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Running a presidential campaign from a jail cell

Adele FasickLeave a comment

With a presidential election coming up soon, there’s been a lot of talk about past campaigns and past elections.  Were they more genteel and courteous than campaigns today? It doesn’t seem so.  You may think you know a lot about past presidential candidates, but have you heard about the candidate who spent Election Day in jail and who wasn’t allowed to vote?

The year was 1872, and the candidate was Victoria Woodhull, the first woman candidate for president in the United States.

Portrait of Victoria Wookhull
Victoria Woodhull

She announced her candidacy with an article in the New York Herald:

“As I happen to be the most prominent representative of the only unrepresented class in the republic, and perhaps the most practical exponent of the principles of equality, I request the favor of being permitted to address the public through the medium of the Herald. While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of woman with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why women should not be treated, socially and politically, as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of politics and business and exercised the rights I already possessed.”

Victoria Woodhull had indeed demonstrated her ability to work in a man’s world. With her sister Tennessee Claflin, she had started the first brokerage firm in New York operated by women. The path to that financial success was long and hard, but Victoria was always a fighter.

Born in Ohio in 1838, she had grown up in an unstable and impoverished family. She declared she had been “a child without a childhood” because her father had put his daughters to work as soon as he realized they could tell fortunes and claim healing powers. Victoria escaped from him by running away at 15 to get married, but the husband she chose was as shiftless as her father. He quickly became an alcoholic and a philanderer. Fed up with his neglect and dependence, Victoria divorced him and decided to make life on her own terms with her two children.

Some women in those circumstances might have struggled to maintain respectability by turning to teaching, but respectability was not high on the list of Victoria’s priorities. She had discovered spirituality and believed in her power to foresee events to come. Her sister Tennessee was also a clairvoyant and both sisters were quite willing to use their talents as well as their sexual appeal to earn money. Both were at various times accused of being prostitutes, but both were clever enough to use their sexual availability to their advantage rather than being punished for it. During the late 19th century when a married woman could lose her husband, children, and livelihood by a single slip into adultery, married men were free to consort with prostitutes and enjoy their sexual adventures without losing anything. Tennessee and Victoria claimed the same privilege.

How did this background lead not only to wealth but to a presidential campaign? It’s a good story and I will continue it in my next blog post.

Celebrating the heroes of Labor Day

Adele FasickLeave a comment

Anti-union sentiment is in the air these days as the media reports tales of high pensions for union workers and undue pressure by unions on the government. If you read the Republican Platform passed by the convention in Tampa a few days ago, you can read that “We call for repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act, which costs the taxpayers billions of dollars annually in artificially high wages on government projects. We support the right of States to enact Right-to-Work laws and encourage them to do so to promote greater economic liberty.” Few people know what is in the Davis-Bacon Act, which was passed in 1931. It provides that people working on government projects be paid no less than the locally prevailing wages and benefits paid on similar projects. That doesn’t sound too unreasonable—to ask that people building our courthouses, libraries and schools don’t have to put up with below-market wages, does it? It was signed into law by Republican President Herbert Hoover, but Republicans have been trying to repeal the act for more than fifty years and now they are trying again.

Why are so many Americans anti-labor these days? Probably because they forget what life was like in a pre-union world. At least one day a year, on Labor Day, we ought to try to remember those days and honor the people who changed the rules. Clothing workers are a good example of why unions were needed. It was an industry dominated by women, most of them immigrant women. Some of them worked in small factories, others took the work home. Jacob Riis had described the conditions during the 1890s. In How the Other Half Lives he wrote: “From every door multitudes of tired men and women pour forth for half-hour’s rest in the open air before sleep closes the eyes weary with incessant working.” Factories were not much better than working at home. There were no limitation on working hours, safety rules were nonexistent, workers were hired and laid off erratically as demand rose and fell. There was no health insurance and no unemployment benefits. If your family couldn’t help you out, you were just out of luck.

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911

Picture of bodies from the Triangle factory fire.
Triangle Factory Fire 1911 (ILGWU photo)

finally awakened many people to the dangers of unregulated factory work. Pictures like this documented the horror of young women trapped into an unsafe factory. The doors to the fire escapes had been locked to keep workers from stealing fabric or sneaking outside for a break. Gradually most of the public woke up to the fact that regulations were needed to keep employers from exploiting workers. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) grew and through negotiation and strikes finally forged agreements that made many people’s lives better.

Women like Rose Pesotta traveled across the country to organize clothing workers. She went to Los Angeles where the clothing industry workers were mostly Mexican immigrants. Rose was told that Mexican women would never join a union, but she disagreed. She started broadcasting on the local Spanish-language radio station and found a willing audience. As she wrote in her memoir Bread upon the Waters, Cover of Rose Pesotta's "Bread upon the Waters" “Gradually the Mexicans in the dress factories came to our union headquarters, asking questions timidly but eagerly. Some employers, learning of signed membership cards, scoffed: “They won’t stick.” Others were plainly worried. Women not yet in our ranks came with the disquieting news that their boss had threatened to report them to the immigration authorities and have them “sent back” if they joined our union. We promised that our attorneys would fight any such underhanded move.” Gradually the workers were won over, they agreed to strike and eventually the ILGWU was able to ensure them better working conditions through the union.

The ILGWU revolutionized the lives of millions of women across the country, and even though it gradually lost members and strength as the century went on, it remains a shining example of what Americans can do when they work together. The same can be said of other unions which made America a country recognized across the world as a land of promise. The conditions brought about by union workers made the late twentieth century a prosperous time for almost all working families. Today on Labor Day let’s pay tribute to the people who fought to give us unions. They are not always perfect, and sometimes their demands can’t be met, but they have been a blessing for the country. Let’s work with them and not try to wipe them out.    

 

What a difference a century makes

Adele FasickLeave a comment

The recent death of Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine calls to mind the scope and influence of earlier women editors in America. The appointment of Brown as editor of a traditional women’s magazine in 1962 shook the publishing world. Her emphasis on the acceptance of the right of single women to have sex was a bombshell in many conventional suburban communities. I remember as a young mother living in a sprawling housing development in New Jersey the startled reaction of some of my neighbors. One morning I saw a woman down my street sitting on her steps crying because she worried about her husband being seduced by secretaries made daring by Cosmopolitan. Within a few years the domestic life of many women was being reshaped by the bold ideas implanted by Helen Gurley Brown and her magazine.

Portrait of Sarah Hale

Long before Brown, however, women editors had shaped the lives and expectations of American women. Sarah J. Hale, who for forty years ruled over Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the country’s most influential magazines, had a different agenda for her journal. Instead of seeing sexual freedom as the most important empowerment tool for women, Hale crusaded for education. Offering young women an education similar to their brothers was a radical idea. She strongly supported economic independence for woman and wanted them to become teachers and doctors to serve both the community and their families. Unlike Brown, Hale never saw the role of women as extending far beyond the family circle. She wanted women to use their new strength and independence to educate their children and serve their husbands. She never thought of herself as a feminist, but her influence on women’s lives went far beyond what she intended. By supporting and publicizing the founding of Vassar College, she opened the door for girls to leave home to study and work independently of their families.

Education for women wasn’t the only cause Hale worked on. She also created Thanksgiving as a national holiday rather than the quiet New England celebration it had been when she was young. After a long campaign, she persuaded Abraham Lincoln to proclaim the first national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863. Perhaps her work on this had a more lasting effect than any other single goal she pursued. Just think of the millions of dollars spent every year on advertising and merchandizing food and decorations for Thanksgiving celebrations.

Journalists who pull together the work of others to create a magazine, newspaper, or perhaps a television program are often underrated as thought leaders, but many of them have a greater effect on society than the “great books” that cause a stir. It’s the inexorable repetition of a periodical that gradually shapes our ideas far more than one book read during a few days. Perhaps we’ll never know how much Helen Gurley Brown of Sarah J. Hale changed women’s lives, but let’s take at least a few minutes to honor their memories.

Visiting the Past

Adele FasickLeave a comment

What is it about being in a history-laden building or viewing ancient art in a museum that fills us with a sense of wonder? A few weeks ago I was in Paris and visited several of the great museums there. Walking through the 15th century mansion that houses the Musee Cluny, the museum of medieval art, it was impossible not to feel a sense of mystery and wonder. The serene faces of the many images of the Virgin Mary were more calming than a dozen tranquillizers. Yet the medieval period was not was serene. Life was harsh and brutal. Peasants suffered through their short lives, prey to hunger, poverty, and the cruelty of aristocrats. But somehow in their art, they showed a promise of what life, or perhaps heaven, could be like. And all these centuries later those faces still fascinate us with a vision of peace and serenity.

It is not only the religious figures in the Cluny that give us a sense of continuity and achievement. I found it touching to see this sun dial carved into the wall of the building. Somehow a dial that has tracked the movement of the shadows in this courtyard for more than 300 years speaks to me of how people’s greatest ideas can survive. We have no idea of who first set this dial on the wall, but his work (and it probably was a man who did it) has helped generations of people mark the time through their days.

Of course Cluny is not the only museum in Paris that gives us a restorative glimpse of the past. The lovely (and almost never crowded) Musee Guimet with its collection of Asian Art has the West’s largest collection of ancient Cambodian sculpture as well as pieces from Japan, China, Nepal and India.

This wooden Buddha  embodies the very idea of peace and disengagement from the trivial cares of the day.

Visiting a city with a long record of its historic past is quite a change for someone who lives in the today-focused culture of California. It is another reminder of how much we need to hold onto our collective past, to think about it, read about it and if possible visit it. We can find a perspective which is not so easy to find in the clutter of media that fills our lives.

Tragedy in Timbuktu

Adele FasickLeave a comment

For those of us who believe history gives us a way to understand the world we live in, the recent events in Northern Mali have been especially wrenching. Mali is a poor country, but it has a long tradition and a strong culture that gives its citizens shared valued and enables them to live in dignity and to cope with their hard existence. During the last few months, ever since the March coup against the government in Bamako, that culture has been under attack in Northern Mali and especially in the ancient city of Timbuktu.

If you have ever visited the remote city of Timbuktu, you have probably been impressed, as I was, by the exotic beauty of the city. It’s almost ten years since I traveled there with a group of American tourists. We flew on a chartered plane and landed at a modern looking airport after having flown over miles of a lovely sandscape contoured into pale colors and shapes. When we disembarked, we found ourselves almost alone at the airport. We were told that there was only one scheduled flight a week into and out of the city. Eventually we got our hand luggage and piled into all-terrain vehicles, which are the only vehicles that can travel on the unmarked, sand covered roads.

Timbuktu looked like nothing else I’ve ever seen–the buildings are made of mud or stucco, and the roads and open spaces are covered with sand. It’s impossible to tell whether the roads are paved or not. They curve around the city and our drivers zoomed around buildings, donkeys, children, men in long robes and women in subdued colors walking along the streets. Most of the women balanced tubs of water on their heads.

As soon as we dropped our things at the hotel, we were taken to see the mosque, the oldest mosque in Mali. Our guide, who worked for the Ministry of Culture, had a degree from Western Illinois University, and was in charge of preserving the culture of Timbuktu which had been named a UNESCO world heritage site. The mosque we visited was built in the fifteenth century and has been in use ever since. We took off our shoes outside, with the crowd of young boys offering to help, and then followed our white-robed guide into the mosque. He took us through the narrow halls to show us the elaborate carved wooden doors, the tombs of the saints, and a small courtyard. The floors and grounds were covered in sand; the courtyard had one small tree in which a few flame finches fluttered.

We also went to a private library to see a collection of manuscripts. Henry Louis Gates had given the money to build the library, but the collection belonged to a private family. All the manuscripts were in Arabic, the earliest dating from the 12th century, and among them were some of the most prized treasures of Islamic culture.

Our dinner that night was served on the terrace of the upper floor of the hotel. The air was cool by 7:30 when our meal began, the sun had gone down but it was still light. Waiters lit candles on our long table before serving us delicious vegetable soup. Then they brought in a whole roast lamb, which Ballo had arranged for us to have barbecued. The meat was tough and stringy, the result of eating free range lamb. We also had couscous, vegetables, and for dessert a creme caramel. It was delightful dining under the moon (few stars in sight) with a cool breeze blowing. The streets were almost completely quiet and the darkness beyond our hotel was overwhelming.

The next morning we had breakfast on the same terrace. We could look down and see men pulling loaves of bread out of the ovens on the street below. Everything tastes slightly of sand; even the bread had a grittiness from the fine sand that blew into the dough as it was being prepared. Our guide told us that people who live in the city often lost their teeth early because the sand in their food slowly grinds down the enamel.

That trip was in 2003, now all of Timbuktu has changed. A radical Islamist group have taken over most of Northern Mali and determined to destroy the tolerant Islamic culture that had developed there. According to the BBC News “The Ansar Dine group, which is said to have links to al-Qaeda, seized control of Timbuktu earlier this year and said it destroyed several of the city’s shrines as they contravened its strict interpretation of Islam. Ansar Dine spokesman Sanda Ould Bamana told the BBC that Islamic law did not allow the building of tombs taller than 15cm (6in).” The tombs that had stood for hundreds of years were destroyed and so was the magnificent wooden door of the mosque. People in Timbuktu are fleeing to Bamako or to other countries because armed men are roaming the streets enforcing strict sharia laws.

What is it that drives people to destroy the past? What is it that makes warriors think they can erase history and rewrite it as they think it should be? Perhaps we’ll never know the answers, but the least we can do is to try to preserve as much of the history of our world as we can. And we can encourage UNESCO, which has announced that it is concerned about Timbuktu, to act quickly to try to preserve these important cultural artifacts. They are important not only to Malians but to people everywhere who care about human culture.

 

Dorothy Day and the nuns of today

Adele Fasick2 Comments

In recent weeks there have been several news stories about the ongoing tensions between the Vatican and American nuns. After the nuns had been criticized by the Vatican for paying too much attention to social issues and too little to doctrinal concerns, a group of nuns traveled to Rome to speak to leaders about what they felt were injustices in the report. According to the New York Times, “The group’s president, Sister Pat Farrell, said in a statement that during an “open meeting” the group’s representatives “were able to directly express” their concerns. The nuns said they would report back to the group’s board in the United States and determine a course of action to respond to the Vatican.” Americans of all religious persuasions, or none at all will be waiting to hear what the nuns’ course of action will be.

For many people the confrontation between the nuns and the bishops will recall memories of Dorothy Day, a social activist who had no difficulty speaking up to bishops. Dorothy Day was not a nun, but she was an ardent Catholic and a founder of the Catholic Worker movement. A convert to Catholicism, Day decided in the late 1920s to give up secular journalism and start a newspaper devoted to social issues. Working with Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker paper, which started appearing at about the same time that the United States entered the Great Depression. The newspaper soon attracted not only a core of readers, but also a community of people bound by the ideals of social justice and peace.

For several decades the Catholic Worker was a center of ideas and activism for many Catholics. The original house was in New York City and Dorothy’s work was always centered there. The workers were strongly pacifist all through the Second World War, which was an unpopular stance with many Catholics, both laypeople and clergy. After the war they demonstrated against the development of nuclear weapons and refused to participate in civil defense drills and other aspects of the 1950s.

Dorothy Day and the Workers also strongly supported unions, which led to perhaps her most visible struggle with the Catholic hierarchy. When the gravediggers went on strike for higher wages, Cardinal Spellman, representing the Catholic Church that owned the cemeteries strongly opposed them. Dorothy Day and many of her supporters picketed with the strikers, who eventually lost the strike. At one point in this period, Dorothy Day was asked to go to the chancery office where a Monsignor told her she must change the name of the newspaper The Catholic Worker because it was not an official publication of the church. Dorothy discussed the matter with her colleagues and they did not comply with the request. Nothing ever came of the refusal and the Workers and the Cardinal continued in wary co-existence with one another for many years.

Dorothy Day was always a faithful Catholic, but she did not find it necessary to bow to the will of every clergyman. She is quoted in Robert Coles’s excellent book Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion as saying:

[Cardinal Spellman] is our chief priest and confessor; he is our spiritual leader—of all of us who live here in New York. But he is not our ruler. He is not someone whose very word all Catholics must heed, whose every deed we must copy.

As we watch watch the nuns today and their struggles with the way they practice their religious duties, we can hope that today’s Catholic women can also draw the line between following their faith and blindly obeying all the criticisms of the clergy.

What are the children learning?

Adele Fasick2 Comments

An article in the NY Times today tells a worrying tale about how some high school students in high-achieving schools are using so-called “study pills” to increase their performance on exams. The drugs are legally prescribed to many teenagers who complain about an inability to concentrate or a tendency “to stare out the window” during classes. Well, most of us who have finished school can remember long periods of staring out of windows (if we were lucky enough to have classrooms with windows) during classes that seemed long and boring. I remember staring longingly out of an open window from which I could hear the thump of the school baseball team practicing every afternoon during my history class. History was one of my favorite subjects, but when spring came and the sun was shining on bright new grass outside, even stories of Henry VIII and his many wives couldn’t compete. When did staring out of a window become a symptom needing treatment instead of a natural response for young people? Being distracted by new sensations isn’t necessarily a bad thing and surely it would be better for parents and teachers to help kids learn how to cope instead of sending them to a doctor for medication. But trying to produce outstanding children motivates lots of parents.   

The urge to push children into ever-higher achievement isn’t new; the Victorians did the same.  John Stuart Mill is an example of a child whose parents wanted him to excel. His father, a famous philosopher, decided his son would follow in his footsteps, and he started early. According to a Wikipedia article, John Stuart was taught Greek when he was three years old. “By the age of eight he had read Aesop’s Fables, Xenophon’s Anabasis and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic.” The lessons came thick and fast all through his teenage years and he studied dutifully until at the age of twenty he suffered a nervous breakdown, which he later thought was caused by the heavy emphasis on early intellectual achievement. Fortunately for Mill, he pulled out of his depression and went on to have a distinguished career.

Margaret Fuller is another example of an individual whose early life was dominated by a father’s insistence on intellectual distinction. Her position was unusual for a woman, because most fathers in the early 19th century would not have bothered educating a daughter. While I was writing my biography of Margaret Fuller, I found ample evidence that Margaret had very mixed feelings about her precocious education and how it affected her life. Before Margaret was four years old, her father started teaching her to read. She learned easily and within a few months she was reading stories and enjoying them. Almost as soon as she had mastered reading in English, she started on Latin. By the time she was six years old, Margaret was spending her days bent over a book instead of playing with other children. Although she too grew up to have a distinguished career, she sometimes wondered whether her father’s early pushing made her life less happy than it might have been.

It seems as though we haven’t learned much over the years about letting children find their own paths in life. I guess it’s just something every generation has to learn all over again. Meanwhile we can only hope that pharmaceuticals won’t become a regular part of high school life.

A Man Who Noticed Women

Adele FasickLeave a comment

Women from history give us tantalizing glimpses of what life was like for women in the centuries before we were born, but sometimes it’s worth looking at women’s lives through the eyes of men. One of the unlikely observers of women’s lives was the African explorer Mungo Park.  Born in Scotland in 1771, Park was hungry for adventure and travel, and he certainly got his fill of those.

In 1795, he got funding from the African Association in London to explore Africa and if possible locate the sources of the rivers that enabled trade to the interior. The Association wanted someone who could provide an accurate map of Africa. Too impatient to wait for the Association to hire the fifty men originally planned to go with him, he left on May 22, 1795, on the brig Endeavor. After sailing for thirty days, the ship arrived at Jillifree, a town at the mouth of the Gambia River in West Africa.

During all of his travels Mungo Park distinguished himself by paying a lot of attention to African life and to learning how tribal societies worked. He admired the strength and courage of many Africans, but disapproved of the way they treated their women. In one village, Mungo saw a ceremony that shocked him. It started when darkness fell and he heard screams from the forest. Soon a masked man appeared and all of the villagers assembled in the central square. The ceremony began with singing and dancing, but even as they danced, the women were afraid. They knew the ceremony had been started by a husband who was angry with one of his wives, but no one knew whose husband it was. At last the masked man pointed to one woman, and men hurried to tie her to a tree. She was beaten as a punishment for not obeying her husband. The women who watched were expected to learn their lesson and be obedient to their husbands after seeing the harsh punishment.

Mungo Park was captured several times during his travels and held as a captive by tribal chiefs who were suspicious of his motives. He escaped successfully from one captivity by sneaking out of his tent in the middle of the night, but found that the harsh landscape was a greater threat than the chief. He walked for miles trying to find a water hole. As the sun rose, the hot sand reflected heat until the sand began to shimmer. Mungo grew dizzy watching it. He had to find a water hole. Climbing a tree gave him a wider view, but there was no sign of a water hole. The land was sandy and desolate as far as he could see. His horse was thirsty, and too tired to carry him. Hoping the horse would survive even if he himself died of thirst, Mungo removed his bridle. As he did that, his dizziness overwhelmed him and he fainted on the sand.

When he recovered consciousness, Mungo realized the horse had not run off but was munching dry grass nearby. The sun was sinking and the sand was a little cooler. Mungo resolved to make another effort to reach water. He led the horse onward in the direction of Bambara. It was now dark, but Mungo could read his compass by the lightning which continued to flash. Finally the rain came—a downpour. Hastily Mungo spread all of his clothes on the ground so the rain could soak them. He quenched his thirst by wringing and sucking the wet cloth. At last his parched throat had some relief. The horse opened his mouth to let the rain fall on his tongue, and Mungo helped by squeezing water into his mouth too. The water gave them strength to move on.

At last he found a Fulani village, but the people refused to give him food. He turned to leave, and noticed a few huts outside the main village. Hoping to find more sympathy there than from more prosperous citizens, he approached them. At the door of one hut, an elderly woman was spinning cotton. He gestured to indicate that he was hungry, and she immediately invited him inside. There she brought him a bowl of couscous left from the night before. In return for her generosity, he gave her a pocket handkerchief. The kindly woman even provided corn for his horse, so Mungo left her hut feeling more comfortable than he had for days.

When at last Park reached the city of Segu and located the Niger River, he felt triumphant, but he found no welcome among local people. The king of the area refused to see him and once again he had to rely on the kindness of women.  A woman passing by from her work in the fields she saw how tired and hungry Mungo looked.  She invited him into her hut, spread out a mat and told him he could remain for the night. She also prepared food for him and gave him grain for the horse. Then she called the rest of the women of the family together and they continued their work of spinning cotton while Mungo rested on the mat.

As the women spun the cotton they sang, and Mungo soon heard one woman singing a song about him:

“The winds roared, and the rains fell.

The poor white man, faint and weary,

Came and sat under our tree

He has no mother to bring him milk;

No wife to grind his corn.

And all of the women joined in the chorus: “Let us pity the white man; no mother has he”

When Mungo Park finally returned to England, he wrote a bestselling book about his travels in Africa. It remained in print for generations and many people learned from it something about the lives of Africans. The history of the nineteenth century shows that Europeans did not learn enough, but Mungo Park made at least a first attempt in that direction.

Misunderstood Women as Leaders

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Two of the best-known women in history are the Egyptian Cleopatra and Catherine the Great of Russia. Both have been portrayed frequently in popular culture and are known to many non-historians as well as scholars although both lived centuries ago. And even though both of them spent most of their time and efforts on ruling large and tumultuous countries, they are both remembered primarily for the men they had sex with. Their two recent biographers have had to point out that neither of them was as promiscuous as the male rulers of their times and later.
Cleopatra is one of the few rulers of ancient Egypt whose name is still widely known. She has been celebrated in stories and art for century, yet she is almost always remembered as part of a couple. Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” gave way to George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” and a series of other efforts. Even the movie “Cleopatra” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, which finally let her dominate the title, treated the monarch as a lovestruck woman. Furthermore, that movie had a lasting impact on American culture by making the glamorous Taylor the permanent face of the less-beautiful but more powerful real Cleopatra.
Now Cleopatra has become for many people a glamorous figure suitable to be impersonated in Halloween costumes and dramatized in plays for children, but never really taken seriously. The transformation of this powerful ruler into just another femme fatale began soon after her death. As her biographer Stacy Schiff writes: “It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.”
For anyone who would like to get a reasonable idea of what Cleopatra was like and the story behind her misrepresented life, read Stacy Schiff’s great biography,  Cleopatra, available in every public library I’m sure, and also from most bookstores.
Another woman I’ve been reading about recently who suffers from the same problem is Catherine the Great of Russia. Although she was born a German girl named Sophia and became the wife of the heir to the Russian throne almost by accident, she dedicated her life to improving her adopted country. Starting with changing her name to Catherine and her religion to the Russian Orthodox Church, Catherine studied the Russian language and history. Although she was saddled with a mean-spirited and somewhat stupid husband, she seized control of her life and of the country she had adopted.
Her husband, Peter III, had none of her love of Russia and instead tried to follow the model of Prussian military rule. He enraged his own subjects so much that no one complained much when Catherine helped to overthrow him and take the throne for herself. It was a wise move. Catherine was an intellectual who read and corresponded with some of the leading thinkers of Europe. She introduced modern enlightenment into the rigid Russian society, although even she could not completely change the pattern of serfdom and the stubborn resistance of provincial landowners.
Catherine reigned for more than thirty years and changed the country dramatically. Besides introducing Western ideas and developing closer ties with other European countries, she also extended the country to the East. It was during her reign that Russia began to explore Alaska and to establish a presence there. Yet, what is she remembered for in popular culture? It’s mostly for her lovers who helped her politically and made her personal life endurable. They were certainly close colleague and some of them were important political allies, but Catherine’s achievements didn’t depend on them.


Male monarchs are seldom defined by their lovers, but female rulers are. Anyone who reads Robert Massie’s recent biography Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman will come to understand how much more there is to know about her.
Perhaps as we enter this Mother’s Day weekend we ought to think about not only loving the mothers in our lives but looking at them as the individuals they are. Partners and children are an important part of most women’s lives, but they are not the only thing. If we love and respect our mothers, our spouses, and our daughters, we should look at them as individuals and not define them only in their relationships with the men in their lives. Cleopatra and Catherine the Great are not typical women, but they are emblematic of the problem of viewing women solely through the lens of their emotions. We certainly owe all women more than that.

May Alcott: Woman of the Week

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Reading about other people’s lives is one of my favorite activities. Who needs fictional accounts of fantastic worlds when the real world offers so many fascinating stories? Often it’s not the lives of people who had brilliant successes that affect me most; it’s the people who didn’t quite make it. May Alcott was one of these. She was the “sister of the more famous Louisa” as family historians might say.

There were five Alcott daughters. Louisa grew up to be a famous author. Her book Little Women gives readers a glimpse of the lives of the Alcott sisters. In the book they are called the March sisters and the youngest, called Amy in the book, was modeled on May Alcott. Amy loved art, just as May did, but her life was more exciting than the one Louisa put into the book.

May Alcott was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 26, 1840 to Bronson and Abigail Alcott. As a young child she lived in the community Fruitlands, which her father had started. The rules were strict—no animal food, not even milk for two-year-old May. When her mother tried to milk the cow, her father decreed, “We don’t allow milk on this farm. Pure water is the best drink for all God’s creatures.”

“Why can’t we live the way other people do?” his wife protested. That question was one young May Alcott would ask often as she grew older, and she never found an answer.

As May grew up she was independent and ambitious. Most of her friends thought only about getting married, but May had different ideas. She was determined to earn money herself and not depend on a husband’s support. It would not be easy to support herself as an artist. Many girls studied art but when they grew up, they were expected to get married and let their husbands earn money. Professional artists were almost always men. May studied art in Boston, and she gave art lessons, but made so little money that she had to turn to teaching.

May’s life was dramatically changed by the success of Louisa’s book, Little Women.  Now there was money for new clothes and books and even travel. For years May had longed to study art in Europe. The great museums and picturesque castles, churches, and cities of Italy and France were unlike anything in America. May had never seen famous paintings or statues. She had never even seen photographs of them. Instead, she had learned about European paintings by looking at copies made by Americans who traveled abroad. Some of the copies were good, but they were only small imitations of what the artist had created. Now at last she would be able to see the glowing colors of the originals. Louisa had been in Europe once before, when she had traveled as a paid companion to an ill elderly woman, but they had done little sightseeing. She wanted to return to Europe and spend leisurely time introducing May to the places she had seen briefly before.

Two years after the publication of Little Women, Louisa finished writing An Old Fashioned Girl. Now the two sisters had their chance to travel. On April 2, 1870, May and Louisa and their friend Alice Bartlett sailed to France. Everything was different from what they had been accustomed to in New England. Instead of fresh white clapboard houses, they saw homes, some of them centuries old, built of stone. Instead of simple wooden churches, they saw shadowy cathedrals with statues, candles, and stained glass windows. May carried her sketchbook everywhere, always ready to capture the changing sights that surprised her so much.

The study years in Europe were May’s happiest times, but she and Louisa could not remain there long. Their mother was growing old and ill; their sister Anna’s husband died. Louisa went home first to help out and then May followed. For the next several years family responsibilities tied May down. It wasn’t until 1876 that she had a chance to return to France.

This time, May went directly to Paris where she joined two friends from home, Kate and Rose Peckham. The three of them settled into comfortable lodgings and arranged for art lessons. Suitable art classes for women were not easy to find because art students learned to draw people by having live models in class. For many people the idea of women looking at people who were nude or lightly clothed was shocking. Even worse was the idea of having men and women in the same class looking at these models. Because of this, many of the famous art schools in Paris did not accept women. May was disappointed, but she made the best of her situation. She found a teacher, Monsieur Krug, who solved the problem by accepting only women in his classes.

Not only was May a successful student, but one of her paintings was chosen from among the thousands submitted for the Paris Salon exhibit of 1877. May was eager to share her triumph with her family. No longer would Louisa be the only successful Alcott. May wrote to her mother:

Who would have imagined such good fortune, and so strong a proof that Lu does not monopolize all the Alcott talent. Ha! Ha! Sister, this is the first feather plucked from your cap, and I shall endeavor to fill mine with so many waving in the breeze that you will be quite ready to lay down your pen and rest on your laurels already won.

When the first viewing day of the Salon arrived, May went very early to see how her picture was hung. She found it was dwarfed by the huge canvases around it, but thought it held its own because the hanging committee had placed it at eye level where everyone could easily see it. Many of the artists and visitors complimented her on her painting. She felt very festive in her fashionable black silk dress and was surprised at how easily she mingled with the smart, artistic crowd. At last her patience and persistence were being rewarded. After years of being a student, she was finally being recognized as a real artist. She moved to London to pursue her career.

Meanwhile in Concord, the Alcott family was struggling with May’s mother’s failing health. Louisa wrote to urge May to come home and spend some time with her mother. May was torn between wanting to return to Concord and longing to stay abroad. She knew her mother missed her, and she wanted to be with her family at this difficult time. One day she walked to the steamship office to buy a ticket to sail to America, but when she got to the office, she turned back. She was afraid leaving Europe would mean giving up all her artistic hopes. Her dream was to return home with a strong record of artistic achievement to make her mother proud.

In November, that dream ended when May received word that her mother had died. She was overwhelmed with grief and felt guilty about her decision to remain in Europe. Although American friends were kind and helpful, May spent most of her time alone. She avoided people who came to express their sympathy, because she found it difficult to talk about her mother without crying. Instead, she took long walks through the dark, rainy London streets and spent hours in Westminister Abbey listening to organ music. She wrote to Louisa, “I try to do as she would have me and perhaps shall work the better for the real suffering I never knew till now.”

One of her boarding house friends was a young Swiss businessman named Ernest Nieriker. During the darkest days of her grief, she could hear him playing the violin in his room across the hall from hers. He knew the music cheered her, so he would leave his door open as he played.  He also offered to read to her in the evenings when her eyes were tired, or to play chess with her. He and May soon became close friends and their friendship slowly turned into love. Although he earned his living in business, Ernest was deeply interested in both art and music. May found him very congenial, and he encouraged and appreciated her work.

By March, there was another artistic triumph to celebrate. May had two pictures accepted at the Ladies Exhibition in London. But soon she had an even greater event to write home about. Ernest asked her to marry him! He was several years younger than she was, but they shared a love of music and art. Best of all, Ernest encouraged May to continue her artistic career.

May’s father and sisters were astonished at this sudden engagement, but even more startling news was soon to come. Within a few days of their engagement, Ernest received unexpected news. He would have to leave London for at least a year to work for his business in either France or Russia. May and Ernest were unhappy at the thought of being separated for such a long time and Ernest made a bold suggestion:

Why should we not have this year together? Life seems too short to lose so much. If you will consent to forego a fine wedding and fine trousseau and begin with me now, we can enjoy so much together.   

And so May’s life took another turn for the better. The young couple was very happy and soon May was pregnant. She looked forward to having a child and to continuing her artistic career with Ernest’s help. Once again things went wrong. May did not survive the childbirth, although her daughter did. May’s life was cut short and she was never able to fully realize her talents and achieve her goals. To me she is still a heroine because she faithfully pursued her goals and tried to achieve success without sacrificing her family or the people she loved. That’s why she is my Woman of the Week.