“As Dangerous as High Explosives,” or, The Sexual Lives of Hired Girls: Sex Radicalism in My Ántonia

Radical Sex and Politics in Progressive Era Greenwich Village

Willa Cather and Emma Goldman admittedly make an unlikely couple; individually, they inhabit virtually opposite roles in both the popular and the critical imaginary. Recent scholarly interventions have scarcely loosened a long-held perception of Cather as a somewhat reclusive traditionalist with aristocratic leanings, while Goldman has been remembered as a dangerously passionate revolutionary and outspoken partisan of the immigrant working classes. Both of these characterizations merit a degree of reconsideration, however, particularly in the years in which these women’s lives most closely overlapped, between 1906 and 1918. As readers of this volume are likely aware, Cather claimed allegiance with a cultural elite that addressed itself to the transcendent art of the novel rather than the turmoil of popular politics, a move that distanced her from the muckraking journalism that had initially brought her to New York City. At the same time, in interviews and published comments about her work, she frequently projected an image of herself as accessible, down-to-earth, and sincerely interested in the imaginative and material lives of hardworking farmers and small-town folk—people around whom she was raised and with whom she claimed to be familiar (Bohlke).

Emma Goldman, perhaps less well known to Cather’s readers, was a self-proclaimed “firebrand” and radical anarchist who founded and published Mother Earth—officially a “monthly magazine devoted to Social Science and Literature” but better known as the nation’s most widely circulating anarchist magazine between 1906 and 1917. The anarchism it promoted emphasized personal liberation and voluntary association as well as active, collective struggle to abolish capitalism and overthrow church and state (Cornell; Hsu). More idealist than insurrectionary, Goldman’s Mother Earth was established with an inclusionary vision of anarchism, one that explicitly “aim[ed] for unity between revolutionary effort and artistic expression” (qtd. in Cornell 39). Like many of Cather’s most memorable characters, Goldman was an immigrant to the United States from eastern Europe; in the United States, she became immersed in the growing radical, foreign-led anarchist movement in the late nineteenth century and eventually became one of its most recognizable leaders worldwide. Over the course of her life she was imprisoned, beaten, and physically, legally, and financially threatened for her activism; she was deported under the Alien Act of 1918 for her anarchist views, but she continued to espouse them in Russia, Europe, and Canada until her death in 1940. Although she cultivated a public image as a radical activist, Goldman in fact spent much of her time fundraising, which involved hobnobbing with New York City’s wealthy, cultured, leftist elite, with whom she spoke not only about wage slavery but also about modern art and literature, free speech, and free love.

While archival evidence has not shown that Cather and Goldman knew each other personally, it would be almost inconceivable that the two powerful female writer-editors, almost exact contemporaries, were not aware of each other. They both lived and worked in New York City’s intimate but bustling Greenwich Village from 1906, when Cather moved there from Pittsburgh, until Goldman’s deportation at the close of World War I. This was a critical period in each of their careers, as they were both expanding their national and international profiles. The year that Cather arrived, Goldman began publishing Mother Earth in Greenwich Village. In addition to writing for and publishing the journal, Goldman circulated continuously throughout the city, region, and nation, giving widely publicized lectures to promote the anarchist cause. Willa Cather was based in Greenwich Village while she conceived, wrote, and revised her first novels, including My Ántonia. Her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant recalled that she was a vital participant in social life during this period, though she avoided exclusive “circles” (140). With her partner, Edith Lewis, Willa Cather regularly hosted musicians and artists for tea in her home at 5 Bank Street, dined at the Hotel Brevoort, and attended the theater (Jewell), a passion she shared not only with Goldman, who lectured nationally on the subject and published a book about it in 1914, but with virtually all of the Village’s movers and shakers in the 1910s, including members of the Greenwich Village–based Washington Square Players, the Province-town Players, and organizers of the Paterson Strike Pageant (Falk).

During the period in which these women lived in Greenwich Village, the neighborhood became known around the world as ground zero for a “lyrical Left” of socially engaged writers, artists, and arts workers (Abrahams, Stansell). According to Christine Stansell, this hotbed of radical bohemianism was anchored by a core group of feminists that included militant suffragists, birth control advocates, and free love proponents—those on the radical end of a broad spectrum of Progressive Era feminisms that also included middle-class clubwomen, maternalists, civic reformers, and wealthy philanthropists (Muncy). Many of these women were connected through their membership in Heterodoxy, a Greenwich Village–based feminist women’s group and social club that ran from 1912 through the 1940s. The club’s members met bimonthly for lunch, hosted presentations by guests, and offered one another mutual support. Although Goldman and Cather both had friends, relations, and associates who were involved in the group, neither was a member. Both held themselves apart from the feminist organizations and clubs that proliferated in the Village, such as Heterodoxy, the New York Women’s Trade Union League, and the New York Equal Suffrage League. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant reported that Cather detested the very thought of joining such a group (127), while Goldman railed against them publicly as wrongheaded institutions that would not lead to women’s true liberation—something she considered impossible within a state-defined and male-led capitalist democracy—because they were wrongly focused on what she called the “fetich” [sic] of women’s suffrage (Anarchism 201). At issue for each of the women seems to have been a general and sweeping opposition to what Cather referred to as “deadly conformity” and a vision of individual freedom, regardless of gender, that they held in common; both were convinced that personal liberation for women would not come about through their participation in reformist social clubs (qtd. in Jewell 60).

Emma Goldman’s views on the subject were particularly well known. Although she was one of the most prominent female political activists in the nation, she publicly decried “the narrowness of the existing conception of women’s independence and emancipation” as espoused by mainstream women’s suffrage groups (Anarchism 223). In her widely reprinted 1906 essay for Mother Earth, “The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation,” she expressed her belief that winning equality with men—an equality defined primarily by the right to vote and work alongside them within a capitalist system—would fail to liberate either sex. In speeches and in widely disseminated published essays such as this one, she described the pursuit of “equality” under capitalism as a profoundly diminished vision of women’s emancipation that failed to promote the ideals of freedom espoused by Mary Wollstonecraft and other feminist forebears.

Goldman further argued that, in order to win even a “partial” equality with men (as female voters in the Far West had done by gaining the right to vote and own property), modern feminists promoted a “narrow puritanical vision” of feminine morality and manners that did not liberate women but instead established new fetters (Anarchism 225). She believed that in the push toward suffrage, women had willingly bound themselves to crippling ethical and social conventions, many of which were reinforced by a punishing array of vice laws. According to Goldman, the tactical straitening of the expanded feminist vision within a rigid, moralizing paradigm at the end of the nineteenth century had exacted a heavy sacrifice from women. Instead of advancing on the path toward liberation, this narrowed vision of feminism further constrained women’s daily practices and diminished the pleasures of their “inner li[ves]” (Anarchism 226). For Goldman—and, I would argue, for Cather—the freedom to express their “inner lives” was of the utmost importance, surpassing the attainment of legal rights to vote, work, or hold property.

For Goldman, the ultimate expressions of women’s emancipation involved asserting her rights to her own body in the form of free love and free motherhood (Hemmings; Lumsden; Marso). As Clare Hemmings has argued, “Goldman consistently situate[d] sexuality in a broad political context of the sexual division of labour, the institutions of marriage and church, consumerism, patriotism and productive (as well as reproductive) labour” (43). She framed “sexual freedom as both the basis of new relationships between men and women and as a model for a new political future” (44). In her essay “Marriage and Love,” Goldman argued that sexual freedom—free love and free motherhood—was impinged upon most directly by the convention and institution of marriage. “Marriage and love,” she declared, “have nothing in common” (Anarchism 233). For Goldman, love, expressed emotionally and physically regardless of gender, was central to human liberation: all humans had the right to “acknowledge” and “satisfy” what she characterized as the “demands” of “wild” physical desire freely and without moral censure or legal coercion (228). Marriage, on the other hand, was a “travesty on human character,” a “snare,” and a “prison” (241). It fundamentally corrupted love. It caused “sorrow, misery, humiliation ... tears and curses ... agony and suffering” by requiring a “slavish acquiescence to man’s superiority” and by compelling a wife’s submission to her husband legally, financially, socially, and sexually (236). Compulsory sex within marriage, she argued, was worse than prostitution, in which a woman’s underpaid sexual labor at least received some direct monetary compensation, she retained her legal rights to her own person, and her work was circumscribed to sex and not nannying, cooking, cleaning, and more.

While Goldman frequently affirmed dominant views of motherhood as women’s most “glorious” right (but not what Teddy Roosevelt called their “first and greatest duty”), she insisted that women have free choice about when and if to bear children, becoming an early and uncompromising proponent and practitioner of “family limitation” in the 1910s, a cause for which she was imprisoned in Portland, Oregon, and New York City (Hsu 247, 261). At a time when Comstock laws made disseminating information about birth control illegal but a husband’s conjugal rights were being upheld in the courts, Goldman railed against compulsory motherhood as a perverse institution that transformed the “glory” of motherhood into a “duty” and a “nightmare” (“Social Aspects” 136). Like fellow Greenwich Villager Margaret Sanger, with whom she was closely allied in the 1910s, Goldman had worked as a nurse and midwife among poor, immigrant women in New York’s Lower East Side. As she testified in the pages of Mother Earth, this experience demonstrated to her the “terrible yoke and bondage of enforced pregnancy,” which forced women to risk their health and sacrifice their youth while becoming a “mere machine” for babymaking and babyrearing in the service of the church, the race, the state, and the capitalist system that entwined them all (Anarchism 243).

This undeniably devastating account of marriage and childbearing as it appeared to Goldman and other radical feminists in the Progressive Era—that is, those whose liberal feminism was aligned with a distinctly anticapitalist critique—must seem a far cry from what we can ascribe to Cather, who has regularly been characterized as politically conservative and uninterested in feminism[2] This is especially the case if we believe Cather’s views were aligned with Jim’s romantic vision of Ántonia Cuzak at the end of the novel, when she is finally married off to a decent man of her own race and class and appears as a sacrificial earth mother of a dizzying brood of “ten or eleven” children (Cather 319). However, if we consider Ántonia as something of an outlier among Cather’s unmarried pioneer heroines Alexandra Bergson and Thea Kronborg and instead see Lena Lingard as the third of that trinity, we can see the author quietly building an argument not necessarily against heterosexuality per se but rather for a woman’s right to resist or refuse marriage and childbearing in the pursuit of a future of her own choosing—a view that exactly aligns with the radical feminism articulated by Goldman.[3] In this context, My Ántonia’s “hired girls” collectively represent a class of especially vulnerable women who struggle, under significant pressures, to gain and keep control of their economic and sexual lives outside of motherhood and marriage.

“Dangerous as High Explosives”: The Hired Girls take Black Hawk

“The Hired Girls” provide the title and focus of the second (and second-longest) book in My Ántonia. It is a crucial book for many reasons, including that it is the first of three (with “Lena Lingard” and “The Pioneer Woman’s Story”) whose titles call explicit attention to women; the novel’s first and last books, “The Shimerdas” and “Cuzak’s Boys,” refer to the farm families’ patriarchs. The book is also important for its expansion of the novel’s social world. Here, individual stories are brought together for consideration; they add up to something more than an assemblage of personal anecdotes. From this point onward, Ántonia’s life story can be seen alongside those of a number of others who face similar challenges as poor, young, immigrant women from farming families, including the three Bohemian Marys, the Danish laundry girls, Norwegian Anna, Lena Lingard, and Tiny Soderball. All of these young women, regardless of their wishes for their own futures, “had no alternative but to go into service” in order to “pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten” and “clear the homestead from debt” (Cather 194, 193).

For a man of his class and background, Jim Burden does a generally laudable job of bearing their stories and acknowledging the strain that these women are under. Nonetheless, as Gelfant has commented, Jim “knows of but does not experience the suffering and violence inherent in his story” and tends to romanticize and sexualize their servitude (Gelfant 79). “Physically they were almost a race apart,” Jim recalls wistfully, noting their “positive carriage” and “freedom of movement,” which he ascribes to the hard, out-of-doors work that the country girls did before being entering service in town (Cather 192). By contrast, the daughters of the town’s well-to-do families seemed “cut off below the shoulders,” and he complains that “when one danced with them their bodies never moved inside their clothes” (192). In Jim’s view—and apparently the view of other young men in the town—the physicality of the hired girls, required by their jobs, significantly enhanced their sexual appeal; it made them seem inherently less repressed and more accessible. Jim casually notes, without comment, the regularity with which a young man busy at his business in town might be distracted by a glimpse of Lena Lingard’s “slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in her short skirt and striped stockings,” while another might be tempted by the sight of “Tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten” at the hotel where she worked or “the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with their white throats and their pink cheeks” (195–96). Although Jim often sympathizes with the hired girls, he also participates in their sexual objectification: his stolen kiss from his friend Ántonia serves as a case in point (217).

Although the town boys and the country girls “came together on neutral ground” at the Vannis dancing tent (197), it was not there but in the workplace that the girls were most attractive to the men who knew themselves to belong to a class above. For instance, the four Danish girls (who never are named in Jim’s recollections) “never looked so pretty at the dances as they did standing by the ironing-board, washing the fine pieces, their white arms and throats bare, their cheeks bright as the brightest wild roses, their gold hair moist with the steam or the heat and curling in little damp spirals about their ears” (215). In observations such as these, we see that the sexual attention and—as the novel details—vulnerability that these hired girls experience in Black Hawk is absolutely imbricated with their status as young, working-class, immigrant women.

The adolescent Jim is outraged that the “American” town boys dally with the hired girls at the dances but have no serious intentions to legally, financially, and socially bond themselves to them in marriage. Yet he himself sneaks out of his grandparents’ home every weekend to attend the dances and boldly kisses Lena Lingard and Ántonia with no serious intentions of his own and no thought as to the repercussions his sexual attentions could have for them. Indeed, it is because of an unwanted kiss from a town boy (not Jim, but it easily could have been) that the hardworking Ántonia, who is personally beloved by the Harling family, is abruptly dismissed from her position and forbidden to return to the house. That the dances (and kisses) occur off the clock makes no difference to the Harlings, who see Ántonia as their property to feed, clothe, shelter, and work as they see fit, an arrangement that far exceeds most modern worker-employer relationships. She is the Harlings’ Tony, just as the other hired girls are known around town as the Gardners’ Tiny and the Marshalls’ Anna (Cather 198). After all, this is the arrangement they had brokered with Ántonia’s male guardian, her older brother Ambrosch, who begrudgingly permits her to have shoes but directly receives the bulk of her wages. The Harlings, who have a strict view of middle-class propriety and seem to obsessively gossip about the sexual lives of their neighbors’ hired girls, largely keep Ántonia confined to the house. Lena, who tracks Ántonia down at the Harlings’ not long after her arrival in Black Hawk, is on to something when, at the conclusion of her first visit, she asks “in a guarded whisper,” “You can do what you please when you go out, can’t you?” (159). The unanswered question lingers throughout the book, until Ántonia finally asserts her right to freely conduct herself as she wishes and without the permission of her male overseers—to “have [her] fling” if she so chooses—by announcing, “Mr. Harling ain’t my boss outside my work” (202, 200).

Among the hired girls, Ántonia is one of the last to claim her personal time as her own, cowed as she has been on the isolated farm by a domineering mother and bullying older brother, and then guarded jealously by the large, busy Harling family, who take advantage of her innocence and good nature by asking her to make taffy and entertain the family late into the evening, long after her work as the family’s cook has been concluded for the day. Ántonia knows that the Harlings “don’t like to have [her] run much” or “go gadding about” with the other hired girls (Cather 158), whose gender, race, class, age, and marital status make them vulnerable to the predations of the town’s ostensibly respectable and reputedly dissolute men alike. Wick Cutter’s intended rape of Ántonia—all of the townspeople know that this is not his first assault on a young woman in his employ—is the novel’s most explicit example of this, but hardly the only one.[4] Although they were “such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers,” the “three Marys were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about the kitchen” because of how men responded to their presence; two of the three young women, Jim Burden relates, had been “embarrassed” and “forced to retire from the world for a short time,” presumably to abort unwanted fetuses or bear and give away babies because their male employers found them sexually irresistible (196). Indeed, Jim confirms that all of the “country girls were considered a menace to the social order” of the town (195), and boys like himself who consorted with them were likely to get a reputation for being “sly” (209). To the “respectable,” native-born class of townspeople, the “explosive” nature of the “menace” that the sexually free young women represent is no less threatening than the bombs associated with anarchy itself.

Although the hired girls are not revolutionaries, the independent lives they build in Black Hawk offer them a crucial degree of distance from a dehumanizing frontier capitalism that depends on women’s undervalued, reproductive labor (Moore). For a while, Ántonia envies and attempts to emulate the freedom that the others claim. However, she is not like Lena Lingard or Tiny Soderball, who each take meaningful and decisive steps to forward their careers by avoiding what Judith Fetterley has described as the “developmentally dangerous” notions of romantic love, marriage, or children (“Fiction of Female Development” 227). This careful avoidance, despite the fact that the novel strongly intimates that both are sexually active with men, thus leaves the reader to imagine what forms of family limitation they employ in order to preserve their freedom. In contrast, Jim’s “good” Ántonia remains largely in thrall to a sexual morality that is inseparable from a patriarchal economic system in which her labor is and should be sacrificed so as to forward the economic prospects of the male head of the household (Cather 305).

Jim Burden loses contact with Ántonia, Tiny, Anna, and most of the hired girls when he leaves Black Hawk behind to go to college, but he hears about them from time to time by way of town gossips. When Ántonia finds herself pregnant and unhappily unwed, he is told that she works for her brother even harder than before, apparently in penance for her stumble. When Jim meets her again, after a twenty-year lapse, he finds her safely married in what he seems to believe is the best possible ending for her, given her options. She is out from under her hard-driving brother Ambrosch, but the marriage also works her very hard, as she bears and tends her many children as well as the farm where she and her husband live. The evidence of the physical and intellectual wear of her labors is shocking to Jim; she is physically unrecognizable—her hair is grizzled, her chest is flat, her skin is hardened, she is almost toothless—and she has lost most of her hard-won English as well. Ántonia’s companionate marriage, marked by an “easy friendliness” between husband and wife, seems to lack sexual and romantic desire (Cather 347); this also marks a change in Ántonia, as Jim had counted her strong passions as being among her core characteristics.[5] At the story’s conclusion, Jim praises her—her body, anyway—as a “rich mine” from which “Cuzak’s boys” have emerged and through which he can access memories of his own childhood (342). Cather’s metaphor, admittedly more organic than the “mere machine” that Goldman utilized in her contraception speeches, nonetheless reveals the physical toll that babymaking and babyrearing has had on the once vital woman; the reader can perhaps feel relieved that Cather’s fallen woman manages to come out “battered, but not diminished” (321). However, if a heroine can be imagined as something other than a fertile vessel for producing boys, the final outcome for the good, naïve Ántonia must be reckoned ambivalent at best, and the novel’s highly colored, deeply sentimentalized ending must ring hollow.

“It’s All Being Under Somebody’s Thumb”: Lena’s Critique of Marriage and Motherhood

An attentive reader will recall—against Jim’s illusory, concluding pronouncements—that it was not “the road of Destiny” (Cather 244) that finally reunites Jim and Ántonia but rather their constant, mutual friend Lena Lingard, who had prompted Jim to make the effort to reconnect (360); Lena, we learn casually, has continued to maintain contact with them both over the years. Although she has received little critical attention, Lena Lingard is not an inconsequential pastime but literally a central figure in Jim’s life story; the novel’s third and central book is explicitly named for and devoted to her—the only book in the novel that has such a focus—while after the second book, Ántonia recedes as a primary speaker and actor and shifts to the novel’s background, where she appears primarily through the recollections of others. The third book directs the reader’s attention to Lena’s intimate relationship with Jim, which persisted beyond their juvenile kisses in Black Hawk to lazy Sunday mornings together in her apartment in Lincoln, where, he meaningfully recalls, “Lena was at least a woman, and I was a man” (267). We already know that Lena—not Ántonia—is the one who appears routinely in Jim’s erotic dreams; in the novel’s central book, we learn that she returns his feeling, frankly confessing that she has “always been a little foolish about [him]” (284). We can’t really fathom what Lena sees in the rather unremarkable Jim, but the novel provides ample reason for his interest in her. Lena’s ethereal beauty attracts admirers of all kinds, but this is not her only attractive quality. Her talent for her art—dressmaking—is undeniable, her placid good nature in the face of vicious “talk” and violent threats is almost unbelievable, she is serenely free from jealousy (unlike Ántonia—or Crazy Mary), and she is generous to and thoughtful of others, especially her mother. Even though My Ántonia begins and ends with children and purports to tell a chastely romantic tale of two childhood friends, its narrative arc traces Jim’s first, young amour—one that is truly romantic and quite explicitly sexual in nature, with a woman he can never possess. Although she may not be recognizable as a modern “sex radical” according to the model of bohemian Greenwich Village, she loves freely, deliberately eschews marriage and motherhood, and pursues her personal passion and talent for beautiful creation as a dressmaker.

The pressures Lena faces as a young, poor, immigrant woman are similar to those faced by the novel’s other hired girls. Like them, Lena was raised on a farm but moves to Black Hawk in order to help support her family with her wages, although this also means that her father will have to find someone else to do the labor of the farm chores and her mother will lose her assistance with the baby handling and bottling. At the same time, she keenly understands that distance from the family’s daily demands on her time will give her the opportunity to become independent and develop her talents. She takes it seriously: when she appears at the Harlings’ doorstep at the beginning of book II, she is “brushed and smoothed and dressed like a town girl,” perfectly composed, and exceptionally well-spoken (Cather 155). She informs Ántonia’s employers, the Harlings, that she has “come to town to work,” and although they make inquiries about her sexual life—they want to know if she will marry a young man with whom she has reputedly been involved—she refocuses the conversation on her intention to work as a dressmaker (157). Her comments reveal that her own passion is focused not on “Nick or any other man”—or indeed, as she declares matter-of-factly, marriage at all—but rather on the dresses she will create and the materials that she will be working with, the mere thought of which elicits her sighs of approval (157). While this exchange marks the reader’s first encounter with Lena, her stance on marriage is made clear; she will affirm it repeatedly throughout the novel to those like Jim who don’t believe that such a beautiful young woman will follow through with her intention to remain single.

Lena’s career mirrors to a large degree those of the other major female protagonists in Cather’s early novels: Alexandra Bergson and Thea Kronborg. Like Thea and, arguably, Willa Cather herself, Lena is a truly gifted artist whose successes may seem to have come to her easily but were in fact advanced over the course of long years of determined apprenticeship and the steady development of both her craft and her clientele.[6] Although we see relatively little of Lena before she comes to town, the scene of her knitting socks for her siblings while also tending cattle on the prairie is sufficient to indicate her juvenile attempts at creation with the rough tools and time at hand. W. T. Benda’s illustration of this scene, one of eight commissioned by the author for the novel, is the only one that shows a single character’s identifiable, personal features.[7] In this significant illustration, Lena is deeply absorbed in her art, equally heedless of the cattle that her father assigned her to watch and of her own personal appearance: her thin, tattered clothes literally fall from her body (revealing a pert nipple) as the fruits of her labor are subsumed by the pressing needs of her father’s large family.

Lena’s talent and dedicated work in Black Hawk pay off, and she is aided rather than derailed by her female employer, Mrs. Thomas, who allows Lena “a room of [her] own” and a measure of freedom that is withheld from the other hired girls (Cather 158); she is never the Thomases’ Lena. Within a few years she is able to move to the capital city of Lincoln and open her own dress shop in a fashionable part of town; she does so well that by the time Jim enters college there she has begun to furnish and build a home for her mother “before she is too old to enjoy it”: this is perhaps the novel’s clearest indication of her right character and arguably her crowning achievement, even if Black Hawk’s gossips whisper otherwise (191). Jim is “puzzled” by Lena’s successes, although he accepts that “she had great natural aptitude” for dressmaking and observes that the great satisfaction she gets from it allows her to work tirelessly into the evenings (270). He notes that she does not seem to “push” in order to get ahead, as most people who are successful in business seem to do, nor does she drive herself so hard as to exclude other pleasures (270). When she wants to, she treats herself to dinners out, the theater, flowers, and candy.

Fig. 7.1. W. T. Benda’s original illustration of Lena Lingard. Willa Cather, My Ántonia.

That the good life that Lena creates for herself is predicated on her deliberate rejection of marriage and childbearing is imperceptible to Jim, who has it in his head that “[e]very handsome girl like you marries, of course” (Cather 282). Lena, however, has maintained an essentially Goldmanian view of marriage since she first got away from home; she reasserts it at length at the end of book III, in the last exchange she has with Jim before he leaves her to continue his studies at Harvard. When Jim presses her as to why she won’t marry, she gives a number of reasons. A modern careerwoman might propose that a husband and children would disrupt a woman’s professional path, but this practical consideration for rejecting marriage is not one that Lena (or Goldman) identifies. “Mainly,” Lena tells Jim, “it’s because I don’t want a husband” (282). She concedes that “men are all right for friends,” but a husband will inevitably assert his will, to which he expects his wife to submit. While Goldman would argue that marriage requires a wife’s “slavish acquiescence” to a man, Lena, who prizes her independence, puts the anarchist argument even more plainly: she prefers to “be accountable to nobody” (282). Secondly, she cherishes having a “minute to myself” and a bed—and home—of her own: “she remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man, and work piling up around a sick woman” (283). As the oldest daughter, Lena “couldn’t remember a time when she was so little that she wasn’t lugging a heavy baby about, helping to wash for babies, trying to keep their little chapped hands and faces clean” in the effort to help her overworked mother with the endless nannying, cooking, and cleaning (283). Lena’s own resolution never to marry comes directly from her own firsthand experience of what Goldman had referred to as the “duty” and “nightmare” of marriage that had literally driven her beloved mother to her sickbed. “You can’t tell me anything about family life,” Lena testifies. “I’ve had plenty to last me” (283). When Jim protests that it isn’t all like that, she replies with finality, “Near enough. It’s all being under somebody’s thumb” (283). Judith Fetterley has argued that My Ántonia’s “hostility to marriage would be hard to exceed”; more than any other character in the novel, Lena Lingard articulates this hostility directly and adamantly, albeit in her typically easygoing way (Fetterley, “Dilemma” 48).

Lena’s rejection of marriage does not mean, however, that she has rejected love; it would seem that she is in total agreement with Goldman that the two “have nothing in common.” As many of those who gossip about Lena’s affairs imply, she puts into active practice the Goldmanian principle of “free love” by acknowledging and satisfying her physical desires and “giv[ing] her heart away when she felt like it” (Cather 290). We know from Jim that Lena “lets [him] kiss her” without any strings attached (217), and she confesses to pursuing him to his rented room in Lincoln, where she boldly “beg[an] it” (284) by proposing that he “come and see me sometime when you’re lonesome” (261). Nor is Jim her only lover; the reader gets the strong feeling that My Ántonia’s documentation of Lena’s sexual and romantic escapades is suggestive rather than exhaustive or explicit. Just as Goldman openly advocated, physical love is simply a pleasure for Lena; by giving it away, untethered to either legal and social contracts and obligations or the capitalist system where everything is supposed to have a price, Lena makes sex and desire into defiant, radical acts of anarchist joy (Hemmings).

In the final book of the novel, we learn that Lena has achieved the American dream, going from literal rags to ample comfort, if not riches. Although the ambitious adventure seeker Tiny Soderball “achieves the most solid worldly success” of all of the boys and girls who grew up together in Black Hawk, Tiny’s singular pursuit of money has taken its toll on her, body and soul: she has sacrificed an important part of herself along the way—three toes on her once-dainty foot, a symbol of her sexuality—and has become exhausted, embittered, and disinterested in life (Cather 291). Lena, by contrast, seems to have found the key to eternal youth: she still “enjoys things” and “never gets any older” (294). With Tiny, she has moved to San Francisco, an even larger field for her talents as a dressmaker, and has continued to reap the rewards that her talent and skill have brought to her and that marriage and motherhood would have forced her to renounce.

Lena’s path toward personal autonomy and fulfillment—through free love and freedom from motherhood—is of course anathema in Black Hawk. The Widow Steavens’s comments on the subject make this clear when she laments that the morally conventional— that is, “good”—Ántonia had “come home disgraced” while loose Lena “turned out well” (Cather 305). Even though Lena serves as the novel’s model of generosity, kindness, tolerance, filial duty, and loyal friendship (not to mention artistic genius), the Widow Steavens sweepingly condemns her in a lengthy tirade, declaring that she “was always a bad one, say what you will” (305). Emphasizing the “great difference in the principles of those two girls”—she is clearly speaking specifically to Lena’s sexual practices—the Widow Steavens gnashes her teeth at having to “give credit where credit is due” by acknowledging the indisputable good that Lena has done for her mother and siblings (305). Lena’s flagrant flouting of the community’s moral codes of right sexual conduct cannot be forgiven or forgotten.

The Widow Steavens’s disapproval notwithstanding, Cather never assigns Lena her comeuppance: no “babies come along pretty fast” for Lena, as they do for the married couple Ántonia and Cuzak, and her story does not adhere to the predictable, tragic path of the fallen woman. Even if the Widow Steavens cannot accept it, Cather shows us that Lena’s refusal of marriage and childbearing (though, crucially, not love and pleasure) has enabled her alone to emerge unscathed from a brutal frontier capitalism that relentlessly exacts a physical, intellectual, and emotional toll on the young, poor, immigrant women on whose labor it depends. While these issues surface in other well-known Cather novels, it is through her collective portrait of the hired girls in My Ántonia that she makes her radical feminist critique of this brutal form of capitalism most explicit. Her hired girls not only expose the close relationship between women’s sexual practices and their relative subjugation or freedom within the U.S. capitalist economy, but it is one of them who comes to stand as Cather’s positive example of a poor, immigrant woman who has fully, successfully, unqualifiedly made good.