Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Sunny Stalter-Pace
Sunny Stalter-Pace says she likes to write about women making a scene!
The Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature, she received her PhD from Rutgers University and her BA from Loyola University Chicago. She specializes in the interdisciplinary study of modernist performance, literature, and urban space. Her first book, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. Her current book is forthcoming in May 2020 from Northwestern University Press. Titled Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance, this critical biography considers how a vaudeville performer and producer transmitted European culture to American mass audiences.
Take it away, Sunny!
How did you get interested in Gertrude Hoffman?
I was looking for plays set on subway cars, and I found her. My first book, a revised version of my dissertation, was about modern literature related to the New York City subway. I thought my second book was going to go into more depth on that topic, specifically looking at drama with a subway setting. I was poking around on the New York Public Library digital collections site (as one does). I think my search term was “subway express.” And I found a theater program for a vaudeville revue with a tango dance at the entrance to a subway station. I was intrigued, so I googled the dancer’s name. Once I found out that she had produced a knockoff version of the Ballets Russes and toured the U.S. with it before the original dancers came over from Paris, I was hooked. Some feminist historians and performance studies scholars had written about different parts of her life. But she’s so representative of the culture of imitation in early twentieth-century American performance, and just this gutsy, self-made woman. I wanted to tell her whole story.
You straddle many disciplines in your academic work. Do you consider yourself a historian, or something else?
I’m an American literature professor, with some background in urban studies and performance studies. My intellectual home base is the Modernist Studies Association, which covers all kinds of art, writing, and culture from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. My background helped me understand Gertrude Hoffmann a little better than someone might who was firmly rooted in a particular discipline. Hoffmann’s work cut across categories of performance: she did comic imitations and serious dances in the same vaudeville act. She once wrote a letter to Lucille Ball saying she did “a bit of everything.” I feel the same way.
What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?
That letter to Lucille Ball was definitely one of the most surprising artifacts. She was trying to convince Lucy to play her in a bio-pic. It’s a draft letter in the Wake Forest papers; the second page is written in pencil on a paper napkin. It’s fragile and poignant. I don’t know if she ever sent a version of the letter, but it told me so much about how Hoffmann was thinking about her career later in her life. Another surprising things had to do with child care. Gertrude and Max Hoffmann had a son, Max Jr., very early in Gertrude’s career as a performer. Once, when her mother was babysitting over the summer, Max Jr. stole a buggy and tried to get to the beach to “give the horse a chance to get his feet wet”! The horse and kid were recovered without further incident.
A question from Sunny for Pamela: What’s the best place to visit in Chicago in order to better understand women’s history in that city?
The Women and Leadership Archives at your alma mater, Loyola University. They have excellent on-line exhibits and are becoming an important repository for the papers of women who played a role in the city’s history, with a special emphasis on women and activism.
Want to know more about Sunny Stalter-Pace and her work?
Check out her website at https://www.sunnystalterpace.com/ and the website for Imitation Artist https://nupress.northwestern.edu/content/imitation-artist
Her Twitter handle is @slstalter.
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with novelist Kip Wilson, author of a novel in verse about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose resistance movement in World War II.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Theresa Kaminski
Theresa Kaminski and I are co-administrators (and occasionally, co-conspirators) for a Facebook reading called Non-Fiction Fans, where readers and writers of narrative nonfiction meet up to talk about great non-fiction and how it gets written. She is also a wonderful writer of women’s history and a generous member of the on-line literary and historical community.
Theresa holds a PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For more than twenty-five years she worked as a history professor at a state university in Wisconsin. She is the author of a trilogy of nonfiction histories on American women in the Philippine Islands during World War II. Her book on Dr. Mary Walker is due out from Lyons Press in June 2020.* She is currently completing the first full-length biography of America’s favorite cowgirl, Dale Evans. Theresa lives with her husband in a small town outside of Madison, Wisconsin.
Take it away, Theresa:
You have been working on biographies of two women whose names many of my readers will recognize, Dr. Mary Walker, of the American Civil War, and Dale Evans, pop-culture cowgirl extraordinaire. Are there particular challenges in writing about women people think they know something about?
The Mary Walker book was probably easier in this regard. Even for people who have heard of her (the only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor), few know many of the details of her life. It was fascinating to delve into those. The biggest challenge stemmed from the fact that while Walker left behind a lot of public writing, there’s not much of the personal kind.
The same is pretty much true of Dale Evans. As a celebrity, she was really good at all the public stuff, especially giving interviews and writing books about her life. But in researching beyond what she wrote about herself, I’ve uncovered things she rarely talked about publicly. Not that these things were negative or scandalous, but I could see why she wanted to control if and how they were discussed in public. Most people probably don’t know about them because Dale was so adept at highlighting what she wanted to emphasize. I’ve just been fascinated with how she constructed her own celebrity. So I think a lot of people who know the public Dale will be fascinated by the behind-the-scenes stories.
You’ve successfully made the jump that many academics dream of, from writing purely academic work to writing rock-solid scholarship with a popular audience in mind. Do you have any advice for writers who dream of doing the same?
It’s funny, but I think of that “jump” more of as a slow (sometimes painfully so) learning process. My first two books on American women in the Philippines were scholarly, but what drew me to the topic was the drama of their stories. Academic writers interested in making the move to trade presses should definitely read a lot of popular history to get a sense of how narrative is used. I recommend Jill Lepore since I turn to her books for inspiration on how to focus on story. Lepore’s output is also a reminder that good history can be written rather quickly. Trade press editors won’t wait ten years for the delivery of a manuscript!
What have you read lately that you loved?
I always have to push myself to read something on non-American topics, and I was so happy I picked up Hallie Rubenhold’s wonderful history, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. It’s a first-rate social history of late 19th century London and the lives of the poorer women who lived there.
A question from Theresa for Pamela: You have worked on topics that tend to be global in nature and feature war and politics. How have you come to focus more on women’s history?
It’s hard to get more global or war-centric than a global history of women warriors!
That said, I would argue that in focusing more on women’s history I have returned to my historical roots. The first biography I ever read was about Clara Barton. My guess is the second was a book about Joan of Arc. Ten-year-old me would have been very excited to get her hands on a book on Civil War nurses, or on on women warriors for that matter.
Want to know more about Theresa Kaminski and her work?
She blogs about women’s history and the writing life at https://theresakaminski.com/.
Her Twitter handle is @KaminskiTheresa
*I had the privilege of reading an advance copy of this. I’ll post a review here on the Margins when it comes out, but the short version is it’s really good.
Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Sunny Stalter-Pace, who writes about modernist art and literature. Her biography of innovative vaudeville performer and producer Gertrude Hoffman is due out in May. Mark your calendars.)
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Vicky Alvear Shechter
Vicky Alvear Shechter has been on my radar since the days when we both contributed posts to the late, lamented group history blog Wonders and Marvels.* When I learned that she had written a book titled Warrior Queens, which introduces pre-teens to little-known ancient queens who took up arms against invaders and enemies, it was an automatic pre-order.
Vicky writes fiction and nonfiction about the ancient world for kids and adults. Her novels include the award-winning Cleopatra’s Moon and Day of Fire: A Novel of Pompeii. Her latest nonfiction release is Warrior Queens: True Stories of Six Ancient Rebels Who Slayed History. Vicky has also served as a docent for more than twelve years at the Carlos Museum of Antiquities at Emory University.
Who better to head off this year’s series of Women’s History Month? Take it away Vicky!
You write both historical fiction and historical non-fiction. Is your research process different for fiction than for non-fiction?
The research process for fiction and non-fiction is about the same, though the difference is in the level of obsession! LOL. For nonfiction, because of the stakes, I try to find multiple sources to back up a claim, whereas for fiction, if one reliable scholarly source makes a claim and it’s a detail I can use, I am more apt to consider weaving it into the story without hunting down corroboration in the way that I would for nonfiction.
Here’s an example: When I was writing my novel set in Pompeii (Curses and Smoke: A Novel of Pompeii), I read about graffiti in the city. Again and again I found references to graffiti that warned passers-by to “not to defecate here.” I remember thinking, oh my gawd, there was a public defecation issue in Pompeii? I even found one reference to a sign, posted by a magistrate outside a gate that said, “Dear Shitter, Hold it In Until You Pass this Area.”
I mean, that is hysterical! If I were writing nonfiction about this, I would confirm these signs by location on the city walls and by consensus translations from the Latin. And I would probably spend quite a bit of time recreating how that must have looked and smelled at the time, as well as use that information to discuss ancient attitudes toward elimination and bodily functions. It would then lead to a discussion of public toilets, how one wiped (with a sea sponge attached to a stick, shared by everyone!), etc., etc.
But when it came to writing the novel, I could only slip this detail into the story in passing. Why? Well despite that I personally found it hysterical, my main character would not find this kind of graffiti unusual. Also, if I made a big deal about the fact that she had to dodge people taking craps in the street when she went outside, then I unconsciously create a fear in the reader that she might “step in it” at some point. Since that option would’ve been a distraction rather than part of the story, I had to minimize this fascinating (and very funny) historical detail.
If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?
That would have to be Queen Amanirenas of Nubia, who I write about in Warrior Queens: True Stories of Six Ancient Rebels Who Slayed History. I would want every kid to know about her because she took on Rome at the height of its powers and won!
Yet no one knows about her. Indeed after fighting and defeating Roman legions who dared try to invade her territory from Egypt after the fall of Cleopatra, Amanirenas negotiated a treaty with the most powerful man in the world—Octavian Caesar (later known as Augustus Caesar) and got everything she demanded! That’s pretty incredible!
She was a bad a** in so many ways. She lost an eye in battle leading her army against the Roman incursion into her cities. And when she retook one of her cities, she toppled a bronze statue of Augustus, had it beheaded, and marched back to her palace with the head. Then she buried it under the walkway in her palace so she would walk all over him every day! This bronze head was dug up under her palace and is one of the most recognizable busts of the young Roman emperor in the world.
How could you not love a woman so fearless and protective of her nation and its people?
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
Because I focus on women of the ancient world, the challenge is working with a lack of written material about powerful women. Both Greek and Roman cultures were deeply misogynistic and women’s stories were rarely considered let alone written about. So, for example, the story of Amanirenas mentioned above, shows up as only one paragraph in Strabo’s work. He mentions her victory in passing as if it had been no big deal, yet it was huge. Admitting to being bested by a woman was deeply embarrassing so her story is downplayed and mentioned as an aside.
The exciting part is realizing that we can analyze the lens through which women’s stories are told. For example, the Romans depicted Queen Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of Egypt, as a hyper-sexual femme fatale type, a wanton woman who put Marc Antony under “her spell.” When in reality Cleopatra had only two relationships her whole life, which she treated as marriages—one with Julius Caesar and one with Marc Antony. She was the mother of four children—a son with Julius Caesar and two sons and a daughter with Marc Antony. (I tell the daughter’s story in my novel, Cleopatra’s Moon).
She was also politically brilliant: she kept Egypt independent of Rome for twenty years, despite the mistakes of her father who put Egypt in deep debt to greedy Roman senators. She spoke seven languages and was considered a religious leader of larger Egypt in a way that former Ptolemaic (Greek) kings never could.
And yet, even today, we envision Cleopatra as highly “sexy” and beautiful when even Plutarch describes her as somewhat ordinary looking but whose charm, intelligence, and personality won over everyone in her presence. Also, she is depicted as shamefully abandoning Antony yet Plutarch reveals that she was asked several times to hand over her husband to Octavian with promises of keeping her throne but she always refused.
Finally, from Shakespeare on, Cleopatra is always depicted as a lovesick woman who kills herself right after Antony’s death. In reality, she waited three weeks after capture before she killed herself. Why? Plutarch says that during those weeks, Caesar pounded her with threats to her children as if “with siege engines.” He had already killed her first born.
As a mom, I understood instinctively what she was doing those three weeks. She was fighting for and negotiating for the lives of her remaining three children. At some point, she must have realized she had to remove herself in order to save their lives, so she did. And Octavian saved the remaining children, bringing them back to Rome with him. (The daughter was the only one to survive and later ruled a north African province as queen). [Pamela butting in here: What????!!!]
Seeing past the lens of their propaganda, we can see beyond the “sexification” of her reputation and glimpse a more complex, savvy, and brilliant political leader.
Question for you: You’ve written about so many brilliant women throughout history. Which one do you wish more people knew about and why?
My answer to this question probably depends on the day you ask. But for today, my answer is Matilda of Tuscany. (1046-1115). She was a major player in the most important political and theological issue of her time, the Investiture Controversy, which was an ugly struggle between emperor and pope that was ostensibly over who would control appointments to religious offices and was at root over the relationship between secular and religious power.
Matilda’s appearance in history books, to the extent that she appears at all, is generally limited to one incident, known as the Humiliation at Canossa. In 1077, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV arrived as a penitent at her fortress at Canossa to petition Pope Gregory VII for absolution. It’s a dramatic incident, complete with the emperor dressed in sackcloth, standing barefoot in the snow, and begging for admission to the fortress for several days. When Matilda appears in accounts of the event, her role is often limited to that of a peacemaker.
In fact, the Humiliation of Canossa was one brief moment of peace in the Investiture Controversy. Matilda, the peacemaker of Canossa, provided the main military support for Gregory and his successors in their struggles with Henry for the next twenty years and became the secular rallying point for the reform cause after Gregory’s death.
Over the course of a forty-year military career, Matilda mustered troops for long-distance expeditions, fought successful defensive campaigns against the Holy Roman emperor (himself a skilled commander), launched ambushes, engaged in urban warfare, directed sieges, lifted sieges, and was besieged. She built, stocked, and fortified castles. She maintained an effective intelligence network. She negotiated alliances with local leaders. She rewarded her followers with the favorite currencies of medieval rulers: land, castles, and privileges. In short, she did everything that her male counterparts did, with the handicap of being female in a time when elite women were often little more than political poker chips in the hands of their male relatives.
Interested in learning more about Vicky Alvear Shecter and her work?
Check out her website: www.vickyalvearshecter.com.
Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/valvearshecter
*It’s no longer being updated, but the archived articles are still available to read, and they are indeed wonderful and marvelous. Just click the hot-link. But only after you read the rest of this post.
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historian Theresa Kaminski, who has some fascinating projects underway, including a biography of Civil War surgeon and ardent reformer Dr. Mary Walker, due out on June 1st. Mark your calendars.
P.S. Women Warriors is now out in paperback, in case you missed the news.