POETREE

Hello! I'm untonuggan , I comment here a lot apparently, and today I'll be writing about historical context for Julia Stein's poem Downtown Women. For background, I have a degree in history and a love-hate relationship with the Progressive Era (see below).

I set out to try to write a history post about "Downtown Women," and realized there was so much historical context that I didn't know whether to go broad or specific. I've gone broad in the hopes that if any of this interests you, you can search out the specifics from the poem yourself. Perhaps someone will also follow up with a more in-depth post about Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the labor movement.

The poem is set in the early 1900s, an era known as the Progressive Era. "Progress" was seen as a steady march from "barbarism" and "savagery" to the "civilization" of the WASP upper-class society. A whole set of problems emerged from this, such as Eugenics (the forced sterilization of those who were deemed to have poor genes that would set the race back); Questionable Anthropology with Unfortunate Results; not to mention being used as a justification for the horrors of colonialism (i.e. "we are uplifting these poor backward savages and civilizing them").

The Progressive Era was not all bad. There were a number of much-needed reforms in what was called the "Progressive Movement". For example, as a result of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle the US government developed the Food and Drug Administration to regulate what goes into sausages and medications &c. (Never mind that Sinclair was also trying to write about the dehumanizing working conditions of the "downtown" workers in the meat-packing industry, which was largely ignored by the "uptown" people who read his book.) People with mental illnesses were actually beginning to receive treatment; prison reforms began; efforts were made to fight graft and voter fraud; poverty was a large concern.

This was also the heyday of so-called First Wave Feminism. (As distinct from Second-Wave Feminism in the 1960s/70s and Third Wave Feminism of the 90s and today.) First-wave feminists - a prominent one of whom was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, referenced in the poem - were largely concerned with obtaining the right to vote for women, which mattered a lot to "uptown women." They were less receptive to calls from "downtown women" to focus on workers' rights (as most "uptown women" did not face the reality of sweatshop labor), thus creating a rift between "uptown" and "downtown" women. (Don't even get me started on how little First Wave Feminists cared about listening to what women of color wanted to do.) 

Meanwhile, many "uptown women" attempted to "uplift" some of the "downtown women" from their situation of poverty by bringing them baskets of food and clothing rather than by addressing underlying inequalities or forming coalitions with the "downtown women." Thus, Stein's reference in the poem to:
and when the uptown ladies came downtown
with their charity baskets
I told them, "Go to Hell"

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