‘Fallen Among Reformers’ focuses on Stella Miles Franklin’s New Woman protest literature written during her time in Chicago with the National Women’s Trade Union League (1906-1915). This time away from literary pursuits enriched Franklin’s literary productivity and provided a feminist social justice ethics, which shaped her writing.
Close readings of Franklin’s (mostly unpublished) short stories, plays, and novels contextualises them in the personal politics of her everyday life and historicises them in the socio-economic and literary realities of early twentieth-century Australia and United States: themes embedded in broader cultural patterns of socialism, pacifism, and feminism.