“Find Their Place and Fall in Line”: The Revisioning of Women's Work inHerlandandEmma McChesney & Co.

Abstract

In 1910, at the outset of a turbulent American decade, Annie P. Hillis reviewed the liberating social advances being made by women during the Progressive Era. Writing in theOutlook, Hillis declared that the days of “idyllic, helpless femininity” were passing. As evidence she adduced the “six-foot captain of the basket-ball team” — who “laughs outright at the slender youth who would protect her” — and the “business woman,” who “can earn her own support and would be beholden to no one.” In both adult work and children's play, she claimed, American women were achieving “independence and equality with the other sex.” But in practically her next breath Hillis makes clear that women's liberation might have reached - or perhaps surpassed - its natural limits. Protesting that it is “too soon to predict the future” even as she reaffirms progressivism's fundamental ideology (“We are in a world where there is a definite purpose running through all events, where there is a definite march forward”), Hillis retreats to a distinctly unliberating position: it is for contemporary women, she insists, to “find their place and fall in line.”