Frances Kellor Founded Modern America - Part 3

In this part Kellor:

1) Defeats scientific racism,
2) Greets Ellis Island generation
3) Founds the National Urban League

Enjoy!

John K. Press, Ph.D.

Frances Kellor Founded Modern America - Part 2

In this episode Kellor:

1) Launches women's sports
2) Puts suffrage on National party platforms
3) Introduces women's political leadership

Enjoy friends!

John K. Press, Ph.D.
www.franceskellor.com

Frances Kellor Founded Modern America Video Series Introduced

Video introducing my Frances Kellor Video channel

Happy Birthday Frances Kellor

October 23rd, 1873, Alice Frances Kellor entered the world she would do so much to reshape.  Birthing a new American social order in the Progressive Era via the Americanization movement (1906 - 1921) and later connecting the world with her international arbitration work, this Founding Mother helped create modern America and a good deal of the current global order.

Every piece of Kellor's work defended social justice.  She founded the National Urban League. She worked in Southern African - American prisons when no one else considered it.  She pioneered women's basketball with the hope of reforming women.  She launched Service Learning in New York State.  She publicly led Presidential campaigns to show women capable.  She ran immigrant media in America.  She got women's voting on national political party platforms for the first times. She launched an alternative form of government in America. She developed multiculturalism in practice and modern culturally- neutral citizenship.

Repeating the pronoun "she" at the beginning of the above sentences highlights Kellor's function as a transgender lesbian.  Upon going to college, she changed her above name to Frances Kellor.  In many photos she is dressed as a man.  And, took the masculine role in her 47 year relationship with Mary Dreier.

As a gift to Kellor, on this occasion of her 128th birthday, I wish to offer you a birthday gift.  If you'd read a copy of her biography and tell someone about this LGBT role model, I'll give you a free copy of Founding Mother: Frances Kellor and the Creation of Modern America; just email me your name and address.

In honor of her, visit www.franceskellor.com.  Happy Birthday!!

John K. Press, Ph.D.

Cheryl Hicks' Talk With You Like a Woman

Cheryl Hicks’ book, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890 – 1935 contrasts Victoria Earle Matthews (1861 – 1907) and Frances Alice Kellor (1873 – 1952) in its third chapter.  This work illuminates many of the joys and challenges biographers encounter.  We will look at these.  But Hicks' work also illustrates the modern historical tendency to judge historical characters by how well they live up to modern authors’ reform agendas.  As such, this analysis of Hicks’ third chapter will provide a cautionary tale.

Matthews worked alongside Kellor to protect African American women in New York City at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.  Matthews was an African American woman born into slavery.  Kellor was white. Hicks’ uses the pair to typify the races’ different approaches to helping African American women in the Progressive Era.  Hicks argues that Matthews’ empowered African American women more; whereas Kellor saw them as racially prone to mischief and immorality. 

Imagine if someone slandered a person you love dearly. Biographers, hopefully, love their subjects as I do mine.  In researching my biography of Kellor, Founding Mother, I found no evidence of what I would call racism.  But if your loved-one uttered something off-color, you might ignore it.  Emotional investments in story lines run alongside historians’ dry considerations of facts.  Falling in love with your subject, and so writing to vindicate them, is a trap for biographers.  I will send the following with as much integrity as my heart can muster. 

Hicks tells us that Kellor shooting herself in the hand led to her adoption by the Eddy sisters.  This adoption, in turn, led to Kellor’s becoming the woman we know today.  The evidence for this shooting story comes from one article.  And all the other evidence counters it.  Hicks, as others, got the story from Ellen Fitzpatrick’s book Endless Crusade, which popularized it.  When one deals in primary sources, they see that what secondary sources report ‘ain’t necessarily so.’  As Hicks’ main goal was not to explore Kellor’s early life, the oversight is forgiven.  But, glosses’ reliance on secondary sources has dangers. One of the joys of biography is seeing how stories get formed and passed along. 

In my biography of Kellor, Founding Mother, I can be accused of the same failure to get details right that I noted Hicks engaged in with the shooting story.  I provided a systematized overview of all of Kellor’s life in support of a general thesis about her having been an intellectual, cultivating progressive democracy, who created much of the modern world.  Hicks narrowed in on a particular portion of Kellor’s life and rhetoric.  This led her to archives I did not find.  And, more significantly, she interrogated her sources with different questions than I did.  Focused interrogations can provide insights that sprawling overviews miss. 

In some regards, different questions and archives make historical investigations bottomless.  But all historical interpretations must stay within the limits of some reigning guidelines.  In this respect, I find Hicks has committed some misdemeanors. 

Non-fiction must employ logical consistency.  We are an evidence-based discipline.  Hicks has assertions that are, in my humble opinion, seemingly contradicted by evidence she provides in the very same chapter of Talk With You Like a Woman.  On page 113 Hicks quotes Kellor to the effect that penal reform will not happen while the State gets so much revenue from it.  But on page 116, she claims that Kellor never considered the influence that corrupt policing had on incarceration.  Unless I failed to see a subtlety, Hicks’ contradicts her own claim herein. And Hicks's assertions are also contradicted by evidence outside of the chapter under consideration.

Hicks claims that that Kellor “characterized black people as without individual agency to improve themselves and fight for their rights.”[i] But in Kellor’s major work on African-Americans, Experimental Sociology, she suggests that African-American ministers could improve the parishioner, “not by characterizing him as a transgressor, but by enabling him to reason out his own position” on social problems.[ii] Elsewhere Kellor advocated “educational opportunity for training of Negro social workers, and social science education for Negro leaders in other walks of life to prepare them for leadership in urban centers.”[iii] Broad sweeping statements require more than internal logic, they require familiarity with the preponderance of evidence. 

Though more subtle, employing absolutes in analysis undermines historical analysis as much as failures to note evidence. Hicks specifically castigates Kellor for not recognizing the agency of incarcerated women.  Well, the horrid truth of the matter is that late twentieth century African American women incarcerated in southern penitentiaries had very little agency.  Kellor herself had to drop out of high school to help support her family via domestic labor and Matthews was born into slavery. Agency has degrees.  A debate over how much agency she saw would have provided more illumination than castigating Kellor for not seeing everyone as having agency.

Hicks also falls into the all-too-common modern trap of seeing normative cultural criticism as simply racist and irrational. This sort of analysis sits particularly strangely next to Hicks' praising Kellor’s taking us from a biological view of crime to one wherein environment plays a role in fomenting criminality.  If we judge criminality, we need to see that poor morals do exist.  We, in turn, would not be totally out of line in judging the environs that foster criminality. To be sure, economics contribute to these poor environs.  But if we believe in agency, we have to accept that cultural values also impact individuals’ moral choices.  It disempowers us to dismiss discussions of values simply as signs of irrationality. 

 

Hicks' most provocative thesis is the one wherein she accuses Kellor of working on African American women’s morals more than she fights discrimination and exploitation in order to demonstrate that Kellor had racist leanings.  Kellor’s work to regulate employment agencies shows that she fought exploitation.  And, her cutting edge exposes of “White Slavery” show that Kellor was not only concerned with African American morals. If true, the idea that white reformers attacked morals more than African American reformers would demonstrate bias and merit interest.  But, Hicks' third chapter fails to provide statistical or convincing qualitative evidence of this assertion.

Talk With You Like a Woman provides a service, as we should interrogate historical texts for hidden messages.  And, indeed, white reformers might have emphasized morals more than African American ones in order to elide discussions of structural inequality.  But Hicks sometimes loses credibility in a desire to prove her assertions. And, in probing the historical impact of values and exploitation one could do worse than to respect the views of your historical subjects.  Hicks instead dismisses all discussions of morals out-of-hand.  History has a lot to teach us.  But, to get such benefits we must listen to historical figures prior to judging them.  

---

[i] Hicks, Cheryl D., Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890 – 1935, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 114.

[ii] Kellor, Frances, Experimental Sociology: Descriptive and Analytic (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1901), 211

[iii] Weiss, Nancy, The National Urban League, 1910 – 1940, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 42, 43

[iv] Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)

Kellor Starts a Fascinating LGBT Discussion

Recently I created some entries on Frances Kellor a fantastic timeline project.  My entry on Kellor's co-founding the National Urban League in 1910 got included in the women's timeline.  The entry on Kellor's first book being published in 1901, got included in the African - American timeline.  It likely got put there as the book concerns the plight of African - American women in southern penitentiaries.
The time line organizers are working on an LGBT timeline.

The editor of the timeline had removed Kellor's sexuality from the initial timeline entries I wrote.  The editor explained that if you click on the timeline, it expands, and then Kellor's LGBT status was mentioned. It was not put on the time line itself, he explained, because her LGBT status did not seem relevant to the accomplishments.  We do not, after all, put all peoples' sexuality on the timeline.

In response, I noted that both Kellor's first book and the group she merged to form the National Urban League, aimed to help women exclusively.  Kellor only lived with women. As a transgender person from childhood, she wrote a lot about gender.   Her identity was intimately tied to the projects she chose to pursue.

Then, via email, the woman that introduced an even more radical suggestion:

Why not just have one timeline for all groups?

The suggestion was put forward because straight students will not look at the LGBT timeline.  This leaves prejudice unchallenged.  Furthermore, LGBT students would feel better about themselves if their experience were normalized.

I agree with the idea of inclusion.  But, taken to the extreme, this thought would mean the disappearance of African - American Studies and Women's departments.  And, I would argue that Kellor's LGBT status informed her aiming to create an inclusive form of Americanization.  But, we do not want to see LGBT persons as necessarily separate and different.

What do you think?  Can you come up with arguments for either side?

Capsule, Kellor, and You!

My two most recent books concern the formation of identity in modernity.  “Capsule: A Search for Identity in Modern Japan” follows Adam and John as they systematically discuss sources of identity on psychedelics.   “Founding Mother: Frances Kellor and the Creation of Modern America,” looks at ways in which Kellor (1873 – 1952) presaged, promoted, and formed our modern sense of American identity.

The quintessential characteristic of modernity is choice.  You can live as a gay Buddhist all the while working as a corporate executive, voting Republican, and have surrogates create multiple children for you.  You could also stay single, vote Democrat, and spend the majority of your time improving your drinking skills.  Nothing fetters your self-invention in this modern world. 

In its valuing of choice, modernism contradicts traditionalism.  In traditional societies men and women know their roles. They have children.  The men work and the women raise the children. In this sense, child-free transgender persons represent the final frontier of modernity, of the Western modern experience.  They have become the essential Americans.  No tradition binds them.

Kellor lived with a woman, had no children, and dressed as a man.  And, she ran the Americanization movement that greeted immigrants from 1906 – 1921.  100 million Americans trace their heritage to Ellis Island.  During Ellis Island’s hey day she ran New York’s Bureau of Industries and Immigrants; the official governmental agency in charge of immigrant affairs.   This is only one way that this LGBT role model created America’s modern self-image.

The definition of American identity Kellor promulgated eschewed traditional American sources of identity.  Rather than our old Protestant definition, she taught that Americans were those who participated in political activism.  Her multicultural parades showed that being American required no particular sets of beliefs.  To her, as to us, our national identity solely stems from our label as a democracy.

This lack of judgment made a world safe for modern gender benders with alternative life styles like Kellor.  So from where do we get our moorings today? 

In Capsule Adam and I discuss our lack of belonging.  He lives in Japan and so is clearly out of place.  And, I am bewildered by the dizzying array of choices my life presents.  In a backdrop of adventure in Japan, we ponder if marriage, LGBT lifestyles, travel, nationalism, our personal stories, our work, or many other sources of identity could provide us with a fulfilling sense of community, belonging, meaning in live, or identity. 

To understand Capsule’s conclusions, you must read the book.  But know that the search, the fact that we must self-identify fuels every fun moment.  And, Kellor necessarily launched the search that the Capsule chronicles.  Once we have left our traditional moorings, we get faced with choice.  Founding Mother helps us understand where our modernity comes from.  Capsule helps chronicle the adventure that being let loose from roles entails. Both help us to understand who are and might become in this modern world.  

Frances Kellor Interrupted

The new edition of Founding Mother has been published.  The last blog post, simply relayed the new introduction.  As book introductions went, it rocked the house.  As a blog post, it ran a bit long. And, due to my occupied by publishing, it stayed up for months.  For all of those who were considering becoming regular readers, I apologize.  I am back.  Now if you want the new introduction, just buy the new version of Founding Mother.  The blog is back.

In the interim, I have also published another book, Capsule: A Search for Identity in Modern Japan.  This project also kept me from writing Kellor blog posts.  And, as this blog provides my main word-based source of expression, I will introduce those interested in Kellor to capsule at a later date, on this blog.  Suffice it to now say, that both Kellor and Capsule converge in the theme of my publishing company, Social Books; the attempt to understand what holds society together.

Today, I launched another phase of my Kellor promotion campaign.  I began bringing Kellor and my other books to the streets of New York.  I set up a table and chair and offered such information to the Columbia University community.  I sold zero books in my hour and a half selling.  But, I met some very interesting people.  I have always been attracted to the extravagant, eccentric folks in the world.  And, if nothing else, selling Founding Mother on the street seems to introduce one to eccentrics.

Transgender Pronoun Disclaimer Help

Hello Readers, Colleagues, and Friends,


I am especially asking the LGBT scholarly community to critique the "Note on Pronouns" that will appear on in the final edition of Frances Kellor's biography, Founding Mother.   


Your comments are greatly appreciated.


Thanks in advance,


Here is the text:

A Note on Pronouns

Throughout this text, though transgender, Frances Kellor will be referenced with the feminine pronouns, “she,” “her,” and, “herself.” Kellor was the male persona in her forty-seven year relationship with Mary Dreier, argued publically that women needed to take on more “masculine” characteristics, changed her name from the feminine “Alice” to the more masculine “Frances,” and dressed in men’s clothes.  Within the broad parameters of today’s language, Kellor was transgender. But, the past lives with different terms. In Kellor’s time, sex change operations did not yet exist.  As such, to expect her to even consider becoming anatomically male is anachronistic. In her ongoing focus on gender roles, Kellor called herself “masculine,” but she never called herself “male.” Therefore, throughout this text we shall use feminine pronouns in reference to Kellor.

Frances Kellor Lives in Lady Gaga and Media Bias

     
The transformation of a photograph of the transgender lesbian activist Frances Kellor (1873 – 1952) raises important questions concerning our current perceptions of gender. The photograph shows Kellor in her full masculine guise.[i] Months thereafter, a line-drawing rendition of the image appeared.[ii]  The contrast between the photograph and the line-drawing provides a contrast between what Kellor really looked like and an artistic rendition for public consumption.  The newspaper redrew her as they would like to have seen a female leader – they feminized this giant figure.

 Frances Kellor had her likeness in the newspapers a lot. She garnered wide publicity for her studies of African-American women in southern penitentiaries. Her work leading up to the founding of the National Urban League received a lot of attention, as did her undercover work for domestic workers.  When Theodore Roosevelt told crowds about Kellor taking him to homeless shelters, she needed no introduction. But at the time of the images, the public would have read of her monthly as the head of the movement that greeted immigrants –the Americanization movement.

  At first glance, the photograph of Kellor could be one of a man.  An acquaintance from childhood claimed dislike of young Kellor was widespread because she walked and talked like a boy.  Here we see a thirty-seven year old Kellor dressed in men’s clothes.  She has a tie on and a shirt that accentuates extremely broad shoulders.   Kellor worked as a basketball coach and rowed on the Cornell boating team she helped form. The expression on this reformer’s face gives the impression that she is busy and businesslike. The mess on her desk provides another clue that could lead an unsuspecting      reader to think ‘male.’

  The drawing rendition of this photograph could not but retain the masculine tie and shirt.  But several essentials have been feminized. While a Romanesque slightly florid design accompanies the photo, we now have a full flower below Kellor and another above her. The hair has feminized streaks and sits a bit looser. The eyebrows have been stylized. And the harried expression in the photograph has been transmuted into a welcoming feminine smile. 

  The differences between the photo and the drawing are subtle.  To totally feminize this short-haired, tie wearing, broad-shouldered person, would require a total falsification.  And, perhaps my perception that a slight hint of breasts appears in the drawn version verges on the paranoid. Furthermore, we could argue that newspapers routinely work to make people appear more appealing.  Still, in this case, it seems the aggregate of the small changes, making Kellor more “appealing,” results in a much more feminine appearance overall.

  Today it is still news when Lady Gaga or others act as ‘gender benders.’  The media’s shock reflects our fascination with this chink in the armor of the dominant gender paradigm.  And while at first blush the rare attention to ‘gender benders’ might not seem socially significant, it should raise our awareness of the constancy of normalized gender depictions. Female celebrities’ femininity, their dress, and make-up get hyped daily. And while these women may love performing these gender roles, Kellor’s photograph makeover reminds us of the longstanding and constant public pressure to bend girls to femininity and alternatives. 

 But what does this matter?

 The line-drawing rendition of the photograph sat above a headline that read, “Little Sister of the Alien Comes to Teach.” No male in Kellor’s position would have been described as a “Little Brother.” Upon becoming the first woman to head a New York State Bureau, a surprised New York Times told readers that they would have thought, “the head of the New York State Bureau of Industries and Immigration would be some big strong man.”[iii] Earlier the Times exclaimed that if anyone had suggested a year earlier that a woman would have had held Kellor’s position in a Presidential campaign they would have been “thought mad.”[iv] With such a powerful known history, this depiction of Kellor as “little” and familial illustrates how feminized images of women can diminish them.

 Not only can the reception of Kellor’s masculine image tell us something about gender perceptions, her example can remind us of means to fight it. Kellor advocated using sports – particularly basketball - to make women more masculine. Specifically, she thought sports would get women out of the home and off gossipy topics and into the street publically fighting injustices. In 1916 Kellor opened a women’s campaign for Presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes with a “historical discussion of men’s campaign trains and the masculine way of working.”[v] And, of course, in contrast to the more feminine settlement house workers around her, Kellor often dressed as a man. 

 The drawing of Kellor identifies her as “Miss Frances Alice Kellor.” As a teen Kellor wrote under the name of ‘Alice Kellar.’ After leaving her hometown, she only wrote under the more androgynous name Frances Kellor. This feminized depiction of this ‘little sister’ marked her gender by revising her girlish first name. Not all women would be comfortable changing names, dressing as a man, or adopting “masculine” styles of activism; nor should they have to. But we would do well to understand the dynamics in public presentations of gender. To this end, we would do well to teach Kellor’s example and depictions of gender in today’s media.

  Finally, these comparisons model something of a victory in public perception. The photograph appeared in The New York Times in April of 1912. The article it illustrated showed Kellor scouring filthy conditions in industrial sites.  The ‘Little Sister’ drawing was printed in The Los Angeles Times in November of 1913. The text noted Kellor was a “remarkable woman” for leading a New York Bureau. Kellor’s level of achievement was new for women on the West Coast. The drawing and the headline had not yet caught up with the possibility of powerful masculine women. But the photo running earlier in the East Coast paper showed that activism had laid the groundwork for seeing women as powerful.

[i] “Preying Upon Helpless Immigrants After They Land,” The New York Times, April 14, 1912, SM10

[ii] “Little Sister of the Alien Comes to Teach,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1913, II1

[iii] “A Good Samaritan for Hapless Alien Hosts is Miss Frances Kellor,” New – York Tribune, May 12, 1912, A4

[iv] “Women as A Factor In the Political Campaign:  For the First Time in American History Their Active Support Is Openly Sought by All Parties,” The New York Times, Sept. 1,1912, SM9

[v] “Tells Why Hughes Asks Women’s Aid,” The New York Times, Aug. 7, 1916, 9

Frances Kellor’s Americanization Versus Tony Kaye’s Detachment

Detachment, by Tony Kaye and Carl Lund, ranks among the most depressing films ever made.  It includes two suicides, overdosing, incest, whores, the beating of whores, and, worst of all, apathy.

Much of the social detachment that the film highlights comes from the absurdity of trying to foster growth in mechanized schools.   The out-of-control students’ rebellion mirrors rather than challenges the surrounding ugliness.  But if Detachment blamed the school system for all of the characters’ pain, the film would just be preachy.  This amazing piece of art explores all of our slow daily deaths.

But while institutions do not cause our existential dilemmas, a day at the DMV will show you the connection between systems and death. 

Frances Alice Kellor (1873 – 1952) was a asocial scientist and educational theorist.  And while the system caused Detachment’s educators to simply worry about State test scores, Kellor promulgated systems that took the human element into account – that sought to combat the very lethargy and mood of Kaye and Lund portray.

“Some women are abnormally sensitive and introspective or morbid, and live too much on the subjective side of life” Kellor noted in her book Athletic Games in the Education of Women.[i]  Detachment exposes just these sorts of brooding states. Kellor called these states “feminine” and sought to combat them by getting women involved in action via sports.  In a phrase, “When down do!”

Basketball instills the aggressive characteristics Kellor found feminine girls lacked.  Among the desired characteristics were focus, energy, and initiative.  And, the newly constituted active female would have mastery of herself. “All forms of ball-playing, from simple chase-ball up to basket-ball,” Kellor wrote in 1901, “require self control.”[ii]

In trying to make women as effective as marines, Kellor could be said to mirror one of the systemic traps that Detachment poetically shows us.  In the film, exterior goals remove all internal values and feelings. Brutal self-control for the sake of a goal can kill.  

But from her earliest sports writing, Kellor insisted on the “play-spirit.”  This coach never wanted her girls to become “too hard and business-like.”[iii] Eerily predicting Detachment, she wrote that without the “play-spirit” humans were “a machine, which without its operator either runs amuck or becomes a mere automaton.”[iv] And, on Detachment’s very subject, she worried that “the growing commercial spirit in education institutions so hurries students that they have no time for games.”[v]

By way of a cure, Kellor enthused that sports “Seem to awaken a spirit of play and fun which brings a level of healthy excitement to even the most sluggish natures.”[vi] Yet, insightfully, she held that even in sports, “The play-spirit is yielding to the work-spirit and the loss of individual play spirit has not yet found its counterpart in the proportionate increase of the group play-spirit.”[vii]

We can see herein that Kellor promoted a complicated nuanced vision of play that deserves analysis. And, if we wish to use social systems, such as sport, to enliven people, we would do well to investigate the values that competition and other structural trappings our sports and other endeavors tend to cultivate. If nothing else, Detachment should encourage such discussions.  

Kellor’s greatest notoriety came from leading the Americanization movement.  From 1906 – 1921 this movement greeted immigrants and attempted to assimilate them into our national fiber. This systemic confrontation with alienation parallels took on the sort of alienation Detachment depicted, only on a national level. 

While other’s brand of Americanization sought to make immigrants conform culturally, Kellor Americanized via having immigrants and long-term Americans work collectively on progressive reform efforts.  Thus, quite literally, her Americanization work became a direct analogy to team building in sports.  When undertaken with a play – spirit such reform could bring a joyous sense of vibrancy to our national community. 

In Detachment, the lead character finds some salvation via helping his father and a prostitute.  No impersonal goals, such as saving the homeless, grace the screen.  Such distant impossible goals would only insert more distance into any of the immediately needy Detachment characters.  Whereas Kellor dealt in social justice writ large, she also understood the importance of human connection. 

Kellor’s Neighborhood Americanization project urged long-term American women to spend time in the homes of immigrant women. Beautifully, she advocated entering immigrants’ homes without an agenda. She told her female audiences, that immigrants just wanted “friendliness and new contacts.”[viii] The public social scientist told them to visit, “Not with the idea of uplift, but of getting acquainted for mutual benefit.”[ix]

Detachment painfully exposed the intimate pain and distance in modern lives. As a sensitive humanist Kellor realized that large systems could not solve deeply intimate psychic issues. She asked, “Have we gotten into the habit of asking too much of our government – thinking of it as something impersonal – unfailing, like air and sunshine? The governments cannot impersonally Americanize the home.”

Yet as a sensitive soul, Kellor understood, as Detachment conveyed, that social systems can promote or hinder well-being. This creative sociologist began the national celebration called Americanization Day. And she often crowed that immigrants told her “it was the first time they had shaken hands with an American!”[x] We can create venues for intimacy. And, sports, with a proper sense of the play-spirit, can promote well – being. Thus can the social sciences combat Detachment. 

---

[i] Dudley, Gertrude, Kellor, Frances, Athletic Games in the Education of Women, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 135

[ii] Kellor, Frances, Experimental Sociology: Descriptive and Analytic (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1901), 29

[iii] “Ethical Value of Sports for Women,” American Physical Education Review, Vol. 11, 1906, 162

[iv] Dudley, Gertrude, Kellor, Frances, Athletic Games in the Education of Women, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 142

[v] Dudley, Gertrude, Kellor, Frances, Athletic Games in the Education of Women, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 38

[vi] Ibid, pg. 238

[vii] Ibid., pg. 5

[viii] Ibid pg.,17.

[ix] Kellor, Frances, “Americanization of Women: A Discussion of an Emergency Created by Granting the Vote to Women in New York State,” Address delivered before the New York State Woman’s Suffrage Party in New York City, Jan. 17, 1918, 7

[x] Kellor, Frances, Neighborhood Americanization: A Discussion of the Alien in a New Country and of the Native in His Home Country, An address to the Colony Club in New York City, Feb. 8, 1918; in Wisconsin State Historical Society Pamphlet Collection #54-997, 8

Frances Kellor at the 4th Annual Leon Levy Biography Conference

Today my never-ending quest to make Frances Kellor known, led me to a wonderful time at the 4^th Annual Leon Levy Biography Conference.  I passed out over 100 fliers introducing Kellor.  Each offered a heavily discounted copy of my Kellor biography, Founding Mother, to people who would email me.  But I also got a lot of intellectual stimulation.  And that is always wonderful.

My encounter with the famous E. L. Doctorow provided great entertainment.  He argued for the importance of story.  He noted the cultural importance of Homer’s stories and how boring factual depictions would be.  Realities result from Jesus’ virgin birth.  And, in contrast to scientists’ big bang, he championed author’s little bangs – creation in the form of a sentence.

I told him that as a historian, I was a bit offended.  Did my research mean nothing?  Is there no virtue in trying as best as possible to uncover the past on its own terms?  Though we ultimately interpret, shouldn’t we historians strive to be as faithful to the past as possible?  And, for good measure, I asked him if storytellers were central to culture, why is writing better than TV?

First he asked me to rephrase the question while “he thought up an answer.”  I returned to the microphone and repeated the question.  He then answered, “If you’re asking how much research I do, the answer is ‘as little as possible.’”  Someone from the audience shouted, “That wasn’t the question!”  He retorted, “Well that’s the question I wanted to answer!”  Wow!  Fun!!

During the body of Doctorow’s speech he said that the fictional and real person had nothing to do with each other.  That was a relief.  I have often wondered if Frances Kellor would punch me for distorting her if she came back from the grave.  Doctorow essentially said, “Don’t worry about it.  All is fiction. The real person and the fictional character we create based on them have nothing to do with each other. Invent.”  I am not sure I am comfortable with that answer.

Still my portrait of Kellor is a portrait that locates her in the debates happening between today’s scholars.  Specifically, these scholars discuss progressive intellectuals’ search for progressive democracy in the era of mass Federal programs.  And while this question resonates in our time of apathy and disconnect from political elections, it also resonated with progressive activists.

A gossip-ladened session looked into biographies of the singers Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett and asked what people you write about would think of your depiction.  In writing about Tony Bennett, David Evanier even has to worry about what a living subject would think of his biography.  Though safely dead and without relatives or mafia ties, I often ask, "What would Kellor think of my depiction of her as a transgender lesbian?"

Kellor might have a beef with me for discussing her lesbianism publically.  But, in today’s world she’d likely get married to Mary Dreier.  And, though the term had not been invented, she might chafe at the emphasis I put on her being “transgender.”  But if you asked her about the import of women being masculine and acting like men, she’d go on for hours. She clearly thought women should be more masculine and dressed the part. 

I think Kellor would not totally disavow my depiction of her as trasngender.  And, that is important to me.

I asked Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the biography of John Nash, upon whom the Academy Award winning film ‘A Beautiful Mind’ was based, about whether personal life and public life intersected.  If not, why was Nash’s bisexuality an issue? 

Nasar’s argument about Nash’s difficulty with personal relations feeding into his facility with abstractions sort of worked for me.   And, I have written about the contrast between Kellor’s public emphasis on gender and her not discussing sexuality. But her insistence on sticking to policy publicly seems like a very masculine thing to do.  Her stance asks the reader to value public issues over private issues.  Subtlety, her public issue orientation can be read as a manifestation of a desire to live in the closet and still honestly say a lot about her personal values. 

This gets us to the fractal labyrinth of Margo Jefferson’s biography of Michael Jackson and back to E. L. Doctorow. Michael Jackson’s public image distorted his “real self” to the extent that no “real self” existed.  Is Kellor her public image?  In some respects.  She would want it that way.  Did she have bizarre subconscious dreams as Michael did?  Did she reflect our public as he did?  I think inclusion as a lesbian transgender woman fed her passion for including immigrants. And she framed issues in ways that spoke to public opinion.

Like Michael Jackson, Kellor’s private and the public image, the real person and the performer, became a part of a simultaneously created life based in imagination. 

All-in-all, I ended up feeling great about my Frances Kellor project. 

Brad Gooch spoke of not always liking his subject Flannery O’Connor.  As I love Kellor, that problem only challenged me in terms of my tendency to ignore critics. Debby Applegate has written about a Madam who ran a prostitution ring.  Kellor brought the question of “white slavery” while the Madam lived.  Making connections with other scholar’s work is important.  And, James Kaplan wrote that he had to find an “edge” to justify his writing the umpteenth biography of Frank Sinatra. Kellor’s amazing contributions to creating the modern world have gone unnoticed and obviously deserve recognition. 

All-in-all, it was a wonderful conference.  I got a book to a person who knew an agent.  And, again, more than 100 people now have heard of Frances Alice Kellor who previously had not.  But,  I mostly enjoyed this brush with academics reminding me of the eternal unanswerable questions upon which any conscious biographer must dwell.  

www.franceskellor.com

My Uncle Lou and Frances Kellor

This week my Uncle Lou died.  Louis Press was the youngest of eight siblings.  My grandfather was the oldest.  Uncle Lou was always an enjoyable man.  He played piano.  He met his wife while stationed in India during World War Two and made his money in the wig business.  And, Frances Kellor influenced his life.

In 1915 or thereabouts, my family moved from New York City to Bay Minette, Alabama.  They went with three children, including my grandfather, and left with seven, ten years later.  When the oldest child, Rachel, turned eighteen, my great grandparents realized there were few Jewish men for her to marry in Alabama.  So they sold the potato farm and tailor shop and moved to California.    My Uncle Lou was born in Pasadena.

From the beginning of her Americanization work until the end, Kellor worked with Jacob Schiff.  This wealthy Jewish banker founded the Industrial Removal Office (IRO).  The purpose of this office was to remove and resettle New York City’s Jews.  Schiff hoped to relieve decongestion and assimilate Jews with this effort.  70,000 Jewish families took his offer of financing emigration.  My family’s records are in the IRO archives. 

Kellor stole and modified Schiff’s program.  Her program was not specific to any one ethnicity.  Furthermore, her distribution program was the hub of an national employment agency program.  It told workers where there was work and made sure those advertising work had it.  While it didn’t go national, her arguments for seeing unemployment as the Federal government’s responsibility did take hold.

As there was no industrial employment there, and assimilation was not a goal she cared about, Kellor would have never sent immigrants to rural Alabama. But Jacob Schiff was a main backer of pretty much every effort she ever undertook in the name of Americanization.  And, I am sure that she returned the support. 

Whereas my grandfather always seemed influenced by the South, Uncle Lou had a more Californian demeanor.  I call Kellor our Founding Mother because she helped launch so many aspects of our modern world. The existence of Federal unemployment programs provides one example.  But, her influence went deeper as well.   My family, as well as many others, was intimately touched by Kellor’s work.   

In summary, bye Uncle Lou, I will always cherish having known you!

Kellor at Trans*Studies Conference 2012

I learned an amazing amount from my attendance at the Association for Gender Research, Education, Academia & Action Trans*Studies conference.  I, of course, went to present on Frances Kellor (1873 - 1952).  California just passed bill SB48 which requires the inclusion of LGBT persons and ideas in public school curriculum.  My talk, which can be read by clicking here, argued that Kellor should be the content of the LGBT inclusion.

The trans*gender conference taught me a lot.  Sel J. Hwahng, Ph.D. taught us about the increased health risks faced by trans persons.  Early death is especially prevalent among trans people of color.  At one point I got uneasy.  I thought he said that having been abused in childhood made one more likely to become transgender.  No.  He reassured me that it is the other way around.  Trans youth are much more likely to be physically and sexually assaulted by their family members and peers.

The only trans judge in California Victoria Kolakowski discussed the struggles faced by trans people in the work place.   So in addition to early abuse, trans people often have difficulty finding employment.  This can lead to homelessness and sex work.  And once in the penal system, trans people face even harsher physical and sexual abuse. We spoke of going beyond arguing for inclusion and ending discrimination against trans persons to celebrating trans people.  But, overall, the conference taught me about trans persons' vulnerability.

The conference added urgency to my desire to get Kellor into the California curriculum.  When Judge Kolakowski first attempted to take the bar, she was stopped due to being of "unsound mind."  Many in society think trans people crazy and thus not valuable.  We need role models which will show that trans people are as mentally stable and creative as any other group.  In short they are fully human. Getting this message out is a matter of life and death.

Place Frances Alice Kellor in the California Curriculum to Fulfill SB48

In 2011 California Governor Jerry Brown signed SB48 into law, thereby requiring that the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) persons get taught in his state’s public schools.  While districts have content and grade-level discretion, they must do so in beginning in 2012. And by 2019 textbooks should overtly include LGBT characters. To fulfill the mandate of SB48, Frances Alice Kellor (1873 – 1952) should enter California’s curriculum and textbooks. 

Most obviously, conservative moral concerns plague the introduction of LGBT role models and curriculum into the schools. Judy Chiasson is the Program Coordinator for Human Relations, Diversity, and Equity for California’s largest school district - the Los Angeles Unified School District.  She summarized the public relations problem, “People sexualize homosexuality and romanticize heterosexuality.”[i] In other words, to make LGBT figures less threatening, we must see them as people rather than simply a sexual orientation and gender challenges.

 Kellor’s Victorian attitudes towards relationships make her a perfect LGBT role model. Her 47-year relationship with Mary Elizabeth Dreier serves as a model of devotion and monogamy in an LGBT relationship. Their private letters hint strongly at sexuality. They shared a home and grew old together.  The two went out frequently, yet maintained a strong sense of public decorum. Their relationship demonstrates that LGBT persons can have conservative romantic relationships.

Kellor also helps challenge the sexualizing of homosexuality due to the broad range of issues for which she worked.  Using people victims of gay-bashing or LGBT rights advocates in the curriculum will not counter critics of SB48.  Including such figures will strike them as bald propaganda for “the LGBT lifestyle” rather than substantive content. Since Kellor engaged in a wide array of issues at the highest level, we can include her accomplishments and include her LGBT status incidentally. 

Kellor got suffrage put on the Progressive and Republican national party platforms. She ran much of Theodore Roosevelt 1912 and Charles Evans Hughes’ 1916 Presidential campaigns. She ran State and Federal Bureaus and more. She was seminal in changing the way we currently view criminality in our nation. She merits inclusion in the curriculum regardless of her LGBT status. In fact, all immigration historians consider Kellor the main leader of the Americanization movement. And California’s Department of Education curriculum requires that teachers “trace the effect Americanization movement.”[ii] As such educators are already nearly mandated to discuss her.

Frances Kellor's Quest for Participatory Democracy

Frances Alice Kellor (1873 – 1952) tried to cultivate unity via getting people to work collectively for social justice.  She did so as the leader of the Americanization Movement that greeted immigrants from 1906 - 1921.  Historians portray the Americanization Movement as coercive.  But, having earned a law degree at Cornell and done graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago, Kellor was a formidable social philosopher.  Her Americanization movement worked to cultivate social unity via participation in alternative forms of governance she designed.   

We first see Kellor create unity via collective social action in the system of certifying employment agencies she created to address both the exploitation of domestic workers and to help employers’ difficulties find good help. The problems would totally resolve when employees and prospective employers only used approved employment agencies. And female sociologists investigated and certified the agencies.  Thus a female network tackled “the servant problem” by involving all parties in a solution that addressed all parties’ concerns. 

Later, Kellor’s Progressive Service constituted one-half of the Progressive Party and an alternative national form of government.  Local groups sent representatives to the State conventions who, in turn, populated the national conferences.  The Service’s Legislative Branch turned sociologists’ findings, researched by locals, into Bills. The Education Branch brought all American towns attention to harms and their legal solutions.  Thus legislators would only exist to implement sociologists’ popular remedies. Thus, while the political wing of the Progressive Party cultivated votes for candidates, the Service unified the nation via focusing on issues. 

When the Service failed, Kellor advocated for civilian training camps. Popular with progressives, these would bring unity to our population as they cultivated civic virtue. Rather than xenophobic, our strident social philosopher noted we must use, “civilian training camp and universal service as a melting pot for natives before we can make America a successful melting pot for aliens.”  But when America’s voting population got active, they simply clamored for shutting down foreign language newspapers and restricting immigration. While Kellor kept foreign language newspapers alive, few agreed with her proposals for treaties to protect “international human beings.”

Perhaps disillusioned with the masses, Kellor’s American Arbitration Association (AAA) ended conflict via cultivating cooperation amongst the elite.  She ran the AAA from 1926 until her death in 1952. The year prior to her death, 11 governments recognized her arbitration guidelines and the AAA arbitrated conflicts between 47 countries. Her pride in getting businessmen to volunteer and pronouncements about arbitration constituting “self-regulative procedures,” “befitting . . . democracies” mirrors her other formulas for cultivating unity via cooperation. Currently solving over 200,000 disputes annually, the AAA demonstrates the consistency with which this social philosopher sought to foster unity via alternative governance systems.

As a social philosopher, Kellor also sought to bring unity via her Americanization Day endeavors. On the 4^th of July these vastly popular parades got long-term Americans to publically cheer immigrants.  But, Kellor more consistently created alternative forms of popular participatory governance to address our social divisions and cultivate civic virtues. 

Foucault, Butler, and Kellor

You will excuse my shaky grasp of Judith Butler’s theories.  She believes that gender is “performed.”  That is, rather than characteristics being in essential categories authentically inhering in people (a mouth full), people make up forms of sexuality and gender and perform them.  Frances Kellor provides evidence for Butler’s position. 

Michel Foucault discussed the use of sexuality by regimes of power.  And, my Foucault is vulnerable to refinement.  However, heterosexuality being crucial to the socio-economic structure and reproduction provides evidence that sex and power impact each other. Furthermore, the very title of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, implies that it changes over time.  Like Butler, Foucault eschews the idea of essential gender types over time.

We do not know about the intimate details of Kellor’s sexual relationship.  She hunted little curly hairs from her lover Mary Dreier.   However, Kellor had a somewhat Victorian sense of decorum.  So raunchy sexual details will not be forthcoming. However, illustrating both Butler and Foucault’s ideas, Kellor performed gender consciously to impact the power structure.

People who were children along with Kellor in her small town of Coldwater, Michigan, claimed she walked and talked like a boy.  She had biological transgender tendencies.  But in changing her name from the feminine “Alice” to the masculine “Frances” and her use of athletics to impact gender characteristics shows she also understood gender to be performative.

In her book Athletic Games in the Education of Women, Kellor said that sports would help women shake their femininity.  By this she meant they would exchange their passive subjective domestic concerns for an active role in righting public problems.  Sports would teach women to fight in public and thus perform gender differently as Butler would expect.  And, herein, ala Foucault, Kellor’s call to have women mend public ills, conveyed an understanding that gender can impact the power structure. 

Frances Kellor Conversations

Saturday, February 18th, at 7 pm, at Manhattan's Bluestockings Book Store I will be having a book launch for Founding Mother: Frances Kellor and the Quest for Progressive Democracy.  Mostly in my presentation, I hope to have questions as Kellor's ability to raise them is what makes her so fascinating.

Right now I am at The Affect Factory Conference which looks at the intersection of gender, affect, and labor.  Right now is a performance and I am a word guy.  But Kellor was transgender and wrote on labor issues, so I am at the conference seeking questions. 

In a presentation on exuberance in Latin American labor movements, I got to wonder about Kellor.

What place did her "play spirit" in her basketball work play in her depiction of the "creative" input of workers?  

At the beginning of March, I will be speaking at a trans*studies conference in California.  I wrote of Kellor within the discussions around Intellectual History.  I need transgender scholars to answer another question I had today. 

In an informal conversation here someone asked me if Kellor was misogynistic and, if transgendered, properly a lesbian (being then perhaps a man who loved women).  

Great!  Sex change operations did not happen popularly in America until the 1940s.  And I do not think she would not have had the language to call herself a man.  But since childhood she identified with masculine traits. I hope to learn more about where she fits in modern trans discourse in California.  

Kellor's masculinity made her disrespectful of stereotypical women's passivity and gossipy concern with "women's virtue."  She cared about social justice writ large and wanted all to engage in activism.  But her piece  [sex] Cloisters in American Politics makes clear that she admired women's sensibilities and she lived only in women's communities.  Questions of consistency and meaning call for study and interpretation.

Frances Kellor fascinates me because of the number of ways in which we can ask questions about her.

Please join at one of these events and generate some questions!

Kellor's LGBT Status and Today's American Identity

More than nearly any other American, Frances Alice Kellor can claim to have shaped America’s modern identity.  Historians acknowledge her as the leading figure in the Americanization movement (1906-1921).  This movement sought to assimilate and educate immigrants during the greatest period of immigration our nation had ever known.  As the head of New York’s Bureau of Industries and Immigrants, she was officially in charge of immigrants during the pinnacle of this population transfer.

How did Kellor’s transgender lesbian identity impact her sculpting of our public identity?

Kellor’s vision of Americanization did not involve cultural, ethnic, racial or religious norms.  She only insisted that immigrants become activists in pursuit of social justice.  The ideal she promulgated made all potential Americans without regard to their private cultural ideals.  As such she helped launch the vision that led to today’s multiculturalism.  In her view, and ours, all cultures can equally claim their status as Americans.  

Again, how did Kellor’s transgender lesbian identity impact her sculpting of our public identity?

When in public, Kellor only discussed policy.  Her letters to her girlfriend contain sentimental terms of endearment, but in public she identified as a male and had a hard edge.  She wrote that her male attitude and attire addressed the limited access women had.  She needed to be taken seriously outside of what she called “sex cloisters.”  And her aggressive transgender public persona might likely taught immigrants something about being an American. But more importantly  for our question, we read nothing referring to sexuality in her work. 

Rather than her transgender identity, her lesbian identity informed the way in which she shaped our national character.  Her private life remained intensely private.  And, consistently, she removed immigrants’ private lives from their qualification of being American.  Again, she argued that all who publically fought for social justice were Americans.  Your personal characteristics and morality were removed from the scrutiny in her formulation.

The Americanization curriculum Kellor wrote, presaged today’s social sciences in looking at numbers more than normative behaviors.   And in doing so she pushed a social trend of her era towards bureaucratization.  But much of the Americanization movement demanded cultural conformity.  Kellor had that option available.  It was popular.  Instead, as she rose to the top of the Federal Americanization bureaucracy, she separated personal characteristics from American identity.

In separating the public and private realms, she kept her lesbian life safe.  In this way, even more than her transgender identity, Kellor's lesbianism informed the culturally neutral version of Americanization she championed and we assume today.