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My own dear beautiful Sweetheart. . . . I find I have been thinking many things to you out the window which do not appear here or anywhere perhaps unless it be [in] the Silences of the night where you nestle close to me to be comforted and assured that you are not alone. This is a poor substitute for what I would give you tonight.
—Frances Kellor to Mary Dreier, ca. 1905
New Professions for New Women
IN AN 1897 SPEECH, “The Idea of a Settlement Movement,” Jane Addams observed that the mother-heart by itself could not right the wrongs of America. In order for the settlement house phenomenon to make a significant difference outside the neighborhood, “scientific skills and patience in the accumulation of facts” were required—professionally generated data and informed polemic that would give reformers the ammunition to push legislation through the various channels. The skills Addams called for were soon provided by university-trained social scientists, many of them women, who were entering graduate schools in increasing numbers. The settlement house was often a welcome field placement for them because it permitted them to combine what had long been an accepted female endeavor, betterment, with a new professionalism.
By the early twentieth century, Hull House and the settlements modeled after it were no longer staffed primarily by volunteers looking for an outlet from stifling lives as unmarried females of the middle and upper classes. A new generation of professional women—social workers and public policymakers—had emerged. They were well trained and had excellent credentials. Their settlement house experiences often led them to paid work that not only permitted them to expand reform in the public sector but also gave them the financial wherewithal to support themselves. They could be New Women in a new century that seemed open both to social reform and to women’s professional role in it.
In 1910, Jane Addams was able to report that the majority of Hull House residents were working in professions that grew out of or complemented their settlement interests: they were salaried as sanitary inspectors, lecturers in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, administrators and social workers in the Juvenile Protective Association and the League for the Protection of Immigrants. The settlement movement not only called into being a variety of professional-level jobs for the New Women, but also helped make them ready for such careers and deeply influenced their approach. Frances Perkins, for instance, cut her teeth on public policy work at Hull House, where she came to appreciate labor unions and to defend workers who were taken advantage of by their bosses. What she learned at Hull House from 1904 to 1907 had great effects on her policies as secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945.
Educated women whose life partners were other women were especially likely to pursue the professional occupations to which the settlement house phenomenon led. These early twentieth-century lesbians (or sexual inverts, as such women were now often called even outside of medical literature) could see unprecedented opportunities opening for females in professional reform work, and they were able to seize them. Their ambitions were often marked by a clarity of purpose that might have been elusive to women torn between careers and domesticity.
However, while it was likely that in the early twentieth century a college-educated woman who saw herself as a congenital sexual invert would want to become a professional person, it was also likely that a woman desiring a profession would choose to make her life with other women. If a professional woman wanted love and companionship, she could find it more easily with another woman who shared her struggles than with a man who wanted a wife. Many of the early professional women were thus undoubtedly living challenges to the simplistic ideas of the sexologists about the congenital sexual inversion of females who made their lives with other females. Which came first, so-called sexual inversion or the desire for the kind of life that was inimical to heterosexual marriage, was far from evident regarding individual lesbians.
The Making of a “Sexual Invert” and a Professional Reformer
Frances Kellor, an early twentieth-century lesbian who took the torch from Jane Addams and made an exemplary career in social reform, is an apt illustration of these points. Kellor, who in 1898 became one of the first female graduate students in the sociology program at the University of Chicago, conducted fieldwork at Hull House and also resided there and at the Rivington Street College Settlement in New York as often as her other duties would permit. Her career as one of the leading Progressive professional reformers was thus forged in the settlement house milieu and the University of Chicago’s department of sociology, which emphasized the study of problems such as those that Jane Addams had brought to Chicago’s attention.
Kellor was among the most successful of those in the municipal housekeeping movement who took the next step, for which Addams had called in 1898. As a social scientist, Kellor knew how to conduct investigations, collect the facts, and use them as persuasive evidence in convincing city, state, and national legislatures of the need for reform. As a professional, she also brought the kind of continuity to reform that was generally impossible through the voluntarism that had characterized reform work in the nineteenth century. She helped establish what became a woman-dominated, and often lesbian-dominated, occupation that combined social science with social activism.
Unlike most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lesbian pioneers, whose families were solidly middle or upper class, Frances Kellor came from a working-class background. Her mother took in laundry and cleaned other people’s houses, and while Frances was growing up, she too worked in these jobs. Her early life was formative both emotionally and in terms of her professional interests. Despite her phenomenal successes as an adult and the many years she shared with Mary Dreier, an heiress whose father had been a wealthy industrialist, Kellor never fully recovered from her childhood bitterness and frustrations because of poverty and the knowledge of her mother’s powerlessness. She sought remedies for the social problems connected with such conditions throughout her career.
Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing would have considered Kellor an excellent case to illustrate their theories of congenital sexual inversion. Even in childhood, she passionately eschewed femininity. However, that may have been because she saw that her mother’s femininity got her nothing but a life of hard work. There is no credible trace of a father in Kellor’s history, and it is very possible that she was what was then called illegitimate. A purposely assumed masculinity would surely have seemed useful to her as a girl; boyishness, she may have believed, would protect her from the victimization that her mother suffered.
Like so many female pioneers—Frances Willard, Anna Shaw, and Mollie Hay among them—as a child Kellor was a “fearless tomboy” who could use both a shotgun and a revolver to hunt, which she did in order to augment her mother’s meager earnings. Ellen Fitzpatrick, who includes Kellor in her study of four pioneering social scientists at the University of Chicago (none of them married), interviewed a girlhood acquaintance of Kellor’s from Coldwater, Michigan, who “disapproved of her because she ‘wore her hair shingled and walked and talked like a boy.’” The woman’s brother recalled in another interview that Kellor as a girl “could whittle out a slingshot and hit anything [at which] she aimed.” On the school playground she could “outdo any of the boys.”
Fitzpatrick characterizes Kellor as “never really [having] lost the tough persona she exhibited as a child.” But Kellor put to good use that toughness, which the sexologists of her day assumed to be characteristic of gender inversion. Surely her hard-skinned demeanor, her bluntness and directness, helped her to achieve in a man’s world far more than most women ever achieved.
Kellor left school at the age of seventeen to become a typesetter at the local newspaper, a far more lucrative position than the domestic jobs that had supported her mother. Her verbal skills soon landed her an even better job as a reporter. When she was twenty-one, she left her mother’s home to live with two librarians, Frances and Mary Eddy. Biographers usually suggest that the Eddy sisters, who encouraged her to study and to apply to Cornell Law School, which had recently opened to women, wished only to help the bright young Kellor set out on the right road in life. However, that theory does not explain why Frances Eddy followed Kellor to Cornell in 1895 and lived with her there.
Kellor received her law degree within two years. But by then she had decided that she was more interested in the new field of experimental sociology than in the dry applications of the law, and she enrolled in the University of Chicago. Gertrude Dudley, the head professor of women’s physical education at the university, helped Kellor finance her studies by hiring her to teach gymnastics. At this time, perhaps under Dudley’s influence, Kellor published her first academic article, which foreshadowed the philosophy of Title IX by the better part of a century: she argued that physical education for college women should be expanded to equal the men’s physical education programs. “If women are to accomplish the same quality and quantity of intellectual work as men,” she insisted, “one of the essentials is a more active, variable physical life.” Kellor, to whom appropriate gender behavior had never meant anything, appears to have been blessedly oblivious of the fact that in 1898 most people believed that women never could accomplish intellectual work equal to men’s under any circumstances, and that on no account should they engage in serious physical education. Yet such ostensible oblivion may have been one of her bold strategies, in embryo form, for charging ahead and pulling other women in her wake, as she often did later in her professional life.
No letters that give insight into the relationship between Kellor and Gertrude Dudley exist, but Mary Dreier, who was Kellor’s life partner from 1904 until Kellor’s death, in 1952, has written that while Kellor was a graduate student, Dudley was her “close and intimate friend” (a common description in that era of a relationship that our era would dub lesbian). It appears likely that the two women were lovers while Kellor was at the University of Chicago. Their friendship, though probably not their intimacy, continued long after Kellor left Chicago. In 1909, they wrote on women’s athletics together, publishing the book Athletic Games in the Education of Women.
Kellor left Chicago in 1902 and went to New York, where she did research on fraud and corruption in employment bureaus. She had suspected that many of these businesses swindled and led astray innocent immigrants and young women from rural areas who came to the city to find work. She visited employment agencies disguised as a prospective employer or employee, and once actually worked for some time as a servant in order to carry out an investigation thoroughly. The research resulted in her 1904 book, Out of Work: A Study of Employment Agencies, in which she was the first to call for government regulation of such agencies. The social philosophy her book propounded, which had been developed in the crucible of her firsthand experiences of deprivation and her later settlement house work, prefigured crucial ideas of the New Deal of the 1930s and 1940s and the Great Society of the 1960s. For example, Kellor was one of the first to articulate the point that unemployment is not a problem for the individual alone; it is also a problem for the government, because it must necessarily affect the welfare of the nation.
The same year Out of Work was published, Kellor met Mary Dreier, a socialite with a social conscience, who was awed by the energy and intelligence Kellor applied to the causes that both of them held dear. A few months later the two women were living together in the Dreier family mansion in Brooklyn, New York.
“A World Dear That Love Makes So Beautiful”
The early correspondence between Frances and Mary consists of surreptitious, indisputably passionate letters. The first extant letter, dated May 5, 1904, established a code intended to deceive Mary’s sister, Margaret, with whom Mary then lived. (Frances and Mary probably met through Margaret, when Frances worked with her in the Women’s Municipal League, which helped lobby the New York legislature to pass a bill regulating women’s employment agencies.) In this letter, Frances intimated that her relationship with Mary had been in progress for a while. Hoping that Margaret “will be unable, as usual, to guess about our numbers,” she suggested that from then on in their correspondence, Mary was to sign her name “Six” or “Sixy” and Frances would be “Seven” or “7.”
The erotic nature of the letters reveals why Frances and Mary felt a code was necessary. “The colors and sunlight make me hungry for you, you dear small six,” Frances wrote during a brief separation in their first year. “It was so hard to go and leave you. There can be no goodnight here dear.” She had gone to investigate a tenement housing problem, but she would be returning to Mary soon, and “even tho it will be late I know I shall gather you up to give you . . . the tenderness and sweetness.” A few months later, on the first anniversary of what had apparently been their first sexual encounter, Frances wrote to Mary from a train to Philadelphia, where she was going to investigate a labor problem:
My own dear beautiful Sweetheart. I am wondering a little if you know what I am thinking about on this Phila trip. I am afraid dear it’s not about the problems, the day, or what I hope to do. It’s back a year ago this week. Was it not a year ago this week dear that I had you in C—and really took you for my own dear heart? Seems to me it was dear and my heart is full of love and longing to gather you up and to try and tell you how wonderfully beautiful you have been in all these months.
These love letters were written usually on trains or in unfamiliar hotels, in the course of lonely travel to various cities where Kellor, and Mary Dreier too, were trying to improve the lot of the poor and the disenfranchised. They are filled with playfulness and longing and the crying need for intimacy that even the most devoted of social reformers must feel to the bone. They reveal too the erotic tension between the two women and their sexual dynamic. “I have this whole car [on a train] to myself,” Frances wrote during the winter of 1905, “and if you were here I could put my arm around you and hunt out one of those tiny curls—and embarrass you shy little girl. . . . Thursday isn’t far away. There love burns through beautiful nights you dear sweetheart.” Six months later Frances was still teasing: “Sixy dear, That was a naughty note last night and I guess it made you lonely and I am sorry.”
Understanding the rather devout Mary’s need for a spiritual confirmation of the physical, Frances was also careful to assure her, “There is such a sweet consciousness of the beauty of our love tonight and tho I want you I feel so strongly its beauty and strength and my soul goes out to you in a way the body cannot limit. We know dear the greatness and loneliness of the separation and when we are together it will be the holier for that.” Yet the physical remained overwhelming for a time. On still another train, during the summer of 1905, Frances lamented to Mary, “I’d give most anything to just see and feel you for a little while.”
Their relationship was probably complicated by Mary’s bisexuality, though there is no record of Frances’s response to it. As the papers Mary left behind reveal, by 1907, while she was deep in a relationship with Frances, she was also in love with her brother-in-law, Raymond Robins, a social activist, who married Margaret Dreier in 1905. Mary’s love poems to Robins, written over a period of more than thirty years (during her relationship with Frances), employ elaborate metaphors of knights and ladies and honorable renunciations, suggesting that she and Robins agreed to sublimate their passion in good works. However, as the correspondence with Frances illustrates, Mary felt no restraint in her passionate lesbian relationship.
Despite the apparent complications, Mary and Frances’s life together appears to have been fulfilling, even exciting, and conducive to both women’s grand work. When they met, in 1904, Mary considered herself, as she wrote, “something of a wreck, without energy.” Frances saw her weakness and encouraged her to strength, as she did throughout the next forty-eight years. “Along with your love—the depth and beauty of which I am just coming to know,” Frances wrote in an early letter, “I want there to be dear a strength equal to the beauty, and individuality along with the duality.”
To encourage that strength and individuality, Frances—after remarking on “that beautiful mind of yours which so depreciates itself and which so few have ever tried to help grow”—insisted that Mary go to school. Mary had always believed that her mind was lax and untrained but had accepted without argument her father’s edict that college was unnecessary. However, now she followed Frances’s urgings and enrolled at the New York School of Civics and Philanthropy, where Frances herself had studied when she first went to New York, in 1902. “Then it will be easier to express yourself,” Frances wrote to Mary in 1905, arguing for the importance of higher education yet sensitively assuring her, “You dear heart I’m not thinking to change the real you a bit only the training.”
Frances’s hope for Mary was realized. Though Mary had been shy and self-effacing by all accounts, under Frances’s influence she forced herself to assume the presidency of the New York Women’s Trade Union League in 1906. She was especially terrified of the public speaking that a leadership position involved, but with Frances’s help and with her new formal training, she became an increasingly confident speaker and organizer. Along with Helen Marot, she was a leading figure in the 1909 Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, bringing many workers into the strike and arousing the sympathy of the public through what was by then her superlative oratorical skill. In 1911, after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, she was appointed to a nine-member New York State Factory Investigating Commission. She was its only female member and, according to various accounts, its moving force and its soul. The commission drafted legislation that revolutionized New York labor laws regarding wages and safety.
In 1914, Mary Dreier became the chair of the Industrial Section of the Woman Suffrage Party, and she began lecturing widely on the importance of the vote to the concerns of working women. In 1916 she became an officer in the New York Women’s City Club, where she started lifelong friendships with Frances Perkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other lesbian and bisexual women who shared her Progressive ideals. They aided her in building important coalitions to agitate for legislation that she regarded as vital, such as the eight-hour day and health insurance for workers. Dreier played a prominent role in helping make social causes into public policy virtually until her death, in 1963, when she was in her eighties.
But the powerful Mary Dreier of those years was very different from the diffident young woman who came into Frances Kellor’s life in 1904. Though Frances was only two years older than Mary, she was by far the more accomplished of the two when they met. She was living proof of what the liberal and radical daughters of the captains of industry had been insisting for more than a generation: if the poor were given adequate opportunities—which America could afford and the rich had the responsibility to help provide—their potential would be limitless. Mary Dreier was awed by Frances’s brilliance, but surely she was also excited by this working-class daughter who had achieved success with her tough-girl drive and realism. Frances was only thirty-one years old when they met, but she had already completed a law degree and several years of graduate study, written two books, and published several articles. In the dynamic between them, Mary was happy to let herself be taught by Frances, who in turn was thrilled to assume toward Mary the role of parent and teacher as well as lover.
Yet Mary had qualities that Frances believed she herself lacked and that she could not help admiring. Mary was classy, attractive, feminine. Frances saw her as “always so dear and bright and fresh and lovely and never seem[ing] too tired to be thoughtful and loving,” while she saw in herself an almost overly focused energy that she had had to develop in order to move beyond her early circumstances. Frances feared that her keen focus had made her “uninteresting and tiresome,” quite without the discursive charm that she believed was possessed by the wealthy young women with whom she worked in reform organizations such as the Women’s Municipal League. To Frances’s pleasure, though, Mary did not seem to notice her deficiencies. What Frances loved especially about their relationship, as she wrote in the summer of 1905, was that they did not need to “know all about the past and talk it over” and dwell on issues that might divide them, such as class differences (and perhaps Mary’s bisexuality?). Together they could be “so silently contented” and so happy in the moment—undoubtedly a luxury that the hard-striving, perpetually cogitating Frances seldom allowed herself outside of her connection with Mary Dreier.
Through the years, Frances Kellor and Mary Dreier worked side by side, whether in a formal capacity—as in 1912, when through the New York Women’s Trade Union League the two women fought for a legislative bill that would mandate a maximum forty-eight-hour work week—or in an informal capacity, when Mary used her social position to open doors to philanthropists, which Frances was able to keep open through her brilliant skills. But perhaps Mary’s most important function in Frances’s life was to heal the wounds inflicted by her painful childhood. As Frances wrote to Mary during a pre-Christmas depression early in their relationship, “I don’t do Christmas thoughts as you do, because there are always such sad and sometimes bitter memories of these days. They are going away with you in my life, but the memories do crowd in and make one feel a little cynical as to the whys and wherefores of being in the world at all.” But most often, she assured Mary, she understood the whys and wherefores through her: “It is so beautiful to be in a world dear that love makes so beautiful, tho I am sure dearie I don’t discern anything as beautiful as you are.”
The Profession of Defending the Underdog
As bitter as she continued to be about her early deprivation, Kellor was nevertheless able to ameliorate the deprivation of others significantly in the course of her long career. Almost all of her professional life was concerned with social betterment in some form. In her early work, she conducted research using the muckraking techniques she had learned at the University of Chicago and practiced at Hull House. Her aim was not only to discover social ills and bring them to public awareness, but also to mobilize support for reform legislation. Kellor proposed and lobbied for laws that affected women particularly, but she often went beyond that major concern to issues such as tenement housing conditions and child labor practices. For example, after providing the shocking facts and figures of the continuing abuse of child workers, she drafted and successfully lobbied for the Prentice-Tully Bill, which put teeth into existing laws regarding compulsory education and the minimum age of workers.
As general director of the Inter-Municipal Committee on Household Research—a group Kellor founded with Margaret Dreier, in which Mary was also active—she once again focused on the problems of female domestic workers. Perhaps she kept returning to the subject because she had learned about such problems up close as a child, and even living with the very wealthy Mary Dreier could not make her forget that knowledge. Through the Inter-Municipal Committee, Kellor planned and supervised investigations into conditions for domestic workers and set up models for similar investigations throughout the country.
Realizing that many of the labor problems she was dealing with piecemeal could be handled more effectively on a national level, Kellor was among the first to lobby the federal government for a Department of Labor. When government was not forthcoming in its solutions to various ills, she also worked to establish efficient private organizations. For example, in her book Out of Work she was especially concerned with the exploitation of African-American women who had come north. Her research led her to the conclusion that often they had been promised decent jobs by northern employment agencies, but once they arrived, they were forced to take work—usually as domestic servants—that exploited them mercilessly and left them without recourse. Kellor dubbed this “a new system of slavery.” In response to the situation, she and Mary Dreier worked in 1906 to instigate the formation of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, a society that helped new migrants find better jobs and provided them with social services and housing. The National League for the Protection of Colored Women was a forerunner of the National Urban League, with which it merged in 1911.
Kellor’s preoccupation in her work was always with the disadvantaged, the exploited, the underdog. Her own experiences as the child of a poor, unmarried woman and a “masculine” girl (an “invert”) in a small midwestern town where girls were supposed to be traditionally feminine may have formed her as a champion for the alienated, but her undistracted focus as well as her forceful rhetorical and administrative skills permitted her to succeed so well in that role. While the feminine woman remained the social and erotic ideal in the early twentieth century, there was, thanks to Kellor’s predecessors, such as Shaw, Willard, and Hay, enough space for the “unfeminine” woman of extraordinary talents to maneuver—and Kellor did just that, managing to win the professional admiration of influential politicians, who took her seriously and placed her in positions where she could effect important social changes.
In 1906, Kellor organized a major research project exposing the myriad ways in which new immigrants were exploited in America. She discovered that private bankers would “invest” the money of immigrant clients and never return it; employment agencies would send them to labor camps or sweatshops, where they were worked to death; agents would sell them bogus ship tickets for their families, who would then be left stranded in the old country; notaries public would fleece them with invalid leases or deeds of sale. Indeed, they were taken advantage of from the moment they set foot in America. Sleazy types would meet immigrants at the boat and sell them five-cent subway tickets for a dollar or five dollars apiece, or exchange the immigrants’ foreign money for counterfeit or Confederate bills.
Kellor shared her research findings with Theodore Roosevelt, who had become her friend and admirer since reading Out of Work, and he was soon extolling her as an expert on the problems of immigrants. The immigration historian John Higham observes that Kellor “did more than anyone else” to direct Roosevelt’s reformist zeal to the plight of urban immigrants. Roosevelt encouraged the governor of New York, Charles Hughes, to take Kellor as seriously as he himself did. In 1908, Hughes appointed her to a state commission looking into the living and working conditions of immigrants. When a bill was passed, through her maneuvering, creating a new Bureau of Industries and Immigration under the New York State Department of Labor, she was appointed its chief. She was thirty-six years old at the time, and women in most places in the United States still could not even vote. Yet Kellor became not only the first woman to head an executive department in New York, but also the state’s youngest division head.
In 1910, the year Kellor was named chief, over 580,000 immigrants landed on Ellis Island, a good many of them poor, gullible, and friendless. Her job was monumental, since her bureau was the coordinating agency for all problems concerning immigrants in the state: enforcing and/or creating laws dealing with wages and working conditions, preventing fraud, prosecuting those who played on the ignorance of the newcomers. But under her, the bureau’s interests went beyond legislative matters to practical services. For example, newly arrived immigrants were now rescued from the clutches of swindlers by welfare workers who spoke their language; the workers would meet the immigrants as they disembarked and direct them to special transfer facilities that would get them where they wanted to go in America. Kellor’s earlier research and (perhaps especially) her emotional connection to the alien and the powerless permitted her to anticipate their needs by such personal touches.
Kellor generally promoted welfare programs for the immigrants that were financed and administered by the state. But, again following the model of Jane Addams, she also believed it was important to get wealthy private citizens and philanthropic organizations to pitch in and help the underclass. In her work with immigrants, as in her earlier work, Kellor understood how to appeal to the rich for these ends. It did not hurt that she was able to get Mary Dreier involved. Dreier’s family connections and Kellor’s persuasive intelligence enabled them to interest men such as the head of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and the president of the National City Bank to throw their weight—financial and otherwise—behind Kellor’s various projects: bringing sports, music, and dancing into immigrant neighborhoods; training young immigrants in sanitation and as teachers of English to other immigrants; promoting the hiring of public welfare workers who spoke foreign languages and could communicate with the populations they were trying to serve.
Kellor truly believed that the newest Americans could be assimilated, and that education (which had rescued her from poverty and permitted her to assimilate with other classes) was as vital for them as it had been for her. She thus led campaigns to establish public schools in the immigrant neighborhoods and in labor camps where immigrant workers lived with their families. Because she thought it was important to educate the older generation as well as the young, she set up permanent evening classes in English and civics for immigrant adults. Her efforts were far-reaching: the establishment of night schools for the education of adult immigrants paved the way for the public night school movement in America, which has for generations benefited working-class adults in particular.
As she did in all her work, Kellor brought a liberal, humanistic approach to her job as chief of the Bureau of Industries and Immigration. Her work was not easy, because she had to battle rampant ethnic hatred, particularly from nativist groups such as the Immigration Restriction League, the American Protective Association, and, of course, the Ku Klux Klan, all of which shared the conviction that the only true Americans were of Teutonic origin. But through her settlement house work, Kellor had come to believe that southern and eastern European immigrants, no less than immigrants from the British Isles, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands, were capable of learning to value traditional American conceptions of freedom, individual liberty, and self-government. That many of the new immigrants were illiterate or unused to self-government was only a temporary phenomenon, she argued; soon they would become not Polish-American, say, but simply American. Just as the country had absorbed immigrants into its melting pot in the past, it would again—to everyone’s benefit, she believed. Her optimistic conviction about the simple and inevitable Americanization of even first-generation immigrants was perhaps somewhat naive, but there is no doubt that through her policies and the laws that her bureau helped get passed, she lightened the burdens of millions of immigrants.
Theodore Roosevelt’s continued admiration ushered in the third phase of Kellor’s career: she worked on a national level in Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, which supported federal intervention on social welfare issues. During the 1912 presidential campaign, Kellor, as one of the first American women to penetrate the inner circle of a national political party, wielded power that was virtually unprecedented for a female. Roosevelt claimed in his autobiography that until his association with Frances Kellor and Jane Addams he had favored woman suffrage “only tepidly,” but knowing them, he gladly included a suffrage plank on his platform. Both Kellor and Mary Dreier were delegates to the Progressive Party’s national convention, and through Roosevelt’s influence, Kellor and Jane Addams became national committeewomen to the Progressive Party. In that capacity Kellor drafted the platform planks in the areas of her vital interests: woman suffrage, federal protection of immigrants, workmen’s compensation, and a minimum wage.
Though Roosevelt lost his 1912 bid for the presidency to Woodrow Wilson, the fervor of the Progressive Party continued past the election and into the congressional elections of 1914. Frances Kellor and Jane Addams had written a proposal to establish through the party organization an Office of National Progressive Services. In 1913, Roosevelt named Kellor to direct that major new office, and she resigned as head of the Bureau of Industries and Immigration in order to take the job. Serving on the subcommittees under her jurisdiction were such luminaries as John Dewey, who worked with her on public education issues, and Jacob Riis, who worked with her on immigration issues. With the help of Progressive congressmen, Kellor produced a number of legislative proposals that were passed either in part or in whole by the national government. Her most impassioned interests as head of the National Progressive Services centered on workers, including issues such as a national minimum wage, unemployment and sickness insurance, and old age insurance—that is, social security. But she also promoted such forward-looking programs as school lunches for children.
By World War I, it was apparent that even though reformers were enthusiastic about the National Progressive Services, most Americans were not. Yet during Kellor’s tenure, she managed to do some lasting good, and the Progressive Party’s demise during World War I meant only that she went on to other work along similar lines. She was in the forefront of those who maintained a liberal commitment even when it was no longer in fashion. For example, she took a leadership role on interracial councils during the 1920s, wishing to foster and promulgate the concept that Americans came in various colors as well as ethnic backgrounds.
Frances Kellor was probably more intimately familiar with the sexologists’ pronouncements on female sexual inversion than any of the women discussed thus far. She was the first woman in the United States to write about female criminality, which sexologists and criminologists often associated with lesbianism. Her early studies, published while she was still a student at the University of Chicago—“Psychological and Environmental Study of Women Criminals” (1900) and Experimental Sociology (1901), which also deals with women criminals—were written in response to the work of Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist and the author of the widely translated book The Female Offender (1895). Lombroso’s book remarked repeatedly on the congenital sexual inversion of the female criminals he had studied, suggesting that the “bad genes” that led to criminality frequently also led to lesbianism. American criminologists of the day seemed to confirm this theory by revealing that homosexuality was rampant in women’s penal institutions, where Kellor did her early research. Therefore, it is remarkable that Kellor never once mentioned lesbianism among her subjects. Clearly, she could not bring herself to articulate the topic publicly.
In both of her early works on female criminality, however, she did challenge Lombroso’s general theory, widely shared by nineteenth-century sexologists, that human anomalies are congenital. She argued in social constructionist terms—a revolutionary position for the early twentieth century—saying that the individual is formed largely by “the tremendous forces of social and economic environment.” Kellor must have felt that her lesbianism was a logical response to the personal and impersonal facts of her life—to the emotions she had developed through the particulars of her family romance and to the options her society gave her. She refused what she must have seen as the victimization her mother endured at least partly because of her femininity and heterosexuality. She chose to have intimate relationships with women rather than to marry a man—which would have made her peripatetic, pressured work life virtually impossible in the early twentieth century. She was thus able to become a force for social good, far exceeding what most feminine heterosexual women of her day could possibly accomplish.
Therefore, Kellor must have been horrified by the knowledge that the sexologists considered women like her to be products of a hereditary taint. The kinds of relationships that soothed her “bitter memories” (as she wrote to Mary), and her “masculine” spirit of self-confidence and drive (which made her professional successes possible), were seen by “experts” as inextricably bound up with congenital criminality and degeneracy. How could she not have been shaken by their pronouncements?
The lesbians she knew intimately and socially were, of course, not in penal institutions or insane asylums (another favorite place in which the sexologists gathered their earliest “knowledge” about lesbianism); rather, like her, they were in settlement houses, reform organizations, and Progressive politics, trying to save the world. Yet the connection being made between homosexuality and congenital defect was so insistent that Kellor must have believed that she and many of her reformer friends would have been discredited if they acknowledged that they had anything in common with sexual inverts. It is sadly ironic that despite her strong voice, which corrected hateful stereotypes about minorities and defended those who had been made defenseless, she could not feel free to correct the sexologists’ pronouncements about “masculine,” women-loving women like herself.