Foreword: The Home-Maker
“Dorothy Canfield Fisher as a novelist is certainly of no possible significance,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1938. Balking at seeing Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s name on a list of authors being considered for an encyclopedic survey of contemporary literature, he compared her unfavorably to two other women writers. We can speculate about why Fitzgerald felt women authors needed to compete against one another for a spot in the survey, but contrary to his assessment, an examination of Fisher’s life reveals a writer and activist whose work was of extraordinary significance to the literary and social movements of her day and, a century later, still has much to offer.
Fitzgerald’s chief reason for dismissing Fisher was that he felt her reputation had been earned through her childhood education writings, which she “simply got hold of as an early monopoly,” and not by her novels. True, Fisher was first introduced to the wider public through her interest in child development. She met Maria Montessori in 1911, describing the encounter as a “religious conversion,” and was convinced that the Montessori method, an approach to child development that emphasizes hands-on learning and a deep commitment to children’s personal liberty, could radically transform education and parenting in the United States. Fisher would go on to introduce US audiences to this method through A Montessori Mother (1912) and The Montessori Manual (1913). Her influence is evident today: over three thousand schools operate using the Montessori method in the United States. The method also inspired two of Fisher’s bestselling books, the young adult novel Understood Betsy (1916) and The Home-Maker (1924).
Although The Home-Maker is often read as a feminist work, Fisher herself believed it was “a whoop for children’s rights.” Set in small-town America, the novel tells the story of the Knapp family — Eva is the mother and homemaker, and Lester is the father and breadwinner. Eva and Lester are so miserably unsuited to their roles that their three children suffer the consequences, each in their own way, from indigestion and anxiety to insatiable fury. Their unhappy home life unfurls before the reader until a fateful accident forces Lester to stay at home and Eva to join the workforce.
She flourishes as a saleswoman, and Lester delights in playing a more active role in his children’s lives. Here, the author of A Montessori Mother chooses the father as her avatar of Montessori ideals, and the children blossom under his playful, curiosity-driven approach to parenting. But the moment the Knapps find equilibrium within their home, they find themselves out of harmony with their community. The stakes of the story shift to the Knapps’ navigation of the rigid gendered expectations of 1920s America, though readers today will recognize the judgments and criticisms leveled at Eva and Lester as not so thoroughly left in the past.
Fisher was well positioned to write a novel about unique domestic arrangements that defied the norms of the time. Her academic father and artist mother encouraged her to pursue higher education, and she received one of the first doctoral degrees awarded to a woman by Columbia University, in 1904. Then, early in her marriage to John Fisher, she became her family’s breadwinner. Her husband had shared many of his wife’s literary ambitions, but his ill health prevented him from pursuing them. After settling in Arlington, Vermont, to start their family, it was John Fisher who served as lead parent, homemaker, and manager of his wife’s career. And Fisher’s career was a prolific one. Beginning in 1904 with the submission of her dissertation and continuing until 1959 with the posthumous publication of a collection of short biographies of notable Americans, Fisher would publish fifteen novels, six collections of short stories, and over twenty works of nonfiction.
Her arrangement with her husband served Fisher well, since she needed time not only to write but also to read. A 1926 ad placed in The New Yorker shows Fisher’s portrait alongside four men with the tagline, “The best new book each month selected for you by this committee,” and heralds them as the judges behind the newly formed Book-of-the-Month Club. Still in operation today, the club offered to select and send on approval “the best new books as they appear” for their subscribers, with no extra charge beyond the book’s retail price. During her tenure, which lasted until 1951, Fisher championed authors such as Pearl S. Buck and Richard Wright over long committee lunches at the club’s headquarters in New York City.
Fisher committed to her role as a judge so enthusiastically that she is said to have nearly gone clinically blind from reading so many candidates each month. A history of the club claims that Fisher would read about twenty books a month, exceeding the range of six to fifteen that was asked of the judges.
Fisher’s influence on the literary world cannot be over-stated, as she wielded considerable power as the only female judge at the Book-of-the-Month Club. She introduced US readers to works by international authors like Isak Dinesen and Leo Tolstoy, and new American authors like Wright (who wrote Black Boy and Native Son). After her death, she was eulogized by her fellow Vermonter and fan Robert Frost, as well as Eleanor Roosevelt, who counted Fisher among her favorite authors and wrote in her My Day column, “For many years it has given me comfort if I found myself on the same side of a controversial question with her.”
Roosevelt alluded to the many social causes Fisher was involved with in her lifetime. At the outbreak of World War I, Fisher and her husband relocated to Paris, where he served as an ambulance driver and she quickly busied herself with aid work. She established a home for refugee children, organized the publication and distribution of books printed in braille for blinded veterans, and campaigned for fresh-air and adoption programs for refugee children back in the United States (which later inspired her 1918 novel Home Fires in France).
After World War I, Fisher turned her commitments as an activist toward supporting integration efforts and championing equal rights for Black people. Fisher’s name frequently garnered mention as an ally in Black newspapers across the country, including The Philadelphia Tribune, the Baltimore Afro-American, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Crisis, to which she was also a contributor. In 1924, the same year The Home-Maker was published, Fisher was invited to be the opening speaker at a convention of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in New York, reported by the Baltimore Afro-American to be the first time a white person had been invited to speak to a Black sorority or fraternity. Fisher would continue her involvement with historically Black colleges by giving the 1946 commencement address at Howard University and subsequently serving on its board of trustees until 1949.
Even prior to the publication of Fisher’s novel The Brimming Cup (1921), which was hailed by scholar Janice Stout as “the first modern best-seller to present criticism of racial prejudice,” and several short stories on racism in the United States, Fisher used her pen to encourage an end to racial discrimination and violence. In 1919, The Philadelphia Tribune published a letter from Fisher urging Vermont senator William Paul Dillingham to call for an investigation into lynching and mob violence, which she wrote in the name of “Vermonters who are looking anxiously for your action in the matter.” She would also later be praised by members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for her work documenting poverty in Vermont as part of The Nation’s series “These United States.” Fisher’s views on race, however, sit uneasily with other aspects of her legacy. Her identities as both writer and activist are closely tied with Vermont’s history. A lifelong resident who set many novels and short stories in her home state, Fisher was widely regarded as the great interpreter of the Vermont tradition of her day. But just as Fisher cemented her role as an emblematic Vermonter, the state became embroiled in a broader social panic about the extinction of Anglo-Saxon heritage. This was a concern that would put many New Englanders, including Fisher, on a collision course with the eugenics movement.
From 1928 to 1931, she was affiliated with the Vermont Commission on Country Life (VCCL), an organization charged with improving conditions in rural Vermont, but better understood today, due to its connection with the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, to have the dual purpose of revitalizing the state’s white Anglo-Saxon roots. The Eugenics Survey compiled hereditary information on Vermonters and led to the forced sterilization of over 250 men and women, especially poor and disabled people and those with French Canadian or Indigenous heritage. Though not directly involved with the survey, Fisher served alongside other Vermont writers on the VCCL’s committee for the “Conservation of Vermont Traditions and Ideals,” whose mission it was to preserve and foster Vermont cultural heritage. The committee’s efforts raise questions about which traditions were included or elided, as well as its underlying implication that the state’s culture needed saving before it was lost to outside influence. As part of her work for the committee, Fisher enthusiastically championed efforts to attract educated, middle-class families to settle in Vermont by penning tourism pamphlets that invited those of “good breeding” to consider purchasing a summer home. She testified before the Vermont Chamber of Commerce on the importance of recruiting tourists from the professional classes. As scholar Julie Ehrhardt deftly summarized, the ethos of Fisher’s work from this period was, “Come to Vermont, relax, relocate, reproduce.”
Fisher’s participation in another committee focused on “Educational Facilities for Rural People” is complicated by her involvement in the prison reform movement. She publicly endorsed the work of Lena Ross, a superintendent of the Riverside Reformatory in Rutland, Vermont. She saw Ross’s work as part of the broader national movement that championed rehabilitation over carceral punishment, on par with that of Miriam Van Waters, for whom Fisher also voiced support and whose work with incarcerated women in Massachusetts is celebrated today. In reality, both the Riverside Reformatory, which Fisher and her coauthor Sarah Cleghorn enthusiastically commended in an article for being sunny and homelike, and Ross, whom they wrote of as a visionary, had direct ties to the Vermont Eugenics Survey.
Nowhere are Fisher’s paradoxical views more pronounced than in her novels. Her works like Bonfire (1933) and Seasoned Timber (1939) feature heroes who face recrimination for denouncing racism and ethnic discrimination, but they also express disgust for anything that departs from their traditional Vermont values. Characters across Fisher’s novels who represent “old Vermont stock” are rewarded, while outsiders such as French Canadians, Native Americans, or the poor are cruelly portrayed and often punished.
Consequently, Fisher’s reputation in Vermont today is muddled. In April 2017, Abenaki activist Judy Dow presented compelling evidence of Fisher’s involvement in the Vermont eugenics movement to the Vermont Department of Libraries in an effort to change the name of Vermont’s children’s literary prize, named after Fisher since 1957. Dow also used her platform as an opportunity to educate Vermont residents about the state’s history of eugenics.
In 2020, after three years of tireless advocacy, Fisher’s name was removed, and the award is known today as the Vermont Golden Dome Book Award. While readers, scholars, and Vermonters continue to disagree over how closely Fisher was involved with eugenics, her participation in these state initiatives, coupled with close readings of her Vermont-based work, support an understanding of Fisher as someone who discriminated against those she considered to be outsiders in her home state and who was open to programs that supported more subtle forms of social engineering.
Although these troubling associations exist in tension with her activism and advocacy, Fisher’s role as a representative of children’s literature and rights remains sound. Even in her adult novels, children are portrayed with an unusual level of pathos. The Home-Maker in particular carries a deep respect for the interiority of children (another Montessori principle) and offers readers a profoundly intimate portrait of the Knapp children, especially toddler Stephen. Many of the scenes are told from his perspective. We become acquainted with his deepest fears, such as the threat of Eva washing his beloved teddy bear (“If mother did that to his Teddy . . . his Teddy who was like a part of himself . . .”) or the heartrending realization that his father loves him dearly (“It was a strange good feeling that was almost too much for him. It was too big for him. He was too little to hold it. It seemed to overflow him, so that he could scarcely breathe, in a bright, warm, shining flood.”). When The Home-Maker was made into a silent film, the child actor playing Stephen got top billing, underscoring the importance of his development to the family’s story.
Fisher extends this approach to all of the Knapps, from whose perspectives the story is told in turns, giving the reader a window into each character’s slow recognition of the others’ humanity as they emerge from their own unhappiness. “What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings!” Lester wonders to himself. “In the silent room he heard it echoing solemnly, ‘That’s what it is to be a parent.’ He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it.” Lester, out of all of the Knapps, is given the most philosophical inner monologue, featuring poets and authors from Browning to Emerson. His work in the department store falls victim to his propensity to be lost in thought, but it is these same poetic inclinations that make him an empathetic and involved parent.
While the beats of The Home-Maker ’s dramatic role-reversal arc could be read as didactic, these quiet, introspective scenes inject the novel with a moving realism. American author Edith Franklin Wyatt wrote to Fisher complimenting her on her everyday portrayals, and Fisher responded joyfully to Wyatt for understanding her aims: “I feel a real deep gratitude to you for seeing that what I am always struggling so hard and so imperfectly to express is the poetry and tragedy and profound fundamental importance of the simple recurrent human relationships of daily life.”
Though Wyatt wrote specifically to praise Fisher’s poignant rendering of Lester, Eva’s interiority is just as carefully crafted. Eva reclaims everyday household rituals that were once fraught with anxiety before she and Lester shifted roles. Halfway through the novel, Fisher sketches a cheerful tableau of Eva starting her workday with a hearty breakfast and by poring over the advertisements for the department store authored by Mrs. Willing, the wife of the store manager, in the local paper. Eva’s thoughts unspool as she sips her coffee:
She admired Mrs. Willing’s talent so much! That was something she could never do, not if her life depended on it! She had always hated writing, even letters. . . . But she knew enough to appreciate somebody who could write. And Mrs. Willing could. . . .She knew that all over town women were enjoy ing it with their breakfast and would look around their own kitchens to see how they could be improved. The kitchen-ware department would have a good day, she thought unenviously, her pride in the store embracing all its departments.
Where breakfast was once something to be not enjoyed but administered, we now see Eva relish a chance to sustain herself and invite reverie. Her vision of women in their homes pondering how to upgrade their kitchens with the advertised department store wares is a remnant of her past life as de facto homemaker. The arc of her thoughts illustrates her newly found intellectual curiosities that extend beyond the home, to her colleagues at the department store and to working women she admires.
Fisher animates a relatable urge in Eva that she herself knew all too well: the urge to stimulate her mind. While Fisher from an early age had regular opportunities to devote herself to study and employ herself creatively, Eva does not.
When Eva is first introduced, she is all but starved for the critical use of her mind, so that when the department store manager Mr. Willing offers her a manual on retail work, she sheds her characteristic reserve, and glowing, responds, “Oh, are there books written about the business?. . . Things you can study and learn?”
Like Eva, Fisher enjoyed delving into additional research to broaden her understanding of department stores. She enlisted the help of her friend Elizabeth Jackson, who had training as a saleswoman and helpfully supplied Fisher with proper department store lingo, advising Fisher to change “stock closet” to “stock-cabinet” and “advertisement writers” to “advertising office.” Nevertheless, Jackson expressed to Fisher that she did not find the department store portion of the novel to be of much interest. While disheartened by her friend’s critique, Fisher had already received positive reactions to the world of the store she had painted from her readers. Fisher wrote to Jackson, “You just ought to see the absorbed breathless astonished interest with which several other readers devoured that part . . . ‘literary-minded’ people who never had had the slightest idea of the background of that sort of work.”
Taking her place behind the counter at Mr. Willing’s emporium, Eva blossoms. Where Lester could only see pointless consumerism, Eva deploys perception and empathy in selling suitable clothes to each customer, whose pocketbook and life circumstances she takes into consideration. Suddenly realizing how she would sell a cloak that had remained on the department floor for months, Eva has a bolt of inspiration: “It had come to her, right out of nowhere, as one’s best thoughts always come, that the thing to do with that black, fur-trimmed velours-de-laine cloak was to sell it to Mrs. Prouty in place of the fur coat which she coveted so and couldn’t possibly afford.” Serving a customer is more than transactional for Eva: she takes pride in her affinity for offering the comfort of the right garment at the right time.
For all Fisher’s protestations that The Home-Maker is a story championing children’s rights rather than women’s, Eva’s emancipation from the titular homemaker role seemed destined to get people talking about “the woman question.”
An advertisement for the April 1924 Woman’s Home Companion poses their version of the question —“Must a woman lead two lives?”— and highlighted a feature article by a woman who found satisfaction working inside and outside of the home, as well as the first installment of The Home-Maker, first serialized by the magazine before its trade publication. The Companion predicted that Fisher’s novel would fit neatly into the interests and concerns of their readership.
It teased in announcements that it was “bound to provoke lively discussion,” parroting the promise of Harcourt, Brace & Company’s advertisement for the trade version of the book, “You will enjoy it and discuss it.”
Answering Harcourt’s call, readers wrote in to the Woman’s Home Companion, turning the magazine’s Dear Editor section into a lively platform for criticism and praise. One “V.G.R.” from Nebraska identified with the struggling couple but felt Fisher had offered “no practicable solution.” Another reader wrote to Fisher personally, thanking her for helping her “understand now so many things I never dreamed of before” following the suicide of her husband who, to her, resembled Lester. Fisher had clearly struck a nerve, and readers bought the book in droves, putting it on the list of the ten bestselling books of 1924.
The discussion sparked among critics, meanwhile, was disappointingly tepid. While the Chicago Daily Tribune admitted “Mrs. Fisher’s is a novel solution to the problem of the working woman and the home” and supposed “countless women who read The Home-Maker will want to rush off to their destinies as managers of large department stores,” their reviewer witheringly concluded that “if it isn’t great literature, it is a good story.” A critic for The Atlanta Constitution ventured vaguely that “it is the kind of book men won’t like but women will be glad that what it has to say is now said.” Others sniffed at the novel as not on par with Fisher’s earlier works. Fisher had written to Harcourt on the eve of The Home-Maker’s publication expressing hope that “if only people will find it interesting enough to disagree about violently, they may do some real thinking,” but few reviewers engaged directly with the implications of the gender role reversal at the heart of the book.
It is possible critics considered Fisher’s “novel solution” too fantastical to respond to seriously. In 1920, women only made up 20 percent of the workforce (according to the Women’s Bureau of the US Department of Labor, established that same year), and few of those working women would have had a husband at home to support them. It was also unthinkable that a woman should relinquish her housekeeping duties — the rise of the American middle class and the decline of the domestic service industry, affordable only to the wealthiest, meant that women were widely expected to be experts on efficient home management. For evidence, look to the many books and magazines dedicated to household engineering that proliferated in the 1920s, promising to offer solutions to harried housewives. This assumption undergirds the novel as well — Eva doesn’t dream of working outside the home or asking Lester to help with chores until they are forced to swap roles after his accident. The unusual circumstances afford Eva the safety of seeking and finding satisfaction in employment without the appearance of abandoning her home and family.
This is perhaps what readers a century later will find most radical in The Home-Maker: Fisher warmly portrays a working mother in 1924 who takes pleasure in leaving the home each day, free from the expectation to be both bread-winner and household manager. Eva enjoys the full support of Lester, who trains himself in the domestic arts all while he invents creative methods to keep the house tidy, picks the children up from school, and gets dinner on the table each night. Many women still struggle to achieve this division of labor today. A 2023 Pew Research poll found that wives who make equal or higher salaries than their husbands still spend more than double the amount of time on housework (4.6 hours per week on average for the women versus 1.9 hours per week for the men) and almost two hours more per week on caregiving. These findings are supported by economist Claudia Goldin, who was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work illuminating inequities between women and men at home and at work. In her 2021 book Career and Family, she argues that entrenched gender norms, especially when it comes to childcare, cause both wives and husbands to lose out — men by forgoing time with their families, women by forgoing their careers. It is striking that this twenty-first-century arrangement describes the same unhappy circumstances under which the Knapp family suffers and that Fisher so creatively tackles.
Eva and Lester Knapp offer contemporary readers an imperfect but inspiring example of domestic equality. Though forced into their situation by an act of God, the Knapps take to their new roles with openness and flexibility. In doing so, they come to understand the gendered expectations to which the other had been confined, such as when Lester observes how Eva’s assumed homemaking role obscured her potential: “His heart ached with remorse as he thought of the life to which he had condemned her. Why, like Stephen, she had been buried alive in a shaft deep under the earth.” He admires the “furious splendor of her vigor” that she now takes to the shop work. Through Lester and Eva Knapp’s renegotiation of their roles as husband and wife, Fisher invites women in particular to interrogate the myth of the one-size-fits-all marriage.
This is an invitation as welcome today as when she first wrote it. Writing in the Los Angeles Examiner the same year she wrote The Home-Maker, Fisher asked her readers to realize that “every human being is different from every other, and hence each couple of human beings is different from every couple.” She proposed leaving people “free to construct the sort of marriage that is best for [their] particular combination.” Fisher knew the benefits of this first-hand, and they afforded her a significant life.
October 2024
Molly Brown
Reference and Outreach Archivist,
Archives and Special Collections
Northeastern University Library
Christine Jacobson
Associate Curator of Modern Books & Manuscripts
Houghton Library, Harvard University
This foreword was originally published by Quite Literally Books in their 2025 edition of The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Shop QLB No. 1 The Home-Maker today