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Michelle Christine Smith, "Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age" (Southern Illinois UP, 2021)
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- [00:01]
Michelle C. Smith
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- [00:32]
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- [01:35]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Hello everyone, and welcome to New Books in History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. My name is Jeanette Cockcroft and I am the. I am the host of this channel. Today we are talking with Michelle C. Smith, who is the author of the new book Utopian Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age. And so welcome, Michelle C. Smith, to the program.
- [02:10]
Michelle C. Smith
Thank you. It's great to be here.
- [02:12]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Oh, it's wonderful to have you. Let's start, Michelle, with your telling us a little bit about yourself.
- [02:20]
Michelle C. Smith
Okay. I grew up in a small town, Marietta, Ohio. It's a little town on the Ohio river right on the border with West Virginia. And my parents were both political science professors. So I sort of grew up with academia, as in the home, around the home, et cetera, and my sister, who the book is dedicated to. So that's where I grew up. I went to college at the University of Richmond in Virginia. That's where I studied English and sort of first really got into English. And I studied women's studies, was a part of a women's and gender sort of leadership program there called will, which is still going. It's a great place. And I got interested in what became my field of rhetoric and composition by working in the writing center at Richmond as a tutor. And I did some individual tutoring and was assigned to some English classes to do some work with the students on their writing. And that is when I learned that people who run writing centers get educated in rhetoric and composition. And so when I was finished with my undergraduate degree, I applied to rhetoric and composition programs and ended up getting my master's and Ph.D. at Penn State in the English department there, but with a concentration in rhetor Rhetoric and composition. So that's a little bit about. Yeah, where I. Where I came from and how I got where I went.
- [04:03]
Jeanette Cockcroft
That's really interesting. So tell us, where does this book come from? How did you happen to write this?
- [04:10]
Michelle C. Smith
So my interest in utopian communities or intentional communities was sort of sparked by a couple different things. I did some research projects with faculty as kind of a research assistant as an undergraduate graduate working on utopian literature. And when I was in college, my women's studies class visited an intentional community in Twin Oaks, Virginia. And I had never been to such a place in person. So that was very interesting to me, just a one day visit, but it stuck with me. And then the summer after my junior year in college, I stayed in a co housing community outside Washington D.C. which the community is called Blueberry Hill. And you know, I also, in my small town in Ohio, had not really seen co housing or other kind of models for living around me very much. So all of those experiences, but especially that summer I lived with a family in that community, I saw how, you know, they, this was a community where they owned the land jointly, but everyone owned their individual houses. So, you know, they sort of had a mixture of things they shared in common and then things that were sort of kept more privately. Pretty much everyone worked outside the community. Lots of people worked in bc, but two or three times a week they'd meet in the common house and have a meal there instead of everyone having to prepare their meals separately. And they did sort of outside lawn maintenance and things like that, sort of communally, rather than everyone owning their own lawnmower. And they had the parking lot, parking lots at the edges of the community so that the whole rest of the place was kind of a safe middle ground for children to run around and not worry about getting hit by cars and just everything about the community. I was really struck by what was possible when you made intentional choices like this, not only for yourself or your immediate family. But with other people who had shared goals with you. So that's where I got excited about that. And when I was a graduate student at Penn State studying feminist rhetorics, I knew that was going to be my area, with my background in gender studies and everything. But when I was thinking about topics that I found myself drawn to consistently, that I might look at from a feminist rhetorical perspective, the intentional communities came to mind. And I love the 19th century. So fortunately, that's a time when there's a lot of interesting things going on with utopian communities. So that is. Yeah, sort of. Sort of the beginning of the book.
- [06:56]
Jeanette Cockcroft
That sounds. That sounds like a really extraordinary opportunity for a young woman. I always like it when I. When I see people's research coming out of their life experiences, that strikes me as being not just very cool, but also really meaningful.
- [07:18]
Michelle C. Smith
Yeah, that's how it felt for me. I mean, when I was, you know, I knew that as a scholar of rhetoric, Rhetoric is so interdisciplinary that. And, you know, lots of disciplines are very interdisciplinary, but rhetoric, you know, my advisors were telling me, like, you could write about almost anything. You're going to bring this rhetorical perspective to it. And so I said, like, yeah, like, what is it that I want to write about? And, you know, in picking a dissertation topic, I knew this was something I was going to be living with for a long time, maybe even longer than I might have imagined. And, yeah, I wanted something where my. It wasn't just a sense of, like, oh, the field wants this, or the field needs this, or this is really popular right now, but sort of a. Like, where do I have that intrinsic sort of desire and curiosity? And gender is something I have intrinsic desire and curiosity about, and so is history, and so are our utopias. So that is how that worked.
- [08:23]
Jeanette Cockcroft
That's wonderful. It's the best possible graduate experience.
- [08:26]
Michelle C. Smith
It is. Yeah.
- [08:28]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Wonderful.
- [08:29]
Michelle C. Smith
And I said intentional communities to my advisor, who I'm sure she said that sounds great. Michelle, what's an intentional community?
- [08:36]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Well, that's a good place to start. What is an intentional community?
- [08:42]
Michelle C. Smith
So I use utopian community and intentional community pretty interchangeably. Neither of those terms would have been recognized, recognizable to the individuals in the 1840s. In the communities I study, they might have called what they were doing communal living or communalism, but those terms are a little vague today. And people. They might have even called it communism. And that term definitely confuses people today or sends them down the wrong path. So we sort of have to have an anachronistic term here. So utopian community Conveys what I mean. It's the most recognizable in a popular sense. Like, you know, if I'm chatting with somebody at bar, the utopian community will tell them what I'm looking at. But individuals living in these kinds of communities now favor the term intentional community because there's the stigma with utopia. Right. I mean, in, in this, maybe the last century and a half or so, but the 20th century and into the 21st century, there's a stigma that utopia is about perfection and it's about perfection at any cost. Right. And it's about one, often an authoritarian group or maybe leader. Right. Sort of imposing their perfect world on other people and making them fall in line. And so utopia now actually is pretty synonymous with dystopia for a lot of people. And so sometimes when I would say I'm studying utopian communities, people would say like, oh, like cults. And I was like, well, you know, I try to have a more open and nuanced view about the motivations that might have led people to choose to join these kinds of communities. So I go back and forth between them. Utopian gets across what I'm talking about intentional sort of honors again, the people choosing those kinds of living situations today, the things that got me so interested in them and dodges some of that utopian stigma. So I go back and forth there. But you know, kind of like I said earlier, an intentional community. The concept of an intentional community is based in the idea that some things you might want for your life can't be achieved solely on your own or in family units, but must be achieved by living amidst other people who share those goals. Generally it does involve sharing things in common, but what exactly is shared varies a lot by community, you know, so like I said, the co housing community I was in actually, you know, if you didn't know was a co housing community and you visited one of the families living in one of these houses, it would look pretty sort of typically suburban, except they don't have garages attached to their homes. You know, and you would have to sort of like look a little deeper to see the what's happening there. Right. But you know, other communities are more. Are committed to self subsistence. You know, they, yeah. May practice a particular religion, they share childcare income, their material goods, you know, so there's a whole range of practices that fall under that intentional community label.
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Jeanette Cockcroft
So let's talk about the three communities that you focused on in your book.
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Michelle C. Smith
Right.
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Jeanette Cockcroft
Brook Farm, Harmony Society and the Oneida Community. So why don't you start by telling Us why you chose each of those.
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Michelle C. Smith
So the Harmony Society I chose when I was a graduate student beginning to study these things. I didn't have a lot of funding for things like archival research. And so this was really one of the first communities I studied. And I found out that their archives, you know, having grown up in Ohio, being in school in Pennsylvania, I was familiar with the area and their archives were just a couple hours away outside of Pittsburgh from where I was in the middle of the state in school. And so I thought, you know, I first tackled that archive for a seminar paper in a historiography class I was in. And it really, I, you know, once I got into it, I said, like, this is what I want to be doing. And there were really interesting things happening there, particularly with the granddaughter of the founder of the community. And this is a community that lasted just over a century, so a very long lived community compared to most others. And. But the granddaughter of the founder sort of became an important figure in the community and gained some notoriety outside the community for her work making silk. So that that kind of drew me in. And then the other communities I study, I study Brook Farm. I had read Nathaniel Hawthorne's book based on Brook Farm as a college student. It was one of those sort of early, you know, early connections I made, sort of between utopian literature and actual utopian communities. And so it was familiar to me as sort of an English literature and rhetoric person. And so. And it's a very popular community. You know, it's better known now than a lot of the historical communities from this time period. So I chose that one as my second one. I was excited about its association with Transcendentalism, which I thought had important, had a lot of promise for women. I had a lot of women involved in that movement. And so I said, if I would be hoping to see interesting things going on with gender, this seems like a likely spot. And then. And the dissertation I wrote about the Neshoba community in Tennessee, which was founded by Frances Wright, who was an early public speaker. And so I had learned about her in studying women's rhetoric and then discovered that this woman's rhetorician had founded an interracial utopian community in Tennessee. And I thought, like, well, this is fabulous. But then once I got into it, the problem with Francis Wright's community was that it was so controversial at the time that basically all records have been razed to the ground. It was very short lived, very controversial. There are rumors of the races mixing. So it was a very interesting community. But what really is extant. What we still have from it are sort of her ideas and goals for it. And then ahead of time, like how she was trying to sell it to people like Jefferson when she visited him. So as she was making the rounds, she was trying to raise money for the community. We sort of have that vision, but we don't have much of what actually happened when the community came together, except that it caused a hue and a cry and fell apart pretty quickly. So when I, you know, I. I wrote that as a dissertation chapter, but I knew that, you know, I just wasn't able to do the same kind of archival excavation that was really important to me. And so when I was revising the book and returning to the book project, I swapped that chapter out and have a new chapter on the Oneida community in upstate New York, which, in the meantime, I mean, Oneida was also. Was very well known at the time and is slightly better known now, probably than the Harmony Society, at least not as well known as Brook Farm. But the Oneida community was also very interesting in terms of gender because they practiced an early form of birth control and, like, had some of the sort of explicit claims about wanting men and women doing the same kinds of work and things like that that I had sort of expected to find in Brook, but I actually found in this also very controversial community. So I swapped one controversial community for another one, but one with a lot more archives and archives that were locked for a long time until recently because the descendants of the members of the community didn't want the Oneida flatware company and other things associated with, you know, some of what had gone on in the community. So I kept the controversy, but a lot more archival material at Syracuse, in the Syracuse Library in New York. Just tons and tons of material there to work with. So that was a little better fit for me in the end. But at some point, I'm going to go back to Frances Wright and give her some attention and see if I can do something with that material because she was such a fascinating figure, even if her community didn't last long enough to leave the kinds of traces I would need for this particular project.
- [18:18]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Absolutely. Now, why focus on women's labor? That's a big part of this analysis. So can you talk about that a little bit?
- [18:29]
Michelle C. Smith
So the dissertation. I was very interested in rhetoric and space and rhetorics of space in these communities. Again, partly from my time, my own time in the cohousing community, and sort of seeing the layout of the community and how the kitchens were at the front of all the Houses, because that's where people spend time. And so you'd be more likely to, you know, see your neighbors were home and pop in and say hi if their kitchen was at the front of the house instead of the back. And those kinds of notions. And so I was very excited about space. And there was lots of really interesting work happening in rhetorical studies around space and gender at the time. And so that seemed like sort of a useful lens, but it was also a very broad lens in terms of what's happening with space and gender in these communities. And so really, by the end of the dissertation, I kind of knew what the dissertation should have been about, which is that, like, when. At least in the 19th century. But I would argue in a lot of times, in places when we talk about gender in space, we end up talking about labor. Spaces are really understood in terms of what kinds of bodies we think are supposed to be there and what kinds of practices, labor or leisure, we think they should be doing there. And so once that sort of clicked in my head, I was listening to a conference presentation someone else was giving somewhere, and I was like, like, it's about women's work. That's what this is about. And I realized, well, yeah, I'm talking about Gertrude Rapp and the Harmony Society and the work she did, and I'm talking about in the, you know, the silk industry that she led. And I'm talking about Brook Farm and, like, their battles over who was going to do the housework and could housework be noble, the way that they wanted to believe labor could be, like. And I just realized that thread was already. And I mean, Francis Wright, you know, looking at the dissertation. Francis Wright, that community was trying to end slavery. Right? So if that's not about labor, I don't know what, you know, I was like, this is all about labor. And so that's how I kind of came to that focus. And I also realized that I needed to do more work than to try to understand what was happening with labor, you know, in the country writ large, in order to reflect on what was unique or not about what was happening in these communities. So I knew that was the big task for the book revision was sort of that broader context in order to kind of put these communities in relief, you know, against that background. But once I clicked into place, it just. It made a lot of sense to me. And the focus on rhetoric of women's work has also been really interesting within the field of rhetorical studies, because feminist rhetoricians have spent a lot of time looking at you know, social movements women have been involved in as a way they came to voice suffrage, temperance, you know, women's activism in education, you know, those sorts of things. And it seemed like there was this sort of. We were very interested in this sort of civic and political roles of women, but we actually hadn't spent much time looking at women's economic situation, which is, of course, also an important part of gender oppression and gender relations, is economics. And so when I reached that, I also. Once I turned. Once I realized my project wanted to be about women's work, I sort of said, and, you know, actually, like, maybe this economic realm is something that deserves more attention generally, because we know that getting the vote didn't actually immediately overturn. Right. Gender inequality, gender hierarchies, et cetera. So it seems, you know, and. And if we want to understand the factors that matter in women's lives, of course, getting the vote matters in women's lives, but also, you know, having a roof over your head, being able to care for yourself or your family, you know, these things also matter. So.
- [22:45]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Absolutely. Now, in the context of each of these communities, you talk about work in a very specific sort of way.
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Michelle C. Smith
Right.
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Jeanette Cockcroft
So, you know, for example, when you were talking about Brook Farm, as you just noted, it's a. It's about housework. So let's explore that, because I think that's really fascinating.
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Michelle C. Smith
So, you know, I sort of realized I. Well, I didn't want to define work as work outside the home, because this already. I mean, you know, like the. The definitional or boundary work that we do in all of our disciplines. When we define rhetoric as public speechifying in front of large audiences, then we limit where we can look. And then we say, oh, we didn't find a lot of women, but that's not really that surprising. We sort of tie our hands a little bit. So in thinking about work, I really wanted to think about from a rhetorical perspective, like, what makes an activity credible as work, what makes something count as work. And I thought that to do that, we needed to look at some of the different forms of labor people do that are or are not in different times or different situations, considered real work. Right. Given credit as work, I focus on housework. Also, of course, I'm shaped by the kinds of work women were doing in these communities. And the women at Brook Farm were not riveting. They were not involved in intense industrial labor. So that wasn't an opportunity to look at that particular kind of labor. But they were very interested in, like I said before, in These questions about the transcendental ideal, which said that all work is. Has value and is ennobling to the laborer. And the women said, you know, you're telling me this, but yet you're not helping do the dishes still, you know, so they, they certainly felt a sort of lived conflict, right. Between what was being espoused and their own experience of their labor and the division of labor in the community. So I focus on housework there. There's also, like many women who didn't work outside the home, the women at Brook Farm were engaged in other projects in the home that were sort of, you know, remunerative. Right. So some of the women in the community started sewing silk purses and other small items or doing little artwork, and those would be sent to Boston to be sold on the market there. And so the women immediately felt that that work was more valuable and valued than the work they did in the home and strove to make that as much of their work as possible, often by recruiting other women to do more of the housework. Right. Because they were, well, we can make these, you know, they call it their fancy group. So they made little fancy things, fancy bags, fancy purses. They. We will do our fancy group work more and more. And if we could just find some nice working class women with experience doing some hard domestic labor, that would free us up to do that, and wouldn't that be better for everybody? So in some ways, they fought to be kind of included in the transcendental ideal. But the women who were able to sort of achieve that were the more privileged women who were part of the founding group at Brook Farm. And the group as a whole worked to recruit working class men and women to sort of help with the labor that they found less tasteful that they didn't have the actual skill to do. But they perhaps had underestimated the, you know, the knowledge that one needed to succeed in these endeavors. So. So, yeah, so that's, you know, sort of housework there. And then the, the Harmony society had the silk industry, like I said, that was run by Gertrude Rapp. And so huge.
- [27:21]
Jeanette Cockcroft
That was a huge revelation for me. I had no idea that silk culture.
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Michelle C. Smith
Yeah, it's so interesting. And it had this whole aura attached to it because silk was a fin and had often been imported from Europe. And so it was part of sort of proving that America wasn't this backwoods place dependent on Europe for its culture and its refinement. Right. Because we can make our own silk. And thus extrapolating outwards, you know, we can supply the finer things in life for ourselves. So that was very interesting and also I think, you know, from a rhetorical perspective, very savvy for an immigrant community. And Gertrude Rap really championed this endeavor to say we're going to attach ourselves to this industry and we're going to succeed in this industry that is seen as upholding American pride because they're a German community. But Gertrude spoke English, but most of the members of the community didn't speak or write English. And so they were very clearly other. They're very different. And this was a way of saying, you know, we're fighting for the American cause, you know, sort of thing. So yeah, so that was very interesting and was a chance to kind of think about what's happening during industrialization with these kinds of family or community based endeavors like the silk industry, the harmony society, which then shuts down in the second half of the 19th century when the community is still going on, but the silk industry industry closes there as factories start taking up that kind of work more and more. And these sort of hand spinning silk and other kinds of textile production being done in similar ways that other homes and communities couldn't keep up, you know, just couldn't compete in that regard. So they sort of proved it was doable here and then people made it doable faster, faster, more efficiently, et cetera, et cetera, you know. But yeah, so that was. That was an interesting sort of. Yeah. Consideration that really shows the transition from these more sort of local home kinds of production. The house really house production. But of course the Harmony society was on a larger scale because it was communal. So it's really something in between the kind of home production families and individual women were doing around the country. And then the factory system that came, you know, became dominant.
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- [31:13]
Michelle C. Smith
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- [32:10]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Society fit into this framework? This is the one that I find most intriguing.
- [32:18]
Michelle C. Smith
Well, that makes me glad I added it then. Yeah, this one. The Oneida Community. I focused initially on child care in this community and maybe just because of the really amazing sort of depth and richness of the archive, it was sort of difficult to only talk about one thing there because there was just so much. And there are also a fairly long lived community with very large with a lot of members. So I started out looking at childcare because I thought this was also important work that isn't always counted as work. And so I thought again to keep sort of challenging this idea that work for pay is work or whatnot, or work outside the home is real work. So I started looking at childcare there because they had a practice of birth control called male continence and it was very successful as a mode of birth control. And the idea was that in the early years of the community, before they really had things up and running, they didn't want to have a lot of children that they couldn't care for and provide for. And then as they sort of Moved along, the community progressed. It became really very well known for its wealth. They, you know, they sort of loosened those practices and did start raising children. But they had, you know, a children's house where the children, you know, basically, once they were weaned, they were sent to the children's house to live. And they were sort of encouraged to interact with all the adults in the community as, like, role models and mentors and family members and not to have a particularly super tight, intimate connection with their biological parents. And so there was this sense of communal child rearing that I was very interested in. Like, what does that mean for women's work? And of course, one of the things that means for women's work is when childcare doesn't dominate women's work, or when childcare and housework don't dominate women's work, that women are more able to take on and explore other kinds of pursuits. And women at Oneida do a wider. Are engaged in a wider range of industries than at any of the other communities I looked at. And not just while there are still some. There was still some hierarchy and there were some individuals who are more privileged than others. You know, it wasn't like at the Harmony Society where Gertrude Rapp is running the. The silk industry and all the other, you know, girls work for her. Right. It was sort of of, you know, women kind of dispersed in finding what kind of work they were interested in. So a lot of them did do, you know, Oneida is a place where women might have been riveting and welding. Right. So, you know, they did work in the trap shop, which eventually the metal work they did making these animal traps was also. Is sort of what evolved into the cutlery, silverware production that the Oneida Corporation still does today. So that metalwork stayed central to them. And women were teachers and women were writers. They had a community newspaper. Women were editors and, you know, copy editors, writers, publisher. You know, they had a lot of roles in that printing, in the printing office and in the newspaper. They, you know, they printed their own newspaper and also wrote content for it.
- [36:20]
Jeanette Cockcroft
So.
- [36:20]
Michelle C. Smith
And we have all of those. I mean, so, again, the archival resources here, you know, you could keep going back to the Oneida sort of. Well, many times as a scholar, and not have exhausted.
- [36:31]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Oh, that's fabulous.
- [36:33]
Michelle C. Smith
Available resources. Yeah. So it's an exciting. I do have a chapter coming out in an edited collection that is me sort of going and exploring one of those paths with Oneida that I couldn't take for this book. Book, which is a chapter. It's in a book on reproductive rhetoric. So it makes sense. And because of my initial interest, really sparking from that method of birth control, I was just fascinated that one of the early advocates for birth control was the male leader of this utopian community, and that the later birth control movement really gave credit to Oneida and Noyes, the leader, as an inspiration for. For the birth control efforts more broadly. So that was so interesting to me. But then in the book, I kind of have to move pretty swiftly from just quickly going through the nuts and bolts of the birth control and then getting to what were the consequences for women in their work, because already there's so much to say about that that I didn't get to spend as much time on sort of the birth control itself. And so. And what that meant for women and what it meant for women who wanted children in that era where the community was sort of saying, we're not ready to support them, or women who were less privileged in the community hierarchy and thus were not deemed to be fit to become mothers. This is like the eugenic, sort of implicit ideals of the community that later become an explicit eugenic project. So I was glad because I tried in the book to acknowledge this sort of the control happening at Oneida around sexuality and parenting, but also acknowledging at the same time some of the things that women were freed up to do due to those restrictions. And then this other chapter is sort of of, you know, exploring in a little more detail the sort of more. Some of the more shadowy aspects of what was going on here. Right. Because there are some pretty horrific sort of stories. So once I didn't have to try to tell the whole story of women's work in the community, I was, like, free to do a little bit more with that kind of darker aspect there. So.
- [39:04]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Yep, that's fascinating. How is it you think that. That these communities are defined as failures? I mean, each of them undertakes something that they think is plausible and doable. And yet you talk in the book about the fact that they're failures.
- [39:27]
Michelle C. Smith
Well, this is interesting. I mean, my sense is that this term in part becomes associated with utopianism, with that kind of turn to dystopia that I talked about early in our conversation. And so I think that there has been a tendency that. And maybe more popular than a scholarly tendency, really, like a popular tendency. Tendency to sort of say, like, well, that would never work. Or like a celibate community. Like, what? What's that? That's just gonna die out, you know, like what? You know, and so there's this idea that continuation is the goal, you know, that, like, continuation and stasis are the goal. Right, to carry on living. Like, if you decided to live in a certain way. Well, are people still living that way now? No, of course not. It could have never worked, you know, and so it's really that mindful mindset that I wanted to challenge. But there is a sense that these communities, there's something about, like, oh, these people wanted to live this way. And then there's sort of an immediate sort of hunger to hear, like, well, when did it go bad? Because I know it must have, you know, kind of idea. And I say it's popular more than scholarly. And I think that's true. I do think we're pessimistic about utopian thought and utopian programs right now, and, you know, for some very reasonable, justifiable reasons. But I do also think that that sort of. There has been also, in people who studied these communities, a little bit of a preoccupation with sort of. Of when it broke down, you know, which I think is natural, you know, like, that obviously, like, founding a community is a big deal, and dissolving a community is a big deal. So sometimes those points get the most attention, and the middle is a little bit, you know, lost. So those are some of the things I was trying to speak to there. And particularly, you know, just wanting to think about, like. Like, what is lost when we fixate on what might seem like an inevitable failure, whereas it, like, seems what's inevitable is change, you know, so inevitably, these communities changed as society at large has changed, you know, but. Yeah, but, you know, a lot of these, you know, so it's just about trying to sort of take a more nuanced understanding of. Of what these communities were going for and that, like, all of us, like, they were trying to survive, you know. So the Brook Farm community, or the Harmony Society in particular, is a group of German immigrants, many of whom don't speak the language, they don't know the country. They don't, you know, and they. Their chances of survival as immigrants in this mansion were better banded together. Right. So, yeah, So I think that this idea that the goal was for them to be here in 2022, living as they were in 1848, is not something we should put on them and that we should say, these are people adapting to an environment and a time and getting. Getting through their lives, trying to do something with their lives like we all are, you know, and change is inevitable. But. But, yeah, that's. That's kind of what I was thinking about with the failure idea.
- [43:20]
Jeanette Cockcroft
In what way do you think these are not failed communities?
- [43:24]
Michelle C. Smith
I think they are not failed communities insofar as I think they have an outsized impact on the society around them. And so, like I talked about with the United community and birth control. Right. You know, I'm less interested in whether. I mean, Noise really believed in birth control and wanted to, you know, he believed in it. I sometimes wonder if he believed in it for the sort of women's liberation ends he would sometimes talk about or whether he believed in it more as an end to his own goals. But he believed in it very deeply. So he would be, I think, gratified to know that he was an influence for the birth control movement moving forward. And he might see that as a success. But even if he didn't see that as a success, I think we can look at that as a success and say these communities and experimented in ways that helped other people think of what was possible in a new way and sort of expand the boundaries of the possible, particularly in questions surrounding gender and work. So, you know, the Brook Farm community had one of the first kindergartens in the US and was a force behind that sort of evolution. The Harmony Society, as I talked about, was used at the federal level as an example of the kinds of production that could be successful and were worth investing in in the US and that women could be part of that work was also testified before Congress. I think that, again, that these communities, partly because at the time, anyway, and though the Harmony Society is. Is. Is not well known at all today, at the time, these communities were such objects of curiosity that people. They made people sort of spank. Well, would I do that? You know, could I live that way?
- [45:41]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Or.
- [45:41]
Michelle C. Smith
Or is that right? Or can that be right? Or, you know, and they. They sparked sort of lines of thought and possibilities for the people around them. So in that sense, I think they're very much a success. I, you know, I sort of. Yeah, I want to kind of think about success in a different way than sort of narrowly like, what did these people set out to do? And I want to think of success in a broader way of, like, what did they make possible for other people? You know, what was that kind of legacy? Regardless of whether they wanted it to be their legacy.
- [46:24]
Jeanette Cockcroft
How does an exploration of these communities extend our understanding of the way work is configured in terms of race and gender and class? That's an interesting part of the book as well.
- [46:39]
Michelle C. Smith
I think one of the recurring threads in the book is that when women, and here in these communities these were mostly white, middle, sometimes upper class women, when those kinds of women agitate for increased rights, for increased access to particular careers and to education with men, right, it becomes this sort of trade off where their gains in that sort of battle of the genders, if we want to think of it that way, but their gains to realms previously controlled by or dominated by men sort of requires or at least occasioned in these cases, a delegation of work that was seen as less valuable to poorer women, to working class women and to women of color. This is a strand through all the communities, really. It started for me when I was looking at Brook Farm and I found mention of one of those working class women who I said they had recruited to the community, being like, sent back home because she wasn't working hard enough or something, which never seemed to happen to the upper class women. Apparently they all did their work and didn't complain. But this woman is sent home with a pretty damning letter from Ripley, the. The male founder of the community. The Ripley. George and Sophia Rickley founded the community together. But George Ripley sort of sent this woman back home and said, like, she is not what you. You promised us. We expected a hearty Granite State girl. And she, you know, and the more delicate women do not complain of these, of these labors. So I then started thinking when I saw that dynamic at play in the Brook Farm community, I was kind of on the lookout because it took me a while to find that it wasn't until there's a Sterling Delano, who's a great Brook Farm scholar, had pointed me to a piece where he documented every extant letter we have from a woman who is at Brook Farm. And, you know, I. I had thought I knew most of this story. And then when I found. I found a letter from her to her family about how she felt that there was still a hierarchy and an aristocracy play in the community. And then I found the letter from George Ripley, sort of firing this woman who wasn't officially a worker there, but, you know, was a border who worked in exchange for her education. And he said, like, she's not working hard enough. We're sending her home. And so that made me think, like, wow, what if I had? And that changed how I saw the work of the women in the fancy group. You know, it became. Became not just sort of, oh, they found this work that's more that they like more that they appreciate more than their housework. It was like they like, you know, society is valuing work for the market. Over this domestic subsistence labor. And they're now trying to figure out, well, who can do that work for us so that we can be freed up to do this other kind of work. And that's, of course, the kind of mindset of women staying at home so men can grow up to work. Right. That we've seen in gender relations. So what I saw was that kind of replication, except rather than it being between the genders, it was between different kinds of women. And that's, you know, one of the sort of sad parts of this project was realizing how often those divides, those gender divides about what kinds of work is valued and not. Rather than revaluing the work work, we redistribute it, you know, and we don't redistribute it evenly across people, everyone. We redistribute it to certain classes and kinds and types of women. However those are defined. They're defined differently, you know, for different communities and in different groups. But. But I saw similar things happening with Oneida, with finding they had, like, start they had a head housekeeper and, like, nobody. You know, they used to take turns doing that position because they knew it was really. It's really hard work. So the woman just traded it off like, it's thankless. It's hard, it's stressful. But then this new woman, who'd had professional work as a domestic servant, joins the community, and turns out she's just really well suited to this position. And so she becomes the permanent one. And they hire black laundress to come in and do their laundry once a week. And they, you know, and so as soon as they're able, these more affluent women are paying or whatever means they have, you know, making. I mean, the situation living and working in this community might still have been better than domestic service in other households outside this community. So women may have been willing to do that work because in a lot of ways, Oneida was a good employer compared to other options women had. But they weren't going to be on the same level, obviously, as the women in the community working in the printing house. Right. And similar things happened in the Harmony Society as well. There's some really troubling stuff in the Harmony Society about sort of a trade in German maids at the time. Right. And people sort of these wealthier German in communities wanting to hire German mates because it's easier to communicate with them and sort of like having their ear to the ground in terms of, like, when has a new sort of shipment of immigrants arrived and can we, like, who's it we're going to send you one, and you send us. You know, there's a very, you know, so. Yeah, so that. That was a recurring theme here, was this sort of improving things for women meant improving things for someone, and often at the cost of other women. Right.
- [53:10]
Jeanette Cockcroft
And so these are the configurations that then shape industrial work in this country. Right.
- [53:17]
Michelle C. Smith
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there's this sense that the story of labor and industrialization certainly does have an impact on gender roles. But I left the project feeling like maybe even more significant is the change in relations among women that divide between the lady and the domestic or the domestic and the factory worker and these sort of classes of women. And of course, in more recent times, we've also seen women divided by whether their work, where their work occurs. Really, you know, so I really sort of see that tracing back to this historical moment. Yeah.
- [54:04]
Jeanette Cockcroft
That continues to dog feminism right into the contemporary period.
- [54:10]
Michelle C. Smith
Absolutely.
- [54:12]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Let me ask you one last thing. This phrase, ecologies of gender, that was very intriguing to me, and I'm not exactly sure what you meant by it.
- [54:27]
Michelle C. Smith
Okay. In rhetorical studies, we have sort of embraced ecological methodologies for research. And so, you know, rather than studying texts or language kind of in isolation, attempting to trace the interactions between texts and material factors, objects, technologies, et cetera. And so I, you know, the work I do is very much inspired by those kinds of ecological views of rhetoric as sort of, you know, part of this bigger network and context. Not sort of above or apart from it. Right. Not sort of. There's language and then there's what was really happening. It's like we try to, you know, collapse that distinction a little bit in that more sort of ecological model. And then as I was working and thinking about rhetorics of gender, it struck me that, in fact, I'm interested in thinking about gender in that way as well, that gender is, of course, as feminism has said for a long time, not sort of an innate or essential thing, but it's something that's produced, constructed. And the ecological aspect there with ecologies of gender, where I'm trying to say that sort of it's produced and constructed in tension with a lot of other factors. Right. Including, as we were talking about, that you can't look at constructions of gender and sort of set aside race or class or that you can't look at constructions of gender and not look at what's happening, like the changes associated with industrialization, with urbanization, et cetera. Right. So that's sort of the basic concept of what I'm going for There is that sort of the interaction that kind of produces a particular construct of gender in a certain moment.
- [56:56]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Fascinating methodology. Well, I think I've taken up enough of your time, and it's about time for me to let you go. But before I do, what do you have going on now? What are you working on next?
- [57:10]
Michelle C. Smith
So I'm. I've done a little bit of work looking at gendered labor in the context of World War II. And so my next project, I am anticipating a project spinning out from some work I've done around the Rosie the Riveter image and our sort of popular misunderstanding of that image as having been part of the methods used to recruit women into the factory. Whereas actually, the poster was a work incentive poster in a factory meant to get women who were all women and men who are already at work to keep working and not go on strike and not fight with their supervisors. So it's very. You know, so I'm just really. When I learned about this misunderstanding, I was like, but I know that that poster was used to get women to go to the factory. And it's like, how do I know that? I think I know this thing, but in fact, it's wrong, so I can't know it. And when was I taught that anyway? I don't really remember it being part of my curriculum. You know, I've sort of just imbibed this understanding from the culture around me. So I'm really interested in looking at. But the role this particular poster did play, which was a pretty small role, actually, in a Pittsburgh factory. So Pittsburgh is a constant in my research. And then the image disappears for decades and then is unearthed, we think, in the early 90s from the National Archives, as you know, as part of a sort of like, feminist moment at that time. Right. And sort of a sign of what women had done in the past. And then got this kind of the attribution of having been a recruitment poster or whatever attached to it at that point in. In the 1990s, and of course, has only taken off since there. So I'm really interested in the work that this image does around narratives of gendered labor, women leaving the home to go to work, that kind of idea. And why we needed this icon badly enough to invent it when it wasn't necessarily readily available. I'm looking at next.
- [59:40]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Oh, good luck with that. That sounds like a wonderful project.
- [59:44]
Michelle C. Smith
Thank you.
- [59:45]
Jeanette Cockcroft
Ah, well, I shall let you go. Michel, thank you so much for your time. Enjoy the rest of your day.
- [59:53]
Michelle C. Smith
Thank you very much. Great to be here.