Talking About Women’s History: Four Questions and an Answer with Stacy Cordery
I am delighted to have Stacy Cordery back for another round of three, or in this case four, questions and an answer.
At Iowa State University, Stacy A. Cordery is a professor of History and the department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies. In addition to the modern U.S. survey, she teaches the Gilded Age, the History of First Ladies, and the Historical Methods course. Cordery is the president of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era (SHGAPE), a board member for the First Ladies Association for Research and Education (FLARE ), and an advisor to the Theodore Roosevelt Center in Dickinson, North Dakota. She has addressed groups of all sorts and sizes, on-line and off, from platforms which included NPR, the History Channel, Smithsonian TV, Anderson Cooper 360°, CNN, and C-SPAN, and at venues ranging from the Wilson Center and the National Constitution Center to her local library. Her five books include biographies of Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Juliette Gordon Low, as well as her newest biography, Becoming Elizabeth Arden: The Woman Behind the Global Beauty Empire.
Take it away, Stacy!
What path led you to Elizabeth Arden? And why do you think it is important to tell her story today?
As with so many authors, the path to this topic was a combination of personal and professional. As a young teen, my mom and I spent a marvelous mother-daughter day at an Elizabeth Arden salon where we learned all about skin care and makeup from gorgeous Arden experts. It was all very hands on and totally fun. I still have the jar of Eight Hour Cream from that day, and it still has its utterly unique color and–for me—Proustian scent. As a classroom professor and a woman’s biographer, it had been clear to me for years that female entrepreneurs are largely missing from history. Most of us can name at least a handful of Gilded Age or Progressive Era captains of industry (or robber barons; take your pick). But few of us teach our students about women of vision and grit who overcame the odds in the overwhelmingly masculine world of business. In seeking a topic acceptable to my agent and to my editor at Viking/Penguin, it dawned on me how very little I knew about the woman whose ideas and guidance had given my mother and me such a memorable day.
I learned that Elizabeth Arden’s is a rags-to-riches immigrant success story—not unlike John Jacob Astor’s or Andrew Carnegie’s. Because she was a woman, however, she lacked a network, access to bank loans, a mentor, or even a wife to aid in the varied and critical ways wives have always helped their businessmen husbands. Arden began with little beyond fierce determination. She wanted to help women to a greater inner and outer beauty so that they could feel good about themselves, project internal strength, and attain their goals. In the process, she brought about a cultural sea change when she overrode the deep social taboo against cosmetics. She successfully introduced makeup to America with her minimalist and sophisticated “Arden Look.” She originated the first holistic beauty system, which included healthy skin, physical fitness, mental well-being, a nutritious diet, and flattering clothes for all occasions. Arden wasn’t just ahead of the curve, she had a genius for creating it. For nearly six decades she was the premier innovator in the prestige fashion and beauty industries. She built—from scratch and in an extraordinarily short time—a global beauty empire. She ran it as owner and CEO, redefining customer loyalty as her loyalty to her clients. She built the first luxury beauty spa, Maine Chance, which became the destination for celebrities, royalty, and the wealthy from all walks of life. In the process, she hired and promoted countless women, discovered and launched influential couturiers such as Charles James and Oscar de la Renta, and began innovative newspaper, magazine, radio, and television advertising campaigns to reach ever broader swaths of consumers. Elizabeth Arden was also a patriotic contributor to the Allied effort in World War II, an inventor, and a philanthropist, who built a winning thoroughbred racing stable on the side! Her life was fascinating and instructive, and including this successful female entrepreneur enriches the historical record in critically important ways.
What was the most surprising thing you learned about Arden doing historical research for your work?
The most surprising thing may have been how truly self-taught and self-driven she was, and yet how successful. Elizabeth Arden was born in poverty in rural Canada. She never graduated high school, let alone business school. She had an unshakeable faith that she understood women’s desires. She knew that she knew more about her clientele, her products, her industry, and how to run her company than anyone else. She made so much money and methodically rose up the social ranks that her name became a synonym for luxury. How? Where did that conviction originate? She was occasionally wrong, but not often! Elizabeth Arden was by far the most self-certain individual I have ever studied.
If I can add the most admirable thing I learned about Arden, it would be all of her amazing accomplishments during World War II. Her efforts were generous, sincere, and motivated by a deep patriotism. She loved working with the women’s auxiliaries in the U.S. military, particularly the Women Marines. She aided recruitment, designed the color Montezuma Red for products such as lipstick and nail polish to match their uniforms, and loved every visit to a base where she could mingle with the WRs. Elizabeth Arden teamed up with Kappa Kappa Gamma to create, stock, and pay for makeup bars at Women’s Service Centers—what an incredible story!
Elizabeth Arden lived a very different life than the subjects of your earlier biographies of influential women, Juliette Gordon Low and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Were there similarities that surprised you?
It is true that on the face of it, those are three very different women! But all of them devoted their lives to their own “passion projects,” and while they were certainly unalike, all three operated on behalf of a larger population: women (Arden), girls and women (Low), the U.S. democracy (Longworth). Plus, all three were single-minded in their commitment and utterly convinced of the rightness of their cause. Arden, who at the time had one salon and was doing it all—from staffing the front desk to providing treatments to sweeping up—nevertheless started by advertising in Vogue, which was even then was national and aimed at elites! Juliette Gordon Low famously began, when there were exactly zero Girl Scouts, by stating that she had “something for the girls of Savannah, and all of America, and all the world, and we’re going to start it tonight!” Longworth worked mostly behind the scenes, but for sixty years the nation’s most powerful leaders sought her opinion. And of course, the similarity that mattered to me as their biographer is that all three intriguing women deserve to be better known.
Do you think Women’s History Month is important and why?
I’m at the end of my career, and I will speak frankly. Misogyny exists. It is (often but not always) subterranean, persistent, harmful, and costly. It is debilitating to everyone, including misogynists. Women’s History Month at the very least gives us a rationale to shine the spotlight for one short period on women, without too much blowback. Women’s History Month has been going on in some fashion since the 1980s. It has generally been an uncontroversial thing on the calendar—that is, until very recently I have not been aware of protests against the idea. I do think Women’s History Month is important. These 31 dedicated days mean that we can educate ourselves and deepen our corporate understanding of women’s nuanced and complicated histories. While perhaps a small thing in the ancient and often overwhelming presence of misogyny, I believe it is worthwhile to continue to set aside March to focus, to learn, to remember, to caution, to inspire. As Hillary Clinton wrote in Something Lost, Something Gained, “We need to understand women’s history (and all our history) to better secure our rights and fight for the ones we’ve lost or have yet to gain.” (p. 293)
A question from Stacy: I love libraries and librarians, archives and archivists. Tell us about a time when an archivist made all the difference!
One subject I wrote about in Women Warriors, was the role supportive fathers played in the creation of women who fought. I wanted to move the story beyond the past to the modern world. I had plenty of anecdotal evidence about women following their fathers into the military, but I really wanted some hard data.
I was spending a lot of time at the Pritzer Military Library, which was then located in downtown Chicago. When I asked the chief librarian, Teri Embry, if she had any ideas about where I could find the information, she grinned, held up a finger and walked away. She came back with a large book, West Point’s Annual Register of Graduates for 2010, and flipped to the genealogical succession table, which listed every West Point graduate from 1802 to 2010 who was a descendant (or ancestor) of another West Point graduate. Beginning with the class of 1980, every graduating class has included women who are the daughters, granddaughters, nieces, sisters and in one case great-great granddaughter of former cadets. I would never have found that source without Teri’s help.
After that I regularly turned to Teri and her reference staff when I ran into questions for both Women Warriors and The Dragon From Chicago, or when I found it difficult to get my hands on a source. During Covid, they were a lifesaver.
It broke my heart when the library moved to Wisconsin.
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Interested in learning more about Stacy and her work?
Check out her website: https://www.stacycordery.com/
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Olivia Campbell, author of Sisters in Science.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Sarah Hagglund
Sarah Hagglund is a Boston-based art historian and currently works in the Division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. She received her BA in History and Anthropology from Kent State University and her MA in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University. Her research focuses on 17th-century Italian women artists and women art collectors, and in 2021 she was named a Portz Scholar for her work on the subject. More broadly, Sarah’s love for uncovering the stories of women of the past has led her to be interviewed on the What’sHerName podcast,and she recently worked with a local tour company, Hub Town Tours, to help research and develop a women’s suffrage walking tour of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. Before she joined the Harvard Art Museums, she previously held positions at the Gibson House Museum and the Kent State University Museum.
Take it away, Sarah!
When did you first become interested in women artists of the Italian Baroque era? What sparked that interest?
It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I really became fascinated with the Italian Baroque, and particularly looking at women artists of that period. I had often written my term papers in my other history and art history classes on a specific woman or about gender more broadly, but in the fall of my junior year, I had the opportunity to take a mixed undergraduate/graduate level course focused solely on Italian Baroque Art. The course covered the greats of the period—Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, among others—and I was immediately captivated by the Baroque style and have been ever since (thank you Dr. Medicus). However, I remember really struggling to come up with a topic for my term paper as the class drew to a close. I knew I wanted to focus on a woman artist and so I started with a simple google search and eventually stumbled upon the name Elisabetta Sirani.
At this point, the only woman artist of the period I had known was Artemisia Gentileschi, and so after finding Sirani’s name, I dove head-first into researching her. Little did I know at the time, I would very quickly become enamored with her art and her story. Sirani was a prolific artist in Bologna during the 17th century and would financially support her family through her art practice before she even turned the age of 20. She taught other women, including her sisters, to paint and draw, and she was known for working so fast that she became a local spectacle that drew in visiting dignitaries and wealthy patrons. Tragically, she died at age 27, likely due to stomach ulcers brought on by overwork, but she left behind a substantial oeuvre that often portrays historical and biblical stories of women with strength and nuance. Her painting, Portia Wounding Her Thigh, immediately struck me when I first saw it on my computer screen, and her work would later go on to inspire my undergraduate thesis focused on women’s cultural production in the city of Bologna in the 17th century.
Why do you think so many of these women have been left out of traditional art histories?
In my opinion, one of the biggest contributing factors to women being left out of our traditional art histories is survival bias. The art that survives today is only a minuscule fraction of all of the art that has been made in human history, and yet, that fraction is what is mostly informing our current understanding of the past. Over time, names have been lost to history, but so has the art made by their hands, and I think women artists were particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. The art forms that many women would have had access to, such as lace making or embroidery, are not only more susceptible to decay over time because they are made from organic materials, but they were also not always valued as an art form and therefore were not as well protected.
Moreover, women artists who painted or made sculpture in the early modern period, were still often limited to specific genres that were deemed “appropriate” for women such as portraiture or devotional imagery. These genres were more susceptible to being removed from their original contexts which results in information loss over time. One example of this is Sirani herself and particularly the women artists she taught. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte had captured Bologna, and damaged or looted several convents and churches. Because many of the paintings made by women artists during the centuries prior dealt mostly with religious subjects—as was “appropriate”—they were disproportionately affected by these kinds of events, making some women artists all but disappear from the art historical record.
Additionally, an important factor to consider as to why women were (and sometimes still are) left out of art history narratives, is the bias of early scholars themselves. It is not just lack of documentation, but also a lack of willingness to uncover more about the women that might have been mentioned in the early sources. This is a symptom so many marginalized communities face when trying to uncover and forefront their stories: people, moments in history, and important nuance were forgotten or intentionally overlooked simply because they were not seen as valuable to the already determined historical narrative. This too applies to art history, where often art made by the Old Masters (aka male European artists from the 14th-18th centuries) was valued more highly and as a result, informed not only the taste of the art market, but also the direction of scholarship. Although the field is continuing to progress, we are still left with the legacies of a biased foundation. [Pamela butting it: this is an idea I’m going to come back to!]
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
As I have mentioned, the stories, the art, and the documentation we have about the lives of past women are deeply fragmented. To me, this is the very thing that I find not only most challenging, but also most exciting about researching historical women. Rarely do the traditional written sources provide a full picture; we instead have to turn to other additional avenues, such as social histories, art, and material culture to bolster our understanding of women’s stories of the past and the worlds they navigated. In Joan Kelly-Gadol’s seminal essay from 1976, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” she posed and explored this question as a way to challenge the historical timeline built around the male experience and highlight the fact that it may not align with what women were experiencing at the same time. If the historical context itself was created by centering male stories, when researching women, we not only have to try and piece together information, but often we must confront the preconceived notions about a period of time or a series of events that prevent more diverse stories from being explored. This excites me because it means there is still so much left to uncover, but it does make it hard at times to really access the nuance around a past woman’s life. And in that way, I think this is what has always drawn me to women artists in particular, because there is something extremely powerful about being in a room in front of a work of art made by a woman centuries ago that we may know nothing about, and yet, the work of art can still resonate with women today.
Portia Wounding Her Thigh. Portia Catonis was the wife of Brutus. According to Plutarch, she came upon her husband while he was thinking about the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar. He would not share his concerns with Portia, for fear that she would reveal the plot under torture. To prove her ability to withstand physical pain, Portia wounded herself and then suffered in silence for a day proving to her husband that she could keep her secrets.
A question from Sarah: As someone who is still developing her career, I would love to know if there is anything you wish you would have known or anything that still to this day surprises you about studying women of the past and then publishing their stories?
I’m going to come at this from a slightly angle, and tell you two things I wish I had understood earlier
1. Take the opportunities when they come if they interest you. Even when they are outside your academic field. (It sounds like you’ve already figured this one out.)
2. Find your people, in real life and on-line, and nurture your connections to them.
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Interested in learning more about Sarah and her work? Listen to her episode on the What’s Her Name podcast.
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historian Stacy Cordery
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
Several years ago, My Own True Love and I visited the headwaters of the Mississippi at Lake Itasca State Park, in Minnesota, as part of our multi-part road trip along the Great River Road. There we learned that Henry Rowe Schoolcraft “discovered” and named the headwaters of the Mississippi.* We also learned that Schoolcraft developed a reputation as an expert on Ojibwe language and culture, with the “help” of his wife, Jane Johnston, an educated woman of Ojibwe and Scots-Irish heritage. (Quotation marks are mine, and loaded with opinions.) I tucked that away as something worth looking into later.
Schoolcraft, and consequently Johnston, recently popped up in the context of something I am researching.** Apparently later is now.
Poet and writer Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800-1842) is considered the first major Native American woman writer in English. She was born into a prominent family in Sault Ste Marie in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an area where Native American, Canadian, and American cultures intertwined. She navigated between (at least) three linguistic and cultural worlds long before she met Henry: the Ojibwe culture, language and kinship network of her mother, her father’s Scots-Irish heritage (and love of Shakespeare),*** and the polyglot lingua franca of the region.
Henry arrived in Sault Ste Marie as an Indian Affairs agent in 1822 and boarded with the Johnston family. He and Jane married soon after.
Jane and her family members collected, transcribed, and translated stories from the Ojibwe tradition and those of other Native American peoples, including creation stories and tales about the origins of various plants and animals in the time before man. Henry reused some of these legends in his own writing, earning a reputation as an ethnographer in the process. One of his poems inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha.
Jane was often separated from Henry while he traveled for his territorial duties and in his role as a literary lion. Lonely, and later anguished when her children were sent away to attend an eastern boarding school, she wrote poetry in both English and Ojibwe, sometimes using both languages in a single poem, that explore themes of loss, loneliness and alienation. Her poetry was never published in her life time, with the exception of a few pieces included in a handwritten magazine she published with her husband.
In time she became addicted to laudanum, which doctors prescribed with a liberal hand to women during the period. She died suddenly at 42 while Henry was away in England.
Her work was published posthumously in 2007, in a collection titled The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky, edited by Robert Dale Parker.
*You can read my rant on the subject of both the “discovery” and the re-naming of the lake as an inherently colonial project in my post on that visit.
**Nope. Still no hints.
***She even spent some time in Ireland.
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Come back on Monday for three questions and an answer with art historian Sarah Hagglund.