Renewal by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Author:Anne-Marie Slaughter [Slaughter, Anne-Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The official name of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was the World’s Columbian Exposition, to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the year Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, a verb and a story many Americans now reject or at least caveat. We presented ourselves to the world as a country of optimism, progress, and unshakable faith in technology. Author Erik Larson described the fair evocatively as a “dream city,” one square mile with more than two hundred buildings that visitors entered somberly, “as if entering a great cathedral. Some wept at its beauty.”21 Less remembered is that journalist and activist Ida B. Wells joined with other African American leaders calling for a boycott of the exposition based on its exclusion of Black voices and negative depictions of the Black community.22

Inside the exposition, Frederick Jackson Turner—a historian of the age in which the men who wrote American history seem all to have had grand three-barreled names—gave his famous address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”23 He read it as a scholarly paper before the members of the American Historical Association, which was meeting at the fair. His argument had many facets, but the core is the idea that the repeated encounter with an ever-moving Western frontier forged the individualism of American character and of American democracy itself.24

Needless to say, he described a male character, more precisely a white male character. And what men they were! They combined “coarseness and strength … with acuteness and inquisitiveness.” They were practical, inventive, masters of “material things” that they could use to achieve “great ends.” They had a “restless, nervous energy,” and the “buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”25

Turner’s analysis, though deeply revised and contested by historians since, may still hold in some ways as an explanation of the relative libertarianism of the American West, the resistance to governmental control of any kind. Yet at least to my eyes, what is most striking is the way he completely collapses American men and their families.

Turner sees the family; indeed, he observes, “Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family.”26 He describes the ways in which pioneers would strike out with their families and gather other families around to create rude settlements. It is the father who matters, however; family members are the baggage he drags with him on his great individualist adventure.

Yet as we have just seen, the accounts written by those family members tell a very different but parallel story, one of interdependence and, indeed, of greater equality between men and women.27 What if the significance of the frontier in American history was that it reinforced the lesson, over and over again, of the necessity of nurturing and supporting strong family and community bonds, without which individuals cannot survive?28

For this very different vision of American society, we need travel barely nine miles from where Turner lectured his audience at the exposition, to the site of Hull House. There, the activist and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.