Midwest Canon: On Margaret Deland's "The Iron Woman"

Margaret Deland | The Iron Woman | 1911 | Harper & Brothers | 477 Pages

I was in a rideshare in Los Angeles this summer, and the driver was telling me about his conversations with foreigners about the US. He said that one of the things that people always say to him was that no one works as hard as Americans. He said this with some pride in his voice. And, I thought, really? Not really in the sense that Americans don’t work hard. Americans work very, very hard. Rather, the really was for: should we be proud of that? Is the sheer intensity with which we work something to value? 

There was a time in my life where my mind would have not wandered to these questions, but recently I have been thinking about ideas of work and its value with more frequency. As an academic, I have had to think about my relationship to work because of the adjunct crisis. For me, this has meant working abroad—for many of my peers, making due on contingent wages or leaving academia. Others, perhaps, have thought about these issues when working in warehouses owned by powerful companies or when trying to sort out how to pay for their health insurance. Etc, etc. Our “work hard and you will achieve” understanding of the world is failing us, and we need more outlets to help us think through and recognize these issues. 

One outlet for these thoughts in my life has been the early twentieth century novel The Iron Woman by Margaret Deland. The Iron Woman is a fascinating novel about an iron mill run by Sarah Maitland, the titular iron woman, in Mercer, a smoky, industrial city across the mountains from Philadelphia—in other words, a clear stand in for the author’s hometown of Pittsburgh. While the novel is, foremost, a portrayal of Maitland and her commitment to work, it is of particular interest because it does not fully support Maitland’s views concerning work. Instead, it questions the value of solely defining oneself by work and pushes the reader to consider their own relationship to labor.

The idea of work is particularly relevant to the industrial midwest, which has built the bulk of its identity on work. For example, consider the term “Rust Belt” as a name for an entire area—a name that does not go beyond (former) relationships to industry. The Iron Woman shows us something similar: a character in Sarah who also has constructed herself around her work. Because of this she can never quite reconcile her other wants and desires with her singular focus. There is a lesson in the trajectory of her character for those of us who can identify with her—which I think will be many readers from the region and beyond. 

Sarah is foremost intriguing because of the prestigious position she has as the owner of an iron mill. If we imagine the typical fictional heroine of the time period when The Iron Woman was written, Lily Bart, from The House of Mirth, for instance, as often defined by their relationship to capital but not capable of controlling it themselves, then Sarah Maitland is a stark contrast. She inherited her mill from her father and husband, who had been partners, and she runs it (as the book often reminds us) with the competence of the best of men. For example, a bank teller says to Sarah’s son, that there is “no better business man this side of the Alleghanies than your mother, sir.’” (242). 

Sarah is a success not simply because she is good at business but rather because of her dedication to her work at the mill. She defines herself and her life through her work. After her husband dies, she transfers her grief into work and uses it as “a refuge” (12). Work is a place where she finds genuine joy and contentment; she tries to explain her love of work to her children and wonders how her son never understood “that work was the finest thing in the world” (166). Furthermore, her work is so ingrained in her that she is often described in relation to iron itself. She has a backbone and will made of iron, and more remarkably, her appearance is also connected to iron. In one scene, when she is in a worried state, her face looks like iron that had “once been molten and had cooled into roughened immobility” (27). She is an iron woman through and through. 

The main contrast to Sarah in the novel is her son Blair, who has an aversion to work and a dedication to beauty. Blair’s principle role in the novel is to be a part of a marriage plot, but, for modern readers, he is most interesting for his vast difference from Sarah. His complete inability to value work makes the reader wonder if Sarah has the right idea about commitment to her profession. Blair does not understand Sarah and routinely shrinks from her and from her attempts to connect with him. He finds her appearance, her connection to the mill, and her affinity for work “ugly”—a word he uses repeatedly in relation to his mother. Blair’s reverence for beauty is absolute or as the text says, his “feeling for beauty was a form of religion” (95). Blair has no interest in the mill he will inherit from his mother, finds his hometown to be filled with “hideousness and dirt” (71), wastes years in college throwing parties and buying pretty things, and makes an impulsive love match with very little forethought about the consequences. He could not be a more extreme opposite to his mother. 

In a less interesting novel, Blair or Sarah would be the clear hero or villain, but what is of note here is that neither of these characters are treated as if they are completely in the right. Rather, the novel emphasizes how much these two are unable to understand each other. Without a sense for the less practical things in life, Sarah misses the chance to connect not only to Blair but to most of the people in her life. And Blair does have a sincere desire for beauty but has let those desires subsume his personality and all direction in life.

The clash of these two very different personalities is what opens up space for the reader to consider their own ideas about the role of work in their lives. I do not think the message is, though: reject Sarah and be like Blair or even split down the middle and care a little about work and a little about beauty. Rather, I find the space to consider is the reward of this novel. 

I would also argue, given the increase in precarious work situations in many of our lives, that it is not just an option to consider how we think about work but increasingly necessary to do so. What value does work bring into our lives? Is there worth in work for its own sake beyond the necessity of providing income? What does work mean to us? What might happen if we form our identities around something other than work?  

While I find these questions to be particularly applicable to Americans in general, as I said above, I think it is no accident that this book is set in a facsimile of Pittsburgh. The industrial midwest has been long demarcated through its relationship to work. When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, it was the place that the mills left. Now, it is defining itself in relation to new kinds of work: education, hospitals, technology. Yet, throughout, work is central to the definition. The Iron Woman does not tell us that this is wrong, but it does ask us to ask about it. Why work? And if not work, what else?