Sigrid Schultz, the “New Woman,” and Fanny Fern Fitzwater
Sigrid Schultz always described herself as a newspaperman. She worked in a largely male world, first as a foreign correspondents and later as a war correspondent in World War II. She was proud of her role as the first woman to be a foreign bureau chief for an American newspaper.
Schultz, and the small number of other women who worked as correspondents, weren’t the only women stepping into a new role in the years between the two world wars. Women had taken on new jobs during World War I, replacing men who had gone to the front. It wasn’t a new idea—women have always run farms and businesses when men go off to war. But the sheer scale of the war meant that the numbers of women involved was new. And so was the number of women who remained in the work force after the war, whether because of economic need resulting from war casualties or because they did not want to give up their new freedom. * (“How ya gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” applied to young women as well as to returning soldiers.)
[reminder: if you’re reading this in an email, you may need to click through to your browser to see, or in this case hear, the video.]
The “New Woman” doesn’t show up much in Sigrid Schultz’s letters, so whenever she mentions a woman who is not the wife of a fellow correspondent,** diplomat, or other player in Schultz’s world, I take the time to try to track her down. This week one of those searches led me to illustrator, fashion designer, business woman, and “influencer” Fanny Fern Fitzwater (1886-1966).
A Worth design illustrated by Fanny Fitzwater, late 1920s.
Fitwater appeared in a throw away line in one of Schultz’s letters. Schultz was constantly looking for a side gig. In 1927, she had the idea for a syndicated “strip”: an illustrated combination of fashion, travel, gossip and news. On a trip to Paris on newspaper business, she went looking for collaborators: “Grace Ziegler Brown to write the captions, Fanny Fitzwater draw the pictures and I provide the ideas.”
At the time, Fitzwater was a fashion reporter for the New York Herald Tribune who lived part-time in Paris, in order to report on French fashions. Unlike most other fashion reporters, she illustrated the designs she reported on. (She was a trained artist, who had studied at the Art Students League in New York and then spent several years in Paris working with French artists and fashion designers.) Her columns were soon syndicated nationwide. (Unlike Schult’z proposed strip, which went nowhere.)
After World War II, she taught fashion design and illustration at the Kansas City Art Institute for a time. In 1952, Elizabeth Arden offered her the job as head of Arden’s newly formed fashion department. At Elizabeth Arden, she managed the firm’s in-house designers and developed its clothing line until her death in 1966.
Fitzwater was a recognized fashion aauthority in her time, but is largely forgotten today.
Now if I could just find out something about Grace Ziegler Brown. Anyone have a clue?
*It should be pointed out that the idea of women working outside the home was new only in the middle and upper classes. Working class women had, by necessity, always worked. It is all too easy to filter women’s history through the lens of privilege.
**In fact, the wives of many of Sigrid’s colleagues were themselves journalists when they met their husbands and continued to work on a freelance basis after their marriages. If this is something you’re interested in, I discussed in my newsletter about a year ago. You can find it here.
https://missouriartists.org/person/morem164/
Karl May is tracking me down
Karl May as Old Shatterhand
I’ve mentioned this phenomenon before: you become aware of a subject and suddenly you are stumbling across it with some regularity. It happened to me with Erasmus Darwin. It happened to me with the Sand Creek Massacre. It happened to me with Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus school. Eventually I give in and do a little research. Often it leads to a blog post. Sometimes it leads to a new project. Sometimes it fills a gap that I didn’t realize existed in a current project. At a minimum, I learn something new. (There is no downside to learning something new, right?)
Popular nineteenth century German novelist Karl May (1842-1912)* has been tracking me down for a while now. I first came across him in an author’s note at the back of a modern fantasy novel in which the popularity of May’s novels played a critical element in the plot. Then he popped up while I was doing research for an article on satirical German artist George Grosz, who was an enormous fan of pulp fiction in general. He’s been crossing my path ever since.
This may have something to do with the fact that for the last several years I’ve been hanging out in early and mid-twentieth century Germany, when May was still a popular author. George Grosz wasn’t the only young German who found the window to a larger world in May’s adventure stories in the years between the world wars. Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, and possibly Adolf Hitler were all fans.**
May wrote adventure stories set mostly in highly fictionalized versions of the American West and the Middle East: non-stop action stories set in vividly imagined landscapes (As someone who wrote my dissertation on Romantic Orientalism, I am fascinated to see the same ideas applied to the American West) His most popular novels deal with the adventures of the Mescalero Apache Chief, Winnetou, and his German friend/sidekick, Old Shatterhand—an interesting inversion of the pairings with which Americans are familiar, from the novels of James Fennimore Cooper to the cinematic adventures of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. May allowed his readers to think that Old Shatterhand was his thinly veiled alter-ego, but in fact, he did not visit either the Middle East or the United States until late in his life. And he never made it to the West where his most popular books were set. The America which caught the imagination of generations of young Germans was in itself a creation of May’s imagination, aided by extensive research of the nerdiest variety.
May was Germany’s first best-selling novelist. His adventure novels are still in print and are estimated to have sold more than 200 million copies in 40 languages. Today, or at least pre-pandemic, thousands of people make the pilgrimage to the annual Karl May Festival.
It’s not clear to me who would be the English-language equivalent of Karl May. I have seen his work compared to both Indiana Jones, in terms of the content, and the Harry Potter books, as a cultural phenomenon. The Indiana Jones comparison seems fair, with the caveat that I haven’t actually gone so far as to read one of May’s novels. (It would be an interesting test of my very academic German reading skills.) We won’t know whether Harry Potter can hold his own with Winnetou for another 80 years or so.
*First thing I learned: the name is pronounced “my”, which is not the way I’d been saying it in the privacy of my own head. Luckily I haven’t had many chances to say it out loud in front of anyone who would know better.
**So was Arnold Schwarzenegger, later in the century. Schwartzenegger claimed that May’s books “opened up my world and gave me a window to see America.”
In which I recommend a newsletter
I recently subscribed to a newsletter that I eagerly read each time it appears in my email in-box.*
I am not sure what led me to World War II on Deadline —my guess is that someone linked to an issue on Twitter. Whatever the path, I was immediately hooked. The newsletter, and the website behind it, are a passion project of journalist Marc Lancaster. In each issue, he tells a story about news from the front and the journalists who wrote it. Sometimes he looks at a story I’m familiar from the perspective of how the story was written, which almost always gives the story a new twist. Sometimes he introduces me to war correspondents I’ve never heard of or to people I am familiar with in another context but did not realize were war correspondents in WWII. (I’m looking at you Andy Rooney.) No matter what approach he takes, it is consistently interested and well told.
If you’re interested in World War II, journalism, or a good story, you might want to give it a look.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go work on my own story about a journalist.
*All of us who write newsletters and blogs dream of achieving “must-read” status for at least a handful of our readers. (And yes, I also have a newsletter, in which I discuss writing and thinking about history. Totally different material that you read here on the Margins. If you think that might be your shot of 12-year old scotch, you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b . When you subscribe, you’ll get a link for a very cool downloadable timeline of the Roman emperors and the women who fought against them or supported them, which I created with the people behind The Exploress podcast–which I also highly recommend.)