History in the Margins

In case you missed the memo, or got a memo that says otherwise, March is Women’s History Month.

We’re going to celebrate here in the Margins the same way we’ve celebrated for the last six (!) years, with a series of mini-interviews with people who write about or otherwise work with women’s history. Unlike the rest of the year, there will be new posts Monday through Friday. (If you want to rev yourself up, you can read all the previous interviews here.)

I’ve got a great mix of people lined up to talk about a wide range of women and historical projects. It’s going to be Big Fun!

In fact I’m so excited about the prospect that we’re going to start a day early in celebration of the 100th birthday of The New Yorker. The magazine plays a central role in Amy Reading’s book, The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, which is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

Amy is also the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library, among others. She lives in upstate New York, where she serves on the board of her local independent bookstore, Buffalo Street Books. Her name is an aptonym. (Pamela here: I’ll save you the bother of looking it up. According to the Oxford English Dictionary an aptonym is “a person’s name that is regarded as amusingly appropriate to their occupation.” How fun is that?)

Take it away, Amy!

Photo credit: Jamie Love

Writing about a historical figure like Katharine White requires living with her over a period of years.  What was it like to have her as a constant companion?

I began researching Katharine White’s life and career in 2017, and I immediately knew I could settle in comfortably for a long journey because she felt familiar to me. I get her mind. She was, like me, first and foremost a reader and she felt most herself when reading with a pencil in hand, whether to edit a manuscript or to notate a book. Criticism was her love language or, to put it another way, she had an editorial mindset about nearly everything in her life. Many people know her from her garden columns in The New Yorker and her posthumously published book, Onward and Upward in the Garden, but what is gardening except editing the landscape?

I came to understand how her editorial mindset could feel to her like generosity and abundance, like she was always in pursuit of a higher vision and bringing others along with her. This vision applied, first of all, to the magazine as a whole. She joined the staff just a few months after it was founded in 1925 when it was still a scrappy humor magazine, and she was the person most responsible for expanding its purview to more serious literature, memoir, and poetry. And of course her vision also applied to the manuscripts that arrived in the mail in huge stacks every day. She was so unbelievably good at reading something and seeing the outlines of what it could become. Her authors adored her for it—there are so many letters in the archives that testify to this.

The arc of Katharine’s life was unfailingly interesting for me in the eight years it took to research, write, and publish her biography. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1914 and she campaigned for suffrage, but she did not use the term “feminist” to describe herself, and her career took place almost exactly in the interval between the Nineteenth Amendment and The Feminine Mystique, an interval when women’s activism slackened. Yet she published a dazzling array of women authors who became canonical—Kay Boyle, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, just to name a few—and furthermore, she corresponded with an impressive network of literary women, agents and editors who helped create the literature that women just like themselves were reading. I was riveted to the changes of Katharine’s career over time, to how she responded to changes in the workforce and changes in the culture at large. It’s not a bad idea as a historian to look at the editors who were themselves looking at their own times with critical, discerning eyes. And in Katharine’s case, that sense of being part of the slipstream of her times was doubled. Her marriage to E.B. White and his own career at The New Yorker meant that both people in that partnership were attuned to the news and their own roles in shaping, responding to, and commenting on it.

We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past.  What are the challenges of writing about women from the early and middle twentieth century?

I was drowning in sources for Katharine’s life. As a literary woman in the era of typewriters, carbon copies, and secretaries who took dictation, her life and career has been very well documented and preserved. Too well! The New Yorker papers live at the New York Public Library, and just this month the NYPL has put treasures from this archive on exhibit to mark the magazine’s 100th anniversary. Here (second picture) is a note from Katharine White to her boss, Harold Ross. These papers felt nearly bottomless to me. I joked that Katharine’s editorial memos are like bindweed: I’d pull one folder out of the box, and three more folders would grow deep in the archive. My challenge was to forge a path through these papers, to find the authors who particularly mattered to her or who told a story that readers particularly needed to hear. That’s the challenge of any biography: to give shape to a life that is full to bursting in the living of it.

The New Yorker papers weren’t my only source. Katharine spent her retirement creating five distinct archives (her papers, her husband E.B. White’s, her sister Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s, and papers from both her mother’s and her father’s families) which she donated to four universities. She would often jot down a note, sometimes small and sometimes running to many pages, to explain why a particular letter was important, and then she’d paperclip the note to the letter, thus expanding her archive even more. It felt as if I were reading every source over her shoulder and that was both a blessing and a curse. Letters and notes within these archives make very clear that she destroyed sources even as she notated and preserved others. I learned about some of the most important moments of her personal life only from letters that escaped her attention or were donated after her death.

But the depth and breadth of these sources arise from privilege, and so the other challenge of writing about Katharine was to make this privilege visible. It wasn’t enough to just read the papers; I also needed to read the silences, the absences, the counterfactuals, the might-have-beens. I researched who Katharine didn’t edit, which authors tried to break into The New Yorker but were rejected time and again, including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Alex Haley. I looked at other editors whose careers are not as fulsomely documented, such as Jessie Redmon Fauset at The Crisis. The challenge of twentieth century women’s history is that the archives mirror the circumstances in which they were created, and the researcher needs to imagine what might exist outside them to begin to counteract their biases.

One of the important elements in The World She Edited is the way White nurtured the careers of women writers in her role as editor.  Do you have a favorite story about her relationship with one of those writers?

Hard to choose. How Katharine revived Jean Stafford’s career after the end of her violent marriage to Robert Lowell, and eventually introduced her to her third husband, New Yorker reporter A.J. Liebling? How Vladimir Nabokov sent the top-secret manuscript of Lolita to her house only to have her send it back unread?

Perhaps my favorite story is her editing relationship with Mary McCarthy. Katharine loved McCarthy’s writing and worked hard to bring her into the magazine. Their relationship really clicked when McCarthy began writing reminiscences about her ghastly childhood as an orphan of the 1918 epidemic, raised by unbelievably cruel relatives. Katharine worked with her to strike the exact right tone of the stories, which risked seeming too incredible or exaggerated. (Katharine also advanced her money before accepting or publishing these stories, something she often did to nurture writers she wanted to publish—she played the long game.) In one exuberantly grateful letter, McCarthy told her that these edits helped her remember the true events lying underneath her facile prose, that Katharine had magically peered through the manuscript to see the real story, as yet unexpressed. The letters between the two of them are quite touching but also fascinating from a literary critical perspective.

And then I reread the book that McCarthy published from these reminiscences, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. I had written a chapter of my dissertation on this book, but now, with Katharine’s editing foremost in my mind, I saw it very differently. When she collected the essays, McCarthy did not change a word from how they had appeared in The New Yorker. But after each essay she appended a new passage, usually just a few short pages, which reconsidered the essay, noting what she originally got wrong or misremembered, what she later learned, where she lied or falsified for a good story. She gave a reading of her own work, probing each essay’s weakness and pointing out where it worked. And suddenly I could see that these interludes sound exactly like Katharine’s gentle but substantive editorial memos. McCarthy had been so influenced by Katharine that she adopted this editorial mindset toward her own work, and it struck her as so valuable that she wove it into the structure of her book so that readers could witness this interplay between earlier draft and later consideration. No surprise that Katharine loved the book and its unique design.

What work of women’s history have you read lately that you loved?  (Or for that matter, what work of women’s history have you loved in any format?)

What immense pleasure I got from reading The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963 to 1973 by Clara Bingham. I cannot recommend it highly enough, even to your readers, who are surely more versed than most in second wave feminism. Bingham’s book is an oral history of a tremendously consequential decade, and the dozens of voices we get to hear in these pages make it so lively and vibrant. I guarantee you’ll encounter women and subcultures and victories that you’ve never heard of before. Bingham’s achievement is to render this history fully contingent and suspenseful. You know how it all turns out, of course, but she brings you back to a time when women had far fewer rights and everything to gain by taking risks, speaking out, creating their own networks and institutions from scratch. I found this book equally humbling and inspiring, wildly moving, a page-turner, and above all, deeply relevant.

A question from Amy: How can we use women’s history to forge a path through this post-Dobbs, authoritarian moment, when women, trans people, and LGBTQ folks are highly vulnerable yet ready to fight? What figures and era in women’s history are you reading about to tell us how to counter this administration’s hostility to women?

*Gulp* That is a BIG question. I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer it. (In fact, I urge you to read the Q & A with philosopher and historian Lydia Moland, which will run on March 10, for a much better answer than I can give you.)  But here are my thoughts:

• First, and most important, find your heroes.  Not only women who inspire you with their courage or stubbornness or brains, but women who changed the world to use as your models.
• Resist efforts to erase women’s accomplishments when you see them. (And they are happening.) If you aren’t able to stop an immediate effort, document it and shout about it where ever you can. And yes, I know this is hard.
• Keep telling and sharing the stories of women who made changes (especially if they were not given credit for their innovations), women whose stories were covered up, women who fought injustice—you get the idea.
• Support the people who are telling those stories.
• If you are in a position to green light projects that tell stories about the history of women or other groups left out of mainstream historical accounts (books, movies, panels, museum exhibits, public programs at a school/church/library),   don’t reflexively say no because it might be a hard sell . And don’t cancel scheduled  projects just because you are scared. (And yes, that is happening, also.

In other words, use women’s history* as a means to speak up and speak out. It would be easy to say that there are more important battles to fight right now. But the politics surrounding who is remembered and who isn’t is powerful and  all attacks on liberties are related.

As for me, these Women History Month posts are my own way of speaking up. Or at least one of them.

*And Black history, and LBGTQ history, and Labor history, etc, etc , etc.

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Interested in learning more about Amy Reading and her work? Check out her website, http://www.amyreading.com/

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Come back on Monday for three questions and an answer with Sara Catterall, author of Amelia Bloomer: Journalists, Suffragists, Anti-Fashion Icon.