Miles Franklin on American Manhood and White Slavery: The Case of ‘Red Cross Nurse’

Abstract

On the eve of the First World War when Stella Miles Franklin was distressed by work, love, and a world gone mad, she wrote a 'curious story' (Coleman 165) titled 'Red Cross Nurse and Armored Chauffeur', amended in her handwriting with the subtitle 'Confessions of a Frustrated Grandmother' and known simply in discussions of Franklin's work as 'Red Cross Nurse'. Here the nameless protagonist tangles with the staples of the Franklin's feminist project: gender politics, sexuality and desire, the inadequacies of manhood, and the slavery of women in marriage and relationships. The heroine of 'Red Cross Nurse', however, is not the innocent Sybylla Melvyn of 'My Brilliant Career' (1901), narrating a story of gender and nationalist politics in late nineteenth-century Australia. She has grown into a modern heroine, the urban 'New Woman' who models female sexual autonomy and critiques gender relations in early twentieth-century America. Like her contemporaries Sybyl Penelo of 'On Dearborn Street' (1981) and Constance Roberts of 'The Net of' Circumstance' (1915), the heroine of 'Red Cross Nurse' is an independent working woman, faced with decisions about suitors and marriage. She chooses a different path from these heroines, a choice that provides strong critique of American manhood and sheds new insight on Franklin's personal and political passions during a decade of involvement with the National Women's Trade Union League (NWTUL). This essay focuses on cultural anxiety associated with gender and American manhood, with particular reference to fears of the white slave trade, as depicted in Franklin's 1914 unpublished short novel, 'Red Cross Nurse'.