Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Elaine Hayes
Elaine Hayes is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan (Ecco, 2017). Recognized as a best book of the year by Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and the Washington Post, Queen of Bebop tells the story of this iconic vocalist’s rise from a choir girl in Newark, New Jersey, to an innovator at the forefront of modern jazz, a pop star, and ultimately a vocal legend, whose voice transcended boundaries of genre, race, and class. Elaine received her doctorate in musicology from the University of Pennsylvania and currently lives in Seattle with her husband, son, and Archie the miniature poodle.
I am thrilled to have Elaine here on History in the Margins on March 27, 2024, just in time to celebrate Sarah Vaughan’s 100th Birthday.
Take it away, Elaine:
When did you first become interested in big band “girl singers” and women in jazz? What sparked that interest?
Sarah Vaughan was my entry point into girl singers, big bands, and really, jazz more generally. I was a classically trained pianist, who hadn’t thought much about jazz until a college roommate played lots of Sarah Vaughan. I was immediately drawn to her voice, how she used it, and the sheer presence and authority she exuded when she sang.
I didn’t really know that much about Sarah the woman until a couple years later when, as a graduate student, I wrote a research paper about her for a seminar on women in jazz. I learned more about her artistry and creative process. The challenges she faced as a woman working in the male-dominated world of jazz. And how the narratives surrounding both her professional and personal life shaped her legacy. I realized that there was a bigger story to tell—one that would provide insights not only into Sarah Vaughan but also vocalist and women in jazz more generally.
Writing about a historical figure like Sarah Vaughan requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have her as a constant companion?
Yes, Sarah Vaughan really did become my constant companion, first as a graduate student and then a decade later as her biographer. Spending five days a week, for years, thinking about a single person, investing in her life and career, triumphs and challenges, can be very intimate. Even though we never met, and I didn’t have a relationship with her in the traditional sense, I felt a close emotional bond. Vaughan’s power as an artist magnified this connection. She possessed an uncanny ability to capture the full spectrum of human experiences and emotions in her singing. And I, like so many other listeners, felt as if I knew her and she knew me.
I am not a sentimental person, but I cried as I wrote, and even edited, the final chapter and epilogue of Queen of Bebop. The life of a person who I admired and cared deeply about was ending, and so was my journey with her. There was a very real sense of mourning and loss.
As I re-visit the material for Vaughan’s centenary, however, it is speaking to me in a new way. It’s like reconnecting with an old friend that I hadn’t realized I’d missed. I’m enjoying their company again and remembering why we became friends in the first place.
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?
In the past 20 years, writing about a public figure like Sarah Vaughan has, in fact, gotten much easier. When I began the project as graduate student, it was hard to find source material. If I wanted to go beyond the clip folders collected by two or three specialized libraries, I needed to read full runs of publications—on microfilm! This was incredibly time consuming (and nausea inducing). So I limited myself to trade publications, how critics, usually white critics, responded to her singing. This really narrowed the story I could tell.
But now, thanks to the emergence of searchable digital newspaper and magazine archives, there is a wealth of source material. With patience, persistence, and perhaps most importantly, good organization, researchers can find amazing things.
This allowed me to reconstruct Vaughan’s career with a level of granularity and precision which had been missing. It also helped me incorporate perspectives that had been underrepresented or overlooked in past scholarship. A survey of the Black press, for example, added complexity to her story by providing insights into how Black communities understood Vaughan and her singing.
And, finally, because of these digital resources, I was able to re-insert Vaughan’s own voice back into her narrative. (Past biographers relied on contemporaries and acquaintances to tell her story.) When I began the project, I couldn’t find many interviews with Vaughan, and I assumed she simply did not give that many. This was not the case. Although she was a reluctant, often hostile interview subject, she regularly spoke to the press. By digging into this newly accessible historical record, I rediscovered many of these interviews, making it possible for Vaughan to tell us, in her own words, about her worldview and approach to making music. This was huge.
A question from Elaine: Now that I’ve told you about the wealth of source material I was lucky to find about Sarah Vaughan, I’m interested in learning more about how a historian like you, who does study women from the distant past, recreates their life stories.
In working on my last book, Women Warriors, I faced a number of challenges as far as sources were concerned.
Because it was a global history, I was dependent on secondary sources and translations of primary sources in languages I could read. (And mightily frustrated by the hints about sources that had not been translated.)
Even when I had access to sources, they were often meager. In the case of Boudica for instance, who led her people in a revolt against the Romans in 61 CE, we are limited to three written sources, with some help from modern archeology. All three written accounts are told from the perspective of her enemies. The Roman historian, Tacitus, who was born five years before the revolt, wrote two separate accounts of Boudica’s revolt. He could at least claim secondhand knowledge of the events on which he reported: his father-in-law served as a member of the Roman governor’s staff during the revolt, and there is evidence that Tacitus interviewed other veterans of the rebellion. Our only source is a fragment of an account written roughly a hundred years later by Dio Cassius, which appears in a a selection of readings compiled by a Greek monk in the eleventh century CE. With primary sources such as these, one must read and write warily.
My current book is a different story. There is a great deal of material by and about its subject, Sigrid Schultz, the Chicago Tribune’s Berlin bureau chief from 1925 to 1940. And even so there are holes I was not able to fill.
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Interested in learning more about Elaine Hayes’ work on Sarah Vaughan and other women of jazz?
Check out her website: https://elainemhayes.com/
Follow her Facebook page: Sarah Vaughan, Queen of Bebop
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Come back tomorrow for a whole lot of questions with novelist Vanessa Riley.
Talking About Women’s History: Two, or Possibly Five, Questions and an Answer with Natalie Dykstra
Natalie Dykstra grew up in the Midwest, first near the shores of Lake Michigan, then in a suburb west of Chicago. She received her undergraduate degree in Classics followed by graduate degrees in American Studies at the University of Wyoming and the University of Kansas. She won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her work on Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life as well as grants from the Schlesinger Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she was elected an honorary fellow in 2011. She received a 2018 Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her newest book, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. This work also has been supported by the inaugural 2018 Robert and Ina Caro Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). She has served as a board member of BIO since 2020.
She is emerita professor of English and senior research professor at Hope College, where she taught writing, literature, and the arts for twenty years. She lives with her husband in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Chasing Beauty launches today and I am delighted to welcome Natalie Dykstra back to History on the Margins. She participated in Three Questions and an Answer several years ago, when she was in the process of writing the book. I strongly urge you to go back to that post, in which she had interesting things to say about Isabella Stewart Gardner and writing biography. Then come back and see what she has to add to the discussion today.
Take it away, Natalie!
Thank you for having me back, Pamela, for the launch of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. I’m so glad to continue the conversation….
How did you decide there was room for another book on Gardner? (Which, of course, there is.)
It took me awhile to make the decision. She lived to 84, a long life in her era, filled to the brim with travel and collecting and houses, to say nothing of her husband’s large family and many friends and correspondents. I felt an enormous responsibility because of the extraordinary eponymous museum. But I also suspected there were more archival materials to discover related to her and her story. And that’s what happened – I found letter collections and diaries in a range of repositories that unveiled key aspects of her life: her education in Paris, her relationship to her husband Jack Gardner and his family; her relationship to her father; and her religious faith and philanthropy. The museum has published excellent accounts of its founder. But I felt there was room for a longer biography that could include more about her early years as well as the two decades after the opening of the museum in 1903. I wanted her life story to stay in tune with how her art collection, housed in a four-story Venetian-style palace, combined both a hushed intimacy and a remarkable sweep of time.
Chasing Beauty is such an evocative title for the biography of a woman who is best known for creating a wonderful art museum. Can you tell us how you came to it?
I had always wanted the Anders Zorn portrait to be the book cover, where she’s pictured in motion on the balcony of the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal in Venice. She’s at her most vital in that image, with her long arms wide open and the point of her fashionable shoe stepping into the palace. Last spring, my publishing team began with a long list of title options, and I knew early on I wanted her name to be the subtitle. I had filled small notebooks while on my research travels in France and Italy, where I’d jot down first impressions and phrases. And in reviewing a notebook from a trip to Florence, where I traced Isabella’s steps, I’d written: “It’s as if she is chasing beauty throughout the city.” I liked the combination of beauty, a word I found often in her papers, and chasing, which conveyed her love of speed and movement, her enormous energy. I liked, too, that there was something both modern and slightly melancholy about it. She’s on a chase; we’re all on a chase.
A question from Natalie: Your biography of the World War II reporter Sigrid Schultz, The Dragon From Chicago, will be published by Beacon Press in August – many congratulations! How did you decide to tell her story and what were some key challenges?
I stumbled on her story entirely by accident. Several years ago an interesting item appeared in my news feed: an architectural salvage vendor had discovered seventy-five glass plate photographic negatives in the attic of an old house in what is now the Chicago neighborhood of Ravenswood. The images dated from the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them were informal pictures of a woman, a child, and a large dog, taken in the house where they were found.
It was exactly the sort of historical puzzle I love, so I kept reading. It turned out that the little girl in the pictures was named Sigrid Schultz. The pictures were taken by Sigrid’s father, who was a successful portrait painter who had emigrated from Norway in 1892. It was an interesting enough story to read with my morning tea, but then I hit the punch line: Sigrid grew up to be a groundbreaking foreign correspondent.
At that point, I was deep in the process of writing a proposal for a totally different book about another woman whose story deserves to be told. Sigrid elbowed her neatly off my desk. She was the Chicago Tribune’s foreign bureau chief in Berlin from 1925 to 1940, during the rise of the Nazis and the early days of World War II. Her story was just too timely to ignore.
The biggest challenge in telling her story—other than difficulties in accessing archives due to the pandemic—was deciding how much historical context to provide. (This is a recurring challenge for me.) As I got into her story, I realized how little I knew about German politics in the years between the two world wars. I had to assume most of my future readers didn’t know any more than I had. So I wrote big chunks of German history, and then decided what pieces of it were essential to understanding Sigrid’s story. Hard choices.
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Want to know more about Natalie Dykstra and her work?
Check out her website: https://www.nataliedykstra.com/
Read this review in the New York Times: An Exquisite Biography of a Gilded Age Legend
Follow her on the site previously known as Twitter: @NatalieanneDY
Follow her on Instagram: natalieannedy
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Elaine Hayes, author of Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan
Talking About Women’s History: A Bunch of Questions and an Answer with Jennifer Lunden
Jennifer Lunden (she/her) is the author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, which was praised by the Los Angeles Review of Books and Washington Post, and called a “genre-bending masterpiece” by Hippocampus. The recipient of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for Literary Arts and the 2016 Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction, Lunden writes at the intersection of health and the environment. Her essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction, Orion, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Longreads, and other journals; selected for several anthologies; and praised as notable in Best American Essays. A former therapist, she was named Maine’s Social Worker of the Year in 2012. She and her husband, the artist Frank Turek, live in a little house in Portland, Maine, where they keep several chickens, two cats, and some gloriously untamed gardens.
Take it away, Jennifer!
What inspired you to write American Breakdown?
I’d been disabled by what’s now known as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS, for five years when I stumbled upon Jean Strouse’s brilliant 1980 biography of Alice James in a used bookstore. I knew Alice was the sister of the nineteenth-century author Henry James and the psychologist William James, and that she spent much of her life bedridden by a mysterious illness. So I bought the book. It changed my life. Alice’s symptoms and mine were so similar I wondered if our illnesses might be one and the same, and I wondered if anyone else had made that connection.
In 2001 I asked a research librarian to help me search for papers connecting ME/CFS with Alice’s illness, neurasthenia, and she found a handful. Reading and researching was something I could largely do in bed, and I began doing so voraciously.
I wanted to write a book about ME/CFS and multiple chemical sensitivity because the biased perceptions faced by those of us who suffer from these and similarly misunderstood illnesses from doctors, researchers, the media, and the general public is harmful to our health. The further I delved into my research, however, I could see that America’s rapacious form of industrial capitalism is bad for all of us. So, like the ripples around a stone tossed in the water, my story started with Alice and me and expanded outward.
In American Breakdown, you combine memoir, biography and medical history to produce a complex exploration of industrialization and its impact not only on the environment but on healthcare in the United States. How did you navigate the narrative requirements of three very different types of storytelling?
What I love about the braided narrative is that it allows for a telling that includes head and heart. In other words, it is a way to connect mind and body. This was especially important to me because one of the key themes I tackle in the book is the problems posed by the limitations of our dualistic approach to medicine and to life in general. Biologically, and ecologically, we’re much more complex than that, and that’s a beautiful thing.
I knew that I wanted to include data and research that legitimized my experience and the lived experiences of others who, like me, live with the poorly understood, complex, multi-system illnesses that primarily strike women. I wanted skeptics to be able to read my book and know they could turn to the endnotes and see that what I was saying was backed by peer-reviewed research.
But I also knew if I didn’t include story that the book would be dry and hard to get through. So as I was interweaving the strands, I listened to my body, which told me when the facts were getting to be too much, and I would break there and put in a segment from my own story, or Alice’s.
And even when I was writing about dualism, I started by reading one or two biographies of Descartes, who is attributed as the thinker behind dualism, and I wove some of his story into the narrative about dualism.
We learn more effectively through story than through data; I felt that I could broaden people’s perspectives about these contested illnesses by opening their hearts through my illness story, and Alice’s.
Writing about a historical figure like Alice James requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have her as a constant companion?
Finding Alice felt like finding my kindred spirit, my illness comrade. Alice was witty and whip-smart, and, like me, often bedridden due to a poorly understood illness.
Here’s an Alice quote that still makes me laugh out loud, written to a friend when Alice was 31:
Ill-health though not an exceptional or tragic fate inevitably brings a certain monotony into the lives of its victims which makes them rather sceptical [sic] of the much talked of and apparently much believed-in joy of mere existence.
And when she was diagnosed, at 42, with breast cancer, her response wasn’t what most people would expect, but it deeply resonated with me. As she enthused in her diary, finally, and to her great relief, she was lifted “out of the formless void” and set down “within the very heart of the sustaining concrete.”
While most of us chronically disabled by similar illnesses aren’t ready to embrace death the way Alice was, I suspect that just about anyone who has contended with ME/CFS, multiple chemical sensitivity, long Covid, or any one of a number of other poorly understood illnesses can identify with Alice’s relief at finally receiving a concrete diagnosis, one recognized as “real” and valid in their world.
Alice’s doctor, “the blessed being,” had also “endowed” her with “not only cardiac complications,” but also a “most distressing case of nervous hyperaesthesia” (hypersensitivity of one or more of the senses of sight, sound, touch, and/or smell). These, she wrote triumphantly,
added to a spinal neurosis that has taken me off my legs for seven years; with attacks of rheumatic gout in my stomach for the last twenty, ought to satisfy the most inflated pathologic vanity. It is decidedly indecent to catalogue oneself in this way, but I put it down in a scientific spirit, to show that though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.
Here, while reveling in her concrete diagnoses, Alice simultaneously pushes against capitalistic definitions of human worth and expands the definition of our value. It’s an early expression of disability pride.So I would say that Alice resided in my heart over the many years it took to write this book. She helped to sustain me.
How did your training as a social worker and therapist inform your work on American Breakdown?
I didn’t realize until 2017, when I began teaching a foundational graduate social work course called Human Behavior in the Social Environment, how social-worky American Breakdown is. Social workers are trained to look for the contexts contributing to the personal difficulties people are facing. My curiosity about the sociocultural contexts that influenced my biology, and Alice’s, took me on a journey beyond anything I envisioned when I started writing—research that included American history, of course, and biology, but also nineteenth-century and contemporary toxicology, medical history, economics, environmental history, sociology, chaos theory, and more, and the process of synthesizing what I learned into a narrative interwoven with both my story and Alice’s was deeply illuminating.
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? )
Well, I’ve only just started reading it, but I highly recommend National Book Award winner Tiya Miles’s new book Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation.
A question from Jennifer: I see that, in addition to Women Warriors and the forthcoming The Dragon from Chicago, you are also the author of The Everything Guide to Understanding Socialism. How do your understanding of socialism and your interest in women’s history inform each other?
I must admit that I am interested in many, many things and the relationships between them in my head are more like a tangled knot of yarn than a web.
In the case of socialism and women’s history, the most obvious link is that I have long been interested in women’s involvement in social reform movements in the mid-nineteenth to the earlier twentieth century, whether we’re talking about Jane Addams and her colleagues at Hull House or Mother Jones and the labor movement. That link shows up clearly in my book on Civil War nurses, for example.
Other threads leading into that knot of yarn are fundamental interests in stories that stand outside the primary historical narrative (labor history and women, for example), how social change happens, and the people I call shin-kickers.
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Want to know more about Jennifer Lunden and her work?
Check out her website: https://jenniferlunden.com/
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Come back tomorrow for two, or five, questions and an answer with Natalie Dykstra, author of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner