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.
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