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Narratives of African American Women’s Literary
Pragmatism and Creative Democracy
 Gregory Phipps

Narratives of African
American Women’s
Literary Pragmatism
and Creative
Democracy
Gregory Phipps
University of Iceland
Reykjavík, Iceland

ISBN 978-3-030-01853-5 ISBN 978-3-030-01854-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01854-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957692

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Jessica
 Acknowledgements

This book was researched, written, and edited in several different loca-
tions. For independent scholars and people in the early stages of their
post-Ph.D. lives, ongoing migration is often the norm instead of the
exception. Such experiences can be challenging, but they can also be
beneficial insofar as they afford opportunities to enter into multiple com-
munities and to form relationships with diverse people. It is the commu-
nities I have inhabited and the relationships I have formed over the past
years that have made the present book possible.
I could not have found a better environment for the stretch run of
this project than the University of Iceland. The first person I met here
was Guðrún Björk Guðsteinsdóttir, who answered (and continues to
answer) all of my questions about teaching, research, administration, and
Icelandic culture with warmth and perception. Matthew Whelpton has
been an excellent Chair, colleague, and friend. Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir is
another colleague who has welcomed me with kindness and friendship. I
have enjoyed many conversations about teaching, literature, and sports
with Jay D’Arcy. My deep gratitude also goes to Ásrún Jóhannsdóttir,
Anna Heiða Pálsdóttir, Þórhallur Eyþórsson, Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, and
Erlendína Kristjánsson for making me feel at home in the Department of
English.
My colleagues in the Faculty of Languages and Cultures have also
contributed in equal parts to my work and well-being. First, I thank
Auður Hauksdóttir for her leadership and hospitality. From inviting me
into her home to helping me tackle an eleventh-hour tax application,

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

she has been nothing short of magnificent as a colleague, friend, and

Director. I also thank my neighbour in Veröld, Birna Bjarnadóttir, who
never fails to make me smile with her humour, encouragement, and
intelligence. For their time and generosity in arranging our Faculty trip
to China, I thank Geir Sigurðsson and Magnús Björnsson. I also owe
thanks to Sebastian Drude and Valgerður Jónasdóttir for their tireless
work as researchers, organizers, and founts of knowledge. Bernharð
Antoniussen has handled all issues pertaining to administration with con-
sideration and an eagerness to help. Finally, to all the people I have met
in Iceland who have welcomed me, offered assistance, made suggestions,
commiserated about the weather, unlocked the beauty of their land,
and indulged my attempts to pronounce the double L and the rolled R,
thank you.
Before I moved to Iceland, I found a temporary home at the
Rothermere American Institute in Oxford, where I received generous
assistance from many people. Michèle Mendelssohn and Lloyd Pratt
offered warm welcomes and enthusiastic responses to my work. Sally
Bayley and Tessa Roynon were ideal officemates—accommodating,
brilliant, and always willing to exchange ideas. Hal Jones was a perfect
Director, attending all talks and events and always finding time in his
busy schedule to exchange a friendly word. Like many others, I also ben-
efited from Huw David’s versatility as Director of Development. Fellow
American Literature scholar Spencer Morrison provided indispensible
feedback on this project. I thank Alice Kelly for the many conversations
about literature, history, the profession, and everything in between.
Benjamin Hennig and Tina Gotthardt were wonderful neighbours; the
sadness of our parting in Oxford was swept away by the joys of our reun-
ion in Iceland. Most of all, I thank the extraordinary librarians at the
Rothermere American Institute, particularly Jane Rawson, Judy Warden,
and Johanna O’Connor. From finding books to arranging the use of
rooms for interviews, they provided all the assistance I could ever ask for
while also displaying a consistent and genuine interest in my work.
The early stages of this book were written in Montreal, where I
have formed the strongest and most lasting relationships of my life. To
my doctoral supervisor, Peter Gibian, many thanks for the continued
friendship and interest in my work. To my friends Joel Deshaye, Paula
Derdiger, Kelly MacPhail, and Michael Parrish Lee, thank you for stay-
ing with me as we have branched off to different places and lives. I also
thank Kelly Phipps and Sarah Beer for their love and camaraderie. Carl
 Acknowledgements    ix

Murphy, Cathy McIninch, Ali Murphy, Emily Murphy, and Paul Lessard
have inspired me through unwavering support and generosity.
During the past couple of years, I have presented excerpts from this
project at various conferences, so I thank those who have honed my
ideas through their feedback. In particular, my thanks to the people at
BrANCA for organizing reading groups, conferences, and for carving
out a space for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American studies
in Britain. Portions of Chapter 4 of this book were published in Volume
49 of African American Review as an article entitled “The Deliberate
Introduction of Beauty and Pleasure: Femininity and Black Feminist
Pragmatism in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun.” I thank the people
at African American Review for granting me permission to republish
this material. Also, parts of Chapter 6 appeared in Volume 42 of English
Studies in Canada as an article entitled “Breaking Down Creative
Democracy: A Pragmatist Reading of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s
Quicksand.” I thank the people at English Studies in Canada for permis-
sion to republish this material.
I also thank the people at Palgrave Macmillan for their interest in this
project and for all their hard work in bringing it to publication. Both
Ryan Jenkins and Allie Troyanos have been helpful and informative as
Editors and Rachel Jacobe has done everything to make the final pro-
cess of submission run smoothly. I am also grateful to the two anony-
mous readers who reviewed this book. Their insights, suggestions, and
critiques shaped the current project while stimulating me to work harder
and search deeper.
My parents, Alan and Pauline, have encouraged me over the course
of this project just as they have throughout my life. They have embraced
my decisions, applauded my efforts, and supported my dreams. For this,
I owe them a debt of gratitude that I could never hope to repay in full.
My final thank you goes to the one who has stood at the centre of my
world wherever I have lived and whatever I have set out to accomplish.
She has shared my life in Montreal, Oxford, and Reykjavík and has trav-
elled with me near and far, from Paris to Prague to Athens, from Beijing
to Shanghai to Tokyo. As long as I am with her, each new beginning is
filled with hope, each new adventure is filled with happiness, and each
new day is filled with love. For this, for more, for everything, thank you
to my wife, Jessica Murphy.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Nineteenth-Century Philosophical Pragmatism:

The Black Maternal Archetype and the Communities
of Creative Democracy 35

3 The Narrative of Creative Democracy in the Harlem

Renaissance 77

4 The Search for Beautiful Experience in Jessie Fauset’s

Plum Bun 113

5 Creative Democracy in One Community: Literary

Pragmatism in Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree 137

6 Breaking Down Creative Democracy: The Cycle of

Experience and Truth in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand 163

7 Securing the Archetype and the Community: Irene

Redfield’s Resistance to Creative Democracy in Nella
Larsen’s Passing 187

xi
xii    Contents

8 “She Told Them About Her Trips to the Horizon”:

Creative Democracy in the Short Fiction of Zora Neale
Hurston 213

9 Conclusion 239

Bibliography 251

Index 269
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This is a book about African American women who create versions of

democracy different from the ones entrenched in state apparatuses,
constitutions, and mainstream discourses. Focusing on narratives writ-
ten by black women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the book explores how select philosophers and authors offer alternative
visions of the United States as a democratic society. In the narratives of
these women, democracy is not a system of government or a nationalis-
tic brand name; rather, it is a way of life shaped by cultural experiences
that unfold within communities of African American women. From this
standpoint, democracy involves the participation of individuals in an
array of culture-building practices that bring together storytelling, art,
labour, religion, and activism. Democracy equally constitutes a proces-
sual, open-ended, and fluid set of relations among people which breaks
through social barriers, linking together not only individuals within
marginalized communities but also communities themselves. I refer to
this version of democracy as “creative democracy,” a term that should
call to mind John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy.1 However, creative
democracy existed as a set of ideals and narratives long before Dewey
gave it a name, in much the same way that pragmatism existed within
American letters before William James codified it in his 1907 mani-
festo, Pragmatism. James and Dewey belong to one pragmatic tradi-
tion that melds creative understandings of democracy with concepts
like individualism, pluralism, and experience. This book focuses on a

© The Author(s) 2018 1

G. Phipps, Narratives of African American Women’s
Literary Pragmatism and Creative Democracy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01854-2_1
2 G. PHIPPS

different genealogy of pragmatism which developed through the writ-

ings of African American women theorists and literary writers. It is this
genealogy that offers some of the most robust and sophisticated inter-
ventions against the manifold failures (past and present) of institutional
democracy in the United States. Rooted in both personal experience and
long-standing cultural symbols, committed to the unification of theory
and practice, African American women’s pragmatism exposes the dis-
tortions, betrayals, and manipulations of state-sponsored U.S. demo-
cratic idealism while simultaneously creating spaces for new forms of
democracy.
There are many potential starting points for thinking about African
American women’s literary pragmatism and creative democracy, but I
focus on a trajectory that passes through the nineteenth-century philos-
ophy of Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell,
and the interwar literature of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale
Hurston. One reason for choosing this approach and these authors
is that doing so equips us to chart an evolution of black feminism that
features continuity and yet a diversity of perspectives. As critics like
Kristin Waters (366), Beverly Guy-Sheftall (2), and Patricia Hill Collins
have pointed out, the balance between multiplicity and “thematic con-
sistency” (as Collins calls it [“Politics” 395]) has shaped much of black
feminist history. Case in point, the theological works of the first African
American woman philosopher, Maria Stewart, are profoundly differ-
ent, on the levels of both form and content, from the passing novels of
Harlem Renaissance authors like Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, but we
can nonetheless identify recurring subjects and themes across them. For
my purposes, these individuals belong to a black feminist tradition not by
virtue of being black female authors, but by virtue of participating in a
shared trajectory of literary pragmatism and creative democracy. For the
pragmatist critic, building an arc in black women’s writing from the early
nineteenth century to the interwar period involves examining a multi-
dimensional narrative that crosses disciplinary boundaries to find modes
of expression at sites of resistance, struggle, and community formation.
The narrative involves a diversity of voices, times, and places, but it also
features a continuity founded on simultaneously pragmatic and creative
reconstructions of democracy.
I say “narrative” to acknowledge that the genealogy of black fem-
inist pragmatism centres on stories which women have shared among
themselves and passed down across the generations. Black feminism in
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

the United States traces its roots to an array of collective enterprises and
political causes, including abolitionism, anti-lynching campaigns, and
club movements, but it also locates its origins in lineages grounded on
storytelling, art, and cultural symbols. Moreover, the transmission of
knowledge among black women has traditionally revolved around mat-
rilineal narratives, specifically stories that mothers and grandmothers
have told to their daughters. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Toni C. King, and
S. Alease Ferguson use the term “the motherline” to describe such nar-
ratological lines of descent, a concept that brings into focus the symbolic
and practical role of maternity as an anchor in African American wom-
en’s cultural traditions. In this book, I explore one version of a matri-
lineal narrative that extends across multiple generations and is united
through crosscurrents between practical tenets and literary elements. As
many critics have indicated, the tight unity between theory and practice
(as well as between theory and personal experience) has shaped black
feminism from its inception. So too, this unity defines the pragmatist
approach to creative democracy. Yet the narrative of creative democracy
is built around more than a common methodological approach to polit-
ical struggle. It also includes a series of literary components—­characters,
symbols, settings, and thematic concerns—which bring aesthetic vital-
ity to representations of creative democracy while also capturing how
African American women see democracy working as a communal expe-
rience. Therefore, a literary pragmatic approach to creative democracy
begins with the simple but necessary observation that black women’s
constructions of democracy are and always has been concurrently lit-
erary and pragmatic. In a related vein, the literary pragmatic approach
demands a receptivity to the foundational ties that bind together creative
democracy and black feminist culture, most pointedly the centrality of
maternity and the overarching importance of community life.
What defines a literary pragmatic approach to African American wom-
en’s texts? This approach requires an understanding of the principles that
have tied together the many strains of pragmatist thought as well as an
openness to the way black women have developed pragmatist narratives
that speak to their particular experiences. As I have discussed in previ-
ous work, to my mind, literary pragmatist reading begins with the claim
that pragmatism at large reflects in myriad ways an American national
ethos.2 The first self-identified pragmatist, William James, developed
his conception of the distinctly American ethos of pragmatism in writ-
ings such as Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth.3 At the same time,
4 G. PHIPPS

from the literary standpoint, the American orientation of pragmatism

cannot be located in a common set of ideas that James and others insert
into specific arguments. Rather, the American characteristics of pragma-
tism consist of subtle literary components embedded within a wide array
of novels, stories, poems, and non-fiction texts that cover a range of sub-
jects, from history to metaphysics to biology, from religion to aesthet-
ics to politics. Among the writings of pragmatist philosophers, we find a
variety of commentaries on that most flexible of topics, the relationship
between the individual and society (and, more abstractly, between sub-
jectivity and objectivity); but we also find literary inflections that frame
this relationship in the context of varied locales, time periods, and cul-
tural formations in the United States, from the eighteenth century to
the present day. In the philosophical tradition, pragmatist ideas about
individuality and society work in concert with figurative representa-
tions of pragmatic individuals inhabiting American social settings. Such
representations are built around archetypes, national mythology, and
portrayals of and reflections on U.S. geographical spaces, national insti-
tutions, and sociopolitical transformations.
What emerges through comparative literary analyses of these writings
is not a theory of American identity per se, but a cast of characters and
settings that are products of American society just as much as they are
actors and stages which enliven the fundamental principles of pragmatist
philosophy. These literary components afford multiple portraits of how
theorists incorporate constructions of American culture into their writ-
ing. In the process, these components also provide snapshots of the ways
interactions between the individual and society are delimited by one of
the key tenets of pragmatist thought: the relationship between experi-
ence and truth. Literary pragmatism identifies a reciprocal relationship
between theory (in the widest sense) and literature, exploring how fic-
tion and poetry both enact and revise the themes, characterizations,
motifs, and settings found within pragmatist writing. Literary pragma-
tism is less a lens for reading either theory or literature than a series of
reading practices that track long threads that run across diverse forms of
writing—a method of exploration that does not actively blur disciplinary
boundaries so much as it seeks instances of blurring, opposition, influ-
ence, and synthesis in the narratives that wind throughout the works of
authors, philosophers, essayists, and activists.
Previous critics have examined the writings of black men and
white women in relation to pragmatism, and literary pragmatism has
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

emerged as a field unto itself in recent years.4 Monographs such as

Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism (2006), Walton
Muyumba’s The Shadow and the Act (2009), Lisi Schoenbach’s
Pragmatic Modernism (2011), and Paul Grimstad’s Experience and
Experimental Writing (2013) have joined earlier texts like Richard
Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), Ross Posnock’s The Trial of
Curiosity (1991), and Patricia Rae’s The Practical Muse (1997).5 One
reason for the recent increase in literary pragmatist studies is that prag-
matism itself has grown into one of the most influential schools of
thought in contemporary theory. There are a number of explanations
for the resurgence of pragmatism in the twenty-first century, with anx-
ieties about the current state of American democracy perhaps being
the most poignant of them. Commentaries on the cultural, philosoph-
ical, and political meaning of democracy are deeply entrenched in the
classical pragmatist tradition, not only in the works of foundational
authors like William James and John Dewey, but also in the writings of
thinkers regarded as the forerunners to pragmatism, such as Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dewey’s works,
in particular, are rightly known for celebrating the intrinsic connection
between democracy and classical pragmatism.6 My book does not revisit
the thematic role that democracy has played (and still plays) in the works
of canonical pragmatists, not least because many critics have already
explored these connections. Rather, the current study seeks to develop
a literary pragmatist approach to a largely ignored narrative of creative
democracy. What is sorely missing in scholarship, I argue, is a compre-
hensive literary pragmatist study of how African American women’s writ-
ing brings forth this narrative.
Aiming to fill this substantial gap, my book works on the premise
that genealogies of African American women’s letters stretching from
the early nineteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance offer some of
the fullest and most provocative representations of how pragmatism
understands democracy creatively. Today this project is more necessary
than ever, for reasons that are both scholarly and sociopolitical (which in
black feminism and pragmatism are not separate domains). In recent dec-
ades, the mechanistic workings of U.S. democracy have steadily degen-
erated into a grotesque menagerie of corporate and institutional status
quos, preservations of racist and misogynistic stratifications, entertain-
ment bonanzas masquerading as public discourses, and rigged elections.
The question of how and when early twenty-first-century American
6 G. PHIPPS

democracy will finally bottom out is an open one, but one positive that
has emerged from the downward spiral is an increasingly fervent grass-
roots resistance to these manifestations of democratic idealism. Following
Donald Trump’s bizarre yet not wholly unexpected victory in the 2016
election, the battle cry among vast numbers of American citizens was
“not my president.” But perhaps a wider and more historical phrase is
required: not my democracy.
To be sure, this is an underlying (and at times explicit) statement
that has found countless modes of expression in the history of African
American women’s letters. The works of nineteenth-century theorists
like Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell empha-
size in a variety of ways the massive disjunctions between the promises
of establishment democracy and the experiences of black women in the
United States. They also give voice to different possibilities of demo-
cratic life, not only showcasing how African American women create
organic, cultural, and flexible experiences of democracy within marginal-
ized communities, but also outlining how their approaches to communal
experience harbour the potential to transform the workings of democ-
racy within U.S. institutions. In the next generation, the literary works
of Harlem Renaissance authors like Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora
Neale Hurston depict young African American women enacting their
own versions of creative democracy through mobility among commu-
nities, the traversal of societal barriers, and interpersonal relationships
founded on shared enterprises of art, labour, culture, and amelioration.
One of the consistent thematic concerns across the philosophical and lit-
erary writings is the notion that, for black women, democracy is an expe-
rience that happens outside of and/or in opposition to the mainstream
appendages of the democratic state. In black women’s literary pragma-
tism, “not my democracy” is less a mantra than one half of an experien-
tial truth that grows for individuals over time; the other half consists of
the realization that creative, artistic, and cultural endeavours within com-
munities do bring value to the concept of democracy.
While the social relevance of creative democracy has steadily evolved
in new ways, black feminist criticism has also expanded over the past
four decades, particularly in conjunction with landmark theories of inter-
sectionality. Barbara Smith’s 1977 article “Toward a Black Feminist
Criticism” signalled a new orientation in scholarship, with Smith arguing
for the importance of looking at the “politics of sex as well as the politics
of race and class [as] crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

women writers” (134). This article helped establish a basis for intersec-
tional approaches to literary and philosophical works of black women
authors—approaches that see race, gender, class, and sexuality as fluid
matrices that always work in tandem.7 For many critics, intersectionality
is an ongoing corrective to the notion that African American women are
caught in a double bind in which they experience racism and sexism as
separate forces.8 Consequently, identifying the specificity and uniqueness
of black women’s experience has long been a guiding objective for crit-
ics in the field. Interestingly for pragmatist readers, the status of both
personal and collective experience remains contested in black feminist
scholarship. Some critics argue that the emphasis on experiential under-
standings of intersectionality forms an overwrought attempt to establish
firm boundaries around the field and repel “outsiders.”9 Other scholars
argue that the validation of African American women’s experience works
productively against the assumption that their literature and theory can
fit readily within discourses that tend to privilege white, male voices.10
At the heart of these ongoing discussions reside lively conflicts regard-
ing the dimensions of African American female experience and the means
through which theory should deploy interpretations of said experience to
bring about social change in the United States and the world.
As conversations and debates surrounding black feminist scholarship
have continued to unfold, new issues and points of focus have emerged
in recent years. Vivian May’s 2015 book Pursuing Intersectionality
argues that intersectional thought has brought innovations to theory but
has also endured subtle distortions and subversions, usually at the hands
of those who profess to understand it. For May, misapplications and mis-
representations of intersectionality are especially troubling, considering
that the movement is grounded on “radical resistance politics, particu-
larly in Black feminist, critical race, and women of color theorizing and
praxis” (2). Now the practical, experiential, and transformative thrust of
intersectionality is at risk of falling into disuse, with the theory serving
either as one more tool for grasping race and gender (in isolation) or as
an “intellectual or political relic” (1). Relatedly, in a 2013 article, Sumi
Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall assert, “Intersectionality
has traveled into spaces and discourses that are themselves constituted by
power relations that are far from transparent” (789), a process that often
leaves these power relations (and their roles in upholding established
modes of interpretation and knowledge production) untouched. So too,
some recent critics have wondered whether intersectionality should be
8 G. PHIPPS

supplemented with or replaced by alternative frameworks, if only because

supposedly the “strictures of language require us to invoke race, gen-
der, sexual orientation, and other categories one discursive moment at a
time” (Carbado 7).11 Within these commentaries, one can discern per-
vasive concerns about the simultaneous entrenchment and diffusion of
intersectionality. This is a trend in which the complex lineage that nur-
tured intersectionality—the writings of African American women, from
the early nineteenth century to the present day—is held increasingly in
abeyance in favour of hermeneutic simplicity and the assumption that all
critical reading shares the same basic premises. As May indicates, inter-
sectionality should remain on guard, in a self-reflexive manner, against
potential collusions between strategies of resistance and dominance.
Literary pragmatism features many ways of entering into contempo-
rary debates about intersectionality and the historical roots of black fem-
inism. In recent years, critics like May, Farah Griffin, Mia Bay, Martha
Jones, and Barbara Savage have renewed calls to recognize the existence
of an African American women’s intellectual tradition.12 In this book,
the starting point in this imperative project is the assertion that geneal-
ogies of African American women’s writing form, in their own distinct
manner, narratives of pragmatist thought that cut across disciplinary,
geographical, and generational boundaries. In other words, pragma-
tism is not merely a method of reading to be imposed onto the works
of black women theorists and authors. Rather, reading their works prag-
matically involves excavating narrative undercurrents, philosophical ideas,
and political interventions that together form the foundations of a prag-
matist lineage. This lineage is shaped by experiential representations of
creative democracy. Other critics have located pragmatic orientations in
the works of thinkers like Stewart and Cooper, usually focusing on their
appeals to experiential understandings of philosophy or their emphasis on
the practical applicability of theory.13 Also, scholars like V. Denise James
have presented black feminist reformulations of contemporary pragma-
tism that speak to ideas of creative democracy.14 However, focusing on
the literary pragmatist aspects of black women’s writing illuminates the
extent to which creative democracy is more than a set of principles or
general orientations in their texts. Just as creative democracy is an expe-
riential way of life that is externalized through cultural practices, it is also
a form of writing that knits together aesthetic, philosophical, theologi-
cal, autobiographical, political, historical, and literary modes of expres-
sion and argumentation. Creative democracy is first and foremost an
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

experience, and the textual articulation of experience entails depicting

and harnessing community-based labours and endeavours that capture
democracy in action.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett state, “Almost as
soon as blacks could write, they set out to redefine—against already
received racial stereotypes—who and what a black person was” (3). From
the early nineteenth century on, African American women have also
used writing to reshape constructions of black female identity, but this
is not to say that their textual representations have been predominantly
reactive. Their narratives set out to express the uniqueness of African
American women’s experiences, a process that necessitated, from the
start, new styles of writing, new theoretical contexts, and on the liter-
ary level, new characterizations and settings. Nineteenth-century think-
ers like Maria Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper did not simply write into
existence revised versions of black womanhood. They also created an
intricate web of textual relations for portraying them, enlisting and sam-
pling a range of cultural practices in order to assemble frameworks that
would be capable of bringing African American women into view. Such
frameworks emerged through revisionary interpretations of biblical his-
tory, cultural archetypes grounded on African traditions, personal experi-
ence, and samplings of music, oral narratives, and domestic art.15 These
thinkers narrativized the rhythms and movements of creative democ-
racy within communities of black women, but they also positioned their
articulations in relation to U.S. democracy—not just in the sense that
they carved out oppositions to the latter, but also in the sense that they
demonstrated how black women’s communal experiences can and should
radically alter institutional democracy. In this way, African American
women’s literary pragmatism is grounded on varying levels of practice.
It draws upon close-knit cultural formations that tie together communi-
ties, but it also demands macrocosmic sociopolitical transformations in
the American state.
A literary pragmatist approach to black women’s writing includes
the observation that their texts are inherently heterotopic and interdis-
ciplinary. Indeed, these structural aspects help encapsulate the cultural
diversity that defines communal experiences of democracy. To put it suc-
cinctly, the form matches the content. At the same time, a literary prag-
matist approach to African American women’s writing identifies not just
shared philosophical ideas and themes across texts, but also recurring
narratological patterns founded on motifs, characterization, and setting.
10 G. PHIPPS

The unity that emerges within the diversity involves literary elements
that intersperse eclectic writings. Furthermore, these elements ulti-
mately emerge as the aesthetic shapes of pragmatist principles, including
the overarching idea that truth develops through experience (and more
particularly, the notion that the truth of democracy, whatever it may be,
only comes to light through communal experience). In this way, writ-
ing about creative democracy entails more than just enumerating a list of
political or theoretical tenets; it also involves activating a series of ideas
and beliefs that acquire definition through textual reflections of the com-
plex characters, settings, and practices that help capture African American
women’s participation in communities. Such reflections are often at their
most intricate in works of literature, including the novels and short sto-
ries of Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston. However, works of fiction coexist
with theoretical, autobiographical, sociopolitical, and theological texts.
From the literary standpoint, the trajectory from nineteenth-century
philosophy to Harlem Renaissance fiction centres on crisscrossing rep-
resentations of the ways that archetypes, settings, and cultural activities
bring creative democracy to life.

Mothers, Daughters, and the Evolution

of the Black Maternal Archetype

What kinds of literary elements form narrative arcs across the writings of
nineteenth-century philosophers and Harlem Renaissance authors? This
question grows out of a literary pragmatist approach to reading, but in
this context, it also directs attention to black feminist and intersectional
modes of analysis.16 Literary pragmatism locates depictions of American
society and democracy in motifs, characterizations, settings, and other
literary components. A literary pragmatic approach to black feminist
texts demands, in turn, a focus on how African American women rep-
resent democracy through literary elements that reflect their experiential
understandings of democracy at the margins of U.S. society. Examining
their writings as narratives requires receptivity to the way black women
have constructed narratives on their own terms. This point brings
us back to the subject of the “motherline.” Scholars have frequently
invoked matrilineal transmissions of knowledge when assembling gene-
alogies of black feminism.17 The model of mothers and grandmothers
passing on stories to their daughters has served as both a literal and figu-
rative template for these genealogies. Relatedly, it is no secret in criticism
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Women wanted:
The story written in blood red letters on the
horizon of the Great World War
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on

the horizon of the Great World War

Author: Mabel Potter Daggett

Release date: June 7, 2022 [eBook #68257]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: George H. Doran Company,

1917

Credits: Fay Dunn, Fiona Holmes and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN

WANTED: THE STORY WRITTEN IN BLOOD RED LETTERS ON
THE HORIZON OF THE GREAT WORLD WAR ***
 Transcriber’s Notes
Hyphenation has been standardised.
Changes made are noted at the end of the book.
WOMEN WANTED
MABEL POTTER DAGGETT
 WOMEN WANTED
The story written in blood red
letters on the horizon of the
Great World War

BY

MABEL POTTER DAGGETT

AUTHOR OF “IN LOCKERBIE STREET,” ETC.

Illustrated

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
 COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1917, 1918,

BY THE PICTORIAL REVIEW COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To My Friend
KATHERINE LECKIE
THE ILLUMINATION OF
WHOSE PERSONALITY HAS
LIGHTED MY PATHWAY TO
TRUTH, THIS BOOK IS
AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE

I Glimpsing the Great World War 13

II Close Up Behind the Lines 48
III Her Country’s Call 82
IV Women Who Wear War Jewelry 115
V The New Wage Envelope 147
VI The Open Door in Commerce 201
VII Taking Title in the Professions 239
VIII At the Gates of Government 280
IX The Rising Value of a Baby 308
X The Ring and the Woman 338
 Page 106
MRS. PANKHURST’S GREATEST PARADE
When she led 40,000 English women through the streets of
London in July, 1915. This procession is the vanguard in the march
of all the women of the world to economic independence.
 ILLUSTRATIONS
Mrs. Pankhurst’s Greatest Parade the March
of the English Women into Industry Frontispiece
PAGE

The Staff of the Women’s War Hospital,

Endell St. W. C., London 64
Mrs. H. J. Tennant of London 96
Viscountess Elizabeth Benoit D’Azy of Paris in
the Red Cross Service 120
Lady Ralph Paget, Celebrated War Heroine 128
Mrs. Katherine M. Harley of London, Who Died
at the Front 136
Miss Elizabeth Rachel Wylie of New York 202
Mlle. Sanua at the Head of the Paris School
of Commerce for Women 224
Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, England’s
First Woman Physician 256
Miss Nancy Nettleford of London 264
Mme. Suzanne Grinberg of Paris, Famous
Lawyer 272
Dr. Rosalie S. Morton of New York 276
Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett of London 290
Mme. Charles Le Verrier of Paris 298
Dr. Schiskina Yavein of Petrograd 304
Her Grace the Duchess of Marlborough 320
WOMEN WANTED
 CHAPTER I
Glimpsing the Great World War
“Who goes there?”
I hear it yet, the ringing challenge from the war offices of Europe.
Automatically my hand slides over my left hip. But to-day my tailored
skirt drapes smoothly there.
The chamois bag that for months has bulged beneath is gone. As
regularly as I fastened my garters every morning I have been wont to
buckle the safety belt about my waist and straighten the bag at my
side and feel with careful fingers for its tight shut clasp. You have to
be thoughtful like that when you’re carrying credentials on which at
any moment your personal safety, even your life may depend. As
faithfully as I looked under the bed at night I always counted them
over: my letter of credit for $3,000, my blue enveloped police book,
and my passport criss-crossed with visés in the varied colours of all
the rubber stamps that must officially vouch for me along my way.
Ah, they were still all there. And with a sigh of relief I was wont to
retire to my pillow with the sense of one more day safely done.
The long steel lines I have passed, I cannot forget. “Who goes
there?” These that speak with authority are men with pistols in their
belts and swords at their sides. And there are rows of them, O rows
and rows of them along the way to the front. See the cold glitter of
them! I still look nervously first over one shoulder and then over the
other. This morning at breakfast a waiter only drops a fork. And I
jump at the sound as if a shot had been fired. You know the feeling
something’s going to catch you if you don’t watch out. Well, you have
it like that for a long time after you’ve been in the war zone. Will it be
a submarine or a Zeppelin or a khaki clad line of steel?
It was on a summer’s day in 1916 that I rushed into the office of
the Pictorial Review. “Look!” I exclaimed excitedly to the editor at his
desk. “See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above
the battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for
women!”
He brushed aside the magazine “lay out” before him, and lifted his
eyes to the horizon of the world. And he too saw. Among the
feminists of New York he has been known as the man with the
vision. “Yes,” he agreed, “you are right. It is the wonder that is
coming. Will you go over there and find out just what this terrible
cataclysm of civilisation means to the woman’s cause?”
And he handed me my European commission. The next morning
when I applied for my passport I began to be written down in the
great books of judgment which the chancelleries of the nations keep
to-day. Hear the leaves rustle as the pages chronicle my record in
full. I must clear myself of the charge of even a German relative-in-
law. I must be able to tell accurately, say, how many blocks intervene
between the Baptist Church and the city hall in the town where I was
born. They want to know the colour of my husband’s eyes. They will
ask for all that is on my grandfather’s tombstone. They must have
my genealogy through all my greatest ancestors. I have learned it
that I may tell it glibly. For I shall scarcely be able to go round the
block in Europe, you see, without meeting some military person who
must know.
Even in New York, every consul of the countries to which I wish to
proceed, puts these inquiries before my passport gets his visé. It is
the British consul who is holding his in abeyance. He fixes me with a
look, and he charges: “You’re not a suffragist, are you? Well,” he
goes on severely, “they don’t want any trouble over there. I don’t
know what they’ll do about you over there.” And his voice rises with
his disapproval: “I don’t at all know that I ought to let you go.”
But finally he does. And he leans across his desk and passes me
the pen with which to “sign on the dotted line.” It is the required
documentary evidence. He feels reasonably sure now that the Kaiser
and I wouldn’t speak if we passed by. And for the rest? Well, all
governments demand to know very particularly who goes there when
it happens to be a woman. You’re wishing trouble on yourself to be a
suffragist almost as much as if you should elect to be a pacifist or an
alien enemy. There is a prevailing opinion—which is a hang-over
from say 1908 —that you may break something, if it is only a military
rule. Why are you wandering about the world anyhow? You’ll take up
a man’s place in the boat in a submarine incident. You’ll be so in the
way in a bombardment. And you’ll eat as much sugar in a day as a
soldier. So, do your dotted lines as you’re told.
They dance before my eyes in a dotted itinerary. It stretches away
and away into far distant lands, where death may be the passing
event in any day’s work. I shall face eternity from, say, the time that I
awake to step into the bath tub in the morning until, having finished
the last one hundredth stroke with the brush at night, I lay my
troubled head on the pillow to rest uneasily beneath a heavy
magazine assignment. “There’s going to be some risk,” the editor of
the Pictorial Review said to me that day in his office, with just a note
of hesitation in his voice. “I’ll take it,” I agreed.
The gangway lifts in Hoboken. We are cutting adrift from the
American shore. Standing at the steamship’s rail, I am gazing down
into faces that are dear. Slowly, surely they are dimming through the
ocean’s mists. Shall I ever again look into eyes that look back love
into mine?
I think, right here, some of the sparkle begins to fade from the
great adventure on which I am embarked. We are steaming steadily
out to sea. Whither? It has commenced, that anxious thought for
every to-morrow, that is with a war zone traveller even in his dreams.
A cold October wind whips full in my face. I shiver and turn up my
coat collar. But is it the wind or the pain at my heart? I can no longer
see the New York sky line for the tears in my eyes. And I turn in to
my stateroom.

There on the white counterpane of my berth stretches a life-

preserver thoughtfully laid out by my steward. On the wall directly
above the wash-stand, a neatly printed card announces: “The
occupant of this room is assigned to Lifeboat 17 on the starboard
side.” It makes quite definitely clear the circumstances of ocean
travel. This is to be no holiday jaunt. One ought at least to know how
to wear a life-preserver. Before I read my steamer letters, I try mine
on. It isn’t a “perfect 36.” “But they don’t come any smaller,” the
steward says. “You just have to fold them over so,” and he ties the
strings tight. Will they hold in the highest sea, I wonder.
The signs above the washstands, I think, have been seen by
pretty nearly every one before lunch time. When we who are taking
the Great Chance together, assemble in the dining-room, each of us
has glimpsed the same shadowy figure at the wheel in the pilot
house. We all earnestly hope it will be the captain who will take us
across the Atlantic. But we know also that it may be the ghostly
figure of the boatman Charon who will take us silently across the
Styx.
Whatever else we may do on this voyage, we shall have to be
always going-to-be-drowned. It is a curiously continuously present
sensation. I don’t know just how many of my fellow travellers go to
bed at night with the old nursery prayer in their minds if not on their
lips. But I know that for me it is as vivid as when I was four years old:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And should I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Each morning I awake in faint surprise that I am still here in this

same seasick world. The daily promenade begins with a tour of
inspection to one’s personal lifeboat. Everybody does it. You wish to
make sure that it has not sprung a leak over night. Then you lean
over the steamship’s rail to look for the great letters four feet high
and electrically illuminated after dark, for all prowling undersea
German craft to notice that this is the neutral New Amsterdam of the
Holland-American line. Submarine warfare has not yet reached its
most savage climax. Somebody says with confident courage: “Now
that makes us quite safe, don’t you think?” And somebody answers
as promptly as expected. “Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t sink us when
they see that sign.” And no one speaks the thought that’s plain in
every face: “But Huns make ‘mistakes.’ And remember the
Lusitania.”
 We always are remembering the Lusitania. I never dress for dinner
at night without recalling: And they went down in evening clothes.
We play cards. We dance on deck. But never does one completely
while away the recurring thought: Death snatched them as suddenly
as from this my next play or as from the Turkey Trot or the Maxixe
that the band is just beginning.
We read our Mr. Britlings but intermittently. The plot in which we
find ourselves competes with the best seller. Subconsciously I am
always listening for the explosion. If the Germans don’t do it with a
submarine, it may be a floating mine that the last storm has lashed
loose from its moorings.
What is this? Rumour spreads among the steamer chairs.
Everybody rises. Little groups gather with lifted glasses. And—it is a
piece of driftwood sighted on the wide Atlantic. That thrill walks off in
about three times around the deck.
But what is that, out there, beyond the steamer’s path? Right over
there where the fog is lifting? Surely, yes, that shadowy outline. Don’t
you see it? Why, it’s growing larger every minute. I believe it is! Oh,
yes, I’m sure they look like that. Wait. Well, if it were, it does seem as
if the torpedo would have been here by now. Ah, we shall not be
sunk this time after all! Our periscope passes. It is clearly now only a
steamship’s funnel against the horizon.
Then one day there is an unusual stir of activity on deck. The
sailors are stripping the canvas from off the lifeboats. The great
crane is hauling the life rafts from out the hold. Oh, what is going to
happen? The most nervous passenger wants right away to know.
And the truthful answer to her query is, that no one can tell. But we
are making ready now for shipwreck. In these days, methodically,
like this it is done. It has to be, as you approach the more intense
danger zone of a mined coast. You see you never can tell.
I go inside once more to try the straps of my life-preserver. But we
are sailing through a sunlit sea. And at dinner the philosopher at our
table—he is a Hindu from Calcutta—says smilingly, “Now this will do
very nicely for shipwreck weather, gentlemen, very nicely for
shipwreck weather.” It is the round-faced Hollander at my right, of
orthodox Presbyterian faith, who protests earnestly, “Ah, but please
no. Do not jest.” The next day when the dishes slide back and forth
between the table racks, none of us laugh when the Hollander says
solemnly, “See, but if God should call us now.” Ah, if he should, our
life boats would never last us to Heaven. They would crumple like
floats of paper in Neptune’s hand. Eating our dessert, we look out on
the terrible green and white sea that licks and slaps at the portholes
and all of us are very still. The lace importer from New York at my
left, is the most quiet of all.
For eight days and nights we have escaped all the perils of the
deep. And now it is the morning of the ninth day. You count them
over like that momentously as God did when he made the world.
What will to-morrow bring forth? Well, one prepares of course for
landing.
I sit up late, nervously censoring my note book through. The
nearer we get to the British coast, the more incriminating it appears
to be familiar with so much as the German woman movement. I dig
my blue pencil deep through the name of Frau Cauer. I rip open the
package of my letters of introduction. What will they do to a person
who is going to meet a pacifist by her first name? That’s a narrow
escape. Another letter is signed by a perfectly good loyal American
who, however, has the misfortune to have inherited a Fatherland
name from some generations before. Oh, I cannot afford to be
acquainted with either of my friends. I’ve got to be pro-ally all wool
and yard wide clear to the most inside seams of my soul. I’ve got to
avoid even the appearance of guilt. So, stealthily I tiptoe from my
stateroom to drop both compromising letters into the sea.
Like this a journalist goes through Europe these days editing
oneself, to be acceptable to the rows of men in khaki. So I edit and I
edit and I edit myself until after midnight for the British government’s
inspection. I try to think earnestly. What would a spy do? So that I
may avoid doing it. And I go to bed so anxious lest I act like a spy
that I dream I am one. When I awake on the morning of the tenth
day, all our engines are still. And from bow to stern, our boat is all a-
quiver with glad excitement. We have not been drowned! There
beside us dances the little tender to take us ashore at Falmouth.
 FACING THE STEEL LINE OF INQUIRY
The good safe earth is firm beneath our feet before the lace
importer speaks. Then, looking out on the harbor, he says: “On my
last business trip over a few months since, my steamship came in
here safely. But the boat ahead and the next behind each struck a
mine.” So the chances of life are like that, sometimes as close as
one in three. But while you take them as they come, there are lesser
difficulties that it’s a great relief to have some one to do something
about. At this very moment I am devoutly glad for the lace importer
near at hand. He is carrying my bag and holding his umbrella over
me in the rain. For, you see, he is an American man. The more I
have travelled, the more certain I have become that it’s a mistake to
be a woman anywhere in the world there aren’t American men
around. In far foreign lands I have found myself instinctively looking
round the landscape for their first aid. The others, I am sure, mean
well. But they aren’t like ours. An Englishman gave me his card last
night at dinner: “Now if I can do anything for you in London,” he said,
and so forth. It was the American man now holding his umbrella over
me in the rain, who came yesterday to my steamer chair: “It’s going
to be dark to-morrow night in London,” he said, “and the taxicabs are
scarce. You must let me see that you reach your hotel in safety.” And
I felt as sure a reliance in him as if we’d made mud pies together or
he’d carried my books to school. You see, you count on an American
man like that.
But the cold line of steel! That you have to do alone, even as you
go each soul singly to the judgment gate of heaven. I grip my
passport hard. It has been removed from its usual place of secure
safety. Chamois bags are the eternal bother of being a woman
abroad in war-time. Men have pockets, easy ones to get at
informally. I have among my “most important credentials”—they are
in separate packages carefully labelled like that—a special
“diplomatic letter” commending me officially by the Secretary of State
to the protection of all United States embassies and consulates.
When they handed it to me in Washington, I remember they told me
significantly: “We have just picked out of prison over there, two
American correspondents whose lives we were able to save by the