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. 

Alice Kellar's Transgender Name

Recently a person about to read Kellor’s biography, Founding Mother, wrote me “I refer to her [Kellor] as a woman only because that is how she is portrayed on just about every site.” She then asked, "Would it be more correct to refer to her as Francis (male), than Frances (female)??”

In the small town of her youth, Coldwater, Michigan, Kellor wrote a gossip column under the name “Alice Kellar.” Mysteriously, upon arriving at Cornell University’s law program, she changed her last name's spelling from “Kellar to Kellor” and swapped out her feminine first name for her middle name, “Frances.” So while she used the female spelling, she consciously chose her sexually ambiguous first name.

A banker's daughter in Coldwater disliked Alice because she and talked like a boy.  In all images of Kellor she has some level of male attire; in the majority she simply dressed as a man. Despite her shortness, Kellor had her arm around her girlfriend’s shoulders in a photo in which they both greeted Eleanor Roosevelt. The visual record is clear that Kellor took the male role in her life and same-sex marriage of 49 years.

When others denounced women’s basketball because it would make girls too masculine, Kellor championed it for the very same gendered reason. Kellor publically identified her considerable political career as masculine, and railed against the gender-based cloistering of women into feminine concerns. In a very real way, Kellor’s transgender identity suffused all of her work.

As no private letters show her self-identifying with the pronoun “he,” I referred to Kellor as “her” throughout Founding Mother.  However, the book forefronts the looming importance of masculine gender identity to Frances, (with an ‘e’). 

Kellor's Americanization and American Arbitration Association

            Frances Alice Kellor (b. 1873) helped found the American Arbitration Association (AAA) in 1926 and served as its vice-President until her death in 1952. The AAA sought to resolve disputes within industries and between nations. In juxtaposing Kellor’s work, the Americanization movement and the AAA, we can come to appreciate Kellor’s genius and the nature of her projects.

Kellor worked to create win-win situations via sociological constructs. This pattern first emerged in her 1904 book investigating the plight of domestic workers, Out of Work.  As a solution, she set up a certification program.  If a housewife saw an employment agency had good grades, she new the workers were well trained and not exploited. Workers could also use this rating to choose employment agencies. Even employing housewives were graded. Rather than pit employers against employees, this system helped all involved.

The AAA utilizes arbitration to solve conflicts. In litigation one side defeats the other in a court of law.  This system creates losers and distorts reality.  Mediation happens when two people agree to discuss their differences in an attempt to come to an amicable resolution.  When honest discussion fails, the two sides can hire an arbitrator.  This neutral third party comes up with a solution that works as well as possible for both parties. While Kellor preferred that the sides would mediate an agreement on their own, if they could not, the AAA would provide a neutral and trained arbitrator for them.

Historians often simply typify the Americanization movement Kellor led as hostile to immigrant culture. In fact, her programs aimed their animus at the prejudice of long-term Americans and industrial exploitation.  If corporations would stop abusing workers, strikes and revolutionary propaganda would cease.  However, the immigrants did not have the power in this relationship.  American institutions would have to shift for all to coexist in harmony. Her movement sought an attitudinal shift that would result in our all winning.

Deeper understanding of the AAA and Americanization comes via remembering Kellor’s Service project. The activist half of the official progressive party, the Service featured a legal branch and an educational branch. The legal branch turned sociologists’ findings into bills. The educational branch got the populace to understand and agitate for these bills. Thus, the Service system limited the importance of politicians and made constant activism more important than elections.

In the Service, the AAA, and the Americanization movement, the medium was the message. Kellor’s employment certification program was to require the cooperation of housewives, workers, agencies, and trained female sociologists.  But the participation was not stressed as an end.  But the Service overtly sought to unite immigrants and long-term Americans via participation in reform efforts. Their working together was as important as their goals. Kellor took great pride in her ability to get thousands of businessmen to volunteer as arbitrators. It gave them practice in envisioning cooperation and solutions that benefited all.  She hoped arbitration would “drive disputes out of American industries in a manner befitting the democracies in which we live.” (NYT, 12/2/41)

In the first half of her career we see Kellor move towards creating unity and win-win situations via mass activism. But as immigration restriction laws were passed, Kellor announced the need to protect “International Human Beings.” In her efforts to protect immigrants, she overtly denounced the national perspective for an international one. Her move towards internationalism also highlighted tension with the concept of Americanization.  From her perspective, the American public was showing itself to be punitive and exclusionary. As such she moved towards working with elites in the AAA. But even at this time, her embrace of internationalism made the word “American” in the title of the AAA anachronistic.

Historians have only understood the Americanization as a reactionary movement born of conservative fears of changes wrought by immigration and industrial change. Rather than a hayseed, Kellor was a cutting-edge sociologist who designed extra-governmental systems with an eye towards fomenting altruism. The failure of the Service and the passage of immigration restriction laws likely drove her to work with elites in the AAA rather than the masses about whom she had lost some faith.   But in all of her efforts, she used sophisticated means to create win-win situations that would call upon the better angels of our nature.

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To what extent was Kellor's switch to working with elites in the AAA a rational assessment of popular attitudes?  Is there a clash between "Enlightened" policies and popular public sentiment now?

What evidence, arguments, and counter-arguments might arise in a debate over whether or not sexism accounted for Kellor only being the Vice-President during her 26 years at the AAA?  

Teachers can find more questions concerning Kellor and the AAA, in the final section of the "Essential Questions Handout," under "Lesson Plans" at www.franceskellor.com