From the Archives–Talking About Women’s History: Three Question and an Answer with Lydia Moland
Like all historians, I enjoy a dip into the archives!
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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–someone!
From the Archives–Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Sara Catterall
Another post from the past!
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Sara Catterall and I have been following each other around the internet since we met as reviewers for Shelf Awareness, a shockingly long time ago. I’ve been looking forward to her biography of Amelia Bloomer ever since she began posting about it. As you’ll see below, bloomers were only a small part of Bloomer’s life.
Sara is a writer with a Drama degree from NYU, and an MLIS from Syracuse University. She was born in Ankara and grew up in South Minneapolis. She has worked as a librarian at Cornell University, as a reviewer and interviewer for Shelf Awareness, and as a professional book indexer. Her work has been published in the NEH’s Humanities magazine and The Sun, and she co-authored Ottoman Dress and Design in the West: A Visual History of Cultural Exchange. She lives with her family near Ithaca, New York, serves on the Executive Board of Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, and is a member of Biographers International.
Take it away, Sara!
Photo credit: Edna Brown
Many of my readers will recognize the name Amelia Bloomer. Are there particular challenges in writing about women who people think they know something about?
I think that her name recognition helped me more than challenged me. I was first inspired to look up more about her because of it. Once I realized there was much more to her career, I kept a file of misinformation about her starting in 1851 right up to the current news. And I thought a lot about what those wrong ideas served, and why on earth people are still repeating them after so long. Why she comes up more often than some of her much more influential or scandalous peers. Also, though that viral incident of the “short dress and trousers” is far from her whole story, it does echo through her life. And they make a great hook! Even when people haven’t heard of Bloomer, they have heard of bloomers.
The thing most of us know about Amelia Bloomer is her championship of “rational dress” in the form of the “bloomers” that came to bear her name. How did dress reform fit into her larger career as a suffragist and social advocate?
In the more general sense of her advocacy for women’s personal and political freedom. She never considered dress reform one of her primary causes. She came to it by way of alternative medicine. Bloomer was chronically ill herself, with serious GI issues and daily headaches starting in her youth, possibly because of a bad bout of malaria, and possibly because of the mercury treatments that were common at that time. Tight clothes are fine when you’re healthy, but if you aren’t, and a lot of people had uncurable chronic ailments in the 19th century, switching to loose clothes can give some relief. “The Turkish dress” had been worn by white women since the 18th century as a political statement and for exercise and leisure, and was considered a feminine alternative to the clothing men wore. Also, in the 1840s, women’s clothing was not just tight, it was heavy and the hemlines trailed on the ground, which made it hard to work or walk in. Bloomer gave up corsets before she put on “the Turkish Dress” and she blamed her sister’s postpartum death on burdensome clothing. She was also known for walking so fast everywhere that her own husband, who was nearly a foot taller, could barely keep up with her. So the short dress and trousers appealed to Bloomer and her friends, and to other women who wore it before she did, for their physical comfort and freedom, without giving up modesty. You had to be a nonconformist, that’s for sure, but some women who wore it were not in favor of woman suffrage, and some women who kept wearing long skirts, were.
What is the most surprising thing you found doing research for your work?
So many! But one was how broad-minded Bloomer was about gender expression through clothes, given that she was born in 1818 and had a conservative rural upbringing. She had no problem with the idea of men wearing “women’s clothes” if they found them comfortable and liked them. Another was her clash with Frederick Douglass, and her friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, over the question of allowing men to be controlling officers in the one-year-old New York Women’s Temperance Society. Douglass, Stanton, and Anthony wanted the most educated, experienced, and influential officers possible, which at that time mostly meant men, and they wanted to focus on women’s rights rather than temperance. Bloomer felt that it was wrong to change the mission of the organization after a year of fundraising for a woman-controlled temperance society, and that women needed to keep control of the funds and the power for a while to gain confidence and learn how to manage an organization. This incident is well documented, including Douglass’s aggravated report of the meeting in his paper, and her reply in hers, but as far as I could see, no-one had written it up before.
Great cover!
A question from Sara: Other than Bloomer and Sigrid Schultz (I loved The Dragon From Chicago and gave it to friends for Christmas!), who are some Midwestern historical women that you think deserve a more national fame than they’ve had so far?
How to chose?
The first one that comes to mind is Indiana-born novelist Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924). I first read one of her novels, A Girl of the Limberlost when I was nine or ten. I still read it every year or two. The more I learn about her, the more amazing she is. She was a best-selling novelist in the early twentieth century, an early conservation activist, and one of the first women to form a movie production company.
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Interested in learning more about Sara Catterall and her work?
Check out her website: https://saracatterall.com/
Follow her on Bluesky: @scatterall.bsky.social
Follow her on Instagram: saracatterall
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with –someone.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Ericka Verba
Ericka Verba is Professor of Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Her research interests include the cultural Cold War, the role of music in social movements, and the intersection of gender and class politics in twentieth-century Latin America. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright, and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. She is a founding member of SCALAS (Southern California Association of Latin American Studies) and the recipient of the E. Bradford Burns Award for service to the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies. She is the author of the book Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra.
Take it away, Ericka!
What path led you to Violeta Parra?
I first encountered Violeta Parra’s music as a high school student when I became friends with a Chilean family of musicians and artists living in exile. The family taught me my first Violeta Parra songs and guided my political awakening to the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship and the role of the US government in installing and supporting it. As a musician and member of the US-based New Song groups Sabiá and Desborde, I have been performing Parra’s music since the late 1970s. I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on Parra’s autobiography in verse in 1980, and gave my first academic presentation on Parra at the 2nd International Conference on Women in Music in 1982. In 1996, I was musical director and arranger for a tribute concert to Violeta Parra, held in Los Angeles with the participation of L.A.-based musicians from four continents. As a professor of Latin American History since 2004, I have welded my research on the history of women in Chile with my interest in Parra to acquire a deeper understanding of the social context and gender dynamics that shaped her life. Suffice to say that my biography of Violeta Parra is the culmination of my decades-long curiosity about and engagement with her work.
Thanks to Life is an evocative title. Can you tell me how you came to it?
“Thanks to Life” is the English translation of the title of Violeta Parra’s most famous song, “Gracias a la vida.” The song has been translated into 14 different languages and sung and recorded by scores of musicians the world over, including country music star Kasey Musgraves, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (instrumental version), Latin pop singers Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, K-pop duo Davichi, US folksinger Joan Baez, and Cuban singer Omara Portuando of the Buena Vista Social Club. I recently learned that Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa’s version of the song is featured on the soundtrack to the film Project Hail Mary. The song’s title also has the word “life” in it. Finally, the song clearly hits a universal chord. For all these reasons, it felt like the obvious choice for the first major biography of Violeta Parra to be published in English. My hope is that it will lead listeners to want to know more not just about her music, but also her visual art, poetry, and life story.
How did your experience as a musician inform your work on Violeta Parra?
I’ve been singing Parra’s songs since I was a teenager. Her lyrics have become part of my internal vocabulary and a particular line will come to the surface when I need it most to help me grasp what I am feeling at that moment. Lately, for example, this phrase from the last verse of “Gracias a la vida” often comes to mind:
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.
Me ha dado la risa y me ha dado el llanto.
Así yo distingo dicha de quebranto,
los dos materiales que forman mi canto
[Thanks to life for all it has given me.
It has given me laughter, it has given me tears.
And so I distinguish joyfulness from sorrow,
The materials that together make up my song]
I think this level of familiarity with Parra’s poetry gave me an edge when I began to examine her life from the analytical perspective of a historian. It also influenced my decision to integrate excerpts of Parra’s song lyrics and décimas, her autobiography in verse, into my book.
And I am so happy with the translations, which were done with much love and effort by my dear friends and colleagues Nancy Morris and Patricia Vilches. Here is their explanation of their process: “Translating parts of Violeta Parra’s Décimas [Parra’s autobiography in verse] and songs constituted both a cherished and monumental task for us. We worked through successive draft translations, parsing and refining line by line and at times word by word. We sought to maintain the vibrancy of Parra’s poetry and songs while staying faithful to her meaning, and to convey the meter, pacing, rhythm, tone, and, where achievable, rhyme of the original texts.”
A question from Ericka: What inspired you to start your blog?
When I started History in the Margins, almost fifteen (!!!) years ago, the first post I wrote was an attempt to answer the question “Why Another History Blog? “ I went back to that post today, I found it still rings true to me. Here’s the guts of it: “These days I write about a wide range of historical topics…And at the end of every day I have a great story that didn’t quite fit in the piece at hand, a dangling idea that I want to play with, a connection I want to explore, or a book that I can’t wait to share with someone else.”
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Want to know more about Ericka and her work?
Visit her website: https://erickaverba.com/
Follow her on Instagram
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Come back tomorrow for more women’s history fun.