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)
