Americans began moving North in significant numbers, as did Mexicans in the West. Native Americans waged desperate, defiant battles against United States imperialism.
The struggles of women to achieve change took many forms. By the end of the nineteenth century, many middle-class young white women, rebelling against the unwritten rule that they must not support themselves, sought to enter the ranks of paid employment, while growing numbers of African American women, most of them expecting to work throughout adulthood, fought to enter occupations from which they had been barred by discrimination. Across the nation, women's clubs devoted to self-improvement and civic involvement sprang up; African American clubs actively campaigned against lynching, the convict lease system, and institutionalized racial segregation, while all of the clubs lobbied for such social reforms as kindergartens, women matrons in women's prisons, and an end to child labor. Marking a major change in childbearing for many women, the average number of children for a woman of forty dropped from seven or eight in 1800 to three or four in 1900. Individuals such as Mary Cassatt, Emily Putnam, Maggie Walker, and Emma Goldman -268- achieved fame as artists, scholars, entrepreneurs, and activists, while others such as Ida B. Wells and Jane Addams became well known as advocates for specific political and social reforms. Female enrollment in colleges and universities increased during the first two decades of the twentieth century by 1000 percent in public institutions and 482 percent in private ones. The campaign for women's suffrage intensified and ended successfully in 1920 in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
It is important not to overstate women's gains during the Progressive Era — nor should divisions and inequalities be ignored. Most women who worked for pay held low-paying, unprestigious jobs. Those who worked in the home for no pay typically faced unending cycles of hard physical labor combined, frequently, with killing monotony. Birth control and divorce did not exist for huge numbers of women, who continued to have to bear more children than they wished and to endure oppressive, often violent, marriages. Most important, the life-situations of immigrant women and of women of color often differed radically from those of native-born white women, who in many cases were their exploiters and oppressors every bit as much as white men were. As a result, deep divisions existed. Often displaying itself in magnanimous attempts to 'lift up' one's inferiors, the social reformist activities of privileged women frequently provoked resentment in poor and working-class women, even as circumstances forced them to accept the aid rendered. And racism more often than not made talk of 'sisterhood' ludicrous. As Charlotte Hawkins Brown, one of four African American women invited to speak at an interracial conference in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1920, bluntly told the white women listening to her: 'We have begun to feel that you are not, after all, interested in us and I am going still further. The negro women of the South lay everything that happens to the members of her race at the door of the Southern white woman. . We feel that so far as lynching is concerned, that, if the white women would take hold of the situation, lynching would be stopped.'
However, important as the differences and conflicts among women were they should not obscure the fact that from the white, male, dominant-culture point of view at the turn of the century — as well as from the point of view of many women at the time — major, fundamental change in the status and position of women was taking place. -269-
In fact, by the turn of the century feminist ideas and activities, referred to at the time simply as the Woman Movement, had become so widespread and powerful that a strong reactionary counterattack had settled in. No less a spokesman than Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States from 1901 to 1909, denounced the fight for suffrage, for example, as 'a thousandth or a millionth part as important as the question of keeping, and where necessary reviving, among the women of this country, the realization that their great work must be done in the home.'
All of this determination of women to change their economic, social, and political situations found clear expression in their relationship to the novel, the most popular but also, it was becoming more and more evident, the most prestigious literary form in the United States. During the second half of the nineteenth century and then early in the twentieth, women writers increasingly set out to write their way into the national literature not simply as money-making professionals but as artists — as the equals of great international figures such as Flaubert, Tolstoy, or Balzac, or their rare female counterpart such as George Eliot or George Sand. Alice Dunbar-Nelson declared at the turn of the century that she wished to write the best novel ever written. Edith Wharton (for a while) enjoyed being compared to Henry James. Kate Chopin named as her favorite author and primary model Guy de Maupassant. Willa Cather began her career by denouncing feminine writing and aligning herself instead with men. By the turn of the century the battle over white male ownership of the high-art novel in the United States had come to a head. Even more important, it was a battle that took place within a context of more women from various backgrounds being able to become authors than ever before in the nation's history. African American women published more novels between 1892 and 1902 than in all previous decades of United States history combined. White women, in the opinion of many turn-of-the-century readers and reviewers, virtually owned the form. Women previously unrepresented among American writers launched careers. The sisters Edith and Winnifred Eaton, whose mother was Chinese and who wrote under the names Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, respectively, began publishing at the end of the nineteenth century. The Native American authors Zitkala-Ša (sometimes known as Gertrude Bonnin) and Hum-ishu-ma (also -270- known as Mourning Dove) began writing for publication. Similarly, the short- story writer María Cristina Mena, thought to be the first woman of Mexican descent to publish in English in the United States, began her career at the turn of the century.
Debate about gender and novel writing was not new in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Fierce rivalry had emerged as early as the 1850s. Inspiring Hawthorne's much-quoted complaint about that 'damned mob of scribbling women' supposedly stealing his audience, popular white novelists such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Maria Susanna Cummins, and Susan Warner dominated the midcentury novel market. Indeed, their best-sellers about and for women shaped the domestic novel to such an extent that their work affected not only the next generation of white male novelists such as Henry James and William Dean Howells but even their successors such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, all of whom had to deal (comfortably or not) with the predominance of women among their readership. To be sure, most popular mid-nineteenth-century women novelists did not define themselves as artists. Typically, they protested that they were writing merely to make a living; they emphasized that they were not attempting to lay claim to the traditionally male province of high art. Nevertheless, their extraordinary popularity forced subsequent generations of novelists, male and female, to take into account the audience served by them — and for women novelists, the public image of the woman novelist that they created as well.
A case in point is the influence of popular mid- nineteenth-century novels by and for women on the two best-known male authors of realistic fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century, William Dean Howells and Henry James. As Alfred Habegger explains, the two men came of age during a period when women wrote almost all of the major novels in the United States. It is therefore not surprising that pleasing an overwhelmingly female readership accustomed to narratives about women and women's concerns created a basic — if not the basic — challenge for both men. Howells himself theorized in
If the label 'feminine' was complicated for male novelists such as Howells and James (it could be either a compliment or an insult, depending on who used it, why, and when), the issue of gender and novel writing was even more tangled for women writers. For those who wished to continue in the popular-novel tradition of their midcentury, white, domestic-novel predecessors, identification as a woman writer posed little problem. Traditional Victorian codes of femininity emphasizing modesty, intellectual conformity, and primary commitment to home and family dovetailed with the occupation of producing ostensibly formulaic novels that did not claim to be 'art' — by which in the modern West is meant work that is original and idiosyncratic, individualistic, and frequently challenging or even upsetting. However, for many women late in the nineteenth and then early in the twentieth century, the mid-nineteenth-century mainstream American image of the domestic novelist no longer applied, if it ever had in the first place. Increasingly, women writers as a group were determined to assert their right to write not simply to
