Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Natalie Dykstra
Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, a 2013 Massachusetts Book Award finalist. She received a 2005 NEH Fellowship for her research on Clover Adams and a 2018 NEH Public Scholar Award for her upcoming biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. She is Professor of English at Hope College and an elected Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Take it away, Natalie:
Writing about a historical figure like Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have her as your constant companion?
At first, it was very intimidating. She was a remarkable woman who lived a long life, knew a wide range of people, collected important art, and created a magnificent museum that bears her name in Boston. She knew how to dress and dance and didn’t suffer fools. She could be unpredictable, saying whatever was on her mind. Her wealth unnerved me initially. And at first I found it hard to lay aside my need to have her like me or approve of me in some kind of retroactive way. As I’ve gotten to know her, slowly over several years, I see a tender side that she protected very carefully. She’d lost her only child early in her life; Bostonians mocked her; she knew the men around her would get most of the credit for what she accomplished with her museum. Yet she persisted. There’s a scene from a trip she and her husband, Jack Gardner, took on the Nile in 1874 that I loved thinking and writing about. They’d spent months on the river, coming on shore for various expeditions. She filled her travel album with descriptions and sketches of the scenery along with an elaborate key for the hieroglyphics. On one of their last days, she woke up very early to say “goodbye to one of the old worlds’ wonders” at Abu Simbel. She got there first, before anyone else, and lay on the warm sand to watch the sun rise in the sky as it lit up the “benign calm of the great Ramses.” Someone who does that is a lot of fun to write about!
*Mrs. Gardner at Fenway Court, 1903, by John Singer Sargent, ISGM.
Has your experience of writing about Gardner been significantly different than writing about Gilded Age hostess and photographer, Clover Adams, who was the subject of your previous book?
The two women knew each other. Gardner was three older than Adams, and their social circles overlapped. I first took on Clover’s attitude toward Mrs. Jack – that she was a lot of work to be around. I gradually let that go, agreeing more with Clover’s husband, Henry Adams, who thought otherwise and marveled at her energy. I’ve said elsewhere that Clover’s story was a kind of chamber piece; she died young and tragically by suicide. Her world started to close in around her, even as she grew to be a gifted photographer in her last years. Isabella’s story is a full orchestra with innumerable instruments and choirs. And her life became larger and larger as she got older. Her museum opened to the public when she was about to turn sixty-three years old. That’s part of what drew me to the story. I find the shape of her life – an early promise, terrible losses, a long quiet, and then a coming to fruition, a blooming, much past the time otherwise expected—to be fascinating, unexpected, immensely moving. And she lived long enough to fully realize and enjoy what she’d accomplished. That’s rare and particularly so for a woman of her generation.
How would you describe what you write?
I write biography. I like thinking a long time about a single person in relation to a time period and cultural context. Virginia Woolf has a simple phrase for this interweaving of an intimate story with larger historical forces: “a fish in the stream.” What I like so much about the genre is that it defeats preconceived ideas of what happened. People are never the sum of our theories about them. So there are always surprises or eddies in how a story moves that I can’t anticipate ahead of time. I’m not a fiction writer. I like the constraint of fact that biography imposes, and within that constraint, one can use the tools of fiction, such as setting, character, detail, metaphor, and voice.
I think, too, I write biography for the same reason I read biography: to feel less alone. Biography assuages as no other kind of writing or reading.
My question for Pamela: I’d love to know how you choose your writing projects – what combination of sources, characters, or storylines get you to say: “that’s next.”
In my experience, writing projects choose the author, and not the other way around.
In the case of Women Warriors, I had literally been collecting the material for years, just because, before my then-agent asked “Would you be interested in writing something about women warriors?” My response could be summed up as “Who dropped that hat?” (It was another two years, another book, and another agent before it found a home.)
But that’s the exception.
Usually a project (large or small) starts by my stumbling across something I don’t know that catches my imagination. I almost never have the luxury of thinking about it immediately. So I start a page in my ideas notebook* and move along. A lot of ideas die in that notebook. But if a subject continues to poke at me, eventually I start down the rabbit hole: What already exists on the subject? What sources are available? What shape would the book take? Why should anyone else care?
All of those are practical questions. They are important questions. But they aren’t the decisive question. At least twice I have abandoned perfectly viable book proposals halfway through. (It hurts.) In one case, I realized that if I was that bored writing the proposal, writing the book would be even worse. In the other case, I thought it was a important book, that someone should write it—and I wasn’t the right person. That word “should” is critical. In a recent newsletter, biographer Alexis Coe drew a distinction between a book she wanted to write and a book she thought she should write. It is the crucial distinction. And it doesn’t happen in your head. Or at least it doesn’t happen in mine.
Two years ago, an article that referred to my current book topic popped up in my newsfeed. I was already deep in the process of exploring an entirely different subject. I’d done some interviews. I’d traveled to meet with a group of enthusiasts. I wasn’t quite sure about the shape of the story, but I was sure there was a story. I just needed a little more time to find it. While I struggled to find what the story would look like, decided to spend some time with the new idea, just to see what was there. And just like that, I had my next project.
Superficially, the two subjects looked very similar. Both are under-told stories about women who were well known in their time and were not quite forgotten. Both had available archival sources. But one story demanded to be told NOW and the other didn’t.
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Interested in learning more about Natalie Dykstra and her work?
Check out her website: nataliedykstra.com
Follow her on Twitter: @natalieanneDY
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Come back tomorrow for more juicy Women’s History Month content.
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If you’re interested in the process of writing and thinking about history, you might enjoy my newsletter, which comes out roughly every two weeks. The content is totally different from History in the Margins. In recent months I’ve discussed cliffhangers, the odd experience of reading history “in real time” in the form of old newspapers, the question of “first-naming” the subject of a biography, and , well, women photojournalists. (You can tell where my mind’s been lately.) If that sounds like your glass of chianti, 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.)
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Tori Telfer
Tori Telfer is the author of Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History and Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion. She has written on the culture of crime for The Believer, Vulture, The Awl, Vice, TheAtlantic.com, and RollingStone.com, and is the host of the podcast Criminal Broads. She lives in NYC with her husband and son.
Take it away, Tori:
My impression is that stories in which women are the criminal rather than the victims are relatively rare in the genre of true crime. (I am just spitballing here. I don’t read true crime, horror, or violent mystery novels because I am a wimp.) If this is not true, correct me. If it is true, tell me why. (In other words, do female criminals suffer from the same kind of historical erasure as female scientists and women warriors?)
You’re right—they are rare. Our most famous criminals are, of course, men. The figures in true crime—like Bundy and Manson—that get 1,294,890 movies made about them are almost always men. I do think it’s important to remember that part of this is a statistical matter: men commit something like 90% of homicides. Though it’s interesting to note that most victims of violent crimes are actually men, too, other than victims of rape/sexual assault—but all our most famous victims are females. Our most famous missing-person stories are women (Natalee Holloway, Maura Murray). Our most famous cold cases feature dead women (Jack the Ripper, the Black Dahlia). Anyway! Female criminals are simply a much, much smaller population, especially female murderers. What I’ve noticed is that they are erased—until they’re not. For instance, Jack the Ripper is much more famous than his serial killing countrywoman Mary Ann Cotton. But Aileen Wuornos? Casey Anthony? Jodi Arias? As a society we’re definitely not opposed to obsessing over a female criminal. Plus, even the ones who are now forgotten were often very, very famous when they were captured, because it’s more rare and thus more shocking. So perhaps what’s going on here is a blend of statistics, historical erasure, and selective memory (immortalizing the sexiest and most psychopathic of the killers, say, and forgetting the rest).
You also host a podcast about women on the wrong side of the law, Criminal Broads. How do you choose the stories that go into your podcast? Do you have different criteria for the stories that go into your books?
I really follow my fancy for this podcast. I like to do a blend of scary cases (like nurse Jane Toppan, who, uh…let’s just say…you definitely don’t want her delivering your morphine) and lighter historical ones (like the Pomeranian-owning rival gang queens of 1930s Australia). On a practical level, I pick cases that I can research rather quickly; I spend much less time on a podcast episode than on a book chapter. But with every woman who I’ve ever written or podcast about, I look for certain things (is there material available about her? does she fit with the other stories in this project? is she different from the women I’ve written about before?) but ultimately rely on a gut instinct that just tells me, yeah, this woman is interesting.
If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?
Phoolan Devi! One of the most compelling podcast episodes I’ve ever done. She was a poor Indian girl from Uttar Pradesh who endured a terrible arranged marriage (as a child!) and unthinkable assault by the wealthier men in her village. And then she RAN AWAY AND JOINED A GANG OF BANDITS AND WREAKED REVENGE ON EVERYONE WHO WRONGED HER. Her story is striking for many reasons: it’s hard to overstate the terrors she endured (and I wouldn’t put them all in a high school textbook), which had everything to do with her being a woman, her caste, and her defiant spirit. But then she has this phenomenal revenge story, earns herself the nickname Bandit Queen, gets arrested, spends years in jail, and then runs for parliament and wins! The media loves her, the public loves her. And then at age 37, she’s assassinated as a belated revenge for her revenge. Why aren’t there 1,294,890 movies made about her? (I believe there is one, plus a documentary.)
Question for you: I have a practical question! I imagine that as a freelance writer with a lot of interests, you have ideas for projects bubbling on at any given time. If so—how do you organize your thoughts, ideas, windy paths you want to go down, and so on?
Now you’re asking the hard stuff!
I am fascinated by organizing systems. Over the years I have tried things like Trello and Get Things Done. They look so cool, but they all turn into the place that ideas and to-do lists go to die.
Several years ago I abandoned productivity systems and went back to the basics:
- A notebook for future projects that I haven’t yet made a commitment to. Each idea gets a page where I record info and questions as they occur to me.
- When I reach the point at which an idea has a full page, or I am finding physical stuff supporting a project, I set up a file folder for pictures, maps, clippings etc and a project folder on my computer, which at a minimum includes a Scrivener file.
- When I commit to a large project, I set up a work notebook for it which allows me to capture ideas and random information related to the project that don’t have an obvious home.
- I use Scrivener as a rough and ready editorial calendar to organize ideas for both this blog and my newsletter, with a separate document for each post/issue. At the moment, I have 20 current ideas for blog posts lined up in my April folder. Some of these ideas will ultimately end up in the Dud folder.
- I also use Scrivener to record ideas (and the rough research for those ideas) for a publication that I write for several times a year.
This may all sound complicated, but it boils down to having a single place where I can capture ideas as they appear. (And I mean immediately. I lost one a couple of days ago because I didn’t stop and write it down.) Everything else branches off from that first notebook.
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Want to know more about Tori Telfer and her work?
Check out her website: toritelfer.com
Listen to her podcast: criminalbroads.com
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Natalie Dykstra, talking about Isabella Stewart Gardner and writing biography.
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If you’re interested in the process of writing and thinking about history, you might enjoy my newsletter, which comes out roughly every two weeks. The content is totally different from History in the Margins. In recent months I’ve discussed cliffhangers, the odd experience of reading history “in real time” in the form of old newspapers, the question of “first-naming” the subject of a biography, and , well, women photojournalists. (You can tell where my mind’s been lately.) If that sounds like your order of egg rolls, 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.)
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Tiffany Sippial
Dr. Tiffany Sippial’s research focuses on the experience of women in Latin America, as part of a broader commitment to the study of the operation of power in Latin American society. Her first book, Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840-1920 (University of North Carolina Press), received the 2013-2014 Alfred B. Thomas Award for the best book on a Latin American subject from the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies. Sippial’s second book, Celia Sánchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary was also published by University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Grant, a CCWH Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Award, an American Historical Association Albert J. Beveridge Grant for Research in the History of the Western Hemisphere, a Latin American and Iberian Institute Doctoral Degree Fellowship, and a Dean’s Dissertation Scholarship from the University of New Mexico.
Sippial received her doctoral degree in Latin American History with distinction from the University of New Mexico in 2007 and joined the history faculty at Auburn that same year. She has completed prestigious fellowships with the Southeastern Conference’s Academic Leadership Development Program and the HERS Leadership Institute, and she was the university’s Presidential Administrative Fellow in 2017.
In 2010, Sippial was honored with an Early Career Teaching Excellence Award by the College of Liberal Arts, and she received the Auburn Alumni Association Teaching Excellence Award in 2015. A strong advocate of international experiences, Sippial leads the Honors College study and travel courses to Cuba. Sippial also served as president of the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association in 2018-2019.
Take it away, Tiffany:
What path led you to Celia Sánchez Manduley’s story?
The first name mentioned in the acknowledgements section of my book is Dr. Sonia Riquelme. She was my Latin American literature professor at Southwestern University and a massive influence on my academic career. Unfortunately, she has passed away, but I wish that she could have seen the culmination of her influence on me and this project.
I traveled to Oaxaca (Mexico) with Sonia in 1994 on a university-sponsored study and travel experience. While there, I became fascinated with the stories of indigenous women fighting with the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Sonia celebrated and encouraged that interest. A couple of years later, she approached me with a proposition that would change my life. She had received a grant to study Afro-Cuban poets and she wanted to take me to Cuba with her. She insisted, however, that I conduct my own research while there and mentioned Celia Sánchez as a possible woman to research.
I remember that distinct mix of elation and fear that her proposition sparked in me. I was so honored Sonia selected me for the opportunity, but I did not know anyone who had even traveled to Cuba. My parents were so worried about the state of U.S.-Cuban relations at that time (1996) and they feared that those tensions might complicate our plans. I am grateful that they let me go on the trip, despite their trepidation.
Sonia taught me how to research that summer and helped me locate and connect with my first interviewees. She came to the libraries and archives with me to help me learn how to work with the (few available) sources about Sánchez’s life. We both marveled at the paucity of sources, considering that Sánchez was—and remains—such an iconic figure within the history of the Cuban Revolution. This was truly my first glimpse into the difficulties scholars face when attempting to research and write the life stories of women. I could not imagine that in the summer of 1996 I was beginning a research journey that would last for more than two decades.
In my roles as a professor and administrator, I love that I now have the chance to support and encourage students to engage in undergraduate research and study abroad opportunities. I could not have imagined that an undergraduate thesis would prove the first step toward an eventual book, but I share my story with my students all the time. I want them to see that the interests they discover now may well shape their lives for years to come.
What did you find most challenging about researching Celia Sánchez Manduley?
Everyone who is committed to researching and writing the histories of women faces numerous challenges. For many of us, the primary obstacle is lack of sources. Stories of women often do not figure prominently—or at all—within “official” narratives of key historical events and processes. These omissions require us to become especially enterprising, creative, tenacious, and resilient researchers. We have to discover and weave together sources that other scholars might overlook or disregard in order to tell the stories we want to tell. While I did have some written sources to work with, I also had to look to oral sources, pop culture, memorabilia, literature, music, poetry, monuments, museums, and photographs to piece together the story of Sánchez’s life and legacy. Those kinds of sources really allowed me to take a deep dive into popular imaginings of her life and read those imaginings alongside and against state-produced renderings of her biography.
Sánchez was also a famously private person. She hated the press and even threatened to change her name after the revolution. While I did eventually gain access to her personal papers—which are housed in the high-security Office of Historical Affairs that she herself created—she rarely gave interviews, avoided cameras, left only one incomplete diary, and generally did everything that she could to avoid the spotlight. One long-time colleague of Sánchez told me that she always acted “allergic to cameras.” This aversion to attention has since become one of the principal hallmarks of Sánchez’s legacy on the island: humility. As an historian, however, her desire to operate off camera made my job even more challenging. I state in the book that Sánchez was one of the primary architects of the silence surrounding her lived experience. I often wonder how she would feel knowing that she is the subject of a biography.
I also faced significant complications in my work due to fraught U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations. From denied travel requests to potential interviewees who questioned my motives, my identity as a U.S. citizen complicated my ability to research one of Cuba’s most iconic women in many ways. I always understood this hesitancy and protectiveness. Allowing me access to the stories that sit at the heart of many Cubans’ national, and even personal, history and identity felt risky to many. I never let those hesitations halt my research, but I did work hard to win trust and prove the integrity of my intentions with the project. There are so many stories related to this element of my work, but the happiest of them occurred just prior to my finishing the book. I tell this story in the book, but it was only after more than twenty years of writing letters, making visits, and placing phone calls that the director of the Office of Historical Affairs finally granted me access to Sánchez’s personal papers in the Office of Historical Affairs in Havana. You can read the book to learn more about that most exciting development in the project!
What was the most surprising thing you have found doing historical research for your work?
This question may be asking me to remark on the most surprising thing I learned about Sánchez during my research, but I want to use it to offer a final encouragement to anyone engaged in this kind of work.
What is most surprising to me about the work of writing women’s histories—even after all of these years—is just how much work we still have ahead of us.
Writing women’s histories is challenging work, but it is absolutely worth pursuing. We have to keep at it, as there are still so many important stories that we have not yet told. Go to any bookstore or library—or flip through the pages of most history textbooks—and you will still find histories told primary through the lens of men’s experiences. The same is true for the history of Cuba and the Cuban Revolution. It is a history still dominated by the image of men with beards.
As educators, we also have the awesome opportunity to do what Sonia Riquelme did for me so many years ago. We can nurture, train, and reward those students willing to take up this important work. I hope that we will all continue to do so!
My question for you : What prompted you to start this blog and what do you hope to accomplish with it?
I’ll be honest: I started History in the Margins almost ten years ago with the hope of taking my writing career to the next level. The collective wisdom of the writing world was that if I wanted to sell a book to a traditional publisher, I needed a “platform.”* And one of the accepted ways of building a platform was to start a blog.
That said, I dragged my heels about blogging for a long time** because I believed (and still believe) that doing anything for the sole purpose of building a platform felt icky. Specifically, I needed an answer to one question: “Why another history blog? “ When I had an answer to that question it became my first blog post:
The first day of my PhD program, my advisor said, “You know there are no jobs, right?” I knew, but I didn’t care. I wanted to write about South Asia and history for a broader audience than the other five people interested in my dissertation topic. I wanted to write for history buffs and nerdy kids and the intelligent general reader.
When I finished my degree, I started writing for magazines aimed at history buffs, nerdy kids and –you get the idea. My first, and second, and third sales came straight from my dissertation research. Then I got an e-mail from an editor that said: “I know this isn’t what you normally do, but….” Suddenly the words “not my field” no longer applied. The fence of academic boundaries that had been both bulwark and prison was gone.
These days I write about a wide range of historical topics, from ancient Peru (Not just the Incas. Who knew?) to World War II. At least half the time I’m writing outside of “my field”. And at the end of every day I have a great story that didn’t quite fit in the piece at hand, a dangling idea that I want to play with, a connection I want to explore, or a book that I can’t wait to share with someone else.
I hope that someone will be you. Read along. Make a comment. Suggest a topic. Enjoy the ride.
Ten years, and roughly 1000 blog posts later, that answer remains unchanged, though I have a broader understanding of what History in the Margins is for me. It is a practice, in the sense that yoga can be a practice. It is a way to exercise my writing muscles. It is a place to play with ideas. And above all, it is an on-going conversation with people who share my interests.
*Just what constitutes “platform” was and remains a subject of debate and anxiety. My personal definition comes from the theme song to Cheers: “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came .” This may explain why my platform is small.
**Two years according to my working notes!
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Want to know more about Tiffany Sippial and her work?
Check out her faculty profile: https://cla.auburn.edu/history/people/faculty/faculty/tiffany-sippial/
Follow her on Twitter: @SippialTiffany
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with author Tori Telfer, talking about female confidence artists and serial killers. Because women’s history is not limited to role models and heroines. We contain multitudes.
* * *
If you’re interested in the process of writing and thinking about history, you might enjoy my newsletter, which comes out roughly every two weeks. The content is totally different from History in the Margins. In recent months I’ve discussed cliffhangers, the odd experience of reading history “in real time” in the form of old newspapers, the question of “first-naming” the subject of a biography, and , well, women photojournalists. (You can tell where my mind’s been lately.) If that sounds like your cup of oolong, 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.)