History in the Margins

Jennifer S. Tuttle is the Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health at the University of New England (UNE) in Maine, where she directs the Maine Women Writers Collection (an archive within the UNE Library) and co-founded the Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies program. She has published three books on American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman along with myriad other work on the US West, archival studies, gender studies, and health humanities. Her current book project, Dora Mitchell/Dolores Michel: A Literary Biography, illuminates how one woman navigated early 20th-century California’s shifting and racialized terrain, enlarges what is considered to be Black literary women’s historical archive, and reconsiders where and how to look for Black women’s texts. Dr. Tuttle was also designated the 2021-22 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNE and was a longtime editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

Take it away, Jennifer!

Your current work focuses on 20th century Black writer Dora Mitchell, later Dolores Michel.  Are there special challenges to researching women of color, who in some ways have been doubly erased from history?

Yes indeed. I am writing a literary biography of Dora L. Mitchell (1891-1970), a Los Angeles fiction writer, journalist, screenwriter/scenarist, and playwright who often self-obscured through racial passing under the name Dolores Michel. Certainly, one challenge is in tracing her family history, for her mother, Medora, was born with slave status in Virginia; Medora’s father was her and her mother’s enslaver. Abler pens than mine have written about the myriad ways that enslavement disrupts familial self-knowledge; I am still unable to verify even who Medora and her family’s enslavers were, in part because of the reductive and dehumanizing ways enslaved people were listed in antebellum records (if they appeared at all). Added to this are the facts that Medora’s mother did not apparently know how to write and so had fewer opportunities to leave any record of her life, while Medora herself refused to speak of her early life in slavery (“When in a hangman’s house, don’t speak of rope,” she would say).

Another challenge, one that is not unique to women of color but is exponentially worse for them, is the ephemerality of sources; as I often say, most traces of Mitchell’s life and work have quite literally crumbled into dust. Women like Mitchell—Black women, to be sure, but also other women of modest means—simply had less access to high-profile, high-status, and thus more visible and durable publication venues, rendering their work less findable in the historical record. Consider the venues of Mitchell’s creative output. She wrote for the silent film industry as a translator, scenarist, continuity writer, and screenwriter, yet I have been able find barely a hint of this work. Not only were such writers rarely if ever credited, but nitrate film was highly unstable and brittle, and much of it—especially the inferior stock Black-run studios were forced to use—simply has not survived the ravages of time (added to the fact that materials from the Black film industry were less valued and so have not had access to the same preservation resources). I mean, Mitchell wrote the original screenplay for, and assistant directed, one of the earliest westerns by a Black woman—The $10,000 Trail in 1921—and neither the film nor the screenplay is known to be extant. The loss is staggering!

The print venues for her work were equally vulnerable. First, she wrote for pulp magazines—publications that were ephemeral by design. They were made of cheap wood pulp paper and intended as a form of mass entertainment that was assumed to be expendable. Pulp magazines have also long been held in low esteem, so they were rarely kept. Today they are unevenly archived and very difficult to find.

Second, in 1923 Mitchell published a short story in the California Eagle, LA’s preeminent Black newspaper. Many of its issues have been preserved, but the physical pages are rare and often damaged; the microfilmed issues are more widely available, but some are in quite dreadful condition and partly illegible. Finding and making sense of Mitchell’s short murder mystery, called “The Shadowed Witness,” was therefore a challenge. The relevant issues (the story appeared serially over 3 weeks) had been microfilmed decades ago and are now available, thankfully, on Internet Archive and Newspapers.com. However, the scans are both misdated and mispaginated in ways that actually obscure more than they reveal. Untangling those errors took a really long time and required that I use internal evidence from each newspaper page to figure out what its proper date was. (Shameless plug: you can now read the story in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 39.2 [2022], 93-131.)

Third, Michel co-wrote two plays in the 1930s, and at least one of them was performed in a Hollywood little theater (i.e. a small, experimental community theater), but the plays themselves are missing. I only know of them because Michel and her co-authors copyrighted them (though the Library of Congress discarded them years ago, not recognizing their historical value).

Recovering Mitchell’s life and work, then, is tricky because so much of her creative output is susceptible to dismissal, decay, and destruction, but it is every bit as worthy as better-preserved, more highly regarded work, and it is that much more valuable because of how illuminating it can be for our historical understanding. Darnell Hunt has noted that California and Los Angeles have had a formatively Black presence for hundreds of years, yet that Black heritage is largely unacknowledged; uncovering more stories like those of Mitchell and her family (who did not follow the archetypal South-to-North trajectory but instead settled in California) fills gaps in African American history as well as the history of the US West. And just as African Americans are underrepresented in California history, so Black women writers are an underappreciated and underdocumented part of California’s literary heritage, and Mitchell is part of that story. Her life and work are part of women’s history, California history, and American history, after all. The challenges in finding her are greater, but that makes the rewards of doing so greater still.

Speaking as scholar of women writers, what is your favorite research tip for people doing work on historical women?

I have been doing this kind of work for my entire career, and there was a period of time when I thought I basically understood what it entailed, as I had lots of experience finding archives that held materials relating to the women writers I was investigating and really making great use of those holdings. How wrong I was! It was only when I started working on Dora Mitchell, someone who has no archival presence, whose papers were not saved, and who was nearly invisible in the historical record, that I understood how spoiled I’d been while working on well-documented women. Much became newly clear to me. Here are just a couple of the things I have learned.

Court records are immensely valuable, the more acrimonious the better. For my Mitchell book, I am writing about three generations of women: Dora herself, her mother, Medora (Reed Thompson) Mitchell, and her grandmother, Louisa Reed. Early on in my research process, before I knew anything about Medora’s mother, I found the record of Medora’s first marriage to James Thompson (Dora was the child of her second marriage to Peter Mitchell). In this record, Medora listed her mother’s name as Mary, so that shaped my research going forward, and it was basically a dead end for me in trying to understand Medora’s history. Some months later, I tracked down the court records relating to Medora and James’s divorce. Because the divorce was not amicable, depositions were required, including one from Medora’s mother, whose name, it turns out, was not Mary but Louisa. (This, of course, signals another well-known principle of historical research: Sometimes the records are wrong.) For reasons that are not yet clear, on her first marriage certificate, Medora had (thought-provokingly!) listed John and Mary Reed, her former enslavers, as her parents.

Because of Louisa’s dictated deposition, which constitutes the only known written record she left of her life (she seems to have been illiterate, as she signed her name with a cross), I was able to learn not only her actual name but also a great deal about her and Medora. Louisa, who along with Medora and her siblings had self-emancipated from slavery, accompanied Medora and James when they moved from Boston to Denver, so she was able to provide a wealth of biographical detail that would otherwise have been lost. In these legal papers, there was also another deposition that served as a character reference from one of Medora’s clients (she ran catering and laundry businesses out of a shed in her back yard). Had the divorce not been so fraught that such depositions were required, very little would be known about these women’s lives, and we would have no trace of Louisa’s voice.

Historical research is not linear; recursiveness is key. So often with historical research, we can be looking right at a key piece of information, but because we lack other information, we pass right over it. This is why it is important, I have learned, to revisit our sources frequently. For my Dora Mitchell project, Louisa is Exhibit A for this hard-won piece of methodological insight. Before I found those court records, I had located Medora, James, and their daughter Beatrice on the 1880 Denver Census and noted that they were living with a white family for whom Medora was a domestic servant. But it was months later, after I learned Louisa’s real name, that I happened to go back to that census sheet and noticed that Louisa was employed in the same capacity by a next-door neighbor! So much about Louisa (when she came to Denver, where she was living, what she was doing, and how she remained connected to her family) is revealed in that census, and I had been looking right at it for months without knowing what I was seeing.

This same principle was borne out in an even more symbolic way in the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles. In the early months of my research, I was thrilled to track Dora’s burial place to Angelus-Rosedale. Soon enough, I found her sister, Maude, along with their parents. During my first year working on Dora, I visited their graves to pay my respects. After that, many months passed, and eventually I learned Louisa’s name, after which I realized that I had literally been standing at Louisa’s grave (she is next to Medora and Peter) but had not seen her. My eyes had seen the headstone boldly declaring her name, tangible and solid, having stood for more than a century. I myself had stood above her remains. But still, because I would have been looking for Mary, I could not see Louisa for who she was; she was invisible in Dora’s story and illegible in the historical record that I was trying to reconstruct.

So many traces of these people’s lives have been lost; that I well knew. But what I also came to understand in a really visceral way, as Louisa’s prominent headstone and census entry suggest, is that even when historical records do exist, historians may lack the information they need to actually recognize them for what they are, and we don’t always even know it. These experiences have taught me that I need to revisit sources on a regular basis, because sometimes I will see things in them that were not legible to me before. These women humble me as a scholar, in the best possible way. They demand persistence, recursiveness, and the interrogation of assumptions, and they are totally worth it.

 Many of us are familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about historical women.  What type of sources are available in the Maine Women Writers Collection?  

The Maine Women Writers Collection (MWWC) is a pretty amazing place. It was founded in 1959 at what was then Westbrook Junior College by English professor Grace Dow and teacher and administrator Dorothy Healy. Grace had the brainstorm to establish a collection of Maine women’s writing before it was lost to history, and Dorothy--dynamic, committed, and well-connected (also possessing the energy of 10 people)--worked with her to make it a reality.

In this day and age, this achievement might not seem unusual or significant. But consider the state of things in 1959. This was the year that:

• Alaska and Hawai‘i entered the union as states.
• The Guggenheim Museum opened in New York.
•  Mattell introduced the Barbie Doll.
• The proportion of women among college students was 35%--down from 47% in 1920.
• Women could still legally be paid less than men for equal work and suffer other employment discriminations. The EEOC did not yet exist.
• Roe v. Wade (may it rest in peace) was still 14 years away.
• Women could be denied credit on the basis of sex, or required to get a husband’s approval before they could get a credit card in their own names.
•  There were no women on the US Supreme Court; that would take another 22 years
• The Second Wave of the Women’s Movement had not yet begun, and there was no such thing as Women’s Studies.
•  And as literary critic Elaine Showalter has put it, in this period of American history, “with a handful of exceptions,” women writers were “ignored, ridiculed, or scorned.”

There did not exist, then, anything like the MWWC in the scale of its vision, to acknowledge the crucial importance of women’s lives and work to a regional culture like Maine’s. Women had long been collecting and documenting their work, and there was a smattering of local initiatives in other states, but what Grace and Dorothy created and quickly grew was special, and it has only grown in significance since.

One of the things I love most about the MWWC is that our holdings include both published work and unpublished material, such as letters, photographs, diaries, and scrapbooks by authors who may be world renowned, locally known, or anonymous. Among high-profile writers, we have a vast collection, for example, relating to Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), full of treasures including early and ardent letters exchanged with Annie Adams Fields, childhood essays, even a porridge bowl; a rich array of the Honorable Donna M. Loring’s (1948-) papers, documenting her important work as the Penobscot Representative to the Maine Legislature along with other aspects of her life and career; and the only known image, a daguerreotype, of early novelist Sally S. B. K. Wood (1759-1855).

But valuable in their own right are the myriad materials we hold that document the lives of women who never sought publication and, in some cases, whose names we do not even know. For example, we have a large collection of diaries written throughout Maine. Recently, we’ve been working with student interns to transcribe some of these diaries, and the results have been fascinating. One of these belonged to Skowhegan, Maine middle-schooler Grace Hoyt, who, as tweens are wont to do, started writing her diary on New Year’s Day, 1932, and had given it up by June of that year, but not before recording her crushes and disappointments in romance (“My New Year’s Resolution is not to fight and to get done with French men”), her frequent pastime of catching “talkies” at the local movie theater, and her questioning of whether to join a particular church in town. Another is the 1896 diary of Lucy Leighton of Columbia Falls, Maine, which delightfully documents community life in her small town as well as her venture in the fall to matriculate at Westbrook Seminary, which had been coeducational since its 1831 founding. Her diary offers lots of insights into the experiences of late-19th-century women pursuing higher education. The MWWC is housed at the former Westbrook Seminary campus, which is now part of the University of New England, which makes reading this diary all the more meaningful.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to invite readers to reach out to the MWWC. We are open to all and are always happy to welcome visitors from any walk of life--community members, writers, students, teachers, scholars, and others! We also offer research support grants and an annual creative fellowship, along with creative writing workshops and other programs. We are located on the UNE Campus, in the Josephine S. Abplanalp Library, 716 Stevens Ave., Portland, Maine 04103. You can contact our curator, Sarah Baker, at 207 221-4334 or sbaker8@une.edu and visit our website at https://library.une.edu/mwwc/.

A question from Jennifer: You are an accomplished public historian who has done the crucial work of making history popular. In our current historical moment, what do we need from public historians, and what do public historians need from us?

Another tough one. *gulp*

Now more than ever, public historians need to think about what it means to be a public historian.

It is not simply a matter of making the past accessible—though as I have said in other places, accessible does not mean easy. It means looking at stories we think we know from different angles and looking at stories that have been left behind, on the local level as well as on a larger scale. And now it means speaking up. Being a little louder than we might have been before. (I’m a prime example of the need to be a little bolder.)

As far as what we need from our readers, listeners, students, museum goers—and each other—we need you think about the stories we tell and what they tell us about both the past and the present.  To ask us hard questions.  To hold us accountable. And to tell us about stories we might not know.

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Interested in learning more about Jennifer Tuttle and her work?

Check her faculty page

Read Mitchell/Michel’s short detective story, “The Shadowed Witness” and Tuttle’s profile of Mitchell/Michel  in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 39.2 [2022], 93-131

Visit the MWWC website

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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with textile artist Ruth Scheuing