THEATER AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES WORKSHOP
“Upward With Aspiring Aim”: Working Girls’ Clubs, Spoken Art, and Political Aspiration at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920”
Fiona Maxwell, History PhD Candidate, University of Chicago
Theater and Performance Studies Workshop
November 14, 2023
This presentation investigates the ways in which the members of self-governing working girls’ clubs at Chicago settlement houses used collaborative performance to assume new identities as public speakers, community organizers, and civic actors. Drawing on club-authored sources, I track each stage of the participants’ development, from their initial meetings, through their eager embrace of oratorical training, to their ascension to local leadership. These self-described “bachelor maids” mobilized a wide range of speaking genres – including conversation, debate, improvisation, and farce – to demonstrate their political competency, and they identified cultural heterogeneity, female independence, and labor solidarity as club values. Recapturing the joy participants experienced as they chatted, deliberated, recited, and recounted, I demonstrate the transformative role of speaking in convincing Chicago’s young working women that they would soon – to quote one working girl orator – “rule the world of politics.”
Zoom Information
Time: Nov 14, 2023, 04:30 PM- 6 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/91837343665?pwd=R0FrZEhCUHBFcmZKclNHUzIraVhOUT09
Meeting ID: 918 3734 3665
Passcode: 026214