Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Kathryn Atwood
Kathryn J. Attwood has written multiple young adult collective biographies on women and war for the Chicago Review Press, and edited Code Name Pauline, the memoirs of WWII SOE agent Pearl Witherington. Her first book, Women Heroes of World War II, gets all the attention, but her fifth, Courageous Women of the Vietnam War, was honored with an award that resembles the Newbery Medal if you don’t look too closely.
She has been seen on America: Facts vs. Fiction; heard on BBC America; published in the Historian and War, Literature & the Arts; and featured as a guest speaker at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, the First Division Museum at Cantigny Park, and the Atlanta History Center. In addition to writing, she is part of the musical duo, The History Singers, who combine their passions for music and history in programs that use music to both entertain and educate.
Take it away, Kathryn!
How do you choose which women to include in your books?
The easiest women to locate were those who were already famous prior to whichever war I was writing about at the time, or those who became so because of their war work. But what simultaneously fascinates and saddens me are the thousands of ordinary women who acted on their conviction and then disappeared post-war, their stories lost to history. To represent a few of them, at least, I searched through collective biographies, small publishers and indie book reviewing sites.
In addition to writing women’s history, you give musical lecture programs that place classic American folk, pop, and war-related songs within their historical context. (Which sound fascinating, by the way.) Is there any imaginative cross-over between your two projects? What can we learn when we use music as a historical source?
Some of my most precious childhood memories involve music: sitting at the piano with my dad as he taught me how to harmonize or singing second soprano with my mom in a small women’s church ensemble. I think the WWII generation must have been filled with music lovers, like my parents, or at least that’s the impression I got during the 2010s when my husband and I sang WWII songs for an organization called Pillars of Honor, run by some founding members of Honor Flight. The vets at these events would always sit in the front rows, most of them beaming and singing with us on every song: “We Did it Before and We Can Do it Again”, “I’ll be Seeing You”, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”, “Any Bonds Today?”, “This is the Army Mr. Jones”, “I’ll Walk Alone,” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”, “It’s Been a Long, Long Time”, and the “Star Spangled Banner.”
Multiple radio stations use the tagline “The Soundtrack of our Lives” which is exactly what we try to accomplish when we present our programs: singing the soundtrack of people’s lives from different historical eras. In the case of the WWII vets, we were bringing them—and ourselves! –back to the days when they were saving the world from fascism. Heady stuff!
What work of women’s history have you read lately that you loved? (Or for that matter, what work of women’s history have you loved in any format? )
Fire Road: The Napalm Girl’s Journey through the Horrors of War to Faith, Forgiveness, and Peace by Kim Phuc Phan Thi. This memoir came out while I was turning in the manuscript for my Vietnam War collective biography, but Kim still took time away from promoting her book to write a glowing endorsement for mine. My chapter on Kim was based on the Denise Chong biography—it was too late to utilize the memoir at that point–but I recently suggested it for one of my book clubs and they all went wild over it. War stories have the potential to inspire because of the heroism they often illuminate, but war is always a destructive force that creates far too many victims. Kim’s story is, sadly, in this category, but the way she eventually triumphed makes her memoir a phenomenal inspiration.
Question for Pamela: You’ve written many books but only the last two feature women’s history. What caused the switch? And do you have more women’s stories on the back (or front) burner?
You could argue that I returned to my first historical love when I wrote my book on Civil War nurses, Heroines of Mercy Street. As a child I read every book I could find about notable women in history, because we just didn’t show up in history as it was taught in the public school system. Even the big names like Joan of Arc or Queen Elizabeth I, were relegated to sidebars.
As those of you who have been reading History on the Margins for a while know, I have lots of historical interests. That said, for the foreseeable future, I will be writing about women in history. Because we were always there.
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Interested in learning more about Kathryn Atwood and her work?
Check out her websites: www.kathrynatwood.com and www.historysingers.com
Follow her on Instagram: Kathryn Atwood
Follow her on Goodreads: Kathryn J. Atwood
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Come back tomorrow for more juicy Women’s History Month content!
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Eve M. Kahn
Independent scholar Eve M. Kahn is the former Antiques columnist for The New York Times. Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857-1907 (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) won prizes from organizations including the Connecticut League of History Organizations and the Connecticut Center for the Book. Kahn contributes regularly to the Times, The Magazine Antiques, Apollo magazine and Atlas Obscura. Her book in progress is provisionally titled Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: The Forgotten Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris, 1860-1914.
Take it away, Eve!
Photograph by Katherine Lanza
Q: Writing about a historical figure like Mary Rogers Williams requires living with them over a period of years. What was it like to have her as your constant companion?
A: One of the funniest moments came right after the book was published—when I first had it hand, with Mary’s luminous painting on the cover and the wonderful heft of the high-quality paper. I vividly dreamed that I was having lunch with Mary. It was just the two of us, outdoors, on some kind of restaurant terrace in Italy, overlooking a flowered hillside. I handed her the book and, blushing a little, told her that I hoped she’d like it. Then I felt my face drain of color: oh no, it tells her she’s going to die young. I started to apologize, stammering, almost rising up in my seat. But she took it all in stride: “Oh, don’t worry; knowing that helped me get a lot done in the short time I had.” Of course it makes no sense—how would my book published 112 years after her death have forewarned her? But I grew to care so much about her feelings, while living amid and poring over her handwritten letters for so many years. And I’ve also had nightmares, while traveling, that some part of her archive has gone missing—I wake up jetlaggedly convinced a sketchbook is gone, a box has been accidentally thrown out. Her papers, just to be clear, are well stewarded. They’re in neat chronological order, boxed on shelves in my bedroom, they’ve been transcribed in backed-up files, and they’re a promised gift to Smith College.
Q: One of the questions I’m fascinated with right now is how biographers name their subjects, particularly when writing about a woman. Did you choose to use Mary or Williams (or something else) in your book, and why?
A: I call her Mary. I alerted readers, however, that her family called her Polly, although I have never dared call her that even after a decade in her company. Even to her closest friends she was Mary or Miss Mary. Polly only appears in my quotes from her family letters, which sometimes give such an intimate look at how a baker’s daughter felt far from home. At one point Mary wrote to her sisters from Paris that she was mastering French: “Si vous pouvez voir votre soeur Polly, la prosaique dans la belle Paris, what would you say?” And “Polly” appears in her sisters’ funny quotes from their travels with her. Mary often longed to wear men’s clothing, especially military uniforms, and during one of her trips, her sister Laura tattled in a letter home: “Polly is again struck by the stunning appearance of the German officers.” For my book’s whole large cast of characters, to make them as vivid as possible to modern readers, I mostly used the first names of people in Mary’s inner circle and sometimes nicknames. Her baby-faced architect friend Alfred Gumaer was known as Gummy. The college professor and administrator Marie Elizabeth Josephine Czarnomska, the imperious daughter of a Polish aristocrat, was nicknamed “the Czar” and sometimes “Czarina.” I’ve tried to capture how much of Mary’s inner life, the casual expressions of her observations and affections, are documented in letters scrawled at a fast pace.
Q: You describe Williams as “the Mary Cassatt you’ve never heard of”. Why was her story and her art forgotten, and what can that tell us about how women artists are erased from history?
A: A Gilded Age woman artist could far more easily make a name for herself if, like Mary Cassatt, she had family money, no need for a day job, a network of wealthy patrons, and a long life with time to try to get her paintings in the hands of institutions and prominent collectors. The more productive a woman artist had time and resources to be, the more she could exhibit, the more reviews appeared in her lifetime, the more of her works survive, the more collectors, curators and dealers now know of her, the higher the prices—it all snowballs. It accounts for the fact that today, Mary Cassatt is one of few women artists people outside the art world can name, along with Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo. And there was subtle and unsubtle entrenched misogyny everywhere in the art world that “my” Mary writes about: sneering male critics, exhibitions that women could only attend on “ladies’ days,” male art dealers who publicly praised but privately mocked mediocre paintings by famous men—Mary quotes some great gossip she heard at New York galleries. Mary’s letters also reveal the small dreary demands that reduced women’s productivity. She describes hours spent waxing her floors and getting custom clothes made—ready-to-wear didn’t exist in her day. And after her sudden death, her surviving sisters, one of them a retired teacher and the other a homemaker, with no expertise in maneuvering in the art world, could not do much more for Mary’s legacy than to make sure her letters and paintings were safe and dry. Which is how they were, slumbering away in the hands of a Williams family friend’s descendants, when I stumbled upon them in a funny way in 2012.
Question for Pamela: My current biography subject, the writer and reformer Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914), heroically documented desperate immigrant poverty on the Lower East Side. But she also said about a dozen prejudiced things that I for one wish she hadn’t—and which, had she lived longer, she might have regretted as times changed around her and not wanted in her biography. How do you deal with some really unfortunate words or actions in the life of a deeply interesting person you admire enough to write about? How do you ask for some kind of forgiveness and perspective from the reader, without downplaying the missteps too much, what’s the right balance?
I think novelist Hilary Mantel said it best in a talk she gave to the Royal Society of Literature in 2010: ”Learn to tolerate strange worldviews. Don’t pervert the values of the past. Women in former eras were downtrodden and frequently assented to it. Generally speaking, our ancestors were not tolerant, liberal or democratic. Your characters probably did not read The Guardian, and very likely believed in hellfire, beating children and hanging malefactors. Can you live with that?”
As a biographer or a history, I think the most useful thing we can do is state clearly that our subjects held ideas that are troubling from a modern perspective, and often stated them in ways that we find offensive. And then to place those ideas within their historical context—not in an attempt to excuse them, or downplay them, but to explain them.
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Want to know more about Eve Kahn and her work?
Check out her website: Evekahn.com
Read this interview in Vogue: American Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams Is Finally Getting the Recognition She Deserves
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with author and musician Kathryn Atwood, who writes collective biographies about women in war for younger readers.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Shelley Puhak
Shelley Puhak is the author of the newly-released The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry that Forged the Medieval World, a dual biography of the early medieval queens Brunhild and Fredegund. Shelley is also a former literature and creative writing professor and the author of three books of poetry, the most recent of which is Harbinger, a National Poetry Series selection.
I met Shelley (only virtually alas) back in September, courtesy of Nancy Marie Brown, who thought we would like each other’s books. As indeed we did. (Actually, I loved her book. Great story-telling, solid research and a significant amount of attitude at the way the two women at the center of her book were intentionally denigrated and effectively erased by their immediate successors and later chroniclers. Good stuff.) I immediately asked her to be part of this year’s Women’s History Month extravaganza here on the Margins.
Take it away, Shelley!
© 2019 | Kristina Sherk Photography | www.Kristinasherk.com
You are an award-winning poet. What inspired you to make the leap to writing a work of historical non-fiction?
You know, I think of it less as a leap and more as a lateral move. My previous books of poetry focused on lesser-known women’s lives and involved considerable research. For my book Stalin in Aruba, for example, I had to read diaries and memoirs and visit archives to be able to write in the voices of the women in Stalin’s inner circle, women like his daughter, sisters-in-law, and the wives of his close advisors.
I also write nonfiction, but prior to this just essays and articles. When I stumbled across the story of Brunhild and Fredegund, I first wrote an article about them for Lapham’s Quarterly. But I felt like the queens weren’t done with me yet. After all, we have yet to have a female head of state. Didn’t people deserve to know that during a time we think of as so much less sophisticated, women were ruling? In an attempt to get these two queens in front of as big an audience as possible, my project morphed into a book.
Brunhild and Fredegund are typically vilified in histories of the Merovingian period. You have turned them into rounded figures who were power players in the, admittedly blood-stained, politics of their times. Were there special challenges in bringing these women out of the historical shadows?
There are always challenges when trying to write about any women, and then there is the additional challenge of trying to write about anyone who lived 1,400 years ago. A major difficulty is the general lack of sources for the era. Some scholars estimate that what survives represents less than 1% of what was produced during that time period– loss on that sort of scale is staggering!
Some works were purposefully suppressed, but most vanished due to plain old bad luck. The Merovingians primarily used papyrus, and while that writing material can survive for tens of thousands of years in a dry climate like Egypt, it doesn’t make it more than a few centuries in the cold and damp of Europe. The sources that do survive are (surprise!) quite misogynist, and then each of these writers had his own individual biases and blindspots that I had to navigate. The research process was a lot like looking through a kaleidoscope— everything was scrambled, fractured, and distorted.
What are the most surprising things you’ve found doing historical research for The Dark Queens?
I was really surprised to discover how many women wielded power in the sixth century. I initially assumed that Brunhild and Fredegund were exceptions to the rule, but there were quite a few female political leaders. There were also women exerting power as abbesses and business owners and healers. We have wives walking out on their husbands, common women engineering political plots, and even nuns participating in armed rebellions. And given how many sources were lost, it is safe to say we don’t even know the half of it.
I was also startled to see how methodically Brunhild and Fredegund were silenced. It is one thing to know that women are often erased from history, and it is another thing altogether to see exactly how that happens. I had a really visceral reaction to reading, side-by-side, successive versions of a chronicle and seeing a few lines inserted here, a slur inserted there, something else conveniently trimmed out, over and over, until the original narrative was completely transformed. As chilling as that experience was, the flip side is a sort of awe at how women have, against the odds, managed to save some of their stories. Here’s one example: a very admiring account of Queen Fredegund’s military prowess survives in one anonymous chronicle. There are all sorts of theories about this chronicler’s identity, but it seems that Anonymous was (once again) a woman: circumstantial evidence links these tales to a nun at a local convent. I love to imagine that nun in her quiet cloister painstakingly preserving the battlefield exploits of a fierce queen. In other cases, these narratives might not have been written down right away but were instead told slant— embedded in a myth or a legend, for example. People will always find ways to resist.
A question for Pamela: Do you see your project about Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune as more of a continuation of your previous book (warrior to war reporter?) or a complete departure from it? Can you talk about how this research is similar to and different from your previous work?
I definitely see it as a continuation of my last three books, though Sigrid Schultz was a war correspondent for only a small part of her career. In Heroines of Mercy Street, I wrote about women in the American Civil War. In Women Warriors, I wrote about women in many different times and places who actually fought. Across the Minefields tells the story of a woman driver attached to the Free French in World War II. In When I began to look for a new subject, I was worried about pigeon-holing myself as someone who wrote only about women and war. In fact, I was deep in the initial research about a woman who had nothing to do with warfare when Sigrid Schultz elbowed her out of the way.
As far as the research goes, the current book is very different from my previous books. Both Heroines of Mercy Street and Across the Minefields rested heavily on the printed memoirs of a single character. (And both had seriously short deadlines, which made archival research impossible.) Women Warriors by its very nature meant I was dependent on secondary sources and translations of primary sources in languages I can’t read. Often the primary sources available in any language were sparse, not to mention heavily slanted. In the case of Sigrid Schultz, there is substantial archival material, with substantial gaps in the record. It’s been an adventure.
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Want to know more about Shelly Puhak and The Dark Queens?
Check out her website: https://www.shelleypuhak.com/
Read her article in Smithsonian: The Medieval Queens Whose Daring Murderous Reigns Were Quickly Forgotten
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with independent scholar and art historian Eve Kahn, talking about forgotten American Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams.