Genevieve Taggard's Sentimental Marxism in Calling Western Union

Allego, Donna M

In Sentimental Modernism, Suzanne Clark argues that throughout the twentieth century American women writers perpetuated an earlier sentimental tradition. Although Clark's particular interest in lyrical poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan results in her downplaying the woman poets as activists in the 1930s, Genevieve Taggard and Muriel Rukeyser utilized the sentimental to denounce social and economic inequities in American culture. Calling Western Union (1936) is especially important because as Taggard's only book of poetry entirely devoted to class issues, it employs the ethical norms and pathos for which Clark praises the sentimental (1991, 24-25). Admittedly, Taggard's work is not characterized by overwrought characters as in, for instance, Maria Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854) or by the narratorial exhortations as in Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861). However, Calling Western Union, like Davis's novel and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, is blatantly interventionist by targeting social problems and attempting to cure them with actions derived from a maternal ethos. As characters exemplify this ethos by bonding with and helping the unfortunate, they function as role models whom readers can respect and emulate. Taggard's concern is creating an inclusive community, and for her this is a classless society that provides opportunities and an improved standard of living for working class people. Although Calling Western Union is unapologetically leftist, we should not dismiss it as mere Marxist propaganda; it is actually a complex work that recasts a maternal ethic of interpersonal bonds into helping others in Marxist terms. After discussing Taggard's links with this strain of American sentimentalism, I use close readings of her autobiographical preface and representative vocalic poems in which women frequently play key roles to evidence her sentimental Marxism.

Calling Western Union1 consists of several prose sections and thirty eight poems: the autobiographical prose preface is followed by four books, each consisting of thematically linked poems and an interpretative prose note. The volume's two concluding poems predict the victory of the working class. The preface, "Hawaii, Washington, Vermont A Frame for the Verse," focuses on early experiences that shaped Taggard's later political views and lays the foundation for poems calling for an inclusive community within the United States. Since the preface uses geographical regions to expose ethical issues, the volume's title is a plea for Americans to unite by eliminating divisive social conditions stemming from a socio-economic hierarchy. The poems and notes underscore that this goal can be accomplished by altering the economic base of a class structure debilitating to the working class. By advancing a position consistent with Marx and Engel's historical materialism, these sections call for an alignment of primarily middle and working class people to supersede powerful, moneyed groups. Throughout the poetry, community is a class issue subsuming geography, gender roles, and art.

Taggard's Marxism complicates her relationship to sentimental writers because unlike many of them she accepts technology and industrialism. In "Stowe's Dream of the Mother Savior," Elizabeth Animons argues that after 1850, black and white female writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Harper, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Sarah Orne Jewett, challenged the ethos of industrialism with an idea of community that asserted the supremacy of family, relationships, and the power of women over work, products, and the domination of males (1986, 156-57). Because Taggard accepts industrialism as a given in twentieth-century America, she cannot concur with, for instance, Davis's solution in Life in the Iron Mills to remove exploited workers from the mills into a loving Quaker community. Taggard's working class women labor in mills or support their men by marching in the streets to protest working conditions, and her men are beaten when they strike against Ford Motor Company for higher wages in order to feed their families. Although Taggard embraces industrialization and technology, she still envisions women as powerful agents who advocate an ethos of interpersonal bonds and helping others which is associated with nineteenth-century domestic figures and showcased in the interventionist sentimental fiction to which Animons refers. Concerning the potency of these earlier domestic women, Barbara Welter and historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg think that a middle class Caucasian woman in nineteenth-century America had considerably more independence and power as a mother and as a pious woman rather than as a submissive, supportive wife. She exerted her strength by inculcating morality into children and influencing her husband so that his actions would hopefully counter the immorality in his workplace (Welter 1966, 152, 154-55, 159-61; Smith-Rosenberg 1985, 199). In The Bonds of Womanhood, Nancy Cott draws out the moral implication of this selfless figure when she argues that mothers were powerful because they shaped the mores of America: In guiding a child's life, the American mother guided the nation, because social progress was based on individual character (1977, 85, 94).

Sentimental novels reflected the efficacy of this figure when, for example, The Lamplighter portrays a community of reciprocal love in which individual needs are met and human lives begin to heal. Mrs. Sullivan and Emily Graham are instrumental in facilitating the orphan Gerty's maturation as they provide for her needs and guide her moral and intellectual growth; their mentoring is later reciprocated when the adult Gertrude ministers to them and also integrates her emotionally isolated father into meaningful relationships with others. Davis joins Ammons's impressive group of writers by extending these same values of selflessness and bonding into the public workplace and calling for social reform. The Quaker woman enables Deb to escape the mill by integrating her into a religious community that fosters her physical and emotional healing, and the narrator-artist, who empathizes with the wretched mill workers, exhorts readers to understand their plight and dedicates her talents to write on their behalf. In the same vein, Taggard also advocates bonds that necessitate going beyond one's self-interest in order to help others as the foundation of her Marxist community, but for her this ethos grows out of actual experiences in communities and anti-communities described in the preface to Calling Western Union. Because Taggard weaves strands from her experiences in small towns in Hawaii and Washington throughout much of this section, it is apparent that she embraces Marxism only because it is consistent with the lessons that these experiences taught her about inclusiveness and hierarchies. These real world experiences, rather than a theoretical Marxism, form the bedrock of Taggard's sentimental ethics, as her reflections about her adolescence make clear.

Taggard was born in Waitsburg, Washington, on November 28, 1894, but because her parents tired of small town life, the family migrated to Hawaii when Taggard was two. With the exception of a few visits to Washington, Taggard lived her formative years in Hawaii until she was sixteen, when her father's failing health forced the family to return to Waitsburg. As McCann emphasizes,

The contrast between small-town rural America and the rich multiracial cosmopolitanism of Hawaii made a lasting impression on Genevieve: the cruel and brutal insensitivity she found in Waitsburg, where the Taggards lived the life of the rural poor, crystallized into a liberalism she later expressed through leftist poetry and commitment to liberal and proletarian causes. (McCann 1986, 376)

The town to which her family returned was an anti-community consisting of haves and have-nots, and Taggard's family belonged to the latter because they were exploited by a paternal uncle who refused to repay a two thousand dollar loan from Taggard's parents. Taggard's comment that she and her siblings "were to see our America with the eyes of outsiders" (1936, xiv) aptly summarizes her relationship to the economic exploitation embedded in Waitsburg's small town ways and ugly, harsh surroundings. The younger Taggard was astonished by the town's parochialism:

They thought it was a lark to go down to see the noon train come in! They waited with great tension in a room full of tobacco spit for the mail that consisted of a mail-order catalog. They screamed out the news if a neighbor had a haircut. They told each other how many overalls they had in their washtubs last Monday. (Taggard 1936, xvi)

These citizens were so content that they walled out other people with different life experiences. For example, Taggard was ostracized by her female high school peers because "My clothes were funny; my talk was funny; and it was whispered that I had lived in a grass hut with cannibals" (1936, xxiii). Moreover, because the locals lacked other standards by which to measure their experiences, they made life, which was already difficult enough in a landscape of dust and "stubble-covered hills," even worse by failing to repair sidewalks and by imposing restrictions such as not sitting in parlors or forbidding children to run freely in orchards.

These conditions-closed-mindedness, lack of beauty, and ridiculous restrictions-worked in tandem with an economic hierarchy that advantaged the rugged individualist farm owner, but exacerbated the poor working conditions of field hands. The latter, in contending with natural elements, worked in such difficult conditions that they "behaved like men in war time":

they slept in their dirt-caked clothes; they went unwashed and unshaved for weeks at a time. Their eyes were blood-shot from chaff, their tempers ragged with the misfortunes of the machinery and the horses that had to co-ordinate to make an efficient combine. They staggered and snarled and gulped their food. (Taggard 1936, xviii)

Despite their efforts to make a living, half of the town was in debt because it owed money to stores, had outstanding loans to banks, and mortgaged wheat crops to the other half of the town "who owned the store, the bank and the wheat crop" (Taggard 1936, xix). Taggard believes that this class structure results from individualism taken to its logical conclusion, and her chief example is her unethical, power-hungry uncle who used a loan from Taggard's parents to gain power in the community and later reduced her family to workers because no legal papers required him to repay the debt.

Taggard does not argue that as an adolescent she grasped the integral relationship between exploitation, exclusion, and aesthetics or the inference that domination requires and produces a subordinate class subsisting in ugliness. However, the Washington and Hawaiian experiences taught the young girl to align these features and to reject an exclusionary ethic which supported exploitation. Taggard's Hawaiian experience of beauty and especially inclusiveness and reciprocity shapes her notion of community and ties her to earlier American sentimentalists. Not only did Taggard's family live in a clean and aesthetically pleasing environment, but more importantly her parents and the Hawaiians retained their humanity even though they were poor. Taggard describes her parents as "mild internationalists" who knew the native Hawaiians on an individual basis and her sister and herself as enculturated children who used many Hawaiian expressions and whose sun darkened skin resembled the pigmentation of the natives (1936, xiv). The natives whom they knew were a racially and culturally diverse group comprised of Portuguese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian-Chinese, and hapa-haoles (xv).2

Taggard's family was woven into the fabric of Hawaiian life as they helped to form a community of cooperation, good will, and good feeling that was as "amiable" as the varied landscape of ferns, flowers, coral walks, and the sea. Although Taggard's family and the Hawaiians were poor, their poverty was not "abject" and "It had not cut us off from human exchange" (1936, xxi). Consequently, they retained a decency that enabled them to help each other or to reciprocate the other's good will. For example, when Taggard's family was quarantined for allegedly having the black plague, their neighbors still gave them tea and cakes. Because Taggard's family provided the town's only medical care ("things we did as a matter of course"), people consistently responded "in delicate ways" by leaving them "a pile of sugar cane, or a heap of mangoes . . ." (xxii). This good will also extended to the children's camaraderie: "If we went to the mountains to pick guavas, the Portuguese children trooped beside us to help fill our pails, and we came home with the leis they made for us, just for fun" (xxii).

Because Taggard had experienced a community of total inclusion-the beauty of the landscape and of human good will that created reciprocal and meaningful relationships-she internalized a value system that shaped her criticism of Waitsburg and that guided her later critique of economic exploitation in Vermont during the early 1930s. Taggard bonds with poor Vermonters when she recognizes their horrendous living and "working conditions and uses her poetry to help them and other disadvantaged people:

I saw canned wood-chuck in the farmers' cellars. I saw slums in Brattleboro and Burlington. I knew children who picked ferns for a few cents a day. I knew/ a man who worked in a furniture factory for ten cents an hour! I saw his starved wife and children. Slow starvation gives children starry eyes and delicate faces. I saw five men who were a few weeks ago sentenced to jail for their activity in the Vermont Marble Strike. I saw a voucher for two cents one worker got for a week's wages, all that was left after the company deducted for rent and light. I saw a pile of such vouchers. When they eat, the quarry workers eat potatoes and turnips. . . . In Rutland County the Overseer of the Poor is a Marble Company official. (Taggard 1936, xxxi-xxxii)

Like the early sentimentalists, Taggard values reciprocal bonds in which people help others rather than exploiting them out of self-interest, and like Davis, she rejects an anti-community of power-over relationships for inclusive groups which make commitments to others so that human lives can flourish. Taggard's poetry, by supporting poor working class people, also echoes these earlier writers by often showcasing female characters to critique inhumane social practices and to shape the values of an audience in order to change American culture.

In her synthesis of sentimentalism and Marxism, Taggard writes a group of poems in which speakers emulate another voice. This technique, which was widely used in worker's correspondence poems and in Tillie Olsen's "I Want You Women Up North to Know," is developed more fully inTaggard's voice poems by speakers representing the entire socio-economic hierarchy (Nelson 1996, 41-45). As these speakers reveal their own attitudes, their voices are often juxtaposed, creating a biting irony especially when degenerate, affluent characters contrast with empathie middle class people who bond with the working class.Taggard also uses a knowledgeable, middle class voice as a lens through which readers can define the working class, and at appropriate moments she supersedes this voice with those of the workers. With the exception of upper class representatives who benefit from capitalism, the other speakers demonstrate the efficacy of maternal values, especially when these norms pertain to crucial roles that women can play in creating a more equitable America.

Although Taggard knows that economically powerful people control other human beings, she also believes that they are not permanently entrenched in American culture. In the note to Book II, she argues that because this anti-community repudiates science and technology, it cannot cope with modern life and needs to be supplanted by a more robust group: "This wail rises only when a class is terribly, terribly, terribly tired. And this wail is the sign that the culture of the future world must be entrusted to another class. To the class that is not tired" (1936, 47).Taggard's belief is consistent with an historical materialism that posits the mutability of social systems and the collapse of capitalism, and her poetry repudiates an irresponsible upper class benefiting from an economic and social hierarchy. Collectively the speakers in "To an American Workman Dying of Starvation," "To Marcia with Asphodel, 1931,"and "Funeral in May" illustrate the "tiredness" of a class that, in embracing outmoded economics and aesthetics, is too callused or emotionally weak to lead an American nation.

The speaker in "To an American Workman Dying of Starvation" is a caricature of a morally sluggish capitalist flicking off economically dispossessed people:

This speaker evidences his flippant, hackneyed ethics in monosyllabic and parroting diction and cliches which he thinks are clever, especially the rhyming of "Swell guy" and "die." Equally important is his ironic use of the Florists' International Delivery slogan "say it with flowers" which should, but fails to connote reaching out and showing concern for other people.3 Although the speaker's telegraphic sentences signal a brutal indifference, his head is so full of borrowed and repetitive language that he cannot begin to imagine the impact of his attitude and actions on less fortunate people, and he is so emotionally impoverished and set in his ways that he cannot generate a life affirming paradigm for them.

In exposing the dominant class, Taggard also shows that the emotional emptiness and escapism of introspective characters are symptomatic of moral decay. "To Marcia with Asphodel, 1931," is especially important because Taggard's using mythology as a metaphor for the speaker's interior life distances her poetry from mere propaganda. The speaker is a well-educated woman who has lost her identity and power. In retelling the love story of Persephone and Hades to a female friend, she uses mythology as a metaphor for the emotional emptiness resulting from a failed relationship:

I picked these on my ramble. You want them now.

I would say no; but these are innocent flowers.

You do not see my hand tremble as I perplex how

To tell you or not tell you of this life of ours:

(The legend in my head and my own legend,

And my view of Hades, and these real lilies. . . .) (Taggard 1936, 1-6)

The increasing length of the speaker's sentences suggests that the simple facts stated in lines one and two belie the complex story she tells with flowers associated with Hades and the dead and sacred to Persephone. Although the woman hesitates to give the flowers, she realizes that their innocence renders them safe, and this feature, which differentiates her flowers from those of the under-world, signals that her story will diverge from the Greek myth. This impotence is in turn attributed to her as her hands tremble and she hesitates to relate her own experience (her life in and with Hades). Her reticence also suggests that her story diverges from the popular myth in which the abducted Persephone must spend half of the year living with Hades, but ultimately emerges as a rejuvenating symbol of spring. These infelicitous and more hopeful details emphasize that Persephone has a well defined self and real power that the speaker lacks and needs. The speaker's lengthy parenthetical comment, in conjunction with her hesitation, also indicates that she experiences a significant degree of dissonance between the myth and her daily life. Her compounding personal adjectives ("my own legend" and "my view of Hades") indicates an immense emotional gap between her interpretation and the received views about Persephone, while her references to the legend are bereft of possessives that would attribute the meaning of that story to her. Also, by designating her flowers as real, she continues demarcating them from sacred emblems of the underworld and thereby further distances herself from the mythological woman. Since the speaker cannot claim Persephone's legend, she cannot claim her imposed marital status as either Queen of the Underworld or life-giving power of spring. She seems to have nothing meaningful to say, a point her indecisiveness underscores. Thus, this speaker has not only lost her identity as a woman, but she clearly lacks the energy and the will to transform her life let alone the lives of others.

Taggard continues probing the psychological imperfections of the upper class by satirizing elitist artists who use religion and art to escape a technological world. In "Funeral in May," a male, high modernist poet modeled on T. S. Eliot and an anonymous character speak from different perspectives to expose the deficiencies of artists who retreat from the mundane world by attempting to express the ineffable character of a transcendent God. Although the poet lauds this God for whom he thinks he is a spokesman, his beliefs are crumbling even in the opening lines when he permutes Jesus' crucifixion cry ("My God, my God. Why hast Thou forsaken me?") into "Metaphor metaphor why hast thou forsaken me." After venting his existential angst, he attempts to reaffirm his faith in a deity and in art by anchoring life and metaphors in a divine source. This affirmation, however, hangs by a mere thread when the poet admits that he grasped this insight "Ever since my last nervous breakdown. . . ." The poet's ongoing emotional problems indicate that he has turned to an aesthetically informed religion in order to cope with modern life, but as he attempts to persevere in his faith as God's mouthpiece, his metaphysics completely breaks down when he tries to convince himself of this belief:

The poet's metaphysical and aesthetic faith evaporates as he flits from one topic to another. With the trailing ellipsis at the end of line thirty-four, he fails to convince himself of the sufficiency of aesthetics, and although he asserts the supremacy of religious values in times of war, religion and metaphorical language fail when he cannot grasp the prepositional content of mysticism. However, the poet still clings to symbols because he cannot accept that using literal language requires him to interact with the day-to-day world he seeks to escape. Thus, he echoes the Lord's prayer ("Deliver us from evil") when he beseeches metaphor to "deliver us from meaning."

In presenting the poet's angst from a different vantage point, the exuberant second speaker uses language to redirect human beings to mundane affairs. Her direct speech exemplifies a system of signs in which words correspond to things and events in the day-to-day world so despised by the poet, when, for example, she gives specific directions for the poet's funeral: "Scoop his grave with the jolly steam shovel. One scoop will do." and "When we gather fresh laurel Blow blasts on the factory whistle."When this speaker uses figurative language to mock the poet, she displays an uncanny insight into his character so that metaphor illuminates a tangible reality and yields meaning. Using the image of the mirror, she illustrates that the poet became so trapped in his own reflection ("the anxious close-up the smile the grimace and the wince") that he could not see beyond his self-indulgence to God's mockery. Consequently, the speaker thinks that the mirror, "the ghost-haunted glass" and "His perfect companion," is a fitting grave marker.The speaker then calls for the poet's successors, skilled artists who join with others, to lead a communal form of poetry-song.

Taggard counterpoints this version of high modernism with a populist aesthetic that has the potential to create a community cutting across class lines. In "NOTE BOOK I," she rejects poets who aggrandize themselves and are at loggerheads with society for those representing and drawing their poetic power from this source. Thus she draws the poet into a reciprocal community whose members critique the poet's work ("Community") and whom the poet, in turn, nourishes. As the leftist poet in "Dedication for a Book" imagines her poems engaging readers on social issues, she expresses an unwavering confidence and pride in verses that refresh others:

By drawing poets into a community, Taggard redirects a potentially recalcitrant role so that artists, especially poets, and their audience function as maternal figures who nourish each other and thereby help to create a classless society. By embracing the everyday world and using their abilities to help others, these energetic poets are emblems of other middle class speakers whom Taggard envisions uniting with workers in order to undermine a morally anemic, but powerful affluent class. As these groups join forces, each exemplifies maternal values in ways appropriate for the power it wields or can generate and each does so in the context of the "woman question," a vexing problem in which leftists struggled to define the political role(s) of women. Paula Rabinowitz's and Barbara Foley's studies of American proletarian fiction illuminate the importance ofTaggard's voice poems by considering how women achieve equality with men in the class struggle and how intellectual and working class women are depicted as participants in the leftist movement (Rabinowitz 1991, 17, 62; Foley 1993, 214-15).

Foley argues that the Communist Party and leftist writers responded to this complex issue by characterizing the female gender role in various ways, some of which gave women more space than others (1993, 219, 225). Taggard creates middle class speakers who are either female or, as poets, parents, and teachers, play roles open to women that Taggard actually lived. These speakers illustrate the middle class as developing a political consciousness and using their power to help the working class obtain the benefits that they already enjoy. Taggard creates space for middle class women in leftist politics by first eliminating their entanglement in heterosexual relationships. This move enables her to avoid the tension between love and political activism that, for instance, Josephine Herbst addresses in Victoria Wendell's and Jonathan Chance's marriage in Rope of Gold. By favoring male members, the Communist Party initially closes off Victoria's participation, and once she becomes politically active, her work is incompatible with intimate relationships. Victoria is frustrated when Jonathan unexpectedly returns home and interrupts her work on an important manuscript, and although her daring work in Cuba enables her to meet revolutionaries, she cannot fully savor this experience because she is preoccupied with thoughts about her husband, even though their relationship has failed (Herbst 1984, 264, 362-64, 402-03). Taggard's female speakers counterpoint this ineffective behavior by eschewing romantic entanglements and exotic political experiences, and as they model a fruitful ethos and ways to actualize it, they demonstrate practical ways to become powerful.

"A Middle-Aged, Middle-Class Woman at Midnight" is set in Vermont during a frigid winter, and the speaker, a female insomniac, takes a sleep inducing medicine (veronal) in order to ignore the poor's horrendous living conditions and their being punished for striking for better working conditions that would benefit their families. She takes veronal, if not regularly surely more than intermittently, and although she is aware of the poor's impoverished conditions, she is reluctant to face the implications of her knowledge. However, she gradually accepts what she has attempted to deny, and as she does her consciousness raising plays on readers' sympathy to encourage their support of the working class. As the speaker's acceptance shifts from the periphery to the focal point of her consciousness, she reveals the information that she can no longer ignore and through this process comes to support the disadvantaged.

This shift begins in the first stanza as the woman's references to herself become increasingly personal. She initially uses the impersonal third person to refer to herself as an insomniac ("A woman took veronal in vain") and then shifts to the second person: "If you once think of the cold, continent wide Iron bitter. Ten below. Here in bed I stiffen" (Taggard 1936, 4-5). The referent of "you" is ambiguous because it is not clear if she is addressing the reader or speaking of herself; that she means the latter is clarified by "I." Only after directly referring to herself can she begin articulating the problems motivating her insomnia. At first, she tries to ignore the effects of the bitter cold on the poor ("especially the children") and on the striking Vermont workers:

Her efforts to avoid the import of facts fail, and she petitions the veronal to erase this information from her mind. After making one more attempt to rationalize her insomnia, she permits the information to surface full force, and from lines fifteen through twenty-six, she verbalizes the horrible impact of winter on the poor as a family, a social unit that she and the working class share. For example, she acknowledges the physical abuse that fathers working for Ford Motors endure when they attempt to help their children:

The woman's bond is especially strengthened by her sympathy for the children when her insomnia merges with their inadequate sleep ("Bad sleep for us all"). After she admits that the effects of hunger and the harsh winter are so extensive that farmers starve and the urban poor seek relief through suicide, she further identifies with the working class by complaining of illness and her difficulty in purchasing veronal.

Consequently, she refuses to tolerate these injustices and aligns herself with them by rejecting escapism through medicine and the social and familial system in which she has participated and that has checked the self-determination of the poor:

By empathizing and identifying with the poor, the female insomniac demonstrates that developing a political conscience is the first way that a maternal ethic helps to reshape a culture. Other middle-class speakers take this ethic an additional step by translating beliefs into action.

In "To My Daughter, 1936" a parent illustrates that learning to apply maternal values is just as important as establishing them when she rejects a life insurance policy for her daughter because it cannot protect anyone from death. She elects to work for a promising future for all children by creating a community that safeguards against economic inequity:

By including the girl in this large group, the mother provides for her by ensuring that all children, regardless of their status, have the same opportunities.

As a teacher in "This Way We Make History" clarifies power, she demonstrates that middle class people can apply maternal values by sharing their knowledge with the disadvantaged. This teacher, who may be a professional educator or any knowledgeable person, demystifies power for working class people in order to alter the existing class structure. Because both groups share this goal ("We Make History"), the speaker makes her idea accessible by using colloquial language and comparisons that less educated listeners can grasp. Her permutation of "Do you get me?" also marks the familiarity and co-operation both classes share. She explains that over an extended period of time, the elite, acting as a unit, have retained power by surreptitiously passing it on ("under cover of hands" and "Polished hands, deceptive clever"). By punctuating her lesson with variations of "Do you get me?," the speaker emphasizes that only the method of retaining power, but not power per se, is mysterious. Consequently, she encourages politically disenfranchised people to change their circumstances by grasping power. The commands "Take and create Power" emphasize the attainability of this goal, while her translating power into images familiar to the working class ("huge as a tank or a turbine") underscores that they can create a dynamic political force. Moreover, the speaker's additional comparisons to familiar objects and activities suggest that the potential power of working class people is qualitatively better than the covert kind because it is accessible to more people who can communicate with each other:

Simple as the back of your hand, simple.

Foregone as a pow-wow at noon, or the talk of two cronies.

As sweet on the tongue as slang;

"Flat and final as a show-down in poker." (Taggard 1936, 16-19)

Taggard's middle class speakers, in bonding with the less fortunate through consciousness raising and actions, position women to play various roles that are essential in shaping a more promising future for the working class.

But how does Taggard define this marginal group, and how do its women, in the context of the "woman question," contribute to the "We" who will make history? Taggard frequently uses a middle class speaker who, in being privy to the daily lives of the working class, guides a reader's assessment of this group, and at important points she supersedes this voice with those of workers. In Book I, empathie speakers laud working class women who validate maternal values by nurturing others or participating in political affairs. However, in Book III, the speakers are more critical as they reveal how both sexes' limited perception of the female gender role weakens their class. Although the speakers are harsh, they actually uncover potential pockets of power that females and males can actualize if they apply a maternal ethos to their problems-women by interrogating entrenched, oversimplified beliefs that equate the maternal with motherhood and males by becoming more sensitive to the women's needs.

In both books, Taggard is working within but against an iconography and discourse that, according to Rabinowitz, usually showcased a heroic male worker and revolutionary as the dominant image of the working class and, as Foley argues, that depicted the worker as a muscular male and portrayed a female as often accompanied by a husband (Rabinowitz 1991, 37; Foley 1993, 221). Despite the problematic gender hierarchy embedded in these images, the Communist Party still attempted to include women in politics. During the Popular Front Era, the Party encouraged working class women to be nurturers and helpmates in the home, while women workers and housewives exerted pressure in the workplace (Foley 1993, 219, 225). As Taggard's empathic speakers portray both kinds of domestic women as central to the marital unit and the working class, they demonstrate that these women, like their middle class counterparts, display a resourcefulness and assertiveness driven by a concern for others, even though their help takes a different form.

In "Everyday Alchemy" and "At Last the Women are Moving," working class women are maternal figures who strengthen their families and class by moving beyond personal self-interest or their domestic space to nurture husbands and other males fighting for better working conditions. The wife in "Everyday Alchemy" exemplifies selflessness by creating a home of solace for an exhausted husband:

Men go to women mutely for their peace;

And they, who lack it most, create it when

They make, because they must, loving their men,

A solace for sad bosom-bended heads. There

Is all the meagre peace men get-no otherwhere;

No mountain space, no tree with placid leaves,

Or heavy gloom beneath a young girl's hair,

No sound of valley bell on autumn air

Or room made home with doves along the eaves,

Ever holds peace, like this, poured by poor women

Out of their heart's poverty, for worn men. (Taggard 1936, 1-11)

The speaker's well placed subordinate clauses, by interrupting the sentence in lines two through four, underscore that meeting the needs of another human being is burdensome for an exhausted wife. Although she needs the peace she must provide ("who lack it most"), she still manages to care for him, and because she musters the strength to do this, she is commended when other means of solace-pastoral beauty, romantic love, and wealth-fail to equal her work. These alternatives, in so far as they require large expanses of space or large quantities of capital, suggest that a poor woman provides comfort by performing small, but important acts that ensure the cohesiveness of the marital unit. By responding to a male who, as the family's likely breadwinner, has been caring for her, she is crucial to the survival of the marital unit in which both sexes strengthen each other by performing reciprocal acts of love.

During the 1930s, domestic working class women also supported males by exerting pressure in the public workplace. For example, when women's trade union auxiliaries supported striking members, the unions garnered praise, such as that of Suda Gates, for acknowledging the role of women in these efforts. Gates's comment on a miner's strike in Straight Creek, Kentucky addresses this point:

Now is the time that the woman has some right to fight with her husband and by fighting we can win in time to come. The good thing about the National Miners Union is that they don't leave the women out and so, not like in other times, many times the wives make the husband go back to work. The wives meet with their husbands and together plan because it is as much to the wives as to the miners. . . . We never had nothing to do before but cook some beans. Now we have something to do. (qtd. in Foley 1993, 225)

Gates's comment is especially apropos to "At Last the Women are Moving." As young and elderly women march in the streets to support their men's protest for better working conditions, they permute the nurturing figure of "Everyday Alchemy" by expanding their gendered work space and by embedding a female element into the definition of their class. As the women walk in the streets, the ambiguous space that joins the home and the larger public arena, they are out of place, but eventually adapt and exert their influence:

Such women looked odd, marching on American asphalt.

Kitchens they knew, sinks, suds, stew-pots and pennies . . .

Dull hurry and worry, clatter, wet hands and backache.

Here they were out in the glare on the militant march. (Taggard 1936, 5-8)

The speaker emphasizes that the women are out of their domestic element and that they have entered a public, male gendered space that actually excludes all members of the lower classes. As "American asphalt," the street is a synecdoche for a gendered and economic hierarchy that, in excluding the women, by extension excludes working class males fighting for their rights. Hence, the women's assertiveness shapes female identity and that of the lower class. Although these lines reaffirm the home as a woman's sphere, the three successive anapests in "they were out in the glare on the militant" speed up the reading and suggest the women's acclimation to the public work space.

The speaker's inquiry of how these "timid, the slaves of breakfast and supper" accomplished this transition unfolds a complex female identity which closes the gap between gendered private and public spaces. When the women march with their men, both sexes share the same "work-worn" identity: "Here they are as work-worn as stitchers and fitters." Although tiredness unites the sexes, it fails to explain how people working in different spaces can claim the same class identity. The next stanza addresses this point by reverting to the maternal role and privileging female knowledge:

Oh, but these who know in their growing sons and their husbands

How the exhausted body needs sleep, how often needs food,

These, whose business is keeping the body alive,

These are ready, if you talk their language, to strike. (Taggard 1936, 13-16)

Because the women can read the marks on the male body and use this information to draw valid inferences about his workplace, their domestic knowledge extends beyond the home, and this information and their desire to sustain life account for their marching in the streets. Also since the women have marched for "sons" and especially "husbands," they support males in their families and the entire working class. As the women finally speak in their own voices, they validate female identity as a viable component of class structure by reverting to a maternal ethos to close the gap between domestic and public work places: "Not for me and mine only. For my class I have come To walk city miles with many, my will in our work." As these women and those in "Everyday Alchemy" go beyond their own needs or adapt traditional nurturing to a new situation, they strengthen and shape the working class, and with their admirable actions unite the middle and working classes.

In Book III, Taggard continues using a maternal ethos to evaluate the conduct of the working class, but in a radically different way. In the most significant voice poems, she uncovers deep divisions within the working class that taint the laudable image she has created. Initially, this approach seems problematic because up to this point Taggard has reserved her severest criticism for the wealthy, and by redirecting it to the poor's large families and marital strife, she risks alienating readers from the very people she wants to help. However, Taggard has built in several safeguards to prevent this. By previously portraying the beneficiaries of capitalism as despicable and emotionally anemic, Taggard drives a wedge between them and humane middle class people who choose to use their abilities on behalf of innocent victims trying to help themselves. Also, when Taggard exposes how large families and marital problems erode individuals and working class communities in "Mill Town" and "Up State-Depression Summer," she actually assures her readers that their support is not in vain. Taggard is not "blaming the victims," but admonishing them to correct their problems by considering the needs of others and acting accordingly. That Taggard is appealing to the same maternal ethos undergirded by self-determination and free will that motivates the middle class is born out by "Feeding the Children" and the workers' ultimate victory in "Mass Song." As Taggard calls for workers of both sexes to clean up their act so they can fully participate with the middle class to change America, she continues relying on knowledgeable outsiders and also injects working class voices at critical points. The speakers in "Mill Town," "Up State-Depression Summer," and "Feeding the Children" zero in on problems traceable to the working class's limited perceptions of the female gender role and the participation of their women in leftist politics. Until both sexes learn to apply maternal values more widely so that women continue reinterpreting their role and men become more sensitive to female family members, they actually perpetuate the inequitable class structure that needs to be eliminated.

By linking the liberation of women and the lower classes in "Mill Town," Taggard joins women novelists who, as Foley explains, focused on "the specifically gendered plight of the working-class woman." For example, Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth (1929), Myra Page's The Gathering Storm (1932), and Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread (1932) "portray the physical and psychological deterioration of overworked women burdened with childrearing and continual pregnancy" (Foley 1993, 235-36). Smedley depicts the trials of the washerwoman Mrs. Rogers who attempts to sustain herself and five children by working a twelve hour day that aggravates the neuralgia in her face, neck, and back. She works in other people's homes so she can eat one decent meal a day and leave more food for her own children. Although the frail woman wants to purchase a washing machine to preserve her failing health, she is caught in a double bind because she can only spend her limited funds on this appliance or on the children's shoes and school books (1976, 79-81). Lumpkin's protagonist, Emma McClure, who is constantly on her feet during a twelve hour shift in a factory, illustrates a similar dilemma. Although her children help with chores at home, Emma still does the washing and ironing, and since the family cannot afford healthy food, she suffers from pellagra and dies. The family's health continues to be sacrificed when Emma's daughter, Bonnie, attempts to safeguard her child by asking for a reduced salary so she can leave work and nurse her. Her boss denies this request because other working mothers who comprise much of his work force would want the same treatment and their absence would lower profits (1932, 212, 253, 283-84).

Initially, Taggard's "Mill Town" links with these works by focusing on the poor working woman's perpetual cycle of pregnancy and poverty; the bureaucratic voice in the epigraph elucidates the vicious circle of her experience: ". . . the child died, the investigator said, for lack of proper food. After the funeral the mother went back to the mill. She is expecting another child. . ."

Taggard, however, diverges from the novelists' sympathetic presentations when her main speaker traces the deleterious effects of perpetual pregnancies and challenges a female worker to reconsider an entrenched belief equating a maternal figure with a reproductive agent. As the pregnant mother folds her deceased child's clothes, the narrator chides her for not questioning a reproductive role that yields life to death and that, in conjunction with her job, exhausts her body:

The speaker's irony, although harsh, is necessary to goad the woman to question her beliefs about pregnancy. This criticism implies that a maternal ethos and an individual's actions are co-extensive because they extend beyond the biological and the personal to the ethical and the communal ("Never try Asking if we should blame you"). By curtailing her reproductive capacity, the woman can improve her life and her community by not encumbering them with ill fed and sickly bodies. Although the speaker fails to offer a specific solution, Taggard's point in "NOTE BOOK III" about utilizing science to improve human life suggests that birth control would, at least temporarily, give women some control over their bodies and help them create a physically and politically stronger community.4 This preventative would not only ease the woman's hardships and benefit her community by limiting the number of burdensome children, but also enable her to participate more fully in political affairs. If the mill mother's physical and emotional strength is continually drained by childbirth, domestic duties, and the pressure of supporting an increasing family, she is less apt to join others and dispute working conditions because she lacks energy and fears losing a desperately needed, low paying job that in the last analysis ensures her poverty. However, if she seizes the power available to her, she will demonstrate a self determination in which working class women are key players in the potential victory of their people.

Taggard affirms the importance of working class women from another angle by showing the deleterious effects of male insensitivity on women and the class as a whole. If marriages fail, as they do in "Up State-Depression Summer," partly because husbands disregard the efforts and the needs of their wives, then the local working class community, which is already economically disadvantaged, is further weakened. Taggard's position in this poem links her to female novelists who, Foley thinks, radically changed "representations of identity and selfhood" because they depict class struggle occurring not only in mills or picket lines but also in daily interpersonal relationships. Consequently, people become aware of their class membership by acknowledging these bonds and not solely through autonomous acts in public places (1993, 237). Developing class consciousness in this way is crucial in "Up State-Depression Summer" because even if the protagonists, Tom and Emma, could not control larger economic problems, they could have formed an emotionally supporting and politically egalitarian unit ifTom had understood Emma. In this long poem, the anonymous speaker's narratorial skills, especially selecting small details that reveal emotions and mental states, are crucial to Taggard's point.

The speaker first attributes their problems to the depression and then zeroes in on their marriage. Tom and Emma are a poor, rural couple who must take out a second mortgage in order to save their farm. Their difficulties are compounded by their young daughter's illness, and since they cannot afford the prescribed medication, the girl eventually dies. These events have so strained the couple's marriage that after the daughter's death, Tom and Emma become even more estranged and eventually lose the farm. Although the details surrounding the family's financial ruin, as well as the doctor's refusal to help the family obtain the medicine, are obvious criticisms of capitalism, the speaker refuses to portray the couple as helpless victims by indicating that they could have achieved some degree of power if Tom had understood Emma's needs. For example, in only one instance, the speaker permits her voice to be superseded by Tom's as he explodes at Emma because he thinks that in failing to anticipate problems, she did not provide for their daughter's health:

Tom's chastisement goes beyond venting his personal frustration as he faults Emma without even considering how their financial straits affected her actions. Tom's imperatives in lines forty-one and forty-two indicate that he isolates himself physically and emotionally from Emma by pushing her away.

As Tom watches the sick child, the narrator relates a chain of events registering Emma's realization that he has rejected her: "Emma left the door / Open. Tom closed it. It was the closing door / That felt like death. Emma stared and stood" (Taggard 1936, 43-45). The pause at the end of line fortythree emphasizes Emma's desire to keep the communication lines open between Tom and herself. However, Tom's opposing intentions are registered in the abrupt periodic sentence stressing each word ("Tom closed it") and in the run-on line that moves quickly into the finality signaled by the iambs in "That felt like death." By scorning Emma, Tom depreciates her worth as a person and a mate and within his marriage replicates the socio-economic hierarchy plaguing his family and class .

After the child's death, the narrator focuses on the couple's gendered work spaces to reveal their contrasting ways of responding to death and Tom's increasing insensitivity to Emma. Emma copes ineffectively as she stares, works silently, performs tasks aimlessly, expresses anger by over cleaning, and cries over insignificant things. Because she is confined in the house, she cannot escape the physical space that is emotionally charged with memories of her daughter. However, since Tom works outside, his work provides an escape from his grief:

Tom found his cows, his second haying, found

The solid substance that he walked upon.

The roughness of his tools, the excellent

Hard silence of his clumsy cultivator

And milking had its comfort, morning and evening. (Taggard 1936, 78-82)

Despite this reprieve, Tom's responses to Emma are as rough and clumsy as the feel of his tools. When he eats, he tells her not to express her feelings, and he finds it impossible to "even roughly kiss her." Tom's failure to cross into the emotional domestic space delivers the coup de grace to a relationship already strained by economic hardship and death. Unlike the emotionally impoverished women in "Everyday Alchemy" who still manage to fulfill their husbands' needs and thereby strengthen their class, Tom remains oblivious to Emma's. Consequently, Tom, like the mill mother, is hampered by limited perceptions of the female gender role that have disastrous consequences on families and local working class communities. The mill mother restricts the maternal role and ethics to biology, while Tom, in making it gender specific, fails to realize that emotionally nurturing men are necessary to sustain women who are germane to the survival of the working class.

That Taggard s intention in these poems is to emphasize correctable flaws that workers can transform into empowering experiences is born out by women reconciling their roles of wife and mother in "Feeding the Children." This poem illustrates a more complicated issue than that in "At Last the Women are Moving" because now the women fear for the children's well-being if their men strike. When these women voice their opinions, they speak as much as the knowledgeable narrator. The women confront their husbands because they want a steady supply of food for their children ("I must feed my children. Keep the peace." and "You risk your job for nothing, starve my babies! What sort of father are you?"). However, by restricting their nurturing to the home front, these mothers succumb to an either-or-fallacy that finally dissolves when they cannot afford necessities and realize that to feed the children, they must support husbands who join unions, march, and strike. The concluding interchange of the women's voices demonstrates that the power of nurturing is maximized when women bond with the entire family and class and straddle female and male spaces:

We must feed the children. Have you joined the Union?

We must feed the children. March today.

We must feed the children. How shall we feed the children?

We must feed the children.Vote the strike! (Taggard 1936, 13-16)

"Feeding the Children" and the two previous poems underscore potential pockets of power for working class people who will rid themselves of narrow ideas. If both sexes provide needed assistance or cease performing harmful acts, they will instanciate maternal values by forging bonds that strengthen others or alleviate hardship. In this way, both sexes have the potential to unite and form a strong political community, while their failure to do so erodes the little they already have. By targeting the female gender role, Taggard shows that working class people of both sexes, but especially women, have grassroots power even if they cannot immediately alter nationwide problems. In so doing Taggard also envisions a maternal ethos that is not specific to a particular sex or form such as biological motherhood. For Taggard, the importance of nurturing and bonding lies in flexible actions that can improve the quality of life for the working class as a unit. Therefore, she can decry biological motherhood in "Mill Town" and support it in "Feeding the Children," while she also shows the disastrous consequences resulting from male insensitivity to women. If working class people cease debilitating actions and replace them with deeds motivated by maternal values, they will equal the power modeled by the magnanimous, astute women in "Everyday Alchemy" and "At Last the Women are Moving."

Only after she has targeted flaws within the working class does Taggard flesh out her vision of a classless society that benefits these people. Several concluding poems, but especially "Mass Song," are spoken entirely by workers expressing their self-determination and hope:

O hardy hope, Titanic throng!

With sober hope, substantial fare

Now for new worlds prepare

On earth, not high in air,

Toward which we march with song,

Our song, with one refrain:

OUR HOPE'S NOT VAIN. (Taggard 1936, 22-28)

The worker's confidence conveys Taggard's vision of a more equitable America. Although other leftists lost their political faith in the 1930s, Taggard's remained firm because, as her Preface testifies, her beliefs were not grounded in abstract Marxist theory, but in lived experiences in Hawaii and Washington which taught her the worst and the best that people could become and which shaped her maternal ethic. The totality of these experiences is the germ of the Marxism to which Taggard gives theoretical expression. A person can embrace a philosophy after studying it, or, as Taggard's Preface suggests, after making observations and drawing conclusions about life that she later finds are consistent with a philosophical system. Taggard's actual experiences form the bedrock of vocalic poems which demonstrate that a degenerate upper class must yield to the combined efforts of the middle and working classes if they will embrace and act on a maternal ethic of bonding and helping others. In advocating this ethic, Taggard continues the political tradition of her nineteenth century female predecessors while reshaping it into a sentimental Marxism in which women were often key players in shaping a more robust working class and democratic America.

Notes

1 Taggard's Preface raises a problem about the relationship between autobiography and the incidents that she describes. Did Taggard actually experience these incidents or fabricate them? Early critics, Ruth Lechlitner and William Drake, elide autobiography and the incidents, as does a more recent critic, Nancy Berke, who discusses Taggard's childhood in the 1934 memoir "Hawaii, Washington, Vermont" that Taggard revised for Calling Western Union. Taggard also writes negatively about her Hawaiian experience in "Poet Out of Pioneer," one of a series of autobiographical essays about feminism contributed by various authors to The Nation in 1926 and 1927. Although Taggard's description of life in Hawaii in this writing markedly differs from that in Calling Western Union, both, I think, should be accepted at face value. Taggard is responding to issues that offer her different possibilities, and as a complex person, she would not view her environment the same in both accounts. (see Lechlitner 1936, 16; Drake 1987, 171-72; Berke 2001, 106-10; Taggard 1989, 62-68).

2 Although Taggard does not define "hapa-haoles," this term means a racially mixed person who is part white. In her short story, "The Shirt,""haoles" means white people (1926-27, 279).

3 According to 1910, the official history of the Florists' Transworld Delivery Association, the FTD Mercury logo and the slogan "Say It With Flowers" first appeared in 1914 (Gilmartin 1985, 4). Although this was not the only slogan used by FTD, the pictures in 1910 suggest that it was well-known in advertisements from 1918 through 1936, especially during the late 1920s and the early to mid-1930s. For example, two adds in 1931 issues of Colliers use the slogan, and one of these is a two page display for Valentine's Day (58-59). In 1933, FTD's entry in the Rose Bowl Parade depicted the winged Mercury and a globe embraced by the slogan (36). Perhaps the picture most relevant to Calling Western Union is the addition of the slogan to the logo in 1936, the year Taggard's book was published (70).

4 Taggard's position on birth control is consistent with that of other leftists who championed it as early as the latter half of the nineteenth century (see Buhle 1983, 268-80). Leftist poets and critics Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney believed that birth control was one of the seven wonders of the modern world (1929, 36-37).

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Donna Allego is an assistant professor of English at Gwynedd-Mercy College. Her current interests are in the long poem and twentieth century American Literature.

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