Attic Wife: A Q & A with Marcia Biederman
Attic Wife: The Shocking Case of Agnes Young McAlpin by Marcia Biederman is the true story of an Alaska Native woman who married a young white dentist’s apprentice during the Klondike Gold Rush. Soon regretting his choice, he brought her back to his Pennsylvania home, where his mother and sister, mortified by the interracial marriage, concealed her in an attic. She bore her husband three children even as he refused to be seen with her in public.
Yet, against all odds, Agnes Young McAlpin managed to alert next-door neighbors to her plight, rallying their support to rise up against her abusers. After escaping with her children to a safe house, she sued for divorce in a weeklong trial that made national headlines.
It’s an amazing story.
I’m delighted to have Marcia back here on the Margins to talk about the book and how she wrote it.*
Take it away, Marcia!
What brought you to the story of Agnes Young McAlpin? Why do you think it’s important to tell this story today?
For research related to another of my nonfiction books, I needed to look at early 20th-century Pennsylvania newspapers, and they were filled with coverage of Agnes Young McAlpin’s divorce trial. Much as I tried to put on blinders and get my work done, I kept getting distracted by the small photo of her and the caption identifying her as an “educated” Alaskan seeking divorce from a dentist in Butler, about an hour outside Pittsburgh. “News of Her First-Born’s Death Was Withheld by Butler Family,” declared a subheading, while another added, “Baby’s Grave Is Hidden.”
Obviously, this was quite a story. A glance at other papers published around the same date showed that it was getting widespread coverage. Moreover, the press seemed to empathize with this woman, whom they identified as an Alaska Native—she was Haida—but one sufficiently assimilated to meet their approval. The Butler Eagle said it had expected Agnes McAlpin to be an Indian, Eskimo, or other “low-bred person,” only to find she was a “refined and cultured lady,” whom Kenneth had met in Alaska during the madness of the Klondike gold rush.
Then there were the villainous relatives: the mother- and sister-in-law from hell, who welcomed Agnes by showing her to a stark, unheated attic room, giving her the silent treatment, and concealing her from visitors. They told close friends they felt disgraced by Kenneth’s marriage to a woman they accurately described as “nearly a full-blooded Indian.” Instead of taking Agnes’s side, the husband spent most of his time away from home, ostensibly looking for work, but seldom finding any and never writing to Agnes. She bore him two children, but he refused to be seen with her in public. When she discovered she was pregnant a third time, he conspired with his female relatives to try to abort her against her will, forcing her to flee to Alaska in fear for her life.
Agnes’s story encompasses themes of colonization, racism, and domestic abuse that are relevant today. But I was drawn to it largely because, as one reader of my book put it, “Agnes did stuff.” Ignoring the McAlpins’ objections, she returned to Alaska twice, sometimes without money to buy food on the arduous journey. In Butler, she refused to stay in the shadows. Never mind that the McAlpins did their best to confine her to the attic. Running after her children, or intercepting visitors in her in-laws’ absence, Agnes managed to meet and charm the neighbors. Many were longtime friends of the McAlpins, but Agnes recruited them to her side. When she was ready to sue for her divorce, they offered her a safe house and free legal services, which made her freedom possible.
Writing about a historical figure like Agnes Young McAlpin requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have McAlpin as your constant companion?
It’s interesting that you ask. One of her neighbors, a so-called society matron, testified that Agnes was “good company,” and I agree. I was especially fortunate to find dozens of letters written by her, her husband Kenneth, and her in-laws, beautifully preserved and organized in a family collection. This gave me a window into Agnes’s thoughts and feelings, particularly the letters in which she unburdened herself to a young brother-in-law, Victor McAlpin, whom she thought she could trust.
Kenneth’s letters to Agnes and Victor were also preserved, affording me a look at the spouses’ differing views of the same events, with Kenneth always perceiving himself as the victim. These and other missives from the mother-in-law, the sister-in-law, and the “other woman” who eventually entered the picture helped me bring these key players to life. I’m indebted to the descendants of Kenneth’s oldest brother, Archie, who kept the letters and allowed me access to them.
What type of sources do you rely on in writing about a non-elite woman from the past?
I’ve already mentioned newspapers and correspondence. I also made liberal use of the usual genealogical records: censuses, birth and death certificates, etc. For that, and to find clippings from Butler newspapers, which exhaustively covered the divorce trial, I relied on the staff and volunteers of the Butler Area Public Library.
Like everyone else, I also use search engines, and in this case Google was enormously helpful. Agnes had a father-in-law, Volney McAlpin, who felt sympathy for her and may have protected her, had he not died shortly after she arrived in Pennsylvania. A historical Alaskan newspaper told me that Volney had preceded Kenneth to Alaska, taking several trips there during his lifetime. Googling his unusual name, I learned that Volney had assembled a formidable collection of Haida and Tlingit artifacts, some of which his descendants donated to the American Museum of Natural History in 1945. Just a few years ago, one of these items ended up in an exhibit at the Bard College Graduate Center here in New York.
As a former journalist, I don’t hesitate to reach out to living people who might know anything, however peripheral, about someone from the past. I emailed the Bard anthropology professor who’d put together the exhibit. He referred me to a former graduate student of his who’d done extensive research on the Volney McAlpin Alaskan Collection at the natural history museum. He also told me the exciting news about the cache of letters, including some about a “Native girl” who had married into the family.
Through that connection, I contacted the family guardians of the letters, who invited me to come to Indiana and read them. I learned that the descendants were appalled to learn of Agnes’s mistreatment (which a grandson of Kenneth, related to him through his second wife, discovered in a genealogical search) and were willing to share her story. Indeed, since I began my project, that grandson has reached out to his Indigenous relatives in Alaska, and they’ve stayed in touch.
Agnes Young McAlpin had both Haida and European ancestry. You describe her as a “code switcher”: she had a European-style convent education but was also deeply aware of her Haida traditions. Were there special difficulties in writing about a woman with cultural roots so different from your own?
There were definitely special responsibilities. Taking my cue from art historian Emily L. Moore, who has written about the New Deal totem pole restoration projects that employed one of Agnes’s sons, I made sure to identify myself as non-Native in all communications with potential sources.
Early on, I presented my project to the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, asking their opinion on whether I should proceed with a project, then tentatively supported by a Butler pastor, to memorialize the death of Agnes’s firstborn son by erecting a plaque in the cemetery where his grave is unmarked. The council made clear that, for questions like that, I had to talk to the family. For all my projects, I try to locate descendants, not always successfully. For this book, I saw that it was not optional.
With the help of the then-mayor of Ketchikan, AK, who is also a journalist and poet, I found that at that time, 2022, one of Agnes’s grandsons was alive at 93, although seriously ill. His family, the Alaskan McAlpins, generously invited me to visit them, and I did, twice. The time I spent with them was a delight, and the grandson, who has since died, understood the basic outlines of my project and welcomed me. He’d always known that his grandmother went to Pennsylvania and had to free herself of some sort of intolerable situation. The family was pleased that I could fill in the details. I returned with scans of family photos and useful information. Best of all was spending time with them.
In California, I met two grandchildren of Agnes’s maternal aunt, Cecilia Baronovich Balenti, who was a few years younger than her niece. The two had been close before Agnes married and moved to Pennsylvania, and they revived their friendship later. Cecilia’s grandchildren shared with me photographs, news clippings, and their grandmother’s unpublished writings about her childhood memories of visiting relatives in a traditional Haida village, an experience that Agnes shared with her. The grandchildren also led me to a book, Alaska Silver, written by a white man once smitten with Cecilia, in which he describes Cecilia multiple times and mentions Agnes without naming her. That book deepened my understanding of Cecilia and filled in blanks about a period of Agnes’s life when, while still married, she experimented with living independently.
I also relied heavily on an extensive oral interview about Agnes’s family that one of her brothers, Walter Young, recorded in 1971. By then, Agnes had long been dead, but her brother mentioned her several times in the interview, which focused on their parents, the houses and fishing camps where they spent their childhoods, and the way their father, a hereditary clan chief, melded Christian and Haida traditions. The person conducting this interview—a Canadian anthropologist who was then in grad school—is still active in the field and remembers Walter. Agnes’s other brothers left other descendants whom I’ve talked to or texted, but these first-hand recollections, guided by an anthropologist’s questions, gave me the confidence to write about Agnes’s childhood.
What was the most surprising thing you found doing historical research for The Attic Wife?
That Americans of that eraweren’t as buttoned up as we think. From researching my previous book, The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill, I already knew that abortion, though strictly criminal, was then commonplace. However, I didn’t expect to find abortion playing an important part in this book as well. Her sister-in-law, a licensed physician, had participated in a criminal abortion, for which she evaded legal consequences. She also oversaw the forcible attempts to abort Agnes, which sent Agnes fleeing to Alaska.
On a lighter note, I was delighted to find Agnes complaining in a letter that her husband thought “I’d be contented to sit on my ass the rest of my days.” Well said, but the phrasing surprised me!
What is your favorite research tip for people who want to write about obscure historical women?
Well, I can’t give advice about medieval times, but for American women alive in the late 19th or early 20th century, you’ll probably be using newspapers, vital records, and, if you’re lucky, letters and diaries. To organize those, I’ll share some nuts-and-bolts tips about naming files. Attach a date to every one of your files in the format YYYY MM DD. Then alphabetizing them in File Explorer or Finder will put them into chronological order. It’s amazing how often this reveals cause and effect: earlier events set later ones into motion.
I often use very long file names. In addition to the date, I might include the title of a newspaper (to compare different reports on the same events) and a fragment of a quote you might use, so you don’t go nuts later searching for it. For example, to answer the question about things that surprised me, I searched File Explorer for “on my ass,” and voila!
Marcia Biederman is the author of five nonfiction books about remarkable American women, as well as three mystery novels. A former journalist residing in Brooklyn, New York, she has written more than 100 pieces for the New York Times on subjects ranging from ice dancing to automobile wheel repair, and her guest essays have appeared in the New York Daily News and the Hartford Courant.
For more information about Marcia and her writing, check out her website: https://marciabiederman.com/
*You can read other interviews with Marcia here and here:
From the Archives: Log Cabins, Two Ways
Another post from the History in the Margins archives: this one from 2012.
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I always learn something new when My Own True Love and I head out on a Road Trip Through History. Our recent expedition to Colonial Michilimacinac was no exception.
- I learned that eighteenth century cooks dried pumpkins as well as apples* and used pig bladders to seal crocks of prickled vegetables.
- I had long known that when push came to shove (so to speak) the bayonet was a more useful weapon than the musket to which it was affixed. I had not previously known that with repeated firing the sides of the bayonet became coated with a greasy toxin that meant soldiers stabbed with a bayonet were unlikely to survive even a flesh wound. **
- I was introduced to wall guns–a weapon that combined the blasting power of a cannon with the mobility of a musket. Obviously a besieged fort’s best friend.
But the thing that struck me the most forcibly was the difference between how the British and the French built log cabins in the wilderness.
The Anglo-American log cabin style is what I picture when I think of log cabins: horizontal logs fitted together with notches and chinked with mud.
photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress
It is the form that evolved into WPA lodges, resort cabins, and Lincoln Logs.***
The French Canadian style of construction, known as poteaux en terre, or posts in the ground, used vertical timbers set into trenches, then weather-proofed with chinking and plaster.
It’s a small difference, I know. But it somehow seemed emblematic of the larger cultural differences that exploded into violence along the borders of the British and French colonies–a subject I’ll be coming back to in later posts.
*I may have learned about dried pumpkin before and simply blocked it out. I know it’s un-American, but I do not like pumpkin and cannot understand wanting to preserve it for future use.
**I’m not sure why this came as a surprise. Until the commercial production of penicillin in WWII, infected wounds were a major cause of death in warfare.
***Invented by John Lloyd Wright, the son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Really. I was as surprised as you are.
Selling Opportunity: A Q & A with Mary Lisa Gavenas
As those of you who have been hanging out here in the Margins know, I’ve been spending time over the last year thinking about women entrepreneurs. One of the most interesting things I’ve read on the subject is a new book by journalist Mary Lisa Gavenas: Selling Opportunity: the Story of Mary Kay.
I am pleased to have Mary Lisa here to answer some questions about Selling Opportunity, Mary Kay, and what she learned from writing about the woman and business.
Take it away, Mary Lisa!
What path lead you to the story of Mary Kay Ash and her creation of Mary Kay Cosmetics? Why do you think it’s important to tell this story today?
For a biographer, Mary Kay Ash was the best of both worlds: undocumented American history and the rags-to-riches story of a public figure.
She belonged to a demographic that historians don’t really examine. Mary Kay was a dutiful daughter and diligent student who believed every bromide she ever heard about hard work making dreams come true, over-performed in any task she was assigned, and yet still found herself in a dead-end marriage with two babies by the age of eighteen. As the success of her company demonstrated, she proved to be far from the only woman desperate for a second chance and self-invention.
Writing that story let me dig into the culture of evangelical capitalism, how we are brought up to define the American Dream, traditional gender roles, women’s access to capital, and a lot of other issues that are especially topical today.
All that, plus a page-turning personal history that ended up with Mary Kay being the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange and the only woman in Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time.
A man with that level of influence on American culture would have been the subject of a biography long ago.
Most of my readers will recognize the name Mary Kay as a product—and probably have opinions about direct selling as a business model—but know little about Mary Kay as a person. (Me included before I read your book.) Are there particular challenges in writing about a figure who is best known as a brand?
Women regard beauty brands as a referendum on taste. This is not a brand you’ll see on the cover of Vogue, so the biggest challenge is getting them to pick up the book.
Once you get past that, most people assume this book will be an endorsement of her brand and/or current MLM business models. It’s quite the opposite. But you have to read the book to realize that.
Writing about a historical figure like Mary Kay Ash requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have Mary Kay as your constant companion?
After seeing so much video, reading so much publicity, and talking to so many people who knew her, I found myself thinking, “Hmmm . . . I bet she would have done this next. . . . “ I started developing a “spidey sense” about what she left out of her life story. Intuitions led me to biographical details that nobody else had been able to find: her parents’ divorce and remarriage, her sketchy stepfather, her first husband’s work at a nightclub known as a drug and gambling den, her financial bailout for her third husband, etc.
What was the most surprising thing you learned working on this book?
That anybody could write anything about Mary Kay and get away with it. Hard to imagine that happening in coverage of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or any other male CEO.
During her lifetime, Mary Kay made that work to her advantage. She was an easy story: campy, quotable, cooperative. No fact-checking needed. Even if the story was inaccurate or insulting, she would still send the reporter a thank you note. So she got a lot of coverage, which she used to build her brand.
How does your previous career as a beauty journalist inform your response to Mary Kay, and Mary Kay Cosmetics?
Mention the name Mary Kay Ash to a beauty editor and she will make a moue of distaste, perhaps followed by a graceful shudder. I’m sure that was one of the things that attracted me to the subject.
I left the beauty beat in 1997. Well before that, I was known as the cranky one who asked inappropriate questions at press conferences. Ruth Whitney, Glamour’s editor-in-chief, had recruited me as Beauty Features Editor in the early 1990s, a time when the magazine was using its considerable clout to promote Susan Faludi’s Backlash and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. Whitney added me to the magazine’s coverlines meeting and let me focus on ingredients stories and female entrepreneurship; both years that I was on staff, Glamour was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.
I was not so lucky with other editors at other titles. The perks of being a top beauty editor were phenomenal, so it was not a job that most women willingly surrendered. But, one fine day, I found myself in a limo going from the Chanel sample sale to an all-the-caviar-you-can-eat event at The Four Seasons—bored with being a beauty editor—and I realized it was time to stop. My first book, Color Stories, put the nail in that coffin.
We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past and little-known women. What are the challenges of writing about a prominent woman from the twentieth century?
People suspend their willingness to put themselves in another place and time. As history comes closer to their own lifetime, solipsism takes over. I’ve had people ask why Mary Kay didn’t jump on the bandwagon for second wave feminism. They don’t consider that, in Texas, it was illegal for a woman to open a bank account, take a job, or write a check without her husband’s permission—a law didn’t change until 1968 and a culture that didn’t change until much later.
You also find yourself playing whack-a-mole with the internet. For example: Type Mary Kay’s name into a search engine and Biography.com will dish up an official-looking factoid explaining that she was “hired away” by World Gift in 1952—which was a full year before World Gift was founded and at least two years before Mary Kay ever considered working for them. (Sadly, that one made it into a NewYorker.com piece: proof of how pervasive the disinformation can be.)
Selling Opportunity is as much—or more—a history of direct selling as it is a biography. Why did you decide to take this approach?
There was no way to write about Mary Kay without writing about the business that consumed her every waking hour.
I was already a couple of months into the project before I learned that I was going to have to figure out a lot of the business history for myself. The major work on the subject, sociologist Nicole Woolsey Biggart’s wonderful Charismatic Capitalism, published in 1989, included a high-level history of early direct sales companies. But, as I tracked down original documents of those early companies, I found an ad hoc, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, improvisatory industry and not the organized, intentional enterprises described in her book. I also saw found brilliant African-American businesswomen, like Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker, who had not been mentioned.
So I took a different approach. Borrowing from my start as a reporter, I did “history from the ground up” documentation in imitation of my heroes Studs Terkel and the late Mike Wallace, who headed the Gotham Center for New York City, where I was listed as an “expert resource” from 2003–2015.
I saw Mary Kay as a figure who—like Henry Ford or Dale Carnegie—synthesized cultural influences and then sold that synthesis back to her customers. She was a one-woman historical feedback loop.
Readers have alternately described Selling Opportunity as a hagiography or as a hatchet job, depending on how they feel about Mary Kay Ash. Why is Mary Kay such a polarizing figure?
Class prejudice. Mary Kay was as a working class Southern girl who became a teenage mother. She loved Liberace. She drove pink Cadillacs. She wore big wigs and the kind of jewelry that fashion magazines do not find to be in good taste. People either embrace that as authenticity or run far and fast in the opposite direction.
Regional prejudice plays a part too. Mary Kay is identified with traditional gender roles, the motivational speaking industry, the Southern Baptist Convention, and conspicuous consumption. Those are not topics beloved by legacy media.
Then there’s politics. Donald Trump ran an MLM. Betsy DeVos, his former Secretary of Education, is married to the CEO of Amway. His former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was a spokesman for a nutritional MLM. Lumping Mary Kay, who had a massive stroke in 1996 and died in 2001, with current MLM culture gives any pundit a lot of clicks.
Selling Opportunity straddles the boundary between biography and business history. How did you balance those components in telling Mary Kay’s story?
Mary Kay was an ideal subject—a one-woman history of direct selling. Her life touched on everything I needed to tell that story.
What she didn’t experience directly, she experienced indirectly through her many marriages. For example: Husband Number Two started with the old tea wagon traditions inherited from the 19th century, then moved to Fuller Brush, the company that changed the image of the door to door salesman; thanks to Husband Number Four, she had a sister-in-law who founded an outrageously successful company that later provided the model for Mary Kay’s own recruiting and rewards; Husband Number Five had been involved in one of the era’s most notorious network marketing scams. And so on . . .
Your previous book, Color Stories, is an engaging look behind the scenes in America’s beauty industry. Was it a challenge to make the leap to a historical narrative?
A lot happened between that book and this one.
Color Stories came out in 2002, after I made the switch from lifestyle to business reporting, a beat that tends to integrate lots of historical narrative. I was working full-time, finishing a master’s degree in the history of material culture, and writing an academic reference, The Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear (Bloomsbury, 2008). That book included hundreds of biographies and brand histories, so that gave me plenty of practice.
After that, I was looking at PhD programs when I won a Leon Levy Fellowship for Biography. That was a life-changing experience: I had a full year to research, develop Mary Kay’s story, and discuss my work with distinguished practitioners. When the fellowship ended, I also benefited from a year at the Wertheim Study of the New York Public Library.
Unfortunately, I had to put reporting on hold for a dozen years because I became a self-supporting single mom—that “Can you be in Shanghai by Saturday?” schedule doesn’t work when you’re raising a child—but I was able to sneak in some academic writing and conference presentations. It’s no coincidence that this book finally came out the same year that my son started college.
Is there anything else you wish I had asked you about?
I changed my writing style for this book. Selling Opportunity uses a lot of idioms to help readers understand characters who used those tropes.
I also committed to a non-academic writing style. True, this book has over a thousand end notes, but I didn’t want it to read that way. Going back to Terkel and Wallace again, I am a fan of accessible history—that’s how I became a fan of your blog.
After her start as a reporter and editor on daily newspapers, Mary Lisa Gavenas became an editor at Mirabella, Glamour, and InStyle magazines, was twice a columnist for ELLE, and freelanced for publications ranging from Salon to Fast Company. Writing for both the academic and popular press, she is the author of Color Stories: Behind the Scenes in America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry (Simon & Schuster) and The Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear (Bloomsbury, 2008). Her current book, Selling Opportunity, a NYT Editors’ Choice, grew out of her fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Follow her online at https://marylisagavenas.com/