society depends far more on the physical, moral and intellectual excellence
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of woman than on that of ‘mere man’” (1887). Neither these views, nor
their expression in a medical journal was unusual. It was commonly argued
that the nation had a biological as well as social basis in the family, and the institution of marriage safeguarded the reproduction of both. Marriage was
therefore a medical as well as social and political concern, and any threat to
the socially sanctioned sexuality expressed by the institution of marriage was
a threat to the nation. Venereal disease marked the violation of the marriage
contract by at least one of the members of the marriage (even if it occurred
before the marriage), and according to Burr, it “outrival[ed] the criminal
interference with the products of conception as a cause of race suicide”
(1887–8).
With the term “race suicide,” Burr picked up on a sociological debate
that typically concerned the New Woman rather than the prostitute. Circu-
lated by sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross in a series of essays on “social
control,” the term refers to the declining birth rate of middle-class white
Americans and the corresponding rise in groups of non-whites, immigrants,
and the impoverished.11 Articulating the familiar charge against the New
Woman, Burr sees one of “the principal causes” of the imminent threat to
the white American family – hence nation – as “late marriage”; he explains
that “women will not get married unless the man is rich or has a good in-
come. A man cannot have a good income until he has had experience, that
is, he must be older. The man does not marry young because the woman puts
on too much style and he cannot afford it on a small salary, hence marriage
is deferred until later in life.” Here the New Woman poses a threat to the
(white) race and nation because by not procreating she fails to add the right
kind of citizens to the mix. The sexual pathologizing of the threat is evident
as the New Woman shades into the fallen woman in Burr’s addendum that
“the sexual passion is strong, as nature intends it should be, and many fall.”
Against this scenario, he advocates “home training and early marriages”
(1889).
It is easy to imagine how the unattached woman could be similarly posi-
tioned. When she returns from wherever she has been, the community that
had lost sight of her will not know what she might be carrying – whether it be a disease or a baby (either potentially representing a threat to paternity).
Yet, posing the threat she constitutes in exclusively sexual terms risks ob-
scuring an important implication of how Thomas frames his concern. Her
ability to disappear and reappear also represents the community’s lack of
control of its spaces. I do not mean to suggest here that this concern has no
place in fallen woman narratives. I am arguing, rather, that the multi-faceted
nature of the concern was overlooked as were the non-sexual dangers that
the unattached woman embodied.
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Thomas’s and Dreiser’s narratives register not only changes in personal be-
havior, but also a changing conception and experience of space. Sociologists
of the time described the city in terms of promiscuous spaces, where people mingled with strangers, where boundaries were fluid, and traditional
spatial segregation according to class, race, religion, sexuality, gender, na-
tionality held no purchase. These spaces, of course, offered the opportunity
for both anonymity and dangerous attractions, both tempting and allow-
ing the unattached woman to disappear. She inhabited those spaces and
came to embody the breakdown of familiar classifications and other social
codes. Even more than the recognizably fallen woman, she represented the
reorganization of the familiar social relations that constitute recognizable
communities, in which the sociologists saw both possibilities and danger.
Rosen describes the spatial transformation, ironically effected by Progres-
sive reformers at the turn of the twentieth century, as identifiable vice areas (“red-light districts”) were closed down and “replaced by the riskier, but
less visible, act of streetwalking” (xii). In the fallen woman narratives, the
protagonists became more physically marked – recognizable, that is, as pros-
titutes – as their places of business and habitation became less identifiable.
Like streetwalkers, the unattached woman and Carrie Meeber might turn
up where one least expects them. But they are even more dangerous because
their signature characteristic is their unrecognizability; their spatial liberties leave them unmarked by their behavior.
Thomas’s study and Dreiser’s novel may be most generically familiar as
passing narratives, stories that proliferated in this period in which characters whose sexual and/or social past was visibly indeterminate assumed identities different from their conventional roles. Although George Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion is a classic passing narrative, in the United States in this period most stories that have been so labeled involved characters who “passed” for
white against the dominant definitions of the time. Passing narratives regis-
tered cultural anxieties about the instability of race and (imagined) threats to white Americanism such as those articulated as well in the concept of “race
suicide.” The danger Thomas’s and Dreiser’s protagonists pose as disap-
pearing women, in other words, is analogous to (possibly reimagined as) the
challenge that “passers” allegedly pose to white Americanism. The pressing
threat of the unattached woman was that, even more than her middle-class
counterpart, for whom invisibility was not so easy an option, she represented
the mobility attendant upon the social, economic, and spatial transforma-
tions that were transpiring at both local and national levels; her ability to become undetectable highlighted the uncertainty and instability of social roles.
As a “passer,” the unattached woman provoked anxiety about the reproduc-
tion (in all senses) of economic and racial hierarchies and the sociopolitical
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identities they subtended. The nature of passing narratives, however, was to
displace concern about the deeper social issues onto the transgressions of the
“passer.”
Since the sexuality and reproduction that were centrally at issue found
expression for many cultural commentators as the threat of prostitution,
the uncertainties attendant upon socioeconomic and spatial reorganization
were deflected onto heightened concern about that particular social issue.
The idea, for instance, that the entrance of women into professions led to
prostitution was circulated not only in popular media, but, again, in medical
journals. While the stage had been frequently thus assailed, the turn of the
century witnessed a broadening of professions that posed a threat to women’s
virtue. The readership of the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, learned that “another source of prostitution is the entrance
of women into industrial life. For centuries she was surrounded by home
life and home industries. Then the spinning wheel gave way to the loom in
factories, the needle yielded to the sewing machine, the individual worker
changed into a ‘hand,’ producing in the factory a certain part of the whole.
Women have entered the professions, arts and literature with success. She has
gained independence, but is lost to family life and its beneficial influences.”12
The definition of the prostitute was clearly expanding to encompass women
who ventured into anonymous spaces and who abjured the marriage bond.
Throughout this passage, the writer signals his implicit concern with the
woman’s evident detachment. Using the alienating metonymy of industri-
alization (the production of “a certain part of the whole”), he depicts her
corresponding transformation into “a ‘hand.’” In the context of the severed
bonds of her home life and the alienating world of the factory, the unattached
woman becomes herself not only “a certain part of the whole,” but, perhaps,
a violently severed “hand” – or other body part. But by immediately naming
the threat as prostitution, the author fails to explore the range of changes he describes or the various challenges they both register and foster. Ironically,
however, in the grammatically awkward oscillation between the plural sub-
ject women and the singular pronoun she, the writer implicitly manifests a way of understanding – and perhaps solving – the problem that corresponds
to the sociologists’ use of types. Using “she” for “women,” he turns the range
of working women in factories, the arts and professions into a single type
whose story and fate can be predicted. Any fear that these women will dis-
appear from view is answered as they become visible by being incorporated
into a narrative that is so legible, it seems, that this author does not even have to make the actual connection to prostitution. Types and narratives in effect
compensate for the disappearance of the familiar spaces, making unattached
women visible, comprehensible, and apprehensible. When the writer of this
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piece turns to prostitution, however, he loses the distinction between the
unattached woman and the prostitute (or fallen woman). In their more care-
ful distinction among types, the sociologists worked to identify a range of
social actors and thereby to develop a “science of society.”13 Dreiser makes