DUSTING WITH A BALLOT
THE PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN THE MILWAUKEE LEADER
JON BEKKEN
Industrial Worker
4043 N. Ravenswood #205A
Chicago, Illinois 60613 USA
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ABSTRACT:
This paper examines the women's pages of the Milwaukee Leader,
the longest-running and most successful of the Socialist Party's
English-language daily newspapers, demonstrating that for much of
its life the paper failed to challenge traditional sex roles and
stereotypes. Other socialist newspapers, however, were more
willing to address the "woman question" critically. A content
analysis examines Leader women's pages for 1912, 1917, 1922 and
1927.
DUSTING WITH A BALLOT
THE PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN THE MILWAUKEE LEADER
JON BEKKEN
Industrial Worker
4043 N. Ravenswood #205A
Chicago, Illinois 60613 USA
[log in to unmask]
ABSTRACT:
This paper examines the women's pages of the Milwaukee Leader,
the longest-running and most successful of the Socialist Party's
English-language daily newspapers, demonstrating that for much of
its life the paper failed to challenge traditional sex roles and
stereotypes. Other socialist newspapers, however, were more
willing to address the "woman question" critically. A content
analysis examines Leader women's pages for 1912, 1917, 1922 and
1927.
DUSTING WITH A BALLOT
THE PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN THE MILWAUKEE LEADER
Jon Bekken
AEJMC History Division, August 1995, Washington D.C.
In recent years, scholars have begun to study the workers'
movement in the United States _ in particular the Socialist Party _
and its record on the "Woman Question." This research has been
informed by the concerns of the contemporary feminist movement,
predominantly the struggle to integrate the problem of women's
oppression within a broader leftist agenda. Early Socialist
movements saw "women's emancipation as an integral feature of a
general social emancipation," a position that began to change as
Marx's "scientific socialism" subordinated women's issues to issues
of class (Dixler 1984). Yet many in the socialist movement refused
to accept this subordination, and the period surrounding the turn
of the century saw heated battles over what was termed the "woman
question."
In large part these battles over the importance of women's issues
were fought out in the pages of the workers' press. As Buhle
(1981: 147) notes, when the Socialist Party decided in the early
years of the century to bolster its efforts to involve women, "a
few important newspapers, including St. Louis Labor and the Chicago
Daily Socialist, followed the precedent set by the New Yorker
Volkszeitung and converted their pages of fashions and recipes to
politically sophisticated women's departments." Like the workers'
press in general, these efforts have been little studied. This
paper discusses the women's page of the Milwaukee Leader _ probably
the Socialist Party's most successful English-language daily,
certainly its longest-lived _ and the changing conceptions of
women's role and domain found in its pages between 1912 (shortly
after the paper was founded) and 1927, when the Leader had begun
its slow decline. Content analysis of the women's page(s) of 35
representative issues each from 1912, 1917, 1922 and 1927 documents
changing patterns of coverage. For comparative purposes, 35 issues
each of the Chicago Daily Socialist were examined for 1912 (the
paper's last year of publication) and 1909. Selected issues of the
market-leading Milwaukee Journal's women's pages were also
examined.
THE WOMEN'S PAGE
Women's pages have been little studied, though the feminist
movement has long challenged the values which these pages all too
often embodied. Jane Croly introduced the first known women's
column to the New York Dispatch in 1859, while Samuel McClure
introduced a syndicated women's page in 1892. These early women's
pages, Marzolf (1977: 205) notes, were intended to attract a new
audience to the newspapers with a blend of "entertainment,
enticements for shoppers, and some enlightenment..." From the
start, editors generally viewed these pages as unimportant _ a
place to dump young women seeking careers in journalism and
advertisements aimed at female consumers (Hoffman, 1971; Marzolf,
1977). Amidst the light features and recipes, however, women could
also occasionally read about women in public affairs and the
struggle for women's suffrage, among other material challenging the
notion that women's lives should center around fashion and the
home.
In 1924, Rebecca West _ writing in the British feminist weekly,
Time and Tide _ felt compelled to respond to the "sneers at the
women's papers which concern themselves specifically with household
manners," arguing that providing recipes and such information can
provide a useful service. West provides two examples to bolster
her case: the allegedly superior diet of the British (which she
attributes to the positive influence of the women's page on women's
knowledge of what is healthful), and her experience editing a
women's page on a workers' newspaper (almost certainly the Daily
Herald) begun to aid the dockers' strike:
I went home after having written a cookery column of filling
recipes that made the most of bread and butter and cheese and all
those horrid half-masonry-half-food stuffs that the poor must
eat. It proved to be an inch too short. This deficiency the
editor remedied by opening a cookery book... and copying out a
recipe for Nesselrode Pudding. Which is a prima donna among
ices... [of] great expensiveness. I received several satirical
letters on the subject from dockers' wives... The editor chose
that recipe because he had an inch of a cookery column to fill...
He did not consider that he had to examine the particular nature
of the recipe and discuss its relevance to the kitchen of a
docker on strike... (pp 59-60)
West goes on to argue that, even if unintentionally, women's
pages not only can, but do, play an important role _ if only in
improving domestic economy and diet:
Why should we not be grateful to Home Twitters? ...we mistake
the function of such papers as being general instead of
specialist. One imagines that they are attempting to present a
complete survey of women's life, instead of merely offering her
advice on the technical side of certain of her occupations.
Because Home Twitters talks of nothing but recipes and babies, we
are not to think that it supports an ideal in which women would
concern themselves with [nothing but] recipes and babies...
(p 62)
I have quoted West at some length because she offers one of only
two feminist defenses for Women's pages that I have been able to
locate (the other being Marzolf's [1977, 1995] contention that as a
result of publishers' "benign neglect" of women's pages, these
offered a space for women to enter journalism and to present
sometimes controversial information about women's activities and
options that otherwise would not have been able to get into the
paper at all), and offers criteria for evaluating the traditional
women's page.
Most comment has been more hostile. As Lindsy Van Gelder
(1974:112) argues,
The average newspaper women's page has traditionally been a
low-prestige, low-budget, low-paying operation, rife with payola
and press agentry. For a great many women journalists _
particularly and ironically, for feminists _ it has been a
purgatory from which to escape.
She notes that this began to change after 1970, with women's
sections at many big-city papers beginning to cover issues such as
abortion, child care, job discrimination and other feminist issues,
as well as taking fresh approaches towards traditional subjects
such as food, fashion and home decorating (Marzolf [1995] provides
examples of pioneering coverage from the 1950s and 1960s). Yet
most women's pages, Van Gelder argues, "are nearly as awful as
ever":
For starters, any section that still calls itself a "women's
page" is suspect. When the New Orleans Times-Picayune, for
example, presents the title "Women's Activities: Society/
Fashion/Clubs" on a section whose front page is graced by five
blown-up photographs of five white fiancees and brides, you get a
rough idea of what the Times-Picayune thinks about women...
(p 112)
Even where this has changed, the (often re-titled) women's section
remained a dumping ground for "women's" stories that more properly
belong in the front of the news section. In the fifteen years
since, women's sections have almost universally disappeared,
replaced by sections retitled "Style" or "Living." Whether the
press now does a better job _ on the women's pages or in the news
section _ of covering women's issues and activities is a question
beyond the scope of this paper, though Hoffman's (1971) charge that
women's pages are too often the receptacle for public relations
handouts and advertisers' puff pieces still rings true.
More recently some women journalists have despaired of getting
news of specific interest to women into newspapers' news sections
and have sought to reclaim women's pages. The Chicago Tribune, for
example, now publishes a weekly section, "Womanews," in its Sunday
newspaper devoted to significant news stories targeted to women.
From 1924 to 1994, Whitt (1994) found, the Chicago Tribune's front
page has remained an almost exclusively male domain, and men have
been crowding women's subjects out of their traditional domain in
the features pages as well. Although "Womanews" guarantees regular
coverage of women, many see it as a surrender to the notion that
women are not news and can be ignored by serious journalists.
WOMEN'S PAPERS
Women have been publishing their own newspapers and magazines at
least as long as women's pages have appeared in the mainstream
press. While many of these papers shared similar values _ one
early women's magazine going so far as to assure husbands "that
nothing found in these papers shall cause her [his wife]...to
encroach upon the prerogatives of men" _ others, as early as the
1850s, argued explicitly for women's rights (Mather, 1974). Papers
such as Revolution and Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly called for
suffrage, equal pay and employment opportunities while also
supporting the workers' movement. More common were women's papers
restricting their attention to women's suffrage, and women's
business and professional publications.
This press, as is the case for movement presses in general, is
only beginning to receive the attention it deserves (see, e.g.,
Mather 1974, Bennion 1986, Kennedy 1980, Karvonen 1977,
Lindstrom-Best and Seager 1985). Journals such as Socialist Woman
(later retitled Progressive Woman) _ which Buhle (1981:148) terms
"the single most important source of propaganda and news of the
[Party's] women's sector," and which is vital to an understanding
of the debate within the Socialist Party, particularly as carried
out by women, on the woman question _ have been studied only in
passing by Buhle (1981) and in her brief essay in Conlin (1974).
Launched in 1907 with 26 subscribers out of the Appeal to Reason
offices, Socialist Woman grew to 15,000 subscribers _ with special
issues printed in press runs of up to 100,000 copies for mass
distribution. Karvonen (1977: 203) describes Socialist/Progressive
Woman as:
a newspaper which gave advice on how to arrange programs,
explained the status of women, discussed vocations of various
kinds, informed the readers of activities in the socialist and in
the general labor movement. It also had a children's section
with serious articles, poems, plays, stories, songs and
letters...
Editor Josephine Conger-Kaneko (1911) argued that most Socialist
papers could not reach women because they did not address their
concerns:
The average Socialist paper deals with the economic and political
issues of the day in a general sense. Women, unused to viewing
life save in a very special, concrete manner... must be appealed
to directly, specifically.... The home, the child, the family
purse and the family larder, are matters that appeal to every
woman of the working class.... This is what The Progressive Woman
is for: To show the "average woman" just where and how the
capitalist system gets in its work within the four walls of her
home. How it skimps her in the matter of food and clothes, sends
her boy to work before he has finished high school, and puts her
little girl in the department store, or something worse...
This, then, was the Socialist/Progressive Woman's mission. The
magazine was the most prominent in a variety of educational and
agitational activities undertaken by the Socialists' Women's
National Committee in its five-year existence _ efforts which
included speakers, leaflets, and study programs in socialist,
scientific and literary ideas.
Socialists also published foreign-language women's periodicals.
Toveritar (Female Comrade) was launched in 1911 to draw
Finnish-American women into the socialist movement, and to discuss
the relationship between socialism and women's rights. Published
in Astoria, Oregon, Toveritar circulated throughout the U.S. and
Canada, and "became an integral component not only of the women's
movement, but of the day-to-day activities of Finnish immigrant
women," playing a vital role in fostering feminist consciousness
among its readers:
Among the most serious of issues addressed by Toveritar was birth
control... hostility to traditional relationships suffused this
publication, which gladly printed and personal horror stories....
Toveritar [also] campaign[ed] on behalf of [domestic servants],
the largest group of wage-earning Finnish women...
(Lindstrom-Best & Seager [1985:250, 255])
Other issues addressed in Toveritar included conditions for women
workers, the need for child care, the status of working women and
women's suffrage, together with club news, household tips and short
fiction touching on women's rights or some other social problem. In
1914, Toveritar argued for "the modernization of the home so that
women could be freed from menial tasks... [and] all members of the
family share in household tasks. 'There should be no division into
sex roles...'" One writer called on women to "work alongside our
men comrades, demanding our rights, as if demon-possessed, for a
better future" (Karvonen, 1977: 205-06). In later years, however,
Toveritar tended towards literary and cultural offerings.
MILWAUKEE: THE LEADER IS BORN
Milwaukee, Wisconsin was an industrial city of 373,857 with a
tradition of socialist and labor activity, particularly among its
sizable immigrant German community, when the Leader was launched
(succeeding the weekly Social-Democratic Herald) on December 7,
1911. The first issue boasted that its circulation was larger than
that of any of the nine other Milwaukee dailies, a claim bitterly
contested by competing papers. Leader circulation reached 45,580
by March of 1912 (at a time when the Milwaukee Journal _ which also
targeted a working-class audience, and against which the Leader was
pitted in bitter competition throughout its entire existence _
claimed an [unsworn] circulation of 60,000) (Beck, 1970; Ayers,
1913). Throughout the period of this study, the Leader remained
one of Milwaukee's major newspapers, though it fell to a distant
fourth place by the end of the 1930s (Beck, 1970).
Milwaukee had a long tradition of workers' newspapers, beginning
with the establishment of the short-lived Workingman's Advocate in
1842. In 1860 striking printers founded the Daily Union _ intended
both to present labor's perspective on the news, and to draw away
support from the Sentinel _ but the paper, unable to secure
advertising or operating funds, died after only 17 days. In 1875
the Milwaukee section of the First International began the weekly
Der Sozialist under the banner "No Master, No Slaves," with 2,000
subscribers. An English-language edition was launched later that
year, and the two papers played a major role in promoting
Milwaukee's unions and mutual aid associations before veering off
into electoral activity. In 1880 the socialist weekly Arminia was
established, changing its title to Arbeiter-Zeitung (and increasing
its frequency to thrice-weekly) in 1886, becoming the official
organ of Milwaukee's Federated Trades Council (AFL) upon its
founding in 1887. In 1893, Victor Berger bought the paper, taking
it daily and changing the name to Vorwarts; it reverted to weekly
publication in 1897 and continued as the Socialist Party/Federated
Trades Council German-language organ throughout this period. In
1901 the Socialist Party moved its weekly Social-Democratic Herald
to Milwaukee, where it too served as a joint SP/FTC organ. As
Gavett (1965: 98) notes, "virtually every enterprise of the
socialists was underwritten by the FTC in some way" during the
early decades of this century, with the Trades Council donating
campaign funds, buying shares in party papers, and renting offices
in the Socialist hall.
Milwaukee's Socialist Party (which campaigned in Milwaukee as the
Social-Democratic Party) was the Party's most successful electoral
machine, frequently electing candidates to local and state office
during the 1910s and 1920s (and continuing to enjoy some local
electoral success through the 1960s), and repeatedly electing
Victor Berger to Congress (though he served only three full terms _
during World War I the House refused to seat him). Following the
Party's stunning electoral success in 1910, when it captured
control of City Hall, its long-standing desire for a daily
English-language paper (efforts towards this end had been underway
at least since 1897) took on increased urgency. Although
Milwaukee's daily press had been relatively even-handed during the
1910 campaign, waged largely on a clean-government platform
following exposure of massive graft by the incumbent
administration, relations between the Socialist administration and
the press rapidly deteriorated. As Algie Simons, editor of
Chicago's Daily Socialist, later to work for the Leader , explained
in the Leader's premier issue,
The Milwaukee Leader came because it had to be. Nine capitalist
dailies all lying about the majority of Milwaukee's population
(and the only useful portion) created a vacuum of veracity that
was bound to draw a Socialist daily into existence... (Dec.
7, 1911, p 1)
PARTY, LABOR AND PRESS
From its birth, Beck (1970: 39) notes, the Leader represented
what Berger, the Leader's publisher and editor (when not in
Congress), called the "personal fusion" of party and unions:
In the creed of right-wing Socialism, the ideologues of both the
political and economic branches of the labor movement held as an
article of faith that the Cooperative Commonwealth would come
through Education. And no weapon in the educational arsenal was
as important as the Socialist press...
In an editorial marking the Leader's sixth anniversary, Victor
Berger said that the Leader was launched amidst the jeers of its
enemies.
The paper was started mainly because the rank and file of the
Milwaukee Socialists had become tired of the hateful
misrepresentations of the Socialist administration and of
social-ism in general by the capitalist press.... Today The
Milwaukee Leader undoubtedly is the best equipped and foremost
Socialist paper in the English-speaking world. (Dec.
7, 1916, p 1)
The Leader was certainly the best capitalized of the Socialist
dailies (though it constantly operated on the verge of bankruptcy)
_ and while others enjoyed for brief periods a larger circulation,
the Leader was to survive for more than 30 years (although under
different ownerships after 1938), making it by far the
longest-lived of the Socialist Party's English-language papers.
The Leader was part of a widespread network of Socialist organs.
National Secretary John Work reported to the Party's 1912
Convention that the Party published 13 daily newspapers (five of
them in English), and more than 300 weekly and monthly papers. A
weekly Socialist Party news service served more than 400 socialist
and labor papers (Leader May 1, 1912, p 8). The Party placed
great emphasis upon its press. As Eugene Debs, the Socialist's
most prominent national figure, put it in the Leader's premier
issue: "The building of a socialist press is the most important
factor in the building of the socialist movement."
The paper played a crucial role in enabling the party to win
support outside of its traditional German base and in outlying
areas, and in promoting and sustaining not only the Socialist Party
but the Federated Trades Council as well. While devoting extensive
space to the party's program and campaigns (particularly for
municipal office) and to exposes of opposing politicians, the
Leader strove to be a complete newspaper _ with local, national and
world news, heavily spiced with human interest stories, and
Business, Sports and Women's pages. This effort was hampered by
insufficient resources, aggravated by the Leader's difficulties in
securing advertising despite its substantial circulation, and
further complicated by the difficulty, particularly prior to the
establishment of the Federated Press in 1920, of obtaining accurate
and timely reports on labor and socialist news. The Leader relied
on United Press dispatches for the bulk of its news, and these
reports were often quite hostile to the labor movement (especially
towards its more militant sectors). A Leader headline reporting
that "tin soldiers" had fired on women and children, over a UP
dispatch reporting that a mob of strikers had attacked state
militia was symptomatic of the resulting tensions.
Like Milwaukee's Socialist Party, the Leader advocated a
reformist agenda often indistinguishable from the program of the
Progressive Republicans. The Party's 1910 platform called for
public ownership of trusts and public utilities, home rule, tax
reform, public works, redistricting, free medical service,
municipal plumbing, improved public sanitation (the city had been
dumping its garbage in the lake), park construction, urban renewal,
better schools, and fair treatment of city workers. The platform's
preamble did proclaim that "this capitalist system not only results
in untold misery and suffering, but also in crime, prostitution and
corruption," going on to explain that Socialism would eliminate the
evils of graft in government, trusts, and private ownership of
public utilities. (Wachman, 1945, pages 77-81) Following the logic
of this reformist platform, the Party gave up its ballot slot in
1936 for a joint Farmer-Labor Progressive ticket (Beck, 1970).
THE LEADER AND THE WOMAN QUESTION
The Socialist movement stands for equal rights for men and women.
Not only "when we shall have Socialism," but right now in the
party organization... (Conger-Kaneko, 1911)
From its very first issue the Milwaukee Leader featured a women's
page, running under nameplates such as "For Women and the Home,"
"Fashions and Other Feminine Affairs," "Homemaking - Entertaining -
Fashions," and "Leader's Magazine and Home Page." The Leader took
pride in its women's page, boasting in 1913 that it "compares
favorably with that of any paper in America" (1/9/13, p 4). When a
new editor, Hazel Moore, was hired to edit the page, a page 1
headline announced "Miss Moore Begins Her Work with the Leader"
(Nov. 20, 1916). The article beneath explained that she was a
writer on domestic economy who would answer queries on home
problems, provide household hints, and publish information on food,
clothing, and how to combat the rising cost of living. At a time
when the only name in the editorial staff box was Victor Berger's,
Moore became one of only two editors (the other being the Sports
editor) to see her name published in the paper _ incorporated into
the 'Magazine and Home Page' nameplate. (After several months of
Moore's editorship, the women's page was reorganized once again,
and Mary McCreary was brought on as editor. McCreary's name never
ran in the nameplate, but several articles appeared over her
byline.)
News about women's activities and issues also ran in the Leader's
news section. Editorially and in its news columns, the Leader
urged approval of women suffrage. October 29th, 1912, when
suffrage was on the ballot, the Leader ran a page 1 cartoon
proclaiming that without full suffrage there was no liberty. The
lead editorial explained "Why votes for women". A two-page spread
provided several articles on various aspects of women's suffrage
(including the role of socialists in promoting it), with several of
the articles continued onto the women's page. In all, more than
three pages of the 14-page edition was devoted to the question.
Yet though the Leader consistently supported women's suffrage,
running frequent articles on the movement both on the women's page
and in the rest of the paper, when the Socialists were defeated in
the 1917 local elections the Leader blamed the results on women
voters voting under the directions of Catholic and Lutheran
ministers. After the elections, relations between the Socialists
and the suffrage movement steadily deteriorated, with many party
members convinced that the women's vote was costing them elections.
The Leader made a special appeal to women voters for the 1917
school board elections: "To vote is a simple matter. It is part of
the work of municipal housekeeping. It is woman's work..." Women
were urged to vote "for the children's sake." (Buenker, 1981: 136)
A similar campaign for women's votes was carried out for the 1919
elections. Thus the Leader's record on suffrage, while formally
correct, was somewhat ambiguous. Where the Party nominated women
as candidates, it was for the school board and similar races. No
effort was made in these campaigns, or in the Leader's campaigns to
encourage women to vote, to challenge the notion that women's
concerns were properly confined to the private sphere _ rather the
private sphere was redefined to incorporate 'municipal
housekeeping,' dusting with a ballot, so to speak.
The Leader's record on other women's issues was similarly
ambiguous. The June 30, 1912 edition, for example, featured three
articles on its front page of relevance here. A brief report of a
Socialist women's picnic reported (in full):
About 50 women met at a picnic at Fernwood grove yesterday.
During the afternoon Mrs. Victor L. Berger delivered a short talk
on the fascination of working shoulder to shoulder with the men
in the movement and urged the women to join their regular ward
branches. Edmund T. Melms told of his plans for active work to
be done by the women during the fall and winter.
Notably, it is a male party official setting forth the plans,
though the headline proclaims "Women Plan Work At Picnic," and Meta
Berger, an elected member of the School Board and party activist in
her own right, is referred to only as "Mrs. Victor L. Berger."
Three columns to the right, a headline announces "Woman Socialist
Out for Congress." The candidate, "Mrs. Marie B. MacDonald," who
gained public attention for battling anarchists trying to tear down
an American flag, is identified as a prominent "worker for suffrage
and socialism" and wife of a Socialist editor. And a two-column,
10-paragraph article about the Puerto Rican anarchist-feminist
Luisa Capetillo _ running under a three tier headline, "Porto [sic]
Rican Joan of Arc Unable To Get Women to Join Crusade To Abolish
Skirts and Marriage" _ ridicules her views and activities.
January 9, 1912, the Leader ran an item entitled "Sheriff
Harburger of New York Who has Appointed Women Deputies." The
Sheriff, the one-paragraph article explains, "has announced that he
will make no distinction in the matter of sex when making
appointments and distributing badges." The article was accompanied
by a 3-column graphic depicting the sheriff surrounded by three
women deputies _ their tiny, caricatured bodies dwarfed by giant
heads. A year following this ridicule against the notion that
women could "serve" as deputy sheriffs, the women's page ran an
interview with a Los Angeles policewoman, assigned to cases
involving juvenile and women offenders (Jan. 3, 1913).
May 5, 1912, a page three story revealed that women were smoking.
The three tier head proclaimed: "How Shocking! Girlies Carry
'Makings' in Stocking; Wear Cigarettes on Garter; Maids and Matrons
'Puff' Together in Rest Rooms." By 1916 such blatantly
sensationalist material had largely disappeared from the paper,
although news about women's issues and activities remained quite
scarce. By 1917, when women made the front page it was as workers
(demanding equal wages for war work or having their health ruined
by long hours _ part of the paper's campaign against World War I),
suffragists, or anti-war activists.
However, this improvement (such as it was) was not mirrored in
the Leader's women's page _ which replaced the occasional articles
about women's political activity (and the more frequent recipes)
with serialized movie plots and theatrical news (which had formerly
run on another page). By the early 1920s, theatrical news once
again ran on a separate page and the movie serials were replaced
with serial and short fiction which spilled over onto other pages.
A PAGE FOR WOMEN?
The April 3, 1917 women's page (titled 'Magazine and Home Page')
was in many ways typical for the era. The left-column lead
proclaims "Singer and Eddie Foy are Stars of Bill at Majestic,"
heading slightly more than a column of brief reviews and
announcements of the bills at 11 local movie and live theaters.
The right column lead (columns 6 and 7) is a serialization of a
movie plot which premiered December 16, 1916, on the Leader's front
page. "The Secret Kingdom" was a story of mystery, intrigue and
action featuring royalty and the idle rich in a seemingly plotless
and leisurely flight across a landscape apparently modeled on
Europe. The other four columns across the top of the page are
filled by "The Mystery of the Double Cross," another motion picture
serial in the soap opera genre, making its second appearance in a
very short run below a large, crude drawing of a scene from the
film (the leading lady rebuffing the hero's advances, which she had
welcomed just seconds before, while a masked man who mysteriously
pops in and out of the action points a gun _ at the woman in the
drawing, but at the hero according to the text).
The rest of the page is devoted to Society news (a half-column of
notices of marriages, meetings [including one of the Milwaukee
County Women Suffrage Association], travel, births, a testimonial
dinner [the honoree and most of the audience appear to have been
men, this is by far the longest item], and an upcoming play being
presented by a student club _ except when getting married, women in
the Society column were invariably referred to by their husband's
names; thus "Mrs. George J. Noyes left Tuesday for Washington,
where she will visit her daughter, Mrs. William Fiather"); notices
("Milwaukee Jews to Celebrate Feast of Passover This Week," Old
Settlers' Club new members, an upcoming talk by a municipal judge
and a speech by a state assemblyman); "The Home Query Box" (hair
care and etiquette); tips for boiling onions; "The Sandman Story
For Tonight" (a long-running series of morality tales masquerading
as animal fables distributed by the McClure Syndicate; this episode
extolled cooperation over greed); and three advertisements (for
Schuster's department store, a new method for removing unwanted
facial hair [a reading notice, identified as an ad only at the
end], and a liquid nostrum).
This page is atypical only in that it contains three fiction
serials where the norm is two _ the additional space generally
taken up by fashion news.
The May 2, 1917 women's page contained more substantive matters.
The right column lead announced that Eastern railroads would hire
women to fill in for drafted workers "in departments not actually
engaged in physical operation of trains." "Officials," the subhead
explains, "after experiment, say they are sure weaker contingent
will satisfy." One line is going so far as to consider employing
women in the sale and collection of tickets, while "The
Pennsylvania lines... planned to place many women in clerical
positions and will later try them in other and more important
positions." Columns 2 and 3 were topped by a photo from a movie
which has just opened at a local theater, while column 4 presents
another Sandman Story (a morality tale about how good deeds, even
when unintentional, pay off in the end).
Column 5 was one in a series of expos s by Hazel Moore about the
dangers of midwifery, focusing on a government report on southern
midwifes. The lack of competent medical attention "during mother's
confinement" results in deformed children, it is argued, although
the report is quoted acknowledging that at least one midwife was
competent.
Superstitious midwives thrive in portions of our large cities
where foreign elements [such as many of the Leader's readers]
live.... Knowing nothing of the wonderful work of the maternity
hospital or the health department, they call in the neighborhood
midwife who frequently combines certain superstitions and
fanaticism with her work...
A letter is also printed from a visiting nurse who "know[s] the
horrible conditions existing where midwives have charge of births."
The problem, Moore concludes, is one of ignorance: "If our present
day mothers and the young women, who are our future mothers, were
instructed in the facilities [the hospital and health department]
which are at hand, there would be less suffering and more sturdy
children." Not a thought here of training midwives so that they
could provide better care, or of educating prospective mothers as
to proper precautions _ the Leader's solution is to have
officially-sanctioned health professionals (presumably male)
replace the midwives.
Columns 6 and 7 are devoted to another movie serialization, "The
Golden Blight" _ a melodrama about a scientist who seeks to put the
capitalists at his mercy through a powerful new invention involving
"radioactives": "You're in my grip, Murchison, you and your whole
class, the class of exploiters, parasites and warmakers _ the
spoilers of the world." This serial premiered on the Leader's front
page April 20th, and is virtually unique among Leader fiction for
its political content, though its literary quality is typical of
the genre:
"Wherever you people go, you capitalists, you set hell in motion.
Like noxious ferments, like malignant bacilli invading a body,
you set up every kind of pestiferous reaction _ and, so that you
may have your gold, the world has strikes, gunmen, murder,
starvation, plague, adulteration, corrupt politics, broken faith,
hate, lies, ugliness and war.
"For you the machine guns sweep the mining camps. For you are
women and nursing babes mangled with explosive bullets, piled
into heaps, saturated with kerosene and burned in hideous pyres
by thugs and offscourgings from the slums! For you _ "
"Stop! Stop, I tell you" remonstrates our hapless capitalist, the
scientist's employer, as the curtain falls with the inevitable "To
Be Continued." Such purple rhetoric rarely found its way onto the
Leader's women's page (or anywhere else in the Leader's pages, for
that matter), although during this period the Leader did
periodically use its theatrical notices to bolster its anti-war
campaign by prominently plugging anti-war films (such as one
depicting the ways in which war disrupts marriage and family life).
Other articles included a half-column item about how ribbon
skirts are the newest fashion in New York (also plugging various
accessories); a half-column of theatrical notices; society news
(two parties and three items on people who returned from
vacations); the daily pattern (an almost daily feature describing a
pattern available for ten cents from the Leader's pattern
department); notices (a recital, club meeting, church picnic,
Anti-Saloon League and Council of Jewish Women elections, and
"Prizes for War Songs" for a patriotic song concert); and short
news items (preparing milk for infants, "Woman, Aged 93, Dies;
Leaves 117 Descendants," town likes daylight savings time, and an
explosion that killed 30 women workers). Also on the page were a
listing of persons holding unpaid-for Party carnival tickets, an ad
for Schuster's department store, and an ad for a high-calorie "food
tonic" _ "the safe medicine for all the family."
Together, these pages are typical of the Leader's women's page
during this period. As the years went by, the trend towards
fashion news, fiction, and other material reflecting traditional
roles and values accelerated. By 1927, as the following table
(representing the number of appearances on Leader women's pages of
articles in the indicated categories for a sample of 35 issues each
for 1912, 1917, 1922 and 1927, and, for comparative purposes, the
Chicago Daily Socialist from 1909 and 1912) illustrates,
alternative and oppositional material had entirely disappeared from
the Leader's women's page. (Advertisements have been excluded from
the content analysis, although "articles" promoting the newspaper's
circulation are included.)
Clearly efforts to educate women as to socialist ideas, to air
issues of particular concern to women, or to embody any sort of
feminist consciousness were largely absent from the women's pages,
a relative absence that would loom much larger were considerations
such as length, placement, or accompanying graphics (almost
entirely restricted to fashion and fiction offerings) to be taken
into account.
Overall, the Leader's women's page differed only slightly from
the Milwaukee Journal's offerings during this period. The Journal,
with Milwaukee's largest circulation (nearly three times that of
the Leader by April of 1917) did not run a women's page labeled as
such, but divided its offerings for women into two pages, separated
by several pages of general news. The first of these two pages
featured Society News (weddings, parties, vacations), Women's Club
reports and notices; along with general news and numerous
advertisements. (Among those running April 3, 1917, were ads for
Victor records, music lessons, hair dye and movies _ including an
anti-birth control film entitled "Never Born.") The second of these
pages included fiction ("Little Stories for Bedtime"), a serialized
novel ("Confessions of a Wife"), theatrical notices, an advice
column, recipes, and similar fare.
The Journal did not hesitate to use its women's page to promote
its political agenda _ the primary item on which was to involve the
United States in World War I. May 4th, for example, the Journal
announced the formation of a women's patriotic league to support US
entry _ among organizations sending representatives were the
Wisconsin Association Opposed to Women's Suffrage and the Wisconsin
Suffrage Association. While the Leader was stressing the war's
role in exacerbating food shortages, the Journal eagerly reported
state plans to increase food supplies, including a page 1
photograph of "Patriotic Women" taking gardening lessons (5/5/17).
The Journal's article endorsing school board candidates reported
that "The Journal does not believe that a single candidate... who
stands for disloyal pro-Germanism masked as Socialism should be
elected to a seat in the school board" (April 2, 1917, p 1). Even
the department store ads boosted the war effort, in which the U.S.
was not yet embroiled.
[insert table]
FREQUENCY OF APPEARANCE OF NEWS AND FEATURE MATERIAL
ON THE MILWAUKEE LEADER WOMEN'S PAGE
CHICAGO
DAILY
SOCIALIST*
Category: 1912 1917 1922 1927 1909
1912
Traditional Roles and Values:
Fashion News and Photos 34 19 40 15
1 40
Patterns 18 15 9 29 58 16
Beauty Tips 10 2 15 2 2 3
Theater/Cinema 8 29 1
1 3
Music & Opera News/Reviews 4 2
4
Fiction, Movie Serials 38 71 113
103 16 18
Literary Criticism & Reviews 4
Society and Club News 12 31 27
1 1 4
Features, Human Interest 25 39 89 38
32 55
Notices 15 7 1 1 3
Food & Recipes 27 8 25 40
11 44
Childcare 5 1 4 29 1 10
Schools & Education, Library 5 2 2 2
2
Health News and Tips 12 3 36 41
3 9
Domestic Tips, Bargains 12 6 29 16
16 22
Advice/Etiquette 7 9 2 27
32
Dishonest Merchants, Profiteering 2 3 1
1
Morality Tales 6 6 2 3
2 10
Humor & Comics 3 11 18
27 24
Poetry 2 1 30 9
Socialist & Progressive:
Socialist News & Events 1 1 13
3
Suffrage News & Events 7 3 12
21
Child Labor 1 1 2 2
Women Workers 1 2 10
9
Changing Housekeeping 1 1
1
Women in Politics 1 2 1
1 5
Birth Control 1 1
Alternative Roles 1 2 2 1
1 7
Charity Ball 2 1
Midwifery 2
Strikes and the Family 1
4 3
Anti-War 6 1 2
General Social Reform 1 2 1
11 3
Left Morality Tales 16
General Socialist Commentary 1 15
5
Newspaper Promotion 2 1
3
General and Local Politics 4 9 8
16 4
Total Sample For Each Year: 35 issues
*Chicago Daily Socialist changed name to World in 1912, and ceased
publication soon thereafter. In the Leader's first years, the
women's page was dominated by fashion news _ particularly huge
photographs often bearing credits to local department stores. What
impact these articles about fur coats and the latest Parisian
fashions might have made upon the Leader's (presumably)
predominantly working-class readership must remain a matter of
speculation, but they seem unlikely to have promoted class
consciousness among the hoped-for readers.
Although fiction played a major role on the Leader's women's page
from the start, it occupied much more space by 1917 and was of a
substantially different character. In 1912 Leader fiction was, for
the most part, boy-meets-girl short romances syndicated by American
Literary Press (although supplemented by occasional reprints,
generally of much higher quality, from other papers). But in 1917
the Leader doubled its literary offerings _ publishing a movie
serialization (occasionally two) and a "Sandman Story" (a series of
short morality tales featuring animal characters) each day. Each
new serial was announced by a prominent advertisement, announcing
where the movie was playing and that the story would run in the
Leader, often the first installment ran on the front page. On
November 29th, 1916, for example, a page 2 advertisement announced
that the first of a series based on "these enthralling pictures"
was running that day on the women's page. "The Scarlet Runner,"
the ad announced, featured a new movie each week: "Action _ which
grips and holds the attention; Life _ the reaction of a brave man
and a tender women in trying circumstances and perilous situations;
Love _ the most wonderful emotion of all; are portrayed in The
Scarlet Runner."
These serials were clearly provided by the motion picture studios
as part of their promotional campaigns, and were presumably
available without cost to the Leader's perennially strapped budget.
By the 1920s, however, the movie serials were dropped for short
fiction and novel serials. Between the Leader's fiction and its
theatrical reviews and notices (almost certainly motivated, at
least in part, by the substantial volume of theatrical advertising
that ran in the Leader), half a page or more of each edition's
women's page was already spoken for. This meant that less space
was available for recipes and fashion news. The amount of
explicitly political material on the women's page increased during
in 1917, although remaining at very low levels, largely as a result
of the Leader's aggressive anti-war campaign which subsided only
days before the U.S. declared war on Germany. (In apparent
retaliation for this campaign the US Post Office, in October 1917,
barred the Leader from mailing copies at newspaper rates _ costing
the paper nearly 16,000 out-of-town readers _ and ten months later
cut off all mail delivery to Leader offices. [Beck, 1970]) But by
war's end political material virtually disappeared from the women's
page.
Over the years, articles such as the 1912 item on "Women in
Japan" (explaining that "No woman in the world is more thoroughly
versed in the difficult art of pleasing a man than the dainty
Japanese.... [whose] real womanliness... [gives the race] a fine
vigor which could only come from a home life of compact strength"
[1/27/12]) disappeared from the Leader's pages, as did the articles
on scandalous women's behavior and features such as a photo spread
on "Milwaukee's Prettiest Young Woman" (April 15, 1912).
On occasion, during the early years, the women's page even went
so far as to criticize prevailing fashions, blasting the "hourglass
style" as uncomfortable and unsightly, arguing that "with the
distension of her lower section a woman lost virtually all
resemblance to a human being. She appeared formalized, bedeviled,
bedigned (sic)" (Feb. 21, 1917). A few days later, the women's
page reported the case of a woman who was working to put her
husband, who did the housework, through college (March 5, 1917).
By late 1917, however, Hazel Moore had been replaced as women's
page editor by Maud McCreary. Under McCreary's editorship,
explicitly socialist articles briefly reappeared on the women's
page (which no longer bore a nameplate distinguishing it from other
pages). McCreary began a series of articles based on German
socialist theoretician August Bebel's classic "Women and
Socialism." In addition to popularizations of socialist classics,
McCreary ran articles on the suffrage movement (in particular the
pickets and arrests of National Women's Party activists), women
physicians, an explanation of how poor working conditions led to
tuberculosis, short items on war deaths, and other political items.
Where an article with a specific women's slant was not available,
its place was usually filled with general political news.
McCreary continued to run traditional women's page fare, of
course, such as theatrical news, the Daily Pattern, Society,
fashion, notices, child rearing, human interest items and fiction,
and also an advice column prepared for the Leader by Dotty Warden.
In November of 1917 the women's page was running up to three
fiction serials a day _ the Sandman stories, a serialized novel,
and a movie serial (occasionally bumped to another page). Thus
under her editorship, which coincided with a dramatic decline in
circulation and advertising occasioned by active government
persecution detailed in Beck (1970), among others, the women's page
did make more of a concerted effort to use its women's page to
raise the political consciousness of its readers, along with the
articles intended to be of practical use or to entertain.
But for the most part the Leader continued to rely on syndicated
material to fill out its women's page, and to use the page as a
vehicle to promote advertising sales. The result was a women's
page that, overall, reflected and upheld the notion that a woman's
place was in the home, and (particularly prior to McCreary's
editorship) that she ought not be concerned with political issues
except insofar as they impacted upon the private sphere.
This was not, however, inevitable. The Chicago Daily Socialist
women's page, for example, combined patterns, fiction and human
interest items (often touching on social issues) with socialist
commentary and articles explicitly challenging traditional sex
roles. Its April 12 1909 "Magazine Page" featured articles on the
role of public schools, architecture, Parisian playgrounds and a
critique of press arguments for lower wages to promote economic
prosperity, alongside the inevitable serialized fiction, patterns,
and embroidery tips. By 1912, however, the Daily Socialist changed
its name (to the Evening World) and editorial policy in pursuit of
a mass readership (Bekken 1993); its women's page dropped political
items in favor of recipes, fiction and club news. The Socialist
did not survive this transformation.
Lotta de Classi, a New York-based Italian-language socialist
paper launched (in 1911) the first women's column in an
Italian-American radical paper. In it the paper urged women to
cast off patriarchal and religious ties and to join the workers'
movement. Buhle (1981: 299) argues that Lotta de Classi's efforts
were "abstract" and "fanatical," and that "the distance between the
revolutionary ideal and daily practice remained too great" to draw
women readers to the left. Yet many workers' papers, including
both English and foreign-language socialist publications, found it
possible to reach women readers by combining arguments for
socialism with entertainment and practical tips, and found that
women were perhaps not quite so dim-witted and parochial as the
theoreticians had argued.
And some socialist women's pages (though by no means the
majority) found it possible to dispense with entertainment
altogether. Seller (1985: 223), for example, reports that the
Jewish Daily Forward's weekly women's page, in 1919, lacked "many
of the usual ingredients":
"Women's Interests" included no advertisements, no consumer
information, no food lore or recipes; indeed the issue published
before Passover... contained an article identifying women's work
in the kitchen with slavery. Also absent were "how to"
articles... The rare articles on fashion and beauty treated these
subjects sarcastically... Articles on education and child
psychology, however, were a staple, as were articles on love,
marriage, and family life... the gap between women's wages and
those of men... [and] a political news column.
Even some mainstream labor newspapers found it possible to offer a
more critical woman's page. Chicago's Union Labor Advocate turned
its women's department over to the Chicago chapter of the National
Women's Trade Union League which used it for in-depth reports on
women's labor struggles, the suffrage movement, the economic and
social conditions of women workers, etc. (As with other Union
Labor Advocate departments, the WTUL was charged a modest fee for
the space its section filled, and expected to promote the paper
among its members.) The League later spun off the section as a
separate magazine, Life and Labor, published from 1911 through 1921
(Bekken, forthcoming).
CONCLUSIONS
Socialism in its inception was absolutely and irrevocably opposed
to this system.... But [socialism] ...now has but one desire _ to
adjust itself to the narrow confines of its cage.... The
political trap has transferred Socialism from the proud,
uncompromising position of a revolutionary minority, fighting
fundamentals and undermining the strongholds of wealth and power,
to... busying itself with nonessentials, with things that barely
touch the surface, measures that have been used as political bait
by the most lukewarm reformers.... In order to achieve these
"revolutionary" measures, the... Socialist[s cater] ...to every
superstition, every prejudice, every silly tradition...
Emma Goldman (1913)
From its inception, Milwaukee's Socialist Party was committed to
reform through the political process, rather than to the sort of
broad, sweeping transformation of society that traditionally
characterized the socialist movement. These reformist tendencies
were bolstered by the Party's commitment to working in close
harmony with the mainstream (AFL) union movement (Gavett, 1965).
In the columns of the Social-Democratic Herald and later the
Leader, Berger and other prominent Milwaukee socialists
consistently argued against the IWW's revolutionary industrial
unionism (which had initially attracted substantial support within
Milwaukee's Federated Trades Council, before the Socialists
intervened to keep the FTC in the AFL), though sometimes supporting
specific strikes and opposing government repression.
As Schofield (1983) notes, women's relationship to the labor
movement has been historically problematic, with trade unions
"reinforc[ing] conventional social attitudes concerning women's
role." Most AFL unions would not admit women to membership, and
while the AFL did support reforms such as women's suffrage (which
more militant currents such as the IWW dismissed as simply
irrelevant), its vision of women's role was essentially domestic.
Women played little role in Milwaukee's Socialist Party, and the
party evidenced little commitment to (or vision of) women's
emancipation.
This limited and reformist vision necessarily carried over to the
Leader's women's page, and to its portrayal of women in the rest of
the paper (as to its coverage in general). While the Leader was
prepared to support reformist demands such as women's suffrage, it
retained a basic commitment to traditional values and norms for
women. If, by 1917, the Leader no longer subjected women who
challenged these roles to ridicule, it still held to traditional
notions of women's domain.
Writing in 1908, John Spargo asked, "Is it not a fact that most
of our speeches and by far the greatest part of our propaganda
literature have been addressed to men, as though it was not
worthwhile to address the women?" Spargo was encouraged by the
fact that socialist women were then taking matters into their own
hands, although these efforts were soon brought under the control
of the Party hierarchy and later dropped in an economy move (Buhle,
1981: 304-310). (Documents from this struggle "to create a
socialist feminism anchored in the working-class experience" are
reproduced in Gordon [1976].) Spargo went on to argue that:
It is high time that the Socialist Party paid more serious
attention to woman's share in the social misery of today, her
vital stake in the movement for the liberation of mankind and her
enormous influence.... Most unsatisfactory of all has been the
treatment [in Socialist propaganda] of woman's place in society.
Most of our literature on this point has been based upon the
assumption that any other employment for women than household and
maternal duties must be considered abnormal and wrong...
(Spargo, 1908: 452-453)
To judge from the pages of the Milwaukee Leader, Spargo _ and
others who voiced similar concerns _ was not heard in Milwaukee.
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