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Article Excerpt
In the spring of 1926 the writer Mary Austin went on a tirade. Such behavior was not uncommon for Austin, but within weeks she had allies as esteemed as the satirist Sinclair Lewis. Austin's target was a proposal for a summer Chautauqua (alternately called a culture center) in her adopted home of Santa Fe, New Mexico. (1) Austin railed. She railed against middlebrow, watered-down cultural expression. She railed against homogeneity. She railed against censorship. She railed against the refusal of many Americans to recognize and praise the contributions of artists to the nation. She railed against the marginality of descendents of Spanish colonial settlers, a sizeable portion of Santa Fe's residents. Austin saw a country at risk. Not just Santa Fe--but the entire nation--risked losing its most valuable cultural expressions if people stood idly by and let the town of Santa Fe accept a Chautauqua.
The source of Austin's ire was not a major corporation, the forces of modern advertising, or even a local business. The group that had driven Austin to the brink of apoplectic anger was the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, an organization composed of women not all that different from Austin herself. As an author of several novels as well as numerous works of nonfiction on the American Southwest's environments and indigenous cultures, Austin's interest in creative work and her enthusiasm for the Southwest were well known. (2) Though more private in their enthusiasm, the women of the Texas Federation shared several similarities with Austin. Like Austin, they wanted more exposure to artistic expression. They delighted in what they saw as the unique natural and cultural qualities of Santa Fe. They wanted art to receive daily recognition in American society. They wanted, like Austin, a place where they could revel in the cultural development of a community devoted to artistic expression. (3)
It was precisely these similarities to Austin that made the club women and their proposal so threatening in the eyes of Austin and many of her allies. Austin and many other women in Santa Fe considered themselves artists who drew their creative inspiration from northern New Mexico as a region and from their relationship with northern New Mexico as a home. Many of the women in Santa Fe's Anglo arts community relied on this identity for their sense of belonging in northern New Mexico as well as for their authority in New Mexico's Anglo arts community. As women interested in building institutions of cultural expression in Santa Fe, the federation members threatened to steal away the place that the women in Santa Fe's Anglo arts community had identified as necessary to their identity as artists. If Austin's reaction to the culture colony seemed extreme, it was because she saw Ear more at stake than the summer entertainment of Texas women. She saw herself and other women interested in literary or artistic careers losing the one place where they could freely and completely pursue their ambitions.
Women were not the only members of the Santa Fe arts community to object to the culture center plan. A large contingent of artists and writers contributed to the outcry that eventually defeated the endeavor, and scholars have suggested a number of explanations for the vehemence of their response. The plan was proposed at a time when alliances within Santa Fe's arts community were shifting, and the Chautauqua was one of many casualties that resulted from the ensuing conflicts. (4) Many of the more recently arrived Anglo artists and writers may have seen the culture center as a threat to one of their causes: support for New Mexico rural Hispanos as an idealized American folk. A culture center filled with white Texan women would hardly have been a conducive environment for fostering Hispano culture, particularly the idealized culture that Anglo artists in Santa Fe had begun to champion. (5) This last reason may have contributed to the objections of two Hispano organizations in town as well. (6) Still other recent arrivals in Santa Fe may have recognized their tenuous status as experts on the region and may have seen a large number of club women seeking education in Southwest culture as a threat to their status as authorities on the area. (7) Finally, scholars have noted that many of the objectors to the center were sincere in their elitism. They truly believed their own interpretation of creative expression to be superior to that provided in more institutional environments, and they objected to a plan that stood to lessen Santa Fe's image as a center of bohemian and sophisticated creative endeavors. (8)
While I agree that all of these factors were at play, I think one of the more significant aspects of the movement against the plan--gender--has received too little attention. (9) The idea of a home--even an artists' home--was completely inundated with ideas about women's roles in the 1920s. By focusing on the culture center debacle, I hope to show a moment in the interplay between ideas of gender and place that contributed to the shaping of Santa Fe's national reputation. Santa Fe's reputation as an artists' home, one that has continued until today, was built on far more than the culture center controversy. As a concentrated example of what outsiders, newcomers, and long-term residents expect from the places they call home, however, the culture colony debate reveals much about how communities in the Southwest have drawn the boundaries of belonging according to attitudes about gender.
To understand why the culture center raised the furor that it did among the women of Santa Fe's arts community, it is first necessary to look at the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs' interests in art, homemaking, and women's position in American society--interests the Texas Federation shared with many of the Anglo women of Santa Fe. (10) The Texas Federation of Women's Clubs was a branch of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, a part of a larger women's club movement that was especially active in social and cultural causes at the turn of the century. Flush with the victory of women's suffrage as well as the fear of the Red Scare of 1919, the predominantly white members of the General Federation remained active but were more conservative in their efforts during the 1920s. (11) In individual clubs, federation members supported domestic skills classes, public health measures, educational opportunities for women, and women's property rights. On a national level, the federation played a role in child welfare legislation, education legislation, the establishment of a juvenile justice system, and the establishment of the first national art gallery, in Washington, DC. The Texas Federation involved itself in many of the General Federation's endeavors, but the Texas branch also chose to focus on causes of particular interest to Texas-area members. (12)
Of special concern to the Texas Federation women was a national campaign called the Better Homes Movement. The Better Homes Movement, begun in 1922 by a household magazine, focused on promoting homeownership, home maintenance, and home decoration. President Coolidge served as honorary chairman of the Advisory Council of Better Homes in America and then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover helped form the organization and served as president of its board of directors. (13) Sally Katherine Martin of Dallas, a Texas Federation member, was particularly involved in the Better Homes Movement. (14) She served as a representative of the Home and Community Committee of the American Farm Bureau, which participated in the Advisory Council of Better Homes. Martin also visited and publicized a Better Homes demonstration in Cleburne, Texas, and she broadcast information about the Better Homes Movement on Dallas radio stations. In addition to Martin's involvement, the Texas Federation included an American Home Department divided into three sections called "Home Economics, Teaching and Thrift Education," "Extension," and "Home Making." (15) It was elements of this last endeavor--homemaking--that would have particular resonance with ideas regarding home espoused by Austin and her peers in Santa Fe.
Overlapping with the Texas Federation's members' commitment to homemaking was their commitment to cultural and artistic expression. Reports from the federation's Fine Arts Division showed the club women's interest in expanding the study of art, literature, music, and drama in Texas; supporting pageants, recitals, and exhibitions; and providing study programs on European, American, and Texan art. A central goal in all of these endeavors was to support home life through artistic expression. At the federation statewide convention, one Fine Arts Division report noted that "'Fine Arts'" are great factors in the making of happy homes. What would home be without music and literature and art? These are the things that lift us out of the material, every day existence into a finer, more spiritual atmosphere." (16) Meanwhile, the Texas Federation's newsletter, the Texas Federation News, argued that "art in the home brings beauty; presents personality; it embodies dignity and peace; it adds joyousness; it develops discernment and appreciation; it creates thoughtfulness; it introduces the presence of great minds." (17) In keeping with the bonds that Texas Federation members saw between the home and art, the Art Division and the American Home Department combined efforts to promote the purchase of sculpture and art by federation members' families, an effort the federation called "education by ownership." (18) Better Homes meant zoning restrictions, homebuilding, and homeownership to Texas Federation women, but it also meant home decoration and arts appreciation. (19)
Art ownership and home decor may seem like the frivolous consumption of middle-class, white women committed only to domestic endeavors, but the Texas Federation was hardly frivolous in its general philosophy toward women's opportunities. The Texas Federation's members were firmly committed to women holding employment outside the home and considered the idea of a "woman's place" being wholly within the home a "somewhat antiquated opinion." (20) The women of the federation took note of women's rising participation in the workforce and suggested that the nation should be attuned to the challenges of balancing work and home life. Federation members were uncertain how to strike a balance between work inside and outside of the home, but they were convinced that women were best qualified to decide this. (21) In terms of a broader conception of women as wage earners as well as choosers of their own destinies, then, the Texas Federation women challenged white, middle-class Victorian norms that dictated that women's place was in the home and contemporary norms that suggested that domestic consumerism was unproductive women's work. (22)
The Texas Federation women, however, did not go so far as to say that women had no essential attachments to their homes whatsoever. The reluctance of the Texas Federation News to take a stand on whether women should work entirely outside their homes indicates that as an institution the Texas Federation was not willing to relinquish the essentialist notion that women were somehow inherently connected to their homes. To answer in part the dilemma of where a woman's place was, the Texas Federation proposed greater recognition of women's work in their homes and on rural ranches and farms. To further this agenda, the federation's Department of American Homes lobbied for a "homemaker" category in the census list of occupations, noting that the word home could be listed as many women's place of employment. In its implication that women have some kind of inherent connection to their homes, then, the Texas Federation did adhere to white, middle-class Victorian norms regarding gender roles and to contemporary norms that saw the often consumption-driven labor of housework as inherently feminine. It was this adherence that would serve as one of the targets for Austin and her allies when they criticized the Texas Federation, but it was also this adherence that made the Texas Federation women surprisingly similar to their Santa Fe...
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