Sisters of Influence: A Q & A with Andrea Friederici Ross
I am happy to have Andrea Friederici Ross back here on the Margins to discuss her latest book about forgotten women changing in the world. Sisters of Influence: A Biography of Zina, Amy, and Rose Fay tells the story of three extraordinary sisters who defied the expectations of their Victorian-era childhood and left their mark on history.
Take it away, Andrea!
Even well-known women in the nineteenth-century are often neglected by biographers and historians. What path led you to the Fay sisters, and why do you think it’s important to tell their stories today?
I’ve done some work in animal rescue, so the first sister to come to my attention was Rose, who founded the Anti-Cruelty Society in Chicago. That she was married to Theodore Thomas, the first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, just added to my interest. Gradually I became aware that she had these remarkable sisters, so I had to incorporate their stories as well. What I thought would be a fairly simple story became very involved once I decided to include Zina and Amy. In addition to learning about the humane movement and the classical music scene in the States, I had to educate myself on cooperative housekeeping, women in music, higher education for women, and other issues the sisters tackled. But, in the end, it makes for a better story — one that incorporates many different things women were championing in the late 1800s. The Fay sisters were a kind of real-life Little Women. They each utilized their unique skills, voices, and personalities to move their issues forward. I think this is so pertinent today: by following our passions to enact change, gradually, society evolves in a more positive direction. There is no place for stagnancy, no time for apathy. Every voice matters.
Zina, Amy, and Rose Fay were all trailblazers in their separate fields during the Progressive Era, a period marked by many political and social reform movements. What new challenges and opportunities did women face at that time, and how did they affect the Fay sisters directly?
The Fay sisters grew up in the Victorian Era, at a time when women were expected to confine themselves to the domestic realm. But through their work in women’s clubs, their writings (all three were authors), and their organizational efforts, they — along with many, many other women — helped expand the women’s sphere into the community and beyond. The Fay sisters were, in effect, bridges from the Victoria Era into the Progressive Era. It begs the question: what about us? What important historical periods are we bridging, as women? Which direction do we want to head?
Writing about historical figures like the Fay sisters requires living with them over a period of years. What was it like to have them as your constant companions?
Ha! They were good company, actually. I have three amaryllis plants that I named Amy, Zina, and Rose, and I kept them abreast of the progress on the manuscript. They say talking to plants helps them grow? I felt like it was the converse — they helped keep me on track.
Did the Fay sisters cross paths with the subject of your last biography, socialite-activist Edith Rockefeller McCormick?
Yes! In fact, they lived on the same street! I was able to figure out several instances where some of the sisters and Edith intersected. That said, they were very different personalities! For example, Edith cherished a fur wrap made of chinchilla skins. Rose, describing what may well have been that very coat, wrote, “A thousand painful deaths in one garment!”
I realize this is an unfair question, but did you have a favorite among the sisters?
As you surely suspect, I did. I started out primarily focused on Rose but, in the end, Amy’s winsome personality won me over. I think, of the three sisters, Amy is the one I’d choose as a friend. Zina was a difficult personality and, while I respect what she was trying to accomplish in terms of restructuring housekeeping to make women’s lives easier, I took issue with some of her exclusionary attitudes. And Rose was lovely but I think I’d share more laughs with Amy.
How difficult was it to find sources for these women?
I got lucky this time! Usually this is one of the most challenging parts of writing about women. But, thanks to work done by Sylvia Wright Mitarachi, a Fay descendant and writer, all of the sisters’ papers are at Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mitarachi obtained a grant to write a biography about Zina but died before finishing the project. I was able to benefit from the materials she had gathered and organized. She even transcribed some of the cross-hatched writing in the family letters — bless her heart! We stand on the shoulders of those before us, right? I think of this quote every election day and it rang true throughout this project as well, particularly with regard to Sylvia Wright Mitarachi.
What was the most surprising thing you learned working on this book?
It’s important to note that the Fay sisters were not among the early suffragists. They weren’t fighting for the vote — they were advocating for greater involvement in their communities and the issues they cared about. This is an area of women’s history that I never learned about! The women’s movement was far more nuanced than just pro- or anti-suffrage. Much as I would have preferred for them to be among the early firebrands who paved the way for us to vote, the Fay sisters gave me a far deeper understanding of the decisions women had before them at that time. While gaining the vote was a monumental step, the quieter, gentler approaches many other women took also helped expand the possibilities for all of us today. Quiet and gentle can also be effective.
Andrea Friederici Ross is the author of Sisters of Influence: A Biography of Zina, Amy, and Rose Fay, as well as Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick, and Let the Lions Roar! The Evolution of Brookfield Zoo. She has worked as the operations manager of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as assistant to the director of Brookfield Zoo, and at her local public school library. She enjoys speaking about the women in her books and has teamed up with historical interpreter ElliePresents to offer unique author programs bringing the women to life.
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Sisters of Influence will be released on October 14. It is available for pre-order wherever you buy your books.
Road Trip Through History: The Boom and Bust of Nininger, Minnesota
To my surprise, ghost towns were a recurring theme of our multi-year trips along the Great River Road. More than once we saw small exhibits dedicated to towns that had grown up to support the fur trade, the logging industry, or mining and withered away because industries closed, transportation routes changed, or county seats shifted. A chilling reminder of the impermanence of the things we build.
On our most recent trip, in and around the Twin Cities, we were introduced to a new type of lost town, courtesy of a historical marker. Founded in 1856 on the banks of the Mississippi, Nininger Minnesota did not grow organically around an industry. The town’s founders, John Nininger, and Ignatius Donnelly moved to Minnesota with the plan of building a new city as a contender for Minnesota’s capital. It was not an implausible goal at a time when Minnesota’s cities were just taking shape.
In order to create the appearance of a boom town, Donnelly purchased 100 of the 3,800 platted lots and advertised the benefits of the new community in newspapers and immigrant neighborhoods throughout the Eastern United States.
By 1857, the new town, with seventy buildings and a population of some 1,000, was a bustling river port.[1] It had everything you would expect in a river port at a time when lumber was booming: two sawmills, a grist mill, several factories, two boarding houses, six saloons, and a dance hall, not to mention a baseball team. The developers had aspirations to be more than just a successful port. They had plans for a public library, a debate hall, and an athenaeum–which in my mind is a combination of a public library and a debate hall, but I am not an urban developer with big dreams.
Those dreams crumbled in the Panic of 1857.[2] By 1869, Nininger City existed largely on paper, though Donnelly’s two-story mansion remained, overlooking the failed city from a hill on river. By 1932, there was nothing left except Donnelly’s mansion and the foundations of a few old buildings, hidden in the prairie grass.
Donnelly lived in his mansion until his death in 1901: one of those larger-than-life enthusiasts (aka eccentrics) whom the nineteenth century produced with some regularity. After Minnesota became a state in 1858, he served three terms as a congressman and one as its lieutenant-governor. He wrote the best-selling Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882)[3] , which is credited with popularizing the idea of the lost civilization, and three books arguing that Francis Bacon wrote not only Shakespeare’s plays, but the works of Marlowe and Montaigne. He supported women’s suffrage and the Farmers’ Alliance, an agrarian movement which sought to improve economic conditions for farmers through political advocacy and the creation of cooperatives. He ran for vice-president on the tickets of two different populist parties. (Not at the same time.)
[1] By comparison, St. Paul, the capital, had a population of roughly 10,000. The population of Minnesota as a whole was about 85,000.
[2] Here’s the short version:
Grain prices dropped due to a combination of bumper crops and reduced demand from Europe due to the end of the Crimean War. Foreign trade imbalances led to a drain on the nation’s gold reserves and increased interest rates. Banks failed. The development of railroads had been a driver of the economic boom that preceded the panic. Now the collapse of credit halted their construction. Unemployment in the large cities of the Northeast and the Midwest soared.
The Panic of 1857 also widened the economic differences between the North and the South, The South, which was less industrialized than the North, did not suffer to the same extent. Low tariffs (ahem) protected its cotton trade with Europe, and sustained its overall economy.
[3] Still in print 140 years later. I can only dream.
Learning Japanese at Fort Snelling during World War II
One of the first things we saw when we got to Fort Snelling was a row of storyboards posted along the sidewalk leading to the visitors’ center. One of them showed a photo of three young Asian-American women in uniform, with a quotation above them:
“I was born in the states, in Nebraska, and I’m an American just like you.”
Sue Ogato Kato. Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, U.S. Army 1943-46.
As I read further, I learned that Sue Kato translated Japanese documents for the American army. I was eager to learn more. Fort Snelling did not disappoint.
In addition to serving as an induction center for new recruits during World War II, Fort Snelling was home to the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS), where second generation Japanese (Nisei) like Sue Kato were trained to read and speak Japanese to prepare them for work as interpreters, interrogators, and in some cases as spies.
Shortly before the war began, the American military recognized they would need Japanese linguists. The military, sharing the general prejudices of the time, would have preferred linguists who were fluent in Japanese but were not themselves Japanese. It turned out to be a very small population. Their next choice were second generation Japanese immigrants, the Nisei, who proved to be less fluent in Japanese and more American culturally than the military leaders had expected. (Only three percent of the Nisei already in the army spoke fluent Japanese,) Even those who spoke Japanese well were not familiar with military terminology in that language or details of the Japanese army.
A month before Pearl Harbor, the Army opened a small class of 60 language students in an empty airplane hangar on Crissy Field at the Presidio in San Francisco. The first class graduated in may, 1942, the same month that the American government began to move Japanese-Americans into internment/concentration camps. With California, western Washington and Oregon and southern Arizona designated as an Exclusion Zone from which Japanese were barred—and overt hostility in California for Asians, even those in military uniform—the school needed to be moved away from the West Coast. MISLS moved to Minnesota, first to Camp Savage and then, as the number of students grew, to Fort Snelling.
More than 6,000 linguists graduated from MISLS, including many recruited from the camps. The curriculum was intensive. In addition to becoming both fluent and literate in Japanese, students learned Japanese army jargon. They learned to read a special style of Japanese used in personal correspondence. They studied captured documents and Japan’s history and culture. They learned to read maps and monitor radios. In 1945, the school added courses in Chinese and Korean and civilian administration in anticipation of new challenges after the end of the war.
Once in the field, MISLS graduates translated and interpreted documents, interrogated prisoners, and communicated with civilians. They convinced soldiers and civilians to surrender at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. One of their most important contributions was translating the “Z Plan,” captured documents which outlined Japanese plans to counter attack in the Southwest Pacific in 1944. General MacArthur’s chief of military intelligence, Major General Charles Willoughby, later claimed The Nisei shortened the Pacific War by two years and saved possibly a million American lives and saved probably billions of dollars.”
Their work continued after the war. MISLS graduates served with the army of occupation in Japan and during the Pacific war crimes trials, where they monitored the work of Japanese translators for accuracy.
In 1946, the school moved to Monterey and was renamed the U.S. Army Language School