Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  The entire splendidly silly debate illustrates just how central a role the metropolitan press in Britain and America played in encouraging men and women to think aloud about gender issues. There were literally dozens of other such controversies on topics relating to marriage, “revolting daughters,” “what is unwomanly,” and “what is unmanly.” Newspapers were as deeply invested in “newness” as they were in “news.” Enterprising editors like W. T. Stead and reporters like Banks soon figured out that “newness” was “news” and that both could be fabricated rather than found. In a lengthy 1897 review essay on recent works of British literature as expressions of the “psychology of feminism,” Hugh Stutfield noted that some believed fin-de-siècle decadence was merely “journalistic froth—just as the New Woman was said to be solely a creation of the comic newspapers.” Whatever their origins, Stutfield was sure that social facts could no longer be separated from journalistic and literary fictions. The “morbid” propensity of modern writers of novels, magazines, and newspapers to wash “domestic dirty linen” in public had widened “the breach between men and women.”123 By making gender into the subject of public debate, editors and their staffs of men and women reporters made it difficult for readers to assume that what it meant to be a man or a woman was simply a preordained fact of nature. No one understood better the cash value of debating gender in print than Banks, who coupled her gender anxieties as a woman reporter with debates about American and English national character. These two issues recurred over and over as the underlying subject of each of her investigations into “how the other half lives.”

  Banks returned to the subject of the college girl in her most provocative and poignant incognito, one requiring neither make up nor costume. In 1899, she decided to investigate the policies of women’s colleges in England and the United States toward mulatto women by pretending (at least in writing) to be one with light hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. Banks’s fictive applicant concluded each letter with a confession that she was stained by a small amount of the blood of the African race. Her reason for writing, she explained to each college administrator, was to seek not only a place alongside the other girls in the classroom but in the dormitory as well.124

  Banks had puzzled over race matters for many years before undertaking this inquiry. In Peru, she had been amazed by the depth and extent of racial mixing between people of African, Indian, Spanish, and Chinese descent. Miscegenation produced a wide array of racial types whose skin ranged from “alabaster to ebony.”125 As a reporter in Baltimore, she had disliked the unchivalrous attitudes of black men to white women, which violated her deeply engrained sense of how all men should treat all women. She had rejoiced when a white Southerner had thrashed a black man who had not yielded his seat to her on a crowded omnibus. Her African-American cook Dinah rivaled her poodle, Judge, as the most significant character (beside herself) in her Autobiography. Dinah remains a one-dimensional foil to her mistress, who never allows her to escape from prevailing white American stereotypes of African-Americans. Dinah’s singing is melodious but unthinking; she is intensely loyal but stupid. Banks’s portrait of Dinah and their relationship with one another is affectionately condescending and deeply racist.

  What did Banks learn about Britain and America in the course of her literary imposture as a mulatto woman? To her astonishment she discovered that no college in America whose population was predominantly white would permit her to live among the other girl students as an equal. Even Oberlin College, renowned for its progressive views on race and gender, directed her to a boardinghouse run by a “a refined, Christian mulatto woman.” English colleges, by contrast, happily offered her an equal place among its white girl students.126 In Banks’s analysis, race throws into doubt the opposition between the American Girl and the English Lady, between freedom and equality in America and “caste” or class in England.

  The results of Banks’s literary impersonation as a mulatto woman might suggest that she had decided to fight for the rights of Black American women. Such was not the case. Her discussion of the mulatto college girl was hidden in the midst of a much longer article entitled “The American Negro and His Place.” Banks wrote the article to refute the charges of “a young coloured woman, a Miss Ida Wells” and to convince Britons that their sympathy for Southern blacks was misplaced. She openly defended lynching which, she claimed, “is seldom appealed to except in regard to questions that are more fitly settled at the point of a shot-gun than in the courts, notwithstanding the sensational reports that are continually being telegraphed to England.” She compared the hypocritical but empty posturing of Northerners who envisioned no place for the Negro in their midst, to the admirable honesty of the Southerner. Alone among Americans, the Southerner really “understands the negro and likes him in his place.” The article ended with a gloomy prediction that has often seemed all too true for much of the history of twentieth-century Britain: should the Negro come in large numbers to Britain, there “would be found no ‘place’ for him.”127

  Perhaps we should not be surprised that thirteen years after writing these words we encounter Banks strolling the streets of London jammed between two stiff boards advertising an upcoming women’s suffrage meeting and blithely concurring with a friend that lynching was a shameful blot on American history. Her moving autobiography The Remaking of an American published in 1928, chronicled her path toward a wholehearted embrace of American democracy which, she argued, compelled her to accept the core beliefs of the women’s suffrage movement. By 1908 she had become an active member of the Women Writers’ Suffrage Association,128 and from 1911 onward, introduced feminist themes to the Referee as Enid, the sole female columnist for the paper. Remarkably, her second autobiography left no traces of her earlier deprecation of suffrage and the “advanced woman” and her idiosyncratic but virulent racism.

  Banks’s transatlantic peregrinations may have been motivated by an inner restlessness, but they were also crucial to her journalistic and financial successes. Her need to move across literal and figurative boundaries and social identities suggests that rather than attempting to resolve the tensions between rich and poor, women workers and their employers, American freedom and English order, she made a profession of writing about them. Banks always defined herself as an outsider whose gifts of disguise and mimicry allowed her to penetrate the secrets of her host locales—Lima, London, and New York; upper-middle-class households, East London laundries, slum tenements in New York. As an outsider, she claimed to be able to see, describe, and satirize those habits of thought and conventions of behavior that people living within a society took for granted as natural. At the time Banks first ventured to England, women journalists in New York had considerably more license than their London counterparts to move through metropolitan space and report on what they saw and did. Whatever the social and political reality, both Britons and Americans described American women as more independent and emancipated than English women. New Yorkers openly celebrated their culture of commerce and the possibilities for social mobility that it supposedly offered newcomers whereas ambitious Londoners aspired to wedding the capitalist pursuit of profit with the deferential ethos and social exclusivity of the gentleman and gentle lady. All of these factors seem to suggest that as a free-spirited independent woman lacking money and social connections, Banks ought to have remained in New York where she would have been at home. But Banks abandoned the familiar comforts of home as a site of female domesticity and self-definition. From the moment she arrived in Britain, she exploited clichéed perceptions of difference between New York and London, America and England. She constructed her public persona as the paradigmatic American Girl whose defiance of English social and gender conventions could always be explained—and partially excused—in terms of her “American-ness.” Similarly, her pose as an English woman in New York allowed her to put on foreign spectacles in her native land and see it through the eyes of an outsider.129

  CONCLUSION

  An anonymous re
viewer of Banks’s Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl for the Nation claimed that “the future historian of nineteenth century journalism will obtain more light from the story of Miss Banks’s career than from many more pretentious volumes, especially through the contrasts it presents between the pursuit of this profession in London and New York.”130 While I concur with this assessment, I have demonstrated that Banks’s career sheds light on a great deal more than the history of metropolitan journalism. Two things stand out most vividly about Banks’s cross-class masquerades and the persona she crafted in her journalistic slumming. First, in marked contrast to James Greenwood’s “A Night in a Workhouse,” gender not only trumps sex but erases any trace of it in Banks’s urban reporting. Banks style was playful but never coy or titillating. To preserve her public image as a feminine and respectable woman, Banks kept sex out of the stories she wrote about herself and her experiences among the poor. Her reticence about sex, I have argued, reflected the contradictory tensions “lady” journalists negotiated in their daily lives as they moved through urban space in pursuit of copy, worked within male-dominated editorial offices, and courted wide readerships in the popular press. I have also suggested that the particularities of Banks’s biography as an unmarried woman lacking familial support account in part for the notable absence of an erotic dimension in the articles she wrote about her incognito slumming. When she first arrived in London the early 1890s, she consciously chose not to identity herself with the community of independent, educated “spinsters,” whose immersion in the dirt, sexual dangers, and pleasures of urban life forms the subject of my next chapter. Her “novelty” and that of the “news” she generated depended on her self-chosen role as an intermediary between the unwomanly and the feminine, the subversive and the decorous, hidden abuses and surface appearances.

  In writing and rewriting her life story in every text she authored, Banks transformed the instabilities of gender itself into a print commodity which she sold to editors and readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Banks understood that editors valued the services of lady journalists because they produced copy for consumption by the widening audience of male and female readers in late Victorian London. Banks owed part of her success to the clever way she marketed herself and her anxieties about reconciling her womanhood with her journalism. To put this in more general terms, the debate about women journalists conducted in print ultimately benefited the business interests of newspapers and their “reporteresses” because it produced more copy and provided free advertising for the goods they sold to the public. At a time when the great retail palaces of London and New York strove to be the secular cathedrals of the age, women journalists like Banks and her rival, Autolycus of the Pall Mall Gazette, played the part of high priestesses. Autolycus’s column, appropriately named “The Wares of Autolycus,” guided readers as they navigated the crowded marketplaces of the metropolis. While Clementina Black and Margaret Harkness also helped to support themselves by selling their literary representations of women’s work and slum life to magazines and newspapers, they positioned themselves as critics rather than celebrants, of commodity capitalism. And, in contrast to Banks, neither woman aspired to being a “lady” journalist. Banks’s journalism effectively linked together and sold her first-hand explorations of social questions whose interest lay less in their revelation of social abuses than in their witty depiction of the dilemmas of bourgeois femininity at the fin-de-siècle.

  Second, Banks vehemently refused to cloak her reporting under the mantle of altruism. The Pall Mall Gazette reviewer of Banks’s Campaigns of Curiosity complained that her methods were “quite a question of literary ethics” and asked, “Is it not a flagrant case of the misdemeanour of obtaining copy [my emphasis] under false pretences.”131 The key word here is “copy.” Most Victorians happily applauded the good deeds of philanthropists, sociologists, and even journalists who braved the horrors of workhouses and common lodging houses as a way to express Christian love, to uplift the fallen, to rectify an abuse, or acquire sociological knowledge. Banks did none of these things. She rejected utterly not only the philosophical premises of James Hinton, who insisted that eros abetted altruism, but also the reformers’ and philanthropists’ justification for their supposedly self-denying efforts on behalf of the poor. She unashamedly announced to all who would listen that her costumed adventures among London’s laboring poor were motivated by her need to sell the fruits of her literary labors on the most favorable terms she could negotiate. In acknowledging the self-interested nature of her slumming, Banks forced Londoners to think about their determined disavowal of slumming as a social practice.

  Banks’s reinvention of herself from a snide critic of women’s suffrage into an active suffragist in the first decade of the twentieth century was a sign of the growing acceptability of suffrage as a mainstream position among women in Britain and America before World War I. This in turn reflected the movement’s success in controlling public representations of their supporters as womanly and sane, rather than mannish and hysterical.132 Banks and many other woman journalists in London probably would not have recognized their own contributions to that sea change in perceptions about what women could—and could not—do that importantly laid the foundations for the expansion of the movement’s rank and file. Banks was part of a much larger group of educated women in the 1880s and ’90s whose economic and social aspirations led them to challenge existing restrictions on women in a wide range of traditional and newly emerging professions without consciously seeking to advance the political emancipation of their sex. Such women have largely failed to attract the interest of scholars precisely because they do not fit neatly into a heroic narrative about women’s struggle for full citizenship.

  It is easy to sympathize with Banks’s desire in 1928 to rewrite her past, but we would be mistaken to play the part of her accomplice. Her career in the 1890s as an expatriate American in London and as an American woman passing for an English lady in New York captures an important albeit anxious moment in the histories of slumming, urban social reporting, and the women’s movement. She forged her identity as a female journalist within the interstices of debates about poverty and urban life, the vices and virtues of the New Journalism, the New Woman, and the American Girl. Her Campaigns of Curiosity laid the foundations for other colonial women and men like the Anglo-Indian Olive Christian Malvery and the American Jack London to undertake similar incognito social investigations into the lives of the metropolitan laboring poor in the early twentieth century.133 Banks’s idiosyncratic history also sets the stage for the next chapter, which probes the politics and erotics of elite women’s experiences in and narratives about the slums of London.

  PART TWO

  CROSS-CLASS SISTERHOOD AND BROTHERHOOD IN THE SLUMS

  Chapter Four

  THE POLITICS AND EROTICS OF DIRT: CROSS-CLASS SISTERHOOD IN THE SLUMS

  … the silver teapot was placed on the table, and virgins and spinsters with hands that had staunched the sores of Bermondsey and Hoxton carefully measured out one, two, three, four spoonfuls of tea.

  —Virginia Woolf, The Years

  “THE SLUM,” George Orwell explained in the opening pages of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), with its “dirt and its queer lives,” was “first an object lesson in poverty, and then the background of my experiences.” Orwell’s influential account marked the culmination of a long history of Victorian and Edwardian social reporting in Britain that imagined the slums of London not only as sites of physical and social disorder—“dirt”—but as spaces hospitable to “queer” lives and “queer” sexual desires. If Orwell can be trusted, only men go slumming. They alone have sexual needs and can satisfy them. Women seem to enter his story merely so that men can sexually and physically exploit them.1

  Orwell is surely right that slums were “queer” spaces in the imagination of many elite men in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, but his vision of slumming as an exclusively male enterprise cannot withsta
nd scrutiny. Well-to-do women, like their male counterparts, were deeply attracted to the sights and sounds of metropolitan poverty and found in slumming a means to expand their social authority over the poor.2 Many, like the social investigator Beatrice Potter, felt “a certain weird romance” in and for the slums. Others experienced a frisson of fear and excitement as they moved about the streets of London shopping, visiting the poor, or, like the charismatic and bohemian socialite Margot Tennant [Asquith], doing both.3 Some women also felt a certain “queer” romance in and for the slums. In the name of caring for their down-trodden sisters in the slums, these women not only did battle with the dirt of city life, but in so doing found ways to express their own desires for closeness with one another and with laboring girls and women.

  Orwell’s insight connecting dirt with “queer lives” is the starting point for my investigation of the politics and erotics of dirt in the lives of philanthropic women. Throughout this chapter, I have bracketed the word “queer” in quotation marks to emphasize that it is drawn from the text I am citing. For Orwell, the phrase “queer lives” refers to homosexual men, though it also includes many other nonhomosexual men whose oddness placed them outside the conventional framework of bourgeois masculinity. Wary of anachronism, historians have rightly been careful not to impose later meanings of words such as “queer” on men and women in the past. But this caution should not prevent us from recognizing that the word “queer” from the 1880s onward did begin to accumulate a long chain of connotative meanings, some of which were associated with male and female same-sex desire.4

  Part one focuses on elite women’s representations of dirt in their accounts of their sisterly labors in the slums. I treat dirt not only as physical matter but also as a pervasive trope in women’s writings about the slums and themselves. Their abhorrence and fascination with dirt, I argue, tell us a great deal about their vision of sisterhood and their own aspirations to engage in useful public work. I examine the ways in which these women invested the dirt of poverty with powerful political, cultural, and sexual meanings. What were the implications of their vision of dirt for the sorts of social politics and policies they advocated? How did they attempt to strike a balance between loving their working-class sisters and controlling them? The second part examines the links between “dirt” and the “queer lives” of elite women in the slums and considers the erotic valences of dirt and dirty spaces for women. While cultural anthropologists assure us that we normally think of dirt as destructive, this chapter explores the ways in which the dirt of slum life became a source of creativity in the lives of well-to-do female charity workers and philanthropists.5 Women’s writings about their slum labors along with novels about sisterhood, slum philanthropy, and same-sex desire serve as sources for analyzing the attractions of slum work for middle-class women seeking ways to create communities of loving solidarity with like-minded women and with the poor.