Talking Abut Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Stephanie Gorton
Stephanie Gorton wrote Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America (2020), a finalist for the Sperber Prize for journalism biography. She has written for The New Yorker online, Smithsonian online, The Paris Review Daily, and LA Review of Books, among other publications, and been featured on radio shows including On Point. Previously, she held editorial roles at Canongate Books, The Overlook Press, and Open Road. She was a fellow with the Logan Nonfiction Program at the Carey Institute for Global Good in 2021. Gorton lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her family.
Those of you you are regulars here on the Margins know that I am all about historical women journalists these days, which means I’ve had Citizen Reporters on my radar ( and my TBR pile) ever since it came out. I was thrilled to have a chance to learn more about the book.
Take it away, Stephanie!
What path led you to Ida Tarbell? And why do you think it is important to tell her story today?
I didn’t set out to focus on Ida Tarbell; she’s been the subject of some great biographies already. Originally, I wanted to write a history without a traditional main character, a kind of survey of the muckraking journalists in the McClure’s Magazine group and the stories they told. But the research entailed was overwhelming, and with a half-dozen subjects who had different trajectories and timelines, the narrative fell flat! After six years of research, I took the difficult step of putting the whole draft away for a few months. When I finally looked at it again, what immediately stood out was that I had unwittingly gotten wrapped up in Tarbell’s story and especially in the collaborative, sometimes exploitative relationship she had with her editor, S. S. McClure.
Tarbell’s work and legacy are worth getting to know today for several reasons. When it comes to the craft of journalism, Tarbell’s self-imposed ethics have become standard: confirming sources’ reports with a separate source wherever possible, for instance. Her History of the Standard Oil Company still stands as one of the most influential works of twentieth-century journalism, alongside the reporting of people like Rachel Carson, John Hersey, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and Edward R. Murrow. The Standard Oil series alone had such an impact on public opinion it has been credited with driving the 1911 Supreme Court decision dissolving the Standard Oil monopoly. But it’s not only deeply worthy; it’s a page-turner. The language is fresh, and the facts unfold according to a sensibility that’s clearly familiar with drama, with the dynamics of great fiction, I even often thought of TV documentary series and the elements that keep you hooked through a long series. Tarbell’s memoir mentions how she used to hide away in her parents’ house with a slice of lemon cake and read Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and there are absolutely in her articles an almost novelistic cast of noble characters and enterprises, shadowy schemes, and a kind of vivid, small-grain level of detail that’s hard to put down once you start reading.
Apart from her genre-defining writing and its transformative impact on antitrust history—a history that is certainly relevant now, when our lives are tracked by Amazon, Facebook, and other monopolistic behemoths every day—Tarbell was a remarkable person. She shunned fame, navigated a workplace that demanded all emotional and intellectual resources, and was kind of a bad feminist in that she never supported women’s suffrage. I think there’s a lot of insight to be gained in exploring complexities like that, in addition to the aspect of her character most intriguing to me: she held herself to a standard of meticulousness that never relented and required severe compromises in her personal life.
Ida Tarbell was well-known in her day, but today often appears as a secondary character in histories of her period. Why do we tend to forget, or at least minimize, the roles women play in history?
History textbooks have a lot to answer for. Thinking of how I first studied American history, going from one presidential administration to the next, many figures and cultural shifts were relegated to colorful context. That framework tends to stay with us through adulthood: so many works of narrative history dive deep into the lives of authority figures, or recount wars, or look at a particular piece of legislation. Marginalized groups don’t get to be part of the “real” story. For a long time, women were largely excluded from the realm of politics, at least on paper, so their achievements tended to be sidebar material: women’s history, not American history. I’m always catching ways in which I’ve been formed by this thinking myself.
Consequently, what I’ve frequently heard is that Ida Tarbell and Ida B. Wells are the same figure in people’s minds: two reporters of the same name in the same era, doing investigative work, but with a huge difference–Wells was risking her life because she was black and investigating lynching. Similarly, many people know the term “muckraking,” but sometimes use it interchangeably with Yellow Journalism – the two are very different, and how you value one shouldn’t color how you view the other! The press had a transformative role during the Gilded Age and that era has many parallels to today, so I wanted to give it center stage.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a narrative history of the birth control movement, focused on activists Mary Ware Dennett and Margaret Sanger, tentatively titled The Icon and the Idealist. The book will track their campaigns to legalize birth control against what was happening culturally from the 1910s to the 1930s—urbanization, modernist literature, silent film, the 1913 Armory show, for example.
Dennett is a fascinating figure, though her belief that birth control should not be subject to gatekeeping by physicians—that access to contraception was a free-speech issue, not a doctor’s-privilege issue—did not end up succeeding. She’s the “idealist” of the title. Sanger’s name is more familiar to us today, but what’s less known is that many of her arguments and achievements can be traced to her contest with Dennett. Their contrasting visions and strategies have much to teach us today, both about how we as a society have adjusted to the idea of women’s bodily autonomy and the risky, happenstance ways in which grassroots activism sometimes leads to legislative change.
A question for Pamela: Who’s more challenging to write for, children or adults?
From my perspective, children are definitely harder to write for, though I think that says as much about me as it does about children and children’s books. Even when I’m writing for adults I don’t always have a clear grasp about what I can expect people to know.* That problem is even worse when I’m writing for kids. (To be honest, even when I was a kid I didn’t know what I could expect other kids to know.) In my last book for kids, Across the Minefields, I was surprised when my editor asked me to add a sentence or two explaining World War II early in the book.
Also, even though I am good at making complex ideas understandable, my default style is complex sentences. This does not work for the 8-12 year old set. Which means I write a draft as simply as I can. Then I go back and break down sentences into their constituent parts—and take out any phrases like “constituent parts” that slipped in when I wasn’t looking.
It is a challenging and profoundly satisfying process.
*Luckily I can always call on My Own True Love and my BFF from graduate school for a reality check. I regularly have conversations with both of them that start with “Is this something everyone knows?” It is amazing to me how often the answer is know—er, no. (A Freudian typo if there ever was one.)
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Want to know more about Stephanie Gorton and her work?
Check out her website: stephaniegorton.com
Follow her on Twitter: @sdgortonwords
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Come back tomorrow for a whole bunch of questions and an answer with author and art historian Bridget Quinn, whose latest book was described by NPR’s Susan Stamberg as “spunky attitudinal, SMART writing,” (Now that’s praise worth having!)
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Nancy Rubin Stuart
Nancy Rubin Stuart is an award-winning author, journalist, and television writer and producer who specializes in writing books about women and the world around them. She is the author of eight books that highlight the lives of important but often forgotten women, including Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, The Reluctant Spiritualist, American Empress and Isabella of Castille. In her most recent book Poor Richard’s Women, she traces the little-known stories of the women Benjamin Franklin loved and lost.
Nancy is also the Executive Director of the Cape Code Writer’s Center.
Take it away, Nancy!
How do you chose the subjects for your biographies?
I always start with questions about potential subjects.Why did a woman do certain things, what made them remarkable and what were the personal consequences of their actions? It’s those questions, that mystery, which motivates me to learn more about them through research. Often I cannot learn enough about them to consider them suitable subjects for a book; fortunately, I’ve been able to find a few.
One example of that is Poor Richard’s Women, which began with my questions about Deborah’s marriage to Benjamin Franklin. Their marriage was presumably happy for well over a generation but later they lived across apart for fifteen years, Deborah alone in Philadelphia, Ben with another women in London. Even so, the Franklins continued to send each other affectionate letters and exchanged many presents. How could that be explained? Ultimately I believe I answered that question in my latest work.
In other words, curiosity is a starting point for my work. To me one of the best thing about being a writer is the worlds I investigate, the lives I live vicariously, and the challenge of putting those experiences in print.
Several of your books, including your newly released book, Poor Richard’s Women, tell the stories of women who are best known because of their relationships to men. Are there special challenges in writing about a woman whose biography is overshadowed by that of a famous man?
There are many challenges writing about a woman whose life is overshadowed by her famous mate.
The first challenge is to establish why a women deserves mention beyond her traditional role as mate and mother of his children.
Another challenge involves sources. All too often the correspondence of historical women has been destroyed or only partially preserved. Those gaps are disturbing and leave a series of questions. How much then, can a biographer reasonably and responsibly assume, given an absence of certain facts. That’s a serious dilemma for biographers of women married to famous men
Finally and perhaps most crucial of all, can the biographer learn enough about a woman to add dimension to the life of her famous mate? Until very recently most biographies about famous men have centered upon their worldly accomplishments with only brief mention of their personal relations. Since our personal relations are so closely related to our outward accomplishments, I believe that information is essential for a real understanding of a famous man’s life.
For instance, Mary Todd Lincoln was said to be a spendthrift. How did that effect Abraham Lincoln’s anxieties during the Civil War? After the death of Thomas Jefferson’s wife he became intimate with Sally Hemings. How did that affect his subsequent ideas about slavery?
One of the most important discoveries I made while researching Benjamin Franklin’s women was the realization that despite his iconic image as a model of discretion (as an “archrationalist’ in the words of a recent reviewer) he struggled throughout his life with the opposing instincts of prudence and passion.
You work as a screen-writer in addition to writing biographies. What do you see as the role of film in introducing history to a popular audience?
Ideally, film is an excellent way to introduce history to popular audiences.
By definition, however, a popular film must have compelling characters, a dramatic story line and a satisfying ending. All too often that means including violence, sexuality and sensational exploitation of an event or a historical character’s life. Consequently, films that introduce history to a popular audience inevitably involve some distortion.
Another obstacle are the high costs associated with creating a film about an earlier historical era.
Today I am pleased to hear that some efforts are finally being made among film makers to portray women in roles other than as sexual or nurturing beings. Those two roles were standard for women in earlier films and while that may be changing, it remains more a hope than a promise.
A question for Pamela: What are the differences between writing the history of a woman and that of a man?
Yikes! Cutting right to the heart of the matter!
I belong to a roundtable of women who write biographies of women, which is part of Biographer’s International. We struggle with this question in one form or another at almost every one of our monthly Zoom meetings.
Some differences are practical:
- Sources can be , ahem, problematic. As people have noted many times in these interviews, it can take perseverance, imagination, and luck to find sources for even well-known women. And even when those sources exist they often come with a certain amount of attitude, especially in earlier periods when the sources are often written by men about women rather than the women themselves. (Trash talking about powerful women is nothing new.) Writing about “ordinary” women is even more challenging; it requires close reading and a willingness to look beyond the archive and traditional sources.**
- In European-based cultures, in relatively modern periods, women change their names at various points in their lives, adding an element of complexity to the hunt.
- Etc.
But there are also differences on a more conceptual scale.
- • Women’s lives are often defined by the men around them: Nancy Rubin Stuart is not the only author I’ve interviewed for this series who writes about women best known for their relationships to men. She isn’t even the only one this year. Often women enter history as “the wife of” a famous man, even while his fame obscures her own contributions. Whenever I see an acknowledge by a writer or scholar of an earlier age thanking his wife for her “help” in preparing his manuscripts, I now wonder how much she did beyond typing.
- We tend to assume that women’s lives stood apart from the large-scale events of their time, and consequently fail to notice their role in those events. As a corollary to that, we often assume women’s lives have traditionally been “smaller” and tend to focus on women who are “firsts” in fields previously (or still) dominated by men.
- As a result, it is not enough to simply tell the story of an individual woman or a group of women. Writing about women involves considering why they were forgotten in the first place.
At least that’s my take on a tough question.
*An excellent organization for any writers in the audience who write biography, or history with biographical elements, and have been looking for a home. I found my people when I joined BIO.
**Obviously this is also true for other “marginalized” people—a term I have problems with because it sometimes seems that more people are marginalized than not in any given time and place. Use of the term disguises that fact.
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Interested in learning more about Nancy Stuart Rubin and her work?
Check out her website: www.nancyrubinstuart.com
Follow her on Facebook: Nancy Rubin Stuart, Author
Connect with her on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nancyrubinstuart
Follow her on Twiter: @newestwords
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with journalist Stephanie Gorton, author of Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America
Talking About Women’s History: A Whole Bunch of Questions and an Answer with Leslie Goddard
The women I interview for this series come to me from a lot of different sources. Some of them are people I know from writing and history groups.(Or Twitter. Don’t tell me that social media is a waste of time.) Some of them are friends of friends. I found Leslie Goddard on a list of programs sponsored by our bank. As soon as I read about the work she does portraying historical women, I tracked her down.
Leslie Goddard, Ph.D., is an award-winning actress and scholar who has been portraying famous women and presenting history lectures for more than ten years.
She holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University specializing in U.S. history and American Studies as well as master’s degrees in both theater and museum studies. A former museum director, she is the author of two books on Chicago history and currently works full-time as a historical interpreter, author, and public speaker.
In her email to me, Leslie confessed that she had so much fun answering the questions that she got a little carried away.
Take it away, Leslie!
What inspired you to portray historical women?
My background is in theater. I did a lot of acting in high school and college, and my undergraduate and master’s degrees are in theater. But my career aim was to work in history museums, so I went on to get a Ph.D. in history and worked for abut 15 years in the museum work. One of my first jobs was at a local historical society, where someone found out I had a theater background and asked me to portray a famous local woman. That was the first portrayal I did, and it was fascinating to see how different it was from reading about a person in a book. So I created another portrayal, this time of Bertha Palmer, the Chicago socialite and philanthropist. And it was surprising how many groups wanted that kind of program. That’s what really set me on this unusual career path. Everyone I know who does historical portrayals gets into from a slightly different place. Some people start out as teachers or librarians or storytellers or actors.
How do you chose the women you portray?
There are a few criteria I use. First, it has to be someone whose story I find particularly compelling. If I have to live with someone in my head for a year – years, really – it has to be someone whose story is fascinating or unexpected or unusual or in some other way compelling. It doesn’t necessarily have to be someone who is a “hero”, but there has be some rich depth there. Second, because it takes about a year to put together a new program, there has to be enough interest out there among the general public to make the program popular. I’ve created some portrayals in the past of characters who I found fascinating – the temperance advocate Frances Willard, for example – but there just wasn’t enough demand to justify the work involved in researching, writing, rehearsing and memorizing a full-length program, so I’ve had to retire a few characters like her. I also like to have characters who reflect a broad range of historical eras and fields of expertise. The character I’ve done who is farthest back in time is the novelist Jane Austen. The character I’ve done who is closest to today is probably Jackie Kennedy. I have a scientist and author (Rachel Carson), an artist (Georgia O’Keeffe), a pilot (Amelia Earhart), a novelist (Louisa May Alcott), and so on.
Over the years, you’ve portrayed a number of different women. Do you have a favorite, or two?
It sounds trite, but it really is like choosing your favorite child. I always choose characters whose stories are compelling to me, so they’re all fascinating in my view. That said, there are a few I particular like performing: Titanic Stewardess Violet Jessop (I just like the way that script turned out), Amelia Earhart (personal heroine of mine, plus the costume is much more comfortable than many), Eleanor Roosevelt (another personal heroine of mine, and her story has so many great inspirational sides to it).
For the most part you portray women who are not forgotten. Are there particularly challenges in doing programs about women who people think they know something about?
Absolutely. I do mostly portray women whose names are well-known, simply because I need to make sure there’s enough of an audience out there to make it worth the time and effort of creating a portrayal. In the past, I’ve had to retire some characters who just weren’t well-enough know even though I loved their stories. The silent movie star Mary Pickford, for example. But when it comes to so-called famous women, there are usually sides of them we don’t know as well. I was reluctant at first when someone asked me to portray Jackie Kennedy, in part because I don’t look very much like her, but also because I thought she was too well-known. But I was surprised. Jackie Kennedy is remembered mostly for her fashion, her youthful elegance and her warmth as a mother. Those are all true, but it means sometimes that means we overlook what a skillful and diplomatic political wife she also was. She gave campaign speeches in Spanish, she fought to preserve Lafayette Square, she brought the best in American performing arts to the White House and on and on. A lot of what we remember about the public image of the Kennedy years – the youth, the glamour, the focus on the arts, historic preservation – was largely due to her efforts.
Which of your programs is requested most often, and why do you think that is?
It really changes every year. Most often, it has to do with something that’s timely. In 2017, when the musical Hamilton opened in Chicago, my portrayal of Eliza Hamilton was really popular. In 2012, which was the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking, I did my Titanic stewardess portrayal a lot. Last year, I did 47 presentations of my Betty Crocker lecture, which was both new and timely since Betty Crocker turned 100 years old in 2021. The programs that consistently remain popular, year after year after year include my portrayal of Amelia Earhart, my lecture on Marshall Field’s, my portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt, and my lecture on Chicago candy. I think some of that might be due to programs that just came together well, with scripts that flow and stories that move to a satisfying ending. But they are also topics that remain universally appealing and that’s probably the main reason.
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
Every woman is so different in terms of how much research materials is out there. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote something like 27 books and published a daily column six days for many years. She received 300,000 letters annually as First Lady. For her, it was difficult to winnow down a script to fit just an hour. Jackie Kennedy, on the other hand, never wrote an autobiography or kept a diary and she disliked interviews. The struggle there was how to get inside the head of someone who was so private. I like the challenge of finding primary source materials and then extracting from them a story that fits together cohesively and reveals something about a person.
Do you think Women’s History Month is important and why?
We sometimes forget how recently Women’s History month became a thing. It was only established on a national level in 1987. When I was growing up, in the 1970s, there was almost no women’s history in my school. I remember one children’s book about a woman – Helen Keller – and that was pretty much it. My high school American history textbook was mostly about politics and wars – two areas where women historically have been relegated to a minor role. One book devoted two paragraphs to the entire women’s suffrage campaign – a campaign that ended with the doubling of the American electorate, the largest single increase in American history. Things are much improved today but there is still a need to call attention to the often-overlooked contributions women have made to U.S. history. Part of the reason I do women’s history is because there is so much for us to gain as a society when we remember women’s contributions. Acknowledging the contributions women have made in so many areas – peace, social progress, equality – it’s the best way we can encourage and inspire women today to participate in society, to work towards peace, social progress and the whole full flowering of human rights and human freedoms. That sounds awfully lofty, perhaps, but to me, it’s absolutely true.
What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?
I’ve always thought of the “great people” in history as being somehow extraordinary in ways ordinary people could never emulate. But when you really look at life stories, most people are far more similar to each other than they are different. Yes, women like Eleanor and Jackie came from socially and economically prominent family, but they shared the same emotions everyone else did. Eleanor struggled with shyness as a debutante and self-doubt as a mother. Her first reaction at the news of FDR’s election in 1932 was to burst into tears. Jackie Kennedy worried she was a “dud” as a politician’s wife. Yet these ordinary people went on to do extraordinary things. It’s the fact that they share the same emotions as everyone else that makes their stories so amazingly compelling.
Question: What was your best-performing blog topic and why?
Here’s where I make an embarrassing confession: I don’t track stats on my blog. Every now and then I check how many people I’m reaching in total. Otherwise, I let it go. I realize that this runs counter to much advice about “best practices”. But I decided it was more important to think about individual readers and building real relationships. I love the fact that readers send me emails with comments on posts, ideas for posts, or just links to things they think I might find interesting.
That said, I think these Women’s History Month interviews are some of the most popular posts I run. Every year I hear from people who hope I will do it again. Music to a writer’s ear!
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Interested in learning more about Leslie Goddard and her work?
Check out her website: http://www.lesliegoddard.info
Follow her on Facebook: Leslie Goddard Presents
Read this article: Leslie Goddard, Historical Interpreter
Watch some video clips:
Eleanor Roosevelt: https://youtu.be/H_KBCJtrK-Q
Amelia Earhart: https://youtu.be/oBz5geNIbSA
Video profile: https://vimeo.com/76922882
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historian Nancy Rubin Stuart, whose most recent book examines the (many) women in Ben Franklin’s life.