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Business as Usual: Re-Domesticating the New Woman in Henry Sydnor Harrison’s Post-World War I Novel, Saint Teresa (1922).

By Karsten H. Piep

“Each woman enjoys the creative world of business, but to each the creative work
of child-rearing is the greater obligation and opportunity.”
— Harriet Abbott, “What the Newest New Woman Is” (1920).

Published in the conservative Ladies’ Home Journal one day after the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified by the requisite number of states on 18 August 1920, Harriet Abbott’s “What the Newest New Woman Is” seeks to contain the partially victorious women’s rights movement by calling for the creation of “a new-woman faith typical of the newest new-woman movement” (154). Claiming that the “red element” in the woman’s movement “is sparring to-day as openly for the destruction of womanhood as the Soviet element in industry is shaking the pillars of organised economics,” Abbott appeals to a new breed of New Women “who believe in the fullness of their powers in business or the professions” yet “dare not hack away” at the “foundation stones of old, tested, true experiences” such as fulfilment in marriage and childcare (154). These “Newest New Women,” she argues, are joining forces in “an after-war movement” characterised by “an eclectic choosing of all that is sanest in the sweep of the last century toward a new freedom for women, combined with the persisting older ideas” (154).

Even though the “newest new-woman movement” never materialised, it is hard to dispute Abbott’s claim that the post-war years are marked by the steady building of “a new philosophy that grows from, yet is not consubstantial with, the postulates of the woman movement” (154). Abbott certainly was not alone in expressing her disapproval of a well-organised women’s movement which had successfully amplified its campaign for suffrage during the war. Aside from conservative pundits and commentators, such as Abbott, an increasing number of prominent culture critics, ranging from Randolph Bourne to H. L. Mencken, started to publicly denounce what they perceived to be the “dangerous excesses” of the women’s movement. Like many educated male liberals of his time, Randolph Bourne had been an ardent supporter of women’s rights. In a 1915 character sketch for the NewRepublic, he lauded the achievements of the New Woman, supported calls for birth control, and denounced women’s economic servitude to men. By 1916 however, his enthusiasm for feminism had dimmed considerably. Organised feminists especially, Bourne perceived, had grown too preoccupied with being females rather than individuals. Thus, in “Making One’s Contribution,” Bourne depicts a young man baffled by women who can think of nothing but making a contribution “as women” (91). Likewise, in “Karen,” he portrays a young emancipated college girl gone awry, who makes herself “hideous in mannish skirts and waists” and becomes “intimate with feminists whose feminism had done little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely conscious of the cloven hoof of the male” (446). And in his review of Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women (1917), Bourne uses words such as “neurotic,” “diabolical,” and “wanton” to describe the book’s headmistress, who, he assesses, represents a “type of woman which must inevitably become rather common in the manless world which women are trying to make for themselves” (“The Vampire” 36).

Striking a similar cord in his In Defense of Women (1918), H. L. Mencken, although supportive of women’s right to vote, castigated feminists who are “vociferous propagandists, almost male in their violent earnestness” and who “range from the man eating suffragettes to such preachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such professional shockers of the bourgeoisie as the American prophetess of birth-control, Margaret Sanger” (182). These he puts into sharp contrast with women:

who wake the world with no such noisy eloquence, but content themselves with carrying out their ideas in a quiet and respectable manner ... They are women who with their economic independence assured, either by inheritance or by their own efforts ... do exactly as they please, and make no pother about it. Naturally enough, their superiority to convention and the common frenzy makes them extremely attractive to the better sort of men, and so it is not uncommon for one of them to find herself voluntarily sought in marriage, without any preliminary scheming by herself. (183)  

Now, if Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar are correct that, generally speaking, “modernist literary men seek to reinscribe traditional gender hierarchies and modernist women seek to overturn those hierarchies” (773), then it seems hardly surprising that quite a few progressive-minded male novelists of the immediate post-war era strove to contain “noisy” feminist demands for gender equality by participating in the creation of Abbott’s “Newest New Woman.” Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel, Main Street, which drew high praise from Mencken, may serve as a well-known case in point here. Before the backdrop of the Great War and the “coming of woman suffrage” (244), the rebellious Carol Kennicott, initially makes good her threat “to chuck it [housework] … and [to] come out and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you’ve cleverly kept for yourselves” (313). But after only one year of “real work” with the Bureau of War Risk Insurance in Washington, Carol grows tired of the office as “her association with women who had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities” (316) makes her detest the “impersonal attitude” of political activism (320). By and by, the increasingly irritable Carol gives up her “perfectly selfish” dream of “building up real political power for women” (327), and realises that she has “one thing … a baby to hug,” and once again sees “Gopher Prairie as her home” (329). Finally, on the train ride back to her husband’s rural Midwestern town, Carol’s newfound domestic devotion reaches such heights that she is “willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott” (330).

Henry Sydnor Harrison’s forgotten 1922 novel, Saint Teresa, probably represents the height of that absurd post-war literary creation, the “Newest New Woman,” who, following a bruising battle of the sexes, “places rights, freedom, suffrage, intelligence, and selfhood in the service of all the traditional obligations of the women’s sphere” (Todd 35).         Written from an avowedly modern perspective on feminism, Henry Sydnor Harrison’s Saint Teresa re-enacts in exaggerated fashion the domestication of the rebellious New Woman in Sinclair’s Main Street. Conceived less as an antifeminist novel than a broadside against obsolete manifestations of  old-style feminism, Harrison’s Saint Teresa portrays the eponymous heroine, Teresa De Silver, as a pugnacious, “mannish” modern woman who wears pantaloons, rejects marriage, flies “aeroplanes,” manipulates the stock market and, on “sheer principle” (19), directs her steel company to shift production from shells to peacetime goods (95).  As the storyline unfolds and the tussle between Teresa and Dean Masury, a pro-war efficiency expert, assumes a decidedly personal character, it becomes clear that the novel advocates a realignment of marriage roles which allows for temporary breaches of the traditional spheres while upholding romantic notions of masculinity and femininity. Too headstrong to recognise that they are destined for each other, Teresa and Dean must first prove each other worthy foes in the worlds of commerce and politics before they can glimpse the complementary fulfilment that modern companionate marriage offers. At the close of the novel, the self-deceiving Teresa has been transformed from the “ludicrous” figure of an old-style feminist into one of Abbott’s “Newest New Woman,” who willingly merges Herland into Hisland.

Thinly plotted and lacking convincing character development, Harrison’s Saint Teresa might be dismissed as misogynist male fantasy that deserves to have fallen into oblivion. In spite of this, it is the novel’s transparent attempt at female containment that makes Saint Teresa a noteworthy social text, not least because it so clearly exposes white male post-war anxieties. As Sandra Gilbert has noted, while many literary men such as Harrison, who had experienced the “muck and blood of No Man’s Land” firsthand , “became increasingly alienated from their pre-war selves ... women seemed to become, as if by some uncanny swing of history’s pendulum, ever more powerful” (425). Randolph Bourne’s fear that women “are trying to make for themselves ... [a] manless world” (“The Vampire” 36) speaks to the “intensified ... misogynist resentment with which male writers defined this Great War as an apocalyptic turning point in the battle of the sexes” (Gilbert 426). Harrison’s Saint Teresa may therefore be fruitfully examined as a case study of how lingering male wartime resentment fostered the creation of pseudo-feminist fictions that sought to co-opt “many feminist issues by linking personal identity and fulfilment with companionate marriage, heterosexual pleasure, motherhood as a career, and consumerism” (Laslett and Brenner 395).  

***

World War I afforded American women nearly unprecedented economic independence and social freedoms. As young men were sent overseas, women suddenly found it their patriotic duty to seek employment outside the home in a variety of occupations. “All told,” Neil Wynn calculates, “one million additional women entered wage labor during the war, and within the female work force there was a considerable shift as women already in employment moved into better-paying occupations” (139). Not surprisingly, by the early 1920s, American newspapers and magazines routinely featured articles about women who had made names for themselves in the male-dominated public spheres of commerce, law, and politics. Under the heading, “Women Who Lead the Way,” a 1921 New York Times article asserted “The old order has changed,” proving its point by providing brief sketches of over twenty prominent female lawyers, brokers, insurance agents, bankers, and playwrights “who are not only keeping pace with the successful business and professional man, but in some instances can hold their own with the very few who stand at the peak of their professions” (XX1). 

Growing economic independence translated into greater personal freedom as well. The early twentieth-century “revolution in manners and morals” predates World War I images of the flapper but, as “its chief embodiment,” images of the urban, middle/upper class flapper proliferated between 1914 and 1920 (McGovern 322). Replacing the wholesome Gibson Girl on the pages of popular magazines such as Collier’s and Ladies Home Journal, the flapper was portrayed as young, assertive and independent:

She joined men as comrades, and the differences in behavior of the sexes were narrowed. She became in fact in some degree desexualised. She might ask herself, “Am I Not a Boy? Yes, I Am Not.”  Her speech, her interest in thrills and excitement, her dress and hair, her more aggressive sexuality, even perhaps her elaborate beautification, which was a statement of intentions, all point to this. Women, whether single or married, became at once more attractive and freer in their morals. (McGovern 322)

Of course, to many contemporary observers, the influx of women into the workforce and the emergence of the unmarried flapper posed serious threats to the established social order. “Nothing could be plainer,” comments H. L. Mencken in In Defense of Women, “than the effect that the increasing economic security of women is having upon their whole habit of life and mind. The diminishing marriage rate and the even more rapidly diminishing birth rates show which way the wind is blowing” (182). Aware that a return to the pre-war order was neither likely nor wholly desirable, progressive reformers began to search for ways to realign gender relations with the new realities of post-war life. Modern theories of sexual repression, propagated since the late nineteenth century by Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, combined with novel business approaches — emphasising the benefits of cooperation, partnership, and efficiency — seemed to proffer solutions to the “battle of the sexes” that would lead to normalised gender relations.

The discipline of sexology furnished ostensibly scientific proof that feminists who demanded absolute equality and new women who single-mindedly followed a career path ran the risk of becoming selfish deviants. In the scholarly works of influential sexologists such as Havelock Ellis, overly self-assertive women emerged as neurotic “female inverts” that harm themselves as well as society at large by aping masculine behaviour. Equating feminism and demands for women’s rights with the socially acknowledged perils of lesbianism, Ellis asserted:

The modern movement of emancipation — the movement to obtain the same rights and duties, the same freedom and responsibility, the same education and the same work, must be regarded as on the whole a wholesome and inevitable movement. But it carries with it certain disadvantages. It has involved an increase in feminine criminality and feminine insanity, which are being elevated towards the masculine standard … Having been taught independence of men and disdain for the old theory which placed women in the moated grange of the home … a tendency develops for women to carry this independence still further and to find love where they find work. I do not say that these unquestionable influences of modern movements can directly cause sexual inversion … but they develop the germs of it, and they probably cause a spurious imitation. This spurious imitation is due to the fact that the congenital anomaly occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence who, voluntarily or involuntarily, influence others. (147)   

The continued authority of Ellis’s account of the latent dangers of sexual inversion or the “spurious imitation” thereof (147), gave popular images of the headstrong, independent, and political active women a decidedly sinister hue.  “Having ‘unnaturally’ denied her own sexual impulses,” writes Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “she was depicted as seeking emotional release through man-hating and bellicose and outdated feminist rhetoric” (282). And the perceived “mannish pugnacious” manner with which she continued to clamour for women’s rights and a female-centred world came to be seen as no more than a protective façade behind which her deeply discontented, sexually perverted, unfulfilled inner self hid. As articulated by William Lee Howard in the New York Medical Journal:

The female possessed of masculine ideas of independence, the virago who would sit in the public highways and lift up her pseudo-virile voice, proclaiming her sole right to decide questions of war or religion … and that disgusting antisocial being, the female sexual pervert, are simply degrees of the same class — degenerates. (qtd. in Smith-Rosenberg 280)

Before long, Smith-Rosenberg points out, “the New Woman had become a repressed, at times ludicrous, figure,” whose radical political aspiration had been safely contained within a normalising discourse of sexual deviance (282).

But the New Woman’s public makeover did not end there. For out of the shadows of her “ludicrous figure” stepped the character of the new New Woman, who considers her mother’s struggle for emancipation a fait accompli and henceforth seeks personal liberation within the confides of a modern heterosexual relationship. Writing in the October 1927 issue of Harper’s Weekly, Dorothy Bromley draws a sharp distinction between “Feminist — New Style” and the “feminist old-style” in interrelated terms of appearance and attitude: “The latter wore flat heels, disliked men, and, accepting that women could not have both a career and marriage, opted for the career. The new-style feminist was a ‘good dresser’ and a ‘pal’ to men, and fully expected to have marriage, children, and a career, too” (qtd. in Brown 33). Content with and secure in her visibly more public role, the “Feminist — New Style” can allow herself to put on her flashiest dress so as to attract a suitable New Man who treats her like a companion or partner rather than servant or saint. Freely yielding to her innermost desires, this new New Women realises that true fulfilment can only be found through a companionate marriage based upon the new business ideals of cooperation, mutual satisfaction, and an efficient division of labour. Office work, in this context, is no longer seen “to make a woman coarse” but as providing her with the necessary training to efficiently manage a modern household (Wadsworth-Baker 1015). As Lisa Fine has shown, limited exposure to office work not only was to teach young white middle-class women good work habits and fiscal responsibility, but also to acquaint them with the professional activities of their future husbands (63). Accordingly, former President Theodore Roosevelt recommended that “every girl should have business training … [because] it makes her self-reliant, not a clinging vine, and if she marries, she can contribute strength to the partnership” (qtd. in Fine 94). Within the corporate framework of the companionate marriage as an enterprise between near equals, then, the New Woman of the post-war era, trained in the essentials of business, could return home to conduct her appointed work of raising children and increasing consumption in a self-respecting and scientific manner. By the early 1920s, notes Eric Drown, “the business girl was constructed alternately as a desirable developmental stage in a young woman’s life preparing her for marriage, or as a perverse social anomaly promising to disrupt both business relations among men and marital relations between men and women” (10). 

***

A closer look at Henry Sydnor Harrison’s Saint Teresa illustrates how popular fictions of the post-war era strove to contain female demands for social and economic independence through satirical modes of representation that stress the self-denying “unnaturalness” of old-style feminists. Both the utopian and the satirical mode, critics have pointed out, draw upon the same impulse to heighten or exaggerate the experience of reality. Thus, heightened to the point of near absurdity, Harrison’s Saint Teresa absorbs images of the “single, highly educated, economically independent New Woman” within a pseudo-scientific normalising discourse that invents categories of deviance so as to predicate true fulfilment upon new concepts of mutual surrender and companionate marriage (Smith-Rosenberg 245).

Prior to World War I, Henry Sydnor Harrison, a Virginia liberal who considered himself a lifelong advocate of women’s rights, had achieved considerable fame as a writer of “popular novels involving themes of class conflict and cultural change” (Longest 534). His two best-known novels, Queed (1911) and V.V.’s Eyes (1913) both made it onto the bestseller list. Shortly after war broke out in Europe, Harrison turned his literary attention to the state of female emancipation in America. In his resulting novel, Angela’s Business (1915), Harrison favourably contrasts the fortunes of the unaffected Mary Wing, an independent and self-supporting professional, with those of the womanly Angela Flower, whose only “business” consists of finding wealthy suitors. Similar to the eponymous heroine in Saint Teresa, Mary Wing’s ability to succeed in the business world first antagonises but then earns her the respect of a male colleague, with whom she eventually finds personal fulfilment in a partnership of equals. This sympathetic portrayal of an independent businesswoman challenged several customary notions of gender roles and thus earned Harrison the esteem of Adele Clark, a pioneer suffragist from his native Richmond, Virginia (MacDonald 44).

Following the publication of Angela’s Business, Harrison volunteered with the American Ambulance Service and saw several months of active duty in Flanders and Northern France. Writing of his brief experiences behind the lines in Dunkirk and Ypres, a noticeably downcast Harrison tries hard to find any meaning in the suffering he has witnessed:

I have never forgotten that the very last soldier I carried in my ambulance (on June 23, 1915) was one whose throat, while he slept, had been quietly cut by a flying sliver of a shell thrown from a gun twenty-two miles away. But it will not do, I am aware, to over-emphasize the purely mechanical side of modern war, the deadly impersonality which often seems to characterize it, the terrible meaninglessness of its deaths at times … Individual exaltation, fear and the victory over fear, conscious consecration to an idea and ideal, all the subtle promptings and stark behavior by which the common man chooses and avows that there are ways of dying which transcend all life, — this, we know, must have been the experience of hundreds of thousands of the young soldiers of France. (“At the Back of the Front” 89)

“The purely mechanical side of modern war, the deadly impersonality which often seems to characterise it, the terrible meaninglessness of its deaths,” would subsequently become the signature theme of a younger generation of American war novelists (Harrison “At the Back of the Front” 88). Harrison managed to uphold his belief in the righteousness of the Allies’ fight against Prussian militarism and, when the United States officially entered the conflict, obtained a commission as first lieutenant in the United States Navel Reserves. “And if our old Uncle Sammy gets into trouble some day,” Harrison had his southern heroine in Queed presage, “never fear but we’ll be on hand to pull him out, with the best troops that ever stepped, and another Lee to lead them” (269). Too old for active duty, Harrison was assigned a desk job with “Uncle Sammy” in Washington (“At the Back of the Front” 88). In early 1918, word reached Harrison that his brother Jack had been killed in France. After being decommissioned in 1919, Harrison published “When I Come Back,” a short eulogy based on his brother’s letters that romanticises warfare and emphasises one’s patriotic duty to the nation.  Three years later, Harrison presented his home front novel Saint Teresa to the public, in which he seeks to reconcile the New Woman’s wartime experience of extended social freedom and greater financial independence with the need to reintegrate returning male soldiers in the post-war economy.

Early reviews of Saint Teresa were largely favourable. Writing for the New York Tribune, the American poet, Alice Duer Miller, found the novel of “absorbing interest from the first page to the last” (V9) and William Lyon Phelps deemed it “a creditable addition to contemporary literature” on the pages of the New York Evening Post (10). “As a presentation of a very modern type of girl Saint Teresa is fascinating, as a picture of modern business it is illuminating, as a study of the eternal conflict of the sexes, it is absorbing,” assessed an anonymous reviewer for The Publisher’s Weekly (5). And the Times Literary Supplement opined that Harrison’s Saint Teresa proves that “the novel of Wall Street can be every bit as romantic and exciting as the most lurid costume drama” (qtd. in MacDonald 52). Notwithstanding H. L. Mencken’s dismissal of Harrison as a “merchant of mush” (138), the generally positive reception of Saint Teresa in the popular press highlights the American public’s post-war interest in matters of business and modern womanhood. Still, more recent critical assessment of Saint Teresa as a “feminist novel truly ahead of its time” (Longest 211), that presents the “ultimate in gender equality” (MacDonald 52), cannot obscure Harrison’s literary attempts to discredit the radical political methods and aims of contemporaneous feminists through stereotypical representations of the novel’s heroine as an overzealous, radical feminist fighting quixotic battles. Seeking to provide readers with both “an example and a warning” (22), the narrator describes “noisy Miss DeSilver” (19) in the early part of the novel as the “perfectly familiar type” of the radical feminist, who, in denial of her true nature, strikes a “misogamist pose” to garner public notoriety (32). As Eric Drown notes, early twentieth-century “women who took positions in business found estimation of their work abilities inextricably intertwined with estimations of their sexuality” (12).

Accordingly, the narrator surmises that Teresa exhibits “the pretences to a noble sexlessness”
(33) as well as “a classic superiority to nature and the ways of men” out of “her instinctive feeling that marriage and motherhood would go deep with her — change her — soften her — put out her fires” (155). To emphasise this point, the narrator relates how the young heiress to Old Joshia DeSilver’s fortunes has made a name for herself by authoring a much advertised pamphlet called “The Woman Who Hates Love” (21), racing her “speedy motor boat as big as yacht,” “crashing an early airship from Wilbur Wright,” getting lost on a hunting expedition in the Canadian Rockies, and catching “a sea-serpent” at Catalina Island (33). In later years, the narrator notes sarcastically, the “suffrage issue was her first obvious prey” on the political front (33). Having, “of course, joined the extreme Left of the cause,” she became “a picketer, etc.” and “was generally credited with having originated the punitive card-index system, by which the ‘personal record’ of every Solon was investigated and tabulated, and his life, if need was, turned into hell” (33). Here, the narrator explains, “she had clearly displayed the overbearing qualities, indeed the ruthlessness, for which the men of her family were celebrated” (33-34). Directing her fight for women’s rights from a “humdrum … working office,” adorned with prints “ranging from Mary Shelly to Jane Addams” and a large bust of Susan B. Anthony that “gather[s] dust upon a pedestal” (47), the mannish-acting heroine comes to exemplify the anachronism of what Dorothy Bromley called “old-style feminism” (47).

In “reckless disregard of herself,” Teresa, like her feminist heroines of bygone days, displays an “unfeminine salience of…idealism” that inexorably thrusts her at the epicentre of political conflicts (346). And beset with an “aversion for men” — and an even deeper aversion for “men’s worst and most characteristic activity — war” (116), Harrison’s Teresa, similar to Gertrude Atherton’s Gisela in The White Morning (1918), seeks to grab and hold the reins of power. “The power some men got in this country, it makes my blood boil just to think about it,” Teresa grumbles at one point in the novel (205). The outbreak of war in Europe affords Teresa with an opportunity to publicly defy patriarchal authority once more. Declaring herself a pacifist on sheer principle, she acquires a controlling share of stocks in the Whitestone Steel Company and immediately shuts down its shell plant. Predictably enough, her actions cause a great public stir and result in charges that she is a “Hun lover”. As Angel Kwolek-Folland has shown in Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930: female managers were “expected to adopt masculine business behaviours and beliefs,” but male office workers generally resented women who acted with authority (168). Thus, her supposedly “misguided” and “dangerous” demonstration of power arouses the “unexampled antagonism” (295) of Dean Masury, a pro-Ally business journalist, who is convinced that “it was certainly no moment for a born fool to be monkeying with one of the world’s vital industries” (20). Appalled by the thought that a woman would not just “assume control of the business,” but “throw on the sidewalk the experienced men who were successfully building it up,” the novel’s male hero hires on as Teresa’s efficiency expert, secretly scheming to oust his employer (19). Keenly aware that World War I, “put conventional views about gender roles under strain,” Saint Teresa deliberately rekindles the simmering “hostility to women in male-dominated jobs” with the aim of reframing “the female-only responsibility for home life” (Goldstein 320).

In the ensuing battle of wills, however, Teresa proves herself a “fit antagonist for a man” and thus gradually earns the grudging respect of Dean (172). Sticking to her principled anti-war stance, while keeping the company afloat through the acquisition of new contracts outside of the booming war industry, Teresa exhibits the “genuine executive abilities,” discerned by Gertrude Atherton among the women of World War I. “Perhaps I understand your course here better than anyone else” (325), Dean assures headstrong Teresa following a heated debate over the company’s wartime production, stressing how impressed he has “been all along, by your perfectly single-minded devotion to your righteousness—a quality which I can admire without reference to the fact that it’s brought you, in this case, so vigorously against me” (324). As Dean’s mollifying words indicate, what has started as a fierce ideological fight over views of war and peace and a few shares of stock has become a “far subtler” battle of the sexes, during which both parties are forced to recognise their complementary qualities as well as their mutual interdependence (452). Consequently, the novel underscores that without Dean’s expertise in Tayloresque scientific management, Teresa would have had to shut down the steel mill. And even though Dean continues his own behind-the-scene efforts to restart the company’s shell production, it is he who alerts Teresa to the fact that her “rubber-heeled secretary” (127) and long-time confidant, Miss Janney, is not only spying for a competitor, but spreading defamatory rumours of her employer’s alleged “sympathies with the rape of Belgium and the German Kaiser” (135). Despite their persistent differences over the war issues, both, it becomes clear, have learned to see the benefits of a cooperative business relationship so that Dean must acknowledge Teresa’s executive abilities to lead the steel company, while Teresa feels compelled to recognise Dean’s invaluable services by promoting him to the position of “secretary of the company” (304-5).

Slowly but surely, then, the personal relationship between Teresa and Dean also subtly changes, as both begin to look beyond their “undying difference” (275) to discover unmistakable temperamental affinities. “I now see much that’s remarkable, and quite admirable, in Miss DeSilver” (257), Dean feels obliged to admit, and the narrator further elucidates, “It was as if that community of sympathy he had been obliged to share with her, more than once now, had left behind its ineradicable mark” (303). Likewise, Teresa begins to soften in Dean’s presence. Shedding her “ridiculous costume” and her “superimposed mannerism” (172), Teresa changes from a “flat executive behind the equally flat desk” into a “natural, animat[ed] girl,” no longer “colorless at all, but on the contrary quite vivid with life” (265).

“Yet the end of conflict was not yet” (326), the narrator notes, with foreboding, at the beginning of chapter 18. Equally stubborn in their pursuits to gain and maintain control over the steel company’s wartime production, the battle of the sexes reaches its rambunctious crescendo when Dean informs Teresa that he has procured the stocks necessary to install a pro-war advocate as the company’s new head. Flush with victory, Dean mocks, ridicules, and throws “insufferable insults” at Teresa, until she, in turn, “hurl[s] herself bodily upon him, her adversary” (364). A farcical fistfight ensues during which Teresa, a “frenzied athlete, who use[s] her body like a bludgeon,” quickly gains the upper-hand and knocks Dean unconscious (368). The war-torn world of gender relations, it seems, is turned upside down once again as Dean’s “manhood” and “unyielding will” suffers a mighty double blow (453). After he has crept out of the blackness that had engulfed him, Dean must learn that his was not an even Pyrrhic victory. For Teresa, aware of Dean’s designs on the company, had previously schemed to obtain enough additional shares to prevent the hostile takeover. But unlike Gertrude Atherton’s “goddess of wrath” in The White Morning or the infuriated foremothers of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Teresa shows herself to be a conciliatory and quite magnanimous “conqueror” of men (451). Having proven herself capable of succeeding on her own in the rough and tumble business world of men, “the power of anger, which had given worth and dignity to their conflict, was no longer in her” so that she can find no lasting satisfaction in her “singular triumph” (437). When she learns of Dean’s decision to volunteer for service in Europe, the already softened Teresa is struck by remorse and overcome by a betraying nervousness: “her…face, already sufficiently white, had gone a little whiter; one of her hands rose unconsciously to her breast, whose rise and fall had suddenly become noticeable” (419). 

Ostensibly visiting Dean to bid her last farewell, Teresa not only offers to bury the war hatchet, but also officially notifies her erstwhile adversary that she has cancelled the transaction, which would have given her control over the Whitestone Steel Company. This sudden peace offer leads Dean to reflect that “she was beating him here in an epilogue” (452), and so he, too, is suddenly left with “nothing to triumph over” (445). But while neither side renounces its principled stand on the divisive war issue, Teresa and Dean declare a truce and “agree to disagree” (449). Finally, both can give free reigns to their “natural” feelings (449). Completing her metamorphosis from a self-denying, sexless, man-hating radical feminist into a modern woman who finds genuine fulfilment in heterosexual love, Teresa “unquestioning, yield[s] herself” to Dean: “Now she felt her veiled face taken between hard hands, forcibly turned upward; and so upon her virgin lips, other lips, lips not virginal at all and scarred for life for just such a thing as this, crushed terribly down” (453). Having allowed Dean to regain the initiative by reasserting masculine control over her, the narrator notes, “all was changed, now, all was changed. Her movement was slight; her eyes, which had closed after the fashion of women, did not open; her lashes lay like a curtain on her cheek. Teresa’s movement was gentle this time: yet it broke this man, her adversary forever. She had put aside her veil—for him” and so “he, like her, must submit himself to find in surrender his most excellent triumph” (453-54).

Mutual surrender— the seemingly natural merging of complementary interests —Harrison suggests in Saint Teresa, provides a progressive solution to the battle of the sexes that acknowledges shifts in gender roles while reaffirming the social reproductive necessity of heterosexual marriage relations. On closer inspection, though, it becomes quite apparent that the novel’s ideal of mutual surrender is not so much predicated upon the recognition of gender equality than upon the re-feminisation and re-domestication of the heroine in accordance with rather traditional gender notions. Tellingly, it is only after Teresa has shed her “ridiculous costume” of belligerent old-style feminism and only after she has graciously resigned as company head that Dean views the new Teresa as “forever his superior” and “comes up into the mountain and take[s] the chaste goddess: to find her his beautiful fellow-creature at last” (454-55). In short, Dean partially re-deifies his future mate and thereby reabsorbs early feminist claims to greater moral purity within the old patriarchal metaphor of the Angel in the House. Accordingly, Teresa is granted “the knowledge of her ultimate conquest,” but it is Dean who emerges “immeasurably the gainer: for through this long and unguessed future, love would be a lamp to the feet, and hearth and home in his soul” (455).  As the successive references to “hearth” and “home” in conjunction with “love” indicate, Teresa”s and Dean’s “unguessed future” will likely be marked by an adherence to fairly conventional gender roles (454-55). And indeed, departing overseas for service with an American ambulance unit, Dean elicits Teresa’s promise that she shall wait for him. “Oh, I will, I will — no fear,” she reassures her smitten lover on the novel’s very last page, “Didn’t I say that you’d put your mark upon my heart?” (455). Love conquers all; even hardened feminists of the old school, Harrison’s normalising post-war novel underscores in closing.

Harrison’s Saint Teresa, similar to Sinclair’s Main Street, depicts independent-minded female characters who repudiate generalised notions of women as the weaker sex that had long constituted core tenets of patriarchal authority. Stripped of its larger and potentially transformative significance, though, the battle of the sexes in Saint Teresa becomes a mere question of convincing woman to reassume her old duties within the new construct of companionate marriage. By the end of the decade, Virginia Woolf commenced her extended essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929), with the straightforward observation that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (2). Both Harrison’s Saint Teresa and Sinclair’s Main Street uneasily acknowledge that a growing number of women can and have achieved the necessary material independence to author their own lives, only to present readers with “exemplary” female characters who gladly forfeit their hard-won autonomy. By renouncing the legacy of pre-war feminists, Harrison’s Teresa and Sinclair’s Carol come to resemble those “feminists in the interwar period” who, according to Joshua Goldstein, “gradually accepted theories of sexual difference that helped to advance notions of separate spheres” (320). Aside from repairing bruised male wartime egos, then, the primary social aim of post-war fantasies such as Saint Teresa and Main Street is nothing less and nothing more than to secure the public spheres of business and politics as quintessentially male domains of activity by construing feminist demands for gender equality as self-destructive and unnatural. To be sure, these and many similar attempts to reestablish the old, pre-war order under a new guise were met with swift counteractions by influential feminists such as Alice Paul, who introduced the initial version of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. Yet, the fact that as of 2012 the Equal Rights Amendment has still not been ratified  by the mandatory number of states suggests that what Christopher Lash has called the “pseudo-feminist position” of many early twentieth century writers has shown remarkable staying power (48, 50).   

Karsten H. Piep is a full-time faculty member at Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he teaches seminars in Western intellectual history, protest literature, and interdisciplinary theory. He is the author of Embattled Home Fronts: Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I (Rodopi 2009). His articles have appeared in such journals as Comparative Literature and Culture, Cultural Logic, New German Review, Papers on Language and Literature, and Studies in American Fiction.

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