
          The Women of Fairhope.  Women of Fairhope, by
Paul M. Gaston. Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures,
No. 25. with foreword by Wayne Mixon. (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1984, 143 pages).
          By Fox-Genovese, ElizabethElizabeth Fox-Genovese
          Vol. 7, No. 3, 1985, pp. 38-40
          
          The charm of Paul Gaston's  The Women of Fairhope 
resembles that of treasured stories. Reading it makes you wish that
you could have heard the lectures on which it is based. But whatever
may have been lost in the translation from spoken to written form, the
haunting attraction of the lives of the women he evokes has withstood
the test. The grandson of the founder of the single-tax colony of
Fairhope, Alabama, Professor Gaston knew the community to which they
were bound. His loving tribute to them constitutes his tribute to the
values of Fairhope itself, but his choice of women about whom to write
reflects a historian's self-imposed critical distance on what must be
a very personal legacy.
          For, if in writing of the lives of Nancy Lewis, Marie Howland, and
Marietta Jackson, Professor Gaston is recreating three lives and
telling three touching stories, he is also, very gently--almost too
gently--saying something about the nature, limits, and interweaving of
different women's experiences in the late-nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. None of these women would, in the normal course
of events, be taken as a preeminent historical figure: none, that is,
would be taken to command a place in a standard history of the
period. Yet each was extraordinary 

and significant, each a woman of
courage, determination, imagination.
          Fairhope, founded in 1894, does not figure in the familiar
histories of "utopian" communities in the United States, not least
because of its dates. By the time Fairhope was founded, Americans had
been pouring their reformist impulses into such "mainstream" movements
as populism and the Knights of Labor. And the even broader Progressive
movement, with its attendant movements for social reform, was
underway. Fairhope came too late to fit comfortably into the mold of
utopian settlement typified by the Owenities' New Lanark and John
Humphrey Noyes's Oneida. Perhaps then, it was too practical--too
insufficiently utopian. Professor Gaston is planning to tell the story
of Fairhope itself in another book, and he here he drops only those
portions he deems essential to his story.
          Located on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, Fairhope embodied "a
plan for justice and equal rights [that] emerged from the same ferment
that spawned new movements in the late nineteenth century for women's
liberation." The plan called for a proper balance between
communitarianism and individualism, including equal rights for women
and men. By the 1920s, among its many other attributes, it boasted a
newspaper, a library, and two schools, one public, one private. Its
women, although entitled to equal access to employment, appear to have
followed the patterns of the larger society they were hoping to reform
by example: only a shade more than one quarter of their adult numbers
worked outside the home. Nor did they inaugurate any "grand domestic
revolution" of the kind favored by radical reformers who sought to
abolish entirely private kitchens and other arenas of women's
isolated, unpaid labor. Rather, most of Fairhope's women appear to
have favored the "social feminism" that was gaining such currency in
the country at large.
          The women's Fairhope that emerges from Professor Gaston's pages
resembles nothing so much as a rarified realization of the dream of
many Progressive, white, middleclass women. And even that modest,
respectable dream required hothouse conditions. The women appear to
have enjoyed the freedom to speak their minds without censure, to
develop their physical and mental capacities, and to participate in
their community as full individuals without the imprisoning dictates
of gender that still curtailed the activities of many middle-class
American women. Even with this freedom, the women--or perhaps the men,
or the community as a whole--still held to conventional gender
divisions. Fairhope offered no Fourieriste utopia of free love. The
women's freedom lay in living with one man and raising his children in
economic security. Nor did these women see their own economic
independence as a prerequisite for the equality they sought, however
much Marie Howland tried to instruct them in its importance. They
delighted in that elusive but persistent American dream of a small
self-sufficient town, inhabited by contented and secure white
families. They even delighted in private property, in conformity with
Henry George's single-tax doctrine, while supporting large community
undertakings. This Progressive dream-down to the fragile balance
between social science and William Morris-has had a tenacious career,
which, as Professor Gaston ruefully avers, excluded blacks (and
although he does not explicitly say so, apparently also excluded
immigrant workers). It was the American dream without the "social" and
"racial" problem.
          Professor Gaston marvelously captures the spirit and dreams of
Marie Howland and Marietta Jackson as part of the essence of
Fairhope. In Fairhope, Howland, born Hannah Marie Stevens in 1836,
ended a career that exemplified American reform and included "Lowell
cotton mills; New York radical and literary salons; an industrial
utopia in France; a rural New Jersey command post of reform agitation
and happy living; a colony in Mexico devoted to 'integral
cooperation."' A passionate, vibrant woman, Howland arrived in
Fairhope with two marriages, varied experiences, a persisting loyalty
to Fourieriste principles, and numerous writings including the novel
Papa's Own Girl (The Familistere in its third edition)
to her credit. Her second marriage to Edward Howland, rather than her
own employment, accounted for her financial resources and the thousand
volumes that she gave to form the core of the Fairhope
library. Fairhope thus crowned her career and, in important respects,
embodied many of the abiding commitments that had informed her forays
into other reform movements. Her experience, talents, and compelling
personality earned her an important position in the colony and regular
access to the pages of the Courier, of which she became associate
editor. Above all, she stimulated the Fairhope women's consciousness
of themselves as women. Under her inspiration, they organized a
panoply of social feminist women's clubs, including the Ladies' Henry
George Club, the Women's Single Tax Club, the Women's Christian
Temperance Union, the Women's Suffrage Society, the Women's Social
Science Club, and more.
          If Fairhope provided the capstone for Marie Howland's career, it
provided the stage and substance for that of Marietta Jackson, who,
born in 1864, arrived from Minnesota in 1902 with her husband and
small son. She had devoted the early part of her adult life to
teaching and, before arriving in Fairhope, had undergone "a
conversion" after reading Nathan Oppenheim's The Development of
the Child. Fairhope provided the ideal climate and setting for
the development and implementation of her passionate commitment to
progressive, "child-centered" education. Not merely did she educate a
significant number of children in her Fairhope private school, but she
established an 

outpost--and garnered important financial support--in
Greenwich, Connecticut as well.
          Firmly convinced that adults existed to serve the child, rather
than the reverse, she held that education should facilitate gently the
unfolding of each child's unique, individual potential. Professor
Gaston makes a strong case for Jackson's integral relation to the
national development of the movement for progressive education. She
lectured throughout the country, frequently to audiences caught in the
spell of her dynamic personality; she trained teachers; and she taught
children. Resoundingly endorsed by John Dewey, among many, her work
attained considerable renown, especially in those middle-class circles
that would foster the development first of progressive education and
later of the study and nurture of the child in general. Like Howland,
she captured an important tendency in the concerns of her generation
throughout the nation. Yet she apparently always understood that,
however broad the interest in her work, Fairhope offered her a
special--perhaps unique--opportunity to do that work as she chose to do
it. Professor Gaston is especially moving in recounting the close of
her career during the Depression of the 1930s: her failing ability to
mobilize resources, her own failing powers, the collapse of her
dream.
          Yet the collapse of her dream--however poignant the individual
case--consists in part in the national tragedy of the depression and in
part in the inescapable individual tragedy of mortality. The collapse
of the dream of Nancy Lewis, with which Professor Gaston begins,
resulted from more precise and, therefore, more painful historical
conflicts. Nancy Lewis never belonged to Fairhope: Fairhope grew on
the ruin of Nancy Lewis's dream. Withal, Nancy Lewis may have, in her
unrecorded life, transcended greater odds and realized, however
fragiley, a more impossible dream than either Howland or Jackson. For
Nancy Lewis, born a slave had, together with her husband, emerged from
slavery to acquire a farm--that ubiquitous but elusive goal of the
exslaves as a group, that unit of private property on which the values
of white Americans rested. And Nancy Lewis had lost that farm to the
founding of Fairhope--that project to perpetuate the values of honest,
individual property holders.
          Credit accrues to Professor Gaston's grandfather for having refused
to repeat that original expropriation when, a few years after the
original founding, he had the opportunity to buy the smaller farm to
which Nancy Lewis, a widow, and her children had retreated. And he
refused even though the parcel was needed to round out the Fairhope
unit. But only God can judge the first expropriation. History is not
good enough, although Professor Gaston evokes it, pointing out that,
in time and place, to include blacks in the Fairhope experiment was
not a real possibility, however decent the values of the
founders. And, after all, Nancy Lewis and her husband had had only
such title to their farm as derived from occupation and the payment of
taxes. Reconstruction southerners were notoriously unenthusiastic
about letting exslaves buy land outright.
          Professor Gaston draws no morals, historical or other. He staunchly
refrains even from the modest temptation to pull these women's lives
together, or to set them explicitly in the context of the lives of the
non-Fairhope women of their generation. Yet he has offered his readers
a small jewel--a series of microcosms of individual women's
experiences. And he has offered those of his readers who so choose all
they need to draw more far-reaching conclusions.
        