Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Shannon Frystak
Shannon Frystak, Ph.D. is a first-generation college student who went on to pursue a Masters and Ph.D. focusing predominantly on Women’s History. An award-winning writer and historian, she is Professor and Graduate Coordinator of the Department of History and Geography at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania where she has taught since 2007. Her first book, Our Minds on Freedom: Women and the Struggle for Black Equality in Louisiana, 1924-1967 looked at the important and, often, overlooked work of female civil rights activists in a Deep South state. Her second book, Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times, part of the Southern Women Series at the University of Georgia Press, is a collection of essays co-edited with her friend, Mary Farmer-Kaiser. She is widely published in a number of collections and journals and is currently working on a book about Lucille Watson, a plantation owner in Tensas Parish, Louisiana.
Take it away, Shannon
When did you first become interested in women's history? What sparked that interest?
I always knew that I wanted to be an academic, in some capacity, but as I had worked full-time to put myself through undergraduate school at Bowling Green State University, my grades were less than stellar and I decided to take some time off before deciding on a career long-term. After traveling across country, living in Washington, D.C. and working as a waitress while I volunteered at the Community for Creative Non-Violence, a homeless shelter/advocacy program, I moved to New Orleans and it was here that I began researching programs that might interest me; it felt like there were so many possibilities. One day I was perusing the Peterson’s Guide to Graduate Programs and happened to notice that Sarah Lawrence had a Master’s program in Women’s History. One of my favorite classes as an undergraduate student was my Women’s Studies course and I had long been an activist, attending many a women’s march in our nation’s capitol. So, I gave it a shot and I applied. And I got in! However, being that my undergraduate GPA wasn’t up to par, mainly because I worked full-time as a bartender to finish school, they asked me to take a few classes at a local university to prove that I was up for the challenge of a rigorous graduate program. The class I chose was called “Black Movements and Messiahs,” and it was taught by professor and civil rights activist, Raphael Cassimere. That class everything changed – I began to do research into black women’s history, reading Nikki Giovanni and Paula Giddings, and this course led me to pursue a Master’s in what was essentially African-American Women’s History. My thesis looked at the integration of the New Orleans chapter of the League of Women Voters, a story I happened upon when researching the white activist, Rosa Freeman Keller. The local chapter of the League of Women Voters allowed me access to their records where I came across a thin folder titled “Integration.” That serendipitous find led me to expand my research and to what ultimately became my larger work on women in New Orleans and across the state who were an integral, yet overlooked, part of the Louisiana civil rights movement.
What unsung woman activist from the past would you most like to read a biography of and why?
I’m currently looking at the life of Lucille Watson, a white female plantation owner, who successfully oversaw the daily operations of her family’s cotton (and later cattle) farm in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, just over the Mississippi River from Natchez. Her life should be made into a movie – she was a young debutante who married her uncle when her aunt died, a tennis pro, an avid hunter and fisherwoman, an amazing host who loved to entertain and who’s Christmas Eve parties were notorious, and the chatelaine of Cross Keys plantation, until her death in 1985.
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?)
When I first began research in women’s history there was so little about women in Louisiana and writ large. Today there are so many wonderful histories and books dedicated to uncovering stories about women and their contributions to American history. Some of the best recently published include my good friend Virginia Summey’s work on Elreta Melton Alexander Ralston, the groundbreaking attorney and first black female graduate of Columbia Law School, who in 1947 became the first black woman to practice law in North Carolina. My friend Jess Armstrong, who has a Master’s Degree in History, has recently published some really fun and engrossing historical fiction – The Curse of Penryth Hall and The Secret of the Three Fates - set in early 20th century gothic Great Britain where the protagonist, Ruby Vaughn, solves mysteries in London, Scotland, and, next up, Oxford. The field of women’s history has expanded greatly since the 1970s and the studies of women in this country and abroad are numerous, illustrating how significant women are to the history of world.
A question from Shannon: What is something that you learned in your research/studies of women in history that was striking, something we wouldn't otherwise know, that surprised you or delighted you? Something that was completely unexpected.
I will never forget learning that Alexander the Great had an older half-sister, Cynane, who was also a successful general—a story that scholars of the period are familiar with, but not one that makes it into mainstream world history classes. When I first stumbled across her story I literally ran down the stairs, shouting to my husband “You’ll never guess what I found!”
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Want to known more about Shannon and her work? Check out her faculty page.
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Tomorrow will be business as usual here on the Margins with a blog post from me. Then we’ll be back on Monday with six questions and two answers from Kim Barton and Johanna Wittenberg, novelists and hosts of the podcast “Shieldmaidens: Women of the Norse World.”
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Joan Fernandez
Former senior marketing executive, speaker, blogger and book reviewer, Joan Fernandez brings to light brilliant women’s courageous deeds in history. Her short story, “A Parisian Daughter,” is published in the award-winning anthology, Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women. Her debut novel, Saving Vincent, A Novel of Jo van Gogh, will be published in April 2025 by She Writes Press.
Take it away, Joan!
What path led you to Jo van Gogh? And why do you think it is important to tell her story today?
I found out about Jo on a long weekend in Amsterdam. I was with three girlfriends, and we’d carved out a getaway between crammed schedules of kids’ sports and dual parental juggling and hectic work demands. It felt giddy, like we were getting away with some crazy caper, and gloriously indulgent since traveling with friends feels different than traveling with a spouse, when a big chunk of attention includes the other person’s welfare.
So, one of our stops is the Van Gogh Museum. I purchase the audio tour and immerse myself in Vincent van Gogh’s artistic tragic life as I follow the recording from painting to painting. In fact, it’s so engrossing that at the end of the tour there are tears in my eyes. At this moment I’m in front of the final exhibition boards. I notice a small notation about Jo—Vincent’s sister-in-law—and how she was the one who worked for over a decade to promote him. I remember staring at her photo and thinking, “If not for you, none of this would be here.” Like a fishhook, Jo caught my thought. A few years later I retired from my corporate career and decided to write her story.
Even though this year, 2025, will be the hundredth-year anniversary of Jo’s death in 1925, I believe her story is coming out at a crucially relevant time. There’s been a gathering storm of societal pressure against women’s rights and agency, Recent attacks on DEI initiatives is just one example. The fact that Jo prevailed despite her experiences of patriarchal prejudice can give comfort and inspiration to readers today. I think there’s a special impact from reading real women’s stories from the past that can give hope today.
How did you walk the line between historical fact and fiction in Saving Vincent?
I started with research from official biographies and letters, including reading the 101-letter exchange between Jo and Theo and all 902 letters of Vincent van Gogh’s correspondence. The first letter exchange gave me a sense of their relationship and what Jo valued and was curious about. I read Vincent’s correspondence because Jo read and organized Vincent’s letters after his death, getting to know him through his writing since she only met him three times in person.
At this juncture, I applied a storytelling framework: choosing an inciting incident, finding a point of no return, identifying a climactic moment, etc. Then I scoured my factual research to give intentional meaning to Jo’s moments within events, a timeline, art exhibitions and relationships. Overlaying all of it, I wanted to show her personal growth from a timid widow to the strong advocate she became. Finally, I also wanted to include societal pressures of her time, so I personified this headwind by creating a fictional antagonist, who represented pushback against her efforts from the art establishment.
How did your previous career as a marketing executive inform your response to Jo van Gogh, whom you’ve described as the “greatest marketer of the century?”
When reading Jo’s biography, my background in marketing caused Jo’s marketing strategies to leap off the page. I’ve gone back to identify eight specific strategies, many ahead of her time. For example, she was vigilant about protecting Vincent’s “brand”—responding to criticism even though it caused others to scold her publicly. Another tactic: she educated the public about Vincent by publishing excerpts from his letters and drawings in six editions of a prominent Parisian newspaper. These letters created curiosity around Vincent, which in marketing is creating awareness. She reminded me of a genius whose talent is so instinctive that what’s elusive to others feels perfectly natural. This genius transformed a product worth nothing (Vincent’s works) into one worth millions upon millions today. It’s by this measure that I’ve enjoyed calling Jo, the greatest marketer of the century.
A question from Joan: Over the long arc of humankind, you’ve studied and written about there have been shifting worldviews on women—what’s your perspective on the current rhetoric and backlash against women’s rights and agency?
First: I want to know if you people got together this year and said “Let’s ask Pamela hard questions.”
Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off of my chest, let me take a stab at this.
Speaking as a historian: progress is not a continuous upward curve. (The most dramatic version of this in American history is the backlash against the Reconstruction following the Civil War.) Instead, progress comes in fits and starts, whether we are talking civil rights, labor safety or clean air. Certainly in the case of women’s rights and agency, every step forward we have made has been followed by an attempt to push us back that was successful in the short run. (As I have said in previous posts I’m talking about the history of women’s rights because that is what I know best, but it is true of every marginalized group who has fought for equal rights.)
Moreover, progress does not occur evenly across a population. The 19th Amendment gave American women the right to vote, but did not address the rules that were already in place to disenfranchise Black men, and consequently Black women.* There is a reason that intersectionality—the way different forms of inequality overlap and exacerbate each other— is an important part of the discussion.
Just because this isn’t the first backlash we’ve seen against civil rights of the marginalized, doesn’t mean we can just wait for the pendulum to swing again. Advances are made because people fight for equality.
On a personal level, I am really angry and my stomach hurts all the time.
*The role of Black women in the suffrage movement and the racism of many of the leading White suffragists is too big a topic for me to handle here, and painful. I was shocked when I first learned some of the stories. I’ve said it before, and I suspect I will say it many times this year: history is hard, and perhaps it should be.
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Want to know more about Joan and her work?
Check out her website at https://www.joanfernandezauthor.com
Read her provocative weekly essays as https://joanfernandez.substack.com
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Dr. Shannon Frystak, who studies the lives of historical women in the Deep sosuth.
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.