Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Margot Mifflin
Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who writes about women’s history and the arts. She pioneered the study of women’s tattoo history with Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo. Her second book, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman, was a finalist for the Caroline Bancroft History Prize. Her most recent book, Looking For Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood, is the first cultural history of the Miss America pageant. Margot’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The NewYorker.com, Vogue, Vice, Elle, ARTnews, Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Feministing, Lapham’s Quarterly, Lit Hub, and other publications.
Margot is an English professor at Lehman College/CUNY and teaches arts journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She has served as a consultant on exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Historical Society, and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and curated the exhibition “Body Electric” at Ricco/Maresca Gallery.
Take it away, Margot!
Why do you think the Miss America story is important today?
We’re in the midst of a painful national reckoning about what it means to be American, and for the past century, the pageant has tried to define that by crowning an ideal American woman. The pageant’s trajectory reflects American assumptions about immigration (it was launched shortly after 20 million immigrants landed on our shores), national purity (for the pageant’s first 50 years, no women of color were crowned) and proper American womanhood (the swimsuit had just replaced woolen dresses women previously swam in, but the question of how much skin it could reveal was being literally legislated city by city.) It’s no coincidence that the pageant was launched a year after the 19th Amendment was passed; it championed values in direct conflict with the goals of first wave feminism: domesticity, virginity, and marriageability. (The first question winners were asked was when and what kind of man they would like to marry.) Even the sash itself was an appropriation of the suffragette sashes women wore to denote women’s collective political identity by state: the contestants wore them to signify individual identity, pitting women against each other regionally for a national title that rewarded appearance, not women’s agency or participation in national politics. So as a reactionary institution, each step of Miss America’s evolution tracks with some development in our culture, whether electoral politics, immigration, war, fashion, feminism or (once scholarships were added in the 1940s) women’s higher education.
But wherever you have a repressive institution, someone is going to rebel, and that’s where Miss America gets interesting. Especially in the early 20th century, when women had fewer professional opportunities and competed as a means to financial and social mobility, some ambitious and courageous women flouted the rules. One refused to wear a swimsuit during her reign, causing a pageant sponsor to withdraw and create the Miss Universe pageant. Others used the title for unexpected ends: for example, Miss America 1958 Marilyn Van Derbur revealed—despite the disapproval of the pageant director–that she was an incest survivor and to this day works to support survivors of sexual abuse. I quote her talking about how the social and physical discipline Miss America required was useful to her in “locking up” her body and containing the trauma she experienced at the hands of her father. It was something she—and other winners—had to unlearn for the sake of their own mental health.
At first glance, your three books cover very different subjects of women in history. Are there common themes that link them?
They all explore female subcultures in which women, under the boot of patriarchy, are trying to gain traction financially or professionally, or both. My book Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, is a feminist history of Western tattoo art. Tattooing has historically been not only a male dominated but also a very macho profession in Europe and the US; the women who broke in as artists starting in the early 20th century were up against tremendous resistance, and transformed this medium by adapting it, in the late 20th century, to specifically female ends, like mastectomy scar coverups or designs specific to the female form. My book The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman grew out of Bodies of Subversion, but it too describes a woman socially marginalized, having been tattooed on her chin as a member of the Mohave tribe, which adopted and raised her after her pioneer family’s death in a wagon train attack. She was pushed into the spotlight and became a reluctant—but very effective—public speaker in the late 1850s, at a time when women had only just started to campaign for their rights. So, like the other women I’ve written about, she was up against very stubborn expectations of women’s social roles, and transcended them in the process of recounting her bicultural life.
What are you working on now?
I’m at work on a book about another sort-of subculture: Quaker abolitionist feminists of the early 1880s.The two most powerful social movements of 19th century America—abolition and women’s suffrage—were dominated by Quaker women. From its birth in Britain in the 1620s, Quakerism encouraged women’s independent travel, preaching, and gender equality, priming them for lives of advocacy that ultimately helped end slavery and secure the vote for women. Some of these women are well-known–Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, Susan B. Anthony, Abby Kelley, Lucy Stone—but the religious foundation of their activism is not. Likewise, dozens of lesser known, equally dauntless Quaker feminists shaped the course of antebellum history, notably the Black abolitionist Grace Bustill Douglass, a founder of the bi-racial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. While it was African Americans themselves who launched and led the bravest fight and took the greatest risks in the push for abolition, Quaker women used their public platform to advance it, attempting—not always successfully—to build an intersectional movement.
A question from Margot: Relevant to your book Understanding Socialism:
What are the biggest misconceptions about socialism at play in contemporary politics (especially in the Trump administration)?
The two biggest factual misconceptions are that socialism and communism are the same thing and that any government-owned, -funded, or subsidized program is socialist. However, the most deep-seated misuse of socialism in politics today is based on fear rather than on misunderstanding.
Over the last hundred years, Americans have been both baffled and frightened by socialism. Periodic “red scares” have shaped America’s domestic and foreign policy at times of national crisis,* beginning in 1919 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was convinced that socialists were plotting to overthrow the government. Without evidence, he arrested thousands of communists, socialists, and anarchists—most of whom trouble organizing a small political party, let alone a revolution—and held them without trial. (I will leave you to draw comparisons or not as you choose.)
Today, the popular understanding of socialism is still shaped to a great degree by the Cold War, which was often described in terms of a battle to the death between good (capitalism) and evil (communism). As a result, many people equate socialism with an attack on American values, without reference to the many different forms and ideals it has encompassed over the centuries, and use “socialist” as an epithet with no particular meaning.
*Though it is an open question whether such red scares are the cause or the result of the crises they accompany.
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Interested in learning more about Lydia and her work? Check out her website: https://margotmifflin.com/
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historical novelist Joan Fernandez, author of Saving Vincent, the story Jo Van Gogh.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Lydia Moland
Lydia Moland is the author of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life, a biography of one of 19th-century America’s fiercest abolitionists. She is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Philosophy at Colby College in Maine and the author of books and articles on 19th-century German philosophy. Her work on Lydia Maria Child has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among other venues. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, and the American Academy in Berlin. The best thing she did on her last sabbatical was to take trapeze lessons. [Pamela here: That sounds like so much fun!]
Take it away, Lydia!
What path led you to Lydia Maria Child? And why do you think it is important to tell her story today?
I had been happily writing academic books about German philosophy before the 2016 election. At that point, I decided that I wanted my scholarship to reflect our new national reality, and I went looking for wisdom from an American woman who had faced a moral emergency in her country. I literally went to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, which has an incredible collection of women’s history, and asked the librarians if they knew of any women philosophers who had also fought against slavery. Their help led me to discover Lydia Maria Child, one of the foremost abolitionists of the 19th century. Child’s example stunned me. Once convinced of the evils of slavery, Child took stock of her abilities and dedicated them to helping her country live up to its principles. Her primary talents were as a writer, so she wrote fiction, nonfiction, histories, biographies, and self-help books, all with the express purpose of cultivating democratic virtues. But she did not only write. She assisted those escaping slavery and faced down mobs of proslavery agitators. She organized antislavery fairs and raised money for freedpeople. She edited a national abolitionist newspaper, used her connections to support Black artists and authors, and farmed sugar beets in an attempt to undermine the value of cane sugar grown on plantations.
If people know anything about Child, they know that she wrote “Over the River and Through the Wood.” I was intrigued (and simultaneously somewhat enraged) by the fact that someone famous for a sentimental Thanksgiving poem was actually a radical reformer. I decided more people needed to learn more from her example, so I wrote Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life.
Child’s story is so important today because she is a brilliant example of someone who recognized her responsibility for her country’s democracy and met that responsibility at every turn. There were very dark times: times when it seemed the country was sliding further into authoritarianism and all hope was lost. Child also survived a decade of disengagement and depression after her editing of a national abolitionist newspaper ended in ruined friendships, an estranged husband, and a conviction that her life had been for nothing. She learned through bitter experience that pursuing political change requires us not just to take stock of our talents but to understand our limits. This knowledge enabled her, after this period of depression, to reengage and keep fighting for the rest of her life. I think this is a vital example for all of us today.
Your previous work focused on 19th century German philosophy. What was it like to write about a 19th-century female activist instead?
I had a fundamental insight going into this project that in order to devote yourself to ending a systematic evil at your country’s core, you would have to be thinking philosophically. That is: you would have to be asking big questions like “What is justice?” or “What is truth?” or “What does it mean to be human?” You’d have to have some deep underlying commitments that would sustain you when things got hard. And you’d have to make good arguments: to listen to people, understand where they were coming from, and then convince them to change their lives. Child was not officially a philosopher—she wouldn’t have been allowed to be, given her gender—but she was inspired by German philosophy, and she certainly thought philosophically. She asked big questions; she had deep underlying commitments; and she was a champion at helping her fellow white Americans see that the arguments that enabled them to condone or ignore slavery were flawed.
Someone once said that no real social change happens without philosophy, and I think that’s true. Philosophy has always been an enormous source of strength to me, including in my political engagements. As we confront social crises from climate change to racial injustice to growing threats to women’s rights, I think we can all benefit from the example of someone like Child.
What are you working on now?
Two things: one, together with Alison Stone of Lancaster University, I am editing the Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century. We were educated to think that there were no women philosophers in the nineteenth century. But once we started looking, they were everywhere. They had been erased or forgotten in all the ways with which we are now familiar. If we assume they were not there, we do not look for them. If we do not look for them, we do not find them! Our volume has 50 chapters bringing these amazing women back into the light. [Pamela butting in again: This is such a familiar, enraging story.]
And I have definitely been bitten by the biography bug! I have started work on the life of Helene Stöcker, a radical German feminist and pacifist who had to flee the Nazis in 1933. Stöcker was the first German woman to earn a PhD in philosophy. She used the radical thought of Friedrich Nietzsche (despite his famous and blistering misogyny!) to claim that society’s values needed radical reevaluation. She used this insight to attack norms that held women back; she also used it to challenge her society’s assumption that war could be justified. But she did not only theorize. Stöcker founded clinics for unwed mothers to give birth and homes for them to live. She organized seminars advising women on sexual health and petitioned the government to provide paid leave for new mothers. After World War I, she organized internationally for peace, collaborating with Albert Einstein and others in the hopes of preventing another war. When this failed, she escaped via the trans-Siberian railroad across Russia and took a steamer to San Francisco. It is a life of principle and adventure, and I am excited to get started!
A question from Lydia: Your book The Dragon from Chicago is also about a woman who, like my new biographical subject Helene Stöcker, lived and wrote in Berlin in the early 1900s. (Stöcker was also a well-known author, so I am sure they knew of each other!) Both women tried to warn their readers about rising fascism. How did you manage the emotionally draining aspects of writing about such dark times? Do you think about lessons for us today about how to encourage readers to do what’s necessary to resist political oppression?
First, let me say, it was indeed emotionally draining. One of the first things I did was read all of Sigrid Schultz’s by-lined articles in chronological order, from a fluffy little piece about her first visit to Paris after World War I, written in 1919, to a retrospective article on identifying Hitler’s body after the war, written in 1968. Reading the news day-to-day as the Weimar republic crumbled and the Nazis seized control was powerful and distressing, especially when the news then seemed all too similar to the news in 2020.
I found the best way to manage the emotional stress was to step away from the grim and dark in my down time. I chopped a lot of vegetables. I knitted simple things—knit four, purl four, repeat. I read a lot of genre novels–science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and romance were all fair game as long as they were not set in Nazi Germany.(Horror, not so much.) I ignored the many many people who told me I really needed to watch Babylon Berlin or World on Fire—sorry, folks, those were the last things I needed to watch. (Though I did indulge myself with a couple of seasons of Wonder Woman. Watching Lynda Carter kick Nazi butt in every episode was deeply satisfying.)
But giving myself downtime was not the same as hiding my head in the sand. I also spent a lot of time thinking about the ways in which Sigrid Schultz stood up to the Nazis , and wondering whether I would be as courageous as she was. Over and over I came back to her own assessment of the work she did: “The greatest service we could render our country was to try to marshal the facts as they were and not as propagandists tried to make them appear.” As a historian, that’s my assignment.
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Interested in learning more about Lydia and her work?
Check out her website: lydiamoland.com
If you have access to the Wall Street Journal, read this review of Lydia Maria Child: “An Abolitionist is Born” (Pay wall, alas!)
Follow her on Bluesky: @lydiamoland.bsky.social
Read this piece about her new research on the feminist and pacifist Helene Stöcker
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Margot Mifflin, author of Looking for Miss America
Rosie the Riveter’s Texas Cousins–and a Piece of Big News at the End!
Rosie the Riveter entered the American imagination in 1942 in a song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb which celebrated a tireless factory worker and her riveting gun.* Artists quickly picked up the image for patriotic posters, the best known being J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It” poster for Westinghouse Electric.
But Rosie was only one version of the women who stepped up to do non-traditional jobs in World War II. The women who worked at Kelly Field in San Antonio were known locally as “Kelly Katies.” During the course of the war, Kelly Airfield became the world’s largest air supply depot; the 10,000 plus Katies who worked there made up more than forty percent of the workforce.** Among other jobs, they overhauled aircraft engines, taxied aircraft, and repaired damaged planes.
When the Korean War began in 1950, Katies returned to Kelly Field to overhaul B-29 bombers and other aircraft that were taken out of storage. You could argue that the Air Force took the Katies out of storage, too.
*This was news to me. This clip is from a 1943 recording of the song made by the Four Vagabonds.
**The first woman to work at Kelly, Estella Davis, arrived during the First World War, in December, 1917. (There’s got to be a story there.) She retired in September, 1945, at the age of 68, but only after she was sure she wasn’t needed to support the war effort.
*Takes a deep breath*
And now for my big news: The Dragon from Chicago is one of five finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography. Needless to say, I am thrilled. (Thrilled!!!!) The winner will be announced on April 25, at a ceremony that kicks off the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the campus of University of Southern California. (I’ll be on a panel at the festival and signing books.) Cross your fingers for me, and drop by to say hi if you’re in the L.A. area.
Quite frankly, I already feel like a winner.
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Come back on Monday for three questions and an answer with philosopher and historian Lydia Moland.