Author: Adele Fasick

Sinner or Savior? Madame Restell

Adele Fasick2 Comments
Mary Trow–Madame Restell

During the 1800s, New York City was an expanding city with a growing population of immigrants and newcomers from rural states. Among the immigrants in 1832 was a young English girl named Mary Stow Sommers and her husband with their infant daughter. Unfortunately, the husband died soon after their arrival in the city, and Mary had to find work to support her daughter. That was no easy task, and Mary struggled to find work she could manage from home while she took care of her daughter. Her brother, who had also moved to America, worked in a pharmacy and Mary soon realized there was a business opportunity in developing skill as a midwife.

At that time, many of women’s healthcare needs were taken care of by women rather than by doctors, all of whom were men. Midwives assisted women in giving birth. They also helped when pregnant women had a miscarriage or a stillbirth. Many of them provided medications made from natural products to ease the difficulties of pregnancy and childbirth.

Mary was a quick learner and soon realized that taking care of women’s health needs was a business opportunity. As she learned more about drugs and natural products that were used to help a woman become pregnant as well as to prevent miscarriages and stillbirths and to ease the pains of giving birth, she built up an efficient organization. She changed her name to Madame Restell and claimed to have learned her medical skills in France. She also married her second husband, Charles Lohman, a printer and a freethinker, who helped her in reaching out to a wide audience.

Many pregnant women wanted abortions because there were no effective contraceptives at that time. Abortions were not illegal if they occurred during early pregnancy, before ‘quickening’ or the time when the fetus began to move in the womb. Within a few years, Mary had established herself as a reliable midwife and as a woman who could help with difficult births, miscarriages, and also provide abortions.

Restell was a good businesswoman as well as a good medical practitioner. She placed ads in the newspapers to let people know that about the services she offered. Not only did she provide medication and treatments, she also helped women who came to her for other needs. Women who wanted to have a baby and give it up for adoption, could stay with her for weeks before the birth knowing that they would have the safest care available. Her clients included wealthy women as well as prostitutes and young unmarried girls. The age of consent was very low, sometimes as low as 10 or 12 years of age, so many young girls fell prey to employers or relatives who were unwilling to take any responsibility for providing care for the girls if they became pregnant.

Madame Restell not only became successful, she also became famous and very wealthy. She built a large mansion directly across the street from the Catholic Archbishop of New York. He could rail against her and her activities from the pulpit, but he could not prevent her from carrying on her business in his own neighborhood.

When Restell travelled around the city, she rode in an elegant carriage drawn by large, handsome horses and driven by coachmen in expensive livery. Madame Restell became a celebrity, and a very wealthy one. Other women followed her example and tried to build up practices similar to hers, but none became as famous as Restell.

As the years went by, doctors noticed that this large section of healthcare was handled by untrained women rather than male doctors, and some of them determined to take over the field. Doctors, despite having more education than female midwives, did not always offer better service. The germ theory was unknown, so doctors did not consider it necessary to wash their hands before attending a birth. Babies delivered by doctors died more often than babies delivered by midwives during these early years. Nonetheless doctors continued to push to take over the entire field of medical services.

For forty years Madame Restell managed her successful business and offered her services to many women, but finally one activist brought an end to her career. That man was Anthony Comstock, who campaigned for “virtue” by trying to eliminate obscenity, contraception, abortion, and several other activities he considered to be sinful. He fought bitterly against Madame Restell and her services. In 1878, he managed to trick her by showing up at her house and asking for contraceptives for his wife. Restell gave him some of her products, but he returned the next day with several policemen and had her arrested.  

At this time, Madame Restell was suffering from a series of troubles. More and more people began to support Comstock’s campaign against obscenity, more doctors were offering services that competed with hers, and her private life was disrupted by the sudden death of her husband a short time before her arrest.

Comstock fought bitterly to bring Restell to court before a judge who was hostile to her. He fought to have her denied bail and it was clear that he wanted to defeat her and drive her out of business. But she was a strong and determined woman. On the morning of the day she was scheduled to appear in court, her body was found in the bathtub of her home. She had evaded a final reckoning by slitting her throat. Comstock had finally managed to defeat the most famous abortionist of nineteenth century America.

The full story of Madame Restell is told in a recent book, Madame Restell: The Life, Death and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by JenniferWright (2022), There you will find an account not only of Restell’s life, but also much of the background about how women’s right to control their fertility and their bodies became a battleground. Today’s news will tell you that this struggle is far from over.

See How She Falls—Fannie Hurst and Her Disappearing Books

Adele Fasick3 Comments

Just about half a century ago, in February 1968, the New York Times printed a front-page obituary of one of the most popular writers of the twentieth century—Fannie Hurst. Today her name means almost nothing to an average American reader. Her books have disappeared from most public libraries and bookstores, although films based them are easy to find in film study classes and on YouTube. Who was this woman who loomed so large for half a century and then fell so far?

Fannie Hurst was born on October 18, 1889, in Hamilton, Ohio. Her only sibling, a sister, died soon after Fannie’s birth. Her parents were an immigrant couple from Germany. Fannie grew up in St. Louis, attended public schools there and graduated from Washington University at the age of 24. During her last year in college, she wrote the book and lyrics for a production of a comic opera. After her graduation, she began submitting stories to magazines, but had a difficult time getting them accepted. Her parents wanted her to stay in St. Louis and find a suitable husband, but Fannie was determined to build a career. Finally, after two years, she persuaded her parents to allow her to move to New York City and find out whether she could succeed as a writer.

Fannie fit easily into life in New York. She wandered around the city to visit different neighborhoods and took jobs as a salesgirl and as a waitress in a Childs restaurant to study city life. She also visited night court sessions to learn more about criminal activity and punishment in the city. But always, she wrote. In 1912, she sold a story to the Saturday Evening Post and after that her sales to magazines increased.  The Post asked her to write exclusively for them and she soon became a well-known author. In 1921, her first novel, Star Dust, the Story of an American Girl appeared. It was not long before her career took off. Within a few years she was one of the best paid writers in the country.

Fanny was an energetic and diligent worker who was never at a loss for devising new twists for her stories. She was also a good businesswoman who had no qualms about demanding high paying contracts with magazine editors so that she could plan on writing a number of stories for publication as a series. In New York, she quickly made new friends with whom she shared social life as well as market information. Perhaps equally important in her success, she was a healthy, disciplined worker who fulfilled her obligations and never developed the bad habits that prevented many other writers from fulfilling their promises. She did not drink alcohol nor get involved in passionate love affairs.  Despite family obligations—her parents demanded many visits and frequent letters—she did not let depression or annoyance interfere with her writing schedule. Editors could count on her.

Fannie Hurst with Eleanor Roosevelt

The public too could count on her to come up with plots that offered endless variations on the familiar themes of family life and love affairs. Her audience was primarily women, who struggled with the endless issues of maintaining satisfactory lives in a fast-changing world. No doubt she introduced many American women to neighborhoods they had never seen and the kinds of people they had never met. She didn’t spare words in describing the settings for her stories and novels. The first sentence of her novel Humoresque uses 53 words to set the stage for the neighborhood where her characters live:

On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every Man’s Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in patois from tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls are terrible and spongy with fungi.

Few of her readers would have ever seen such an inner-city neighborhood, but Fannie spread it out before them so readers in small town Idaho could visualize the lives of immigrant New Yorkers and sympathize with their troubles. Some critics and reviewers complained about the wordy details Fannie provides, but readers loved them and her books sold widely.

As Fannie’s work became more popular, her social life expanded. She became more interested in women’s rights and other causes and was an early member of the Lucy Stone League, a group dedicated to allowing married women to keep their own name rather than adopting their husband’s name. Her own marriage demonstrated her determination not to become labelled as “wife of…”.

In New York, Fannie met and fell in love with a Russian émigré, the musician, Jacques S. Danielson, but when she took him to meet her parents in St. Louis, they objected strenuously to the marriage. They looked forward to having a daughter conventionally married to an American from the Jewish community in which they lived rather than a foreigner. Instead of openly defying her parents, Fannie and Jacques had a quiet wedding in New Jersey and stayed in their separate apartments in New York. For five years they told no one about the marriage and carried on their usual social lives. When a reporter found a record of the marriage and wrote a story about it, the news caused a sensation. Nonetheless, Fannie and Jacques continued their separate social lives although they eventually moved in together. Their marriage lasted until Jacques’s death in 1952. Fannie mourned him for the rest of her life.

By the late 1920s, Fannie was a well-known public figure and one of the most popular and well-paid writers in the country. When the movie industry started during the early 1920s, it was natural for producers to turn to her stories for material to be filmed and made available in the new format. The movies made it possible for Fannie’s readers to see the settings in which her stories took place without reading Fannie’s lengthy prose and so it opened up a new audience. Her fame and popularity with both viewers and readers continued throughout the development of the movies. She was fortunate in her timing because her stories could be filmed more than once as movie technology changed from silent films to talkies and eventually to technicolor films.

During the 1930s, Fannie’s high energy life continued and it was not restricted to writing and publishing. She became more involved in social issues, especially as her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt grew. She was invited to the White House for lunches and events and she supported the first lady in her campaigns to establish racial equality and to increase support for women’s causes.

During her long and busy life, Fannie maintained the discipline that kept her writing and publishing short stories and novels. She became a host on several radio and TV stations, although her popularity in these media never reached the heights of fame that her writing did. Gradually, during the postwar years, Fannie’s earning power diminished. Nonetheless, she remained prosperous and led  an active life until, after a short illness, she died of cancer on February 23, 1968.

A recent biography by Brooke Kroeger,  Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Frances Hurst (2022) tells the full story of Fannie Hurst, an unforgettable woman whose achievements should not be forgotten even by people who no longer read her books. She left an indelible mark on the culture of twentieth century America.

The Woman Who Couldn’t Stop Writing—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Adele Fasick3 Comments

Eighteenth century women were expected to lead quiet lives within their family circle. But Lady Mary Wortley Montagu would not accept that life. She was tormented by the need to express herself and be recognized as the brilliant, successful writer that she was. Throughout her life, she wrote and published articles, sent travel letters to a wide circle of friends, kept a journal, and even publicized new medical treatments. How could she help but yearn for acknowledgement and fame, unwomanly though that idea was?

Lady Mary was born Mary Pierpont on May 15, 1689, into a wealthy British family. Even as a child she showed an avid interest in books and she learned to read at an early age. Mary’s mother and her grandmother encouraged Mary’s interests and the girl spent hours in the family’s large library where she taught herself Latin and read widely. Unfortunately, both her mother and her grandmother died while Mary was still a child and her father did not believe that women should be too highly educated. However, Mary was a stubborn girl and she continued to pursue her literary interests. At the age of 14, she collected her early poems together and produced a booklet that she proudly showed to her family and some of her friends.

Like all wealthy women of the time, Mary was expected to marry young and in 1712, she married Edward Wortley Montagu despite some opposition from her father. She soon produced a son, but continued her writing, especially after she and her husband moved to London. Living in the city, where Lady Mary met most of the leading intellectuals of the day, was delightful. Among her friends were Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope two of the most important cultural leaders in the city. Addison encouraged her to write for the Spectator, the leading journal of the time, and she became the only woman whose articles appeared there. Like all of the articles, hers were unsigned, but at least her friends knew that she had written them.

Life in London was not free of trouble. When she was 25 years old, Mary got smallpox, a constant danger in London. Friends and family were afraid she might die, but she recovered well and soon gave birth to a healthy daughter. Nonetheless, her face was permanently scarred—a bitter trial for a young woman. The many portraits of Lady Mary which still exist do not show the scars, but no doubt they were visible to her as well as to the people around her.  

The biggest event of Lady Mary’s early years of marriage occurred when her husband was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and the family moved to Istanbul.  After a long and difficult journal the family settled into their new quarters. Through all of their adventures, Lady Mary continued to write long letters to her friends and family. Her descriptions of life in Istanbul introduced Londoners to the exotic life she and her family were living. Lady Mary had an advantage over many other travelers because, she could mingle with Turkish women and learn how they lived, raised their children, and lived their lives. She was impressed by the social baths where women gathered every week  and shared stories, news, and ideas.  

One discovery Lady Mary made was that the dreaded smallpox was not feared as much in Turkey as it was in England and other European countries. “I am going to tell you a thing which I am sure will make you wish yourself here,” she wrote in one of her letters. And she described the process of variolation, during which Turkish doctors injected a small amount of smallpox germs into an individual to prevent their catching smallpox. “This method,” she continued, makes the disease – “so fatal, and so general amongst us” – all but “harmless” amongst the Turks.”

Lady Mary had her son and other family members inoculated. When she returned to England, she brought variolation back home, introducing the practice to the aristocracy and their physicians.

After Lady Mary and her family returned to England, she continued to live an active, intellectual life. She never stopped writing, turning to poetry in her later years, but she continued to be reluctant to sign her name to her work. Although some of Lady Mary’s works continue to be available, especially her travel letters and her poems, she has never received the attention she deserves as a writer. A fascinating account of Lady Mary’s work and her ambitions is told in a recent book by Anna Beer, Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature (2022

“The body says what words cannot.” –Martha Graham and the Art of Dance

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Dance is one of humanity’s oldest art forms. Tomb paintings in India dating from 8000 BCE show pictures of people dancing. Throughout history people have danced to celebrate happy events such as births, marriages, and victories as well as to commemorate deaths and defeats. But dance is an art that has not been easy to record, so we know very little of what ancient dancing was like or how the performances looked. And so, it seems that every generation must reinvent the art of dancing.

Fortunately for us, the twentieth century brought us new ways of recording visual arts and movement. At the same time, many artists were turning to dance as a way to express their feelings and ideas. Martha Graham is remembered as a woman who revolutionized the way dance was taught and performed in America. She was born in 1894, and lived through most of the twentieth century, dying in 1991. During her long life she transformed the art of dance.

Martha Graham

Graham was born in Pennsylvania but moved with her family to Santa Barbara, California when she was 14 years old. It was in California that she first saw professional dance performances and decided to study dance. She enrolled in the Denishawn Dance School in Los Angeles and soon became one of their star dancers. In 1923, she left the school and moved east where she started her own studio and school in New York City in 1926. The school which she started has been an important part of the modern dance world ever since its founding and it is now the oldest active dance school in America.

Most dance performances staged in New York before the twentieth century had been based on the European tradition of ballet dancing. Dancers wore gauzy tutus and ballet shoes that allowed them to dance “en pointe” and move about the stage as if they were floating.  Graham’s approach was very different. She developed the concept of “contraction and release” as the major style of movement. Some fans of the more familiar European style of dance considered Graham’s work a betrayal of the traditional culture of ballet. Graham herself felt that she was expressing the spirt of her time. She wrote: “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that the others are behind the times.”

Graham had strong feelings about social and political issues. In 1936, she refused to dance at the Olympics in Germany saying, “I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time” because of Hitler’s persecution of Jews. Many of the dances she created were based on American traditions, or on ancient Greek drama. Through her work she celebrated democracy and freedom. In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt invited her to perform in the White House, making her the first dancer to appear in a performance there. Years later, in 1976, President Gerald Ford presented Graham with a Medal of Freedom in a further acknowledgement of her work.

During her long career, Graham created 181 dances. One of the most popular and influential was “Appalachian Spring” which was first staged in 1944 with music by Aaron Copeland. It was welcomed as a major achievement in American dance and music. As her work became more widely acclaimed, and filming techniques improved, Graham gave up he early objections to having her work photographed. A number of films of Graham’s dances have been preserved at the Library of Congress. In recent years, many have also been made available on YouTube.

Graham continued to create dances and to perform in them during the postwar years of the 1950s and 1960s. The records aren’t clear on when she gave her last performance, but in her unfinished memoir, she said that she last appeared on stage in 1970.

During the years after her retirement from the stage, Graham had a period of depression that lasted for almost two years. Her health declined and she spent some time in a hospital, but in 1972, she returned to her studio and to choreography. She created new dances and coached young dancers in performing them. Her death in 1991 led to an outpouring of honors to celebrate her contributions to the arts.

Several biographies of Martha Graham have been published, most recently, Neil Baldwin’s Martha Graham: When Dancing Became Modern (Knopf 2022). Baldwin’s bookhas been praised as the most complete account of Graham’s life and work.  It is widely available in bookstores and public libraries.

The Woman Who Rivals Shakespeare in Sales—Agatha Christie

Adele Fasick4 Comments

In 1890, when Agatha Miller was born into a middle-class family in Southern England, no one would have predicted that she would still be remembered today. Not only is she remembered, but her books continue to be sold worldwide and movie and tv adaptations of her works continue to be produced. Many of her fans are looking forward to September 2023 when they will be able to see A Haunting in Venice, Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Christie’s Halloween Party, a sequel to Death on the Nile. Who was this woman who holds such a grip on audiences from England to Ethiopia and from North America to Southern Asia?

Agatha’s family was prosperous, but not influential. Her father had been born in the United States but lived much of his life in England. He was not particularly interested in being a businessman and was better at squandering the wealth he had inherited rather than adding to it. Her mother believed that girls did not need much education so she did not encourage Agatha to learn to read. Nonetheless, Agatha was curious about books and with the help of her grandmother, she learned to read by the time she was four years old. Like most middle-class girls at that time, Agatha assumed she would not need to earn a living because she would marry and devote her time to her husband and family. But the world was changing and Agatha’s life did not follow the traditional pattern.

As she grew into her teens, Agatha was given a taste of formal education by attending boarding school in France, but her social life was more important to her than education. She began to attend parties, where she met many young people of her class, notably Archie Christie, a handsome young man who pressed her to marry him.

Agatha Christie and her books

The start of World War I in 1914 brought dramatic changes to all of Europe including England. Earlier British wars had been fought mainly in distant countries such as India and Afghanistan. Suddenly battles were being fought close to home and wounded soldiers were being sent home to hospitals in England. Most young men joined the army, including Archie Christie, who was soon sent overseas to fight in France.

Like many other women in those days, Agatha volunteered to work for the Red Cross in British hospitals. It was a full-time volunteer job, and Agatha learned a great deal about nursing and especially about handling drugs, tending the sick, and dealing with death. During one of his home leaves, Archie and Agatha got married.

Settling down to peacetime life was not easy. Neither Archie nor Agatha was wealthy, although they were accustomed to living as if they were. Their only child, Rosalind, was born in 1919. Archie found jobs in business while Agatha was responsible for taking care of the house and of Rosalind. She wrote her first novels during these postwar years, but finding a publisher was difficult. Finally, she tried writing mystery stories, basing her major character, Hercule Poirot, on the Belgium soldiers she had met during her wartime work. The first Hercule Poirot story, The Mysterious Affair at Styles caught the public’s attention and has held it. Played by a series of actors during the years, Poirot is still appearing in movies and television productions more than a hundred years after he was first introduced.

Agatha continued to write mysteries and soon became one of the most popular and well-known British novelists. Unfortunately, her marriage did not fare so well, and in 1926, this led to the most dramatic episode in her life. The year had not gone well for Agatha, starting with her mother’s death in the spring. In December, Archie asked for a divorce because he wanted to marry his assistant. The day after his announcement, after leaving Rosalind with her sister, Agatha disappeared. Her empty car was soon discovered, but Agatha had vanished. Newspapers worldwide seized upon this story and the search was on. There were reports that Agatha had been seen dancing at a health spa, and later at a resort hotel, but it was ten days before she was finally discovered. She was registered under an assumed name at a spa not far from her country house.

Agatha never completely explained what had happened. After she was discovered, she went into seclusion at her sister’s house leaving the public to argue whether her disappearance had been a publicity stunt or the result of genuine mental illness. Gradually she recovered and returned to normal life. But her marriage to Archie was ended. Her divorce was finalized and Agatha continued her writing career. For the most part she led a quiet, successful life. She had a happy second marriage with anthropologist Max Mallowan, raised her daughter, and enjoyed domestic life. But through all of her years she continued to write and publish more stories that entranced thousands of readers.

Several biographies have been written about Agatha Christie and many of them focus on the few days of her mysterious disappearance in 1926. Fans still argue about the causes and effects of that event, but probably the more important mystery is the question of why her career lasted so long and why it was so successful. The statistics are startling. During her lifetime, Christie published 66 mystery books as well as 14 short story collections. Her play, The Mousetrap, set a record as the world’s longest-running play. All of her works were written in English, but they have been translated and published in 44 different languages.

What is the secret of Agatha Christie’s success? That is the biggest mystery of all. She wrote most of her books during between 1920 and 1970. Other authors of that time have published other mysteries that were popular, but none of them approached the perennial appeal of Christie. Some critics have suggested that it is the cleverness of her best-known detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, that keeps readers entranced. Others say that the complexity of Christie’s plots are the secret ingredient that wins her fans. Her mysteries are honest in the sense that the clues are laid out clearly so the clever reader can match wits with the fictional detectives. And year after year the books continue to be reprinted and produced in electronic versions and readers continue to seek them out.

The only way to judge whether or not Agatha Christie’s work deserves the popularity it has achieved is to read the books for yourself or perhaps to view the film adaptations. Then you too can decide whether or not you are one of Christie’s fans and whether you can solve the mystery of her lasting appeal. 

Writing Women Who Started a Trend—Jane and Maria Porter

Adele Fasick2 Comments

During the early 1800s, more and more people in England were leaning to read. In 1800, 60% of men and 40% of women were literate, but the numbers were growing every year. Supporters of public education declared that the purpose of reading was to give people access to the Bible. But the secret passion of the new readers was often to read fiction—stories that brought excitement and pleasure into their lives. And the people who wrote the stories that people clamored for were often women.

Two of the women who provided popular fiction for the masses were the sisters Jane and Maria Porter. They were born in the 1780s to an Irish doctor and his wife who were then living in Durham, England. Besides Jane and Maria, there were three sons in the family and their father encouraged them all to read, write and learn as much as they could. Unfortunately, the father died young, shortly after Maria was born, leaving them without a secure income. His widow moved the family to Edinburgh where the two girls attended a charity school. Both of them were attracted to reading and writing and as they grew older, they began publishing short articles. In 1790 the family moved to London.

While the boys in the family tried to earn their livings by joining the army or becoming diplomats, both of the girls turned to writing. Between them, they may have invented the historical novel. Jane Porter’s first novels, Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810) were based on well-known figures and were written in a popular style. Both became bestsellers. Many of Jane’s books went through numerous editions and some remained in print for more than 100 years. In fact several editions of The Scottish Chiefs are still available on the Amazon website. But, despite the pleasures of fame, being a bestselling author during the nineteenth century was not easy, especially for a woman.

Maria Porter

At the time when the Porter sisters were writing, women were expected to be dependent on men for economic security. Either their fathers or their husbands were supposed to earn money; women stayed at home. The three Porter brothers should have taken on responsibility for supporting their widowed mother and the two girls, but instead they spent much of their time building up debts of their own. The girls took over, but writing and publishing novels was not an easy way to earn money.

Today, authors expect to earn royalties on the books they write. The more popular a book becomes, the more money the author earns. During the early 1800s, there was no such thing as royalties. Books were sold to the publisher for a flat payment and if they were reprinted and sold widely, the publisher made the money, not the author. The only way the writer could earn more money was to update and change the story and sell it to a publisher as a new book.

The Porter sisters were always short of money, because they supported themselves as well as their mother. The best solution to find security would have been to marry a man with a good income. Both Maria and Jane were attractive women and men clustered around them at social events. Several times they met men who appeared ready to suggest marriage, but somehow, when a wealthier young woman appeared on the scene, each of the Porter’s suitors decided to marry for money rather than to propose to a penniless writer.

Besides not having royalties, the Porter sisters also suffered from the lack of international copyright. Their books sold well in America, but the authors received no money at all from these sales. Late in her life, after Maria died, and while Jane was struggling to keep going, her American publisher wrote to her to say that he believed she deserved some share of the profit he was making from her books. Instead of sending money, however, he sent a gift—a large chair, which turned out to be useless because Jane had no place to keep it.

Both Jane and Maria Porter have been almost forgotten, but fortunately for us, they exchanged numerous letters with one another and the letters have survived. In 2022, their lives were retold in a remarkable book–Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontes  (NY: Bloomsbury 2022) by Devoney Looser. It makes me happy to know that Jane and Maria are being honored at last and I’m sure many readers will join me in celebrating their lives.

 Another Wartime Christmas 2022

Adele Fasick1 Comment

In 1917, Joyce Kilmer, one of the most popular American poets of the early twentieth century wrote this poem, which became one of the best-known poems of the period.

Joyce Kilmer

Wartime Christmas

Led by a star, a golden star,
The youngest star, an olden star,
Here the kings and the shepherds are,
Akneeling on the ground.
What did they come to the inn to see?
God in the Highest, and this is He,
A baby asleep on His mother’s knee
And with her kisses crowned.

Now is the earth a dreary place,
A troubled place, a weary place.
Peace has hidden her lovely face
And turned in tears away.
Yet the sun, through the war-cloud, sees
Babies asleep on their mother’s knees.
While there are love and home and these,
There shall be Christmas Day.

Kilmer’s poem became popular during the years when the United States and most of Europe were entangled in the first World War. The poem pointed toward future peaceful Christmas celebrations. But Kilmer himself never saw another peaceful holiday. He was killed on a battlefield in France on July 30, 1918.

Now, more than 100 years after this poem was written, we are facing another wartime holiday season. A new war in Europe has pitted Russia and Ukraine against one another and has threatened the lives of thousands of civilians as well as soldiers. Almost all the countries of Europe have been drawn into the conflict in one way or another and the struggle ahead looks as though will be a long one.

In the United States, the country has entered a permanent state of war. Teenagers carrying weapons designed for war staged more than 600 mass shooting events during 2022. The children of Uvalde will never see another holiday season, neither will the grocery shoppers in Buffalo who were gunned down, nor the visitors to an LGBTQ club in Colorado. There will be very little holiday cheer among their families and friends during the year ahead or in years to come.  

How long can these undeclared wars continue? Just as long as people allow them to go on. As we start a new year, perhaps all of us should demand that our leaders take steps to ban the unprecedented slaughter of innocent people. The greatest gift 2023 could bring us would be a Peacetime Christmas. 

An unknown Kingdom—The most fascinating book I read in 2022

Adele Fasick3 Comments

Most nonfiction books add ideas and facts to knowledge the reader already has, but it is rare to read a book that opens up a whole new world. This year when I read “Kingdom of Characters” by Jing Tsu, I was introduced to an entire sphere of knowledge I knew almost nothing about. Even though I had studied American and European history in school and have read biographies for many years, I had almost always seen China through the eyes of Western visitors and writers. Tsu gave me an inside view of some of the ways the country has changed over the past hundred years or so and how it has become part of a worldwide culture. And she does this by telling us the ways in which reading and writing have adapted to the modern global world. It started with the alphabet.

To write their language, Chinese speakers have traditionally used ideograms, in which each word is represented by a tiny picture that represented an individual word. Most other languages used an alphabet in which a small number of symbols could be combined in various ways to represent many different words. This made a tremendous difference in the way Chinese people could communicate in writing.

It took years of patient work for scholars to construct a Mandarin alphabet that was finally presented in 1904. Instead of praise, the scholar who achieved this, Wang Zhao, was imprisoned for attempting to modernize the country. But he had taken the first step that would lead the country into the modern world culture.

Jing Tsu takes us through the skills that were needed to allow Chinese speakers to communicate easily with people who spoke and wrote other languages. One step was developing a way to arrange words in an index. We often forget that it is knowledge of the alphabet that allows us to know immediately where to find the word we are looking for. People who grow up using an alphabetic language, learn the alphabet while they are very young. This gives them a basic tool to organize knowledge. In a list of vegetables, for example, a turnip is always going to come after an onion. We don’t even have to think about it. But in a language without an alphabet, a new way of organizing entries had to be worked out.

With every step toward joining the world community, another adaptation had to be mastered. The Chinese language could not be used on a Western typewriter. Those were designed for languages based on an alphabet rather than a language based on characters, as Chinese was, so a new kind of typewriter had to be invented.

With each new development—the typewriter, the card catalog, the teletype and then the computer—new adjustments had to be made so that the Chinese language could be used on the tools developed throughout the world. Jing Tsu makes the struggle to enter the global world of writing almost as exciting as a tiger hunt. Today China holds its place in the international marketplace and the scientific community on an equal footing with other countries using other languages.

You can find Jing Tsu’s book, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (2022) in most public libraries both in hardcover and in Kindle editions. A paperback edition will be published in January 2023.

Read by Millions–Forgotten by All–Elsie Robinson

Adele Fasick1 Comment

If you were asked to name the most popular woman author of the early twentieth century, what names would you recall? Perhaps it would be Edna Ferber, author of Showboat and Giant, Pearl Buck, who wrote exotic stories about China, or Betty Smith whose novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn topped the best-seller list for weeks.

But what about Elsie Robinson? Her name is unlikely to spring to mind, yet during the first half of the 1900s, she was the most widely read female author in America. Why has she been forgotten?

Elsie Robinson was born in 1883, in Benicia, California, a town at the outer edge of the San Francisco Bay area. The community had been developed during the last years of the California gold rush and was still filled with the adventurous spirit of the miners who had built it. Elsie was sent to the only public school in town and was an excellent student, but when she graduated, her parents did not have the money to send her on for higher education.

There were few opportunities at that time for an ambitious girl to get education or to find work, so Elsie turned to the traditional option of marrying an educated and prosperous man. Elsie felt that she was lucky when the pastor of her church introduced her to Christie Crowell, a young widower, who had come to California to visit friends and recover after the death of his wife. He was introduced to Elsie by the pastor of her church and soon found they had many interests in common. After months of courtship, Elsie and Christie became engaged, but their path to marriage was not smooth. Crowell’s family refused to sanction the marriage unless Elsie travelled to their home state, Vermont, and attended finishing school. Elsie agreed, so she took the train across the country by herself, to spend a year at the boarding school. After graduation, she and Christie had a quiet wedding at the Crowell family home. Elsie’s own family was not at the wedding because they could not afford the long trip across the country.

Elsie tried to fit herself into a traditional married life, but there was trouble from the start. She did not feel at home with the Crowell family and had difficulty fitting in with their conservative ideas, while her husband accepted their views completely. In those days women were often told that having a baby would ensure a happy marriage, but even that didn’t work for Elsie. Her only son, George, was born in 1904 with severe asthma, which he did not outgrow. Even after he started school, he was frequently confined to his home when he should have been in the classroom. Elsie, of course, was confined with him.

During her long, quiet days at home, Elsie began writing and illustrating stories to entertain her son and soon realized that she was good at the work. She began to search out opportunities for publishing her stories. When she gathered her courage and sent a story to the local newspaper, they published it and asked for more. Finally she found an agent who specialized in publishing articles and stories for children and distributing them by mail. At last she had an outlet for her energy. Before long she was hired to illustrate two books for children and she began to believe she might have found a career for herself.

But still she and her husband continued to drift apart and George continued to suffer from bouts of asthma. Eventually, Elsie made up her mind to take George to California where she believed his health would improve.

Elsie took George to California in 1912 and was able to find several jobs in writing and editing. Her ability to illustrate her own work made her more valuable than most other writers. Unfortunately, she was not able to earn enough money writing books to support herself and her son.

But Elsie would not give up. In 1915, she moved to a mining community and started working as a laborer in the gold mines. Few other women would have attempted such hard, physical labor, but Elsie was determined to survive. It was a difficult life, and she was the only woman working in the mine. As months went by, she was able to succeed and to earn the respect of the other miners. Gold mining, however, was a dying industry in California and the mine closed in 1918.

Elsie moved back to San Francisco, more determined than ever to find a career in writing. She persisted, sending material to newspapers and publishers. She wrote articles for newspapers in both Oakland and San Francisco and her readership grew with each new column. Her most famous column was called Listen World, which soon became known nationwide.

By 1921, she was hired by William Randolph Hearst to write for his string of newspapers. She signed a contract for $20,000 a year, making her the highest paid journalist in the country. After that, Elsie Robinson did not have to worry about being able to earn a living.

A few years after reaching this goal, however, in 1926, Elsie lost her son George. He had never completely overcome his asthma and died of a respiratory illness. Elsie never got over his loss. Her life then became filled with work. Having lived through a scandalous divorce from her first husband, Elsie wrote a memoir that sold well. She had two other husbands, both of whom seemed better at spending her money than in earning their own.

When Elsie died in 1956, she was still writing columns and influencing people. But today most of her work has disappeared from public view. Fortunately, we now have a biography, Listen World: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman by Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert (2022). It is good to see samples of Elsie Robinson’s columns available again.

Women Demanding a Ballot–Susan B. Anthony, Louisa May Alcott and My Grandmother

Adele Fasick2 Comments

The idea of women’s right to vote grew slowly during the years after the American constitution was adopted. The idea that ordinary men—farmers, merchants, and other non-royal citizens should vote was radical enough for the founding fathers. When Abigail Adams asked her husband, John Adams, to “remember the ladies” as he and others wrote the document, he laughed and ignored her request.

Years went by and American men expanded voting rights to other men, but they apparently never thought of giving women the same rights. Some women realized they would never be given voting rights unless they took dramatic action. Sending petitions and making speeches was not enough.

The presidential election in 1872 marked a turning point. In Rochester, New York, fourteen women, including the suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony, decided they would vote in the presidential election. When Anthony cast her vote, she was arrested, but not jailed. It was not until two months later that her trial began. While she waited, Anthony went on a speaking tour around the area to tell people what she had done and why it was important for women to be allowed to vote.

The judge, however, did not want to hear her arguments. Nor did he give her an opportunity to voice her concerns. He wrote his decision in the case before the trial even started and he directed the jury to find Anthony guilty. They obediently did as they were told. Anthony was fined $100, which she refused to pay. She hoped to make public the reasons for her refusal, but the judge made that impossible. He released her despite her failure to pay and because she was not jailed, she was unable to speak in court and unable to appeal the case to a higher court as she had planned.

Even though she was not able to appeal the court’s decision, Anthony did manage to call attention to the cause of women suffrage. She won many supporters who worked with her during the years it took for women to finally win voting rights. Unfortunately, Anthony died in 1906, long before the 19th amendment gave American women the right to vote, so she was never had a chance to legally cast a ballot in an election.

Susan B. Anthony was not the only American woman who attempted to vote. In 1880, Louisa May Alcott, author of the Little Women and other classic stories, seized the chance to vote. Her opportunity came in Concord, Massachusetts when the town decided women would be allowed to vote in school committee elections.

Alcott led a group of twenty women to the town hall to cast their ballots. They were able to do that, but after their votes were cast, the polls closed so they could not have a voice in any other decision. For several years afterward, Alcott led efforts to have women vote in school committee contests, but she found it difficult to keep them interested. With such a limited voice allowed in city affairs, most women did not think voting was worth their time.

For the rest of her life, Alcott continued to support women’s suffrage, but just like Susan B. Anthony, she was never able to vote in a national election. She died in 1888, more than thirty years before the Women’s Suffrage amendment was passed.

America was not the only country in which politics were tumultuous as the world moved into the twentieth century. Liberal ideas such as women’s suffrage gained support during the late 1800s and during the early 1900s, more and more people believed that radical changes were needed to improve the lives of ordinary people. As usual, the upper classes tried to preserve their privileges and prevent change.

In Southampton, England, a large port city on the southern coast of England, shipping companies found an ingenious way to keep the men who manned the ships from casting their votes and having a voice in elections. Whenever an election was called, the owners made sure that all the ships would leave port before election day. This effectively kept the seamen from voting and allowed the prosperous owners to be sure that only Conservative candidates would be sent to the House of Commons. 

During one bitter election season, however, at least one woman, Ellen Mongan, took a stand. On election day, after the ships had left port and the children were in school, she marched down to the polling place and demanded to be allowed to vote.

“I know how my husband wanted to vote, and I can cast his ballot,” she insisted.

Her demand caused consternation among the voting officials, while some of the bystanders began to cheer her on. Other women had not demanded such a privilege, but the idea made sense to some observers. Such rebellion might cause dramatic changes in the city’s voting pattern.

Eventually the forces of tradition won. Ellen was not allowed to vote. A few years later, in 1910, she and her husband moved to the United States and settled in Brooklyn. Women could not vote there at the time, of course, but at least her husband, Patrick Mongan, could vote as soon as he became a citizen.

In 1920, women at last got the vote in the United States. From that year on, Ellen voted in every election until her death in 1943. Unlike Susan B. Anthony and Louisa May Alcott, she had the satisfaction of being an active, engaged citizen. And in the years since her death, her children and grandchildren, including me, have understood the importance of voting and the value of a ballot.  

None of the women I’ve mentioned had success in their first efforts to vote, but at least they had the satisfaction of knowing they had  taken a stand. And over the years, their courage has made a difference. During this month’s midterm elections, many analysts have acknowledged that the votes of women have been a major force in preserving the values enshrined in Roe v. Wade and ensuring that American women will continue to have the right to control their bodies and their medical decisions.

Words, whether in speeches or writing, may give people new ideas, but it is ballots that give them the power to turn those ideas to action. As Herbert Hoover wrote, A whole people with the ballot in their hands possess the most conclusive and unlimited power ever entrusted to humanity.