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!