SOURCE: Bremer, Sidney H. “Willa Cather's Lost Chicago Sisters.” In Women Writers and the Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Susan Merrill Squier, pp. 210-29. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Bremer draws contrasts between women and male writers of the Chicago literary renaissance, noting that the novels written by women have been overlooked by critics but are no less worthy of attention.]

Most American literary critics can tick off some half-dozen novels from the first phase of the “Chicago literary renaissance”: Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) at the top of the lists, then The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair and The Pit (1903) by Frank Norris, probably Robert Herrick's Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905) and Dreiser's The Titan (1914), and, maybe, The Song of the Lark (1914) by Willa Cather. Indeed Cather's novel does belong to these ranks in quality. But it doesn't quite fit in kind. The problem is not that much of the novel takes place outside Chicago; that is true of Sister Carrie, too. And Cather's heroine is, like Dreiser's, a newcomer who remains an outsider to Chicago and treats the city as raw material for her ambition. But unlike Carrie Meeber, Thea Kronberg never frees herself from ties to family and friends, and her art probes beneath materialistic artifice to root itself in organic forms from rural and urban sources alike. Along with novels written by turn-of-the-century Chicago women whose names are unfamiliar to us now, The Song of the Lark dissents from the fragmented, artificial, alienating image of the city in Sister Carrie and the other men's novels. In the Chicago women's novels, as in their lives, the city is informed by communal concerns, interfused with organic nature, and enmeshed in familial continuities. And although Cather's own trek from midwestern small town to eastern city included a much briefer stopover in Chicago than did Dreiser's, she was more a literary sister than he to the women who lived and wrote some fine, forgotten novels there.

The best-known Chicago novels, those written by men, crested a popular wave of fictional Chicago-watching that began to break at the time of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. In remarkably similar ways and for over two decades, mostly male novelists from across the nation elaborated Chicago as America's “ultimate metropolis” and a “portentous” symbol for the future.¹ In their many Chicago novels, the individual—usually a lone newcomer—discovers the city already in full swing and still expanding. Their inflated rhetoric presents Chicago as a social “inferno” where “the high and the low are met together” in opposing camps of wealth and poverty; as an antinatural “magnet” of railroads and skyscrapers that fling a “blasphemy against nature”; as an economic “pit” where even the most rugged individuals turn out to be “cogs” in a run-away machine.² Denying any hope for community, their Chicago threatens to overwhelm everyone who must confront it alone, while their novels strain to keep the city at bay and to comprehend it in symbolic terms. Theirs is an outsider's vision of the economic city.

Theirs is also a familiar image that fits our dominant cultural paradigm of the city as a battlefield—a new New World for American Adams to conquer (at best), an asphalt jungle (at worst), and a “problem” for “outside experts” (in any case). Backed by such cultural currency, men's Chicago novels have totally eclipsed the less sharply defined, more continuous and experiential vision of Chicago in novels by women. It therefore bears saying that the women's novels are no less worthy of our attention than the men's, on either aesthetic or historical grounds. They range in quality—as do the men's—from excellent to merely curious. The Song of the Lark and Edith Wyatt's True Love (1903) are no less excellent than the best-known standards. Clara Laughlin's “Just Folks” (1910) and Elia Peattie's The Precipice (1914) are no less good and interesting than Herrick's pre-Memoirs novels and the Chicago novels of Henry Blake Fuller. Clara Burnham's Sweet Clover (1894) and Alice Gerstenberg's Unquenched Fire (1912) are no less historically noteworthy than Hamlin Garland's otherwise unremarkable Rose of Dutcher's Coolly (1895) or The Money Captain (1898) by Will Payne. Collectively and profoundly, the women's novels interpret important dimensions of urban experience no less than do the men's. They are now lost to us not because they are less valuable, but because they do not jibe with our dominant cultural understandings.

What are we to make, for instance, of the Chicago of drifting clouds and domesticated lawns, of uncles and cousins and extended family relationships that Edith Wyatt introduces in True Love? Like the Puritans' prospective ideal of “a city on a hill,” this Chicago positively complements and fulfills nature instead of “blaspheming” against it. And unlike Dreiser's “Waif amid Forces,” Wyatt's Chicagoans maintain their family relationships. Even a newcomer to Chicago finds herself en famille there, with her city cousins, aunt, and uncle. Even for her, “the sights of Chicago” figure less as an object for individual study than as a setting for social interaction, an organic context for living.³ Consistently, True Love and its sister novels articulate a vision based in experiential continuities and communal affairs. The only problem is that these novels look so un-urban to our socialized eyes that we are hard pressed to accept their insights.

Specifically, women's Chicago novels present the city as part of a life experience that is continuous, embedded in natural forces and in communal ties and conflicts. For example, Burnham's Sweet Clover appeals not to distant observations, but to the participant's intimate knowledge of Chicago's lived-in qualities. This Chicago extends backward in time and outward in space, fulfilling pioneer aspirations in its gradual evolution from a “country village” to a World's Fair metropolis.⁴ It is not a new reality cut off from the past or the countryside. Moreover, Chicago novels by women usually embrace nature as a powerful, complex presence within the city, whereas the men's novels tend to idealize nature and to present it as apart from the city. And when The Song of the Lark recognizes the vigorous and sordid “congestion of life” in stormy Chicago as the very essence of “the city itself,” that organic image includes human crowds as well as stormy weather.⁵

Indeed the organic fabric of human life epitomizes “the city itself” in women's novels, which enmesh their characters in familial networks. If anything, their fictional Chicagoans suffer from too little, rather than too much, individualism. It is the closely knit “patterns of my home life and city” that Alice Gerstenberg's fictional alter ego must rupture in order to pursue her New York acting career in Unquenched Fire.⁶ But she comes to regret her loss deeply. For the most part, the main characters in Chicago women's novels enact the communalism they learn to value, staying in Chicago and developing careers that support the city's familial patterns. Thus the main character in Laughlin's “Just Folks,” a probation officer, discovers old family ties in the mixed neighborhood where she works, strengthens them through her work, and finally embraces them by making her married home there. And the novel's dramatic action turns on conflicts between competing social ethics—parochial loyalty to a primary group, on the one hand, and a reciprocal give-and-take among diverse groups, on the other—which several characters learn to negotiate along with Beth. Not one alienated individual's economic struggle against the city, but an entire urban society's struggle for civic mutuality is at issue in most Chicago women's novels.⁷

Edith Wyatt's True Love: A Comedy of the Affections best exemplifies the Chicago women's vision, because its special achievement is a structure fully appropriate to that vision. True Love makes collective family units its primary “characters” and simultaneously its embodiment of Chicago. On the one hand, the democratic Marsh family represents Wyatt's urban ideal, a social order that embraces the city's continuities. The Marshes are linked to Chicago's rural environs by the downstate family of Mr. Marsh's brother and to the city's past by Mrs. Marsh's aging father, his sister, and an old Civil War comrade who apparently lives with them. Mr. and Mrs. Marsh's four children complete the three-generational range of this extended family. They live in the grandfather's unpretentious home, where they welcome visitors to “the kindliest intercourse” and lively group activities. On the other hand, their elitist family friends the Hubbards—widowed Madame mother, her two sons, and her maiden cousin—have an elaborately decorated, “sepulchral” mansion. In this “penal spot” visitors put their sophistication to the test by exchanging calling cards and stiff formalities.⁸

These two city families anchor the novel's primary tensions, between participatory democracy and elitism as ethics for society. And the conflict extends beyond city limits, tying Chicago to its rural surroundings by involving country families, too. There the two social ethics are mixed—in the narrowly nuclear family of Mr. Marsh's sociable brother and sister-in-law and their snobbish daughter Inez, and the loose “family” of democratic Dick Colton, his becoming-snobbish sister Fanny, their Polish-American aunt, and their ethnically diverse friends. This last, figurative family congregates in the lobby and dining room of a small-town hotel that Dick runs—as “free [a] place for everyone” to be “at ease and content” as the Chicago Marshes' home, and just as pointedly unlike the Hubbard house with its “little cold, bare reception-room.”⁹

All together, True Love's various families demonstrate the social characters and styles of democracy and elitism, as well as the conflicts between them—most dramatically in several interlocking romances. The romances themselves are a mix-and-match set. Within the democratic camp, city-woman Emily Marsh finds her appropriate mate in country-man Dick Colton. These two young people discover the expansive possibilities of a love that evolves through everyday interactions, unobsessed by display or sentiment. Within the elitist camp, by contrast, Emily's country cousin Inez is matched up with urbane Norman Hubbard, just long enough for their elaborate gestures of “true love” to expose the selfishness from which they proceed and the boredom toward which they tend. Between the two camps, finally, Fred Hubbard and Fanny Colton prove to be star-crossed lovers indeed. They mix and mismatch “strenuous” Norman Hubbard's “unpretentious” younger brother with “commonplace” Dick Colton's “exclusive” younger sister.¹⁰ They marry outside either camp, on the run toward isolation together, then a violent separation when Fred commits suicide.

In structure as in theme, True Love is an insider's story, concerned primarily with a network of ongoing relationships on their own overlapping terms. It is “like one's own story in not being certain of the relative importance of its different persons and events,” William Dean Howells remarked in a national review, which placed True Love at the forefront of “the Chicago School of Fiction.” Howells went on to praise Wyatt for departing from the literary convention of larger-than-life romance by emphasizing daily, familial contexts: “Strangely enough, the lovers and self-lovers have families about them. … [The families] are not treated as mere pieces of mechanism for transacting the lovers' passion.”¹¹ Indeed no single individual emerges as the central character in Wyatt's True Love—distinguishing it from other Chicago novels and marking an important breakthrough in novelistic convention generally. Even more fully than Howells's own 1890 novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes, True Love develops a successful collective form.¹²

As a highly original work and an epitome of the Chicago women's vision, True Love is certainly comparable in quality to the best of its contemporaries. But it is unlike men's standard Chicago novels in its disappearance from our literary canon—and in the kind of urban tradition it develops. In True Love, as in Chicago women's novels generally, the city is linked to the country in a society that centers in families, both biological and figurative. It is caught up in conflicting social ethics, the one fittingly organic, open, and democratic, the other artificially closed and elitist. Its individual members are characterized in terms of those families and social ethics. And social collectivities, not the machinery of economic systems pitted against alienated individuals, define the city.

The contrast between the Chicago women's novels epitomized by True Love and the nationally dominant men's novels directs our attention to the impact of residency and mobility on urban perspectives. Long-time residents like the women and newcomers like the men do see a city differently. In this case, however, the difference between inside and outside perspectives belongs to a more comprehensive pattern of sex-role expectations. That gender gap profoundly divided Victorian America's middle classes, to which the Chicago novelists typically belonged or successfully aspired. Women were encouraged as women to “stay at home” in fact and to express themselves as residents in fiction. On the other hand, men who were similarly “stuck” very long in Chicago—as were native Chicagoan Henry B. Fuller and transplanted Robert Herrick—disappointed a masculine expectation of independence, and they often avoided the posture of residential membership in their fiction; indeed these two men pioneered the economic and objectifying imagery that visiting men later played out. Moreover, women's urban experiences and perspectives generally differed from men's in ways that went well beyond the issue of residency and mobility. After all, Cather echoed the Chicago women's perception of their city as continuous, organic, and communal, even though she remained an outsider to its residential life.

Living and working in Chicago when it became a “literary center,”¹³ Cather's lost Chicago sisters shared a set of urban experiences that were significantly shaped by their feminine status. Besides remaining in the same city (unlike Cather), they had active roles (like Cather) in the male-dominated newspaper world, as well as in Chicago's female-dominated network of settlement houses and women's clubs, Little Theatre and Little Magazine enterprises. And in these endeavors, Chicago's women novelists joined hands with the likes of reformer Jane Addams, club woman Bertha Honoré (Mrs. Potter) Palmer, theatrical director Anna Morgan, and poet-editor Harriet Monroe. They contributed to their city in more diverse and more frequently collaborative ways than did their male compatriots. As their novels suggest, they stretched and re-created their “woman's sphere” in Chicago far beyond the limits of the public recognition they have received.

Most of Chicago's women writers were born in Chicago or, like Wyatt, moved there as young children. This meant that the primary emotions of childhood experience, more than the abstract concepts that people learn only slowly, formed the bedrock for their understanding of the city. They became acquainted with Chicago in its particularities, in the textures of daily experience radiating out, step by step, from their family homes. Middle-class home life provided a great deal of physical and social stability for them—in marked contrast, for instance, to Dreiser's experience of moving in and out of Chicago and living at five different city addresses with various family members before he set out on his own, eventually to other cities. Even as adults, Edith Wyatt, Clara Burnham, Clara Laughlin, and Alice Gerstenberg maintained their Chicago residency as a continuing fact, not just on paper. They lived in the same city, some in the same houses, as their parents. And although Elia Peattie followed her husband's career to Omaha just after their marriage and later moved on with him to New York, for nearly thirty years between they raised their children in her parents' old house in Chicago.

In addition to such factual circumstances, Chicago was home to its literary women in a special, metaphorical sense. As women they were expected to identify “home”—with all its personal and cultural connotations—as the center of their lives. “Home” was then, as it is today, the primary cultural metaphor for a woman's sphere of activities. And Chicago meant “home” to its women in this sense. Even traveling women who identified strongly with Chicago as a home base tended to describe it in familial terms; eastern poet Amy Lowell called Chicago “my adopted city” during the height of her association there with Monroe's Poetry Magazine, which she dubbed “my mother.” As an epitome of a woman's place, home was not coterminous with a physical house, as cultural critic Elizabeth Janeway has explained; and its particular embodiment differed for every individual woman.¹⁴ But for turn-of-the-century Chicago women in general, the family home was central, implicated in civic and cultural, as well as personal and domestic activities. Alice Gerstenberg's unpublished autobiography typifies their experience. It focuses on her companionship with her mother, as together they joined the supposedly leisured “wives, sisters and daughters” who “whirled out of their houses to their clubs and committee meetings to manage benefits, or to start new goals” in the early 1900s. Her descriptions of these mother-daughter adventures regularly proceed from and return to their family house, where she details the entrance hall and reception room as well-kept settings for sociable comings and goings.¹⁵ For Gerstenberg and other Chicago women, the family house was a domestic microcosm for—not a bulwark against—the city itself.

Chicago's home-based literary women were, however, hardly isolated from moneymaking, current political affairs, or public leadership. Wyatt worked as a teacher, wrote feature stories and essays “for which I have always had some demand [and payment] from publishers,”¹⁶ became deeply involved in Progressive reform politics, and was recognized as a Poetry Magazine leader in a newspaper cartoon. Clara Laughlin edited a Chicago journal, turned out advice columns for Good Housekeeping, wrote popular novels and over twenty travel books, then ran Clara Laughlin Travel Services. Elia Peattie scrambled to make a living as the first “girl reporter” for the Chicago Tribune and later profited from her position as that newspaper's literary critic by contracting to write local histories and coffee-table anthologies, in addition to her short stories and novels and plays. Other literary women also worked as paid writers, not amateur contributors, for Chicago newspapers: Harriet and Lucy Monroe as art critics, later Margery Currey (who would be remembered as Floyd Dell's gracious consort) as a society editor, and still later poet Eunice Tietjens as a war correspondent. Women regularly participated in the working world of journalism, with its pipeline to current events, although the all-male exclusivity of Chicago's Press Club and Whitechapel Club promoted a common impression that women had no part in the heyday of Chicago newspapers, and it is true that newspapers were established as a men's business in which women were usually relegated to the new arts and society sections.

Thus Chicago's clubs and settlement houses were hardly the only arenas of public affairs for women. But one cannot underestimate their special importance as centers of female leadership for women who lived and wrote in Chicago. The turn of the century marked the national height of the women's club movement, while settlement houses, often headed by women, stood at the forefront of American social reform. In Chicago their combined leadership formed an interlocking directorate that spearheaded the city's involvement in women's suffrage and social welfare. The clubs gained seriousness from association with reform, and the settlements gained prestige and financial support from association with high society. Writers were seldom their primary leaders, but these groups offered them collegial contacts with women who were then recognized movers and shakers. And because the clubs and settlements often couched their strong political thrust in literary study, they also provided professional literary women with a public forum that was associated with traditional sources of feminine “home rule.”

In particular, most of Chicago's women writers were teachers or visitors or residents at Hull House at one time or another, and Peattie even quoted Addams's concept of the “civic family” as a central element in The Precipice, her fictional anatomy of social roles for Chicago women.¹⁷ As a nationally celebrated writer as well as an activist, Jane Addams offered corroboration for the novelists' vision of the city as a base of human action, not an alien system. And the cooperative spirit of the settlement rank and file gave that common vision experiential reality in their lives.

That collaborative spirit also permeated Chicago's Little Theatre movement, which rivaled journalism in its importance to the city's emergence as a national “literary center” before World War I. The most public of arts, noncommercial drama was the province of women, too—despite doubts about the propriety of ladies becoming professional actresses. In her autobiography My Chicago, Anna Morgan presented her directorial leadership and dramatic coaching as an expression of the city, “worthy of record” because it involved “the earliest efforts in Chicago to produce … The Little Theatre.”¹⁸ Other Little Theatre pioneers included the Hull-House Players and poet-playwright Mary Aldis, at whose Lake Forest playhouse Monroe and Gerstenberg also had their plays produced. And when Maurice Browne later founded the famous, albeit short-lived Chicago Little Theatre in 1912, its producer was his Chicago-born wife, Ellen Van Volkenburg Browne, and her mother was its business manager. It was mostly the fruits of women's ideas and energies that Susan Glaspell and George Cramm Cook brought to the Provincetown Players from their early days in Chicago—where Glaspell, as a matter of fact, wrote a melodramatic Chicago novel in the women's mode, The Glory of the Conquered (1909).

Simultaneously a collaborative form of arts production and a public form of arts consumption, the Little Theatre movement expressed an urban aesthetic that women found especially compelling. Several of the city's literary women mentioned childhood ambitions to become actresses; in fact, Wyatt, Monroe, Peattie, Laughlin, and Gerstenberg all acted in theatricals at some time or another, in addition to writing plays and pageants for amateur groups and a few modern dramas to fill local playbills that otherwise ranged from classic Greek to modern Shaw. Specifically, an impetus toward making the private public, toward giving public voice to their persons, seemed to compel many Chicago literary women toward the stage.

A similar impetus also proved especially important in their poetry, which can be the most intimate literary genre. Most of the Chicago women who wrote novels also wrote poems as well as plays, and they regularly linked their poetry to the public medium of drama. A poet like Harriet Monroe saw her plays as “dramatic poetry.”¹⁹ Conversely, Mary Aldis wrote her best poems as dramatic monologues; and the public textures of choral speech and song infuse the poetic chants that several women wrote. While Vachel Lindsay was popularizing “primitive” chants in Congo Songs (1914), his female colleagues were developing chants as public songs of urban unity. Thus Wyatt chants her sense of sisterhood with Harriet Monroe in “City Whistles” (1916), a harbor song:

Now the morning winds are rising. Now the morning
          whistles cry.
Fast their crescent voices dim the paling star.
Through the misted city mainland, wide their questing
          summons fly
Many-toned—‘O mortal, tell me who you are!’
Down the midland, down the morning, fresh their sweeping
          voices buoy:
‘Siren ship! Silver ship! Sister ship! Ahoy! Sister
          ship ahoy! Ship ahoy!’(20)

The streetmarchers' chant in a protest poem, “The Song of the Women” (1915) by Chicago's Florence Kiper Frank, a Jewish-American, is similarly typical in its collective urban voice:

This is the song of the women, sung to the marching feet,
Mothers and daughters of mothers, out in the crowded
          street,
Yea, and the mothers of mothers, white with the passing years—
This is the chant of the women, and wise is he who hears.(21)

In poetry as in drama, Chicago's women emphasize the participatory speech, rather than objectifying description, that characterizes their novelistic style, too. And in all three media, they affirm public forms of self-expression.

The motivating force of this collective affirmation is exemplified by Harriet Monroe's career as a poet and as founding editor of Poetry Magazine. One of the many women whose early ambition was to be an actress, Monroe fought hard to get the commission to write the “Columbian Ode” for the World's Fair. As a result, she proudly claimed one of the official “seats provided for the five hundred artists of the Fair” on Dedication Day in 1892. And when her Ode was sung, she received a bouquet “‘from the ladies of Chicago’”—as the publicly recognized representative of poetry and of Chicago women. The Fair's chief architect, Daniel Burnham, got the point: “No other woman has ever been so honored, in the way you care for, in our country and time.”²²

Monroe valued public recognition for the “feminine” muse of poetry as for herself, for the human embodied in the feminine. As she explained twenty years later, in her promotional circulars for Poetry and in the magazine's first issue, she was determined not to have poetry “left to herself” while other arts gained public stature. Monroe also concurred in a belief articulated by Walt Whitman—in the motto she chose for the Poetry cover: “To have great poets / there must be great audiences, too.” Affirming the artist's reciprocal relationship to society, her Poetry supported Chicago's women novelists in their emphasis on public speech, as well as their residential sense of the artist's civic responsibility. It is no surprise that many of them had their poetic works published and reviewed in Poetry—or in Margaret Anderson's more bohemian, but also local Little Review. Such public presentation was crucial for them as women participating in Chicago's cultural development.

In all their urban activities and creations, they sought to blaze new trails for women—beyond the increasingly nuclear private family, into public and collegial realms. But when they left their “shelters” in search of “kingdoms”—to use Monroe's terms, they tried to take the home strengths of familiarity and hospitality with them. Thus Monroe wrote of the Poetry offices, “I had never been the actual mistress of any home which had sheltered me, but this little kingdom was mine, and I rather enjoyed dispensing its fleeting hospitalities.”²³ Theirs was a search for urban contexts of community that would unite their professional and familial strengths. That search informed the novels they wrote, the public arts they performed, the magazines they edited, and the clubs they joined in Chicago. But it finally ran up against the limits of their public recognition.

To one artists' club in particular nearly all of Chicago's literary women belonged. The Little Room extended into the professional arts the idea of gathering people across lines of specialization, which women's clubs and settlements had developed. It also brought men and women together as friends and colleagues, in marked contrast to most of the city's sex-divided social clubs and professional organizations. In 1898 the Little Room began meeting weekly in Chicago's new Fine Arts Building, where artists' studios, publishing houses, small theaters, and—significantly—women's clubs and political groups were housed together right downtown. Lucy Monroe suggested that they name themselves after a short story about a room in a family home, a “little room” that was visible only to the imaginative eye. And it was widely understood that the author of that story, Chicagoan Madeline Yale Wynne, embodied in her own person the Little Room's multimedia mix and commitment to hospitality. A painter, muralist, metalworker, writer, violinist, and embroiderer, Wynne was an “all-round artist,” said Harriet Monroe, a woman who “passed no art without a salutation,” said Peattie, and “a great encourager of others,” said Morgan.²⁴

By 1903 the Little Room was a going concern that included Chicago novelists Clara Burnham, Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Robert Herrick, Clara Laughlin, Will Payne, Elia Peattie, and Edith Wyatt, diverse other artists such as director Anna Morgan, newspaper columnist George Ade, sculptor Lorado Taft, dancer Lou Wall Moore, poet William Vaughn Moody, and cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, as well as Jane Addams, Daniel Burnham, the Monroe sisters, and other activists in civic culture. The Little Roomers' weekly conversations spawned collaborative work in the arts, including the annual Twelfth-Night theatricals that Anna Morgan directed for the group itself. Regularly the women of the Little Room—in their dual capacities as hostesses and artists—managed these “entertainments.” And their leadership was recognized in the informal network among male and female members, which was maintained by correspondence when someone was out of town. The Little Room's give-and-take ethos, moreover, expressed the women's communal vision and may have justified one Chicagoan's claim then that “nowhere … is there an artistic colony so untainted by jealousy as is that of Chicago.”²⁵ The women, for a time, had found a way to enjoy full collegiality with men and to share the home spirit with their colleagues.

But when the Little Room began to formalize its organization in 1902, a split developed between the unofficial (feminine) and official (masculine) workings of the club. Although women continued to head the “entertainment” committee and one woman joined each “class” of three elected to the Little Room's board of directors, men became the officers who called meetings and kept the money and records. Then a 1906 decision to include spouses as associate members laced the Little Room with literal family ties, confusing the status of the professional women who were attempting an extension of familylike dynamics beyond the private home.

As the Little Room was thus domesticated under the official leadership of men, a more bohemian colony of artists was also taking shape in some old World's Fair apartments that had been converted to studios out near the University. In this other setting, such literary artists as Susan Glaspell, Margery Currey, Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, Eunice Tietjens, Vachel Lindsay, and Margaret Anderson actively rejected domestic conventions for sexual freedoms. Unfortunately, however, the notoriety of their sexual affairs obscured the value of the women's—although not the men's—literary achievements, in a classic case of the double standard. For the bohemians no less than for the more socially involved artists from whom they were now split off, the delicate balance between family spirit and artistic commitment was upset. And Chicago's literary women fell out from a vital cultural center, one way or the other.

Into the breach stepped Hamlin Garland, trying to establish a professional organization that would associate writers like himself with the city's public leadership—“‘a real club like the Players’” in New York. And that meant a men's club. Working with a “Complete list of men” from the Little Room's membership roster in 1907, Garland sent out invitations: his new club would be a “widening of the scope of the Little Room,” he wrote prospective members, because it would include “distinguished men of science … and other professions.”²⁶ But it would exclude women altogether. For the most part, Chicago's literary men welcomed his suggestion, and Garland's crew soon installed themselves atop a Loop skyscraper where they met to lunch “with the boys” and to lionize visiting dignitaries. Their club was appropriately dubbed the Cliff Dwellers after the 1893 Fuller novel that had established Chicago's economic image for the nation, although Fuller was a social leader in the Little Room and one of the few men who refused to join Garland's club. Those who did join also continued their participation in the Little Room, but it took a back seat in their collegial affections, along with its women. Garland's autobiography records a few occasions when he himself went directly from the Cliff Dwellers Club to the Little Room—taking particular pleasure, for instance, in meeting local-colorist Alice French there: she greeted him “with the directness of a man, professing an abiding interest in all that I am doing,” he wrote. Of course, Garland's sense of French's adulation, which he took for “directness,” made her seem “companionable, a literary comrade” to be valued—but specifically “in a way few women achieve.”²⁷ So when Chicago's “truly professional” women “sent emissaries to ask the officers of the Cliff Dwellers Club, if the men would be willing to accept their female confrères, … the reply was, ‘No!’” In her unpublished autobiography, Alice Gerstenberg goes on to tell how the women then “launched out on their own” and, with novelist Clara Laughlin in the lead, founded the Cordon Club. The name “meant, shall we say, something like many ribbons, or badges of honor, roped together”—a fitting emblem for the women's vision of community, in contrast to the skyscraping imagery of the Cliff Dwellers.²⁸ Not until 1914 would the division between the men and the women be healed, when the long-established Writers Guild of men invited women to a dinner to found a new Society of Midland Authors. All the women on the Society's organizational committee were Little Roomers, and both Clara Laughlin and Alice Gerstenberg eventually succeeded to the presidency of the new organization. But it lacked the multimedia range and the informality that had been hallmarks of the Little Room, where women's special strengths and vision had shone.

Perhaps because they were minimized as literary hostesses to their more established male colleagues during the Cliff Dwellers years, it was then that the women produced most of their Chicago novels, brought the Little Theatre movement to its peak, got Poetry Magazine and The Little Review underway, and became active Progressives and suffragists. They did not, however, surpass in their novels the aesthetic success that Wyatt had achieved with True Love in 1903, and they never fully recouped the professional recognition that the Cliff Dwellers had denied them. Sculptor Lorado Taft, for instance, rudely challenged Anna Morgan's right to initiate a memorial book for Henry Blake Fuller in 1929—although she and Fuller had been extremely close friends, as well as equal partners in catalyzing the Little Room's collegial community. “Why the hurry? … Do you expect to sell it as a Christmas book?” Taft asked offensively, and then went on: “I had supposed that [such a book] would be the work of Fuller's closest literary companions, men like [Hobart Chatfield-Taylor] and [Hamlin] Garland. … Next Sunday Mr. Garland [who was also Taft's brother-in-law] will be here and we can have a consultation.” Taft was hardly alone in dismissing collegial friendship as unprofessional unless it was based on specialization and masculine hegemony. Ever since, Chicago's literary women as a group have been remembered only as hostesses. Individually each has been forgotten or viewed with wrenching condescension—Harriet Monroe being misrepresented, for example, as a “school mistress” who was herself “educated” by her achievements.²⁹ It is this context that explains the loss of the Chicago women's novelistic vision of urban experience.

In their novels and other literary works, as in their lives, Chicago's women emphasized the experiential continuities and involvements that are part of living in a single community from childhood on. Their communal vision reflected, as well, upon the collective activity of the Chicago women's clubs and settlement houses in which they shared. Their Little Theatre plays and newspaper stories also expressed—even more directly than their novels—their participation in the two major public art forms that established Chicago as a national “literary center” during this perid. And in their own professional circles they developed broadly based artists' associations, such as the Little Room, and consciously pursued “collaboration” as a mode of artistic creation.³⁰ Surely such communal activities are important aspects of urban experience, intimately involved in the concentration of diverse groups and institutions that defines a city.

But these are aspects of urban experience that most of the men who wrote standard Chicago novels did not share. And the outsider's vision of the economic city in their novels reflects upon the experiences and expectations peculiar to their sex. For the most part these men were mobile and independent. As newcomers to Chicago they involved themselves in the city's strictly professional associations, such as the newspaper guild. And as men they were expected to be more interested in professional power than in social relationships. As men they probably experienced the city itself as inhibiting the mythic masculinity of frontiersmen, while their female counterparts found that the complex ties of feminine domesticity bound them in city and country alike, although the city offered to open up some new extensions of women's “home.” Whereas the men were challenged to confront and to overcome their environment, dealing with society and nature and technology all as objects to be controlled, their female colleagues were constantly reminded of their embeddedness in the life processes of society and nature.

As a result, the men's Chicago novels tend to objectify the city as a national concern, while the women's novels deal more intimately with organic, regional textures. The Chicago women's novels convey what one of today's leading novelists has called “a very strong sense of place, not in terms of the country or the state, but in terms of the details, the feeling, the mood of the community, of the town.” African-American Toni Morrison elaborates her point in ways that clearly link her experience to that of white women writers in Chicago seventy years ago: “I think some of it is just a woman's strong sense of being in a room, a place, or a house. Sometimes my relationship to things in a house would be a little different from, say, my brother's or my father's or my sons'. I clean them and I move them and I do very intimate things ‘in place’: I am sort of rooted in it, so that writing about being in a room looking out, or being in a world looking out, or living in a small definite place, is probably very common among most women anyway.”³¹

Such an insider's perspective needs a regional, inclusive context of social familiarity to sustain its importance. But the turn of the century marked the simultaneous ascendancy of nationalism and specialization in American life, particularly in cities. The Little Room's eclipse by the Cliff Dwellers, by a New York model of “real” professional power, belongs to that development. As the profession of literature was increasingly delineated by national stature and genre specialization, more informal and multimedia styles of cultural leadership could easily fall through the cracks—particularly when those styles were exercised by women. The status and authority even of women with major achievements to their credit—such as Anna Morgan, Edith Wyatt, Clara Laughlin, and Harriet Monroe—were left open to question when the home spirit they sought to develop was denied broader social significance. So it was that native son Henry Blake Fuller, whose Chicago novel With the Procession (1895) adumbrated the women's vision and whose own life experience involved many lasting friendships with local literary women, confirmed the rising masculinist standard: “The creative impulse is masculine and so are all the forces that organize and propel,” he wrote in the Chicago Evening Post during the time that men were assuming official leadership of the Little Room and that women's experiment in familial colleagueship was losing ground. “Feminine talent may deftly refine and perfect what already exists, but plausible simulations of the real thing” belong to man, who “sees more of life in general than woman can hope to see.”³² In other words, the status of women's cultural leadership, of their literary interpretations, and of their social experience are one and the same, all subject to trivialization from a perspective that identifies “the real thing” with an objectifying, masculine version of “life in general.”

Or, as literary critic Nancy K. Miller has recently put the situation, “the maxims that pass for the truth of human experience, and the encoding of that experience in literature, are organizations, when they are not fantasies, of the dominant culture.” And that dominant culture is masculine. Thus our generalizations about urban experience, no less than the literary constructions that correspond to them, are “in fact based on the masculine population” even when “stated sweepingly to cover the entire society,” as historian David Potter proposed of all our “social generalizations” in his now-famous thesis.³³ The failure of the Chicago women's communal vision to gain ongoing recognition in either life or letters demonstrates the power of that masculine bias in our culture. We can know the full cost of that failure—and our loss—only when we attend to the metaphorical power of their vision and the historical vitality of the urban enterprise—the city of sisterhood—that it interprets for us.

Notes

1. Henry B. Fuller, The Cliff Dwellers (New York: Harper, 1893), 242; Hamlin Garland, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly (1895; New York: Macmillan, 1899), 156.

2. Robert Herrick, The Web of Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1900), 77; Cliff Dwellers, 3; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Claude Simpson, Riverside pb. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 16; Herrick, The Gospel of Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 104; Frank Norris, The Pit (New York: Collier, 1903); Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Signet pb. ed. (New York: New American Library, 1960), 82.

3. Edith F. Wyatt, True Love (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1903), 3-5; cf. Sister Carrie, 16-18.

4. Clara Burnham, Sweet Clover (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 32.

5. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 200.

6. Alice Gerstenberg to W. David Sievers, 22 July 1955 (Alice Gerstenberg Mss., Newberry Library, Chicago).

7. The contrasting patterns here summarized for Chicago novels by men and women, as well as their implications for urban studies, are more fully explicated in my essay “Lost Continuities: Alternative Urban Visions in Chicago Novels, 1890-1915,” Soundings 64 (Spring 1981), 29-51. I also discussed some of these materials in “Chicago in Fiction, Masculine Hegemony, and the Literary Canon,” a paper presented at the MLA convention, Houston, 27 Dec. 1980.

8. True Love, 29, 177; Wyatt contrasts the two homes architecturally, too (10, 47).

9. Ibid., 215, 130, 177.

10. Ibid., 7, 96, 106, 269.

11. William D. Howells, “Certain of the Chicago School of Fiction,” North American Review 176 (1903), 736.

12. Among the few available models, the publishing house associates in Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes are a competitive grouping, not a communal group, and the novel centers on one person whose individual fortunes delimit the plot. The skyscraper inhabitants in Fuller's The Cliff Dwellers follow that pattern, although Fuller's George Ogden is almost as fully immersed in the group as is Wyatt's most prominent figure, Emily Marsh. A later attempt at a collective structure is made at the end of The Jungle by Sinclair, but that novel begins with a clearly delineated central character, and his merging into the proletariat at the end seems more propagandistic than structurally successful. It is possible that the genre of the novel itself, rooted as it is in a bourgeois heritage that stresses individualism, strains against collective forms.

13. Hugh Dalziel Duncan, The Rise of Chicago as a Literary Center from 1885 to 1920 (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster, 1964), exemplifies the common view of Chicago's ascendancy as being centered in an all-male newspaper world.

14. Lowell 1914-16 correspondence qtd. in Harriet Monroe, A Poet's Life (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 400; Elizabeth Janeway, Man's World, Woman's Place, Delta pb. ed. (New York: Dell, 1971), esp. pp. 11-26.

15. Gerstenberg, “Come Back with Me,” unpublished [1962] ms., 130, 209, 95-99 (Gerstenberg Papers, Chicago Historical Society).

16. Wyatt to William Dean Howells, n.d., qtd. in Rudolf and Clara Kirk, eds., “Homage to William Dean Howells,” unpublished ms., 22 (Wyatt Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago).

17. Addams qtd. in Elia Peattie, The Precipice (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 182.

18. Anna Morgan, My Chicago (Chicago: R. F. Seymour, 1918), 44.

19. Monroe, Poet's Life, 175.

20. Wyatt, “City Whistles,” in The Wind in the Corn (New York: Appleton, 1917), 109-11, dedicated to Monroe and originally published in Poetry 9 (Dec. 1916), 114-15.

21. Florence Kiper Frank, “The Song of the Women,” in The Jew to Jesus and Other Poems (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1915), 8-10.

22. Poet's Life, 46, 116-38; Daniel H. Burnham to Harriet Monroe, 22 Dec. 1892 (Monroe Personal Papers, Univ. of Chicago).

23. Monroe, “The Motive of the Magazine,” Poetry, (Oct. 1912), 26-28; Monroe, Poet's Life, 317.

24. Monroe, Poet's Life, 197; dedication of Elia Peattie, The Edge of Things (Chicago: Revell, 1903), frontispiece; My Chicago, 153.

25. Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor, Foreword, My Chicago.

26. Hamlin Garland, Companions on the Trail (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 336; Little Room Papers, passim., including undated [1908] invitation, signed by Hamlin Garland, Chairman, Attic Club [Cliff Dwellers] Provisional Committee (Little Room Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago).

27. Garland, Companions on the Trail, 460; cf. 320-38, 368-75.

28. Gerstenberg, “Come Back with Me,” 262-63.

29. Lorado Taft to Anna Morgan, 20 Oct. 1929 (Anna Morgan Miscellaneous Papers, Chicago Historical Society); Bernard Duffey, The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1956), 183, 66.

30. Gerstenberg to Kate Jordan, 18 Feb. 1916: “I do very much believe in collaboration, do you?” (Gerstenberg Mss., Newberry Library, Chicago).

31. “‘Intimate Things in Place’—A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” 19 May 1976 interview with Robert Stepto, rpt. in Dexter Fisher ed., The Third Woman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 167-68.

32. Fuller, “Our ‘Young Lady Novelist’” and “‘Lady Rose's Daughter’ Displays Mrs. Ward's Genius in Maturity,” clippings dated 1 June 1901 and 28 Feb. 1903 (Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago).

33. Nancy K. Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction,” PMLA 96 (Jan. 1981), 46; David M. Potter, “American Women and the American Character,” Stetson Univ. Bull. 62 (Jan. 1962), rpt. in The Character of Americans, rev. ed., ed. Michael McGiffert (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1970), 318-19.

The research for this essay was supported by a grant from the American Philosophical Society, by released time from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Research Council, and by the energetic assistance of the staff of the Newberry Library in Chicago, in particular. In addition to published sources, the essay draws on materials found in the Newberry Special Collections, the Regenstein Library Special Collections at the Univ. of Chicago, the Chicago Tribune archives, and the Chicago Historical Society.