As the official superintendent of the Union Army’s newly minted nursing corps, Dorothea Dix had a clear vision of what her nurses should look like. Only women between the ages of thirty or thirty-five and fifty would be accepted. “Neatness, order, sobriety and industry” were required; “matronly persons of experience, good conduct or superior education” were preferred.

Dix turned away many able applicants because she thought they were too young, attractive, or frivolous. Twenty-three- year-old Cornelia Hancock, for instance, was preparing to board the train to Gettysburg with a number of women many years older than she was when Dix appeared on the scene to inspect the prospective nurses. She pronounced all of the nurses suitable except for Hancock, whom she objected to on the grounds of her “youth and rosy cheeks.” Hancock simply boarded the train while her companions argued with Dix. When she reached Gettysburg, three days after the battle, the need for nurses was so great that no one worried about her age or appearance. Too inexperienced to help with the physical needs of the soldiers, she went from wounded soldier to wounded soldier, paper, pencil and stamps in hand, and spent the first night writing farewell letters from soldiers to their families and friends. When wagons of provisions began to arrive, Hancock helped herself to bread and jelly, then divided loaves into portions that could be swallowed by weak and wounded men.

She quickly became accustomed to the realities of the battlefield, telling a cousin in a letter written on her second day in the field “I do not mind the sight of blood, have seen limbs taken off and was not sick at all.” In fact, she proved to be such a dedicated nurse that the wounded soldiers of Third Division Second Army Corps presented her with a silver medal inscribed Testimonial of regard for ministrations of mercy to the wounded soldiers at Gettysburg, Pa. -—July 1863. (She also had a dance tune named after her, the Hancock Gallop–a tribute that I suspect none of Dix’s middle-aged matrons received from the soldiers under their care.)

Hancock worked as a nurse for the rest of the war, tending the wounded after the battle of the Wilderness, Fredericksburg, Port Royal, White House Landing, City Point and Petersburg. She was one of the first Union nurses to arrive in Richmond after its capture on April 3, 1865.

After the war, Hancock helped found a freedman’s school in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where she taught for a decade. (At one point those who objected to the concept of education for black children riddled the schoolhouse with fifty bullets.) When she moved back north to Philadelphia, she helped found the Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania.

Hancock became a posthumous best-selling author in 1937, when her charming and insightful letters from the battlefield were published under the title South After Gettysburg. They are now available under the title Letters of a Civil War Nurse–well worth the read if you are interested in Civil War nurses or daily life in a Union army camp behind the lines.

I had no idea what to expect at the museum, mostly because I didn’t take fifteen seconds and look it up online[3]. Even if I had taken a look at the website, nothing would have prepared me for “Spies and Space,” an exhibit featuring artifacts[4] of Cold-War popular culture from both sides of the Iron Curtain. It was a fascinating combination of nostalgia and smack-up-the-side-of-the-head.

The exhibit space is cleverly divided with a mock-Iron Curtain. In some ways it is divided by differing mind sets as well.

The half of the exhibit dealing with Cold War popular culture in the United States is devoted to toys and entertainment. What I’m going to call collectibles rather than artifacts— toys, lunch boxes, posters, etc—evoked childhood memories for my two companions and I, all members of Generation Jones[5]. We laughed, shared memories, and occasionally quoted lines from shows that ranged from early James Bond through Star Wars. (I suspect that no American my age can see a promotional item from Lost in Space without thinking “Danger, Will Robinson”.) We also gasped at a large, over-the-top, toy robot that looked like a mash-up of a giant nutcracker, the witch’s soldiers in The Wizard of Oz, and Snidely Whiplash, with a creepy grin that had too many teeth. None of us had seen anything like it. Which was a good thing from my perspective. I think it would have given seven-year-old Pamela nightmares.

Then we turned the corner at the end of the mock-Iron Curtain and everything changed.

The first thing we saw was The Motherland Meets the Hero a painting on an epic scale depicting cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin being greeted in Moscow after his return from space. The mood is joyous, with the heroic Yuri striding down a red carpet with smiling, red-flag-waving Russians on either side. Krushchev waits at the other end, arms outstretched in welcome. It is socialist realism at its best.

The painting set the theme for the Soviet half of the exhibit. Where much of the American section of the exhibit was focused on spies, often in satirical form, and fictional space adventure, the Soviet section was devoted almost entirely to real life space exploration. Following Gagarin’s flight in space, space exploration became a major theme in Soviet culture, high and low.

Our guide, who was the Russian equivalent of a Baby Boomer in age, clearly felt the same nostalgia for some of the objects on this side of the mock-Iron Curtain as we did for the Get Smart lunch box: holiday[6] tree ornaments in the shape of Sputnik and other space vehicles, a gift tin with images of Belka and Strelka, the first “cosmohounds,”[7] etc. There were many, many postage stamps devoted to triumphs in space exploration, which our guide described a “celebration of firsts.” On the darker side, the exhibit also included Soviet propaganda posters, including images of Uncle Sam as a threatening figure that I found both disturbing[8] and illuminating.

In short, the exhibit was a useful reminder that there is always another side of the wall story.

‘Spies and Space’ is on display through May 10. If you happen to be in the Twin Cities, I strongly recommend that you see it. If you miss “Spies and Space,” I still highly recommend the Museum of Russian Art. Exhibits change every six months. One special exhibit, a selection of Ukrainian political cartoons, changes every week—a statement of the museum’s support of Ukraine in the current war.

[1] And speaking of speaking, if you belong to a group that needs speakers and are interested in hearing about Sigrid Schultz, women warriors, Civil War nurses, or the craft of writing history, send me an email and we’ll see if we can make it work. I’m happy to speak to small book clubs, auditoriums packed with history buffs, and everything in between. And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

[2] I feel some complicated joke about knights and Round Tables circling my brain, but I think I will spare all of us and ignore it.

[3] Life has been crazy enough in the the last few months that I am trying to simply let things happen when I can. Unlikely as that may sound to those of you who know me in real life. Old dog. New tricks.

[4] A term I’m not entirely comfortable with since many of the items on display date from my childhood.

[5] I came across the idea of Generation Jones a while back and it immediately resonated. The term refers to those of us born between 1955 and 1964—although still part of the population explosion that gave the Baby Boom its name, our formative experiences were very different than those of the earlier boomers. Thee term was coined by cultural historian Jonathan Pontell, himself a member of Generation Jones, in 1999 and has gained traction ever sense. But I digress.

[6] New Year’s Eve, in case you’re wondering

[7] Krushchev gave one of Stelka’s puppies, born after the space flight, to Jaqueline Kennedy, after the First Lady asked about the puppies at a state dinner.

[8] Again, So Many Teeth

***

My Own True Love and I are spending a long weekend in Charleston, South Carolina.  For me, it’s a vacation/work sandwich.  Yesterday we bopped around together doing history-buff stuff.*  Today he heads off for twenty-four hours with his grandson’s Cub Scout troop aboard the USS Yorktown while I settle in for a day of reading and writing.  Tomorrow, we resume bopping.

The center of our first day was a visit to Fort Sumter, where the Civil War officially began.**  As always, the National Park Service did an excellent job.

Because Fort Sumter is on a island in the mouth of Charleston’s harbor, the visit begins with a boat ride, offered through an official park vendor.*** I must admit, I grumbled at the idea of a narrated boat “tour” of the harbor with only hour on the ground at the fort. I should have had more faith.  A hour was just about the right amount of time.

If you have the choice, I recommend the first trip of the day because it includes a flag-raising ceremony.  The ranger began with a brief, impassioned account of  the fall of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, including a description of the role that the American flag played in the events on Sumter.  (Stay tuned for some of the details.)  Then she asked for help raising the flag.  Twenty or thirty visitors (including me and My Own True Love) lined up to help unfold and hoist the flag.  Before we began, she asked us to introduce ourselves to our neighbors in the line.  It was moving and meaningful—a moment of unity in which no one mentioned the election or the inauguration that was going on as we shook hands and remembered a time of national division.

Once the ceremony was over, we were  free to explore the ruins of the fort and the excellent small museum. We would have enjoyed the visit even if all we got out of it was a more detailed version of the events of April 12, 1861—the ranger was interesting, the boat ride lovely, the weather was amazing.  But, as is so often the case, the NPS did a good job of putting the place in its broader historical context, including a small exhibit on the role of African-American slaves in the fort’s history.  Here are some of the things that caught my imagination:

The fort was built as part of a string of coastal fortifications, planned as a result of the inadequacy of coastal defense in the War of 1812. (At some level, armies always plan for the last war.  And really, what choice do they have?)  They built a man-made island in the mouth of Charleston’s Harbor in 1829, using sand and 70,000 tons of granite from New England.  Intended for a garrison of 650 men with 135 guns, the fort was almost completed by 1860 but it was not yet manned   When Anderson and his men arrived at the fort, they raised the American flag there for the first time.

The military professionals of the Union and Confederate armies were drawn from the same small pool of big fish:  Brigadier General Pierre G.T. Beauregard led the Confederate troops that bombarded Anderson and his men.  Anderson was Beauregard’s artillery instructor at West Point.  This is the kind of thing that would lead to dramatic tension—or charges of implausibility—if I wrote historical fiction.

Major Anderson was allowed to surrender with full honors, including the right to take his flag with him.  At the war’s end, on April 9, 1865, he raised the same flag over Fort Sumter  once more.

The story of Fort Sumter didn’t end with Anderson’s surrender.  The fort remained a Confederate stronghold for the next four years despite repeated Union efforts to recapture it.  The Confederate garrison never surrendered.  They withdrew from the island when Sherman’s march threatened the South Carolina capitol.

The ruined fort was brought back into service during the Spanish-American War, when the army constructed a large concrete battery on the former parade ground, and it remained in service as part of the coastal defense until Pearl Harbor, when it became clear that aviation was the name of the coastal defense game.

*And eating.  Because everything you hear about food in Charleston is true.  The only thing that saved us from dyspepsia and blimpitude has been lots and lots of walking.

**For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story or want a refresher, here’s a recap:

In November, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president.  On December 20, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union.  By March 2, a total of seven states had seceded and seized Federal forts and naval yards throughout the South.  Fort Sumter, an unfinished red brick fortress built on a man-made granite island,  was one of the few to remain in Federal hands, thanks to peremptory action by Major Robert Anderson.

Anderson commanded two companies—a total of 85 men, including musicians—at nearby Fort Moultrie.  Six days after South Carolina seceded, he decided Moultrie was impossible to defend and moved his troops in the night to Sumter.  The Confederate government saw Anderson’s transfer as an act of aggression.  (Unlike, say, seizing Federal forts.  Partisanship blinds us all.)

The fort became the emotional focal point of the conflict between Union and Confederacy.  The small garrison was cut off from resupply or reinforcement, but refused to surrender the fort to Confederate control. Anderson, a Kentucky native and former slaveholder, was praised as a hero in the North and reviled as a traitor in the South. President James Buchanan, at the end of his term of office, was unwilling to trigger civil war by attempting to relieve the besieged unit and equally unwilling to trigger a public outcry by recalling the troops from Sumter. He chose instead to leave the problem for his successor.

When Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, the garrison at Sumter had less than six weeks of food left. Lincoln’s cabinet told him it was impossible to relieve the fortress and urged him to evacuate Anderson’s troops as a way of reducing tension between North and South. Popular opinion screamed for Lincoln to send reinforcements to the “gallant little band”.  With public opinion eager for action, and no sign that delay would improve the chances of reuniting the country, Lincoln chose to resupply the garrison but not send reinforcements unless the Confederates attacked either the fort or the supply ships—a compromise that pleased no one.

Shortly after midnight on April 12, with resupply ships on the way, the Confederate government gave Anderson until 4:00 AM to surrender. Anderson refused. At 4:30 AM, the bombardment began. Although they had neither the men nor supplies to mount a meaningful defense, the Union forces held out for a day and a half before surrendering.

The war had begun.

***Only two round trips a day in January.  There are more in the high season, but there are also more people who want to go.  Plan ahead so you aren’t disappointed.

Returning to the idea of women who were inventors and/or entrepreneurs, allow me to introduce you to Bette Nesmith Graham, a struggling single mother who founded what became a multi-million dollar business in her kitchen[1].

In 1954, Bette Nesmith Graham was a divorced single mother who supported herself and her son, Michael,[2] by working as the executive secretary for the chairman of the Texas Bank and Trust in Dallas. But the introduction of new technology to American offices, in the form of IBM’s electric typewriter, threatened that position and her livelihood.

Nesmith Graham was an excellent secretary overall, but she was not a good typist. The transition to an electronic typewriter was a nightmare. The new typewriters allowed typists to work more quickly, but they had sensitive keys, which triggered more typos than the stiffer manual typewriter keys. Worse, they used carbon ribbons instead of fabric ones: when typists tried to fix a mistake with a pencil eraser, the carbon ink would smear all over the page, meaning that a secretary often had to retype an entire page because of a single mistake. As far as Nesmith Graham was concerned, it was lose/lose.

Even though the position of executive secretary was as high as a woman could go as a clerical worker, she lived paycheck-to-paycheck on her salary of $300 a month.[3] to make extra money, she would take on side jobs, which often used the artistic skills she had learned from her mother, who was an artist and small business owner. One of those jobs was helping dress display windows at the bank that Christmas. Watching the display artists paint windows with a festive scene, Nesmith Graham noticed that when they made a mistake they painted over it. It was an “aha!” moment. Why couldn’t she do the same thing when she made a typing error?

She started with a small watercolor brush and fast-drying water-based tempera paint that she tinted to match the bank’s stationary. She brought it to the office in nail polish bottles, which she hid in her desk so her boss wouldn’t see. But while her boss might not have noticed her careful corrections using the paint, other secretaries did and asked her to make bottles for them.

Soon she was staying up late at night working in her kitchen,  making batches of “Mistake Out” in her blender and filling bottles. Determined to make it a viable business, she researched paint formulas in the local library. She collaborated with her son’s chemistry teacher to improve the consistency of the product and paid an industrial polymer chemist $200 to help her develop a formula that would dry more quickly.

Orders increased. She formed the Mistake Out Company in 1956, though she couldn’t yet afford the $400 fee to patent the idea.

At night she filled the growing orders from other secretaries in Dallas and sent samples to potential buyers. She sent IBM two typed documents, one with errors corrected with an eraser and one with her correcting fluid, along with a personal note in which she said “I truly believe that this can mean a turning point from the old methods—a new era.” She hoped IBM would be interested in marketing the product. IBM declined.

On the weekends, she traveled from Dallas to San Antonio and Houston trying to market the product.

Eventually orders increased enough that she hired her first employees. She paid her teenage son and his friends a dollar an hour to fill nail polish bottles using restaurant-style ketchup bottles, cut the tips of the brushing inside the bottle caps at an angle, and paste on labels.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that working two jobs would catch up with her. One day she signed a letter at the bank as “The Mistake Out Company.” She was promptly fired.

Without the safety net of her secretarial job, Nesmith Graham concentrated on building her correction fluid business. In 1958, she renamed the product “Liquid Paper” and could finally afford to file for a patent. That same year, the business made a breakthrough when an article in a trade magazine for secretaries, called The Secretary, described Liquid Paper as “the answer to a secretary’s prayer.” Soon after that General Electric placed an order for 400 bottles in three colors—her first large order. Orders from other large companies followed, including IBM. (I bet Graham did a dance of triumph the day that order came in. Or maybe she blew a raspberry in the direction of Big Blue.)

With the help of her second husband, Robert Graham, a former frozen food salesman who used his experience to sell Liquid Paper to office supply stores across the country, the business grew. She moved the business from her kitchen to her garage, to a trailer and then to a four-room house. In 1956, Nesmith Graham was selling 500 bottles of Liquid Paper each week, produced in her kitchen. By 1968 what was then the Mistake Out Company was a million-dollar business, producing one million bottles of Liquid Paper annually.

In 1968, Nesmith Graham changed the name of the company to Liquid Paper Corporation, and filed for a trademark. In 1969, she built a new company headquarters that was well ahead of its time in terms of making it easy for employees to work there. It was wheel-chair accessible 21 years before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It included an in-plant library, an employee-owned credit union, and, perhaps because of her struggles as a single mother, an onsite childcare center.

The company continued to grow: at its height, it produced 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper a year. That’s a lot of typos. (More of them were mine than I like to admit.)

She faced a new business challenge in 1975, following the end of her marriage . After their divorce, Robert Graham, who was then chairman of the board, convinced company executives to bar Nesmith Graham from both the building and any business decisions. He attempted to change the Liquid Paper formula, which she had spent ten years perfecting and which was legally protected as a trade secret. If the formula was changed, it would lose its trade secret protection and Nesmith Graham would lose her royalty rights.

She fought back. (Are you surprised?) After regaining controlled of the company, she sold it to the Gillette Corporation for $475 million in 1980. She died six months later, at the age of 56.

On behalf of all of us whose typing wasn’t our strongest skill, I thank you, Bette Nesmith Graham.

[1] The single mother equivalent of tech bros inventing things in their parents’ garages. It’s a cliche for a reason.
[2] He became a musician, best known as a member of the pop band The Monkees. (I’ve suffered from an ear worm or two since learning this.) He later founded a multimedia production company, Pacific Arts, and helped pioneer music videos. But I digress.
[3] Roughly $3500 today. Slightly less than the average secretary makes in Dallas today.

***

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!

***

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

***

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.

***

Want to know more about Paige Bowers and her work?

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

Follow her on Instagram

***

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.

***

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

***

Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with–someone!