‘Home Feeling in the Heart’: Domestic Feeling and Institutional Space in the American Progressive Era

Abstract

Writing on either side of the emotional watershed of the 1920s, Jane Addams and Anzia Yezierska documented and fictionalised the domestic institutional spaces of the American Progressive Era, from settlements to charity homes. Writing from the perspectives of settlement administrator and immigrant resident, each found emotions central to the era’s crossing of domestic and public spheres, professionalisation of charity and social work, and encounters between middle-class and labouring-immigrant cultures. Their writings portrayed the institutional home as host to the conflicting expressions of middle-class workers and immigrant occupants, a crucible of emotional cultures. Each argued for the importance of emotional encounters and empathy in institutional domestic space, writing back to the dominant professional constraints on women’s emotional expression in the era. Addams and Yezierska advocated for emotional knowledge and drive, challenging the exile of emotional logic and language from women’s emerging public roles. The value and expression of public emotions – as Yezierska’s fictions suggest – proved possible unevenly, along lines of institutional power.