The
aim of my research has been to gather necessary elements in order to create a
more accurate depiction of the social and political atmosphere of
nineteen-twenties America. In facilitating this understanding, I encourage the
reader to weigh fully the factors affecting the status of women in the United
States during the early part of the twentieth century. The play Machinal by Sophie Treadwell outlines
various, and at times conflicting, dynamics of women during this time. Having
distinct roles in political, social, and economic spheres, how a woman behaved,
and what she said depended on the type of situation she was in. One of the most
injurious conditions of the female plight, throughout history, has been the
absence of the female voice to express this dichotomy between women and men. Generations
upon generations of women have turned to writing to disengage from the present.
Also, through writing, women have passionately sought to give an alternate
account of current and past events. Because most historical accounts given are
in a male voice, they depict events from an ultra-masculine perspective, and,
some may say, so lack in sensitivity towards more delicate issues. I hope to
bring to light some of the more poetic, documentary, informative, and
insightful attempts to be a feminine voice among so many men.
Well
before any of the organized feminist movements that gave way to women acquiring
the right to vote, and so to enact real change in American Society, women were
playing out their fantasies of equality through writing. This was often done in
the form of fiction writing. Women’s fiction writing had come a long way since
the practice of writing Women’s Closet Drama during the second half of the
seventeenth century (Cohen, 1105). That is to say, the readership of these
plays was no longer confined to indulging in them in secrecy. After the murder
of Ruth Snyder’s husband in 1927, the play Machinal
premiered on Broadway in 1928. Ironically enough, Clark Gable, who played the
roll of George, opposite Zita Johann as Helen, personified American machismo,
complete with a lusty appetite for women. George is slain by his wife because, on some
level, he signifies a similar swag of disregard for the sensitivities of women (Krazner,
47).
By using the play as a form of social and political discourse,
despite its non-traditional approach, Treadwell and others managed to
participate in important debates of the time, through literature. Women were specifically drawn
to journalism, since in it they found access to an audience who yearned to see
change in the status of women in society Through journalism, women found the
voice to bear witness to current events effecting their world.
What
could be seen as the most difficult hurdle to overcome for women’s rights in
the United States was the predominantly male attitude towards the modernizing
woman. In the article, “Are Women a Class?” published in 1870, Lillie Devereux
Blake frames the Anti-Women’s Suffrage argument, stating “Women are not a
distinct class of the community, their interests are identical with those of
the men among whom they live, and as they are feebler than men, their proper
pursuits evidently within doors, therefore men ought to vote for them.”(Blake) It
was against this enormous wave of resistance that the pioneering women of this
era fought.
In
addition to the general opinion of women as weak and reliant, the dignities of women
were also compromised by poor working environments and negligible wages. These
truths came to the fore following the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
Elizabeth V. Burt, associate professor at the School of Communication at the
University of Hartford observes that “by the late nineteenth century, the majority
of women working in factories were immigrants who were ruthlessly exploited by
capitalistic employers.”(Burt, 189) Although news coverage was a male-dominated
industry, news of the fire, which occurred in 1911, was forced to expose the
horrendous conditions in which these women worked. Since this particular
factory employed mainly immigrant women at the time of the accident, the story
had to be covered from a different angle. These women were working grueling
hours for “pin money”, with families to support. They were working because they
had to. They were not entering the workforce as an act of rebellion against
their husbands; they were working because they had no husbands or because their
husbands were unable to work. Totally disarmed by this very touching plight,
the men went in with their cameras and notebooks and eagerly pursued the story.
While it was typical for news reports of women to portray them as victims, the
women who perished, and those who survived, the Triangle fire of 1911, were
touted as fighters, demanding equal rights for women workers. The fire was
massive. It being a factory that housed primarily fabric, it was quick to burn.
The women had not been prepared to evacuate the building in the event of such
an incident. The firemen could not reach the top floors of the building. The
poignant images of girls jumping from a burning building resonated with readers
of newspapers across the country. And with them, evidence of the terrible
working conditions that existed in most factories in the United States. Commonly
compromised conditions in the workplace, compounded by the hazards entailed in getting
to and from the factory or office, was a major stressor for these women. Many
women of the time were familiar with their neighborhoods, but not so accustomed
to navigating city traffic.
An
accomplished journalist, Sophie Treadwell, led a career driven with passion to
give voice not only to the need for social change, but also to the ways in
which current events were transforming society. Through her role as reporter,
Treadwell gave face to women’s issues, and she was among the small number of
female journalists to cover WW I. In her plays, she offered amusement with, as
well as insight into, the frame of mind of the modern woman. While juxtaposing
Treadwell with Margaret Cavendish and Beth Henley, Susan
Building
on prior efforts to improve the quality of life for women in the United States,
Treadwell, along with so many of her contemporaries, encountered many hurdles
in getting her message across. Poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay captures
the visage of a woman of the times who is emerging from a state of alienation
in her role as the inglorious housewife, towards a state of personal refinement
and self-definition in her role as individual. During the nineteen-twenties,
“her sonnets seemed the ultimate expression of the liberated sexuality of what
was then called the New Woman.”(Gwynn, 230)
According
to an analysis published in the Journal of American Studies, Millay’s poetry
expresses “the gap between the woman’s superficial self, which mechanically
performs the necessary domestic chores, and her dreaming self, becomes wider
and wider.”(Michailidou, 78) I feel like this lends insight into the fragmented
psychological state of Mrs. Ruth Brown Snyder, whose bludgeoning of her
husband, and consequential execution, were the inspiration behind Machinal. The character, Helen, who
represents Ruth Snyder in the play, is just such a female protagonist. She is
instantly a character most women related to in that many of them were plagued by
s similar rift separating their dreams and ideals from the brutally prosaic
reality of their marriage. Her role is captivating, even after she smashes her
husband’s head with a jar of stones given to her by her lover. On the topic of
marriage in discussion with the others in the speakeasy in episode five, Helen
muses aloud that “some men don’t seem to like a woman after she’s
married—“(Treadwell, 38). Like Helen,
Ruth began working as a telephone operator, and each of them married their
boss. Also, Helen suffered the added anxiety that was common among women
entering the workforce for the first time. They each struggled between
fulfilling the role of wife and that of employee with regards to their husbands.
Helen seems to suffer from multiple
fragmentations of her identity. Also tearing at the mind of Helen the worker
and Helen the wife, is the, still underappreciated role as daughter. Helen
feels the pressure to marry from all directions. In an impassioned exchange
between mother and daughter in episode two of the play, Helen admits her
desperation in wanting to marry her boss by saying, “I just mean I’ve never
found anybody-- anybody -- nobody’s ever asked me—till now – he’s the only man
that’s ever asked me – And I suppose I got to marry somebody—all girls do—“(Treadwell,
19) This reflects a strict adherence of women to following the
hetero-normative, socially predicated practice of marrying young and seamlessly
stepping into the role as wife.
After
the passage of the nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, women lost much of
their zeal for political reform. They turned their passions instead “from a
search for political and economic equality to one for sexual and social
identity.”(Freedman, 386) In a
particularly picturesque expression of this new journey of pleasure-seeking
self-examination sweeping the female population in the United States, Edna St.
Vincent Millay illustrates the careless nature and whimsical rush of sexual
liberation, and some of the residual regret that may accompany it. “So sweet
the night, so long-drawn-out and late …/ And if the man were not her spirit’s
mate, / Why was her body sluggish with desire?” (Michailidou, 76)
After
having been married a short time, Helen finds herself in the inconvenient role
of mother. As her different roles become more numerous, Helen is unable to give
adequate attention to any single aspect of her life. And so she finds herself
as a mal-contempt mother and unfulfilled housewife under the thumb of her
husband. Even though she no longer goes to work, she is unable to attend to her
responsibilities as mother, wife, and lover. Ruth, too, seems to lack any
maternal tendencies. It is rumored that she abandoned her daughter, Lorraine,
in the hotel lobby while she pursued an extra-marital love affair (Aldrich). For
Helen, the demands of motherhood required a more durable emotional fabric,
while her sense of identity was stripped into so many ragged shreds. At the end
of episode four of the play, as the doctor and nurse go to retrieve Helen’s
baby, Helen, alone in the hospital room, rants hysterically against
relinquishing yet more of herself, her identity, to a child she did not want
(Treadwell, 31-32).
There
is no questioning the antipathy of these women.
Objectified by their husbands, exploited in the workplace, alien to
themselves, these women need a way to get out. Like an agitated animal in a
cage, their instinct is to lash out at that which is most threatening to their
identities. Under duress of losing themselves, they each succumb to their
desire to be free of their husbands, to save themselves.
On
a subconscious level, I believe that in killing her husband, Ruth Snyder was
symbolically slaying the societal evils embodied by her husband. During their
marriage, Ruth’s husband still kindled the embers of a previous love affair. In
retaliation, Ruth began an affair with a man said to be in the business of
fitting women for corsets (Aldrich). In killing her husband she was rebelling
against the typical attitudes of men towards the fairer sex as a catalog from
which they could choose to possess a wife. In this aspect of his character,
Helen’s husband, George Jones expresses the objectification he imposes on his
wife. In episode seven, while they are chatting about a newly acquired piece of
property, George pinches Helen’s cheek and further irritates her, boasting that
he “got a first mortgage on her –I got a second mortgage on her –and she’s
mine!” (Treadwell, 54) In this final episode of her domestic life, in killing George,
Ruth is also striking at the mundane existence and predictability of her daily
routine.
Treadwell
wrote this play based on the sensationalized news story of Ruth Snyder, but it
was Treadwell’s intention that Helen’s character be more of “’an ordinary young
woman’ who lives in a mechanized, materialistic world.” (Treadwell, vii) Helen
epitomized the modern woman, and her stresses, as well as her delights, were
common among women of that era. The success of the play is that, in it, Helen’s
character is someone every woman could relate to, even almost a hundred years
later.
Works Cited
Aldrich, Brian. “Executed Dead Girls-Ruth
Snyder”.PoeForward.(2007).Web.26
Blake, Lillie
Devereux.(1870).”Are Women a Class?”Revolution
Cohen, Adam Max. "Englishing The Globe: Molyneux's
Globes And Shakespeare's
Theatrical
Career." Sixteenth Century Journal 37.4 (2006): 963-984. Academic
Search
Complete. Web. 11 Dec. 2011.
Freedman, Estelle B.”The New
Woman: Changing Views of Women in thee
1920s”The Journal of American History, Vol.61,No.2.p.372
393(1974).Organization of American
Historians.Jstor.Web.29 Nov. 2011
Gwynn, R. S. Poetry, A Pocket Anthology. 6th ed. New
York: Longman, 2008.
Jonas, Susan. "Subversive
women, then and now: Cavendish, Treadwell and Henley
sound surprisingly similar
themes." American Theatre Nov. 2007: 72+. Literature
Resource Center. Web. 5 Dec.
2011.
Krazner, David. A Companion to Twentieth Century American
Drama. Malden, MA:
Blackwell
Publishing, 2005. Print.
Michailidou, Artemis.”Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne
Sexton: The Disruption
Domestic
Bliss.”Journal of American Studies.(2004):67-88.Academic Search
Complete.Web.29 Nov.2011
Treadwell, Sophie. Machinal. Nick Hern Books, 1993.
*In addition to the above
listed references, much of my understanding of the era commonly referred to as
the “Roaring Twenties” was derived from excerpts from:
Dominico, Desirae M., and
Jones, Karen H. "Career Aspirations of Women in the 20th Century." Journal
of Career and Technical Education. 22.2 (2006): ERIC. Web.
Link, Arthur S. American Epoch A History of
the United States Since the 1890's. 3rd ed. New York: Alfred A
Knopf, Inc., 1963.
