a prize in the contest, “feeling the tiny, perfectly shaped limbs and peeping into the brightest of black eyes,” as if the baby were a piece of livestock. The image disturbingly recalls the physical assessments of African Americans at slave markets in the antebellum period, as does the visual spectacle of the Chinese babies at the mission contest itself, laid out for display before the “group of admiring ladies,” and it calls into question the

43. Ammons, “New Woman,” 92; Sui Sin Far, “Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” 90.

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national eugenic fascination with racial “quality” that underlay the popularity of such contests in this era.44 Though in this case by accident rather than through infanticide, as with “The Wisdom of the New,” Sui Sin Far again paints a grim scenario of a white female philanthropist’s efforts having tragic effects on Chinese immigrant women and their families. Her reiterations of this theme suggest how strongly Sui Sin Far felt that such women’s complicity with nativist expectations of assimilation—or their complicity with the continued exoticization of the immigrant Chinese population—must be exposed. And though Sui Sin Far’s stance in these texts often shows her to be critical of the Progressive ideal of women’s humanitarian work in the public sphere, it is important to note that women and babies are most often seen as the casualties in the misguided efforts of these philanthropic New Women. With such awareness, these stories at the same time reveal a decidedly feminist concern with the welfare of oppressed women, whether their oppressors are men or other women. Other stories in this volume overtly criticize middle-class American New Women—and their male supporters—as unsympathetic to white working-class women, and thus anticipate such works by Anzia Yezierska as Arrogant Beggar (1927), wherein her critique of the Lady Bountiful figure concerns class rather than ethnic difference. As Ammons and Patterson have suggested, “The Inferior Woman” (first published in the progressive Hampton’s Magazine in 1910) portrays in nearly allegorical terms how the rubric of the New Woman could exclude women outside the white middle class, depicting the prejudice of well-to-do “woman suffragist” Mary Carman against the working-class woman her son wishes to marry. Mrs. Carman considers Alice Winthrop, a legal secretary, “uneducated” and the product of a “sordid and demoralizing” environment, complaining, “Is it not disheartening to our woman’s cause to be compelled to realize that girls such as this one can win men over to be their friends and lovers, when there are so many splendid young women who have been carefully trained to be companions and comrades of educated men?” Alice is in fact a sensitive, courageous, self-made woman, and Sui Sin Far highlights her attributes to undermine Mrs. Carman’s erroneous judgement: she is friendly, highly regarded by her colleagues, and resolute in her principles. Moreover, Alice declines to participate in the criti-

44. Sui Sin Far, “The Prize China Baby,” 115, 116.

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cism of men that, Sui Sin Far suggests, is part of the organized women’s movement at that time. Asked to speak at a suffrage meeting about her work experiences as “illustrations of the suppression and oppression of women by men,” she politely refuses, asserting that she has been “borne aloft and morally supported by . . . the men amongst whom I worked.” Even the supposedly “superior woman” in the story with whom Alice is juxtaposed, the middle-class Ethel Evebrook, champions Alice, pointing out the hypocrisy of those like Mrs. Carman: “‘Mrs. Carman is your friend and a well-meaning woman sometimes; but a woman suffragist, in the true sense, she certainly is not. . . . It is women such as Alice Winthrop who, in spite of every drawback, have raised themselves to the level of those who have had every advantage, who are the pride and glory of America.” Ethel implies that true suffrage is one in which all women are included, and she acknowledges the narrow way in which the movement measured women’s contributions. When her mother notes that Alice could not give a speech at a suffrage meeting as Ethel can, her daughter responds: “‘You foolish mother! . . . To stand upon a platform at woman suffrage meetings and exploit myself is certainly a great recompense to you and father for all the sacrifices you have made in my behalf,’” adding that Alice’s “‘heart and mind are better developed. . . . She has been out in the world all her life, I only a few months.’”45 Most significantly, though Sui Sin Far thus critiques turn-of-thecentury feminism through the voice of one of its greatest beneficiaries, a white woman, she also employs a cross-cultural perspective to indict classism in the women’s movement. It is Sui Sin Far’s culturally hybrid character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance who alerts Mrs. Carman to her erroneous thinking, causing the latter to recant her prejudice and welcome Alice as a daughter-in-law. Mrs. Spring Fragrance asks Mrs. Carman, “‘You are so good as to admire my husband because he is what the Americans call ‘a man who has made himself.’ Why then do you not admire the Inferior Woman who is a woman who has made herself?’”46 Far from being a silenced Other, Mrs. Spring Fragrance draws on her unique position in the culture of early-twentiethcentury America—a bemused observer of the American veneration of self-made success—to articulate the hypocrisy of Mrs. Carman’s

45. Sui Sin Far, “The Inferior Woman,” 35–37. 46. Ibid., 39.

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views. In so doing, she performs a more constructive role than does Ethel Evebrook, effecting change that can lead to female solidarity across class lines. Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s own identity as a woman of color, in conjunction with her willingness to criticize a white woman’s definition of feminism, suggests the need for a place from which such women could speak in the discourse of turn-of-the-century feminism. Finally, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s interest in conducting ethnographic study of the white community is a clever way through which Sui Sin Far challenges the racialized discourses about nonwhite cultures in this period that underlay much Progressive thought. Likewise, in the tales “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese” and “Her Chinese Husband” (both originally published in the Independent in 1910), Sui Sin Far trenchantly exposes the limitations of the iconic New Woman as an embodiment of Progressive thought, depicting her male advocates as equally blind to the classist assumptions behind her ideals. In the first story, the working-class speaker recounts her eventual estrangement from her husband, a mouthpiece of Progressive intellectualism in his “omnivorous [reading] of socialistic and new-thought literature,” as well as his support of suffrage and admiration of “clever business women.”47 After divorcing him, the speaker eventually marries an Americanized Chinese man, and although such a scenario—and out of genuine love, rather than the financial opportunism Sui Sin Far elsewhere noted—would have shocked many white readers at the time, Sui Sin Far portrays Liu Kanghi as a far kinder and more affectionate mate than the speaker’s first husband. She thus reverses stereotypical understandings of both the “New Men” in America and Chinese husbands, showing the latter’s potential to be kind and supportive, and the former’s potential to be dictatorial. However, Sui Sin Far suggests that such happy endings cannot last; naturalistic forces come into play as the speaker’s husband is killed by Chinese immigrants who resent his marrying across racial lines. Through these two stories, along with “The Inferior Woman,” Sui Sin Far most critically implies the ironic susceptibility of both suffrage- and reform-oriented New Women and their male supporters to ethnocentrism and classism. As a corrective, perhaps, to the limitations of the iconic American New Woman, other tales in Mrs. Spring Fragrance offer models of

47. Sui Sin Far, “Story of One White Woman,” 67.

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agency in hybrid Chinese American women characters who successfully navigate cultural, geographical, and even gender borders. The character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, whom Annette White-Parks has compared to a trickster, is the most salient example—and indeed, the fact that she appears in the first two stories of the volume suggests how important it may have been to Sui Sin Far to present such an alternative to her readers.48 Having emigrated to Seattle with her husband, Mrs. Spring Fragrance has assimilated successfully into American life while retaining aspects of her culture that she values. She happily wears “the American dress”; she has mastered English to the degree that, as her husband says, “‘There are no more American words for her learning’”; and she shares close friendships with several white women.49 On the other hand, Mrs. Spring Fragrance relies on the rhetoric of a subservient Chinese wife in letters to her husband, and theirs was an arranged marriage, though it is noted that they fell in love with each other’s photographs before the wedding. The stories in which she appears suggest that Mrs. Spring Fragrance draws on both cultures to achieve her goals. In her eponymous story (initially published, like “The Inferior Woman,” in Hampton’s Magazine in 1910), she facilitates the marriage of Chinese American neighbor Laura and her true love against the wishes of Laura’s parents. Also, Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s hybrid, syncretic identity is an empowered location from which she speaks to evaluate the benefits and detriments of Chinese and American culture, as when she criticizes Mrs. Carman’s attitudes in “The Inferior Woman.” Even Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s seemingly submissive epistle to her husband in her eponymous story contains subversive messages. The letter describes how she attended a lecture on “America, the Protector of China!”: “It was most exhilarating, and the effect of so much benevolence leads me to beg of you to forget to remember that the barber charges you one dollar for a shave while he humbly submits to the American man a bill of fifteen cents. And murmur no more because your honored elder brother, on a visit to this country, is detained under the roof-tree of this great government instead of under your own humble roof.”50 This sarcastic commentary on American treatment of Chinese immigrants 48. See White-Parks, Sui Sin Far, esp. 184–87. 49. Sui Sin Far, “The Inferior Woman,” 30; Sui Sin Far, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” 17. 50. Sui Sin Far, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” 21.

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locates Mrs. Spring Fragrance not as an exoticized, silenced female Other but as a woman voicing her political views, recalling Sui Sin Far’s earlier piece “Leung Ki Chu and His Wife.” The character of Fin Fan in “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit” (1912) likewise offers a model of empowerment that transcends the limitations of the American New Woman. In this story, a young Chinese Canadian woman, Fin Fan, resists various authorities, including the missionaries in her community who wish to Christianize her, and her father, who wishes to select a husband for her. On the point of Fin Fan’s resistance to Christianization, the narrator notes that her “independent and original stand led Fin Fan to live, as it were, in an atmosphere of outlawry, even amongst her own countrywomen, for all proper Chinese females in Canada and America, unless their husbands are men of influence in their own country, conform upon request to the religion of the women of the white race.”51 Unfazed by her alienation even from other Chinese immigrant women in her community, Fin Fan chooses her own lover in Tian Shan, a smuggler who, tricksterlike, moves back and forth secretly between the borders of the United States and Canada. When Tian Shan is finally caught by officials and must be deported to China, Fin Fan dresses in men’s clothes and gets herself “deported” to China as well, reuniting en route with Tian Shan in a happy surprise ending. As the character of Mrs. Spring Fragrance crossed the thresholds of Western and Chinese cultures to achieve her own goals, be they circumventing an arranged marriage or critiquing white feminists’ susceptibility to classism, Fin Fan is also willing to cross, if superficially, the borders of gender to achieve her objectives. In doing so, she brings together cultural resonances from West and East, from the mythic Chinese woman warrior Fa Mu Lan to various examples in Western culture, from Joan of Arc to several Shakespearean characters, of women cross-dressing in order to achieve their goals. Moreover, this heroine’s act of masquerading as the opposite sex echoes other instances in Sui Sin Far’s fiction. For instance, in “The Smuggling of Tie Co” (1900), the young “boy” who sacrifices his life for a white American smuggler turns out to be a woman, and in “A Chinese Boy-Girl” (1904), a superstitious father dresses his son as a girl in order to protect him from being taken by evil spirits. Such examples suggest Sui Sin Far’s interest in interrogating not only race, class,

51. Sui Sin Far, “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit,” 120.

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and nationality but also gender as another category that defines identity yet is subject to manipulation. While “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit” is significant in offering a nonwhite model of female empowerment, it is also central to Sui Sin Far’s canon of work, and the ways in which she engages with the New Woman, in suggesting the theoretical significance of borders as empowering sites of transformation and plurality, particularly with regard to reconceiving women’s roles in society. Gloria Anzaldúa established the critical presence of the “border” for Chicano subjectivity, with critics such as Paula Gunn Allen amplifying on her thinking for other racial minorities.52 With its various border crossings, both literal and metaphorical, “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit” may be seen as an early contribution to Asian American literature that signifies on the figurative richness of this metaphor. Indeed, Sui Sin Far’s symbolic use of the border in “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit” is indicative of a quality of her work as a whole: the way in which it is vocalized from a liminal position, both within the perspective of the Progressive American middle class and outside of it. Her work, particularly as it offers models of female assertion in border-crossing figures, evidences the arguments made by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha that there is strength in liminality, that there is significance, even power, in the seeming no-man’s-land of cultural “in-betweenness.” It is this border subjectivity that allowed Sui Sin Far to engage uniquely with American culture in her writing, and in particular to delineate both the promise and the limitations of the Progressive American New Woman.

52. See P. Allen, “‘Border’ Studies: The Intersection of Gender and Color.”

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4

“The Highly Original Country of the Yanquis” María Cristina Mena and American Womanhood

In a November 1914 letter to her Century magazine editor, Douglas Zabriskie Doty, who had suggested she might write a story about “a Mexican character with an American background,” María Cristina Mena excitedly shared her idea for a new narrative: I have in outline the personalities of a family of wealthy refugees from Mexico, with possibilities of rich comedy in their contact with American life, especially in relation to the gradual emancipation of their daughter, who in spite of the efforts of her parents to keep her in pious subjection in accordance with Mexican tradition, takes to American freedom like a duck to water and blossoms into an ardently independent young woman, with, of course, a suitable romance to crown her adventures—the whole story to be unfolded in a succession of amusing letters from the different personages to their friends at home. For all this I have a rich store of material to draw from, and the work would not take me very long if I could only give all my time to it.1 1. Doty to Mena, September 28, 1914, and Mena to Doty, November 19, 1914, Century Company Records, New York Public Library, quoted in Amy Doherty, introduction to The Collected Stories of María Cristina Mena, xii–xiii.

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Mena’s letter reveals much about her interests as a writer and her relationship with the magazine that published the majority of her fiction. She herself had emigrated to the United States from Mexico seven years before and therefore likely found the subject of a Mexican refugee family grappling with American society intriguing. Moreover, Mena’s interest in emphasizing the fictional Mexican daughter’s “emancipation” into “American freedom,” transforming her into “an ardently independent young woman,” suggests the author’s fascination with the New Woman ideal in the Progressive Era United States, as well as her recognition that this phenomenon provided a fruitful topic for fiction. On the other hand, Mena’s reassurance that she would accompany this story line with a “suitable romance” recalls the contingencies of the marketplace for magazine fiction, while her comment that she could easily write the story “if I could only give all my time to it” indicates her engagement in composing the “exotic and quaint” stories of life in Mexico that Century had contracted her to write. Perhaps because of Century’s insistence on her providing “Mexican” stories, as well as the economic exigencies of World War I, as Amy Doherty notes, Mena was regrettably not commissioned to write this proposed tale.2 However, her published fiction nonetheless offers valuable insight into how a Mexican American woman viewed American culture in the early twentieth century, particularly the ideal of the New Woman. Largely published between 1913 and 1916 in such widely circulated magazines as American, Cosmopolitan, and especially Century, Mena’s stories may be seen as part of the “local color” literary tradition in depicting life in Mexico for a white American readership, replete with descriptions of the customs, dialects, and folklore of both the upper and lower classes there before and during the Mexican Revolution.3 However, some of her stories also portray cultural influences from the United States in the early twentieth century through the presence of white

2. Ibid., xx, xiii. 3. The majority of Mena’s series appeared in Century magazine between 1913 and 1916 following her commission by its editors to write stories about Mexico. She published little for many years after her marriage in 1916, but her 1913 story “John of God, the Water-Carrier” was republished in 1927 in T. S. Eliot’s Monthly Criterion and collected in The Best American Short Stories of 1928, and she published five children’s novels between 1942 and 1953. In 1997 the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series of Arte Público Press republished the short stories of Mena.

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American visitors to Mexico. These stories rely on dramatic irony to suggest that the values such characters represent, particularly the attitudes and behavior of “modern” young American New Women and the valorization of Anglo-Saxon ideals of beauty so often ascribed to the image of the New Woman, are not worthy of the respect that they receive in Mexico. Rather, these manners and ideals of American womanhood are presented as questionable forms of cultural colonialism from the United States through the carefully controlled tone of Mena’s narrators. Furthermore, Mena weaves into her narration stereotypical notions about Mexicans that are undercut by this dramatic irony, exposing the inadequacies of such views and suggesting that they are vocalized ironically, exemplifying Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of double-voicing.4 Much as with Sui Sin Far’s adoption of an outsider’s ethnographic perspective on the Chinese in some of her writings, though Mena’s narrators may invoke stereotypical American views of Mexicans, the stories themselves problematize such generalizations, often reversing the expectations set up by such views. In so doing, her stories counter the essentializing commentaries on nonwhite races that were prevalent at this time and even published alongside her stories in Century magazine, as with a 1913 essay series on immigration by Progressive sociologist and “race suicide” theorist Edward Alsworth Ross. Some of Mena’s stories also turn a critical eye on characteristics of Mexican society at the turn of the twentieth century, including its class hierarchy and its subjugation of women. Indeed, Mena problematizes several of her Mexican female characters, implicating the submissiveness of the peasant girl Dolores in “John of God, the Water-Carrier” (1913), the superficiality of the shallow and melodramatic María in “The Emotions of María Concepción” (1914), and the caste consciousness of the aristocratic titular character in “Doña Rita’s Rivals” (1914). However, others of Mena’s stories present examples of female selfassertion within her native culture, entirely outside the American New Womanly ideal. As Elizabeth Ammons has noted, “The Vine-Leaf” (1914) offers an intriguing portrait of an empowered woman who is unafraid to resort to murder to subvert her objectification in life and in art.5 Furthermore, Mena portrays a resourceful heroine sympathetic to the Mexican Revolution in “The Sorcerer and General Bisco” (1915) and, later, a bomb-wielding proletarian female revolutionary in “A 4. See Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination. 5. Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 145–47.

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Son of the Tropics” (1931), indicating the increasingly active roles Mexican women played in their society during the revolution. Like Sui Sin Far’s interest in the condition of women in her mother’s native culture that is reflected in some of her stories, Mena presents both critiques of women’s continued subjugation within her patriarchal native land as well as examples of assertive women that complicate this vision of her culture. However, Mena’s stories “The Gold Vanity Set” (1913), “The Education of Popo” (1914), and “Marriage by Miracle” (1916) are particularly significant for their critique of dominant values in the United States of the early twentieth century, particularly the behaviors and even the physical imagery associated with the New Woman. As such, Mena’s works, categorized in their time as charming portraits of Mexican life for largely white, middle-class audiences, can be seen as complex, parodic commentaries about this Progressive ideal of American womanhood from the perspective of an author who lived both within and outside of its paradigm. Mena’s own experiences reveal a cultural plurality that may have inspired the preoccupations with border crossing and cultural juxtaposition in her fiction. Born to an affluent family in Mexico City in 1893, she was raised within the traditions of the Mexican upper class during President Porfirio Díaz’s regime, attending an elite convent school and learning foreign languages.6 In 1907 she was sent to live with acquaintances in the United States out of fear over increasing political tensions that would soon erupt in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. In the United States, she began publishing stories at the age of twenty-one, married playwright Henry Chambers, and moved in a literary milieu that included friendships with D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. Despite her successful assimilation within American society, Mena’s extant correspondence with the editors of Century magazine reveals her desire to succeed in the U.S. literary marketplace while at the same time preserving the cultural integrity of her stories of Mexican life.7 These dual impulses underscore Mena’s own cultural hybridity, suggesting the unique perspective that may have inspired her to write repeatedly about the complicated dynamics of U.S.-Mexican interactions. As one of Mena’s two simultaneously published earliest stories, “The Gold Vanity Set” establishes this thematic preoccupation, while also 6. Doherty, introduction to Collected Stories, vii. 7. Doherty discusses Mena’s correspondence with her editors in ibid., xxii–xxiii.

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initiating her comparative analysis of women’s roles and ideals of female beauty in the two cultures. Along with “John of God, the Water-Carrier,” which appeared in Century magazine the same month, “The Gold Vanity Set” appeared in American magazine in November 1913, accompanied by pen-and-ink sketches and a full-page, brilliantly colored portrait of the story’s protagonist, Petra. The color illustration’s exoticized representation of Mena’s heroine embodies the American touristic gaze upon Mexico, particularly its women. Indeed, this story appeared during an era of growing U.S. tourism in the Southwest and Mexico, as Tiffany Ana López has noted in her consideration of the advertisements and articles surrounding Mena’s stories in Century, and the publishers likely believed that such a vivid image would be an inducement for the audience to read Mena’s story.8 However, the illustration’s stereotypical image of the sensual Mexican woman is, like the story, ironic when considered alongside the critiques the text offers about the perspectives of female tourists from the United States in Mexico. The story concerns the visit of a group of American tourists to a Mexican pueblo, where a young peasant girl, Petra, discovers a gold cosmetic “vanity set” left behind by one of the women. Petra adorns herself with cosmetics from the set, and soon after a series of strange coincidences leads Petra’s abusive husband to fear the power of the patron saint of Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and to vow never to harm Petra again. Petra is thus convinced that the vanity set is a treasure meant to be offered to the Virgin. When the set’s owner, an intrepid traveler and New Woman named Miss Young, wishes the item returned, Petra shows the visitor how she has placed the golden bauble at the local shrine of the Virgin, and Miss Young ultimately agrees to let the vanity set remain there. Despite Petra’s admiration for Miss Young, this North American New Woman’s cultural insensitivity and superficiality are revealed through Mena’s use of dramatic irony and double-voicing. Several details of the opening scene introduce Mena’s critique of the effects of American tourism in Mexico. For example, the story’s narrative intelligence is initially aligned with the inhabitants of the pueblo, particularly the girl Petra, rather than with the visitors: “One afternoon the pueblo resounded with foreign phrases and foreign laughter

8. López, “María Cristina Mena: Turn-of-the-Century La Malinche, and Other Tales of Cultural (Re)Construction,” 27–28.

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in foreign voices.”9 The narrator’s representation of the Americans as “foreign” is significant in light of Mena’s reading audience, for it situates them, if temporarily, in the position of outsiders. Mena’s choice of narrative perspective here suggests how her text will interrogate American assumptions about Mexico, and vice versa. Also, Mena’s initial description of Miss Young, who leads the group, suggests the desire of the tourists, and by extension that of Americans in general, to consume Mexico as an exotic product. Martha Patterson has asserted the New Woman’s association with commodity consumption in the market culture of modern America, and Miss Young stands as a prime example of such practice.10 Tourism, as an emergent economy in this era, was a form of consumption especially suited to the New Woman, suggesting the independence of travel, particularly through new technologies such as the automobile that also explicitly appealed to New Women in their advertising campaigns. The assertive and independent Miss Young, a consummate tourist, carries a camera and a guidebook, and upon glimpsing Petra, she cries out, “‘Oh, what a beautiful girl! I must get her picture.’” She desires to frame what she perceives as Petra’s colorful attractions within her photographer’s lens, viewing her as an object to be captured on film, rather than as an individual whose feelings about being photographed should be considered.11 Indeed, due to her unfamiliarity with cameras, Petra instead sees a “little black instrument pointing at her” (3), becomes frightened, and runs away. In this brief episode, the narrator indicates the very different perspectives of the two women, with seeming sympathy for the exploitation of the Mexican girl. However, this narrative identification with Petra within the story is complicated by the text’s presentation in American magazine, for the accompanying illustration of Petra, gaudily decorated with Miss Young’s rouge and powder and with jonquils from a nearby stream as she eagerly goes to awaken her drunken husband, reifies for American readers a construction of her as an ignorant, exotic ethnic commodity in the same 9. Mena, “The Gold Vanity Set,” 2. Future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text. 10. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 32. 11. Rob Johnson similarly notes how this moment demonstrates Mena’s “powerful understanding of the colonial gaze” in her fiction: “The character Mena has made us care about becomes a commodity, a subject for a thoughtless tourist snapshot” (“A ‘Taste for the Exotic’: Revolutionary Mexico and the Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter and Maria Cristina Mena,” 192).

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way Miss Young’s camera might. It is as if the publishers of American wished to provide their readers, ironically, with the photographic representation of Petra that she denies the American tourist in the story, and this is suggestive of the parameters in which Mena operated in order to publish her work in mainstream American periodicals. The story’s depiction of interactions between the visitors and Don Ramón, the local landowner, also portrays the phenomenon of American tourism in Mexico in a problematic light. The Don is supposed to be escorting the guests but instead finds himself “patiently bringing up the rear of the procession,” again implying the tourists’ selfcenteredness. However, he assures them that Petra and the other Indios are “‘[his] tenants,’” and he tells Miss Young, “‘The house is yours,’” referring to the adjacent inn, in essence cooperating with their desires by offering them “his” local peasants for their entertainment. This attitude is reiterated soon after when, as Miss Young repeats her desire to “‘have [Petra’s] picture,’” he replies, “‘Of course—at your disposition’” (3), as though it were in his power to offer Petra’s physical self to the American woman. In this manner, Mena implies the affiliation of the elite class of Mexicans with wealthy Americans, which was often the case during the Porfiriato regime.12 Mena’s own family was one example of this phenomenon, due to her father’s partnerships with American businessmen and the friends in America with whom she went to live as an adolescent.13 The growing financial and cultural affiliation between the upper classes in Mexico and the United States in the years preceding the Mexican Revolution is a subject of critical representation that reappears in Mena’s other stories. Miss Young’s reaction to Don Ramón’s offer, “‘Girls, do you hear that? . . . This is my house—and I invite you all in’” (3), reveals an imperialistic perspective predicated on the notion that native inhabi-

12. Such affiliation was encouraged by President Porfirio Díaz, who, according to Rebecca Stefoff, “went to great lengths to encourage foreign individuals and companies to invest their capital in Mexico. Díaz wined and dined visiting executives, and his ministers took them on tours of the country to show how peaceful and orderly Mexico had become. . . Foreign investors soon dominated Mexican business and industry, especially in the northern part of the country, where many huge mines and metalworking foundries were owned by American, French, and German millionaires” (Independence and Revolution in Mexico, 1810–1940, 92). Mena takes up this theme of affiliation between wealthy Americans and elite Mexicans again in “The Education of Popo.” 13. Doherty, introduction to Collected Stories, xii.

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tants exist only to serve the visitors, one that has been abetted by the patrón’s behavior. Indeed, the rustic “locals” remain interesting to the tourists only as long as they are being picturesquely entertaining. When Petra’s husband, Manuelo, who has had too much to drink, knocks Petra into a wall for refusing to have her photograph taken, the American tourists decide to leave, further indicating the self-imposed limits of their gaze upon Mexico. An equally important aspect of the story’s critique of North American values concerns Miss Young’s aptly named vanity set. This object inculcates Petra into American women’s interest in cosmetic beautification that gained popularity in this era, with increasing mass production and marketing of cosmetics.14 Indeed, cosmetics were another means through which the New Woman could both demonstrate her nascent purchasing power and, through her physical appearance, resist middle-class Victorian prescriptions of female beauty that were wary of cosmetic use—a phenomenon that found its fullest expression in the obvious use of eye pencil and lipstick by “flappers” in the 1920s. Equally important, Miss Young’s vanity set instills in Petra dominant American ideals of female beauty, which Mena also interrogates in “Marriage by Miracle.” Petra hides herself away to examine the bauble and opens its containers to find a mirror, powder, and rouge. She is excited by the effect of the powder on her hands, suggesting that it makes them paler in accord with her vision of the white hands of the women tourists. Upon discovering the rouge, she delightedly applies “a large patch” of the substance on each cheek, recalling “the brilliant cheeks of the American señorita of the brave looks, the black box, and the golden treasure” (5). Here Mena’s dramatic irony is clear: Petra so admires Miss Young that she wishes to resemble her physically, though the latter has been shown to be self-centered and culturally insensitive. The conclusion of the story builds even more explicitly on Mena’s satire of American attitudes toward Mexico, as well as her ironic exploration of the contrasts between gender ideals in Mexico and in the United States. The final scene describes a shamefaced Petra’s bringing Miss Young to the vanity set at the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, 14. See, for example, discussion of the growth of the cosmetics industry in the United States during this time period in Richard Corson, Fashions in Makeup: From Ancient to Modern Times; and Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture.

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where the visitor trivializes Petra’s plight as an abused wife and her Catholic beliefs. When Don Ramón tells the tourist of Manuelo’s recent vow to quit becoming drunk and abusing Petra, Miss Young’s reply reveals her reductive view of these individuals—“‘Well, I just love the temperance cause, but does she want to keep my danglums to make sure of this Manuelo staying on the water wagon?’” (9)— whereas her sympathy with the temperance movement is another example of causes with which the New Woman was often associated. The officious Don Ramón orders Petra to return the vanity set to its owner, and at the chapel Petra and Miss Young look upon the statue of the Virgin, “almost hidden by the gifts of the faithful,” the “most splendid” of which is the gold vanity set, which hangs sparkling at the Virgin’s breast. It is a moment fraught with irony, as the cosmetic set, a signifier of the materialism and superficiality of the American woman, has been imbued with spiritual power in the religion of the Mexican Indios.15 Miss Young, somewhat affected by the scene, concludes, “‘Well, if it saves that nice girl from ever getting another beating, the saint is welcome to my vanity set’” (11), unconscious of the inanity of her remark. Miss Young’s sympathy for Petra, though patronizing, is a welcome change from her previous behavior, but it is both offhand and late in coming. Though the Mexican girl reveres this “modern” American woman, Mena again employs dramatic irony to undermine that respect, characterizing the aptly named Miss Young as self-oriented, superficial, and disrespectful of the native culture she has come to Mexico to observe. Mena’s story achieves yet another level of irony through its doublevoicing, for in speaking of the Mexican Indios, the text appropriates common generalizations about them in the early twentieth century, but with ironic effect. In so doing, Mena deconstructs the kind of scientific racialist thinking often associated with Progressive intellectuals. Its proponents subscribed to an evolutionary model of thinking wherein the white race—and in particular its women—was at the top, the pinnacle of racial evolution, and the earth’s “darker races” required the aid of their more enlightened brethren to advance, as demonstrated in the sociological writing of such thinkers as Charlotte 15. A similar point is made by Carmen Birkle in “Multiculturalism and the New Woman in Early Twentieth Century America,” who notes that through Petra’s cooptation of the vanity set, “a feminine object used for manipulation empowers and liberates women from patriarchal abuse” (71).

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Perkins Gilman, Lester Frank Ward, and Edward Alsworth Ross. This, then, is another more oblique way in which Mena critiques the ideal of the New Woman as an embodiment of Progressivism, including that era’s discourses of racial evolution. In discussing discourse in the comic novel in The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin asserts how an author may involve broader social voices in his or her own commentary: “The relationship of the author to a language conceived as the common view . . . is always found in a state of movement and oscillation. . . . [T]he author exaggerates, now strongly, now weakly, one or another aspect of the ‘common language,’ sometimes abruptly exposing its inadequacy to its object and sometimes, on the contrary, becoming one with it, maintaining an almost imperceptible distance, sometimes even directly forcing it to reverberate with his own ‘truth.’” Such an author may incorporate a “parodic stylization” of certain languages, such as official or ceremonial languages, with the result that “the speech of another is introduced into the author’s discourse (the story) in concealed form, that is, without any of the formal markers usually accompanying such speech,” namely, quotation marks.16 In doing so, Bakhtin contends, the author interacts dialogically with the reported speech, often in order to unmask its limitations. Mena repeatedly employs this technique in “The Gold Vanity Set” in order to complicate North American attitudes about Mexico. For example, at the beginning of the story, the narrator describes Petra’s charms in language full of the clichés and stereotypes concerning Mexicans: “Her eyes were wonderful, even in a land of wonderful eyes. . . . The dissimulation lurking in that low voice and those melting eyes was characteristic of a race among whom the frankness of the Spaniard is criticized as unpolished” (1). When Petra refuses to have her photograph taken, the narrator resorts to essentialist notions: “Petra . . . rebelled with the dumb obstinacy of the Indian, even to weeping and sitting on the floor” (4). These comments suggest, on the surface, an attempt to align the narrator with white American audiences who would read this story, in a dialogic manner adding another voice to that which speaks from the perspective of the Mexicans. However, the reductive nature of these remarks is undermined by the sympathy with which Petra’s character is developed, as well as by Mena’s

16. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 302, 303.

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representation of the tourists as ignorant and unthinking. Thus, her narrative subverts the expectations raised by such stereotypes. This effect suggests that such generalizations are invoked ironically, as if in quotation marks, in order to unveil the arguability of this “common view” among Progressive Era white Americans of the Mexican peasantry. Also, Mena literally employs quotation marks in making the gentleman Don Ramón a mouthpiece for this discourse of stereotypes. At one point he assures the tourists that “‘the ways of the Indito are past conjecture, except that he is always governed by emotion.’” He continues, “‘We use the diminutive [Indito rather than Indio] because we love them. . . . With their passion, their melancholy, their music and their superstition they have passed without transition from the feudalism of the Aztecs into the world of today.’” However, Don Ramón’s comments occur with our awareness that he is of the ruling class, and thus invested in perpetuating such hegemonic representations of the Mexican peasantry. Furthermore, his generalizations serve to affirm the impression of Miss Young’s stereotyped views about Mexico. Her response to the Don, “‘[The peasants] certainly are picturesque . . . and it’s great fun to run into the twelfth or some other old century one day out from Austin’” (10), epitomizes her ideas about Petra’s world, and in this final passage of the text, Mena’s dramatic irony concerning the American tourists is clear. Thus, in a story likely categorized by publishers as a quaint local-color tale for a popular magazine in the United States, Mena critically interrogates American tourism and cultural imperialism in Mexico, as well as the behaviors of “modern” young American women in the years just before World War I. Furthermore, through her representation of relations between the Mexican peasantry and landowning classes in “The Gold Vanity Set,” Mena also indicts the class stratification within that society. In “The Education of Popo,” published a year later, Mena reprises the theme of a modern young American woman’s cultural insensitivity while visiting Mexico, but this time the theme is focused through a cross-cultural romance. As with “The Gold Vanity Set,” Mena relies on dramatic irony and double-voicing in order to criticize the values and attitudes of the middle- and upper-class Americans who read this story in Century magazine. The story concerns a U.S. senator who, with his family in tow, visits Mexico for government- and traderelated business in the region governed by Don Fernando Arriola, indicating the story’s temporal location within an era of growing

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American financial imperialism in Mexico.17 Senator Cherry’s daughter, Alicia, an “advanced” young American woman who is recently divorced, pursues a flirtation with Don Fernando’s fourteen-year-old son, Prospero, or “Popo.” Popo takes her advances quite seriously, but Alicia blithely reunites with her ex-husband when the latter appears at the end of the story. The love-struck Popo is left brokenhearted, and the Americans that the Arriola family so admire and accommodate are shown throughout the story to be insensitive and foolish. As in “The Gold Vanity Set,” Mena’s narrator employs a sardonic tone from the outset of the story in describing the Mexicans’ desire to please their North American visitors. Mena writes of the Arriolas’ preparations for the visit: On the backs of men and beasts were arriving magnificent quantities, requisitioned from afar, of American canned soups, fish, meats, sweets, hors d’oeuvres, and nondescripts; ready-to-serve cereals, readyto-drink cocktails, a great variety of pickles, and much other cheer of American manufacture. Even an assortment of can-openers had not been forgotten. Above all, an imperial had gone out for ice, and precious consignments of that exotic commodity were now being delivered. . . . By such amiable extremities it was designed to ensure the ladies Cherry against all danger of going hungry or thirsty for lack of conformable aliment or sufficiently frigid liquids. (47)

Here Mena satirizes the Arriolas’ wish to accommodate the convenienceoriented, culturally circumscribed tastes of their guests. Moreover, she suggests how the influence of American products in foreign markets is its own form of cultural colonialism, in the era that Gloria Velásquez Treviño has aptly termed “the economic penetration of the United States into Mexico during the Mexican Revolution.”18 Mena continues to employ dramatic irony in her treatment of the Cherry family’s reactions to their stay in Mexico. Mrs. Cherry is disappointed by not being able to converse with the family, who, except for Popo, does not speak English. “‘Even the parrots here speak nothing but Spanish,’” she laments to Alicia, going on to criticize her daughter for “‘monopolizing the only member of this household to 17. Mena, “The Education of Popo,” 47. Future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text. 18. Gloria Velásquez Treviño, “Cultural Ambivalence in Early Chicana Literature,” 141.

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whom it is possible to communicate the most primitive idea without screaming one’s head off’” (52). Though Tiffany Ana López has argued that this is a story in which “the white subjects . . . can be read positively,” Mena more accurately might be seen to treat the “ugly American” syndrome in a way that is comic but clearly criticizes such attitudes, as in “The Gold Vanity Set.”19 Juxtaposed against the unbecoming views expressed by Mrs. Cherry and her daughter, Alicia, are Popo Arriola’s idealism about the American visitors and his misunderstanding of Alicia’s behavior toward him. An early scene recounts how Popo entreats his mother, in formal language following the syntax of high-class Castilian Spanish, to be allowed to wear long trousers for the first time in honor of the Cherrys’ visit: “‘Mother of my soul, for the honor of our family in the eyes of the foreign ladies, I supplicate thy consent that I should be of long pantaloons!’” The young boy’s sense of his duty during the Cherrys’ visit to “comport himself as a true-born caballero” (48), or gentleman, suggests his earnest respect for the Americans. Soon after, thankfully installed in trousers, he reflects on his first impression of the American women: “Popo found it almost impossible to believe that they were mother and daughter. By some magic peculiar to the highly original country of the Yanquis, their relation appeared to be that of an indifferent sisterliness, with a balance of authority in favor of the younger” (49). Again, Mena’s cultural critique surfaces; this implication of Miss Cherry’s presumption and bossiness coincides with the portrait of Miss Young in “The Gold Vanity Set,” and by extension other “modern” young American women, as when the narrator in the previous story commented that the tourists were led, “American fashion, by a woman” (3). Moreover, the backhanded praise for the “highly original country of the Yanquis” that produces such an absurd motherdaughter relationship epitomizes Mena’s representation of Americans throughout her short stories. Despite Miss Cherry’s dominating manner, however, Popo is carried away by her physical charms, raising another line of critique in Mena’s work: the cultural hegemony of white American ideals of beauty, even outside the borders of the United States. Mena writes, “Never before had [Popo] seen a living woman with hair like daffodils, eyes like violets, and a complexion of coral and porcelain. It seemed to

19. López, “María Cristina Mena,” 26.

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him that some precious image of the Virgin had been changed into a creature of sweet flesh . . . far beyond the dreams of the dark-eyed, demure, and now despised damsels of his own race” (49). This description is ironic both because it will soon be revealed that Miss Cherry dyes her hair blonde and because her behavior and past render her anything but virginal. But beyond its parodic levels, the comment betrays a more ominous concept, one taken up in other American texts such as Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye (1970): the pernicious influence of Anglo-Saxon signifiers of beauty that can compel individuals of color to mimicry or self-hatred or both. Innocent to both the reality of Alicia’s porcelain “virginity” and the hegemonic significance of her appearance, Popo continues to idealize and romanticize the young woman, especially after overhearing her refer casually to him as “‘a perfect darling’” (51). Popo, unfamiliar with the term of endearment, finds it in his English dictionary, and the effect on him is described in amusing terms: “He was living in a realm of enchantment. To think that already, on the very day of their meeting, he and his blonde Venus should have arrived at the intimacies far transcending any that are possible in Mexico except between the wedded or the wicked!” (53). Clearly, Popo does not escape Mena’s comic barbs, as she does not reserve her satire solely for the North American characters in her stories. However, Popo’s naive romanticism seems to stem as much from his extreme youth as from his cultural background. Mena’s ironic contrast between the two young people’s perspectives on the flirtation reaches its climax when the smitten Popo declares his love for Alicia, lauding her as the “‘adored image of all beauty, queen of my heart, object of my prayers, whose purity has sanctified my life.’” Alicia’s reaction is a comic deflation of the high-flown rhetoric of his speech: “Alicia, a confirmed matinée girl, wished that all her woman friends might have seen her at that moment (she had on a sweet frock and a perfectly darling hat), and that they might have heard the speech that had just been addressed to her by the leading man. He was a thorough juvenile, to be sure, but he had lovely, adoring eyes and . . . anyhow, it was simply delicious to be made love to in a foreign language” (56). Like Miss Young’s objectification of Petra in “The Gold Vanity Set,” and her accompanying desire to capture that “exotic” image on film, Alicia Cherry, apparently inspired by the emerging popular cultural form of cinema, appreciates Popo more for the romantic stereotypes of the Spaniard she associates with him than for who he actually is. And

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despite the fact that Popo is also an object of parody here for his naïveté, Mena’s satiric treatment of Alicia is the more critical of the two, as Alicia is fully aware of what she is doing to her admirer. Popo’s real education in the ways of American women, however, does not occur until Alicia’s ex-husband, the satirically named Edward Winterbottom, arrives on the scene, and Alicia forgets Popo in her focus on reviving their romance. The heartbroken boy runs away to a nearby canyon for a few days, and Alicia’s irreverent account to Edward of how she went to console Popo confirms her insensitivity. She recalls how she tried to make him feel better by confessing that she is divorced, is eleven years older than him, and dyes her hair, concluding, “‘I told him that he could thank his stars for the education I’d given him, in view of the fact that he’s going to be sent to college in the U.S.A.’” (62). Miss Cherry sees herself as having done Popo a service in having prepared him for romance, modern American style. However, the shy young Mexican boy is implied to have suffered more than benefited from this experience, despite the humorous tone of the story. Furthermore, if Miss Cherry is any indication of the women Popo will meet when he attends college in the United States, the story suggests that they may also objectify him as one who can fulfill their stereotyped ideas of the passionate Latin lover, insensitive to how their culturally accepted flirting is seen very differently by him. Like “The Gold Vanity Set,” “The Education of Popo” also includes instances of double-voiced narratorial commentary that build on the more overt dramatic irony of Mena’s critiques of her American female characters’ attitudes toward Mexico. In this text, the omniscient narrator, who at times identifies with Popo’s perspective, at other times reflects the narrow attitudes of the American visitors. For example, the narrator describes how Alicia, upon her arrival in Mexico, “gave up her spirit to the enjoyment of finding herself for a little while among a warmer, wilder people, with gallant gestures and languorous smiles,” reveling in “the ardor and mystery of that unknown life” (51). Also, after Popo’s declaration of love, the narrator channels Alicia’s response: “Such musical words! One had to come to the hot countries to discover what emotion was; and as for love-making!” (56). Such language suggests essentialist ideas about Mexican culture that many readers of Century magazine likely held in the early twentieth century, the attitudes of an outsider who regards Mexico as an exotic, slightly dangerous commodity to be consumed, with abandon or with caution. However, the course of Mena’s narrative reverses the expectations that

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proceed from such stereotypes. Rather than the female character being an ingenue who is seduced by a stereotypical “Latin lover,” the boy Popo is the innocent victim of the wiles of a sexually confident American New Woman. The story’s totalizing notions about the “warmer, wilder people” of the “hot countries” are thus bracketed with implied quotation marks, and Mena’s dialogic narration exposes the inadequacies of such perspectives. Thus, “The Education of Popo” provides another example of Mena’s use of double-voiced commentaries in order to question the cultural influence of Americans in Mexico during the Progressive Era, particularly through their interactions with the Mexican elite during Porfirio Díaz’s regime and the revolution. In Mena’s “Marriage by Miracle,” published in Century magazine in 1916, the values of early-twentieth-century American society are once again brought into question through the function of a visitor from the United States to Mexico. In this case, the American is a “beautysurgeon” who has established a flourishing practice among the wealthy in Mexico City. The story recalls the biblical tale of Rachel and Leah in recounting how a parent will not allow a younger daughter to marry until her older sister does, often also a traditional Mexican cultural practice.20 In the story, Doña Rosalia de Ramos Blancos is desperate to maintain the lifestyle of her aristocratic heritage, though the unlucky family has resorted to renting out part of their mansion to make ends meet. When the caste-conscious widow discovers with horror that the suitor of her pretty younger daughter, Clarita, is of a nouveau riche background, she resolves that Clarita shall not marry until the homely, older Ernestina is betrothed. In order to increase the chances of such an event, the selfless Ernestina agrees to undergo plastic surgery by the American doctor, and she and her sister keep the procedure a secret by saying that Ernestina is entering on a religious retreat of several weeks. Despite the surgery’s success in beautifying her, it renders Ernestina unable to smile at all. The mysteriously transfigured, serious-faced woman is regarded as a religious miracle by their acquaintances, and Ernestina resolves to reject all forthcoming offers of marriage because of her newfound importance in the community. The central way in which the story questions hegemonic American values is in its focus on cosmetic surgery, a recent import from the 20. The premise of “Marriage by Miracle” could also be seen to borrow from and revise the plot of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, in an indication of Mena’s assimilative education.

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United States. The historical context of the beauty surgeon’s arrival in Mexico City is significant, for the story records talk of how “this admirable surgeon was already beginning to achieve brilliant results in the newly rich, Americanized society of the Mexican capital.”21 This comment situates the story, like “The Education of Popo,” in the historical era of American capitalistic penetration into Mexico during not only Díaz’s regime but also the ensuing revolution. On a cultural rather than economic level, the cosmetic surgery also constitutes a unique form of colonialism from the United States. This process infuses white Euro-American standards of beauty into Mexican society, as indicated by the “pale and symmetrical face” of Ernestina that is revealed with the removal of her bandages (121), as well as the “Grecian nose of the most delicate modeling” that the surgeon recently created for “the pretty and coquettish Consuelo Quiroz” (120). Also infiltrating Mexican life is America’s reliance on this expensive mode of consumption in order to achieve such standards of beauty. As Amy Doherty has observed, the link between such cultural imperialism and its more obvious political forms is made explicit when the surgeon assures his patient, after robbing her of her smile, that “English immobility was in the latest mode cultivated by the most fashionable señoras” (122). However, the United States was more associated with the consumption of cosmetic surgery than was Great Britain in the early twentieth century, as this phenomenon became increasingly widespread in America during and after World War I.22 Indeed, with her flawless features and impassive expression, as well as her reliance on an expensive form of consumption to achieve that appearance, Ernestina might be seen as having transformed into that most iconic American image of the New Woman, the Gibson girl. In this context, the concept of the colonized individual’s mimicry of the colonizer, a phenomenon explored by Homi Bhabha, brings par21. Mena, “Marriage by Miracle,” 120. Future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text. 22. See Doherty, introduction to Collected Stories. Elizabeth Haiken describes the advent of cosmetic surgery in America in Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery, 17–43. She notes the use of paraffin injections for the face, somewhat similar to the collagen injections of today, between approximately 1903 and 1920 (21–22), and she discusses the career of Dr. Charles C. Miller, a surgeon who also published a textbook on cosmetic surgery and various articles on the subject from 1907 onward (25–26). It is especially interesting to note that he “advocated ‘subcutaneous dissection’ of certain facial nerves and muscles to prevent formation of the ‘expression lines’ to which he believed women were particularly prone” (25).

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ticular relevance to the cultural dynamic between the United States— a country devoted to increasing its own imperial landholdings at the turn of the twentieth century—and Mexico, as represented in Mena’s story. Bhabha describes this mimicry as resulting from “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other” by the colonizer, but such imitation, because it is not entirely accurate, is ultimately subversive rather than complicit with colonial authority.23 In “Marriage by Miracle,” the desire of upper-class Mexican women to resemble the Anglo-Saxon ideal of beauty in the United States—and the American surgeon’s desire to make them look so, despite the unsettling consequences— suggests Bhabha’s concept, particularly through Mena’s use of an ironic perspective. In so doing, Mena’s story evinces the unique significance of the Bakhtinian act of “double-voicing” for the postcolonial theorizing of texts. The play of ironic, bracketed language to undercut the very ideals mimicked by colonial subjects (whether literally colonized or figuratively infiltrated by cultural standards) opens up another means of resisting such standards, alongside the space of resistance that Bhabha believes the inherent impossibility of absolute, accurate mimicry accommodates. Such play can be seen when Mena, as in her other stories, brings dramatic irony to bear on her narrative, this time in order to interrogate the phenomenon of American cosmetic surgery’s infiltration into Mexico. One instance occurs when Clarita is highly impressed with a set of “before and after” photos of a lady “of the highest society of New York.” The narrator notes, “Certainly Ernestina at her very worst had never shown the world a countenance so multifariously blighted as that of this lady in her first picture. . . . In the second one, however, she had effloresced into such beguiling beauty that the members of her own family must have found it extremely difficult to recognize her” (120). Like the backhanded praise for the “highly original country of the Yanquis” in “The Education of Popo,” the narrator’s tone suggests that the work of the overzealous American beauty surgeon is hardly worthy of such admiration. Further on, when the bizarre and disturbing outcome of Ernestina’s surgery is revealed, the surgeon merely “advised her to resist all impulse to smile, a very simple matter if she would only make up her mind never to feel amused.” Mena goes on to add wryly that

23. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” 86.

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“Clarita praised his sagacity” (122), as if to emphasize the implication that the surgeon’s methods are anything but sagacious. As with her other stories concerning American and Mexican interactions, Mena also incorporates satiric double-voicing in this story to undermine essentialist notions about Mexican culture. For instance, the narrator echoes stereotypical conceptions about Mexicans when describing the faithfulness of Clarita’s foiled suitor, Don Luis: “Constancy in love reaches astonishing lengths in Mexico, and it is well that this is so, for in no other land is love itself viewed parentally with so much disfavor and vexed with so many obstacles and indignities” (116). Although it is true that Don Luis patiently waits several years in order to marry Clarita, Mena also subverts this stereotype by the Don’s resorting to subterfuge in order to achieve his goal. Furthermore, when Ernestina is assured that “English immobility was in the latest mode cultivated by the most fashionable señoras,” the narrator coopts the speech of the surgeon, confident in his generalization about the cosmetic aspirations of upper-class Mexican women. But Mena sarcastically undercuts the surgeon’s views in describing the distressed Ernestina’s response: “Not being very logically inclined, Ernestina found no comfort in these arguments” (122). Though Ernestina is mollified after realizing the spiritual importance she may hold in the community as a result of her transformation, Mena’s double-voicing here exposes the inadequacies of such generalizations about Mexican culture. Thus, these tales by Mena may be seen to put forth playful yet complex commentaries about widespread American perspectives on and influences in Mexico in the early twentieth century, focusing on the respective roles of women in Mexican and American cultures to build her critiques. In “The Gold Vanity Set,” her portrayal of Petra as an abused wife might play into stereotypical American notions of patriarchal Mexican culture. However, by the end of the story, Petra has gained at least some authority over her now penitent husband through the ironic means of a superficial American New Woman’s cosmetics set, now imbued with folk religious power. In “The Education of Popo,” Mena also plays on conventional gender and ethnic stereotypes to interrogate the ideal of the American New Woman, representing the story’s female visitor to Mexico as sexually aggressive and the young Mexican man as her innocent victim. “Marriage by Miracle” likewise grounds its critiques in gendered issues by interrogating the racially inflected American ideal of female beauty, as well as the

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lengths to which women may go to achieve it. Mena’s focus on gender creates provocative connections to other women writers of her era— and indeed, whose publications also appeared in Century magazine, such as Edith Wharton—but her interrogation of modern American womanhood is distinct in its cross-cultural emphasis. Furthermore, the stereotypical notions about Mexicans expressed by the narrators in several of Mena’s stories might suggest her capitulation to the marketplace demands of the Progressive Era in order to publish her fiction, but a careful reading of her work does not allow us to take such narratorial asides at face value. Instead, the dramatic irony Mena develops throughout these texts concerning American womanhood shows such references to be the discursive technique of double-voicing, unmasking the limitations of those views. Such a perspective on Mena’s fiction allows us to see beyond her stories’ superficial qualities of charming local-color fiction about Mexican life, and their appearance in mainstream periodicals that generally did not publish fiction with highly politicized content, to recognize the contrasting functions that Mena’s texts were simultaneously able to perform, dialogically balancing hegemonic discursive modes with resistant ones. Finally, Mena’s other fictions featuring resourceful Mexican women—the marquesa in “The Vine Leaf” and in particular the female characters in “The Sorcerer and General Bisco” and “A Son of the Tropics”—may function, as do the examples of empowered women of color offered by other authors in this study, as a corrective to such limitations. For example, Mena’s heroine Carmelita in “The Sorcerer and General Bisco” has just fled an unhappy forced marriage to Don Baltazar, a rapacious and tyrannical landowner, with her lover Aquiles, a young man who was dispossessed of his inheritance by the Don. The couple are taken captive by followers of the revolutionary General Bisco, “a terror to the rich and an idol to the poor,” and they are brought to Baltazar’s hacienda, where the Don is also a prisoner. The Don, a skilled hypnotist, puts Bisco into a trance in order to secure the revolutionary leader’s sympathy and protection. When the hypnotized general resolves instead to kill Aquiles, Carmelita bravely reveals the Don’s nefarious plan, and General Bisco, having come to his senses, shoots the manipulative tyrant. In having the revolutionary leader kill the story’s clear villain, the tale suggests Mena’s sympathy not only with her brave heroine but also with the Mexican Revolution. Although Amy Doherty notes that Mena did reveal “upper-class bias”

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in her correspondence with Century editors, alluding to a Mexican peasantry that was, in Mena’s phrase, “so well worthy of being known and loved, in all their ignorance,” Mena’s support for their claim for greater rights is shown through the sympathy for the revolution shown in her fiction.24 Likewise, her story “A Son of the Tropics,” which may have been composed during this period but was not published until 1931, is another account sympathetic to the revolutionaries, and it includes a female soldier, Tula, who builds bombs out of doorknobs. She is apparently in love with the local revolutionary leader, Rosario, and in the story’s tragic conclusion, Rosario kills himself with one of her bombs upon learning that he is in fact the son of the local landowner. Alongside her tales that contain critiques of the American New Women of her time, in presenting such images of Mexican women who act to restructure fundamental class inequities in their society, Mena offers an alternative ideal of assertive and socially minded womanhood to the iconic American New Woman.

24. Mena, “Sorcerer and General Bisco,” 101; Doherty, introduction to Collected Stories, xxii.

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5

Escaping the “Torah-Made World” The Fiction of Anzia Yezierska

Anzia Yezierska’s story “Wings” (1920) tells the tale of Shenah Pessah, a Jewish immigrant janitor in New York City who successfully resists her uncle’s attempts to force her to marry and dreams of becoming a writer. Like the protagonists of several of Yezierska’s works, she meets and falls in love with an idealistic, privileged Gentile man, in this case sociology professor John Barnes. She shares with him a source of inspiration for her independent ways and artistic aspirations: a “grand book” left her by a boarder. As she tells him, “‘When I only begin to read, I forget I’m on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.’”1 The book is Olive Schreiner’s Dreams, a collection of allegorical sketches that the white South African author published in 1890, and Yezierska’s allusion is significant: Schreiner, a feminist and advocate for the rights of black South Africans, was one of the central figures of the New Woman novel movement in late-nineteenth-century English literature. Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1883), perhaps the earliest example of a genre that flourished throughout the 1890s, voiced critiques of conventional gender ideology through its tragic protagonist, Lyndall, and the novel, originally published under the 1. Yezierska, “Wings,” 8.

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male nom de plume “Ralph Iron” as a cautionary measure, caused great controversy. In a similar vein, Schreiner’s Dreams is a collection of brief allegories featuring such themes as women’s need for freedom and equality with men, and the desire to escape conservative social attitudes. Schreiner remained an outspoken feminist voice throughout her life, later publishing Woman and Labour (1911), in which she condemned the phenomenon of female “sex parasitism” in a manner akin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s analyses in Women and Economics, while also subscribing to an evolutionary view of social development like that of many Progressive thinkers.2 That Yezierska’s immigrant protagonist in this tale is influenced by the work of Schreiner indicates the author’s awareness of the transatlantic cultural discourse of New Womanhood at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, most of Yezierska’s protagonists in addition to Shenah Pessah share the discontent with patriarchy and the desire for self-actualization that informed Schreiner’s depictions of women. However, Yezierska’s engagements with the construct of the New Woman are above all shaped by an understanding of this figure as an embodiment of Progressive American society. As Cara-Lynn Ungar and Carol Batker have argued, Yezierska may be seen to depict examples of what historians Susan A. Glenn and Linda Gordon Kuzmack call “The New Jewish Woman,” developing, as Ungar suggests, a new working-class variant of that ideal.3 However, Yezierska’s heroines’ adoption of certain ideals of the New Woman and rejection of others

2. The influence between Schreiner and Gilman was mutual. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar observe that, while on lecture tours in the 1890s, Gilman “carried only two books in her trunk: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass” (“‘Fecundate! Discriminate!’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity,” 202). Also, as Ann Heilmann notes, Gilman modeled the cover of her first book, the poetry collection In This Our World (1893), on that of Schreiner’s Dreams (“Overwriting Decadence: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oscar Wilde, and the Feminization of Art in ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper,’” 175). 3. Batker, “Literary Reformers: Crossing Class and Ethnic Boundaries in Jewish Women’s Fiction of the 1920s”; Ungar, “Discourses of Class and the New Jewish Working Woman in Anzia Yezierska’s Arrogant Beggar.” In discussing Salome of the Tenements and Arrogant Beggar, Batker argues that Yezierska creates immigrant New Women in her fiction whose lives ultimately constitute a “blend of immigrant and reform positionings” (85), whereas Ungar argues that the protagonist of Arrogant Beggar draws on varying models of womanhood to become “a self-sufficient and materially successful working-class variant of the New Woman” (90). For more on the ideal of Jewish New Womanhood, see Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation, 207–42; and Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause, esp. 159–83.

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underscore uniquely that figure’s connections with Progressive ideology. Her fiction praises the New Woman’s interests in financial independence, higher education, greater social freedom, and egalitarian romantic relationships, which are appealing alternatives to restrictive views of women in traditional Jewish culture as beings inferior to men who should earn money only to support their families (not themselves) and who have little say in whom they marry.4 However, Yezierska’s fiction persistently critiques the Progressive New Woman’s association with social uplift, including Americanization schemes for immigrants, depicting such efforts as misguided and patronizing, if well-intentioned, examples of how “evolutionist discourses of civilization,” to use Louise Michele Newman’s phrase, underlay the public work of many Progressive New Women. Gwendolyn Mink has noted how social class and race divided women’s experience of the enactment of Progressive policies concerning women: The labor and maternity legislation of the industrial period transformed women’s relationships to the political realm. Though these policies hitched women’s citizenship to gender principles, they affected individual women variably depending on race, class, and political position. Some middle-class, old-stock women became direct participants in politics and government—as members of commissions, school superintendents, health officers, social workers. . . . Meanwhile many working class and poor ethnic women became political and governmental dependents subject to regulation by and supervision from courts, legislatures, and middle-class women.5

Just as the protagonists of many of Yezierska’s works conduct internal arguments over their simultaneous attraction to and resistance to American ways (as variously symbolized by educational institutions, social rites, or the Gentile or highly Americanized Jewish men with whom they become romantically involved), then, Yezierska’s fictions themselves reveal ongoing dialogue about the value of the New Woman’s convictions. Like the writing of Sui Sin Far, who similarly regarded the new ideals of womanhood gaining currency at the turn of the century through the complex liminality of an immigrant’s 4. For more on women’s roles within traditional Jewish culture, see Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 8–49; and Paula Hyman, “The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition.” 5. Newman, White Women’s Rights, 129; Mink, 101.

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perspective, Yezierska’s texts persistently associate the New Woman, whether portrayed positively or negatively, with Progressive Era American society itself. As with the other authors in this study, Yezierska’s own life reveals actions prompted both by the ideals of the American New Woman and by the contingencies of her ethnic and socioeconomic positioning. Born in a village within the Polish and Russian Pale of Settlement sometime around 1885, she emigrated to New York City with her family during the 1890s. Like Sui Sin Far, as an adolescent she worked in various menial jobs to support her family. Yezierska left home at seventeen to live in the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls and in 1901 entered the Teachers College of Columbia University, from which she received her diploma in 1904 (the only writer in this study to obtain a higher-education degree). Obtaining intermittent work as a teacher, she began to write fiction, publishing her first story in 1915 in Forum magazine. She experienced an unsatisfying and brief first marriage in 1910, and a second one soon after from which a daughter was born. Separating from her second husband a few years later, she also had a brief relationship with Progressive philosopher John Dewey, who supported her writing efforts. Yezierska’s most prolific years as a writer were between 1920, when her first story collection appeared and attracted the attention of Hollywood—indeed, Hungry Hearts was made into a film, and she was invited to work there as a screenwriter, but quickly found the work and the environment unappealing—and 1927, when her third novel was published. During these successful years, Yezierska represented herself to the public as a “sweatshop Cinderella,” selectively fashioning an image of self-made immigrant success. However, she thereafter found a diminishing audience for her fiction, which critics observed to treat the same themes and ideas repeatedly. Yezierska nonetheless supported herself through other writing, including book reviews for the New York Times, and she published her autobiography in 1950 to modest success.6 Some of Yezier6. For biographical sources on Yezierska, see Carol Schoen, Anzia Yezierska; Louise Levitas Henriksen, Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life; as well as Blanche Gelfant’s introduction to Hungry Hearts; Alice Kessler-Harris’s introduction to Bread Givers; Stubbs’s introduction to Arrogant Beggar; and Gay Wilentz’s introduction to Salome of the Tenements. For further discussion of Yezierska’s self-fashioning of her public identity, see Stubbs, introduction to Arrogant Beggar, viii–x; and Ron Ebest, “Anzia Yezierska and the Popular Periodical Debate over the Jews,” 122–24.

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ska’s choices, such as ending her unsatisfactory marriages and making her living as an artist, reflect typical ideals of the New Woman, while the poverty with which she often contended and her struggles to secure publication of her work indicate the unique challenges she faced as a Jewish American immigrant woman. Demonstrating Yezierska’s often pessimistic view of the philanthropically oriented manifestation of the New Woman, her earliest published fiction contains highly critical portraits of such figures. In these autobiographically based tales, the philanthropic workers with whom Yezierska’s immigrant protagonists interact, sometimes middle-class Jews themselves who have assimilated to American society, reflect the growing presence of bourgeois women in public life in the early twentieth century through their involvement with immigrant aid and uplift. As representatives of genteel values and the relatively conservative platform of social feminism (and assimilation to middle-class Gentile lifestyles, in the case of the Jewish examples), these individuals were regarded as models whom young immigrant women should imitate. However, their often condescending attitudes bred questioning of their efforts by the recipients of such benevolence, a critique that Yezierska puts in the mouths of her immigrant protagonists throughout her fiction. “The Free Vacation House,” appearing in Forum magazine in 1915 as Yezierska’s first published work and republished in Hungry Hearts, tells of an overworked immigrant wife and mother who is given the opportunity to visit the countryside through a public aid program. The stress of managing an ever increasing load of domestic duties in a poverty-stricken household is wearing on the protagonist, and in a move that alludes to the connections other women writers imply between the imprisonment of compulsory domesticity and madness, she acknowledges that the proposed vacation represents an alternative to her sometimes suicidal thoughts: I looked around me in the kitchen. On one side was the big wash-tub with clothes, waiting for me to wash. On the table was a pile of breakfast dishes yet. In the sink was the potatoes, waiting to be peeled. The baby was beginning to cry for the bottle. . . . I felt if I didn’t get away from here for a little while, I would land in a crazy house, or from a window jump down. Which was worser, to land in

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a crazy house, jump from the window down, or go to the country from the charities?7

However, in contrast to late-nineteenth century feminist texts like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), where the concern of a socially privileged protagonist is how the extreme form of forced domesticity constituted by the rest cure restricts her creative inclinations, this speaker’s experience is defined by her poverty, which requires her to manage a house full of hungry children without the help of servants. Retaining a sense of pride despite—or because of—her poverty, the protagonist hesitates at accepting the magnanimous gesture of the Social Betterment Society, as it is accompanied by a humiliating process of interrogation in order to determine her need. Her simultaneous feelings of attraction to the material ease of bourgeois existence and repulsion for the condescension accompanying such charity increase when she arrives at the countryside facility, which appears to her like “the grandest palace” (67). As she is served a meal by waitresses, the speaker initially gains a sense of worth: “For the first time in ten years I sat down to the table like a somebody.” But the mood does not last long: the appearance of “a fat lady all in white, with a teacher’s look on her face,” whom the speaker deduces is “the boss from this place” (68), sharply recalls her to an awareness of the conditions of her visit. The proprietress of the vacation house proceeds to read a long list of rules that restrict the charity visitors to its back areas and regiment their lives into “proper” paradigms of domestic motherhood: “We must always listen to the bells. Bell one was for getting up. Bell two, for getting babies’ bottles. Bell three, for coming to breakfast. Bell four, for bathing the babies. If we come later, after the ring from the bell, then we’ll not get what we need” (69). In an indication of the similarities across reform efforts conducted by Progressives toward various “Others” in American society, the speaker’s experience coincides with that of many young Native American women reared in charitable offreservation boarding schools at the turn of the century, as notably recorded in Sioux author Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essay “The School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900). As Robert Trennert has 7. Yezierska, “The Free Vacation House,” 64. Future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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observed, the military-style regimentation of such schools, driven by a strict schedule punctuated with bells, was intended to train the “savage” out of these young women and render them into assimilated, docile, yet not overly educated individuals suitable to serve as domestic workers.8 The speaker’s experience of the immigrant women’s vacation house here reflects a similar governing philosophy. In other works, especially Arrogant Beggar, Yezierska would further explore the dynamics of assimilative education for immigrant women, particularly its reification of class divisions through its emphasis on training for domestic work rather than professional careers. The protagonist’s sense of the limitations of privileged New Women’s philanthropy increases as she observes these individuals’ visits to the vacation house. The “swell ladies” that periodically arrive in chauffeured automobiles are entertained in the elegant, off-limits front rooms, while the proprietress occasionally “[takes] them over to the back to look on us, where we was sitting together, on long wooden benches, like prisoners. I was always feeling cheap like dirt, and mad that I had to be there, when they smiled down on us” (70). Angered at such treatment but resolved to make the best of her stay, as it will save her money and work at home, the woman internally questions the bases of these “uplift” workers’ practices: “Why drag us from the charity office through the streets? And when we live through the shame of the charities and when we come already to the vacation house, for why do they boss the life out of us with so many rules and bells?” Rightly regarding the whole operation as a “show for visitors,” she realizes her own role in that performance: “For why do they have to fool in worn-out mothers, to make them think they’ll give them a rest? Do they need the worn-out mothers as part of the show? I guess that is it, already” (71). However, the narrator’s bitter realizations remain internal. It would be a few more years before Yezierska’s protagonists would voice aloud their criticisms of women reformers’ benevolent work, beginning with her 1919 story “Soap and Water and the Immigrant.” Indeed, the conclusion of this story seems to retreat from a more constructive critique of the systems that clearly perpetuate such inequality at the same time that they purport to improve the lives of 8. For more on the philosophies behind domestic training of Native American girls, see Trennert, “Educating Indian Girls in Nonreservation Boarding Schools, 1878–1920,” esp. 226–27.

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poor women. Returning to her tenement home, the speaker is pleased with her surroundings, despite the cramped rooms and the squalor of the ghetto streets: “All these ugly things was grand in my eyes. Even the high brick walls all around made me feel like a bird what just jumped out from a cage” (71). As in Yezierska’s story “Wings” and elsewhere in her work, the narrator’s comparison of herself to a freed bird echoes the use of bird imagery in several New Woman–themed novels, such as Chopin’s Awakening (1899) or Cather’s Song of the Lark (1915), but here the analogy does not similarly operate to symbolize the condition of a universalized notion of woman. Rather, the woman’s sense of freedom here hinges on her liberation, at least temporarily, from insulting systems of class identification. Nonetheless, though the speaker’s reveling in her release from the humiliating experience of the “free vacation house” indicts the misguided philanthropies of bourgeois Progressive feminism, we cannot ignore the fact that she is left in the same oppressed conditions where she began, struggling to maintain a poverty-stricken household and care for six children. It might be argued that, having experienced the hypocritical respectability of the vacation house, the heroine of this story has the broadened perspective to bear the burdens of her life with greater equanimity, but the material, as well as cultural, conditions that made this woman’s life miserable to begin with have not changed. The story thus tells us what is wrong with the current attempts to improve the lives of immigrant women, but it does not offer a more constructive solution. Perhaps, in this early story, Yezierska felt compelled to approach her reading audience carefully, criticizing the status quo but retreating from more revolutionary scenarios for fundamentally changing its inequalities. Another early story that strongly critiques bourgeois female philanthropists of the Progressive Era is “My Own People” (1920), featuring a protagonist who, like Shenah Pessah in “Wings,” also dreams of becoming a writer. Sophie Sapinsky obtains the “room of one’s own” that Virginia Woolf would stipulate for creative women in 1929—albeit a filthy tenement basement room—in order to pursue this goal, though she experiences doubt over ignoring the wishes of her family: “Perhaps her family was right in condemning her rashness. Was it worth while to give up the peace of home, and security of a regular job—suffer hunger, loneliness, and want—for what? . . . Would her writing ever amount to enough to vindicate the uprooting of her past?” However, Sophie’s internal conflict is resolved when the offi-

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cious intrusions of a female philanthropic worker into the tenement community galvanize her into finding her true subject for writing. Witnessing the passionate, critical responses of her tenement neighbors to this woman and other wealthy Jewish American visitors from the Social Betterment Society, Sophie is inspired to write about such oppression: “‘It’s not me—it’s their cries—my own people—crying in me! Hanneh Breineh, Shmendrik, they will not be stilled in me, till all America stops to listen.’”9 In this tale, Yezierska’s critique of middleclass women’s immigrant uplift efforts forms the thematic background for a Künstlerroman narrative, as we witness Sophie’s growth from a self-doubting and socially disengaged would-be artist to one who actively bonds with her community and finds her creative destiny. However, in another indication of the persistent emphasis on class issues throughout Yezierska’s canon, Sophie’s objective transcends the typical New Woman artist’s resolve to overcome gender prejudices against women’s privileging artistic work over marriage and domesticity; Sophie wishes to write, more than anything, to be an advocate for her disenfranchised people. “America and I,” from Yezierska’s 1923 story collection Children of Loneliness, also treats the figure of the bourgeois female philanthropist in a negative light, this time in the persona of a vocational guidance counselor whom the protagonist visits at an immigrant women’s club. The woman at first appears to the narrator to promise an example of productive and satisfied New Womanhood: “I found a young, collegelooking woman. Smartness and health shining from her eyes! . . . I could tell at first glance: here is a person that is happy by what she does.” However, rather than being inspired by this social worker, the narrator, a sweatshop laborer hoping to perfect her English and pursue an intellectual profession, is instead rebuffed by her mentor’s cynical attitude, as when the latter informs her, “‘America is no Utopia. First you must become efficient in earning a living before you can indulge your poetic dreams.’”10 Indeed, the young guidance counselor serves as a mouthpiece for the Taylorist rhetoric of efficiency that spread from industry to the broader culture in early-twentiethcentury America, and as such she shows herself complicit with the capitalist infrastructure that often operated to keep such immigrant laborers as the story’s narrator at its base. 9. Yezierska, “My Own People,” 139, 151. 10. Yezierska, “America and I,” 150, 151.

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Although the narrator’s aspirations toward mental rather than menial labor are temporarily discouraged, she prevails despite the social worker’s negative example, initiating a self-study in American history that inspires her to regard herself as a new kind of Pilgrim, overcoming momentous obstacles to succeed in America. The young woman realizes that, like the Pilgrims who faced “Indian savages on all sides,” she has encountered “savage Indian scalpers, like the old witch of the sweatshop, like my ‘Americanized’ countryman, who cheated me of my wages,” but she will prevail and furthermore build a bridge of understanding between herself and other Americans by writing about the world of the ghetto.11 The politics of the protagonist comparing herself to the Pilgrims—those who gave rise to the most American of Americans, in the nativist views of Yezierska’s day—are troubling, revealing the way in which Yezierska’s writings often did not recognize commonalities between the struggles of Jewish Americans and those of other ethnic minority groups in America. All the same, “America and I” functions similarly to “My Own People” in depicting an encounter with an uplift-minded New Woman as a negative, rather than positive, catalyst for the protagonist’s own actualization as a socially committed artist. Despite such examples of narratives in which reformer New Women come across in a straightforwardly critical light, others of Yezierska’s stories reveal a more mixed perspective on this figure, including the early tales “Soap and Water and the Immigrant” and “How I Found America.” Reprinted as “Soap and Water” in Hungry Hearts, “Soap and Water and the Immigrant” was first published as an autobiographical essay in New Republic magazine in 1919, a venue that carries some irony. Yezierska placed the story at this periodical with the help of John Dewey, who was a friend of Herbert Croly, its editor and author of the widely read Progressive manifesto The Promise of American Life (1909). Whether the New Republic editor was fully attuned to the story’s critiques of the very types of social-improvement schemes his theory championed is open to question. The story concerns a young woman who struggles to earn her way through college by working each morning and night at a laundry, as Yezierska supported herself while studying at Columbia University. However, the dean of the college, Miss Whiteside, threatens to withhold the narrator’s

11. Ibid., 152.

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diploma because she doesn’t seem well groomed enough to be a teacher, condescendingly asserting, “‘Soap and water are cheap. Anyone can be clean.’” The narrator’s passionate response underscores the inequities that make such standards more difficult for her to fulfill: At the time when [women like Miss Whiteside] rose and took their morning bath, and put on their fresh-laundered linen that somebody had made ready for them, when they were being served with their breakfast, I had already toiled for three hours in a laundry. . . . At the hour when they came home from the theater or musicale, I came from the laundry. But I was so bathed in the sweat of exhaustion that I could not think of a bath of soap and water. . . . Often, as I stood at my board in the laundry . . . I was thinking . . . I, the unclean one, am actually fashioning the pedestal of their cleanliness, from which they reach down, hoping to lift me to the height I have created for them.

Her outburst seemingly compels a shamed Miss Whiteside to award the diploma after all, but the narrator ends up teaching in low-paid substitute positions because she cannot afford the professional clothing needed to secure a permanent position. She is inspired, however, by the memory of a female chemistry professor at the college who seemed a kindred spirit, and when she miraculously reencounters Miss Van Ness, she feels that “just as Miss Whiteside had tied and bound all my thinking processes, so Miss Van Ness unbound and freed me and suffused me with light.”12 The conclusion of the story somewhat abruptly turns on the disillusioned narrator’s change of heart, inspired by the kindness of Miss Van Ness. Although this tale is an uneven early effort of Yezierska’s, it significantly introduces several themes that recur in her fiction and underscore her unique treatment of the New Woman. The narrator’s feeling of despair at an unactualized life, causing thoughts of suicide or madness, echoes “The Free Vacation House,” among other works, and demonstrates how her writing resonates with the thematic elements of more conventional treatments of the New Woman by authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman. On the other hand, the speaker’s fantasy of intruding on a faculty dinner at the college to “interrupt their grand speech-making” and voice her critique of such bourgeois hypocrisy anticipates Adele Lindner’s outburst at the 12. Yezierska, “Soap and Water,” 102–3, 109.

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board meeting of the Hellman Home for Working Girls in Arrogant Beggar, and it underscores the way in which Yezierska’s engagement with the idea of reformer New Women persistently highlights class difference.13 In “How I Found America” (1920), Yezierska again juxtaposes negative and positive portraits of Progressive New Women involved with immigrant uplift, implying that there is a wrong and a right way to perform such service. In this tale, echoing conversations between idealistic immigrant protagonists and ultimately unsympathetic reformers in other works such as “America and I” and Salome of the Tenements, the narrator’s aspirations to help improve American society are rebuffed by the benefactress of the School for Immigrant Girls, Mrs. Olney, who condescendingly tells her that “‘the best way [for her to “help make America better”] would be for [her] to learn a trade.’”14 However, the narrator, another of Yezierska’s frequently featured factory workers, soon finds a supportive and inspiring confidante in her sister’s English teacher, Miss Latham. Miss Latham shares with the narrator Our America, a book by fellow Jewish American Waldo Frank that asserts the immigrant’s essential role in shaping America. Miss Latham’s sympathy with this revolutionary spirit, rather than a desire to engage in cosmetic philanthropy that does not restructure existing class hierarchies, makes her the kind of socially engaged New Woman whom Yezierska’s protagonist can truly respect. However, other stories offer more positive commentaries on the New Woman’s ideals when they downplay class issues to focus more exclusively on this figure’s assertion of a fulfilling life for women outside of marriage. Two stories from Hungry Hearts, “Wings” and “The Miracle,” feature protagonists inspired by the freedoms of the “American girl” for whom marriage is not compulsory (idealistic as this view may be), in contrast to the rigorous expectation of marriage for women within Old World Jewish culture. As with the speaker in Sui Sin Far’s “A Love Story from the Rice Fields of China,” who recognized her option to “remain single, as the American woman,” the heroines of these stories know they need not rely on a man to complete their lives, whether they remain alone or experience a conventional romantic happy ending. In “Wings,” Shenah Pessah tells her uncle, who conspires with a matchmaker to marry her off to a fish peddler, “‘Don’t take pity on my years. I’m living 13. Ibid., 106. 14. Yezierska, “How I Found America,” 170.

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in America, not in Russia. I’m not hanging on anybody’s neck to support me. In America, if a girl earns her living, she can be fifty years old and without a man, and nobody pities her.’” Her budding relationship with sociology teacher John Barnes founders when he is recalled to a sense of their class and ethnic differences, despite his attraction to her. However, though at first crushed, Shenah soon resolves to make something of herself in spite of him, for he has “opened up the wings of [her] soul,” showing her the value of “higher” intellectual pursuits that provide their own kind of fulfillment.15 “The Miracle” (1920) builds on this emphasis in making the desire to avoid compulsory marriage the primary impetus for the heroine’s actions. Sara Reisel emigrates to America in hopes of marrying for love there, rather than being forced to marry an undesirable man back in Poland because of her lack of a dowry. She is, indeed, painfully aware of her status as a medium of sexual and economic exchange in patriarchal Old World Jewish culture: “I was a poor Melamid’s daughter in Savel, Poland. In my village, a girl without a dowry was a dead one. The only kind of man that would give a look on a girl without money was a widower with a dozen children, or someone with a hump or on crutches.” Unfortunately, she soon encounters the same limitations in the Jewish immigrant community in New York City; when she visits a matchmaker there, she quickly realizes that her net worth is his only concern. However, Sara resolves not to be victimized by this system, telling herself, “Make a person of yourself. . . . Begin to learn English. Make yourself for an American if you want to live in America. American girls don’t go to matchmakers. American girls don’t run after a man; if they don’t get a husband they don’t think the world is over; they turn their mind to something else.”16 Nonetheless, Sara falls in love with her English teacher, another John Dewey–like figure who recalls the male love interests in “Wings” and Salome of the Tenements. In this story, however, a conventional romantic conclusion occurs when she comes home one day to find the teacher in her room and he confesses his love for her. As is often the case with the other authors in this study, Yezierska’s thematic treatment of marriage here does not transcend patriarchal and heteronormative expectations that women marry, but it does imply that Sara’s relationship with the teacher will be far more egalitarian than would a matchmaker-directed 15. Sui Sin Far, “Love Story,” 268; Yezierska, “Wings,” 13, 24. 16. Yezierska, “The Miracle,” 72, 82.

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union with a man marrying her only for her housekeeping abilities or dowry. Indeed, Sara’s wish to “‘get among people where it’s not against a girl if she’s in years and without money,’” as she tells her teacher, is answered; he admires her for her passionate personality rather than for youth or wealth. Although his belief that, through her “emotional” Jewishness, she can “‘lift him out of the dead grooves of sterile intellectuality’” raises a vexed essentializing dichotomy between Jew and Gentile that recurs in Yezierska’s works—particularly Salome of the Tenements— the teacher’s love for her points encouragingly to a more companionate ideal of marriage than what Sara has seen in the Old World and its transplanted community in the New.17 A final tale in Yezierska’s body of short fiction that contributes to cultural dialogues about the New Woman is “A Bed for the Night” (1923), which critiques the double sexual standard in the tradition of several other New Woman texts. Highlighting the Social Purity agenda that unmasked the stigmatization of prostitutes while patronage of their services was tacitly accepted, American authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Stephen Crane and British authors including Sarah Grand and George Egerton presented fictions that sympathized with prostitutes, critiqued their alienation, and pointed out the ironies of a patriarchal system that “ruined” such women and then blamed them for their ruin. Indeed, “A Bed for the Night” thematically recalls George Egerton’s 1905 tale “Mammy,” which concerned a dying prostitute’s request to see a priest; after the priest refuses to come to the house of ill repute, her madam, “Mammy,” carries the girl to the cathedral to ensure her receipt of the final sacraments. Similarly, Yezierska’s story paints a sympathetic portrait of a prostitute who takes in a woman rendered homeless by her landlady. In this story, Yezierska indicts the same lack of sexual protection for women who fall outside the patriarchal system that she depicted in her first novel. When read alongside her short fiction, Yezierska’s novels of the 1920s further illuminate her complex response to the Progressive American New Woman. Her first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1922), has received limited attention compared to the story collection Hungry Hearts (1920) and the novel Bread Givers (1925), and critics of the novel have tended to focus on issues of assimilation and ethnic identity in

17. Ibid., 83, 87.

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this tale of an immigrant dressmaker.18 Moreover, multiethnic studies scholar Werner Sollors dismisses the work as “weak and odd,” questioning its reprinting as an example of the radical novel.19 However, readings of the novel that prioritize considerations of ethnicity or radical politics obscure the fact that it is a provocative, if at times uneven, example of her treatment of the New Woman ideal. With this novel, Yezierska uniquely participates alongside other novelists in dialogue about women’s changing roles, confronting such issues as professions for women, leisure-class marriage, and the gender politics of Progressive Era philanthropy. Moreover, through the heroine’s evolution from husband-stalking femme fatale, complicit with conventional gender ideologies, to self-actualized career woman, Salome of the Tenements epitomizes Yezierska’s conflicted response to the New Woman’s ideals as seen throughout her fiction. The novel traces the evolution of Sonya Vrunsky from struggling journalist of the Lower East Side to secretary to and, soon after, leisureclass wife to wealthy settlement-house reformer John Manning. However, this volatile union, initiated by the clash between Sonya’s passionate disposition and Manning’s poised demeanor, soon selfdestructs, while she simultaneously comes to acknowledge the misguidedness of Manning’s settlement-house work on the Lower East Side. The heroine finds herself once again in the ghetto with the resolve to reach professional and social prominence on her own. She works as a waitress before training to become a successful fashion designer, and the novel concludes with her happily engaged to a fellow designer who also rose from the ghetto, planning to establish her own “settlement” on the Lower East Side: a shop selling tasteful clothing for immigrant women. As some scholars have observed, the story line is partly based on Yezierska’s own romance with John Dewey, as well as the much publicized marriage of Jewish immigrant Rose Pastor to millionaire philanthropist Graham Stokes. What scholars have not fully considered is how Salome of the Tenements further establishes Yezierska as a participant within the cultural debate about New Womanhood.20 Even on a superficial reading, 18. For example, see Christopher Okonkwo, “Of Repression, Assertion, and the Speakerly Dress: Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements”; and Katherine Stubbs, “Reading Material: Contextualizing Clothing in the Work of Anzia Yezierska.” 19. Sollors, “The Radical Novel Reconsidered,” 99. 20. An encouraging recent example to the contrary is Ljiljana Coklin’s “Between the Orient and the Ghetto: A Modern Immigrant Woman in Anzia Yezierska’s

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Yezierska’s novel reveals striking similarities to works by contemporaries who explored themes related to the New Woman. For example, Sonya Vrunsky’s awareness of the demands of the marriage market, as well as her struggle to repay debts incurred in her pursuit of a husband, echoes Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905). When Sonya resolves to “capture” the wealthy John Manning, she cajoles couturier Jacques Hollins into designing a beautiful outfit for her, well aware of the need to maintain appropriate appearances to play the game of catching an upper-class husband. Furthermore, she manipulates her landlord into repainting her apartment so that it too will provide a respectable backdrop for her role as marriageable ingenue, and she secures a loan from a pawnbroker in order to purchase new furniture, promising to repay him once she has married Manning. As with the money Lily Bart accepts from Gus Trenor in Wharton’s novel, for which he expects “repayment” in a scene that underscores the theme of women as sexual commodity, the pawnbroker in Yezierska’s novel soon threatens Sonya with blackmail, and it is the exposure of her debt to Manning that causes him to rebuke her and end their marriage. For both of these female protagonists, having accepted money from men who subsequently exert power over them contributes to their social falls, for Lily is soon snubbed by the influential Trenors for her missteps with Gus, whereas Sonya must return to the ghetto and start over when she is cast out of Manning’s high-society world. Other themes also connect Salome of the Tenements with Wharton’s breakthrough novel. For example, Sonya’s realization of the lack of a “respectable” place for women who lose their niche within or reject the patriarchal system strongly parallels the experiences of Lily toward the end of The House of Mirth. After Sonya has been spurned by Manning, she seeks a place to stay and is rebuffed by a hotel clerk who assumes she is a prostitute; she finally checks into a working women’s hotel that seems a “sepulcher of old maids” (163), echoing the critiques of “A Bed for the Night.” This scene recalls the outcast Lily’s wandering through Manhattan near the close of Wharton’s novel, as well as Lily’s impressions of the “sallow preoccupied women” among whom she mingles

Salome of the Tenements,” which explores how Yezierska “establishes a link between an empowered immigrant woman and a liberated New American Woman through her employment of rich yet contradictory Oriental imagery, and in particular through her use of the Salome myth” (136).

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when she is reduced to working in a milliner’s shop.21 Furthermore, the pervasive emphasis in Yezierska’s novel on Sonya’s beauty, sexuality, and body parallels a similar focus on Lily in The House of Mirth. Just as Lily is persistently the object of masculine gaze and speculation, whether that of Lawrence Selden, Gus Trenor, or the men who view her glorious tableau vivant, Yezierska’s heroine is repeatedly scrutinized by the men around her with great emphasis on her beauty and passionate face and body. For example, when designer Jacques Hollins first sees Sonya, he is fascinated with her “guileless” and “mobile” face and her “erect, live figure poised bird-like with desire” (22–23), in contrast to the imperious and corpulent society women that constitute his regular clientele. Likewise, at their first meeting, John Manning is quickly captivated by Sonya’s sex appeal: “Manning struck a match to his cigarette and over the flame let his eyes rest on her, not appraisingly, but as if studying the woman he did not know. Sonya’s face, her figure vibrated with something more powerful than strength, more poignant than beauty. . . . That something which through the ages has swayed kingdoms, toppled empires—the resistless magnetism—feminine mystery” (35). The particular attraction felt by the men around both heroines is also due in part to the conscious artifice of both Sonya and Lily, who are similarly portrayed as deliberately manipulating their appearance and behavior to achieve the desired effects. Early in Wharton’s novel, Lily cultivates an innocent and pious facade in order to interest straitlaced, wealthy bachelor Percy Gryce, whereas Sonya consciously remakes herself from a denizen of Hester Street to one of Fifth Avenue in order to capture Manning.22 Though composed from very different cultural perspectives, Yezierska’s and Wharton’s novels similarly treat the question of women’s position in society with a cynical emphasis on their status as a sexual commodity in a market for marriage, though these authors also acknowledge their protagonists’ ability to manipulate the rules of that game. On the other hand, Yezierska’s novel also aligns thematically with the fiction of a different contemporary voice on the Woman Question, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Sonya’s experiences when she takes a position as

21. Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements, 163 (future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text); Wharton, The House of Mirth, 282. 22. In another connection with Wharton’s work, Sonya’s manipulation of men throughout Salome of the Tenements, from her landlord to Manning himself, also recalls the wiles of heroine Undine Spragg of The Custom of the Country (1913).

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a waitress, resolving to work her own way toward professional success, recall the protagonists in much of Gilman’s fiction in her magazine, Forerunner—optimistic and often formulaic tales very different from “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Stories including “Baulked; or, Ways a Little Harder” (1912), “With a Difference” (1914), and “His Mother” (1914), though they feature native-born rather than immigrant heroines, critique the lack of respectable job opportunities for women and the sexual harassment they may experience in the public realm. Similarly, Yezierska’s heroine is repulsed by the advances of male patrons at the restaurant and is disenchanted by the lack of job alternatives. Yet she perseveres and ultimately succeeds in her chosen profession as a clothing designer, in true Horatio Alger–esque style, like the protagonists in much of Gilman’s fiction. When she excitedly asks her partner near the close of the novel, “‘Tell me . . . is there anything in the world so real, so thrilling, as real work?’” (175), she echoes a sentiment that pervades Gilman’s fiction and nonfiction, that is, in contrast to the compulsory work of domesticity for many women, a satisfying and chosen occupation gives great meaning to one’s life. Finally, Sonya’s artistic leanings also echo the fiction of other novelists of the era who depicted women preferring pursuit of the arts to marriage and motherhood, among them Edna Pontellier in Chopin’s Awakening, Olivia Lattimore in Mary Austin’s Woman of Genius, and Thea Kronborg in Cather’s Song of the Lark. Like them, Sonya is driven by the desire to create art, in her case through beautiful clothing, and she thereby experiences a feeling of self-actualization, as in the moment when she completes her first design: “She stood back speechless, her eyes half closing with rapture. She had once thought that love was the greatest joy that could ever fill the heart. But now she knew the released passion of creation. Now she felt that art was as great a god as love. It gave her the completest emotion she had ever known” (170). Despite these striking parallels with leading writers of Yezierska’s era in exploring the ideals of New Womanhood, her heroine’s experiences in this novel are uniquely defined by her ethnic and class heritage. Yezierska’s perspective as an immigrant who herself received the condescending aid of “lady philanthropists” qualified her to criticize this quintessential Progressive manifestation of the New Woman, the reformer. Indeed, although Wharton’s House of Mirth and Salome of the Tenements do share several themes, they diverge on the issue of social outreach. Whereas Lily’s friend Gerty Farish’s philanthropic efforts for working girls are portrayed by Wharton as worthwhile,

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even if they are appreciated by Lily in a rather myopic way, Yezierska treats those efforts with a far more cynical view. After her marriage to Manning, Sonya tours his settlement-house operation and observes repeated instances of condescension toward the charity recipients, from poor women reluctantly being taught how to make a “milkless, butterless, eggless cake” (134) to a young shopgirl being lectured and dismissed for wearing cosmetics. Sonya concludes to herself, “So these are Manning’s social experts! So this is their plane of reason—reason forced down the throats of the people! . . . Before her marriage . . . she had told herself that [Manning’s] personality must humanize the most inhuman activities of philanthropy. Now she was seeing his settlement, as she had refused to let herself see it before her marriage” (138). Indeed, it is as much Sonya’s disgust at the misguidedness and condescension of Manning’s philanthropy as it is his anger with Sonya that causes their relationship to end. In addition to establishing Yezierska’s place in the New Woman debate by critiquing this figure’s bourgeois manifestation in a manner distinct among her contemporaries, Salome of the Tenements also reflects Yezierska’s often contradictory response to New Womanhood throughout her fiction. Her first novel’s depiction of this ideal is often positive, as seen by Sonya’s sympathetic evolution from manipulative gold digger to independent career woman. In this way, Sonya anticipates the aspirations of Sara Smolinsky in Bread Givers and the protagonists of later stories such as “America and I” and “To the Stars,” while reiterating themes found in earlier stories including “Wings” and “The Miracle.” Salome of the Tenements especially resembles these narratives, for, in most of them, the heroine not only successfully establishes a livelihood, thus resisting an Old World–style arranged marriage, but also finds a male companion who loves her as an equal and respects her views. Indeed, this last goal is perhaps more solely the focus of Salome than Yezierska’s other texts that portray New Womanhood positively, for Sonya Vrunsky does not face a conflict between pursuing her career and caring for family members, as several other Yezierska protagonists do, especially Sara in Bread Givers. Sonya’s relative isolation as a heroine allows Yezierska to focus more closely on her protagonist’s professional self-actualization and attainment of a romantic partner who supports her values. Despite such praise for the New Woman’s ideals of fulfilling work and companionate love, in this first novel Yezierska is also highly critical of bourgeois women who saw their public role in providing

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immigrant social services, initiating a theme developed further in Arrogant Beggar. In Sonya’s denunciation of John Manning’s settlement-house work, we see the seeds of Adele Lindner’s pronounced attack on such efforts in the latter novel. Although Yezierska is inconsistent on this issue of immigrant philanthropy, sometimes portraying characters such as teachers in night schools sympathetically, she is usually quite critical of such do-gooder New Women’s perpetuation of cultural hegemony, and Salome of the Tenements is no exception. That such themes in this novel have been overlooked is perhaps not surprising; in contrast to the more straightforwardly feminist heroines of Arrogant Beggar or Bread Givers, Sonya Vrunsky is initially complicit with hegemonic notions of gender, if not those of class. Furthermore, Yezierska’s reliance on essentializing notions of difference between Gentile and Jew in tracing John Manning’s attraction to Sonya, even if they ultimately are problematized by the author, strikes some readers as deeply vexed.23 Nonetheless, Salome of the Tenements constitutes Yezierska’s ambitious first novelistic attempt to engage the complex terrain of changing gender ideology in earlytwentieth-century America. Yezierska’s next novel, Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New (1925), does not deal directly with the New Woman as manifested in Progressive social-uplift efforts, instead focusing more directly on the coming of age of the novel’s heroine. As with her stories that concede both worthy and detrimental aspects of the New Woman’s values (sometimes by allegorizing those contrasts through sympathetic and unsympathetic New Woman characters), this novel treats this figure from a middle ground, seeing value not just in the American feminist ideals that spur Sara’s development but also in her honoring the traditional Jewish values of her family. Sara represents such a middle ground in her actualization of many of the New Woman’s goals—a satisfying profession, a residence of her own, and a partner in life who respects her independent ways— and her simultaneous willingness to be a traditional “burden bearer” 23. For example, Werner Sollors argues that “what mars the novel again and again is its relentless racialism” (“The Radical Novel Reconsidered,” 99), citing its depictions of Sonya as passionate Jew and Manning as cold, impassive Gentile, while Katherine Stubbs observes that Yezierska’s repeated reliance on such stereotypes throughout her fiction “dangerously reinforced tenets of eugenicist theory that had gained a measure of intellectual prestige and popular support since the turn of the century” (introduction to Arrogant Beggar, xx).

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to her Old World father. Indeed, Sara draws on both the middle-class ideal of the New Woman and her own ethnic and class background to forge a syncretic ideal of female empowerment. As with much of Yezierska’s fiction, this novel reworks the preoccupations of an earlier text, in this case the title story in her collection Children of Loneliness (1923), which presents the same plot with a bleaker conclusion. That tale concerns Rachel Ravinsky, who, like Sara, has trained to become a schoolteacher. After graduating and returning from Cornell University to the Lower East Side, she finds herself repulsed by both her parents’ Old World attitudes and their squalor, and she painfully decides to break ties with them. The story concludes with Rachel returning to her lonely boardinghouse room, resolved to endure the difficult process of “get[ting] to the new world” once and for all on her own. Yezierska’s treatment of the New Woman in this earlier story is a mixed one: Rachel knows that the self-reliance of this female ideal is a positive alternative to the patriarchy of her father’s world, telling herself, “No wonder a man’s love means so little to the American woman. They belong to the world in which they are born. They belong to their fathers and mothers; they belong to their relatives and friends. They are human even without a man’s love.”24 However, the New Woman’s independence also carries a negative side, with the story’s implication that Rachel is painfully alienating herself from her family to pursue professional achievement. By the time Yezierska finished writing Bread Givers two years later, she was apparently able to envision a happier ending in which a heroine faced with similar challenges could, perhaps, reconcile the contradictory claims of self and family. The plot of Bread Givers follows the trajectories of coming-of-age novels and many New Woman narratives, tracing Sara’s growth from a ten-year-old girl living in a tenement on Hester Street to her attainment of a college education and a position as a schoolteacher. The first third of the novel, however, makes it clear what Sara must escape to do so, presenting a vision of overwhelming patriarchy through the tyranny of Reb Smolinsky, Sara’s Orthodox rabbi father. Even in the opening pages, Yezierska emphasizes the nature of Jewish Old World culture that Sara’s father embodies. He castigates his wife for not having borne him a son, and he repeats a litany of patriarchal notions: “The prayers of his daughters didn’t count because God didn’t listen

24. Yezierska, “The Children of Loneliness,” 190, 187.

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to women. Heaven and the next world were only for men. Women could get into heaven because they were the wives and daughters of men. Women had no brains for the study of God’s Torah, but they could be the servants of men who studied the Torah.” Sara’s mother, though she patiently accepts her burden of caring for Reb, does dare to challenge his thinking; when he laments, “No wonder it says in the Torah, ‘Woe to a man who has females for his offspring!’” she spiritedly replies, “‘And woe to us women who got to live in a Torah-made world that’s only for men.’”25 However, Sara’s mother’s resistance is never strong enough to stop Reb, and when he attempts to marry off one daughter, Mrs. Smolinsky complies with his exaggerations about the girl and his own materialistic values, praising the fur coat and gold watch that the suitor can provide. Furthermore, Reb runs off the chosen suitors of his eldest three daughters when he deems these men inappropriate as future sons-inlaw, denying his daughters the chance to choose husbands based on love. He first alienates his oldest daughter Bessie’s suitor, a clothingfactory coworker, and then dispenses with Mashah’s pianist and Fania’s poet, both of whom he sees as impractical dreamers. Fania and Mashah are then pushed to marry men whom their father has selected through a matchmaker, and they both do so, as Fania tells Sara, “‘only to get away from our house’” (80). Both of the middle two daughters’ marriages, not surprisingly, are unhappy, as the lies that their husbands told in order to secure wives are revealed. However, Sara’s sister Bessie is the most tragic casualty of their father’s tyranny. She has always been the most dutiful and selfsacrificing of Reb’s daughters, yet he castigates her as a “dried-up old maid” (98) and soon pushes her into marrying a detestable fish peddler, Zalmon, who seeks a wife merely to care for his six children from a previous marriage. Yezierska uses metaphors of torture to describe Bessie’s resistance while Reb commandeers a marriage agreement: “Father and Mother kept laughing and talking and singing Bessie’s praises as they drank the tea. Only Bessie couldn’t speak. Only she kept silent and miserable with the tortured frightened eyes of a person torn on a rack by the hair and by the feet” (10). It is not the evidence of Zalmon’s modest business success, of course, that finally changes Bessie’s mind, but her own nurturing and self-sacrificial nature. After 25. Yezierska, Bread Givers, 9–10, 95. Future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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she pities and cares for Zalmon’s sick child, she quietly agrees to marry him; as Sara observes in witnessing Bessie’s subdued transfer from her father’s house to Zalmon’s, “the burden bearer had changed her burden” (110). Through her sisters’ tragic fates, Sara is surrounded by examples of women compromised by Old World Jewish views of women as second-class citizens with little choice over their futures. When an exasperated Sara decides at seventeen to leave her parents’ home and support herself, her father again invokes the Torah, reminding her of the patriarchal injunction that a woman cannot get to heaven except through a man. Revealing how she has absorbed changing gender ideologies in her New World setting, Sara responds curtly that “‘in America, women don’t need men to boss them’” (137), and when her father strikes her, Sara makes her renunciation of such patriarchal values explicit as she shuts the door on her family: “I leaped back and dashed for the door. The Old World had struck its last on me” (138). However, the patriarchy of that Old World is not as easy to escape as leaving her father’s house. Working in a laundry and attending night school in order to become a teacher, Sara yet encounters other instances of male privilege in the urban milieu that usually offered the New Woman broadened opportunities. Eating in a cafeteria run by a charitable organization, she is angered that the male customers are given larger and better portions of food than the women, just as her father received the best servings in her home. When she complains, she is asked to leave the restaurant. Sara furthermore faces resistance in her mother’s and sisters’ admonitions that she should marry. In a letter to Sara, her sister Fania questions why she would want to “work [her]self up to be an old maid school teacher” instead of enjoying the lifestyle of a leisure-class wife through a successful marriage match (185). However, Sara resists her family’s influence, echoing the iconic New Woman’s values in vowing to have her own career: “‘I don’t want to get married. I’ve set out to do something and I’m going to do it, even if it kills me’” (177). The heroine in Bread Givers also undergoes an experience typical of New Woman narratives: a sexual awakening outside of marriage, in the vein of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening and Olivia Lattimore in A Woman of Genius. Erotic sparks fly between Sara and Max Goldstein, a department-store owner who comes from California at Fania’s behest to court her. Yet they disagree in values: he denigrates her pursuit of higher education, asserting his business success without it, and he is later distracted from listening to her read a favorite story aloud by

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thoughts of a real-estate scheme. Though their relationship is not consummated, Sara recognizes its effects within herself: “I turned to the mirror and saw myself with new wonder. . . . My eyes had grown bigger and darker. They had become seeing eyes. I had seen and felt. I had tasted and known” (198). However, she reluctantly concludes, “To him, a wife would only be another piece of property” (199), and “Even in the ecstasy of our kisses, I knew he was not my kind” (201). Sara’s episode with Max Goldstein represents a common stage in the iconic New Woman’s development, but it also serves to reinforce the opposition that Sara faces from her own family in her pursuit of the New Woman’s goals. When her father learns that she has turned down Goldstein, he unleashes a tirade that links Sara’s pursuit of a career with the deleterious effect of all “free” women in American society: “You think you can make over the world? You think millions of educated old maids like you could change the world one inch? Woe to America where women are let free like men. All that’s false in politics, prohibition, and all the evils of the world come from them.” His speech makes clear how the values of the New Woman are strongly aligned with Progressive American society not only in the minds of Yezierska’s heroines but also in the minds of those who most disagree with those values. In this moment Reb Smolinsky’s embodiment of Old World Jewish mores that oppose the values of the New Woman is most clear; indeed, her father appears to Sara at that moment as “a tyrant from the Old World where only men were people” (205), and her continued resistance to his remarks causes him to disown her. Sara is accepted to a college in upstate New York, where she supports herself by working in a laundry and, despite feelings of isolation from the more privileged students, prevails to graduate, even winning an essay contest, “What the College Has Done for Me” (232). She obtains a teaching position and returns to the city, now able to purchase fine clothing and rent a spacious room. These moments, in which new forms of consumption symbolize her arrival as a New Woman, are the actualization of Sara’s lifelong goals, and as in many New Woman–themed works, she recognizes that a meaningful profession is an intrinsic good even more fulfilling than finding a romantic partner: “I, Sara Smolinsky, had done what I had set out to do. I was now a teacher in the public schools. . . . Once I had been elated at the thought that a man had wanted me. How much more thrilling to feel that I had made my work wanted! This was the honeymoon of my career!” (241).

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However, Sara’s devotion to her profession soon drives another wedge between herself and her family. When her long-ailing mother dies, Sara refuses to let the undertaker rend her new suit with a knife in the tradition of the Jewish law for mourning, protesting, “‘It’s my only suit, and I need it for work. Tearing it wouldn’t bring Mother back to life again’” (255). In this moment, Sara reveals how fully she has assimilated the mainstream American values that locate one’s sense of self-worth in what one does for a living—and, perhaps, through the consumption and display of material goods—rather than through family allegiance, but even more so, she symbolizes how the New Woman represented a sometimes-threatening commitment to professional pursuits rather than traditional feminine duties to family and home. Despite her outward signs of successfully attaining the New Woman’s goals, however, Sara struggles internally with the choices she has made, especially her rejection of her father. Following his wife’s death, Reb Smolinsky quickly forges a second marriage with a woman whose acquisitiveness Sara and her sisters despise. Sara cuts ties with Reb, but she is soon shocked to learn that he has been forced by his new wife to sell wares in the street. She renews her relationship with her ailing father, hoping to take better care of him than does her self-centered stepmother. Moreover, Sara begins a romance with Hugo Seelig, the principal of her school. When he meets her father, Hugo’s interest in Reb’s learning and desire to learn Hebrew from him lead Sara to regard her father in a newly sympathetic light. These events make Sara realize that, for better or worse, she must reintegrate her father into her life, and at the novel’s close she and her fiancé resolve to let Reb live with them. The conclusion of the novel does suggest happiness for Sara and Hugo—particularly because her suitor, like Sara, represents a successful syncretic blending of Old and New, through his affection for his Jewish heritage and simultaneous devotion to progress and assimilation in America. However, Sara still feels the oppressive presence of her roots in a patriarchal culture: “I felt the shadow still there, over me. It wasn’t just my father, but the generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me” (297). Thus, the novel ends with a sober recognition of Orthodox Judaic ideology that makes women, no matter how progressive they may be, feel the duty to become “burden bearers” for men, like Sara’s mother and sister Bessie. Although the text implies that Sara will be a different kind of burden bearer for her

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father—even Reb sees that he must accept living in a household that does not observe Jewish orthodoxies as carefully as he does—she nonetheless acknowledges the inescapability of that burden, in the form of her father and the patriarchal attitudes he embodies. Bread Givers thus provides a soberly qualified portrait of the value of attaining the New Woman’s ideals for one Jewish American woman: though Sara’s successes are praiseworthy, those successes mean little without reconciliation with Jewish tradition, as represented through her family, even if that tradition often functions to restrict women’s lives. Yezierska’s next novel, Arrogant Beggar (1927), moves away from the less political bildungsroman focus of Bread Givers toward a strongly class-inflected critique of the immigrant uplift efforts of bourgeois New Women. Like Salome of the Tenements, this novel presents negative portraits of such social workers, making them the overly idealistic mouthpieces for the gospel of scientific social work that inspired many Progressives. However, this novel also valorizes the opportunity and freedom that its heroine, Adele Lindner, enjoys as a woman in earlytwentieth-century America. As Cara-Lynn Ungar and Carol Batker argue, Adele may be seen to represent an innovative, syncretic ideal of Jewish American New Womanhood, blending what is valuable about both mainstream American feminism of the day with her own cultural background. However, despite the way in which these attributes of a changing American society allow Adele to become a successful restaurant owner, in keeping with the heroines’ attainments of successful careers in Yezierska’s previous two long fictions, Arrogant Beggar nonetheless constitutes her angriest novel, a quality noted with consternation by contemporary reviewers.26 The catalyst for Yezierska’s indictment of immigrant philanthropy in this novel is Adele Lindner’s interactions with Mrs. Hellman, a banker’s wife (and highly assimilated Jewish American) who sponsors a “Home for Working Girls”—an organization analogous to the Clara de Hirsch Home in which Yezierska herself spent time. The orphaned Adele, who supports herself by working in a department store, is initially delighted to earn a place at this establishment. Adele especially wishes to rely on the home’s educational opportunities to pursue a profession, having recognized that she cannot foresee a future for herself as a “burden bearer” for men. She moves to the

26. Stubbs’s introduction notes such negative reviews of Arrogant Beggar (vii).

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home, which is filled with working girls of different ethnicities and nationalities—Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Polish. The young women casually use derogatory names to refer to their various backgrounds, and one humorously adds, “‘Only thing missing’s a Chink to make it perfect.’” Yezierska thus invokes the broad cross-section of women who fell outside of the socioeconomically and racially privileged stereotype of the New Woman yet sought to create independent lives for themselves in the early twentieth century, even if their impetus was more often economic necessity than ideological conviction—and who, moreover, were superintended in that process by their more privileged sisters. Despite her initial idealism about the Hellman Home, Adele quickly learns of its restrictive ways, recalling the central theme of “The Free Vacation House” as she reflects, “I began to look back and wonder, wasn’t I perhaps a little freer when I lived alone?”27 Yezierska implies that the young women in this home, whose sexuality and social independence the matrons strive to control through curfews and numerous rules concerning dress and behavior, are ironically as restricted by other women as by patriarchy. When Adele loses her job because of slow business and fears being thrown out of the home, her counselor suggests she enroll in training for domestic service. Despite her shame at doing so, reflecting the cultural preference among Jewish American immigrant women at that time for factory work rather than domestic labor, Adele believes Miss Simons has her best interests at heart, and she joins the class, which preaches the emerging doctrine of “scientific housekeeping,” in line with Progressive interests in the professionalization and standardization of domestic labor. Adele dislikes the work until she is able to prove her skills to the skeptical teacher, and she is complimented by Mrs. Hellman and some other visitors for doing so. Flushed with a sense of success, her words of thanks to Mrs. Hellman so gratify the latter that she invites Adele to her home, promising to enroll her in a training school for domestic science that will enable her “‘to become a leader among [her] people’” (46). However, the limits of Mrs. Hellman’s philanthropy quickly become clear to Adele: when her mentor gives her some secondhand clothes, she delightedly kisses Mrs. Hellman, who greatly offends Adele by surreptitiously wiping her cheek.

27. Yezierska, Arrogant Beggar, 22, 28. Future quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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Adele’s growing sense of the hypocrisy of such philanthropic efforts continues when she begins working as a servant in Mrs. Hellman’s home in order to gain practical experience. One day she overhears a meeting of the home’s board of directors, who are concerned about “spoiling” the girls in the home and want to cut costs by serving them cheaper food—while also teaching them to be satisfied with “simplicity.” The hypocrisy of these overdressed, overfed women preaching the virtues of simplicity is clear, and though Mrs. Hellman does defend the girls’ interests, she is soon overruled by the others, who subscribe to a paradigmatic Progressive view of their philanthropic work. As one woman puts it, “‘We who set out to serve humanity must cultivate a scientific attitude of mind. After all, we’re living in a scientific age, and even social work must be done scientifically’” (68). Moreover, Adele is angered to overhear Mrs. Hellman boast that Adele works for lower wages than she would have to pay a girl from the employment agency (69). The climactic moment in Adele’s recognition of the limitations of this bourgeois philanthropy occurs at a board of directors meeting at the Hellman Home. Adele rises to deliver a speech of gratitude that she was asked to give by her patron. However, she sees Arthur Hellman in the audience, the son of this privileged family who has both attracted and alienated her. Adele becomes angry and forgets her speech, instead bursting out in criticism of that establishment: “Hypocrites! Shaming me before strangers—boasting of your own kindness—because I had no home—I had no friends—I had no work. Feeding your vanity on my helplessness—my misfortune” (86). Adele flees to the streets and, like the women in other works such as Sonya in Salome of the Tenements and the protagonist of “A Bed for the Night,” experiences the threat of becoming sexually vulnerable after abandoning the settings that, for better or worse, protected her. However, Yezierska allows this novel’s heroine not only to fully articulate the limitations of a system of philanthropy that many Progressive New Women supported but also to forge an authentic and satisfying existence through meaningful work and a romantic partner who shares her beliefs. Adele takes a job as a dishwasher, and the menial work is relieved by a friendship she forges with a kindhearted older Jewish woman named Muhmenkeh. When Adele falls ill, a penitent Arthur Hellman seeks her out and, with Muhmenkeh’s help, nurses her back to health. He proposes to marry her, but as she tells him, “‘I’d never feel one of you—never one of the Hellmans. . . . And you don’t feel I’m your equal, because even now, you’re planning

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what you can do for me, what you can make of me’” (117). Thus, Adele has the wisdom to foresee the incompatibility between herself and a privileged husband that Yezierska’s earlier heroine Sonya Vrunsky learned through hard experience. After Muhmenkeh’s death, Adele resolves to “start something with [her] spirit in it” (125), and she opens the old woman’s basement apartment as a restaurant. Like the social and political engagement of other Yezierska heroines in “My Own People” and Salome of the Tenements, who use their professions to aid and advocate for the Jewish immigrant community from within it, Adele’s enterprise is socially committed: she exhibits the work of struggling artists, and her poor customers pay only what they can, or not at all. In this respect, Adele’s restaurant contrasts with another contemporary businesswoman’s enterprise in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel What Diantha Did (1910). Diantha Bell’s diversified empire, including a maid service, restaurant, cooked-food delivery service, and hotel, is also meant to demonstrate to the world the benefits of “organized housekeeping,” part of Gilman’s interest in revolutionizing the home to free women from the burdens of domesticity, but it is also meant to make Diantha profit. As she tells her mother at one point, “‘You know what I’m after—to get ‘housework’ on a business basis. That’s all—and prove, prove, PROVE what a good business it is.’”28 By contrast, Adele’s venture is a business, but far more important to her is its fostering of social support and social justice, nourishing the minds and hearts of her patrons as well as their bodies, regardless of their ability to pay. Moreover, it stands in opposition to the scientific, rational approach to social work praised by individuals like Arther Hellman’s sister, Edna, who tells him at one point, “‘You have no idea how much is needed to be done for the poor. . . . But it’s work that must be done by trained minds with scientific vision’” (79). Adele’s project is not informed by the growing academic field of social science that often influenced attitudes and public policies in the Progressive Era, but that does not hinder its power to create happiness and improve lives. At the conclusion of the novel, Adele has entered into a happy romantic relationship with Jean Rachmansky, a musician and composer who was also once supported by the Hellman family. He is equally committed to Adele’s enterprise, and his performances at

28. Gilman, What Diantha Did, 209.

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Muhmenkeh’s Coffee Shop provide artistic nourishment to a democratic cross-section of Lower East Side life: “What a hurdy-gurdy of life-starved faces! Students, plumbers, salesmen, tailors. Slim stenographers and school teachers side by side with shawled yentehs and gray-bearded old men” (144). Furthermore, Adele and Jean look forward to welcoming Muhmenkeh’s granddaughter to America and into their home. Katherine Stubbs has argued that this action somewhat problematically constitutes Adele’s crossing over “to the other side, [to] become a benefactor, a Lady Bountiful,” and the likely result of “young Shenah Gittel’s inevitable ambivalence to this form of charity” signifies a “resurfacing of the social content of the novel, the return of what the novel’s romantic formula appeared to repress with Adele and Jean’s marriage.”29 However, Adele’s action seems more understandable when viewed within the concept of the Jewish New Woman. Having forged a syncretic ideal of New Womanhood, blending American New Womanly ideals of economic independence and a satisfying career with a devotion to supporting the Jewish immigrant community—and in particular, the Jewish conception of charity embodied in the character of Muhmenkeh, tsodekah—Adele’s choice to support the granddaughter of her beloved mentor seems fitting.30 From her earliest published stories through her novels of the 1920s, Anzia Yezierska’s body of fiction constitutes a challenge to iconic understandings of the New Woman in Progressive America. Although some of her stories contain unmitigated criticism of the philanthropically oriented New Woman, others create a middle ground by including both negative and positive portraits of American New Women with whom her immigrant protagonists interact, whereas still others depict Jewish immigrant women drawing on both this ideal and their own ethnic and class heritage to forge an innovative ideal of female empowerment. Yezierska’s works that foreground bourgeois women’s involvement in social-uplift efforts typical of the Progressive Era are most critical of the New Woman, whereas her works that downplay class issues to focus instead on the protagonist’s attainment of personal and romantic objectives present the New Woman’s priorities more sympathetically—for example, her ideal of companionate marriage. 29. Stubbs, introduction to Arrogant Beggar, xxxiv. 30. See discussion of the concept of tsodekah in ibid., xxix–xxxi; and Ungar, “Discourses of Class,” 88.

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Indeed, Yezierska’s fiction repeatedly establishes a dichotomy between the stifling patriarchy of the Old World Jewish culture from which her female protagonists come and the greater freedoms for women that the New World represents, even if her fiction also shows that American women regrettably seldom use such opportunity to effect greater social justice. Embodying what Susan A. Glenn and Linda Gordon Kuzmack have termed “Jewish New Womanhood,” Yezierska’s heroines selectively incorporate ideas of mainstream American New Womanhood, while both invoking and problematizing the evolutionist discourses of civilization that informed the mission of many Progressive New Women.

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The year 1920 is commonly seen as the end of the Progressive Era, as signified by the election of Republican president Warren G. Harding that year in triumph over the legacy of Democratic, Progressive Wilsonianism. Similarly, by the 1920s, the cultural moment of the New Woman was essentially over; although the flappers of that decade were sometimes called New Women, the ideals for which those figures had stood were so diffused within mass culture that they no longer needed special designation as “New.” Though Anzia Yezierska was still actively writing throughout the 1920s, treating the often vexed relationships between immigrant women and their more privileged philanthropic sisters that exemplified many ethnic women’s experiences during the Progressive Era, the other writers in this study had largely grown silent. Some had died: S. Alice Callahan in 1894, Sui Sin Far in 1914. Others had been unable or unwilling to support themselves through creative writing and turned to other work. Mourning Dove, after the weak reception of her novel when it finally came out in 1927, continued to write and published one other work, her Okanogan folklore collection Coyote Stories (1933), but largely turned to political activism, founding the Eagle Feathers Club for Indian women in 1928, becoming a spokeswoman for the Colville Indian Association, and serving on the Colville Tribal Council before her death in 1936.1 Pauline Hopkins, following attempts to continue her writing career after her departure from Colored American Mag1. Other material written by Mourning Dove has been published posthumously: Tales of the Okanogans, ed. Donald M. Hines (1976), includes the tales in Coyote Stories as well as others she collected that were excluded from the 1933 volume by her editor, Heister Dean Guie; and Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography, ed. Jay Miller (1990).

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azine with the short-lived periodical projects Voice of the Negro and the New Era, apparently turned wholly to stenography to support herself until her death in 1930. And María Cristina Mena, with the exception of her story “A Son of the Tropics” (1931), stopped publishing her incisive fictional treatments of North American–Mexican interactions and of Mexican life and later turned to the realm of children’s literature in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps having found the latter genre to require fewer delicate editorial negotiations in order to see her work in print. These writers’ relative lack of prominence or lasting success during their own lives arguably reflects the barriers for minority, female, and often economically struggling writers attempting publication during the Progressive Era. Indeed, all faced a challenge to secure publishers, as variously shown in the heavy-handed revisions of collaborators, in the authors’ cautious correspondence with editors, or, more obliquely, in what were often carefully manipulated self-presentations as “ethnic” authors.2 The final three authors in this study were able to publish at least some of their writings in widely circulated periodicals such as New England Magazine, Century, and Cosmopolitan. However, the two Native American women’s novels were issued through relatively small publishing houses (Chicago’s H. J. Smith and Company for Callahan’s novel, and Boston’s Four Seas Company for Mourning Dove’s) and never reprinted until the late twentieth century, whereas Hopkins—by choice or necessity—sought publication in forums that, tailored to an African American readership, precluded exposure to a broader American audience. Of course, the choice of these authors to write fiction about their respective ethnic communities and ways of life likely limited their appeal for white American audiences, or at the least compartmentalized their work for publishers seeking examples of the “exotic” local color of immigrant or minority communities, as the packaging and marketing of Sui Sin Far’s story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance suggest.3 2. For more on some of these authors’ presentations as ethnic commodities, whether self-instigated or driven by mentors or publishers, see the following: Concerning Mourning Dove, see Donovan, “Owning Mourning Dove.” For Sui Sin Far, see White-Parks, Sui Sin Far, esp. 195–202; and Ferens, “Subjects of the Gaze,” in Edith and Winnifred Eaton, 80–110. For María Cristina Mena, see Amy Doherty, introduction to Collected Stories. And for Anzia Yezierska, see Ebest, “Anzia Yezierska”; and Lisa Botshon, “Anzia Yezierska and the Marketing of the Jewish Immigrant in 1920s Hollywood.” 3. See discussion of the publishers’ reliance on Orientalist appeal in the design and marketing of Mrs. Spring Fragrance in White-Parks, Sui Sin Far, 195–200.

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I would like to conjecture that these authors’ reception may also be linked to their willingness to interrogate, whether subtly or overtly, what largely became an accepted female ideal in the course of the Progressive Era. From her mass-audience-friendly visual manifestation as the Gibson girl in periodicals to her literary presence not only in highbrow works but also in the development of what Maureen Honey shows to be a flourishing middlebrow literary genre, the New Woman romance, the New Woman became a pervasive image within American culture during the first two decades of the twentieth century, her various objectives increasingly interwoven with the Progressive movement’s emphases on social amelioration and women’s greater participation in public affairs.4 In short, these authors’ discomfiting assertions of the blind spots in the iconic New Woman’s values likely did not play well, ultimately, with the American public. Nonetheless, common themes and discursive techniques connect these authors in their distinctive interrogations of the New Woman from the racial and socioeconomic margins of Progressive Era America. Beyond demonstrating the ways in which this female ideal did not always accommodate their perspectives, the authors in this study further illuminate the double indemnity of being female and ethnically Other (and, as for most of these writers, working-class) at the turn of the twentieth century, and thus particularly vulnerable to victimization by white men—even those who support the ideal of the (white) New Woman. As Sui Sin Far makes clear in “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” the New Man’s lip service to the tenets of Progressive Era feminism such as suffrage did not necessarily translate into more comprehensive support for women, including an awareness of how the contingencies of class and race might impact women’s priorities and values. This idea is echoed in Yezierska’s many presentations of the “enlightened” Gentile men who befriend or romance her Jewish heroines, earnestly voicing the idealistic socialreform rhetoric of Progressives such as Herbert Croly or John Dewey, yet retrograde in their assumptions about those women as members of an “exotic” or even (tellingly) “Oriental” race. Moreover, several of the writers in this study portray white male characters who are both sexist and racist; occasionally, these men emerge as well-intentioned reformers who are nonetheless informed by racial and gender essentialisms (such as John Manning in Salome of 4. Honey, introduction to Breaking the Ties That Bind, 8.

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the Tenements), but in a number of instances, they are unequivocal villains—from the characters of Maurice Mauran and Alfred Densmore in S. Alice Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s novels to Hopkins’s portraits of Anson Pollock in Contending Forces, St. Clair Enson/General Benson in Hagar’s Daughter, and Aubrey Livingston in Of One Blood. These authors thus imply how entrenched cultural perspectives in turn-of-the-century America allowed white men to see themselves as superior to both nonwhite peoples and women (despite the New Woman’s efforts to overturn the latter idea), underscoring the double stigma with which individuals like these authors were often burdened. Furthermore, in depicting such characters, these authors anticipate in a racially inflected manner a pervasive trope in periodical New Woman fiction of the 1920s, which Maureen Honey notes commonly featured “an interrogation of male authority figures who try to control their female employees, wives, sweethearts, or daughters.”5 By implication, these authors may assert that it is all the more important that women be able to collaborate across ethnic or class lines to further overcome a common antagonist, without ignoring the differences that make their experiences distinct. Arguably, as the Progressive Era continued, the works of the authors in this study also began to interrogate more openly the common image of the white, middle-class New Woman, as well as to envision examples of female agency outside of that ideal. As we have seen, the first three writers in this study are linked by a relative lack of depiction of white New Women in their fictions, excepting Callahan’s presentation of Genevieve Weir (which she may have seen as essential to connect with the white audience to whom her novel was largely addressed). Instead, these writers appear mutually interested in claiming New Womanly ideals for their nonwhite protagonists. Sympathetic as their texts may be to such ideals, however, the attempts of their heroines of color to embody New Womanhood are often effaced by—or deliberately subsumed to—a more urgent demonstrated need for racial equality for Native Americans or African Americans. On the other hand, ambivalent or sometimes highly critical representations of white, middle-class New Womanhood do occur in the later stories of Sui Sin Far and in the fiction of María Cristina Mena and Anzia Yezierska, suggesting a growing willingness to engage directly with the racial and class privilege of the iconic New Woman. Furthermore, Mena’s fiction, while critiquing examples of 5. Honey, “Feminist New Woman Fiction in Periodicals of the 1920s,” 87.

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white American New Women, also offers glimpses of Mexican women who act entirely outside of that figure’s milieu yet demonstrate political agency. Sui Sin Far and Yezierska, moreover, portray their ethnic heroines forging syncretic ideals of empowered womanhood that selectively co-opt traits of the New Woman yet reject this figure’s complicity with evolutionist discourses of civilization (and the vexed racial theories underlying them) that guided much Progressive thought. Indeed, one testament to how these writers resist influential turn-ofthe-century theories of race is the way in which all of them, in one way or another, rely on the discourse of ethnography in order to present their ethnic communities to their readers yet complicate or subvert such discourse for their own purposes. As Lori Jirousek and Dominika Ferens have noted, ethnography was a burgeoning field in this era, and these writers reflect America’s fascination with describing, displaying, and gazing at “foreign” cultures at that time. Both Callahan and Mourning Dove devote significant passages of their novels to ethnographic descriptions of their respective Native American communities, the latter at least partially at the behest of her mentor and collaborator, Lucullus V. McWhorter. Although Hopkins does not rely on such discourse in most of her fictional work, her descriptions of the hidden Ethiopian city of Telassar in Of One Blood are ethnographic, echoing her nonfictional writings on African history and civilization, and as in those works, she describes the accomplishments of this culture in order to question white perceptions of Africans as evolutionarily primitive. Sui Sin Far may be seen appropriating the ethnographer’s gaze toward both Chinese immigrant communities and, more interestingly, white Americans.6 Mena’s fictional commentaries on Mexican life are replete with cultural generalizations and attempts to “translate” that culture for white readers—though, like Sui Sin Far, her occasional ethnographic comments about, conversely, “the highly original country of the Yanquis” seem meant to ironize such generalizations. Finally, Yezierska’s fictions and autobiographical works often function to unveil the culture of the Jewish tenements from which she came, even as her final novel explicitly takes to task the pitfalls of nonresidents’ sociological field research in ethnic communities.7 These 6. See Jirousek, “Spectacle Ethnography”; and Ferens, “Subjects of the Gaze,” in Edith and Winnifred Eaton, esp. 96–110. 7. Yezierska’s All I Could Never Be (1932) features as its heroine Fanya Ivanowna, who participates as an interpreter in a social science research project conducted in

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writers’ co-optation of ethnography is never at face value; rather, they manipulate such discourse in order to highlight the complexities of that practice. And in claiming space for themselves to participate in— as well as to subvert—ethnography, these writers reflect women’s participation in the flourishing young discipline of social science that informed influential policies enacted in the Progressive Era.8 Furthermore, we can see the legacy of these authors’ groundbreaking work in the fiction of other multicultural women writers in the 1920s and 1930s who focused on their heroines’ experiences as nonwhite or ethnic women in America, including Harlem Renaissance writers Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen and Jewish American writer Fannie Hurst. It is problematic to speculate whether Fauset would have written novels including There Is Confusion (1924) or Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1929) or Larsen Quicksand (1928) or Passing (1929) without the precedent of Pauline Hopkins’s fiction, especially since there is no evidence to confirm their having been aware of her work. However, their differing cultural contexts notwithstanding, substantial connections exist between the latter authors’ treatments of black heroines negotiating the minefields of race and gender in the 1920s and Hopkins’s explorations of such territory two decades earlier. Elizabeth Ammons, who includes all three authors in her wideranging study Conflicting Stories, notes that Fauset’s fiction “insisted upon the equal importance of sex and race as systems of oppression and silencing in the United States,” an observation that might equally apply to Hopkins’s work. More specifically, Hopkins’s novels offer treatments of black middle-class life, especially women’s roles therein, that also predominate in Fauset’s fiction—even as both authors have been faulted for this emphasis.9 More positively, Carol Allen has

the Polish community in Chicago. Fanya’s disillusion with the social scientists with whom she works and subsequent departure from the project echo the thematic critiques of settlement work developed in Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements and Arrogant Beggar. 8. For more on the development of social science during the Progressive Era and women’s vigorous participation in this field, see Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade; Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres; and Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women. 9. Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 142. Ann DuCille also considers all three authors’ treatments of love or marriage themes in Coupling Convention, 30–47, 86–109. Fauset has been charged with elitism due to her focus on middle-class black life by critics such as Barbara Christian and Cheryl Wall; see a summary of this reception (as well as other critical responses to it) in Batker, Reforming Fictions, 151– 52nn3–4. Hopkins has similarly been charged by critics from Robert Bone to

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observed that Fauset’s “genre of choice was the novel of manners, which she parodied relentlessly in order to construct a new, black female Bildungsroman that steers the young black subject away from bourgeois notions of romantic love and towards a sense of duty to the race and an augmentation of the subject’s own productivity as a black American worker.”10 Sappho Clark in Contending Forces, though she does participate in a bourgeois marriage plot, nonetheless offers a prescient example of such a black female bildungsroman. Moreover, Hopkins’s fiction anticipates both Fauset’s and Larsen’s fictional concern with light-skinned black women passing for white, a trope through which all three writers explore in a racially conscious manner their heroines’ confrontations with dominant American prescriptions of womanhood. Plum Bun’s Angela Murray and Passing’s Clare Kendry echo the heroines of Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter and Of One Blood in their near-white appearance and effacement of their racial identity, though the amnesiac Dianthe Lusk’s racial passing involuntarily results from others’ treachery. Hopkins’s heroines’ fates are quite different: after reclaiming her true identity, Hagar enjoys a happy reunion with her recovered first husband, whereas Dianthe, after discovering the truth about her race, perishes from the poison she attempts to give to one of her betrayers. Fauset’s and Larsen’s protagonists have similarly divergent fates: after Angela Murray publicly acknowledges her true identity, she goes to Paris to study her beloved art and is reunited with her sympathetic (and also multiracial) true love, whereas Clare Kendry, confronted by her husband with her true identity, dies in a fall from a window, Fauset leaving unclear whether she jumped or was pushed by another character. Kathleen Pfeiffer has traced how Fauset’s Plum Bun “consciously participates in an African American literary tradition in which a light skinned heroine negotiates the competing demands of race and gender,” yet does not acknowledge Hopkins as a crucial practitioner of this tradition. And as Hanna Wallinger has observed, Hopkins was either omitted completely from influential early critics’ assessments of African American literature between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth or con-

Houston Baker with creating characters who are seen problematically to mimic middle-class white lifestyles and values. See Kate McCullogh’s summary of such criticisms and responses to them (“Slavery, Sexuality, and Genre,” 23–24). 10. Allen, Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner, 10–11.

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sidered, as William Stanley Braithwaite put it, “negligible.” As Wallinger also notes, scholars have begun to recast the Harlem Renaissance as more informed by the work of earlier African American writers than has been previously recognized, and further attention should be paid to how Hopkins’s fiction may be seen as an antecedent for the work of Fauset and Larsen.11 Anzia Yezierska’s work may similarly be seen to support or influence other writers of this era in focusing on the relationships between immigrant or working-class Jewish American women and the more privileged women with whom they interact. The novels of Edna Ferber, such as Emma McChesney and Co. (1915) and Fanny Herself (1917), similarly portray Jewish American heroines pursuing independent careers and dramatize the dynamics between working-class and middle-class women, although Ferber’s work appeared concurrently with Yezierska’s. Fannie Hurst, who began publishing memorable short fiction in the 1910s, was an overwhelmingly successful writer throughout the 1920s and 1930s, many of whose works were also made into films, and whose fiction has garnered increasing recent interest in its response to highbrow modernism as well as its treatments of immigrant life in America and of women’s roles. Although Hurst differs from Yezierska both in her middle-class background and in the ultimately stronger support demonstrated in her novels of assimilationist philosophies—a fact that, as Carol Batker has noted, has kept working-class and middle-class Jewish American women writers of this era from consideration alongside each other—her fiction nonetheless shares important connections with Yezierska’s in its interest in Jewish American women’s roles and identities in the early twentieth century.12 For example, Hurst’s depiction of the humiliations suffered by an immigrant cook working for the wealthy Farley family in Lummox (1923), the same family who pays Bertha only twenty dollars a month yet contributes every other week to the “Tenement Hygienic Committee of the Human Welfare League,” echoes Yezierska’s thematic explorations of the lives of working-class women beginning with her first published piece, “The Free Vacation House” (1915). Like many of Yezierska’s fictions, Hurst’s novel features a short-lived romance 11. Pfeiffer, “The Limits of Identity in Jessie Faust’s Plum Bun,” 80; Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins, 285 (Braithwaite quote), 283. 12. Batker, Reforming Fictions, 108.

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between her heroine and an upper-class man, the son of the Farleys. After being spurned by him and giving up her illegitimate baby for adoption, Bertha works in other affluent homes, subordinating her anger at the exploitation of immigrant labor into selflessly “mothering” her patrons. Hurst thereby indicts the social inequalities that perpetuated such systems, though, as Carol Batker observes, the conclusion of the novel affirms settlement-house ideology by “rewarding” Bertha for her obedience with adoption into the middle-class Meyerbogen family.13 Hurst’s short stories, several of which have recently been brought back into print, also echo Yezierska’s fiction in their treatment of various themes, including the hardship of poverty on immigrant wives and mothers, and the tensions between economically successful, assimilated young Jewish Americans and their Old World parents.14 Though the ideals of womanhood that Hurst, Fauset, and Larsen were treating in their fiction were no longer so very “New,” their explorations of how such definitions did or did not fit women of ethnic minorities, or their treatment of the dynamics between privileged white American women and immigrants, continue to signify on the earlier authors’ preoccupations. The other authors in this study do not so clearly have immediate successors in their respective cultures who were similarly concerned with the changing roles of women in modern America, but fruitful connections nonetheless emerge between them and other women openly writing of their own ethnic experiences in the first half of the twentieth century, an era that often downplayed ethnicity in favor of assimilation—or else commodified that ethnicity for broad consumption. S. Alice Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s writing, in speaking about Native American life and the future of their race with special attention to women’s concerns, and in attempting (if not always accurately, in Callahan’s case) to record the lifeways of their respective tribes, might be seen to anticipate the work of Sioux ethnographer and writer Ella Cara Deloria, whose work with Franz Boas from the 1920s to 1940s allowed her to record much of her tribe’s cultural and linguistic legacy, and who in the 1940s wrote a novel featuring a Native American heroine, Waterlily, which remained unpublished until 13. Hurst, Lummox, 5; Batker, Reforming Fictions, 127. 14. See, for example, “The Spangle That Could Be a Tear” (1923) and “The Gold in Fish” (1925), reprinted in Susan Koppelman, ed., The Stories of Fannie Hurst (2004).

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1988.15 On the other hand, María Cristina Mena’s fiction might be seen as a significant precursor for the fiction and plays of Mexican American author Josefina Niggli in the 1930s and 1940s, whose work also explored and championed the roles of Mexican women during the Mexican Revolution.16 Furthermore, productive linkages might be considered between Sui Sin Far’s writings and Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), which similarly explores themes of living in America as a young woman of Chinese descent, contending with both patriarchal views of women in Chinese culture and the prejudice of the white community.17 By vexing the turn-of-the-century American women’s movement’s desire to empower a universalized concept of “woman” (which most often meant a white, middle-class one), drawing further attention to the contingencies of race and class on women’s ability to identify with the iconic ideal of the New Woman, the authors in this study also instigated a dialogue about feminism in their cultural moment that resonated later in the twentieth century. One of the keynotes of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s was its recognition of how race and class, as well as sexuality, impact women’s experiences and priorities. As Ruth Rosen 15. Deloria’s publications include two ethnographic works, Dakota Texts (1932) and Speaking of Indians (1944), as well as a linguistic text, Dakota Grammar, with Franz Boas (1941) (all recently reprinted), and her novel Waterlily. For more on Deloria, see Julian Rice, “Ella Cara DeLoria”; Bea Medicine, “Ella Cara Deloria: Lakota Ethnologist, Newly Discovered Novelist”; and Raymond J. DeMallie’s afterword to Waterlily. 16. Niggli published several works, including her story collection Mexican Village (1945), a novel, poetry, and several plays (as well as leaving two unfinished novel manuscripts). She also worked as a screenwriter at Twentieth Century–Fox, including adapting her volume Mexican Village into the film Sombrero (1953). Much of Niggli’s work has been recently brought back into print; see Mexican Village, and Other Works (2008) and The Plays of Josefina Niggli: Recovered Landmarks of Latino Literature (2007). For more on Niggli, see Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez, Josefina Niggli, Mexican American Writer: A Critical Biography. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). 17. Wong was also an accomplished ceramicist and authored a second book, No Chinese Stranger (1975). Fifth Chinese Daughter, though considered a foundational Chinese American autobiography, was charged in 1991 by critic Frank Chin with being what he considered part of an artificial, Christianized Chinese American literary tradition out of touch with working-class Chinese American consciousness (“Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake”). More recently, the book has been reintegrated into critical discussions of Asian American literature; for example, see Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Asian American Women’s Literature. For more on the critical reception of Wong’s book, see Deborah L. Madsen, “Chinese American Writers of the Real and the Fake: Authenticity and the Twin Traditions of Life Writing.”

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has observed in The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, “Although the second wave of feminism initially grew out of problems encountered and addressed mainly by white women who had achieved middle-class status, it didn’t take long for women of different ethnic and racial backgrounds to reinvent feminism for themselves. Nor did it take them long to realize that their historical burden and their culture had created different problems, obligations, and needs that partly overlapped with those of white women, but mostly did not.” Though the works of the writers in this study often reveal the constraints of writing during their own historical era, their prescience may be seen in their correspondences to the utterances of feminists of color during the second wave. Indeed, African American writer Celestine Ware’s assertion in 1970 that “black and white women can work together for women’s liberation . . . but only if the movement changes its priorities to work on issues that affect the lives of minority-group women” echoed Pauline Hopkins’s caution in her essays in Colored American Magazine seventy years before.18 Further testament to the connections between the writers in this study and second-wave feminism is the way in which similar concerns were taken up in the works of many women writers of color in the 1970s and after. Alice Walker’s influential coining in 1983 of the term womanist, rather than feminist, to refer to women of color is a dramatic instance of such women’s negotiating and revising categories of womanhood to better fit themselves, not unlike the ideals of the New Negro Woman and the New Jewish Woman treated by Hopkins and Yezierska. Moreover, Asian American authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan and Hispanic American authors including Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez, to name only a few, echo the concern of these writers with what dominant notions of womanhood in an era of widening possibilities meant for women of ethnic minorities, and the degree to which they as women of color could—or desired to—embody such ideals.19 18. Rosen, World Split Open, 276–77, 280 (Ware quote). See Rosen’s discussion of the unique concerns and questions of women of color within the second-wave women’s movement (276–94). See also Leslie Bow’s discussion of tensions between feminist and racial and cultural identifications for women of color during this era in Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion (26–29). 19. See, for example, Kingston, Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976); Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1989); Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984); and Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991).

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Anticipating second-wave feminism with its interest in ethnicity, class, and race and its attention to prejudice and promise, Callahan, Mourning Dove, Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, Mena, and Yezierska each in her own way called attention to the challenges that women of the margins faced. Decades before feminists of the 1960s and 1970s recognized how race and class impact women’s lives and experiences, these writers both praised and problematized a highly influential instantiation of American womanhood in their day. Invoking a figure whose initially revolutionary ideals largely became mainstream throughout the Progressive Era, and whose values this study has attempted to show were often contingent upon conservative threads of Progressive life and thought, these authors form a community of women who importantly complicated the figure of the New Woman as an embodiment of both the promise and the pitfalls of Progressive ideology in America.

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Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House (with Autobiographical Notes). 1910. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Alcott, Louisa May. Work: A Story of Experience. 1873. In Alternative Alcott, ed. Elaine Showalter, 239–349. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. Allen, Paula Gunn. “‘Border’ Studies: The Intersection of Gender and Color.” In Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph Gibaldi, 303–18. 2d ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1992. Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1991. Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. ———. “Expanding the Canon of American Realism.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, ed. Donald Pizer, 95–114. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. “The New Woman as Cultural Symbol and Social Reality: Six Women Writers’ Perspectives.” In 1915, the Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America, ed. Adele Heller and Lois

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Index

1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, 26 A. C. McClurg, 106 Addams, Jane, 13, 24, 30; Twenty Years at Hull-House, 58 Aesthetic movement, 3 African Americans, 21, 22, 31–32, 34, 72; and equal rights, 77–78, 96, 191; and exploitation of women, 62, 79, 88, 96; and the New Woman, 68–69; and racial uplift, 77, 83, 98; and suffrage, 72, 73–74 African American women’s clubs, 81, 82 Alcott, Louisa May, 16; Work: A Story of Experience, 54 Allen, Carol, 193–94 Allen, Grant, 16 Allen, Paula Gunn, 135 Alvarez, Julia, 198 American Birth Control League, 28 American Colored League, 72 American magazine, 137, 140 American Party, 28 Ammons, Elizabeth, 104, 122, 127, 128, 138; Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, 5, 193 Anthony, Susan B., 14, 46 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 135 Apess, William: “The Indian’s LookingGlass for the White Man,” 50 Austin, Mary: Woman of Genius, 18, 174 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 138; The Dialogic Imagination, 145

Batker, Carol J., 65, 158, 182, 195; Reforming Fictions: Native, African, and Jewish American Women’s Literature and Journalism in the Progressive Era, 6 beauty: and influence of American ideal, 148–49, 151–55 Beidler, Peter, 60 Berg, Allison, 28 Bergman, Jill, 21 Bernardin, Susan, 49, 55 Bhabha, Homi, 135, 152–53 birth control movement, 27–28 black. See African American Blake, Lillie Devereux, 18 Boas, Franz, 196 Boston Globe, 121 Boyce, Neith, 14 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 195 Broderick, Therese: Brand: A Tale of the Flathead Reservation, 60 Brontés, the, 15 Brooks, Kristina, 95 Brown, John, 96 Brown, William Wells: Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, 90, 91 Burke Act, 39n3 Cable, George Washington: Grandissimes, 91 Caird, Mona, 16 California: settlement of, 114 Callahan, S. Alice: death of, 188; and feminism, 4–5; life of, 39–40; and portrayal of Native Americans, 33–34;

223

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224 and portrayal of the New Woman, 18, 33, 46, 47 —works: Wynema: A Child of the Forest, 33, 37, 76; and assimilation, 42–43; Christianity in, 42, 50–51; conventional romance in, 46, 47, 48– 49; and Native American rights, 51–52, 66; and portrayal of New Woman, 37, 40, 42; and racial politics, 53; and resistance to allotment, 48; and status of Native Americans, 38– 39; and suffrage, 37–38, 44, 45, 46; and temperance movement, 43; and women’s rights, 47, 55 Carby, Hazel, 63, 80, 87, 93 Carlisle Indian School (Pennsylvania), 57 Cather, Willa, 2; Song of the Lark, 18, 164, 174 Century magazine, 2, 106, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 146, 150, 151, 155, 156, 189 Chambers, Henry, 139 Chinese American women: and assimilation, 112, 115–16, 133; and equal rights, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113, 115 Chinese culture: and patriarchy, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 128–29; stereotypes of, 113–15, 116, 117, 130, 132 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 28, 29 Chinese women: appearance of, 114, 118; and marriage, 108, 109–11, 112–13, 115, 116, 118, 128–29, 132, 133; and suffrage, 105 Cholmondeley, Mary, 16 Chopin, Kate, 2, 16, 33, 37, 39; Awakening, 18, 59, 164, 174; “La Belle Zoraïde,” 91 Christianity: and racism, 76, 123–25, 134 Cisneros, 198 Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, 160, 182 Collier’s, 27 Colored American Magazine, 21, 34, 68, 69, 70, 71, 76, 80, 98 Colored League, 85, 97 Colored Women’s Progressive Association, 21 Colville Indian Association, 188 Colville Tribal Council, 188

Index Committee for Immigrant in America, 29–30 Contagious Diseases Acts, 9 Cooper, Anna Julia, 82 cosmetic surgery, 151–52, 153–54 Cosmopolitan magazine, 2, 137, 189 Crane, Stephen: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 18; on prostitution, 170 Creek tribe. See Moscogee tribe Croly, Herbert, 190; The Promise of American Life, 23, 25, 166 cross-dressing, 134 Darwin, Charles, 26 Davenport, Charles: Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 26 Davidson, Cathy N., 8 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 16 Dearborn, Mary V.: Pocohontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture, 6 Debo, Angie, 41–42 Decadent movement, 3 Declaration of Sentiments (women’s rights), 10–11 Dell, Floyd, 14 Deloria, Ella Cara: Waterlily, 196–97 Democratic Party: and female suffrage, 12 Dewey, John, 160, 166, 171, 190 Díaz, Porfirio, 139 divorce, 45, 127, 129, 132 Dodge, Mabel, 14 Doherty, Amy, 137, 155–56 domesticity, compulsory: and madness, 161–62 Donovan, Kathleen, 59, 64 Doty, Douglas Zabriskie, 136 double-voicing, 35, 150, 151. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail Dreiser, Theodore: Jennie Gerhardt, 18; Sister Carrie, 18 Du Bois, W. E. B.: and African American women’s movement, 86–87; The Quest of the Silver Fleece, 87 Eastman, Charles Alexander, 54n31 Eastman, Max, 14, 15 Eaton, Edith Maude (Sui Sin Far), 105 Eaton, Winnifred (Onoto Watanna), 105, 120, 121 Egerton, George: “Mammy,” 170

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Index Eighteenth Amendment, 12 Eisenach, Eldon J., 23–25 Eliot, Charles W., 26 Eliot, George, 15 ethnic communities: “translating” cultures for American readers, 191–93 eugenics: 26–28, 130 exploitation: of women of color, 124. See also African American women: exploitation of; marriage: women’s exploitation in; Native American women: exploitation of Far, Sui Sin, 2n3, 34–35, 71; appearance of, 52; death of, 188; and feminism, 4– 5, 105, 106, 111, 113, 115, 122; life of, 105–6, 118–22; and marriage, 106, 121, 126, 127; “passing,” 119; and portrayal of the New Woman, 18, 20, 33, 103–4, 112, 116, 122, 123, 126, 127–29, 130–31; and suffrage, 130–31 —works: “America, the Protector of China!” 133–34; “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” 125, 128–29; “Away Down in Jamaica,” 124; “Chan Han Yen, Chinese Student,” 117, 126–27; “Chinatown Needs a School,” 115; “A Chinese Bride in America,” 112; “A Chinese Boy-Girl,” 134; “Chinese Marriages,” 110; “Chinese Mothers in America,” 112; “The Chinese in America,” 117, 118; “The Chinese Woman in America,” 103, 111–12, 113, 115; “A Girl Slave in Montreal: Only Two Women from the Flowery Land in Town,” 107–8, 113; “Half-Chinese Children,” 109, 112, 123; “Her Chinese Husband,” 127, 132; “The Inferior Woman,” 18, 109, 127, 130–31, 132, 133; Land of Sunshine, 113–14, 117; “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” 106, 119–21, 124; “Leung Ki Chu and His Wife,” 116, 134; “A Love Story from the Rice Fields of China,” 108, 125–26, 168; “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” 117, 118; Mrs. Spring Fragrance, 106, 108, 110, 127, 132–33; “The Prize China Baby,” 128, 129–30; “The Sing Song Woman,” 117–18; “The Smuggling of Tie Co,” 134; “The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” 127, 132,

225 190; “Sui Sin Far, the Half-Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career,” 119, 121– 22; “The Sugar Cane Baby,” 123–25; “Tian Shan’s Kindred Spirit,” 65, 95, 134, 135; “The Wisdom of the New,” 125, 127, 130 Fauset, Jessie Redmon, 196; There Is Confusion, 18, 193; Plum Bun, 193–94 feminism, 14, 15, 198; and African American women, 83; and Chinese American women, 105, 106, 111, 113; and eugenics, 27–28; and marriage, 87; and Native Americans, 46, 64; and racism, 123; in the Progressive Era, 76 Feminist Party, 14 Ferber, Edna, 195 Ferens, Dominika, 107, 108, 114, 192 Fisk Jubilee singers, 99 Fitzpatrick, Ellen, 30 Four Seas Company, 189 Frank, Waldo: Our America, 168 Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 17; “Poetess,” 59 Fuller, Margaret: Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 10 Galler, Fred, 56 Galton, Sir Francis, 26 Garland, Hamlin, 18; Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, 17, 18, 59 gender roles: and conditioning, 8 General Allotment (Dawes) Act, 39n3, 40, 47–48 General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), 21, 71, 72, 73, 76; convention of, 78, 86; origins of, 13; and racism, 97–98 Ghost Dance (Messiah) movement, 40, 49–50, 55 Gibson girl, the, 22, 27, 152, 190 Gibson, Charles Dana, 27 Giddings, Paula, 81 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 2, 14, 15, 145, 167; epitomizing New Woman’s goals, 22; and nativism, 29; portrayal of New Woman, 22, 24; on prostitution, 170; on sex-role conditioning, 8, 10; Gilman: on suffrage, 25 —works: “Baulked; or, Ways a Little Harder,” 174; Crux, 17; “His Mother,” 174; “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” 67–68; What Diantha Did,

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226 185; “With a Difference,” 174; Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relationship between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, 111, 158; “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” 162, 174 Gissing, George, 16 Glasgow, Ellen, 2; Barren Ground, 17; Forerunner, 174; Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman’s Courage, 17; Virginia, 18; Wheel of Life, 18, 59 Glaspell, Susan: Trifles, 18 Glenn, Susan A., 158, 187 “Go Down, Moses,” 99 Good Housekeeping, 123 Grand, Sarah, 16; “The New Aspects of the Woman Question,” 7; on prostitution, 170 Grant, Madison: Passing of the Great Race, 26 Greenwich Village, 14, 20 Grimké, Gertrude, 72 Grimké, Sarah Moore: Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, 9; “Marriage,” 9–10 H. J. Smith and Company, 189 Harding, Warren G., 188 Hardy, Thomas, 16 Harlem Renaissance, 195 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins: Iola Leroy, 18, 73–74, 79 Harrell International Institute, 40 Hatcher, Jessamyn, 8 Heller, Adele, and Rudnick, Lois: 1915, the Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America, 20 Heterodoxy Club, 14–15 Higham, John, 29 Honey, Maureen, 20 Hopkins, Pauline, 21, 22; and feminism, 4–5, 68, 78; life of, 70–71, 79–80, 81, 122, 188–89; politics, 81–83; portrayal of African Americans, 34; portrayal of New Woman, 78, 79, 84–85, 89, 93–94, 95, 101; pseudonyms of, 70; and suffrage, 71; use of melodrama, 88, 90, 91 —works: “Bro’r Abr’m Jimson’s Wedding,” 78; “Club Life among Colored Women,” 74; Contending

Index Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, 63, 69; conventional romance in, 78–79; and “fallen woman plot,” 83, 85–86, 88, 93, 94; feminism in, 88; and marriage, 77–78, 80–81, 85, 86, 87, 88; plot of, 80–81; politics in, 72, 79; portrayal of New Woman, 87–88; suicide in, 80, 86, 88; “Educators,” 72–73; Famous Women of the Negro Race, 69, 71, 75, 78, 95, 98; Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice: 70, 78; and fallen woman plot, 90, 93, 94–95, 96; and intermarriage, 92; and “passing,” 91; plot of, 90–91; racial identity in, 89; and tragic mulatta figure, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93; and transcending race, 96; “Higher Education of Colored Women in White Schools and Colleges,” 68–69, 75–76, 91; Of One Blood, 69, 70, 78, 79, 88, 89, 192; and changing roles of women in, 98; destructiveness of racism in, 89; and “passing,” 99; plot of, 99–100; and tragic mulatta, 100, 101; “Some Literary Workers,” 71–72; “Talma Gordon,” 76, 78, 92; Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, 62, 70, 77, 78, 79, 88, 89, 95; as critique of prejudice, 97–98; marriage in, 98; plot of, 96–97; and romance, 96 Howard, Adeline Turpin, 72 Howard, Edwin, 72 Howard, Joan Imogen, 72 Howells, William Dean, 16; Annie Kilburn, 18; Dr. Breen’s Practice, 17; A Modern Instance, 18 Hull-House, 13. See also Addams, Jane Hurst, Fannie, 193; Lummox, 195–96 Huxley, Aldous, 139 Ibsen, Henrik, 15 immigrants: and American fear of, 28– 30; and assimilation, 161, 163, 166; attraction to/resistance to American ways, 159–60 Indian Question, 49, 55, 66 industrialization: and socioeconomic shifts, 8 intermarriage, 6, 92, 109, 110, 132 International Congress of Women, 15

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Index Iota (Kathleen Mannington Caffyn), 16 Iseman, M. S.: Race Suicide, 26 Jamaica, 120, 123 James, Henry, 16, 17; Bostonians, 17, 18, 83; Daisy Miller, 92; Portrait of a Lady, 18 Jewett, Sarah Orne: Country Doctor, 17 Jewish Americans: and marriage, 168, 169, 179–82; struggles of, 165–66. See also immigrants Jewish culture: and patriarchy, 177–78, 180 Jirousek, Lori, 107, 114, 192 Joan of Arc, 134 Johnson, Pauline: “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” 49 Johnston, Mary, 5 Jordan, David Starr: Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of the Races through the Survival of the Unfit, 26 Kansas Rangers, 96–97 Kellogg, John H., 26 Kellor, Frances, 29, 30 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 198 Künslerroman, 18 Kuzmack, Linda Gordon, 30, 158, 187 labor unions, 15 Lan, Fa Mu, 134 Land of Sunshine, 103 Larsen, Nella, 193, 196 Lawrence, D. H., 139 Lewis, Vashti Crutcher, 73 Life, 22, 27 Ling, Amy, 105 Little, C. C., 28 Logan, Rayford, 32 López, Tiffany Ana, 140, 148 Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, 114 Los Angeles Express, 115, 116 Lummis, Charles F., 103 madness: from compulsory domesticity, 161–62 marriage: and gender roles, 8, 9, 15–17, 58, 59, 132; and suffrage, 10–11; and woman as ornament, 111, 112, 172, 173; women’s exploitation in, 62–63, 169. See also specific groups

227 Married Women’s Property Acts, 9 McCann, Sean, 104, 122 McCleod, Hector, 56 McClure’s, 27 McGerr, Michael, 32 McKay, Nellie Y., 99 McWhorter, Lucullus, 56, 59, 64, 192 Mena, María Cristina, 2n3, 35; and feminism, 4–5; life of, 137, 139, 189; portrayal of New Woman, 20, 33, 140– 44, 148, 149–50, 151, 154, 156; and stories as “local color,” 137–38, 155 —works: “Doña Rita’s Rivals,” 138; “The Education of Popo,” 20, 126, 127, 139; and American tourists’ cultural insensitivity, 146–51; and idealizing of Americans, 147–49; and romantic stereotypes, 149–51; “The Emotions of María Concepción,” 138; “The Gold Vanity Set,” 20, 139; and cultural insensitivity, 140–46; and women’s roles, 140; “John of God, the WaterCarrier,” 138, 140; “Marriage by Miracle,” 139, 143; and cosmetic surgery, 151–54; and idealization of American beauty, 152–53, 154–55; “A Son of the Tropics,” 138–39, 155, 156, 189; “The Sorcerer and General Bisco,” 138, 155; “The Vine-Leaf,” 138, 155 Mexican culture: and female selfassertion, 138–39, 156; and female stereotypes, 140; and idealizing of Americans, 143, 146–47, 148–49; and insensitivity of American tourists, 140–51; and marriage, 151, 155; and patriarchy, 154 Mexican elite: affiliation of, with wealthy Americans, 142–43, 151 Mexican Revolution, 137, 139, 142, 147, 151, 152, 155 Meyer, Annie Nathan: Helen Brent, M.D.: A Social Study, 17 Mill, John Stuart, 24; The Subjection of Women, 8, 77 Mink, Gwendolyn, 159 Montreal Daily Star, 106, 109 Montreal Daily Witness, 107, 113 Moore, Fred R., 70 Morrison, Toni: Bluest Eye, 149 Mourning Dove (Hum-ishu-ma, Christine Quintasket): and feminism,

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228 4–5; life of, 39, 55–56, 57, 188; portrayal of Native Americans, 33–34; portrayal of New Woman, 33, 58–59 —works: Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, 33; conventional romance in, 56–57, 63–64; diversity in, 55; and feminism, 60, 61, 64; and marriage, 62–64; Native American rights, 64, 65, 66, 191; portrayal of New Woman in, 58, 59; and status of Native Americans, 38–39, 40; and the suffrage movement, 37–38, 60–61; and temperance, 65; and women’s desire for meaningful work, 58–59; women’s rights in, 56, 57–59; Coyote Stories, 56, 188 Muscogee tribe, 39, 40; culture of, 41–42, 44–45; marriage in, 45; resistance to allotment, 48 NAACP, 86 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 31 National Association of Colored Women, 21, 86 National Council of American Indians, 54n31 National League of Colored Women, 21 National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL), 15 Native Americans: and antiallotment stance, 48; and assimilation, 54, 66, 162–63; exploitation of women, 61–62; and female suffrage, 44, 45, 47; and feminism, 46, 60, 61, 64; and “imperialist nostalgia,” 51, 53; as only true Americans, 57; as “vanishing breed,” 67 nativism: rise of, 27, 28–30 New England Magazine, 2, 106, 125, 126, 189 New Era, 70 “New Jewish Woman,” 158, 186, 195, 198 New Men, 132 New Negro Woman, 21, 68, 69, 198 New Republic, 2–3, 166 New Woman: changing definitions of, 14, 20–23; and classism, 168; and cultural insensitivity of, 140–44; and

Index desire for self-actualization, 158, 168, 174; and desire for “sphere of usefulness,” 58–59; as embodiment of Progressivism, 4–7, 23, 24–25, 39, 132, 145, 160, 190; end of cultural moment, 188; and eugenics, 27–28; as “forward,” 19, 20, 143, 149–50, 154; and immigrant uplift, 168; and marriage, 10, 15–17, 106, 165, 168, 186–87; image in multiethnic narratives, 4–7; and nativism, 27, 28, 33; as predatory, 126, 127; and racism, 28, 29, 30, 31–32, 71, 102, 122–23, 128– 29, 130, 138; as reformer, 14, 18, 19, 20, 33, 35, 163, 166, 168, 174; roots of, 1–8; and sexuality, 18, 120, 127, 151, 154; and social movements, 13; and social uplift, 159, 161, 163, 165, 168, 182, 186; transgressive manifestations, 93–94; in turn-of-the-century fiction, 15–17, 18, 21–22; and women’s rights movement, 106, 107, 116. See also New Negro Woman; New Jewish Woman New York City Woman Suffrage Party, 15 New York City, 160, 169 New York Independent, 119, 132 New York Times, 160 Newman, Louise Michele, 30, 31, 159 Nineteenth Amendment, 3 O’Reilly, Leonora, 15 Ossoli, Count Giovanni, 10 Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée): “The New Woman,” 7 Our Brother in Red, 40 Owens, Louis, 57 Pastor, Rose, 171 Patterson, Martha H., 22, 27, 104, 112, 127, 141; Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915, 5 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 16; Doctor Zay, 17; Silent Partner, 18; Story of Avis, 18 Pilgrims: and immigrants, 166 Pinchot, Gifford, 26 plastic surgery. See cosmetic surgery Plessy v. Ferguson, 32 Pocahontas, 48–49 Porfiriato regime, 142, 151, 152

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Index Progressive Era, 3–4; and feminism, 76; and racism, 23–24, 25, 27, 29, 30–32, 68, 190–91; and role of women in public life, 24; and women’s clubs, 13; and women’s rights, 56 Progressivism, 20; and classism, 159, 162, 164; and female suffrage, 30; and immigrants and Native Americans, 4– 7; and racism, 144–45 Prohibition, 12 prostitution, 12, 120, 170, 184 Puck, 22 Race Betterment Foundation, 26 race question, 72 racism: and Christianity, 76, 123–25, 134; and feminism, 123; and the New Woman, 68–69, 71; and the women’s rights movement, 79; and women’s clubs, 73, 74–75. See also specific groups Reed, John, 14 Richardson, Angelique, 27 Robins, Elizabeth: Convert, 18 Roosevelt, Theodore, 26, 27, 29, 30, 39n3 Rosaldo, Renato, 51 Rosen, Ruth: The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, 197–98 Ross, Edward Alsworth, 138, 145; The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People, 29 Rudnick, Lois, 27 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre, 74, 81, 86, 87 Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, 40 Sacred Heart Convent School, 55 Sanchez, George J., 29 Sanger, Margaret: and eugenics, 28, 29 Satter, Beryl, 24 Schlereth, Thomas, 26 Schneiderman, Rosa, 15 Schreiner, Olive, 16; Dreams, 157, 158; Story of an African Farm, 157–58; Woman and Labour, 158 Scribner’s Magazine, 2–3 Seneca Falls, New York, 10 Senier, Siobhan, 40 settlement-house movement, 13–14 “sex parasitism,” 158

229 Shuler, Marjorie, 18 slavery, 63, 79, 80, 82, 89, 92, 96, 98, 99, 107, 108, 115, 129 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 14, 19 Social Betterment Society, 165 Social Purity movement, 9, 11, 12–13, 170 Society of American Indians, 54n31 Sollors, Werner, 171 Spivak, Gayatri, 52 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 14, 31, 46 Steinem, Gloria, 28 Stoddard, Lothrop, 28; Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, 26 Stokes, Graham, 171 Stokes, Rose Pastor, 14 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 16, 45–46 Stubbs, Katherine, 25 suffrage, female, 3; and Democratic Party, 12; in England, 8–9; and gender roles, 12, 21; and marriage, 10–11, 82; and Native Americans, 44, 45, 47; and Progressivism, 30; and racism, 29–32; and women’s clubs, 73–74. See also specific groups suffragists, 37–38 Swift, Jonathan: “A Modest Proposal,” 52 Tan, Amy, 198 Tate, Claudia, 98 Tatonetti, Lisa, 40, 50 Teachers College of Columbia University, 160 temperance movement: and Native Americans, 43, 65 Terrell, Mary Church, 86; “What Role Is the Educated Negro Woman to Play in the Uplifting of Her Race?” 82 Tichi, Cecelia, 2, 3 Tonkovich, Nicole, 96–97 Trennert, Robert, 162–63 Treviño, Gloria Velásquez, 147 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 15 True Woman, 2, 33 True Womanhood, 79, 86, 94 Ungar, Cara-Lynn, 158, 182 Veblen, Thorstein: The Theory of the Leisure Class, 111

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230 Victoria (queen of England), 76, 77 Virgin of Guadalupe, 140, 143 Vizenor, Gerald, 50 Vogue, 22 Voice of the Negro, The, 70 Vorse, Mary Heaton, 14 Walker, Alice, 198 Wallinger, Hanna, 81 Ward, Lester Frank, 145 Washington, Booker T., 68, 69, 70; and African American women’s movement, 86, 87 Washington, Margaret Murray, 69, 86 Weld, Angelina Emily Grimké, 9 Wells, H. G., 16 Wells, Ida B. (Wells-Barnett), 72, 82, 86 Welter, Barbara, 2 Wesleyan Female Institute, 40 Wharton, Edith, 2–3, 5, 16, 33, 39; Age of Innocence, 19; House of Mirth, 59, 172– 73, 174–75; In Morocco, 108; “Roman Fever,” 92–93; Summer, 17, 83 Wheatley, Phillis, 72 White-Parks, Annette, 34, 104, 106, 133 Wiggam, Albert Edward: Fruit of the Family Tree, 26 Wilson, Woodrow, 3, 60 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 15; Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 8 Womack, Craig S., 40, 45 Woman Question, 16, 55, 173–74; marriage and suffrage, 82 Woman’s Era Club, 21, 73, 74, 78, 81 Woman’s Era, 81 Woman’s Rights Convention, 10–11 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 12, 43. See also temperance movement women’s club movement: and racism, 68, 69, 71, 78

Index women’s clubs, 13, 81; and racism, 73, 74–75, 86, 97–98; and suffrage, 73–74 Women’s Congress of 1892, 73–74 Women’s Loyal Union, 21 Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA), 41 women’s rights movement: and Chinese women, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113; and classism, 131–32; and racism, 79, 84, 101–2, 125 women’s rights, 10–11, 56 Woodhull, Victoria, 19 Working Women’s Society, 15 Wounded Knee, 38, 39n3, 40, 49, 50, 51, 53 Wovoka, 49n23 Yezierska, Anzia, 2–3n3, 35–36; and attraction to/resistance to American ways, 159; and feminism, 4–5; fictional heroines and Gentile men, 157, 159; life of, 160–61, 188; and marriage, 168–69; and “New Jewish Woman,” 158, 181, 186; portrayal of New Woman, 18, 19, 33, 158–59, 161, 165–66, 167, 168, 170, 171–72, 174 —works: “America and I,” 165–66, 168; Arrogant Beggar, 168, 182–86; “A Bed for the Night,” 170, 172; Bread Givers, 87, 170, 176–82; Children of Loneliness, 165; “The Free Vacation House,” 161– 64, 167; “How I Found America,” 166, 168; Hungry Hearts, 160, 161, 166, 168, 170; “The Miracle, 168, 169–70; “My Own People,” 164–65, 166; Salome of the Tenements, 157, 169–70; 168, 169, 170–72, 174–75; “Soap and Water and the Immigrant,” 163, 166– 68; “Wings,” 157, 164; Zitkala-Ša, 54n31; “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” 162–63