1. Hillis, Annie P., “The Serious Note in the Education of Women,” Outlook, 04 11, 1910, 852, 853.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., 852, 854.

3. Ross, Steven J., “Struggles for the Screen: Workers, Radicals, and the Political Uses of Silent Film,” American Historical Review 96 (04 1991): 341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Oppenheim, James, “Till To-Morrow,” Outlook, 02 24, 1912, 471.Google Scholar

5. As Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick suggest in their introduction to 1915, The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art & the New Theatre in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, mainstream American culture's “almost infinite capacity to absorb - some would say co-opt - the radical edge of any new social, political, or cultural movement” was particularly evident in the 1910s (8).

6. See Guttmann, Allen, A Whole New Ballgame: An Interpretation of American Sports (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), ch. 7Google Scholar; Riess, Steven A., City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), ch. 5Google Scholar; and Bowen, Wilbur P. and Mitchell, Elmer D., The Theory of Organized Play: Its Nature and Significance (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1927), ch. 1.Google Scholar

7. Gulick, Luther Halsey, A Philosophy of Play (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), xiv.Google Scholar

8. Lee, Joseph, Play in Education (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 445Google Scholar; “Boys' Clubs” (editorial), Outlook, 11 1, 1916, 484Google Scholar; and Lee, , Play in Education (discussing Hall), viiiGoogle Scholar. Even when the play group targeted is described as “children,” the play reformers generally only discuss “boy” issues. The extent to which boys stand in for both genders in the 1910s is exemplified in an Outlook article “about children” called “Who Broke the Window?” which elaborates Prof. G. W. Fiske's theory that human “race epochs” can be correlated to “boy epochs” of development (January 1, 1913, 75–78). The “boy epochs” Fiske delineates also correspond closely to the developmental model that play theorists proposed in the 1910s.

9. Curtis, Henry S., Education Through Play (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 11Google Scholar. G. T. W. Patrick addressed this state of affairs head on in his article “The Psychology of Relaxation” for Popular Science Monthly 84 (06 1914)Google Scholar, arguing that men and women possess intrinsically different vectors of force, or “motives”:

Possibly the objection may be made that … our attention has been directed too much to the plays of boys and that the plays of girls have been disregarded. An important distinction arises here.… The life of stress and effort and self-direction of which play is the antithesis is essentially masculine. Man represents the centrifugal motive; he stands for movement, change, variety, adaptation; for activity, tension, and effort. Woman represents the centripetal motive; she stands for passivity, permanence, stability, repose, relaxation, rest. She has greater measure and harmony. She has therefore less need of the release afforded by primitive forms of activity. (601)

10. Ibid., 7, 227.

11. Mrozek, Donald J., Sport and American Mentality, 1880–1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 137, 149Google Scholar; and Dye, Nancy S., introduction, Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era, ed. Frankel, Noralee and Dye, Nancy S. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 5.Google Scholar

12. Outlook, 01 1, 1910, 17Google Scholar; Mott, Frank Luther, A History of American Magazines. Vol. III: 1865–1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 430.Google Scholar

13. Fessenden, Elizabeth M., “The Girl and the Camp,” Outlook, 05 27, 1911, 165, 169Google Scholar; Coale, Anna Worthington, “Life in a Girls' Camp,” Outlook, 07 25, 1914, 713Google Scholar; and Northend, Mary Harrod, “How to Choose a Summer Camp for Boys or Girls,” Outlook, 04 28, 1915, 1007.Google Scholar

14. Fessenden, , “Girl and the Camp,” 173Google Scholar; Outlook, 05 25, 1912, 158Google Scholar; and Coale, , “Life in a Girls' Camp,” 716, 717 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

15. Northend, , “How to Choose a Summer Camp,” 1005, 1004.Google Scholar

16. “The American Woman and Her Home,” Outlook, 09 17, 1910, 111Google Scholar; and “Home Making the Woman's Profession,” Outlook, 12 16, 1911, 909.Google Scholar

17. Outlook, 12 16, 1911, 909Google Scholar. The very first article in the “Home Making the Woman's Profession” series emphatically signaled the subordination of liberation to duty and efficiency in its closing paragraph: “We do not realize that a home is more than a complicated force-pump for getting what we want out of life, that it is a machine by which we are to return to the community what it has a right to expect from us, and efficient or not according to its social output” (Bruere, Martha Bensley, “What Is Home For?” Outlook, 12 16, 1911, 914).Google Scholar

18. Chattle, Ellen, “How to Make Play Out of Work,” Outlook, 08 23, 1916, 997Google Scholar; “Competition,” 02 30, 1916, 1052Google Scholar; and “Joy of Self-Activity,” 09 13, 1916, 105.Google Scholar

19. Arco Wand vacuum cleaner advertisement, Outlook, 01 24, 1917, 157.Google Scholar

20. Read, Mary L., “What Every Mother Knows,” Outlook, 02 3, 1912, 276Google Scholar. As Theodore Roosevelt himself opined in the Outlook (01 3, 1914)Google Scholar, the “new woman” threatened the American “race” to the extent that she sacrificed “old” female values. “New” was fine - as long as nothing “old” really changed. “I am a very firm believer in the new woman,” claimed Roosevelt, “but the only new woman in whom I believe is she who adds new qualities to, and does not try to substitute them for, the primal, the fundamental virtues of the ‘old’ woman - she who was the wife, the mother, the sweetheart, the sister, of the past” (33).

21. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2, ed. Lauter, Paul et al. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1990), 762, 763, 762Google Scholar. Subsequent page references to this story are cited parenthetically in the text.

22. For an excellent reading of the relationship between imagination, art, and gender in “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” see Shumaker, Conrad's essay, “‘Too Terribly Good to be Printed’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, ed. Meyering, Sheryl L. (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 64–74.Google Scholar

23. That housewives recognized this infantilization is made clear in a remarkable letter received by Theodore Roosevelt in 1913 and reprinted in the Outlook later that year (June 28) in an installment of his “Chapters of a Possible Autobiography.” In response to Roosevelt's call for American women to have large families (any woman who bore fewer than three children he declared sterile), the writer, who describes herself as “only one of thousands of middle-class respectable women who give their lives to raise a nice family,” explains how intensive domestic work coupled with a lack of intellectual stimulus made her practically another child in her own home.

I have had nine children, did all my own work, including washing, ironing, housecleaning, and the care of the little ones as they came along, which was about every two years; also sewed everything they wore.… I also helped them all in their school work, and started them in music, etc. But as they grew older I got behind the times. I never belonged to a club or a society or lodge, nor went to any one's house scarcely; there wasn't time. In consequence, I knew nothing that was going on in the town, much less the events of the country.… My husband more and more declined to discuss things with m e.… So here I am, at forty-five years, hopelessly dull and uninteresting, while he can mix with the brightest minds in the country.… No woman can keep up with things who never talks with any one but young children. (476–77)

24. Haney-Peritz, Janice, “Monumental Feminism and Literature's Ancestral House: Another Look at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,”Google Scholar in Meyering, , Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 101.Google Scholar

25. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland (1915; rept. New York: Pantheon, 1979), 1Google Scholar. Subsequent page references to the novel are cited parenthetically in the text. For a very interesting analysis of the connection between Gilman's feminism, her literary style, and the idiom of surveillance (the “look”) in the novel, see Wilson, Christopher P.'s essay, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Steady Burghers: The Terrain of Herland,”Google Scholar in Meyering, , Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 173–90.Google Scholar

26. Sears, John F., Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 119.Google Scholar

27. Kasson, John F., Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 12, 13.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., 18, 17.

29. Ibid., 18.

30. Ibid., 11. Gary Scharnhorst also argues that Gilman's “ideal metropolis” owes much to the principles of urban planning expressed at the Columbia Exposition. See Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 91–92.Google Scholar

31. Progressive theory (and the Herland theory) of child raising differed significantly, however, from the official government position articulated in the pamphlets issued by the newly formed Children's Bureau beginning in 1913. According to Martha Wolfenstein, mothers in the 1910s were told by the government not to play excessively with their babies because play “carried the overtones of feared erotic excitement.” See “The Emergence of Fun Morality,” in Mass Leisure, ed. Larrabee, Eric and Meyersohn, Rolf (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), 90.Google Scholar

32. Lee, for example, notes in Play in Education that children like “to walk along a board laid on the ground, as it is still quite a feat to walk such a straight and narrow path.… There should be banks or slanting boards, or something else of the cellar door variety, … in every playground to which small children are invited” (105–6).

33. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935), 29, 66, 67.Google Scholar

34. Cromie, William J., “Eight Minutes' Common-Sense Exercise for the Nervous Woman,” Outlook, 07 25, 1914, 730.Google Scholar

35. Lee, , Play in Education, 6, 5Google Scholar; and Abbott, Lyman, “A Journal's Autobiography,” Outlook, 01 5, 1895, 9.Google Scholar

36. Glassberg, David, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 1, 67.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., 60.

38. Ibid., 5.

39. Ibid., 135.

40. There was apparently some jockeying between the two organizations over which was founded first. The Book of the Camp Fire Girls (rev. ed. [New York: Camp Fire Girls, 1933])Google Scholar claims 1911 as the group's year of origin, but Bowen and Mitchell report in Theory of Organized Play (122) that it was officially founded in March 1912, the same month that Juliette Low enrolled the “first patrols” of Girl Guides in Savannah, Georgia (see Scouting for Girls: Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts [New York: Girl Scouts, 1920], 1).Google Scholar

41. Davis, Hartley and MrsGulick, Luther Halsey, “The Camp-Fire Girls,” Outlook, 05 25, 1912, 182, 189Google Scholar. Davis and Gulick suggest that “proper training in housework” also required a certain mental disposition in the Camp Fire Girls. “The reason a woman dislikes housework,” they argued, “is because she has let it master her, let it become humdrum; she has let the spirit of discovery and romance go out of it. Instead of making her mind bend to this she has gone into other things and let the home go” (189).

42. Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 6.Google Scholar

43. “The Adventure of Home-Making,” Outlook, 05 25, 1912, 158.Google Scholar

44. Bowen, and Mitchell, , Theory of Organized Play, 121–22.Google Scholar

45. Indeed, facing the title page of Scouting for Girls is “The First Girl Scout in the New World,” Magdelaine de Vercheres, who is pictured wearing a scout's hat and holding a rifle — an image one would never find in the Camp Fire Girls' handbook.

46. See Scouting for Girls, 545Google Scholar. The Scouts also recommended, among other texts, Ward, Lester's Psychic Factors of Civilization and Applied SociologyGoogle Scholar, Mill, John Stuart's The Subjection of WomenGoogle Scholar, Schreiner, Olive's Woman and. LaborGoogle Scholar, Dewey, John's School and SocietyGoogle Scholar, and James, William's Principles of PsychologyGoogle Scholar. No books by G. Stanley Hall, Luther Gulick, Joseph Lee, or Henry Curtis are recommended.

47. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, ed. Degler, Carl N. (1898; rept. New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 157.Google Scholar

48. By distinguishing child-raising from maternity, Gilman also resolves what Erica Wimbush argues is a crucial concern for mothers: how to create social outlets when one is a full-time caretaker of children. Herland's redefinition of motherhood eliminates the “framework of constraints which shape and fragment women's social networks and leisure opportunities” by giving to each woman a job of her own — and to no woman the full- time position of 1910s mother-housewife. See “Mothers Meeting,” in Relative Freedoms: Women and Leisure, ed. Wimbush, Erica and Talbot, Margaret (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1988), 73.Google Scholar

49. In “workshop,” moreover, Gilman here adds precisely the term missing from the narrator's similar description of her bedroom in “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

50. Gulick, Luther, “New Athletes,” Outlook, 07 15, 1911, 600Google Scholar; and Lee, , Play in Education, 140, 335, 340.Google Scholar

51. Gulick, , Philosophy of Play, 93Google Scholar; and Lee, , Play in Education, 400, 401.Google Scholar

52. “Capital and Labor Hand in Hand,” (editorial), Outlook, 02 23, 1916, 410Google Scholar; Dewhurst, Mary, “Bridgeport and the Eight-Hour Day,” Outlook, 07 5, 1916, 555Google Scholar; Robb, Julia Everts, “Our House in Order,” Outlook, 05 28, 1910, 360Google Scholar; and Bruere, Martha Bensley, “First Aid to the Home Budget-Maker,” Outlook, 09 21, 1912, 126.Google Scholar

53. Lane, Ann J., To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon, 1990), p. 230Google Scholar; and Gilman, , Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 303, 303–4, 308, 305.Google Scholar

54. Ferber, Edna, Emma McChesney & Co. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1915), 12Google Scholar. Subsequent page references to the novel are cited parenthetically in the text.

55. Oriard, Michael, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 203.Google Scholar

56. Naumburg, Margaret, “Maria Montessori: Friend of Children,” Outlook, 12 13, 1913, 799Google Scholar; and “A Professional Woman of Yesterday and a Group of Professional Women of To-Day,” Outlook, 10 1, 1919, 186–87Google Scholar. I do not mean to suggest that acting does not require intelligence, merely that in the popular conception actors (and particularly actresses) are more commonly associated with emotion than intellect. Other nondomestic women who appeared in the pages of the Outlook in the 1910s were similarly belittled, particularly the English suffragettes whose militancy included disruptive acts of civil disobedience. The Outlook routinely denounced these women as savage, wild, and dangerously anarchistic. That the journal simultaneously praised women for getting in touch with their “wild” side through vigorous outdoor “boy” play and activities like camping did not seem to strike anyone as an inconsistency.

57. “Maude Adams,” Webster's American Biographies, ed. Van Doren, Charles (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam, 1975), 10–11.Google Scholar

58. Schreiner, Olive, Woman and Labor (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1911), 81.Google Scholar

59. Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; rept. New York: Penguin, 1979), 59–60.Google Scholar

60. Miss Smalley's paean to work echoes Ferber, 's own attitude as later expressed in A Peculiar Treasure (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1939)Google Scholar: “With millions of others I have been a work worshipper,” Ferber declared:

Work and more work. Work was a sedative, a stimulant, an escape, an exercise, a diversion, a passion.… I've worked daily for over a quarter of a century, and loved it. I've worked while ill in bed, while traveling in Europe, riding on trains. I've written in woodsheds, bathrooms, cabins, compartments, bedrooms, living rooms, gardens, porches, decks, hotels, newspaper offices, theaters, kitchens. Nothing in my world was so satisfactory, so lasting and sustaining as work. (11)

61. According to Amott, Teresa L. and Matthaei, Julie A.'s Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States (Boston: South End, 1991)Google Scholar, Emma would be part of the very small 3 percent of working white American women who held managerial positions during the 1910s (125). But what makes Emma's identity as a 1910s female craftsperson particularly ironic is that women were being brought into the workplace as unskilled laborers in the 1910s in a strategic effort to displace male craftsmen who were more likely to strike, unionize, and resist shop discipline. “During World War I,” Jeffrey Haydu reports, “employers praised women workers for their willingness to do as they were told.” See Between Craft and Class: Skilled Workers and Factory Politics in the United States and Britain, 1890–1922 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 42.Google Scholar

62. Veblen, , Theory of the Leisure Class, 182Google Scholar. The appearance of minstrel humor in Ferber's novel also corresponds to a disturbing increase in such jokes in the Outlook over the course of the 1910s, particularly after the journal added a humor section at the end of each issue, beginning in 1911.

63. Ibid., 148.

64. Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turnof-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 178, 163, 164, 55.Google Scholar

65. Even during Emma's most vivid (and potentially homoerotic) recognition of sisterhood — when she meets Hortense, her kindred spirit in idleness, and kisses, “very tenderly, [her] pretty, puckered lips” - she insists that each woman must resolve her dilemma alone: “You're asking a great big question,” she tells Hortense. “I can answer it for myself, but I can't answer it for you” (134).

66. One problem Emma does have, however, is with Jock and Grace's babyraising style, which seems patterned more after the series of “play-is-too-exciting” 1910s government pamphlets (see note 31) than the “all-play-is-good-play” theories of the play reformers. When Emma first sees her granddaughter and reaches down to pick her up out of her crib, Grace prevents the encounter with what would surely have been a government-approved rationale: “‘Not now!’ Grace said hastily. ‘We never play with her just before feeding-time. We find that it excites her, and that's bad for her digestion’” (224).

67. Ida M. Tarbell's series, which originally ran in the American Magazine (like Ferber's earlier McChesney stories), argued that “learning, business careers, political and industrial activities — none of these things is more than incidental in the national task of woman. Her great task is to prepare the citizen.” See The Business of Being a Woman (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 81.Google Scholar

68. Ferber, , Peculiar Treasure, 173–74, 174.Google Scholar

69. In the final story of Ferber, 's Roast Beef Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1913)Google Scholar Emma tells T. A., “We've been good business chums, you and I. I hope we always shall be. I can imagine nothing more beautiful on this earth for a woman than being married to a man she cares for and who cares for her. But, T. A., you're not the man” (287–88).

70. Ferber, , Peculiar Treasure, 196.Google Scholar Ferber reports that Roosevelt, whom she met as a journalist at the 1912 Republican National Convention in Chicago, told her that he thought Emma “ought to marry again. What became of her first husband? Die? Or did she divorce him? You never said. Anyway, she's got to marry T. A. Buck. An immensely vital woman. She could manage business and marriage all right.”

71. Ibid., 174.

72. Ibid., 223. Ferber later notes that in 1925 when she was doing research for her novel Show Boat (1926)Google Scholar, she arrived unannounced dockside at the James Adams Floating Palace. Introducing herself to the owner as Edna Ferber, a writer, down from New York to write about show boats, he exclaimed “Well, my God! … Emma McChesney!” (291).

73. Wilson, , “Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Steady Burghers,” 184.Google Scholar

74. Gilman, , Forerunner (02 1916): 56Google Scholar; quoted in Scharnhorst, , Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 105.Google Scholar