World War I

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/1292430415289125.pdf

To the United States of North America - Thomas Campbell 

I chose to analyze a short poem by Thomas Campbell partially because of its placement within the journal and partially because it is just so striking in its brevity and frankness. The poem (included as a screenshot) is under a list of negro casualties and above a report of thirteen military members being hung. It speaks to the overlooked sacrifice made my African Americans in the success of American endeavors. In describing the stripes on the American flag as representing "your negroes scars" this poem very harshly acknowledges that America is built on the unrecognized, uncelebrated sacrifice of an entire race. The placement of this poem, written before World War One, is crucial in understanding the stance taken on the war by the writers of The Crisis. It is a white mans war fought by young African American men eager to be part of the nation and instead, murdered by mobs at home and hung overseas. 

I found this to be very distressing. It's one thing to study a tragic social issue objectively, but it's another to see it published and written about in a timely periodical and realize this was reality for an entire race within our country. After watching videos and seeing accounts of white soldiers suffering the atrocities of war and coming home as celebrated, albeit damaged, war heroes, it's incredibly more disheartening to realize African Americans were suffering the same and worse, as well as having to deal with racism and segregation while fighting for a country that wouldn't recognize their legitimacy as equal human beings. Then to realize they came home to a racist, segregated country and had to continue fighting for their rights within their own country even after the war was over. 

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/1301604078937504.pdf

The Drudge

The piece I chose to analyze is an article in The Freewoman from Thursday, February 8,1912 titled "The Drudge". It is the opening article of that weeks edition and discusses feminism from what I see as a completely new angle. The author describes the modern housewife as a drudge and burden to her household because she does not earn her keep like women of earlier times did. The author argues that with technological advancements making domestic life so much easier, the suburban housewife no longer earns her keep as a mother and caretaker of home, children, and husband. This is an entirely new perspective to me in that I have only ever heard arguments for feminism arguing a woman's equality, not that her staying in the home is burdensome to the family and society. The author suggests pre kindergarten care for children as the only way that a woman's place in the workplace will become permanent. I found it interesting that the programs and methods described are essentially what's used by families today to allow both parents to work. 

The attitude of the article was somewhat negative and seemed to be appealing more to men than to women, describing housewives as a drudge and belittling, whether intentional or not, their function in the home. This is a somewhat risky strategy, though it made many valid, though harsh, points. I thought the article was nearly mysoginistic in a non-traditional way, arguing that women of that day no longer served a function in the home worthy enough of being "paid" by their husbands. It even went so far as to discuss that their provision of love was not enough because they'll just begin to question whether or not they loved or were loved. 

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=129294798430500&view=pageturner&pageno=8

In the editorial section of The Crisis I read a letter that was written by a man named J.B. Watson titled Our First Great Tragedy of the War. Almost immediately I began to assume that the letter would chronicle the deaths of some poor, brave souls who died during a notable battle in WWI. I was incredibly surprised however when I read the first few sentences which began by saying, "I have seen thousands of Negro men received into the provisional army of the United States who cannot read or write". The author then went on to discuss how most Negro men in the army, besides their inability to read or write, were woefully ignorant in a wide variety of subjects. Watson tells of how "some of them thought the enemy to be fought was just a few miles beyond Atlanta and that a battle was imminent at almost any hour" and goes on to assert that none of the men knew what the war was about and had "never heard of Germany or Serbia or France or the Kaiser or Europe or New York".

This was particularly troubling to me when compared with Jennifer Keene's statement that African-Americans "had additional goals besides winning the war". She asserted that the Negro men who fought in the war hoped that their contributions would help further the Civil Rights movement and help bring an end to disenfranchisement. However, if Our First Great Tragedy of the War has any truth in it, the ideals that Keene speaks of would have a hard time coming to fruition during this era, if only because of the lack of education in young Negro men of the time. Numerous Civil Rights activists throughout the centuries have cited education as a primary tool used to gain civil freedom and it is incredibly troubling to think that despite the personal sacrifice of the Negro soldiers during WWI, they would still be unable to gain that tool. In the end, despite W.E.B. Du Bois's call for young Negro soldiers to "return fighting", their fight would not gain much momentum until more African-Americans became educated.

Forgot the link...here it is!

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/123738991446875.pdf

The peice I chose was a June edition of Cosmopolitan magazine in, I believe, 1911.  On page 17 of this issue, there is an advertisment for different education oppurtunities for women.  This page includes rows and rows of school listings.  What first struck me was the number of schools listed.  While there are still many all girl schools, it isn't a particularly common thing to hear about nowadays.  From the looks of this advertisement, one could easily assume that these types of all girl schools were the norm.  I am not certain if co-ed education was allowed at this point in time, but if it was, it doesn't seem to have been too typical.  The second thing I noticed were the course listing.  Today there are women enrolled in courses like biology or calculus.  This does not appear to have been an option around 1911.  Over half of the advertisements list classes available in Expression, Music, Art, Languages, and Domestic Science.  I think this speaks a lot of the barriers women still had to overcome at this time.  If courses like today were then offered to women, it is not apparent from these advertisements.  It is also metioned many times that the schools are located in 'healthful' environments as if women are somehow very fragile and this is a most important part to consider.  It was really cool to look through this magazine.  It is obviously so different from what we would see in an issue of Cosmopolitan today and this is apparent from just the cover page.  Rather than having a scantily dressed woman on the cover with rated R snippets of articles on it, this 1911 issue is simply a nice, wholesome looking woman wearing a sun hat and sipping a drink from a straw.  

Head Art

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=133157906...

The poem "Patterns" by Amy Lowell is found in Some Imagist Poets, 1916: An Annual Anthology", which was the 1916 publication of the journal Some Imagist Anthologies. The poem is from the point of view of a young woman who has just been informed of her fiance's death in the war. There are several parallels between the speaker's emotions and those described by Vera Brittain after Roland's death. The speaker expresses that she will never be able to be loved by another man after this, saying: "And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace/ By each button, hook and lace./ For the man who should loose me is dead". This reinforces the notion that Buck raised in her article about how wartime poetry "reiterating a version of femininity rooted in home front experiences of waiting and mourning" (89). Lowell's poem exemplifies this notion: the speaker is not a strong woman working for her country but instead a mourning woman who spends her days waiting for bad news.

An interesting aspect of this poem is the pacifist message with which is leaves the reader. The speaker focuses on the pattern of her brocade dress and the individuality of her body within it, and ends the poem by saying her man died "Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,/ In a pattern called a war./ Christ! What are patterns for?". It seems that she is speaking out against the senseless deaths experienced during the war by focusing on the emotional turmoil experienced by just one woman, but also acknowledges that these feelings a pattern happening all throughout the world. This line transforms the speaker from a simple grieving woman to someone questioning the very concept of war. She seems to be wondering, what is the point of so many women feeling like this? Why is this a pattern in our lives when we should instead all have what we want and what we plan for ourselves?

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=116531569...

"Problems of Sex" from The New Age, published 1912, pg. 419-420.

I found this article a confusing representation of the era's views on the social legitimacy of extramarital sex.  The author openly claims the existence of widespread infidelity in marriage, and he (?) himself had previously published an article openly endorsing a hedonistic lifestyle.  The aspect I find the most interesting in this discussion of sexual liberation is the fact that women are not mentioned in it except as passing figures in a male world.  The dutiful wives, raising children at home, are given about as much (written) attention as the prostitutes their husbands frequently visit, yet while both seem to be the direct cause of the article, neither are its focus.  Instead, the article discusses marriage as "merely a licence for carnal connection" and "entirely utilitarian".  However, the article is always from a male's perspective.  The independence of women in marriage is here represented as what it had been for centuries: nonexistent.  The article does not blame women for the shortcomings of man.  The author looks on women almost as inanimate objects, incapable of any true action inspired from within.  

The idea of motherhood and child-bearing is also raised.  The article begins with the supposed quest of attempting to defend the children of so-called "illegitimate" unions, yet never truly does so.  Instead it veers away from the pain of the mother in the midst of social prejudice to instead come to the aid of the father, already glorified in society for his philandering, by relieving him of all blame.  The child and mother become again irrelevant in this situation as the author clamors for men to seek out intellectual pursuits in order to distract themselves from the vices naturally inspired by female objects.

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=130382138...

To follow up on the issue of The Freewoman that we looked at for last class, I decided to go ahead and take a look at the first issue of that magazine's successor, The Egoist, published in January of 1914. After reading The Freewoman, I found myself immediately drawn to Dora Marsden's opening editorial for this magazine, "Liberty, Law, and Democracy," located in the magazine's first three pages. Coming from The Freewoman, I expected a strongly philosophically bent piece, which I found, but what surprised me about this piece is how deftly the piece's philosophical language was employed to make a stinging political point.

In this piece, Dora Marsden decontructs the idea of Democracy as being representative of individuals, but rather as a representative of "interests." She then goes on to state that laws only guarantee the protection of one "interest," while at the same time implying the supression of an opposing interest which was not able to gain sufficient support to defend itself. She then goes on to criticize liberty, stating that liberty serves not to make peoples free, but to serve as something for the weak to lay claim to so that government (here meaning those "interests" that hold sway) can appear not to be ruling over those whose "interests" are being oppressed. Here, Marsden excellently illustrates just what is wrong with women not having the right to vote. After all, when you have an entire gender of people silenced in your government, how is that supposed "democracy" not really just one interest brutally suppressing another?

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=120187698...

"I AM THE WOMAN" is a poem in the journal Poetry, October 1912 (1.1). When I read it through the first time it reminded me of the journal we read previously, The Free Woman. The poem seems to start out with talking about what and who the woman was- obedient. It follows with "Locked up her mouth from scornful speaking; now it is open to speak". As I continued to read there are a few lines that made my thoughts go in two different directions and I am not completely sure which direction is more correct. The lines start with "I am also the Mother.." and ends with "..I soothed him and laid him to rest" (p 4, 4-14). The beginning of these lines make me think of war and nurturing or healing the hurt, but then as it goes on I wonder if the poem speaks of nurturing the dying or laying with men. Parts of the poem really made me think of prostitution and I recalled from British Woman Writers of the Great War, "contributed to women's economic, social and sexual emancipation" (p 85). It sounds like it suggests that woman did not have a choice after the war because they were forced to retain the positions in the home that they once had and not all women could handle going backwards.

"Loosing upon us the wounding joy and the wasting sorrow of life." This line made me think that the women are fighting for their voice and fighting to be themselves outside of the traditional obedient housewife. By denying them their voice they are wasting their lives, because they are not being given the freedom to be more than who they are and more than what they are told to be. What confused me the most was after reading this poem and noting the author of it, William Vaughn Moody, is male. Was the author male and shared the beliefs and views of many women from this time or was it a woman disguising herself as a man, because of the fear of speaking out? I am not entirely sure. With each read I have different thoughts that pop into my head and I am not entirely sure of the direction or the focus of this poem. It could be women's sufferage and/or war or something different entirely.