Rebel Cinderella
You’re going to see a lot of book reviews here in the coming weeks, because I’m doing a lot of reading and I love to share books that I think the Marginalia will enjoy.* I will do my best to mix it up.
Next up, a gripping and occasionally heartbreaking account of American reform movements in the early twentieth century, told through one woman’s story: Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, by Adam Hochschild . (An author whose work I love.)
In 1905, an unlikely marriage made headlines around the world. Rose Pastor was a young Jewish woman whose family had fled Russia when she was a child. She began working in cigar factories at the age of eleven to support her family and turned a talent for language into a career as a journalist for a Yiddish-langue newspaper. James Graham Phelps Stokes (commonly known as Graham) was the Ivy-league educated oldest son of one of “the Four Hundred”—the families that dominated New York Society in the Gilded Age.
Hochschild tells the story of their marriage within the broader history of the American socialist and labor movements in the first half of the twentieth century. (He also provides a comic counterpoint to their story in the form of Stoke’s Uncle Will: an unpredictable and litigious New York real estate mogul who was an ugly version of the sprightly uncles in P.G. Wodehouse novels, complete with mustache.)
Pastor and Stokes met at a time when patrician reformers were not uncommon. She was assigned to interview him at University Settlement, a settlement house that served Italian and Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. Stokes was not only on the settlement house board, he was one of a number of wealthy, young volunteers who lived on the settlement’s top two floors.
For a time they were the golden couple of progressive thought in America. Their home was a salon for visionaries of all types. But there were pressures on their marriage from the beginning. Graham’s family was never comfortable with Rose’s politics. And Rose was never entirely comfortable with the advantages and opportunities that his privilege afforded her, even though that privilege made it possible for her to become a prominent figure in the socialist and labor movements.
Their approaches to reform diverged as Rose became a rising star in radical circles. World War I and the Russian Revolution drove them further apart. Like many socialists, Graham discovered national patriotism mattered to him more than international brotherhood. Rose remained passionately socialist.
In the end, the immigrant Cinderella and her American prince found their differences too great to overcome. They divorced in 1926 and returned to their natural social habitats, at roughly the same time socialism lost its momentum as a mass movement in the United States.
Rebel Cinderella is a powerful account of a woman who, like so many, has disappeared from our historical narrative. It is also an excellent introduction to the the history of socialism and labor in America, which has also disappeared from our historical narrative.
*Which is not to say that you’re going to get a review on everything I’m reading. Some of the academic monographs I’m reading are enormously useful but are not thrilling reads. Which is not to say I won’t share something that is both very academic and thrilling.
A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
18 Tiny Deaths
(I love this cover so much.)
Forensic medicine is a familiar concept today to anyone who reads mystery novels or watches police procedural dramas on television. But as recently as 1944 only one to two percent of the questionable deaths in the United States were investigated by qualified medical examiners. In 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics, journalist Bruce Goldfarb tells the story of how an elderly woman with no formal education became the unlikely crusader behind the development of modern forensic science in the United States.
It takes a good half of the book before Frances Glessner Lee is introduced to the subject that would be her passion. It is time well spent. Goldfarb paints a picture of Lee as a child of the Gilded Age in Chicago, with all the privileges and restrictions that entailed. (Unable to attend Harvard, she chose not to attend college at all.) He traces the history of how questionable deaths were investigated through the early twentieth century. The two threads come together in the person of her childhood friend, Dr. George McGrath, who was Boston’s second medical examiner. McGrath introduced Lee to what was then called “legal medicine,” telling her stories of finished cases and describing his frustrations with the haphazard use of forensics in police work. She was hooked, both by the stories and by the need for an institutional structure for educating both medical examiners and the police in the principals of forensic medicine.
McGrath may have felt he created a monster. Lee dedicated the next 30 years to developing what she called the “three-legged stool” of legal medicine: medicine, the law, and the police. She used the techniques she learned from her mother’s patronage of the Chicago Symphony to alternately seduce and bludgeon Harvard Medical School into founding a department of Legal Medicine. But she wanted to do more than give money. She insisted on hands-on involvement, culminating in the “18 tiny deaths” of the title: eighteen detailed dioramas known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, which Lee created as tools for training police officers in modern scientific forensic methods.
Late in her life, Lee claimed, “Men are dubious of elderly women with a cause.” 18 Tiny Deaths is the fascinating story of how much such a woman can accomplish.
You may never watch a police procedural the same way again.
The guts of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers
How the United States Sanitary Commission Elbowed Women to One Side in the American Civil War
Last week, while writing about the use of hospital transport ships in the American Civil War, I promised to tell you the story of how a group of men hijacked Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell’s Women’s Central Association of Relief to form the United States Sanitary Commission. It is a story that will feel all too familiar to many of you.
Here we go:
The story begins with the ladies’ aid societies that women across the Northern states formed for the support of Union soldiers after the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861.
Perhaps as many as ten thousand local aid societies were formed in the first year of the war alone. Modeled on the mission aid societies common at the time, their purpose was to make and collect food, clothing and medical supplies for Union soldiers.(1) They turned homes, schools, and churches into small-scale factories and shipping warehouses.
Over the course of the war, the aid societies would provide millions of dollars of much-needed supplies and much-appreciated luxuries for the troops, but their initial efforts were sometimes as chaotic as those of the new army itself. With no understanding of how the still-developing military distribution system worked, their boxes were often literally sidetracked at the rail yards to make way for troops and army stores—leaving cakes to mold and jars of jelly to ferment and explode. In addition, some groups produced goods that showed a fundamental ignorance about soldiers’ needs.
Disturbed by the waste of time, energy, and material, as well as the rush of overzealous and under-trained nursing volunteers, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to become a licensed doctor in the United States, decided it would be useful to unite the independent ladies’ aid societies into a central organization. On April 25, 1861, Blackwell called an informal meeting of women with experience in reform work to discuss the possibility of forming a Women’s Central Association of Relief (WCAR). A notice of the meeting accidentally found its way into the New York Times. Instead of a small meeting of known organizers the parlors of the New York Infirmary for Women were crowded with women eager to do their part. Two men also attended the meeting, Reverend Henry Bellows, a popular Unitarian minister, and Dr. Elisha Harris. (You’ll want to keep your eye on Dr. Bellows.)
Encouraged by the enthusiasm of the initial meeting, Blackwell called an open meeting four days later at the much larger Cooper Institute, to be presided over by Rev. Bellows. (I told you to keep an eye on him.) The hall was packed: New York papers estimated the attendance at between two and three thousand. Repeated waves of applause interrupted Bellow’s speech, in which he praised the outpouring of aid for the troops and called for an umbrella organization under what he described as “an appropriate head.” 3)
Blackwell and her associates followed Bellow’s speech with a presentation of a plan for the proposed WCAR. The organization, as they envisioned it, had three objectives:
- Managing the efforts of existing ladies’ aid associations and encouraging the creation of new local associations
- Coordinating with the Army’s Medical Bureau about the needs of the rapidly growing army so members’ efforts weren’t wasted
- Creating a system for selecting and training volunteer nurses (4)
Finally the meeting elected a board of managers for the new umbrella organization, made up of twelve men and twelve women. The board then elected Dr. Valentine Mott, a founding faculty member of the university medical college of New York, as president and Bellows as vice-president—a shrewd recognition on Blackwell’s part that, while the women of the WCAR were more than capable of managing the grassroots support efforts, the organization was unlikely to succeed in its efforts to build a relationship with the Army’s Medical Bureau without male spokesman.
On May 15, Rev. Bellows and three (male) doctors associated with WCAR took the train to Washington. Their goal was to learn firsthand what the relief associations could accomplish and how they could work with the Medical Bureau. Over the course of the thirteen-hour train ride, the four men began to discuss what would become the United States Sanitary Commission.
Once in Washington, as Bellows met with Acting Surgeon General Colonel Robert C. Woods, generals, cabinet members, and President Lincoln himself, his goals changed from formal recognition of the WCAR’s three-part plan to the the creation of a civilian sanitary commission that would focus on the broader questions of army health that the army itself was prone to forget. This was a change that not only bypassed the efforts of the WCAR, but that Bellows presented as a way to control the extent to which the efforts of ladies’ aid societies and volunteer nurses disrupted the army’s systems.(5) In a letter dated May 18, Bellows and his fellow committee members offered themselves as members of a sanitary commission who would serve as advisors to the government with a mandate to inspect military camps and hospitals and the power to enforce sanitary regulations for the benefit of the soldiers. The proposal made no mention of the WCAR, which had paid to send the committee to Washington in the first place and reduced the question of female nurses to a side issue.(6) Check the dates: it took Bellows only three days to throw the women under the ambulance.
On June 9, Secretary of War Simon Cameron approved the creation of the United States Sanitary Commission, which went on to do good work, much of which was powered by women. The executive board of the commission, headed by Rev. Bellows, was all male. But women continued to dominate the organization at the regional and grassroots level. Twelve regional branches of the commission—located in New York, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Louisville, New Albany, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh—coordinated and directed the actives of thousands of local societies that chose to come under its umbrella. Those societies became training grounds for a generation of women who went on to become leaders of the large and varied community of American reformers after the war.
*(1) Now that I think of it, there are parallels with the women who are turning on their sewing machines and raiding their fabric stashes all over the United States to make masks. (In all fairness, there are doubtless men doing this as well. But the mask-warriors[2] of my acquaintance are all women.) Ladies, and gentlemen, I salute you.
(2) Sew-rriors?
(3)Who did he have in mind, I wonder?
(4) Blackwell missed her opportunity on this one. Six days before Blackwell’s meeting, Dorothea Dix had visited the White House and made her pitch to form an army corp of female nurses. Blackwell was unimpressed by Dix’s qualifications for the job. (Rightly so, as it turned out.) Hearing that Dix had been appointed superintendent of women nurses, Blackwell complained, “The government has given Miss Dix a semi-official recognition as meddler general—for it really amounts to that, she being without system or any practical knowledge of the business.”
(5)Grrr.
(6) I repeat, grrr.