In 1921, the Pulitzer Prize for drama went to Zona Gale for Miss Lulu Bett, which she had adapted from her best-selling novel. The New Republic claimed that Gale had done what “only a feminist…and an artist can do”: written a serious comedy about emancipation. Miss Lulu, a middle-aged spinster who lives as an unpaid drudge with her sister and brother-in-law, announces at the end of the play that she is “going to see out of her own eyes. . . I’m going I don’t know where—to work at I don’t know what. But I’m going from choice!” Her declaration echoes Huck Finn’s desire to light out for the territories, but Lulu was one of the first women in twentieth century literature to make a similar proclamation.
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Lulu’s radicalism caused such an outcry that Gale was asked to create a more conventional ending, in which middle-aged Lulu falls in love and marries a wealthy salesman; she leaves town with him, rather than alone. With this new ending, the play had a Broadway run of 200 performances, a national tour of 600 performances, and was adapted into a successful movie by Paramount. Variety noted that in the thirty-first week of its run, the play was making between five and six thousand dollars weekly. Lulu’s escape from small-town Wisconsin made her creator a wealthy woman, and the first woman to win a Pulitzer for drama.
In addition to being a best-selling writer, she was committed to all the progressive movements of the early twentieth century: an early and ardent supporter of Alice Paul (of “Suffs” fame), Gale was equally outspoken about racial equality, immigration and work reform, and the need for businesses to be regulated by the federal government. Gale’s politics are always visible in her writing, sometimes wrapped in what now looks like a kind of New Age spirituality, a mix of Theosophy, Eastern mysticism, and “the divine feminine.”
I discovered Gale’s work decades ago, when I was doing research for a book on Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. Gale, it turns out, had a long correspondence with both writers, in addition to some of the other most prominent figures of the day, including Jessie Redmon Fauset, WEB DuBois, Teddy Roosevelt, Jean Toomer, and Jane Addams. Finding Gale’s writings changed the nature of my argument by raising the question of whether her erasure from literary history was precisely because of her politics. Cather and Wharton, much more discreet in their ideological affinities, were “safer” for the (predominantly male) literary critics of the 1930s and 40s. Gale was deemed old-fashioned and her focus on small-town Midwestern life was thought to be unsophisticated.
When I started reading her work, however, what struck me was her optimism about the possibility for positive social change—if we can change ourselves. Optimism, often, gets construed as naïvete, but Gale’s writing is not naïve: she is far too politically minded. The Friendship Village stories (four collections, in total, spanning 1900-20) are full of subtle humor that often skewers male egos; her use of dialect may seem heavy-handed, but she is representing the voices of uneducated people living in rural Wisconsin, just as the dialect in Their Eyes Were Watching God represents the voices of Eatonville, Florida. Gale’s stories may look simple, that is to say, but I would argue that this simplicity is the result of serious attention to craft.
Gale didn’t coin the term “think global, act local,” but that’s what Sodality does: Gale’s stories imagine an anti-capitalist vision of “sodality” that could extend across the world, if only women were in charge.
Gale worked as a journalist in Manhattan for about six years, before returning to Portage, Wisconsin, where she spent the rest of her life. “Out there in Wisconsin,” as a friend of hers put it, Gale nevertheless managed to be involved in everything, including the founding of the Progressive Party, headed by Robert La Follette, former Congressman, Wisconsin governor, and then Wisconsin Senator. Progressivist reform movements focused in two directions: regulating business and commerce, on the one hand, and enacting a program of humanitarian social reforms, on the other. In Gale’s mind, healthier workplaces led to healthier workers, which led to healthier societies. These were not radical goals: why wouldn’t a healthier society benefit everyone?
As the Trump administration attempts to return the country to the Gilded Age, however, which for most of us will not resemble the glossy Julian Fellowes drama, Gale’s work seems again relevant. The Gilded Age, remember, is also the era of Jacob Riis’ landmark photo essay, How the Other Half Lives (1890), which documented children sleeping in deserted buildings, immigrants crammed into filthy dormitories, and alleyways piled with trash. Gale shares Riis’s reformist ethic, although she dramatizes her ideas through stories about the fictional town of Friendship Village, Wisconsin. Gale’s progressive social agenda gets wrapped in folksy, regionalist humor, as the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery Improvement Sodality try to bring modern improvements to their village.
The name of Sodality itself is a bit of a joke: the narrator of all these stories, Calliope Marsh, is a happy spinster, as are several other members of the group—and Sodality does far more than just beautify the town cemetery. Because the women can’t vote or hold public office, their improvements get implemented through a mixture of trickery and indirection. Gale didn’t coin the term “think global, act local,” but that’s what Sodality does: Gale’s stories imagine an anti-capitalist vision of “sodality” that could extend across the world, if only women were in charge.
Gale believed that women would be the primary drivers of social transformation, as demonstrated by Sodality’s collective work: they empower themselves by working for the social good. Their efforts illustrate what Rheta Childe Dorr (a feminist contemporary of Gale’s) wrote: “Woman’s place is Home . . . but Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do the Home and Family need their mother.” The term “mother” here becomes generalized and non-biological; the Friendship Village stories make clear that one needn’t bear children to want to act as “mother” to society. Gale herself didn’t marry until well into middle-age, and she never had children.
And while this rhetoric might seem old-fashioned and essentialist, more recent scholars have drawn on theories of mothering as a way to advocate for a more peaceful society, as Sara Ruddick does in Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (2002). She writes that practices of mothering could be the foundation for a politics of nonviolence. Sodality women, with their attention to the needs of the town, particularly children, women, and immigrants, illustrate this possibility; they exhibit the kind of radical care that Rachel Adams talks about in Love, Duty, Money: Stories of Care in Our Times (2025). According to Adams, care is “slow, its course meandering, uneven, or regressive [but it] has the potential to upend the values, norms, and practices that govern capitalism and our modern social and political systems.”
Mothers to Men (1911) contains interlinked stories about the lengths to which Sodality must go in order to enact change, given that they aren’t legally allowed to participate in civic affairs. they resort subterfuge and, occasionally, a little blackmail, to get the men of the town to think of something other than profit margins. When the women offer to guest-edit the town paper, for instance, they say they’ll publish interviews with all the male business owners, who are flattered by their attentions. Sodality’s ulterior motive, however, is to force the men into more hygienic business practices, and publicly shame them, if they don’t comply.
Mr. Henney, the dairy farmer, is a prime target of their newspaper, because the women know his dairy barn is filthy, which he gets away with only because he has the town’s only milk delivery service. When Mis’ Toplady interviews him, he swears at her, and then explains that cleanliness doesn’t matter: “folks had been drinking milk since milk began, and if the Lord saw fit to call them home, why not through milk, or even through consumption, as well as through pneumonia and others?” His response sounds similar to what Robert F Kennedy, Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary said recently about deadly measles outbreaks: “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens.” The logic seems to be, for both Mr. Henney in 1911, and RFK in 2025, that we’re all going to die, so why not from germs in milk or the measles?
In their interviews with town businessmen, the Sodality women try to convince the men that more hygienic practices will actually improve their bottom line, but the men are skeptical: why do anything new? As they did with the dairy farmer, Sodality resorts to coercion with the town grocer, Mr. Sykes, who is also the mayor. If he’s not ashamed of how he does business, she says, then he won’t mind that her article will describe “flies promenadin’ on the bread,” the rusty tins of canned fruit and fish lining his shelves, and the fact that he pours kerosene into a jar for one customer and then slices cheese for another without washing his hands in between.
Further, she will tell people that he’s selling meat that isn’t fresh, which he tries to excuse by saying that the old meat is “for them folks on the flats. . . they like it just as good as fresh.” The Flats are where immigrants live, and Mr. Sykes doesn’t understand why Calliope thinks they should be treated with the same respect as the “regular” villagers. Threatened with detailed exposure in the newspaper, however, Sykes gives in, complaining that he’s going to have to wear white gloves from now on to please his customers.
Gale’s descriptions of the unsavory conditions in the grocery and the dairy farm are milder than what Upton Sinclair describe in The Jungle, published in 1905, but they are equally pointed. In the Chicago meat-packing plants, Sinclair writes, “the meat [is] moldy and white, stinking and full of maggots . . . preserved with borax, color[ed]… with gelatine to make it brown.” Gale reminds her readers that even in their seemingly idyllic small towns, the drive for profit often runs counter to the public well-being.
The efforts of Sodality and Sinclair to reform unsanitary—and lethal—business practices are currently under attack: safety standards governing raw chicken have been rolled back, despite salmonella being a leading cause of foodborne illness, for instance, and an e. coli outbreak in November that nearly killed a child and made scores of others sick went unreported by the FDA. Care, it seems, is no longer the purview of the federal government.
Profit and stasis, in other words, are two of the biggest obstacles to positive change, but as Sodality’s efforts make clear, resistance can be overcome or outwitted, once we see our job as “making the world ready for the folks that are to come.”
Capitalism, however, continues to thrive, as we see in the huge parade that Trump planned for his birthday celebration. Sodality, too, had to deal with something like this, when the town councilmen decide that their Independence Day celebration should be for their benefit: a “business bringer.” Calliope wonders why the nation’s birthday should be an earning opportunity, a question that the councilmen seem not to understand. When the council’s plans fall apart, Sodality offers to take over the planning, which includes even giving a holiday to the people living on the Flats. The councilmen don’t understand that concept either, asking “what’s them kinda folks for but work?” Sodality’s celebration is a success, in that people come together in community rather than commerce. Even the councilmen agree that the day has been a success—although they still bemoan the loss of the money they imagined making.
In the final stories of Mother to Men, Sodality reckons with the council’s refusal to deal with a swamp full of brackish water that is causing typhus: the council says that the expense outweighs any potential gain. As a result of their negligence, a little boy who lives in the Flats dies, and Sodality is furious. This final incident leads to the collection’s clearest statement about the need for female suffrage. Letty, an unmarried young woman with no children, tells the council that “we can’t bring up our children with men taking things away from ‘em that we’d know they’d ought to have. I want to bring up my children by my votes as well as by my prayers.” To her stunned audience, she asks “what’s womanly” about caring for children if “dirt and bad food and neglect” are waiting for them outside the home. When one of the men protests, saying that men have been in charge since creation, Calliope observes that “creation is a thing that takes most folks a good while to recover from.”
In these stories, resistance to Sodality’s improvements gets expressed as being either bad for business, or being not the usual way of doing things. Profit and stasis, in other words, are two of the biggest obstacles to positive change, but as Sodality’s efforts make clear, resistance can be overcome or outwitted, once we see our job as “making the world ready for the folks that are to come.” Some years after she published Mothers to Men, Gale wrote an essay for The Nation, in which she wrote that the artist is a “social being” who has a responsibility to shed light on the “social disabilities” that plague the country. She notes that the country has been “long ridden by prejudice and standardization. . . and if the artist is a Negro [sic] his difficulties are needlessly greater in this country than in any other land in the civilized world.” Gale would be profoundly disappointed to see that, a century after this essay, the US government seems intent on going backwards rather than forwards. But her stories offer us the optimistic idea that a politics of care, enacted by local communities, can be a powerful mode of resistance.