***

I was recently digging about in the history of women’s magazines in the early twentieth century when I came across a familiar name: Bessie Beatty. I knew Beatty’s work from her reporting on Russia’s Women’s Battalion of Death,  which I wrote about in Women Warriors. At the time, I was totally engrossed in the women Beatty wrote about and gave no thought to the reporter herself. Funny how things change.

Beatty got her start in journalism at the age of eighteen, working for the Los Angeles Herald while she was still in college. Partway through her senior year, she left college to report on a miner’s strike for the Herald.

Her work in Nevada caught the attention of Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin.*  At the Bulletin, Beatty ran a feature page, titled “On the Margin” [!!!], in which she covered women’s issues and social work, broadly defined. (Among other things, she ran a campaign on behalf of prostitutes who were put out of work when the red light district was closed. Not your typical social justice campaign even today, let alone in the first years of the twentieth century. )

In 1917, as the Great War raged on, Older sent Beatty on a large-scale reporting assignment: a series of articles called “Around the World in War.” Four days after she sailed,  the United States declared war on Germany.

American correspondents, officially accredited and otherwise, headed toward Europe. Beatty and a few others headed east. She reported on social and cultural traditions in Hawaii,** Japan, and China, but her real destination was the revolution in Russia.  Like other reporters who built their careers reporting on social justice issues and exposing corruption in government, she had a romantic vision of the new socialist government and wanted to see it first hand.

She traveled traveled from the Pacific port of Vladivostok to Petrograd (formerly, and once again, St. Petersburg) aboard the TranSiberian Railway, a twelve-day trip through Russia to the heart of the revolution. Once in Petrograd, she managed to get a room in the War Hotel, where Russian officers lived with their wives. With the hotel as her base, she followed Russia’s involvement in the war and the course of the revolution. She traveled to the front, getting within 160 feet of the German trenches, and sat in a concrete observation station from which she could see barbed wire of no-man’s land through a narrow peephole. She and another reporter, Rheta Childe Dorr, spent a week with the Women’s Battalion of Death, traveling with them to the front and sleeping with them in their barracks. She interviewed sailors, soldiers, peasants and the woman in the street.

When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in November, Beatty witnessed every stage of the new revolution, aided by a pass from the Military Revolutionary Committee that gave her access everywhere in the city. She spent hours in the Soviet, listening as revolutionary leaders argued about the shape of the new state. She interviewed political prisoners, including ministers of the deposed Provisional Government

Like other American journalists drawn to report on the revolution, she believed in the experiment she was watching unfold. (In fact, she would later testify in favor of the Bolshevik Revolution before Senator Overman’s sub-committee on the influence of Bolshevism in America.)***

In February 1919, Beatty and two other journalists, Madeline Doty andLouise Bryant, decided it was time to leave Russia. They caught the last train to leave Petrograd for Finland, which was fighting to free itself from Russian rule, and then traveled by sleigh from the northernmost corner of Finland into Sweden. (*Brrr*)

Like many of her fellow journalists, Beatty wrote a book about her experience of the revolution, The Red Heart of Russia (1918). Her sentiments about the revolution, as she expressed them at the end of the book, were complicated: “Mingled with my sorrow, the morning I left Petrograd, was a certain exultant, tragic joy. I had been alive at a great moment and knew that it was great.”

Back in the United States, Beatty chose not to return to San Francisco. Instead she stayed in New York, where she finished her book and worked as the editor of McCall’s from 1918 to 1921.

She soon grew eager to travel as a journalist again. Her articles on politics, women’s rights, and even tourist destinations, appeared in popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping, The New Republic, Women’s Home Journal, and Century.

Beatty returned to Russia in 1921. It took her weeks to get into the country, but once there she stayed for nine months, writing a series of interviews with Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and Trotsky, for the San Francisco Bulletin.

She spent some time as a screenwriter for MGM. She remained a dedicated activist. And in 1940, she entered a new career as the host of a popular radio show on WOR in New York. During World War II, she used her show to sell more than $300,000 in war bonds.**** She continued to broadcast until her death in 1947 at the age of 61.

Describing her on-air personality, Time magazine described her as “a short, voluble bit of human voltage.” Not bad.

*Older was unusually supportive of women reporters and gave a number of talented women, including Rose Wilder Lane, their start in a field that was not always welcoming to women.

**Which was annexed by the United States in 1898 and became a US territory in 1900. Just to give you a piece of chronology to hang your hats on.

***An early version of the Red Scare.

****$5,270,000 in today’s dollars.

As always, I’ve loved running this series of mini-interviews with people doing interesting work in the field of women’s history. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, too.

Over the last few months[1] I’ve had a chance to interact with some of my history-writing heroes, and find some new ones. I’ve added books to my TBR list. I’ve promoted people who are doing wonderful work in our shared project of putting women back into history. And I’ve tried to answer some really hard questions—as always, people posed some doozies!

But I have to admit, this year Women’s History Month has been a little harder. In previous years there has been a sense of celebration in all the places I hang out online. This year organizations still hosted women’s history programs, and I deeply enjoyed the chances I had to speak. People still posted stories about women doing amazing things. But it’s all been less exuberant. Instead of joy, there has been a sense of doggedness. An insistence that women’s history will not be erased. Or maybe that’s just me—I’m pretty dang tired.

In the past one of the questions I asked the people I interviewed was “Do you think Women’s History Month is important and why?” Every year, someone asked me the same question in return. This year I didn’t ask, because the answer is clear.  Most of us who are involved in this work wish we didn’t need Women’s History Month, or Black History Month, or any of the other history months and heritage months that now mark our calendars . That we didn’t have to put up big flashing signs that say “WE WERE THERE, DAMN IT!” once a year to remind people that history should tell everyone’s stories. That we have already integrated those stories into history as we teach and read about it.

Today it seems like we are further away from that goal than we were even a year ago.

As far as I’m concerned, that means I’m going to keep telling you stories you may not know, and that I didn’t know either–year in and year out. I’m going to be a little louder than I have been in the past. I hope you’ll come along for the ride. We’re all in this together.

[1] This is always a five-month project. I start sending out invitations to possible guests in November. And I always scramble to get the last few posts up at the end of March.

After careers in tech and math education, Della began an intensive DIY study of writing fiction within the vibrant Midwestern writing community including coursework and a fellowship at the Newberry Library. She continues to study within editors’ private workshops. Della served on the Board of Directors of the long-running Off Campus Writers’ Workshop for four years. She lives in Chicago with her spouse of several decades and their fearless feline Vic (Victoria). Their son and his wife live nearby along with daughter, Nora Shirley.

Her debut novel, Vivian’s Decision (She Writes Press) is evocative work of historical fiction set in 1956 in Chicago. It is the story of Vivian Jacobson, an overwhelmed mother grappling with whether to have an illegal abortion, who discovers her Jewish immigrant mother faced a similar crisis when pregnant with Vivian. Vivian’s Decision is an all too relevant story of repeated history, female friendship, and the strength that it takes to make choices of one’s own. It will be released on April 14, 2026 and is available for pre-order now.

Take it away, Della!

What inspired you to write Vivian’s Decision?

Not exactly “what”, but “who.” My foray into creative writing came later in life than most after my lengthy careers in the tech field and mathematics education. I had an idea to write the serendipitous story as a gift for my (now, late) mother’s 90th birthday about how my parents met after my father returned to Chicago after fighting in Europe during World War II followed by several months of German occupation. I had long been a discerning reader of fiction and participated in a women’s book group that ran for 30 years, but I never imagined I could become a writer. I soon realized how much I needed to learn if I were to write artful fiction and signed up for many workshops, including Chicago’s StoryStudio and the Off Campus Writers’ Workshop.

I became curious about mother’s mother, a Russian Jewish immigrant who died before I was born. I’m named for her. Her Hebrew name was Dena Rivka, but when she arrived at Ellis Island in 1906, the officials named her Della, a popular female “D” name during that time. She died around age 60 (although we never knew her exact age) in Los Angeles where my mother’s six siblings and their families had moved during the 1940s when they left Chicago. Each of my Grandmother Della’s seven children revered their mother and often spoke of her hard life. Each one named a child for her, often with the initials “D.R.” I’m Della Ruth. There are also Delle, Dan, Debi, Dennis, Denise, and Donna. I wondered whether having seven children–five born at home in a flat on Chicago’s West side and two at Mt. Sinai Hospital—had shortened my grandmother’s life.

Vivian’s Decision began as the  story of Vivian’s immigrant mother, Hannah Kolson, as I began imagine how powerless women must have felt, particularly poor and immigrant women, with almost no control over childbearing. I recalled one of my aunts relating a story when she acted as her mother’s English language go-between. The local druggist admonished my grandmother: “if you don’t want this baby, I’ll take him!” That scene grew in my imagination. It appears in an early chapter of Vivian’s Decision.
As I wrote, I felt strongly that I wanted to portray the lives of Jewish immigrants who came to Chicago in the early 20th Century to escape violent Tsarist pogroms and also, the next generations of their Chicago-born children and their families. How they strived to assimilate during the post-WWII Cold War era. This is a world that no longer exists yet resonates with many issues in today’s United States including antisemitism and the backlash against immigrants or perceived immigrants.

Vivian’s Decision deals with questions of reproductive rights in a time before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal. Are there special challenges in writing about a historical event with echoes in current politics?

The women I wrote about in Vivian’s Decision who lived in the first half of the 20th century all knew that abortion was against the law, despite it being an act many would seek out for various reasons. During my 2021 research fellowship at the Newberry Library, I found statistical references often broken down by religion and the number of a mother’s previous births.  In Chapter 11  of Birth Control: Its Use and Misuse (1934, Harper and Sons), titled “Abortion,” Dorothy Dunbar Bromley cites and summarizes several prominent studies:

•  “The great majority of abortions occur today among married women.” (p. 138)
• “Out of 5010 patients of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York who admitted to having abortions 28 per cent were Protestant, 26 percent were Catholic, and 43 per cent were Jewish, representing the same ratio of religious belief as obtains among all of the Clinic’s patients. After the fifth pregnancy, the Catholic ration led all others.” (p. 142)
• “There are all kinds and varieties of abortionists, ranging from extremely skillful surgeons to one-horse practitioners and bungling midwives. …Abortionists of any class, as a rule, avoid trouble by refusing to abort a patient who is more than two and a half months along…” (p. 143)

As with quantification of any illegal activity, it is unlikely these counts are accurate, but the large numbers imply that the practice of abortion was not uncommon, although each woman would have made her decision specific to her situation. This would always be an individual act.

There is a tendency, as with all historical fiction, to write about an action like abortion through the lens of today’s mores. I tried to keep in mind the perspectives of women and men of Vivian’s Decision who lived in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s who never dreamed abortion could become the law. My own view was different. As a young woman, I was a member of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union who celebrated on the night of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade ruling. By that time, abortion was legal in New York, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico. It was clear that nationwide legalization was imminent.

Before the Dobbs decision in June 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade, I had already written a number of drafts of Vivian’s Decision with several different endings. Given the dramatic increase of draconian restrictions including banning all elective abortions and termination of unviable pregnancies that threaten a mother’s life, I began to feel the urgency to portray a 1950s middle class mother with a supportive husband, who had options. Vivian Jacobson had a referral from a reputable obstetrician to an (albeit, illegal) abortion provider. When at last, I turned to Pulitizer Prize-winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1947 poem “The Mother” to explore the feelings and universality of this truly individual decision, I found the emotional heft I needed to write an ending attuned to the times.

Who are some of your favorite writers of historical fiction?

Like many historical fiction readers, author Kate Quinn stands out for me. Her novels weave twisting plots, and often unlikely, heroic female characters that recreate eras replete with vivid period details. Among my favorites of Quinn’s novels are The Briar Club (2024), taking place in a 1950s McCarthy-era rooming house in Washington, DC; The Huntress (2019), in which a Russian female bomber pilot a British male journalist, and linguist, team up on a worldwide hunt for Nazis after World War II has ended; and The Rose Code (2021) that follows three women from divergent backgrounds who are recruited to serve as codebreakers in England’s Bletchley Park.

Along my writer’s journey over these last twelve years, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have met, befriended, and learned from several generous and talented authors, either in-person or remotely, over Zoom. All have enriched my life. In the last year, two of my contemporaries published well-researched, debut historical novels. Both also drew upon family history for their initial inspirations.  Janis Falk grew up in Detroit’s Polish community. She now lives in Wisconsin’s Door County. Janis looked to her Depression-era forebears for Not Yet Lost (She Writes Press, September 2025). At the core of this novel are the hardships and triumphs that female cigar factory workers endured leading to their courageous strike in 1937.  Leslie Schover grew up in the Chicago area. She’s a retired research psychologist living in Houston. Her debut novel Fission: A Story of Atomic Heartbreak (She Writes Press, January 2026) springs from when Leslie’s parents and older sister lived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Leslie’s father was a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Her father was one of the scientists who signed the petition urging President Truman not to drop the atomic bomb before demonstrating the extent of the weapon’s potential devastation.

One of my favorite novelists, Elizabeth Berg, doesn’t always write historical fiction. While writing the first draft of Vivian’s Decision, I found inspiration in Berg’s historical novel, Dream While You’re Feeling Blue (2008) about a loving Chicago Irish family with

Want to know more about Della and her work?  Check out her website: https://www.dellaleavitt.com/

Dava Sobel is the author of Longitude (Walker 1995, Bloomsbury 2005), Galileo’s Daughter (Walker 1999 and 2011), The Planets (Viking 2005, Penguin 2006), A More Perfect Heaven (Walker/Bloomsbury 2011 and 2012), And the Sun Stood Still (Bloomsbury 2016), The Glass Universe (Viking 2016, Penguin 2017) and The Elements of Marie Curie (Grove/Atlantic 2024). She has also co-authored six books, including Is Anyone Out There? with astronomer Frank Drake, and currently edits the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American.

Take it away Dava!

Image credit: Glen Allsop for Hodinkee

How do you choose subjects for your books?

Choosing a subject for a book is a little like choosing a romantic partner. You’re going to be alone in a room together for a long time, through periods that will feel dark and discouraging, so it helps to really like or even love the topic. I can honestly say that I’ve fallen in love with all the people I’ve written about — or with the story their lives embody. Mme. Curie, the central figure of my most recent book, proved to be the perfect pandemic companion. Her grit had seen her through griefs and challenges far more threatening than any aspect of my situation, and I took inspiration daily from her example.

Of course there has to be science in the mix to attract me. Real chemistry, say, or the dawn of astrophysics. I enjoy learning about and then trying to explain aspects of science as a creative human enterprise. Everyone knows that scientists “do research,” but most people have no idea what such research might entail, or how it would feel to be the scientist at work in this laboratory or at that observatory.

Because I write about the history of science, and can’t interview the long dead, I rely on  archives for letters and diaries. If those kinds of materials don’t exist, or they’re written in a language I can’t read, then I consider that topic out of reach. Sometimes the existence of  such a trove is reason enough to take on a book project, as happened when I learned that Galileo’s elder daughter, who was a cloistered nun, had written her supposedly heretic father more than a hundred letters that still survived. I felt that familiar rush of excitement, and figured I could probably revive my three years of university-level Italian, despite the lapse of three decades. The fact that Galileo’s replies had vanished over the centuries seemed problematic at first, but he’d said enough in other contexts to carry his end of their conversation.

The Curie archives were physically out of reach because of travel restrictions during the pandemic. Fortunately, however, the fact of Marie’s fame as a two-time Nobel Prize winner, coupled with the dangerous nature of the materials she handled, had resulted in the digitization of nearly every notebook and draft letter, including the hand-written grief journal that she kept through the year following her husband’s death. The letters to and from her two daughters had been collected and published as books, so I had all of those at hand as well. The Elements of Marie Curie is a particularly female story — a tale of scientific discovery, yes, but also of love and marriage, childbirth, miscarriage, difficulty nursing, misogyny, and widowhood.

What is the most surprising thing you learned doing research for your books?

By far the most surprising — even shocking — thing was the discovery of my own misogyny. This happened rather late in my career, and explains my decision to tell only women’s stories going forward. Of course, as a woman, I didn’t think I could be accused of misogyny, but I was wrong.

I learned this while writing my previous book, The Glass Universe, which tells the story of a group of women who worked at the Harvard College Observatory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where they made pivotal discoveries in astronomy. I had written about many key figures in the history of astronomy, including Galileo and Copernicus, and the story of the Harvard women appealed to me precisely because it focused on female astronomers. However, once I got to work, each one’s achievements surprised me. And why was that? At length I had to admit that I’d come to them with embarrassingly low expectations. It seemed I didn’t really believe women could do science. In spite of the encouragement I’d enjoyed from my own family, at school, and through decades as a professional science writer, I had not escaped the negative attitudes about women that were “in the air” when I was growing up in the 1950s.

After that transformative moment of confronting my latent undiagnosed misogyny, all I wanted to do was tell true stories that reveal women’s scientific prowess. When I learned that some 45 women had spent a formative period in Mme. Curie’s lab, I knew I had something new and important to say about her.

Two of your books, The Glass Universe and The Elements of Marie Curie, are group biographies. How did you decide which women to include? 

The Harvard Observatory women numbered in the dozens, but only five of them achieved lasting fame (at least in the astronomical community) for their contributions. Still, five main female characters are a lot, plus the charismatic director who hired them, and the two wealthy heiresses who funded their research. I longed for one stand-out who could carry the whole story, but she didn’t exist. Eventually it struck me that the several hundred thousand glass-plate photographs of the night sky, which replaced direct observation by telescope for these women, connected everything and everyone in the story. That gave me the idea for the title, since the collection of plates is truly a “glass universe.” And of course the glass universe — very fittingly — encompassed the notion of the glass ceiling. In fact, the association is so strong that people often call the book “The Glass Ceiling” without realizing they’ve misspoken.

I had the opposite problem with Mme. Curie. She is a figure of such towering fame that nearly everyone has heard of her. Although she was never the only woman scientist, she’s the only one most people can name. My initial idea was to put her in the background of the narrative. Since the women arrived at the lab in a slow trickle at first, one per year, I thought I’d treat each one individually, moving chronologically and bringing in the facts of Mme. Curie’s life only as they related to her protegees’ experiences. That didn’t work at all. My editor, George Gibson, reminded me that although virtually everyone knew Mme. Curie’s name, her name was all they knew. Her personal story had to be the vehicle that carried all the others’ stories.

As with The Glass Universe, an inanimate character also figures in this book. It’s the periodic table of the elements. Each chapter title has two parts: the name of a person (usually a woman in the Curie lab, though occasionally a man) and the name of an element relevant to that person’s work.

My choices of individuals to feature depended partly on the importance or interest of their activities and partly on the amount of available information about them. Some of Mme. Curie’s female assistants flitted through the lab so quickly that they left no historical record, not even their full names. I’m still wondering whatever happened to the mysterious “Mlle. Larch.”

A question from Dava: Is Women’s History Month a good thing or a bad thing? Please elaborate.

I struggle with this question every March. And every March, my answer remains the same. It is neither good nor bad. But for now it is necessary. In fact, I would argue that it is more necessary than ever.  As I write this, Federal agencies are ordering celebration of “cultural awareness” months paused or cancelled altogether.  (Perhaps by the time you read this those orders will have been rolled back.  We can only hope.)

In the meantime, I intend to celebrate Women’s History month as hard as I can.  The fact is that many libraries, museums, and particularly schools only include women in their programming in March.  Until we regularly teach students that women were involved in, well, everything, we need Women’s History Month.

Let’s party hard!

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Interested in learning more about Dava Sobel and her work? Check out her website at http://www.davasobel.com/

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Come back tomorrow for  three questions and a answer from novelist Della Leavitt.

***

I’ve been waiting to read Paige Bowers’s Overnight Code, the story of groundbreaking computer engineer and ship designer Raye Montague, ever since Paige announced the deal more than a year ago. When I finally got my hands on it, the book more than lived up to my expectations. Overnight Code is an important addition to the growing genre of works that give voice to important and largely forgotten women of science. It is also a powerful and inspiring story of a woman who refused to be stopped by the dual challenges of racism and sexism in the largely male, largely white world of the early days of computer science.

I am pleased to have Paige back here on the Margins to talk about the book and how she wrote it.

How did you come across Raye Montague’s story? Was your experience of writing her story significantly different that writing about Genevieve De Gaulle, who was the subject of your previous book?

My agent saw Raye on a “Good Morning America” segment and approached her about writing her memoir, which had been something people had been telling her she needed to do for a long time. Her son, my co-author, David, was going to help her write it, but one thing led to another and my agent approached me about getting involved. I was a huge fan of Hidden Figures, so the opportunity to help Raye tell her little-known story was really appealing to me. Unfortunately, she passed away right as the proposal for her book found a home, so I went from working with her on her memoir, to working with David on what would become a biography. The experience was significantly different from my previous book for a variety of reasons: 1. I actually had the opportunity to interview Raye, which was not possible with Genevieve de Gaulle, who had long since passed before I thought to write her about her. So that helped me get more of a sense of who Raye was, how she spoke, what her personality was like, and so forth; 2. David was a fantastic partner in this because he very generously mailed me his mother’s personal papers, dug up people for me to interview, and was a constant sounding board from beginning to end; and finally 3. I’m typically a pretty anxious person, but when I sent this off to my editor, I was far more at peace with the end result of this book than I was with my first. David and I are very, very excited to introduce his mother to readers!

Overnight Code straddles the boundaries between memoir and biography.  How did you navigate that?

You know, I hadn’t really thought about that until now! I suppose it worked out this way because in the beginning it was supposed to be a memoir, and I spent a lot of time listening to Raye tell stories, and was doing what I could to capture her cadences and her indomitable personality on the page. After she passed, I knew the writing voice needed to shift, and there needed to be more reporting and research to counterbalance what she said. By the same token, I didn’t want to let go of the fiery spirit that I had begun to capture. It is what made her so beloved by so many people, and I felt like it was what was driving the narrative chapter to chapter, making events from decades ago still feel so alive and fresh.

There is a significant STEM component to Raye’s story, but you make it easy for a non-technical reader to understand.  How much did you have to learn to about the technical aspects of her story?  And how hard was it? ( I assume you didn’t already have a background in early computers and ship design.)

Dirty little secret: I was not the best math and science student, so I realized that learning about early computers and ship design was the first and most important thing I needed to do. It was a pretty steep learning curve. I had a general idea of the early computer part, but I was able to interview Raye about her experience, as well as some of her former colleagues to get more detail about how that technology worked. David sent me some of his mother’s books about ship design, so that helped me get a better sense of how it developed over time, and how computers were brought in to make the process faster and easier. I interviewed another former colleague of hers to fill in some of the gaps, and he was so good, and made things so clear to me, I felt confident that I could write about it in a way that was easy to understand.  [Pamela here:  She succeeded.]

You do an excellent job of placing Raye’s story in the context of both the civil rights movement and the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Did anything about her experience of discrimination take you by surprise, or particularly outrage you?

Thank you! She was definitely an extraordinary woman living through an extraordinary moment. I am not sure if I was surprised by her experiences with discrimination, but I was certainly disgusted with the ways in which she was treated with such disrespect because of her color and gender. The saddest part about it is that she went back to be honored by the navy maybe a decade or so after her retirement, women told her that they were still experiencing some of the discrimination she faced.

One of the questions I’m fascinated with right now is how biographers name their subjects, particularly when writing about a woman.  Can you explain why you chose to use Raye’s first name throughout the book?

I think a lot of it boils down to intimacy. I wanted readers to feel close to and be on a first name basis with this little-known woman who lived a big, bold life. But I also think it speaks a bit to Raye, who didn’t want to be called Mrs. Montague, or for me to “Yes ma’am” her. She wanted to be known as Raye, and as a person, not a gender. It was difficult for me to get my head around that when I first began interviewing her. My Southern mama raised me with some pretty old school manners. But from the outset, Raye told me to call her “Raye,” and in doing that, she pulled me close and told me all about her life and times. It was a tremendous honor, one I’ve never taken lightly.

What would you like readers take away from the book?

David and I want people to be inspired by this woman who followed her dreams and didn’t take no for an answer. Having your dreams come true is no straightforward, fairy tale thing. It involves preparation, determination, occasional heartbreak, shifted gears, and ultimate triumphs. Persistence is key. So is resilience. Just look at Raye’s  life and you’ll have all the proof you’ll need!

Paige Bowers is the author of THE GENERAL’S NIECE: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France.  For the past couple of years, she has been working closely with Hidden Figure Raye Montague’s son, David, on the story of how his mother engineered her way out of the Jim Crow South to become the first person to draft a Naval ship design by computer. That book, OVERNIGHT CODE: The Life of Raye Montague, the Woman Who Revolutionized Naval Engineering, now available wherever you buy your books. .

Paige is a nationally published news and features writer whose work has appeared in TIME, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, People, Allure, Thomson Reuters, Glamour, Pregnancy, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Magazine and Palm Beach Illustrated.

A lifelong Francophile, Paige earned a master’s degree in Modern European history from Louisiana State University in 2012, and has taught French history classes for LSU Continuing Education. She is represented by Jane Dystel of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, L.L.C.

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Want to know more about Paige Bowers and her work?

Check out her website: http://www.paigebowers.com/

Follow her on Instagram

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Tomorrow it will be business as usual here on the Margins with a blog post from me.

  ***

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!

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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.

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.

Anne Frank, 1940, at the 6th Montessori School, Amsterdam

One of the delights of a road trip is seeing a sign advertising an unexpected attraction. The kind that makes you go “What??!!” and immediately pull out your phone because you can’t believe you read it correctly.

One of the frustrations of a road trip is missing something you would like to see because the timing does not work.

The Anne Frank Pen Pal Museum in Danville, Iowa, fits both categories.

The story behind the museum is little more than a footnote in the larger Anne Frank story.

Every summer Danville school teacher Miss Birdie Matthews traveled to Europe. Every fall, she would have her students write letters to European pen pals from an interested school that she had contacted during her summer travels. In January 1940, she gave her students a a list of names and addresses of Dutch children who attended the 6h Montessori School in Amsterdam, where Anne Frank was a student.

Ten-year-old Juanita Jane Wagner picked Anne Frank from the list. In her first letter to Anne, she told her about Danville, her family, particularly her sister Betty Anne, and life on an Iowa farm. Then she waited eagerly for a return letter.

A few weeks later, Juanita received her first and only letter from her pen pal, dated April 29 1940. There was a second letter in the envelope, from Anne’s fourteen-year-old sister Margot to Juanita’s sister Betty Ann, who was also fourteen. Anne wrote about her school and her family. She told Juanita that she collected postcards and asked her to send a photo. Margot wrote about what was happening in Europe and the fact that they listened to the news on the radio. She told Betty Ann that “we never feel safe’ because the Netherlands shared a border with Germany. Neither girl mentioned that they were Jewish. Both letters were written in English—the assumption is that they drafted them in Dutch and their father translated them into English for the girls to copy. The Frank sisters also sent small photographs of themselves and a picture postcard of Amsterdam.

The Wagner girls wrote back immediately, and sent snapshots of themselves in return.

They did not hear from their Dutch pen pals again. Germany invaded the Netherlands on May 10, the Dutch surrendered four days later, and the Frank family went into hiding.

In an interview late in her life, Betty Wagner said that she and her sister often wondered if their Dutch pen pals were safe. When the war was over, Betty wrote to the address they had used before. Otto Frank answered, telling them what the family had gone through and what had happened to his daughters. Betty said later that after she read the letter, she “just sat and cried.” It was the first time the Wagners learned that their pen pals were Jewish.

The original letters are now in the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The museum in Danville has copies of the letters on display. It also tells the stories of Holocaust survivors who settled in Iowa. Or so reviews of the museum say. We drove past too late in the day to stop. It’s on my list of places to go back to.

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Come back on Monday for three questions and an answer with somebody about women’s history.

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I have literally been waiting for years to read Elizabeth De Wolfe’s newest book, Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy. In fact, I was so eager that I pre-ordered it twice. . To quote Matthew Goodman, author of one of my favorite books, Eighty Days, “This is a stirring tale of secrecy, betrayal, ambition, jilted love, and the many barriers—political, financial, legal—faced by young women in nineteenth-century America.” Definitely my cup of chai with milk.

I am delighted to have Elizabeth back here on the Margins to talk about Alias Agnes and how she wrote it.

Even well known women in the nineteenth century are often neglected by biographers and historians. What path led you to stenographer turned undercover detective Jane Armstrong Tucker?

The path to Jane was accidental. I began my research intending to write a book about Madeleine Pollard, the plaintiff in a breach of promise lawsuit against Congressman WCP Breckinridge for failing, as pledged, to marry her. While a handful of historians had written about the trial and Breckinridge’s subsequent (failed) political career, the overwhelming assumption was that Pollard was a mistress and nothing more, as if her life was frozen at that very public moment of time. I wanted to know about her life before she met Breckinridge, the path that took her to a courtroom in the nation’s capital, and what happened after the trial was over. As I read through correspondence between Congressman Breckinridge and his legal team at the Library of Congress, I picked up on hints of some sort of secret scheme. His lawyer refused to put details in writing, leaving only the vaguest hints about a “Miss P.” At the same time, I was reading accounts of the trial published during and immediately after – works capitalizing on the public interest. One book was written by “Agnes Parker,” purportedly a memoir of ten weeks as a “girl spy.” Miss P? Agnes Parker? Fiction or fact? As it turns out, a bit of both. Once I began to write my book, I stuck with my initial idea of focusing on the trial, but the manuscript never really gelled. But Agnes Parker’s behind-the-scenes relationship with Madeleine Pollard did. I flipped the narrative of my book to focus on Tucker, and the story just took off.

The Gilded Age has been a popular history hot spot for several years now,  the setting for the television series  by that name, now in its third season, and a number of best-selling novels, including The Personal Librarian,  The Address, and The Social Graces.   In your subtitle, you described Tucker as a Gilded Age spy.  How does her story relate to the world evoked in such works?    

Jane Tucker is an outsider to the glitz and glamor – she does not hobknob with “the 400,” nor aspire to a life of luxury. Yet, as a working-class woman, she is intimately connected. Her goal was to become financially self-sufficient, but it was no easy task. Eschewing the route of marriage, in Boston Jane worked as a seamstress–at one point working in the dress department of a major department store. Skilled in fine embroidery, Jane made the custom buttons and embellishments for women’s bespoke dresses. She also painted porcelain, adding the flowers and delicate motifs to the teacups and plates the upper crust used in their parlors. Jane was well aware of that world — middle class managers and their families boarded at her coastal home for summer relaxation (while she worked for their comfort) and she was well-versed with their culinary preferences, knowledge she put to good use while spying on Madeleine Pollard.

Both the young women at the heart of your book struggle to make a life for themselves as single women in the Gilded Age, though they chose very different paths.  What new opportunities, and challenges, did women face at that time?

An opportunity that connects Tucker and Pollard is the typewriter. This new office tool allowed thousands of young women the opportunity to engage in office work, both in urban businesses and, in Washington, in civil service, a lucrative option.

Tired of working for unpleasant employers, Jane learned to type and take shorthand at the Hickox School in Boston’s Copley Square. She progressed rapidly and easily found work. Her most significant job was working for a group of Kentucky businessmen who had established a New York City office (When Boston jobs grew tiresome, she tried her hand in New York). She loved the work, the city, and her supervisor, a lawyer named Charles Stoll, whom she called “the kindest man she ever met.” When the economy soured and the Kentucky group closed their office, Stoll wrote her a glowing recommendation letter. Eight or so months later, Stoll, now serving as Breckinridge’s attorney, remembered Jane’s skills and derring-do, and begged her to take on a very special job.

Madeleine Pollard also learned to type. In Washington, she took the required Civil Service exam at least twice, each time earning middling scores. Nonetheless, she did get work (in at least one case with the strong-arm assistance of her lover) first in the Botany Division of the Agricultural Department and later with the Census Office. Madeleine started as a “computer,” tallying up census items; she was promoted to copyist and her annual salary reached $900. The money allowed Madeleine to move out of a room in a convent (where she did some light teaching in exchange for housing) and into a series of boarding houses in increasingly tony neighborhoods. Her significant moment came when her landlady introduced the Kentucky-born Pollard to two of her Kentucky friends, sisters Emily Zane and Julia Churchill Blackburn, a senior member of Kentucky “Society” in Washington. Pollard became Blackburn’s protégé and entered the life of which she had dreamed: teas and dinners, literary events, and travel.

As single women earning marginally sufficient salaries, both women were at risk—a job loss could be catastrophic. After New York City, Jane returned to a former Boston job with a street railway company but was laid off at the end of 1893. Worn out and without work, she returned home. Madeleine lost her job at the Census office when tabulation of the 1890 census was completed. Ironically, new technology played a role. The Hollerith keypunch machine counted the collected data more efficiently and instead of years to tabulate the 1880 census, the 1890 census took just twelve months. In June of 1891, Madeleine was let go “on account of necessary reduction of force.”  Shortly thereafter, she met Blackburn and moved from the work-a-day world to the world of leisure.

Both Jane and Madeleine shared a similar fate after the trial: Breckinridge did not pay either one money he owed them.

Like other women you’ve written about, Tucker is not a major historical figure.  How difficult is it to find sources for women whose lives are not well documented?  What is your favorite research tip for people who want to write about relatively obscure historical women?

It is very difficult to find sources. In Jane Tucker’s case, even the archive holding the family papers had no idea of her days as an undercover detective. My tip is to start with the men in a subject’s life – her father, husband, brothers, associates — and scour their papers. Then, build out her world of women and men. I draw relationship maps on big sheets of paper. (Pro tip: use the back of good quality wrapping paper—it’s big, sturdy, and often has grid lines). Who were her relatives? Schoolmates? Neighbors? Businesses she frequented? Places she traveled? And for each, think through what records might exist. Treat every relationship as if it were the subject of your work and dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. And google everything: one insomniac night, instead of googling her name, I googled Madeleine Pollard’s  nineteenth-century address which revealed her presence in a university catalog under one of her playful name variations. I never would have found that if not for this backwards google. The lesson I learned in this project is that to find an undercover detective’s story, you have to be a detective.

What was most challenging or  exciting about researching women in this period of history?

The most challenging part of this project was the absence of two key data sources: the 1890 federal census, which burned in 1921 leaving a twenty year gap between the 1880 and 1900 records, and the Pollard v. Breckinridge trial documents. I found fabulous stories from the women who testified, and I was eager to read their full depositions or transcript of courtroom testimony — typically elided by the newspapers covering the trial. Yet, when I requested the records from the National Archives, the archivist found an empty acid-free box. The only thing inside was a file card that said: “Do not remove this card.”

What was the most surprising thing you learned working on this book?

That Jane Tucker was from my home state, Maine. I nearly fell on the floor when I saw on a key document “Transportation: Maine to Washington.” So much for my idea that, for once, this project would not feature New England!

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

I recently read Jodi Picoult’s novel By Any Other Name that braids the story of Emilia Bassano, possible writer of Shakespeare’s works, and a twenty-first-century young female playwright. Both face challenges of gender, making a living, and erasure. I loved this thought-provoking novel that spoke to my desire to recover and make visible women’s stories.

Along those lines, in non-fiction, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers’s The Vice-President’s Black Wife brings to the fore an amazing story of an enslaved woman’s persistence and her subsequent, quite intentional, erasure. It’s an amazing piece of research.  And I’ll also mention a book I love to teach in my Women in the Modern World course – Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five, which explores the lives, not the deaths, of the victims of Jack the Ripper.  Rubenhold shows how fragile a woman’s security was and how quickly one’s life could change. It’s also a model of historical research and how historians weave together a life from scant references spread across diverse and sometimes unconventional sources.  My students are amazed that what they thought they knew—the victims were all prostitutes—is wrong.

Is there anything else you wish I had asked you about?

I’m glad you did not ask me what’s next, because I really have no idea, but I’m excited by the newfound freedom and creative space freed up by completing Alias Agnes. I’m confident the right project will find me.

Elizabeth DeWolfe is professor of history and co-founder of the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of New England where she teaches courses in women’s history and archival research. She is the award-winning author of The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories (Kent State University Press), about the unfortunate death of a textile mill operative in 1849 and Shaking the Faith (Palgrave) about the nineteenth-century anti-Shaker campaign of Mary Marshall Dyer, a former member. DeWolfe makes her home in southern Maine with her husband, an antiquarian books dealer, and Floyd, a stray cat now living his best life on the DeWolfes’ sun-drenched couch.

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Want to know more about Elizabeth and her work?

Check out her website: www.elizabethdewolfe.com
Follow her on FaceBook and Instagram

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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 three questions and an answer from … someone.