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Civic Play-Housekeeping: Gender, Theatre, and American Reform
Author(s): Shannon Jackson
Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3, Enacting America(n)s (Oct., 1996), pp. 337-361
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Civic Play-Housekeeping:
Gender, Theatre, and American Reform
Shannon Jackson
"We went to Hull-House every Saturday for Miss Nancrede's dance classes,"
Dorothy Mittelman Sigel's eyes held mine as she spoke. "And after every class we
would line up on our way out the door ... and . you know ... as we went out ...
'Thank you, Miss Nancrede."'
During the ellipses in her speech, Mrs. Sigel rose carefully and spoke in another
language, that of the body. Despite a foot that was still recovering from surgery, this
former Hull-House child got up to demonstrate how she and her fellow Marionette
Club members bowed and curtsied in a ritualized performance for their favorite HullHouse club leader, Edith de Nancrede.
Dorothy Mittelman, later Dorothy Mittelman Sigel, now the widow of Louis Sigel,
was born in 1900 in an immigrant neighborhood in the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago's
West Side soon after her parents emigrated to the United States. She now lives alone in
the Winnetka home she and her husband bought when the success of Louis Sigel's
business allowed them to move to Chicago's wealthier North Shore. And it is to this
home that I go to hear Mrs. Sigel's stories of her life in turn-of-the-centuryChicago and
of the impact that one particular institution, the Hull-House Settlement, made on the
course and character of that life.
Mrs. Sigel raised and lowered her body, extending her hand in a gesture that was at
once graceful after years of cultivation and unsteady after 95 years of living. "Thank
you, Miss Nancrede," she said again, now lifting her head to hold the eyes of an
imaginary teacher whose eyes had once held hers.
The Hull-House Settlement of Chicago-which Dorothy attended and where Edith
de Nancrede lived and worked-was a social phenomenon that was both exemplary
of and unique to the period in which it was founded.1 During the early parts of the
ShannonJackson is an assistantprofessorin English and Literatureat Harvard Universityand has
published essays interrogatingthe intersectionbetweencultural theoryand performancepractice in
severaljournals and collections.She is currentlywritinga bookon culturalperformanceat Hull-House
and a collectedseriesof essayson meta-historicaltheoryand performance.
Photographs published with permission from the Jane Addams Memorial Colection, Special
Collections,The UniversityLibrary,The Universityof Illinoisat Chicago.
This is excerpted from a largermanuscriptentitled "Linesof Activity:Performance,Space, and
Pedagogy at Hull-House,"a projectsupportedby dissertationfellowshipsfromThe SpencerFoundation and the NationalEndowmentforthe Humanities.I would like to thankDorothyChansky,Dwight
Conquergood,TracyDavis, JudithHamera,Lucy Knight,Micaeladi Leonardo,MargaretThompson
Drewal, and StacyWolf for insight and encouragementinto the writing of this essay.
TheatreJournal48 (1996)337-361? 1996by TheJohnsHopkins UniversityPress
338
/
ShannonJackson
Progressive Era-the time spanning from the late-nineteenth century to World WarIvarious social and political groups in American society began self-consciously to
contend with the urban, industrial, political, and cultural transformationsbrought on
by structural forces that could no longer be ignored.2Unmonitored housing and city
zoning and unregulated factory and sweatshop systems combined to collide with a
huge wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (including Dorothy
Mittelman's family), thereby profoundly changing the nature of urban social life and
testing the limits of America's much-touted system of democratic governance. While
some hereditary Americans reacted to urban dilemmas by blaming convenient
scapegoats such as union laborers, anarchists, and immigrants, others began to form
partial critiques of the structural forces that precipitated these changes as well as the
transformations-in the nature of the city, the role of the state, and the concept of
America-that would be necessary to respond to them. Activist and reform groups
gathered around different causes-housing, factory reform, public parks, temperance,
immigration protection, food and clothing for the poor-and were propelled by
different principles-religious, political, and intellectual. That this era has been
retroactively historicized as "The Reform Period" attests to its fundamental place in
the institutional and intellectual history of social welfare in the United States, and it is
often placed as the origin point for a host of civic, state, and federal agencies in
existence-and hotly debated-in our present-day society.
This essay is in part an attempt to theorize the relationship between highly local and
intimate moments such as those recounted by Dorothy Mittelman Sigel and the large
network of national and industrial forces charted in the historiography of the
Progressive Era.I suggest that the arena of theatre and performance-characterized as
both a type of case study and an integrated methodology-provides an illustrative
means of reconciling various kinds of interpretive dilemmas in turn-of-the-century
American studies, particularly the tension in this field regarding the combined
analysis of aesthetic and political practices. More specifically the case of Hull-House
theatre contributes to our understanding of the relationship between theatre and
American social reform, a connection that enlarges the historiography of both fields
and extends the types of theoreticaland methodological questions we ask of each.3The
2
Backgroundhistoricalliteratureon the settlementis vast; significanttexts include Allen Davis,
andtheProgressive
Movement,1890-1914(New Brunswick:
for Reform:TheSocialSettlements
Spearheads
with
100Yearsat Hull-House
and
McKree,
eds.,
Press,
1984)
(Bloomington:
MaryLynn
RutgersUniversity
HullHouseandtheNew
IndianaUniversityPress,1990);RivkaShpakLissak,PluralismandProgressives:
Immigrant,1890-1919 (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1989);Mina Carson, SettlementFolk
(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress,1990);KathrynKishSklar,FlorenceKelleyandtheNation'sWork:
TheRiseof Women'sPoliticalCulture,1830-1900(New Haven:YaleUniversityPress, 1995)and "HullHouse in the 1890s:A Communityof WomenReformers,"Signs:Journalof Womenin CultureandSociety
10.4 (1985):658-77 and "WhoFundedHull-House?,"LadyBountifulRevisited,ed. KathleenMcCarthy
Race
(New Brunswick:RutgersUniversityPress,1990),94-115;ElisabethLasch-Quinn,BlackNeighbors:
and the Limitsof Reformin the AmericanSettlementMovement,1890-1945(ChapelHill: University of
North CarolinaPress, 1993);Helen LefkowitzHorowitz, "Hull-Houseas Woman's Space,"Chicago
History12.4(1983-84):40-55;JillConway,"WomenReformersand AmericanCulture,"Journalof Social
History5 (Winter 1971-2): 164-77; John Rousmaniere,"CulturalHybrid in the Slums," American
Quarterly22 (Spring1970):45-66.
3
My preoccupationwith how theoriesof performanceintersectwith those espoused and practiced
at the Hull-House Settlement of Chicago comes amid tremendous debate about the relationship
between "theory" and "history,"particularlyin debates surrounding the presumed opposition
GENDER,THEATRE,AND AMERICANREFORM /
339
role of theatre in the mission of Hull-House reform cannot be fully understood by
analyzing the literary content of its repetoire; nor can the history of reform be
adequately conceived as a series of legislative and governmental policy changes. I
argue that the gaps in both of these lines of inquiry converge and, furthermore, that
the point of convergence hinges on a willingness to understand collective formations
such as Edith de Nancrede's Marionette Club and embodied performances such as
Dorothy Mittelman Sigel's graceful curtsy.
The first part of the essay lays a historical and theoretical foundation for a
between turn-of-the-century America reform and that of theatre and
rapprochement
It begins by foregrounding the impact of Darwinist theories of
studies.
performance
evolution on the work of reform and continues by tracking the way female reformers
negotiated their conflicted position upon entering this arena of public life. Within
these overlapping genealogies in reform history and American women's history,
however, Hull-House settlers distinguished themselves ideologically and methodologically by virtue of their intellectual and political kinship with the philosophical
school of pragmatism and their commitment to a pragmatically derived social
pedagogy. The next two sections focus on how such histories and goals structured
theatre at Hull-House, focusing first on its power in community formation and then on
its utility in the reformation of personal identity. This historically situated system of
beliefs and practices makes, to my mind, the match between turn-of-the-century
reform and the theoretical framework of performance a productive one. Sharing an
etymological root that means "to bring into being" or "to furnish," performance
underscores the material acts of construction implicit in the term "reform."As a mode
of inquiry that takes ontological issues of identity, enactment, embodiment, social
process, and social expression as central points of entry, performance lends a
framework to understand what it means to re-form individuals, communities, or
urban spaces. An understanding of the power of what I will call reformance
sheds light
on the assumptions behind many turn-of-the-century social formations: the play
movement, the public park movement, housing reform, habit and "character-building" clinics, model tenement exhibits, and various recreationalmovements that sought
to re-create individuals by restoring behaviors and environments along alternative
lines. Furthermore, such past formations and the arguments supporting them might
help to counter the charge of ahistoricism some have waged against contemporary
performance theory, thereby extending shared theoretical and methodological innovations in American studies and performance studies.
Reform and Performance at Hull-House
Edith de Nancrede's presence, the principles behind the Marionette Club, and
Dorothy Mittelman's bodily comportment coincided at a place where issues of gender,
class, community, morality, and embodiment also coincided. The place was the latenineteenth-century American city, specifically Chicago, where many gathered to create
a different way of living and to theorize the obstacles that hindered its achievement.
between "language"and "experience."In a largermanuscript,I argue that performanceanalysis can
intervene in discussions such as those that took place around Joan WallachScott's Genderand the
Politicsof History,by theorizingthe discursivemediationof experiencewithout always resortingto the
"cultureas text"model that disturbsmany who questionthe "linguisticturn"in historicalstudies.
340
/
ShannonJackson
While reformers differed in vision and method, most invoked similar examples when
identifying the manifestations of the problem. Many pointed to the increasing
fragmentation and segregation of urban communities such that different immigrant
and laboring groups remained cloistered together without a larger sense of the city's
heterogeneity. Some progressive reformersadded a critique of the increasing segregation between rich and poor promoted in the city, arguing that such divisions made any
formation of urban community impossible. Additionally, most reformers discussed
the problems of poverty, unemployment, labor unfairness, and immigrant adjustment,
using tropes of difference in dress, grammar,vocal volume, gaze, bodily comportment,
spatial habits, and "habits of thought" that often metonymically stood in for social
problems that needed to be addressed, investigated, understood, and in some way
changed.4 Again, the orientation on these perceived differences shifted. While some
crafted garbled rhetoric that managed to interpret noxious city smells as a sign of a
tenement resident's immorality or child labor as a sign of immigrant cultural backwardness, others directed their attention to the city's faulty sewage system or to the
effect of unrestrained competition on the family wage.
Ideologically supporting many of these reform efforts was the pervasive if uneven
impact of Darwinist theories of humanity. Hetereogeneous readings of evolution
could underwrite many different kinds of projects. Some used them to tout the unity
of mankind and others the inevitable "progress"of Progressive society; at still other
times, some invoked such theories to argue for the supremacy of "civilized" cultures
on a dubious evolutionary ladder. Most important for my concerns, however, were the
way that they both provided a discursive basis for theorizing ideal human communities and induced an animating belief in the structuring relationship between the
material and the mental. As reformers theorized new kinds of urban groupings from
amidst the city's heteroegeneity, they appealed to "primitive" memories of racial
collectivity and to the power of adaptation in the race progress. As historian Paul
Boyer has noted of a kind of Positive Environmentalism,many reformers also argued
that the substantive qualities of the environment and of environmental practices
engaged in a recursive relationship with the formation of community and individual
identity.5The ingenuity of this idea for its time lay in the fact that it retrieved the
perceived differences of urban inhabitants from moral, political, nativist, and some
religious arguments that naturalized certain behaviors as inherent to particularly
depraved groups. What it did not always do, however, was question the cultural and
classist signs of depravity; instead it gave reformersboth an ideology and methodology to effect a reformation of such problematic individuals.
Before extrapolating on the specific characterof Hull-House and the performanceinflected philosophies supporting and deriving from it, I want also to resituate
Progressive reform in light of another overlapping historiographical strain-that of
American women's history. This important frame on Hull-House is central to under4 Paul
Boyer, UrbanMasses and Morai Orderin America(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978);
Robert Wiebe, TheSearchforOrder(New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); see also, John Kasson's differently
conceived project in Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-CenturyUrban America (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1990).
5 Boyer, Urban Masses, 220. See also, Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Social Science (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1977) and George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982).
GENDER,THEATRE,AND AMERICANREFORM /
341
standing the social role of theatre and other aesthetic practices in enabling and
legitimating female reformers while also filling out Edith de Nancrede's complicated
location. Concomitant with the Progressive Era's urban tumult and emergent spirit of
social change was another social trend involving a new generation of late-nineteenthcentury women. White, middle and upper-class, and usually of Protestant descent, a
group of hereditary American women emerged as the first identifiable generation of
college-educated females only to find that their newly won access to higher education
did not come with reciprocal changes in the gendered character of American public
life. That is, late nineteenth-century young women received exposure to a world of
ideas and possibilities in college only to find themselves expected to return to the life
of heterosexual marriage, motherhood, and leisured domesticity that was both the
burden and privilege of well-to-do young women. JaneAddams and Ellen Gates Starr
were two such women. Cognizant if somewhat naively so of the great "social malaise"
that plagued Chicago, deeply aware of the limitations of a privileged and heterosexual
domesticity on their personal fulfillment, Starrand Addams embarked on an alternative life course by moving into West Side rooms in an abandoned mansion of the
Nineteenth Ward. Working from her own snare of depression-and with the knowledge that her dissatisfaction was not unique-Jane Addams often represented her
settlement scheme as an antidote to young women's inactivity and feelings of
uselessness, later writing at length of what she named "the subjective necessity for
settlement work" and theorizing the importance of providing "cultivated young
people" with a "recognized outlet for their active faculties."6While this motivation
may be interpreted as an incarnation of classist selfishness-using the lives of the
marginalized for one's own fulfillment-the rhetoric was in a sense more honest than
the language of traditional philanthropy that reveled in the unselfishness and
benevolence of the wealthy.
Soon other young women-including Edith de Nancrede-and later men gathered
around what Starr and Addams eventually called the Hull-House Settlement with a
vague and self-consciously modest hope of bettering the city and, perhaps most
urgently, of saving themselves. The institution grew to a thirteen building complex
and a cadre of volunteers and residents who paid room and board while living and
working there, exercising power in almost every venue and for every cause imaginable. While the Hull-House Settlement was exemplary of a number of turn-of-thecentury reform efforts, this largely female network distinguished it. When Jane
Addams eventually looked back to analyze Hull-House's initial set of collectivized
yearnings, she would theorize this particular involvement of women as a distinctive
and essential contribution to the welfare of American society. Using the term "civic
housekeeping," she argued that the transformations of the cityscape and city politics
created contingencies that unraveled any notion of the "private"home. Furthermore,
women-skilled as they had been historically in tending to the shelter, children, food,
sanitation, and health of their families-were now best equipped to tend to the
reformation of the city, a city figuratively positioned as a larger home. "The very
6
Addams, "TheSubjectiveNecessity"(1892);laterrepublishedin TwentyYearsat Hull-House(New
York:Macmillan,1910),13. Historicalinquiriesinto this structureof feeling include,T. JacksonLears,
No Placeof Grace:Antimodernism
and the Transformation
of AmericanCulture(Chicago:University of
Chicago Press, 1981);Tom Lutz, AmericanNervousness,1903 (Ithaca:CornellUniversity Press, 1991);
ElaineShowalter,TheFemaleMalady(New York:Penguin,1985).
342
/
ShannonJackson
multifariousness and complexity of a city government demands the help of minds
accustomed to detail and variety of work, to a sense of obligation for the health and
welfare of young children, and to a responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of
others."7While some present-day scholars may question Addams's reluctance to offer
a more radical critique of gender categories, I see Addams's rhetorical moves as
discursively expedient, recasting available gendered metaphors to argue for women's
transition from private to public life and exposing the instabilities of the private/
public division in the process. As Kathryn Kish Sklar has recently argued, such
discourses further facilitated a largernational transition, in which women became less
and less exclusively associated with the "private"world of domesticity and increasingly took on a symbolic position as the embodiment of civic virtue for larger national
collectivities. The significance of this transition would also have ramifications on
women's cultural production and on their more specific role in the making of theatre.
To the extent that civic virtue carried with it connotations of both community and
morality, and to the extent that evolutionary theory foregrounded the collective and
embodied aspects of civic virtue, theatre-making-or "civic play-housekeeping"would become a productive arena for female reformers, allowing them to incarnate
their ideal role by overseeing a mode of reformance that exercised their "feminine"
capacities in moral development.
Finally,however, Hull-House was unique in its time for another pointed and, to me,
perpetually challenging reason. When Ellen Gates Starrand JaneAddams moved into
the Nineteenth Ward, they did not do so with the set of high ideals and abstract
reformist programs that many now retroactively associate with the modernist and
scientifically rational methods of the Progressive Era; nor did they hope to replicate
the institutional structures of the many charity organizations already in existence
throughout Chicago. "There is to be nothing of the institution or organization about
it," wrote Starr. Instead, she said, they simply "intended to live there and get
acquainted" and "to ask their friends of both classes to visit them." Abiding in the
belief that "a personality was the only thing that really touched anybody," Starr and
Addams proposed a highly local form of sociality, one that could propel a flexible and
contingent mode of reform that resembled a neighbor-to-neighbor relationship far
more than a hierarchicalone.8The goals of reformwould thereby evolve pragmatically
from the midst and struggle of this relationship rather than from a reformer's predetermined plan or abstracted set of urban ideals. This epistemology of proximity
worked on the lives of both the privileged and the marginalized neighbors who
presumably learned of new behaviors and realms of knowledge through "actual
contact" and daily interaction with each other.As a journalist would later write, "the
ladies fully believe with Tolstoy that 'Enlightenment is not propagated by pictures,'
not 'chiefly' by the spoken word, or the medium of print, but by the infectious example
of the whole life of men."9
While not everyone who eventually clustered around Hull-House practiced the
principle of "infectious example" consistently, and while Addams, Starr,and others
JaneAddams, NewerIdealsof Peace(New York:Macmillan,1907),185.
MaryBlaisdell(Feb.23, 1889)Box I Folder3 Ellen Gates StarrPapers,Smith
College.
9
MaryH. Porter,"A Home on HalstedStreet,"Advance(July 11, 1889).
7
8 Ellen Gates Starrto
GENDER,THEATRE,AND AMERICANREFORM /
343
took several years to understand the difficulties and contours of such an ideal, it
would steer Positive Environmentalism in a slightly different, more local and flexible
direction. As the settlement grew and its network of affiliates increased, the HullHouse method particularly gained from and offered intellectual kinship with the
school of Chicago pragmatism. Philosophers and active Hull-House affiliates such as
George Herbert Mead and John Dewey used the settlement experience as a case study
for their own philosophical theories on the nature of identity, emotion, sociability,
pedagogy, and political practice. Consequently, Mead came to propose that the ideal
method of reform should not resemble Idealism per se but the more mobile conception
of a "working hypothesis."10 Replacing finalizing terminology with this present
participle, reform might begin with ideas or goals, but they should stay flexible,
readily adapted or altered to meet a variety of circumstances and unanticipated
events. Such a sensibility in turn informed his pragmatic theory of the social self,
prompting Mead to emphasize the formative power of social interaction and mimetic
exchange in the on-going formation and reformation of personal identity. Similarly,
this pragmatic theory of the self and sociality lay at the basis for John Dewey's
formative pedagogical theory." Dewey theorized education as "a continual reconstruction of experience" in which change and growth drew from and added to an
individual's store of adaptable experiences. Transformativerepetition-the adapted
restoration of past events into the present-was a central tenet of active learning
where each repetition adjusted to fit new circumstances while new circumstances
added to an identity's set of repeatable experiences. Productively predating contemporary performance theory, George Herbert Mead's mimetic theories of the self and
John Dewey's anti-formalist theory of education did not replicate the host of scientific
methods, quantitative certainties, and attempts to "search for order" that some
historians associate with the Progressive Era. "We cannot make a person social by
legislative enactment," wrote Mead; however, "we can allow the essentially social
nature of their actions to come to expression under conditions which favor this."12
Pragmatists and sympathetic Hull-House settlers maintained a faith in the power of
cross-class and cross-cultural sociality to effect lasting and relevant social reform,
understanding that the course and characterof this lived democracy could not always
be foreseen and would be subject to constant revision. At the same time, the inevitable
power inequities between settlers and neighbors as well as settlers' own relatively
resilient predispositions still made assumptions about who should be imitating whom
in this mimetic interaction.
This complicated network of ideals, shared spaces, mimetic interactions, power
inequities, gendered hopes, and latent biographies forms a context in which to
interpret the method, character,and affect of Hull-House reformance. Settlers practiced their ethic of neighborliness and manifested their commitment to locality and
proximity through many modes of cultural production, several of which, such as
10GeorgeHerbertMead,"TheWorking
American
Journal
Hypothesisin SocialReform,"
ofSociology
5 (1899):370. See also, "TheSocialSettlement:Its Basisand Function,"Universityof ChicagoRecord12
(1907-8),110,GeorgeHerbertMeadPapers,Universityof Chicago.AndrewFefferincludesa chapter
on the settlement movement in The ChicagoPragmatistsand AmericanProgressivism(Ithaca and
London:Corell UniversityPress, 1993).
1John Dewey, "Schoolas Social Center,"Proceedings
of the NationalEducationAssociation(1902),
374-83.
12Mead,
"WorkingHypothesis,"370.
344
/
ShannonJackson
athletics, festivals, pagentry, song, social clubs, and other games, had a performative
element. It also impinged upon the pragmatic theatre of "civic play-housekeeping"
where communities and bodies were subject to constant recreation.
Theatre and the Making of Community
When Dorothy Mittelman Sigel remembered how "we came to Hull-House every
Saturday," she invoked the simultaneous sense of collectivity and routine that
characterized her relationship to the settlement. The "we" referred to a particular
social formation-the Marionette Club-that existed within a larger network of social
clubs and classes. "Every Saturday" illustrated the degree to which Hull-House
sociality could become an incorporated part of everyday life and act as a symbol of
continuity and stability within the neighborhood. Hull-House settlers began modestly
to overcome the fractured and segregated nature of West Side Chicago through
gatherings, dinners, and side-walk conversations that later formalized into social clubs
and routinized events. As the neighborhood visitors increased and the coterie of
settlers and volunteers grew, there were soon thirty to forty clubs or classes that met
regularly in its parlors, dining rooms, studios, and an expanding set of new buildings.
Some-such as the Working Men's Social Science Club-gathered around a shared
political interest, others-such as the Italian Mother's Club-based on shared ethnicity.
Many came for pedagogical reasons, whether to learn art history, to improve Englishspeaking, or to cultivate particularindustrial skills. JaneAddams interpreted the basic
principle behind these social formations within the evolutionary discourse of community.
Thus the value of the social clubs broadensout in one's mind to an instrumentof
companionshipthroughwhichmanymay be led froma sense of isolationto one of civic
responsibility,even as anothertype of club providesrecreationalfacilitiesfor those who
havehad only meaninglessexcitements,oras a thirdtypeopensnew andinterestingvistas
of life to those who areambitious.'3
The most significant proportion of these social clubs were composed of children and
young people, partly derived from the constraints that work and parental responsibility placed on adult neighbors and partly from a disposition toward the young as more
adaptable and therefore more responsive to the mission of reform. Entering "HullHouse frankly in search of that pleasure and recreationwhich all young things crave,"
these young people formed into groups, adopted names such as The Drexel Club, the
Lincoln Club or the Ariadne club, and participated in activities under the guidance of
assigned club leaders. The Hull-House Woman's Club was one of the only adult clubs
that interacted with the children and young people on a regular basis, a connection
supported by the discourse of civic housekeeping. "It is but natural, perhaps, that the
members of the Hull-House Woman's Club ... should have offered their assistance in
our attempt to provide recreation for these restless young people," wrote Jane
Addams. Women's attention to such concerns reproduced their domestic role in the
civic sphere, nurturing the emotional life of a throng of city children.'4
13
Addams, Twenty Yearsat Hull-House, 253.
14Ibid., 254.
:
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Figure 1. Program for The Marionette Club's production of "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme."
!
346
/
ShannonJackson
In light of the attempt to create pragmatic socialities that would "broaden out in
one's mind to an instrument of companionship," Addams increasingly came to
recognize the social value of non-verbal forms of interaction, investigating modes
other than "the medium of talk" for the creation of vital public spheres.15Shifting her
attention to the community-making power of "play" and the "public game," she
developed a performance-centered vocabulary that furthered the Meadian hope of
creating "conditions which favor" the "essentially social nature of human action."
Thesepublicgameswould also performa socialfunctionin revealingmen to each other,
forit is in momentsof pleasure,of emotionalexpansionthatmendo thismostreadily.Play,
beyond any otherhuman activityfulfills this functionof revelationof characterand is
thereforemostusefulin modemcitieswhicharefull of devicesforkeepingmen apartand
holdingthemignorantof eachother.6
Predating John Huizinga's concept of homoludensand Victor Turner's well-circulated
theories of communitas,such a theory of play in turn underwrote an argument for the
role of theatrical practices in pragmatic social reform, albeit within a modified vision
of "Art."In the following passage, for instance, Addams questioned the logic behind
some art-based reform practices by re-evaluating them within a new social conception
of aesthetics.
If we agreewith a recentdefinitionof Art,as that which causesthe spectatorto lose his
senseof isolation,thereis no doubtthatthepopulartheatre,with all its faults,morenearly
fulfillsthe functionof artfor the multitudeof workingpeople thanall the "freegalleries"
and pictureexhibitscombined.17
While retaining a prejudice against the "faults" of the popular theatre, Addams
emphasized a different function for the aesthetic object. Focusing on its communicative power and on the kind of felt collectivity it engendered, she connected the
medium of theatre to the social function of play and to the hope that the singular
individual could "lose his sense of isolation."
A recognition of the role of theatre in forging a spirit of community in Chicago's
West Side underwrote many descriptions and accounts, and its historicization necessarily requires analysis of theatrical rehearsal as much as of theatrical production.
Additionally, it forces attention on the role of performance practice within a larger
network of settlement sociality. Settlers found that the process of producing a
performance generated unique affective bonds amongst tentatively formed social
groups. Thus, receptions that spawned weekly meetings and social clubs of individual
immigrant and young people's groups, later turning to clubs of mixed gender and
mixed ethnicity, gained solidity and staying power when cautious ensembles turned
into performance ensembles. The development of what Raymond Williams calls the
"formations"of cultural production-those "forms of organization and self-organiza15JiirgenHabermas,TheStructuralTransformation
of the PublicSphere:An Inquiryinto a Categoryof
Society,trans.T. Burgerand F. Lawrence(Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress,1989).Some
Bourgeois
andthePublicSphere(Cambridge:MITPress,
critiquesin CraigCalhoun'sedited collection,Habermas
1990)lay the basis for theorizingtheatreand performanceas productivepublic spheres, particularly
Nancy Fraser,"Rethinkingthe PublicSphere,"Geoff Eley, "Nations,Publics,and PoliticalCultures,"
and MaryRyan, "Genderand PublicAccess."
16 JaneAddams, "PublicRecreationand Social
(1907),24.
Morality,"Proceedings
17 Addams,
57.
York:
Ethics
and
Social
Macmillan,
1902),
(New
Democracy
GENDER, THEATRE, AND AMERICAN REFORM
/
347
tion" created by artists themselves-was in itself a pragmatic reform goal of HullHouse theatre.'8 While other art forms require extra-artistic organization between
fellow practitioners in the form of guilds and academies, some type of group
formation is generally built into the execution of the theatrical artistic process itself.
Therefore, it was ideally suited in Hull-House's formative years as a means of creating
group camaraderie within its various social clubs. As Edith de Nancrede would say of
"dramatics"to a conference of reformers:"Certainlywe at Hull-House have found no
other means so successful in holding a large group together from childhood, through
adolescence and into maturity."'9She argued that members could lose interest in other
types of social activities while never allowing the sense of collectivity percolating
around the practice of theatre-making to diminish. "All of the clubs have a decidedly
social side, and give numerous parties, cotillions, and picnics, until most of the
members are thoroughly grown up and begin to marry and to settle down, when they
become purely dramatic clubs."20Since the social clubs tried to encourage meaningful
social interaction between loyal members, theatrical activity was extremely helpful in
enabling such ensemble sociality. Edith de Nancrede would write to JaneAddams that
"there is one thing I absolutely know. It is the 'art' side that holds them when they
grow older. No matter how good a time I give them socially, they would drift apart
after they are grown up but for the plays."21
Individual accounts give a picture of how pragmatic sociality operated within the
theatrical performance process at the highly local level of personal interaction. Madge
Jenison, director of the Lincoln Club and of its 1901 performance of TheMerry Wivesof
Windsor,recalls how the process of rehearsing the play together developed bonds
amongst the club members and served a pedagogical function. She particularly
focuses on how the rehearsal process precipitated valued social interaction.
Sometimesthey came throughblizzards. . . they do not get away fromwork until six; it
was nine when they came.We rehearseduntileleven o'clock,and then sometimeswe sat
and talkedof theplayuntilmidnight.It was an endlessdelightto talkof it, especiallyof the
costumes.... I never told them to read the notes and commissaries,but they did; there
came this hungerto understand.22
After a certain point, the play overtook the social life of the club. "It was splendid to
see the play unfolding itself from month to month, and entering into their speech;
conversation could only be conducted in terms of TheMerry Wives."23
This emphasis
on process and group cohesion did not mean that theatrical productions did not cause
occasional episodes of intra-club conflict. While such incidents usually required the
improvised intervention of club directors, more noteworthy were those moments
when the young performers managed such crises amongst themselves. After a
18
RaymondWilliams,TheSociologyof Culture(New York:SchockenBooks, 1982),57.
9Edithde Nancrede,"Dramatic
WorkatHull-House,"
22(Aug.1928):371,JaneAddams
Playground
MemorialCollectionReel 51-1259 and "CreativePossibilitiesof Art for Children,"paper delivered at
Midwest Conferenceon the EmotionalLife of the Child, PalmerHouse, Chicago (March7, 1930), 1
JAMCReel 51-1259.
20
Edith de Nancrede, "DramaticWorkat Hull House," 278.
21
Nancredeto Addams (August 13, 1931)JAMCReel 22-801-806.
22MadgeJenison,"A Hull-HousePlay,"AtlanticMonthly(1906),86.
23Ibid., 88.
Figure 2. "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," 1920. Dorothy Mittelman Sigel (second from the right) plays Lucil
GENDER, THEATRE, AND AMERICAN REFORM
/
349
particularly arduous and disappointing rehearsal, Jenison recounted one such incident.
One boy was tired, he wanted his supper, and he took his hat and overcoat to go home; I
had seen him backed into a corer, with three irate Jewish boys shaking their fists in his
face, and shrieking imprecations in his ear;in a few moments he came around, shamefaced
and apologetic.24
Thus, in many cases, the performance process could combine with other contingencies
of group dynamics-time constraints, power inequities, and personal differences-to
bring embedded social difficulties to the surface. To the extent, however, that such
conflicts were negotiated within the group, the resolution of moments of crisis could
encourage the formation of community.
Despite personal conflicts and logistical dilemmas, descriptions of the theatrical
process confirm its enormous utility in building intra-club community. As an art form
that required the co-operation of individuals in a group, as a creative endeavor whose
success hinged upon mutual support rather than competition between artists, theatre
was most productive in the service of a reform agenda. Edith de Nancrede romantically described the all-night technical rehearsals that, through shared trial, inevitably
solidified the cast. Additionally, Jenison recalled the pleasures of group involvement.
Best of all was the esprit de corpswith which they came to line up about their play, this
working for a common ideal which was without themselves. I take it that an office boy who
feels that he is part of the firm is in step to become the firm itself.25
When the actual production of her club's TheMerry Wivesof Windsortook place, an
already established sense of community was celebrated throughout, each member
watching "without themselves" upon the creation of their co-operation. "At the end of
each act they embraced each other and shook hands. During the scenes, they stood in
silent, excited groups at the wings, listening." Accounts such as these illustrate the role
of theatre in achieving a highly local form of sociality, one that formed a provisional
community along pragmatic lines and that incarnated a theatrical version of Jane
Addams's theory of play.
In so far as the illusion of the drama succeeds in putting a man back into ancestral and
primitive emotions, it has a close relation to the function of play... the theatre in its ability
to bring men together into a common mood and to unite them through a mutual interest in
elemental experiences has many suggestions for forms of public recreation... as the similar
and interchangeable use of the word "play" may indicate.26
It was through such aesthetic practices that the settlement could actualize its social
ideal of community, albeit in the otherwise unremarkable realm of a modest social
club, led by a less than famous female reformer, and receiving less than marginal
status in the conventional history of the America theatre.
Additionally, Hull-House theatre provided a way for female reformers to participate in the active arena of socially conscious work while positioning themselves
within the relatively unthreatening discourse of civic housekeeping. While not all
24Ibid., 88.
Ibid., 90.
25
26
JaneAddams, "PublicRecreationand Social Morality,"Proceedings
(1907),22-23.
350
/
ShannonJackson
Hull-House settlers and theatre directors were female, women played most of the
important roles in its creation and promotion. In addition to the general aid in
recreationaldevelopment received by the Woman's Club, women led a range of socialcum-dramatic clubs. Edith de Nancrede eventually headed a six-club network of
children's and young people's clubs varying in age from three to twenty-one; Dorothy
Mittelman's Marionettes were among them. When Laura Dainty Pelham left her post
as president of the Hull-House Woman's Club to head up the Hull-House Playersthe settlement theatrical troupe that would receive the widest attention and esteemed
reputation-the two groups maintained a strong relationship of mutuality, the former
financially and materially enabling theatrical productions, the latter performing at
teas, talks, and gatherings sponsored by the former. The gendered authority underwriting Hull-House theatrecould even exist at the tacit level of spatial relations. When
the settlement constructed a separate auditorium to house its theatricalproductions, it
was perhaps no coincidence that the Hull-House Woman's Club transferred the
location of its meetings to this new space, storing cups and saucers for their weekly
afternoon teas amid the props and costumes kept by the young people's clubs.27
Furthermore, when the settlement later built Bowen Hall-a separate building to
house the Hull-House Woman's Club-Edith de Nancrede again enacted the reciprocal relationship between female reform and theatre by moving the productions of her
young people's clubs to this new space.
The role of the theatre in creating community existed not only at the level of intraclub interaction. Descriptions and editorials in the Hull-House Bulletin suggest that
theatre also served a unique function as a facilitator of inter-club relations. Settlers
made such use of several aspects of the theatre-its status as a public event, its
interdisciplinarity, and its paradoxical capacity to break up structural insularity
amongst the clubs. First, the theatrical experience was inherently a collective event
that extended to an audience beyond its club's performance ensemble. Madge Jenison
acknowledged that a club's decision to engage in dramatics served a function beyond
intra-clubcohesion for such "a public occasion... lends prestige to a club so small that
it would otherwise remain obscure."28Thus, performance solidified the status and
identity of a particular social club in the eyes of other ones. Furthermore,the public
nature of theatre encouraged communication and mutual support between clubs.
Particularlynoteworthy in exploring this relationship is the fact that the first publication of the Hull-HouseBulletincoincided with the settlement's more active promotion
of dramatics. The opening issue of the bulletin explicitly stated its goal as a means of
encouraging communication amongst the various branches of the settlement. In
articulating this hope, Jane Addams borrowed the language reformers generally used
to theorize interactive play and ideal human communities in the city at large.
Duringthe past yeartherehas beensome difficultyin establishingcommunicationamong
the membersof the varioussocieties,clubs,and classesmeetingat Hull-House.Without
theadvantageof comingto a socialandeducationcentersuchas Hullthiscommunication
House is largelylost. As a studentin a large school becomesinterestedin studies and
methodsoutsidehis own pursuits,so at a settlementeachmembershouldlearnto know
other characters,thoughts,and feelings. ... It is hoped that these notices may prove
27Hull-House Inventories(1901 and 1903),The JaneAddams MemorialCollections,University of
Illinois at Chicago,Addendum 10.
28Jenison,"A Hull-HousePlay,"85.
GENDER, THEATRE, AND AMERICAN REFORM
/
351
suggestive and stimulate the clubs not only to a greater interest in each others' pursuits but
towarda moregenerousco-operation.29
The rhetoric of the bulletin suggested that the settlement's efforts at creating intra-club
community were almost too successful, that the social clubs promoted a kind of
insularity that, if unchecked, ran counter to the ideals of Hull-House's mission. That
Hull-House participants should "learn to know other characters, thoughts, and
feelings" aligned with the metropolitan sensibility the settlement promoted. It was
with these concerns in mind that Hull-House residents made a temporally coincident
decision to stage a series of Christmas plays and holiday contatas. "Ifthe Christmas of
1896 should do something toward breaking up the unconscious tendency of the clubs
and classes toward isolation and absorption in their own affairs, it would prove a
blessed Christmas indeed for Hull-House."30Thus, the increase in dramatic activity in
the middle of the last decade of the nineteenth century strategically coincided with a
shift in the structural orientation of the Hull-House settlement in general. Since
communication and co-operation across difference was an integral part of the HullHouse agenda, the novelty and public nature of theatricalperformance proved to be a
productive tool in actualizing this goal.
Later, Addams would note an additional attribute of theatrical art that proved
fruitful in creating inter-clubcommunity. Not only was theatre an expressly public art
form, it was also an essentially interdisciplinary one, often combining the skills of
several aesthetic forms-music, movement, speech, visual imagery-and thus requiring the interaction of several resources of the settlement for its execution. As StuartJoel
Hecht has argued, residents were quick to note and appropriate theatre's polyphonic
nature.31
Sometimes all the artistic resources of the House united in a Wagnerian combination; thus,
the textof the 'Troll'sHoliday'was writtenby one resident,set to musicby another,sung
by theMusicSchool,andplacedupon the stageunderthe carefuldirectionand trainingof
the dramaticcommittee;and the little brown trollscould neverhave bumbledaboutso
gracefullyin theirgleamingcavesunless theyhad been taughtin the gymnasium.32
Thus, Hull-House residents capitalized upon particular aspects of the theatrical
medium-specifically its public nature and its interdisciplinarity-to promote a spirit
of communication and co-operation. This use of dramatics does not only illuminate
the means and methods by which residents actualized a Progressive agenda in the
settlement locality, however, for the insights of Hull-House workers into the usefulness of theatre also foreground important characteristicsof the theatrical event itself,
particularly the extra-dramatic aspects of its performance space, its ensemble of
individuals, its process, its publics, and its polyphonic combination of artistic forms.
Occasionally, Hull-House settlers made even more overt attempts to use theatre to
break up the self-containment of the social clubs, a complicated reformance that came
precipitously close to violating pragmatic sociality even as it relied on the collective
spirit of play. Such episodes trouble a naive celebration of Hull-House settlers by
29Hull-HouseBulletin(1896)JAMCReel 53-503.
30Ibid. (Dec. 1896)JAMCReel 53-563.
31 Stuart
Joel Hecht, "Hull-HouseTheatre:An Analyticaland EvaluativeHistory"(Ph.D. dissertation, NorthwesternUniversity,1983).
32Addams,
TwentyYears,273.
352
/
ShannonJackson
showing their interventions in neighorhood sociality, albeit with an informed and
insightful knowledge of human nature and human interaction. The most notable
example involved the creation of a new theatre troupe composed of the "best" actors
from different clubs. Such an endeavor had been proposed earlier,but "the loyalty of
these young people each to their own social organization, prevented carrying out any
such idea....
[Iln spite of the envy and jealousy that was bound to occur, it was
decided to try to form a Hull-House Dramatic Association."33While the HHDA was
ostensibly formed so that Hull-House could produce "better"plays, it is difficult to
believe that Jane Addams would have agreed to this plan solely on the basis of
aesthetic standards. In light of the settlement's larger attempt to discourage "clannishness" in community formation, however, the decision to form a new troupe suggests a
decidedly social mission that could be couched in the language of artistic superiority.
To the extent that a new formation would loosen club loyalties, it was worth risking
"envy and jealousy" in order to achieve an ideologically justified structural shift.
Negative feelings amongst individual club performers might have been a necessary
phase at an institution that now sought to discourage social insularity and club
autonomy.
Not surprisingly, the endeavor encountered many a difficulty in its actualization.
The idea of selecting from a pool of "some hundred and fifty to two hundred young
people" immediately imposed an element of competition amongst a large group of
performers who had been safely distanced from this common aspect of the theatrical
process. Eventually, a production was staged followed by the temporary disbanding of
the group and return of individual actors to their respective clubs, a development
analogized by one chronicleras akin to "the days of the feudal system, where to fight
for the overlord was considered a greater honor than to fight for the king."34Later,
however, the association regrouped and continued with another series of plays,
eventually forming an entire theatrical season. Gradually, the Dramatic Association
became a more entrenched ensemble of its own, a development described by some in
celebratory prose that also echoed many a reformer's ideal for its segregated immigrant cities.
Its membersgraduallybecamemoreloyal to it and sacrificedits interestsless and less for
theirolder affiliation.... Fromthattime the permanencyand successof the Hull-House
DramaticAssociationwas assured.Theplayersbecamea unifiedbody.Traditionsformed
and loyaltyasserteditself.Enthusiasmtookthe placeof doubt.35
The first stories of the Dramatic Association exemplify the role of dramatics in the
creation and re-creation of communities at Hull-House. In particular,it reflects HullHouse's commitment to certain kinds of communities, ones that were outwardlydirected as well as inwardly stable. It encouraged individuals to be members of
several communities rather than to remain insulated within a single group, to be a
member of a social club and a dramatics club and so "to know other characters,
thoughts, and feelings" besides those already familiar. While secondary historiography on Hull-House theatrehas interpretedthe formation of the HHDA as a triumph of
Albert D. Phelps, "How the Hull House Players Fought Their Way to Success," TheatreMagazine 20
(Nov. 1914): 230.
34Ibid., 231.
35Ibid.
33
GENDER, THEATRE, AND AMERICAN REFORM
/
353
"aesthetic" concerns over "social" issues, another perspective that incorporates the
complexity of the settlement's extra-theatricalgroup relations demonstrates that the
HHDA also served particularly "social" ends.36While selecting "better" performers
may well have produced "better" plays, the fact that members of several clubs
participated in a single ensemble also marked a transformation in the settlement's
group relations and a theatrically achieved step toward the ideal of progressive
communities.
Theatre and Bodily Reformation
In addition to the productive role theatre played in the formation of community, the
practice was also placed in service of another parallel brand of reform. Edith de
Nancrede's dance class-its orderly line, its bows and curtsies, its modes of addressillustrates the settlement working within and against a discourse that assessed the
everyday performances of self enacted by heterogeneous city inhabitants. As suggested earlier,performative elements such as dress, taste, manners, speech, and bodily
comportment were duly noted by urban interpreters unfamiliar with immigrant and
working-class difference. Hull-House generally followed the belief that such differences were not innate but cultivated and, therefore, could be recultivated along
alternative lines. As John Kasson has argued, reformers often focused on the realm of
manners as a means of re-creating human beings; "the values of these codes radiated
both outward and inward. They provided standards by which to assess entire social
classes, ethnic groups, and cultures (often justifying their subordination), while at the
same time they extended deep into the individual personality."37Thus, for many
reformers and Hull-House settlers, such material aspects of personal identity engaged
interactively with a person's mental life and could lay the basis for the individual
development of moral "character."This was especially true of young people who,
because their habits were less entrenched, were more adaptable and therefore more
responsive to transformative repetition and the "continual reconstruction of experience." Hull-House settlers often combined this effort with a Deweyian model of the
self, recognizing that learning happened pragmatically in the subtle give and take of
daily interaction and experientially in the accumulation and adaptation of new
encounters. Anticipating Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus,Dewey and his sympathizers recognized the importance of disposition, common sense, and embodiment in
the constitution of social subjects and of how such "tastes and distastes ... more than
declared opinions, forge the unconscious unity of a class ... impressing themselves
through bodily experiences which may be as profoundly unconsicous as the quiet
caress of beige carpet or the thin clamminess of tattered, garish linoleum."38Once
again, female reformers found that this focus on young people's moral development
could easily support and be supported by the discourse of civic housekeeping. At the
same time that Hull-House promoted this reformation of the self in a light of a
pragmatic theory of the self, other Hull-House residents and agencies participated in
developing discourses of juvenile health and delinquency that underwrote legislative
36Hecht.
37Kasson,Rudeness
andCivility,7.
38PierreBourdieuand LoicJ. D. Wacquant,An Invitiation
to ReflexiveSociology(Chicago:University
of ChicagoPress, 1992),127. The connectionbetween Dewey and Bourdieuhas also been tentatively
suggested in this book.
354
/
ShannonJackson
reforms around child labor or the institution of separate juvenile justice systems. Thus,
as the arguments and enactments around theatrical collectivity reproduced HullHouse discourses of urban community and attendant efforts at social formation, so
those around the material and mental formation of young people advanced along with
the settlement's representation and administration of juvenile development. Together
these overlapping arguments, methods, and extra-theatricalreform efforts coincided
with the form of personal recreation enacted by Hull-House's civic play-housekeeping.
Such uses of theatre in the combined cultivation of aesthetic and moral sensibility
lay in the embodied, environmental, and enacted nature of the medium itself, one that
uniquely facilitated the inculcation of a transformationin sensibility and behavior. At
various points in her talks on dramatics,Addams commended the theatre as a "means
of training the young people of the neighborhood in manners and personal refinement
and courtesy."39To the extent that theatricalperformance required a certain amount of
bodily discipline on the part of performers and to the extent that training in personal
refinement also required a neighbor's bodily discipline, the former could be employed
in service of the latter. Theatre club leaders, for instance, lamented young people's
undisciplined comportment using reformist language. Describing how a young boy
"had that strolling tendency which seems to go nowhere and come nowhere, that
moonlight-walk-by-daylight manner of exit and entrance which will make any scene
lag," one director framed this aesthetic deficiency in language that also echoed the
discourse of juvenile delinquency being formulated in other settlement arenas, a
discourse that attempted to categorize and describe the performed signs of juvenile
"incorrigibility,""truancy,"and "loitering."40
To effect a transformation in the students' bodily comportment required for the
stage, Hull-House often solicited the aid of the dance studios, for, as Edith de
Nancrede wrote, "[f]olk dancing and rhythmic dancing form a very important part in
the training, and are invaluable in teaching expression through the use of the body."41
Since the body was a sign system both on and offstage, its co-ordination and
familiarity with new signals and motions also symbolized the success of Hull-House
theatre and of the Hull-House reform project more generally. On the day Dorothy
Mittelman married Louis Sigel, Nancrede celebrated the grace with which Mittelman
walked down the aisle, attributingthe success of the "rhythm"classes in aestheticizing
this performance of everyday life.42Thus, Nancrede enacted a classed cultivation of
taste, what Pierre Bourdieu has called "distinction,"in which agents learned not only
"to take an aesthetic point of view on objects already constituted aesthetically ... [but
also] the even rarercapacity to constitute aesthetically objects [and I would added selfpresentational styles] that are ordinary of even 'common"' applying such principles to
"the most everyday choices of everyday life."43Moreover, such statements of Edith de
Jane Addams, Spirit of Youth in the City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 76.
Jenison, 86. See Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 112-214. As an example of Hull-House residents'
theories of the relationship between child development and environment, see Sophonisba Breckinridge
and Edith Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the Home (New York: Charities Publication Committee,
1912).
41 Nancrede, "Dramatic Work at Hull House," 277.
42 Author's Personal Interview with
Dorothy Mittelman Sigel, May 1994.
43Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 40.
39
40
:r
f
4w
1srs
Figure3. Saturdaydance class in Bowen Hall, circa 1930.Photo:WallaceKirklan
356
/
ShannonJackson
Nancrede and other women colleagues tacitly invoked their own gendered authority
as female theatre workers, appealing to theatre's reformative powers by highlighting
its role in creating virtuous and healthy children and young people and thus placing
theatrical practice on a gendered plane with other sanctioned efforts of women's civic
housekeeping. Moreover,the performed memory enacted by Dorothy Mittelman Sigel
in my opening anecdote (a memory that she has performed for me several times)
attests to the impact of such reformations on her embodied history, one that takes
shape in an extended arm, working inside aging muscles that can still manage a
graceful curtsey.
Such cultivations in distinction and their reformation of neighbor "habitus"continued when settlers demonstrated that such bodily adjustments were intimately related
to spatial habits-that body disciplines and the spatial configurations of rooms and
furniture mutually reinforced each other. Since the assumption that changing an
environment could change the characterof its inhabitants underpinned the movement
of Positive Environmentalism, the creation of and performance within alternative
theatrical settings reinforced the environmental reforms sought during this period in
Chicago. By producing plays that took place in parlors and by inculcating the
character behavior appropriate to such a space, some Hull-House productions indirectly initiated participants in the set of spatial styles also taught in the settlement's
mother's clubs and model tenement exhibits across the street. Edith de Nancrede
favorably underscored the intensity with which her theatre troupes attended to the
beauty of their sets-whether a bourgeois dining room or a more symbolic designsuggesting not only the development of an aesthetic sensibility per se but also the
application of this sensibility to a surrounding environment. If young neighbors
learned to inhabit and appreciate such settings on-stage-sets whose furniture was of
such "good taste," a costume wardrobe (gleaned mostly from the donations of wealthy
Chicago philanthropists and Hull-House benefactors) of such "well-to-do heritage,"
and props sporting a china collection so lovely that, as one reviewer said, "many a
woman envied the possessor"-they ideally became interested in recreating such
settings in their own homes.44When Jane Addams asked Edith de Nancrede to help
her argue to the Carnegie Foundation for the importance of the arts in settlement
reform, Nancrede explicitly noted this valued relationship between aesthetic and
everyday environments. "I am sure that it is impossible to judge of the results, only by
those who make a profession of some form of art... One has only to go to their homes
to see the effects. You would be amazed at the charming apartments that girls like
Anna Behr, Dorothy Mittleman, Chickie, and indeed most of the my older young
people have."45Noting that such "charming apartments" kept by dramatics club
members were proof of the re-creative power of theatre, Nancrede invoked theatrical
practice-or civic play-housekeeping-once again as a means to inculcate the habitual
behaviors and dispositions of a "better" habitus and more morally sound urban
homes.
Besides the embodied and environmental nature of the medium, theatre's oral
component proved useful in reforming the speech of its participating neighbors.
Deviations from certain habits of speech signaled lack of refinement as obtrusively as
44
45
Author Unknown, "Hull-House Theatre," (June 1902) JAMC 51-1080-1081.
Nancrede to Addams (August 13, 1931).
GENDER,THEATRE,AND AMERICANREFORM /
357
did lapses in bodily discipline. Dramatics was thus particularly useful when teachers
made "a great point of the use of the voice, of pronunciation and diction; and what
could not possibly be taught in one play a year, can be inculcated in one play a year for
ten years."46Some times such vocal reformation focused on developing grammatically
"correct" habits of pronunciation in place of patterns endemic to a working-class
performance of personal identity. Addams, for instance, noted that participation in the
plays of the great dramatists necessarily required much work and "hours of labor that
the 'th' may be restored to its proper place in English speech."47Sometimes the
perceived need for training in pronunciation arose from the cultural diversity of HullHouse's immigrant neighborhood, a vocal reformation that facilitated immigrant
assimilation. Thus, many would celebrate the fact that, despite the presence of "a
Frenchman, a German, several Irish, and two Russian Jews who could not speak
English when they landed in America" in one particular cast, "the elocution was
almost without exception on a level of excellence unknown to the commercial stage."48
This micro-level reformanceactivity became even more personal and intimate when
it channeled the emotional component of theatrical expression and hence the emotion
management necessary for its execution. Associating a perceived excess of emotion
with lack of refinement, settlers lauded Hull-House performers when they refrained
from such affective indulgences. In the early production of A ChimneyCorner,Addams
noted that this "pretty domestic play ... might easily be spoiled by ranting, but ...
because it was given with delicacy and real feeling, held the sympathy of the audience
throughout."49Addams thus aligned delicacy, not with repressed emotion, but with
"real"feeling. While, like all performance of the past, such enactments are "lost" to a
performance historian, it is interesting to speculate on the degree to which so-called
realistic acting styles derived from the class and cultural sensibility of bourgeois
residents and whether other performance styles that received the label "indelicate" or
"theatrical"did so because they exceeded the constraints of delicacy and refinement of
such "naturalized" behavioral styles. For instance, certain excessive performance
styles were tolerated and even perceived as "life-like" when used to portray certain
characters. One theatre reviewer applauded a young Hull-House actor's depiction of
a dishonest and immoral labor leader named Buck Foley in The WalkingDelegate,
saying his "brassy, magnetic, shrewd, and evil labor pirate is photographically
conceived and colorfully executed." That a charactercould be "colorfully"performed
and still be "photographically conceived" suggests that representations of workingclass immorality easily turned to a broader performance style. The perception that this
colorful portrayal was also "accurate" reflects the extent to which stereotypes of
working-class emotionalism, vocal volume, and broadened gestural styles functioned
as naturalized images and aural synechoche in the Progressive Era's bourgeois
imaginary. The text of the play further reinforced the stereotype by writing all of Buck
Foley's lines in "improper English speech"-ungrammatical phrases whose words
dropped their endings and their "th's." Unlike Buck Foley, Tom Keating-the honest
working-class labor leader in The WalkingDelegate-spoke in an accentlessly perfect
46
Nancrede,"DramaticWorkat Hull House,"277.
47 Addams, Spiritof Youth,89.
48
MauriceBrown,"TheHull-HousePlayersin 'Justice,"TheatreMagazine(Sept.1911):90.
49Hull-HouseBulletin(Jan.and Feb. 1898)JAMCReel 53-652-653.
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/
ShannonJackson
grammarunaccompaniedby "colorful"gesturesand bodily comportment,performative
styles that presumably symbolized honesty and morality.50
While much has been made of "realism"and "naturalism"as ideological dramatic
literary strategies that work on their audiences, less has been made of the role of
realism as an acting style in ideologically binding its embodied performers. At a
settlement that argued more often for the reformativerole of performance for its actors
than for its audiences, the connection was more than peripheral. This question is also
particularly interesting in light of the naturalizing rhetoric used finally to argue for
theatricalperformanceand for performance-basedsettlementreformance.ForNancrede,
its ultimate recreative efficacy came from the fact that such performances felt natural
to the actors themselves. Nancrede's theatricalrehearsalsintroduced new behaviors in
a way that did not feel intrusive. Instead, habits were produced, restored, and altered
gradually and in such a way that their enactment felt spontaneous, as if it emanated
from "within" rather than being "directed" from "without." Consider one more
description of Nancrede's method.
In two months-often in less time-they have masteredtheirlines withoutknowingit.
Theyareneverset to tasksof memorizingbutnaturallyabsorbtheplay.Hencethe workis
ever a pleasure.They creepinto a perfectillusionand all is kept sweet, wonderfuland
spontaneousfor them.51
Thus, Nancrede's drills were not experienced as "drill-like"to the young performers,
and her ability in this regard is the mark of her sensitivity as a theatre director.Indeed,
theatre directors will recognize such an ideal of natural absorption as a sound means
of creating good theatre. In the settlement context, however, such an ability was also
the mark of Nancrede's capacity as a productive reformer.The quality of spontaneity
and pleasant absorption in these enactments obscured the tacit inculcation of individual reformation, an unregistered latency that also exemplified the distinctive
pragmatic method of Hull-House reform. Rather than assuming the traits of absolute
power, modernizing control, or hierarchized condescension that circulated in other
Progressive Erareform projects,such settlement theatre matched the ethic of neighborliness, subtlety, proximity, continuity, and quiet side-by-sideness articulated as the
method of settlement practice. In a complicated incarnation of the Hull-House
paradox, this device used pragmatic understanding even as its interventionist application side-stepped the ideal of reciprocity in a mimetic exchange. Successful at
infiltrating the corporeal styles of the individual so deeply that their performance
appeared and felt spontaneous, theatre's feeling of unmediated sensation enabled the
re-creation of the Progressive Nineteenth Ward bodies. As Dorothy Mittelman Sigel
has repeatedly articulated to me in an effort to convey her experience of the settlement:
"Wenever felt that we were being 'taught' anything. It's only when I look back now
that I realize Miss Nancrede was teaching us our manners. But she didn't 'teach' it; it
just happened naturally and by example."52
Hilda Satt,JAMCReel 51-1107-1200.
51JamesO'DonnellBennett,"Musicand the Drama,"ChicagoRecord-Herald
(March6, 1906),8;Joseph
Roachexplores ambivalentdefinitionsof "naturalness"and "spontaneity"in earlieracting styles in
ThePlayersPassion(Ann Arbor:Universityof MichiganPress, 1985).
52
Author'sPersonalInterviewwith DorothyMittelmanSigel, May 1994and April 1995.
50 TheWalking
Delegate,Adaptedby
Figure4. Childrens'rehearsalat Hull-House,1910.
360
/
ShannonJackson
Thus, Edith de Nancrede's infectious example supremely exemplified the experiential ideal of both settlement mimesis and pragmatic pedagogy. And to the extent that
Mrs. Sigel now credits these tacit lessons in manners with her own rise in economic
mobility, Nancrede equipped her with valued cultural capital, even as Nancrede
paradoxically made life decisions that successively distanced her from economic
comforts. Dorothy Mittelman Sigel would take her reformed corporeal styles, iterating
her speech and comportment to land a much-coveted position at Chicago's Merchandise Mart in her late-teens. And now that she has iterated and reiterated such
environmental practices in her exchange of "charming"Nineteenth Ward apartments
for larger ones farther north and finally to her charming Winnetka home, she frames
Hull-House's impact as an extension, not a repression, of her own capacities, skills,
and powers of expression. These are corporeal styles that Mrs. Sigel takes up and puts
down, even in an oral history interview where she appropriates the muscular tracings
of the history of her reform to translate its once-thereness to the now-hereness of my
conversations with her. Meanwhile, as Mrs. Sigel embarked on a classic American
story of economic and geographic mobility, Edith de Nancrede stayed put, living until
her death at Hull-House, committing to a decision to abandon the burdens and
entitlements of her gendered and classed familial upbringing, and, at one point,
asking Dorothy's husband Louis to hock a piece of Nancrede's family jewelry so that
she could continue to pay her room and board at the settlement.
Conclusion
A wider interpretationof aesthetics and performance challenges some assumptions
in the history of reform. It particularly troubles the interpretation that many have
given to nineteenth and turn-of-the-century voluntary associations and reform endeavors on the move from less significant cultural activities to the "more important"
work in changing labor, immigration, urban, and welfare policy. Most significantly,
investigation of the role of "artistic practices" in the everyday life of Hull-House
uniquely illuminates its role in the production of locality, a commitment to communication, contact,and co-habitationamongst diverse groups that was both the settlement's
goal and its method. Cultural and social formations such as festivals, exhibits, theatre,
music, reading groups, dances, coffeehouses, social clubs, sports, and recreation
classes were the central methods by which Hull-House reformers worked to create
neighborhood locality, an endeavor that was fundamental rather than peripheral to
their model of social change. At the same time, this production of locality always
occurred in an unequal encounter between settler and neighbor, one where mimetic
exchanges did not always happen reciprocally and where residents intervened in the
reformation of communities and identities using a method that derived paradoxically
from an anti-interventionist philosophy. Hull-House theatre and reformancethus
exemplifies the significance of the experiential to realm of the theoretical, a significance that means attending to nonverbal historiographical documents such as inventories and blueprints and taking seriously the embodied aspects of an oral history
transmission in addition to its verbal transcript.What was theorized verbally around
discourses of evolution, womanhood, pragmatism, community, and morality was also
enacted collectively and embodied viscerally in the motion of a municipal housekeeper, the focused gaze of a female theatre director,the performed espritde corpsof a
group of young people, and the extended arm of a first-generation Polish immigrant
GENDER,THEATRE,AND AMERICANREFORM /
361
girl named Dorothy Mittelman. Finally, the work of settlers like Edith de Nancrede
epitomized the intersection of performance and reform in all its breath-taking and
conflicted productivity, a productivity that now circulates in the infinitely complicated, perpetually problematic, and always breath-taking moments when Dorothy
Mittelman Sigel raises her arm, lowers her leg, and lifts her head to hold the eyes of an
imaginary teacher whose eyes had once held hers.