What Are We to Make of the Puzzling Lives of Two of the Leading Women in the Progressive Era?

[unrepentant progress]

Crystal Eastman and Virginia Gildersleeve


That first paragraph really speaks to me.

The Progressives and their contemporaries, whom we are inclined to admire, are hard to like, and hard to understand. By our standards they were often racists, fanatics about alcohol, and curiously uninterested in the point of view of the people they were interested in uplifting. Their personal relations also are peculiar: reformers without professions and thus without professional norms, their organizational lives were mixed with their liaisons. Women pose special problems. Social constraints channeled their activities, and limited them—but also provided opportunities for shared action, some of which, notably the great women’s causes of prohibition and suffrage, were highly consequential.

Biography is the normal way to make sense of such conflicts and contradictions. But sometimes the biography makes the puzzles worse. Two important women, Crystal Eastman and Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, lack biographies, despite appearing in a lot of historical writing. There is a connection between them: they shared social science teachers at Columbia, a few years apart. Yet they followed quite different paths, and are puzzling in different ways. Both of them seem to have been curiously free of doubt. Eastman came by it honestly: she was the daughter of two Preachers, originally Congregationalists, and her mother was tremendously successful, well-known, and self-assured.

Eastman went to Vassar, and then to Columbia, for an MA in Social Science, an experience that cured her of academic life, but provided valuable relationships, and got her working at a settlement house. She took a one-year course at NYU law school, moved into the reform world, joining the Pittsburgh Survey to do a volume on work accidents, which she had hoped to make a legal career around. Law offices closed their door to her, but she impressed one of her professors at Vassar enough to intervene on her behalf and get her appointed as the only paid employee on a state commission to write a law on workplace injuries. She gave speeches, and became a visible figure in the reform world, while at the same time managing a number of relationships and entering into the bohemian world of Greenwich Village. By 1910 she was a star.

Virginia Gildersleeve pursued a more prosaic path: Barnard, then a history MA with James Harvey Robinson who she admired (and which would make her at least an honorary “Progressive”), and exposure to the grand figures of Columbia, including Franklin Giddings, who Crystal had also taken a course or two from, and Nicholas Murray Butler, teaching the history of philosophy—a consequential connection. She was given an opportunity to teach English at Barnard, realized that she needed a Ph.D. to advance, received one at Columbia, where she found herself treated with complete equality in relation to the male students, and at long last was appointed as an Assistant Professor in 1910 at Barnard.

More: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158011

[marble falls]

1. Very interesting read. There were two exceptional "ordinary" people. In some ways that makes....

them better role models than some of our heroes.

[unrepentant progress]

2. There's something of an ongoing flap in the historical community

It developed in response to Jo Guldi's and David Armitage's The History Manifesto which argued that historians today are too fixated on "small" histories and that we need to return to "big picture" histories. Personally I think it's a false dichotomy and that both kinds are important. Plus I cringe at the abuse of history and science that people like Malcolm Gladwell employ to further their "big picture" narratives.

Anyhow, as you can imagine, I believe histories of people like these women are important. Sure, they didn't cast more than ripples on the zeitgeist, but they are two contradictory instantiations of their times who did impact those around them. There's a lot to be learned by looking at how even ordinary people lived through history. Plus it helps us understand how people can simultaneously embrace progressive and horrific ideas.

[marble falls]

3. A macro/micro dispute. The big picture follows a diagram, the small picture provides the truth.