Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Carolyn Whitzman

Carolyn Whitzman is a writer and housing policy researcher who lives in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Clara at the Door with a Revolver: the scandalous Black suspect, the exemplary white son, and the murder that shocked Toronto (UBC/ On Point Press, 2023) a riveting true-crime story centered on a courageous Black woman living in nineteenth-century Toronto who was charged with murdering the son of a well-do white family and the trial that followed. Her forthcoming book is Home Truths: Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis (UBC/ On Point Press, September 2024).

Take it away, Carolyn!

What path led you to Clara Ford’s story?  Why do you think it is important to tell her story today?

I first came across Clara Ford’s story while working on my PhD over 25 years ago, whose topic was the relationship between stereotypes, social conditions, and housing policies in Toronto’s inner city Parkdale neighbourhood over two centuries. One of the lies told about Parkdale when it was gentrifying in the late 20th century was that it had been a stable, middle-class, residential suburb when it was developed in the late 19th century. But all you needed to do was walk around the neighbourhood and look at old industrial buildings and tiny workers’ cottages to get a sense of social mix – and potential tensions between residents.

I turned to newspapers of the time and quickly came across the story of an impoverished mixed-race tailor, Clara Ford, who was accused of having murdered her former next-door neighbour, the son of a wealthy white manufacturer, in 1894. The more I read about the trial, the more I became obsessed with Clara. Clara was the first person I have found to be described as a “homosexual” in a North American newspaper.  Her adventures as a cross-dressing traveller (who passed as a man but not as a white person) contributed to newspaper coverage that made her out as a ‘monster’, even as other newspapers painted her as a ‘tragic mulatto girl’ seduced by a boy almost half her age. Clara was also the first woman and second person in Canada to testify on her own behalf in a trial. She told a story of police harassment into a false confession, which was, remarkably, believed by a jury of twelve white men.

The themes of the book – working class Black life in Canada, sexual violence, police harassment, fake news – continue to be timely today, in a world of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. I hope that Clara, like many women of her time and class only written about when she got into trouble, emerges from the book as a strong, brave, and very funny heroine of her own story.

What type of sources do you rely on in writing about a non-elite woman from the past?

What a good wonky question! I used two sets of primary sources and one set of secondary sources.

First off, I used newspaper articles. There were seven daily newspapers in Toronto at the time of Clara’s arrest and trial. They were engaged in a furious circulation war and cared very little about verified truth – the most important thing was a ‘scoop’. I see certain similarities with 24-hour news cycles and social media today.

My second set of sources was official documents of the time - census, directory, assessment, birth and death records… but Clara is remarkably absent from the official record. She only appears in the Canadian census once, as a 7-year-old in 1871 (although she was almost certainly close to 10 years old). There is no birth certificate for her or for her daughters, even though they were, again, almost certainly born in Canada. But I was able to track her white mother, Jessie McKay, through a set of falling down shacks and professions such as laundress and housecleaner.

The third set of sources are some excellent recent works on Canadian women’s history, Black history, legal history, and queer history that helped me put Clara’s story in context. Just about every trope that is still out there, particularly Angry Black Woman, was thrown at Clara. I kept on falling into rabbit holes. For instance, when Clara was acquitted, she joined a famous Black vaudeville troupe as a dancer (at the age of 33!). So I had to know more about late 19th century theatre and the development of the musical. My reference list is quite varied, because Clara lived a rich and complex life in several cities, always trying to stay under the radar.

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? )

There are a couple of women’s history books that have rocked my socks in recent years. One is Beautiful Lives, Wayward Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman (Penguin, 2019). Like Clara, Hartman focuses on the lives of 19th century Black women in Philadelphia whose histories are only recorded because they encountered police and other authorities. Hartman writes about vibrant but forgotten women with a poetic sensibility that creates ravishing prose.

Square Haunting: Five writers in London between the wars, by Francesca Wade (Random House, 2021) focuses on a single street in the Bloomsbury neighbourhood, where relatively privileged and educated women in the early 20th century were trying to create new lives as independent writers. Wade’s sense of place, detail, and character lingers in my mind.
I also want to shout out to my favourite podcast, What’s Her Name, created by sister historians Katie Nelson and Olivia Meikle. They are gifted storytellers and I always enjoy travelling with them to re-discover cool women who have been forgotten!

[Pamela butting in here: I, too, am a big fan of the What’s Her Name podcast and the women who created it. In fact, they’ve participated in Three Questions and an Answer several times. You can find their Q & As here, here, and here ]

A question from Carolyn: Can you tell me something surprising you have found about South Asian women's history, please?

My most recent surprises from South Asian women’s history have not been large scale cultural issues, but stories about individual women who did not show up in my graduate student course work. One of my favorites of these is Raziya Sultan (1205-1240 CE), who was the only female ruler of the Delhi Sultanate in India—a Muslim empire that ruled over a large portion of India for several centuries prior to the Mughals.

Although she had several brothers, her father named her his successor to the throne. It probably will not surprise you to learn that neither her brothers nor the Muslim nobles in the sultanate were pleased with his choice. At his death in April, 1236, they attempted to put one of her brothers on the throne. He was described in the chronicles as being “incompetent”—which could mean many things. His mother was in control of the throne during his brief reign, which ended six months later when mother and son were assassinated.

Raziya then ascended to the throne. (It is unclear to me if she was involved in the assassination, but I would not be surprised if that were the case, family politics in medieval kingdoms, Muslim and otherwise, being what they were.) She was by all accounts an effective ruler, but the Turkish nobility, led by one of her brothers, rose up against her. She was defeated in 1240 and died soon thereafter, though accounts of her death vary.

A contemporary chronicler summed up her career with words that could be applied to that of many women who attempted to hold a throne at the time: “She was endowed with all the qualities befitting a king, but she was not born of the right sex, and so in the estimation of men all these virtues were useless.”

***

Want to know more about Carolyn Whitzman and her work?

Check out her Google scholar profile:

Follower her on the platform previously known as Twitter: @CWhitzman

***

Tomorrow it will be business as usual here on the Margins with a blog post from me.  Then we’ll be back on Monday with an interview with Sarah Percy, author of Forgotten Warriors: The Long History of Women in Combat, a subject dear to my heart.

Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Jane Draycott

Jane Draycott is a Roman historian and archaeologist, and the author of Cleopatra’s Daughter: Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen. Over the last two decades, she has worked in academic institutions in the UK and Italy, and excavated sites ranging from Bronze Age villages to First World War trenches across the UK and Europe. She is currently Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Glasgow. When she is not reading, writing, or thinking about Roman history and archaeology, she enjoys indulging her wanderlust by travelling to interesting places, playing computer games, cooking vegan food, practising yoga, and hooping. She lives in Glasgow with a tyrannical Norwegian Forest Cat named Magnus, and is currently renovating a dilapidated Victorian house.

Take it away, Jane!

Cleopatra Selene was a powerful figure in her time, but was largely overlooked until your book.   Why do you think Cleopatra Selene and other powerful women of the past effectively disappeared from history?

Cleopatra Selene and other powerful women of the past have effectively disappeared from history for several reasons. The first is that they were genuinely excluded from most of the formal political and military positions of power that were responsible for shaping world history, and the second is related to that – while they certainly had informal political and military power, the ancient authors recording events preferred not to acknowledge that unless it offered an opportunity to pass comment (usually negative) on the men they were connected to. So during the Late Roman Republic, Roman women could not hold magistracies or imperium, so could not speak in the Senate, vote on or enact legislation, or raise and command armies, but they could wield a considerable amount of influence behind the scenes, hosting social events, lobbying other well-placed women to intercede with their men-folk and so on. And the third is that (predominantly male) historians from later periods have taken the ancient literary evidence largely at face value, and not questioned the fact that women don’t tend to appear in it except in exceptional circumstances. It’s only in the last few decades that historians have started deliberately searching for, and finding, the women. And while not Roman, client queens like Cleopatra and Cleopatra Selene suffered from the fact that it was, in the main, Roman authors writing about them, so they were judged according to Roman standards, and Cleopatra is excoriated because of her husband and Cleopatra Selene is ignored in favour of her husband. Finally, for many modern historians, they baulk at the relatively slim Greek and Latin literary evidence, and it doesn’t necessarily occur to them to look for other types of evidence such as documentary and archaeological evidence to supplement that. Academics can often get quite uncomfortable about stepping outside of their somewhat arbitrary disciplinary boundaries.

What overlooked woman from the ancient world would you most like to read a biography of, and why?

I would love to read a biography of Queen Amanirenas of Kush. She was Cleopatra VII’s contemporary and next-door neighbour, but unlike Cleopatra she was able to fend off the emperor Augustus’ Roman legions and their imperialistic ambitions to seize her kingdom and turn it into a Roman province. She was a one-eyed warrior who led her army into Egypt, sacked many towns, pulled down all the statues of Augustus that had been set up, and even took the head of one home to Kush and buried it under the steps of the temple to the goddess Victory in the capital city of Meroe, so she and her fellow Kushites could walk on it until two thousand years later when archaeologists discovered and excavated it. This head is now on display in the British Museum, a permanent memorial to rare Roman military defeat, and one masterminded by a woman at that. She is a less well-known but much more successful version of Boudicca.

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? )

The best work of women’s history that I have read recently is Emma Southon’s A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women. Brilliantly researched and written, simultaneously managing to be erudite, filthy, and funny. No one writes about the Romans quite like Emma.

[For anyone who missed it, a mini-interview with Emma Southon ran on March 6.  The title in the U.S. is A Rome of One’s Own. I’m currently reading it and agree with everything Jane said about it.]

A question from Jane: Who is your favourite female historical figure, and why?

I never know how to chose when asked this kind of questions. There are are many historical women who I admire or who fascinated me. But the answer that will make my editor, my agent, my publicist, and My Own True Love happy is Sigrid Schultz, the subject of my book that is coming out in August. She really was quite a gal. She was the Chicago Tribune’s Berlin bureau chief from 1925 to 1941 and one of the first reporters to warn American readers about just how dangerous the Nazis were. She was smart, courageous, and equal parts charming and prickly.

Now that I think about it, most of my favorite women in history could be described in similar terms.

***

Want to know more about Jane Draycott and her work?
Visit her website: https://drjanedraycott.co.uk/
Follow her on the platform previously known as Twitter: @JLDraycott
Follow her on Instagram: jane.draycott.

***
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Carolyn Whitzman, author of Clara at the Door with a Revolver: The Scandalous Black Suspect, the Exemplary White Son, and the Murder That Shocked Toronto

 

Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Catherine McNeur

Catherine McNeur is an associate professor of history at Portland State University where she teaches courses on environmental history, the history of science, food history, and public history. Her first book, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City, won the American Society for Environmental History’s George Perkins Marsh Prize, the New York Society Hornblower Award, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, and the Victorian Society of America Metropolitan Book Prize, as well as dissertation prizes from Yale University, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Urban History Association. Taming Manhattan looks at how loose hogs running through the streets, urban sanitation debates, and the location of green spaces were integral parts of the social unrest facing New York City at a moment of dramatic urbanization.

In her second book, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science, she uncovers the lives of the entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris. Though both sisters were at the center of scientific conversations and debates in the middle of the nineteenth century, they’ve long been written out of histories of science. Mischievous Creatures recovers their lives and work, while also investigating how these erasures occur.

Take it away, Catherine!

Credit: Andrea Lonas

What path led you to the Morris sisters? And why do you think it is important to tell their story today?

I never set out to write a book about the nineteenth-century scientists Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris. My plan had been to investigate the history of the much-hated (but sometimes loved) Tree of Heaven in American cities. However, while searching through the papers of a botanist who had written about that tree, I stumbled upon 250 letters written by someone named Elizabeth Morris. Googling her turned up very little at the time, not even a Wikipedia page, but I eventually learned that she was a botanist and her sister Margaretta was a renowned entomologist. Coincidentally, a month later I was doing some research in one of Harvard’s collections and fell across letters from Margaretta Morris. After reading through those letters, it was clear that Margaretta was struggling to be seen as a peer by other entomologists. “I have panted for the sympathy of someone who could appreciate my love of the science, and overlook my want of that learned love derived from books that are, generally speaking, out of woman’s reach,” she wrote. “The book of nature, however, has been widely spread before me, and countless hours of inexpressible happiness I have had in the study, there.”

I was captivated by Margaretta’s words and at the same time confused by the fact that no one had written about these women. Margaretta, after all, was one of the first women elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Academy of Natural Sciences. I wanted to know more about both sisters lives and also why we keep finding all these “hidden figures.” The fact that I stumbled across them was no mistake—many of their peers are similarly forgotten or erased and therefore hard to find in the archives. Recovering these stories, though, makes it possible to see that our current push to diversify the STEM fields has a long and complicated history where women were actually present at the very start of these professions.

Writing about historical figures like the Morris sisters requires living with them over a period of years.  What was it like to have them as constant companions?

Writing biography really does require that you live with your subjects, doesn’t it? Delving into their scientific passions and discoveries, figuring out the romantic dramas affecting their lives, parsing the messages they sent to friends, even reading a neighbor’s gossipy diary that tracked their comings and goings—it all made nineteenth-century Philadelphia really come to life for me. These women, in many ways, feel very much like old friends now. This is perhaps especially true as they were my company (and my family’s company) during the COVID-19 lockdown.

I found, too, that they affected the way I experienced my daily life. Margaretta, for instance, adored what she called her “little friends the Insects” and never passed a spider web or a cluster of flies without stopping to see what she might find. On a neighborhood walk when I found myself engulfed in a cloud of tiny flies and began swatting them away from my face, I stopped to think that Margaretta might not have swatted them. Or as I was editing a chapter in a park and found a tiny beetle making its way across my page, I didn’t hurry to knock it away but instead spent some time closely observing it. In order to be conversant in Elizabeth research, I also ended up learning quite a lot about ferns and now I spend a lot of time reveling in all the maidenhair ferns, sword ferns, and licorice ferns I find on my neighborhood walks. By writing so passionately about entomology and botany, the Morris sisters transformed the way I, too, saw the world around me.

What unsung woman scientist from the past would you most like to read a biography of, and why?

One thing I learned quickly while doing research for this project is that there are so many little-known nineteenth-century women who were scientists and were as well-trained as many of the men who we know to be the “founding fathers” of various scientific fields. There are several women who should have biographies written about them, including Isabella Batchelder James, a botanist who studied the origin of plant scents among other subjects, and Sarah Coates Harris, another botanist who also lectured on women’s health and hygiene and fought for women’s rights in the mid-nineteenth century. One person who is really overdue for a new biography, though, is Dorothea Dix. She’s best known for her reform work with mental health asylums and her work managing nurses during the Civil War. However, she was also a scientist. She published articles in leading scientific journals about insects she had discovered and on all of her travels for work, she collected plant specimens and seeds and sent them to other botanists around the country. She was very much a scientist as well as a reformer, but that part of her life is little known. The biographies that do exist on her woefully underestimate both her and her work. She was a close friend of Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris and from what I’ve been able to find, she was likely in a romantic relationship with Margaretta. How I would love to read a book that truly takes her life and work seriously and sees her for who she was.

[Pamela butting in here: I spent a lot of time reading about Dorothea Dix when I was working on Heroines of Mercy Street and I didn’t read anything about Dix the scientist! Even the women whose stories are told are often reduced in the telling.]

A question from Catherine: Thank you so much for reading Mischievous Creatures and inviting me to participate in this wonderful exchange, Pamela! When I speak with readers at book events, I’m always delighted to hear what stood out to them or what they found relatable in the book. Was there any part that particularly captured your attention?

I am eternally fascinated by the ways in which women are erased from history, in this case by the process of creating scientific professions.  Beyond that, I was intrigued by the fact that they were sisters, and the ways in which they worked together despite the differences in their fields of study and personalities. (Or perhaps because of those differences.)  The comparison with the Blackwell sisters was unavoidable.

***

Want to know more about  Catherine’s archival finds and writing?

Visit her website: https://www.catherinemcneur.com/

Follow her on Instagram: @catherine_mcneur_writer.

***
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historian and archaeologist Jane Draycott, author of Cleopatra’s Daughter