As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been spending a a fair amount of time in recent months in New York City in the 1910s and 1920s, especially the corners of it dedicated to artists, bohemians, and modernists, self-declared and otherwise. Consequently, when All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 by Andrea Barnett crossed my path, I immediately snapped it up.

I expected it to be a companion to Hotbed, Joanna Scutts’ account of radical women in Greenwich Village during much the same period.  And in many ways, it is. Barnet discusses many of the women who appear in Hotbed, and makes an occasional passing reference to Heterodoxy, the social club that stands at the center of Scutt’s account. But where Scutts focuses on the radical activism of the women she discusses, using their personal lives as means of entry to the larger social story, Barnet’s account is driven by what she describes as “Creative dissent, whether expressed as artistic innovation or as liberating lifestyle.” Where Scutts’ radical women were for the most part white, with one or two carefully noted exceptions, Barnet divides her subjects evenly between Greenwich Village and Harlem, and the often uncomfortable intersection between the two.

That said, Barnet’s careful attempt at looking at both the white bohemians of Greenwich Village and their Black counterparts in Harlem underlines the fundamental differences between the two worlds. The white women whose stories she tells include poets, artists, magazine publishers, activists, journalists, a photographer, the dancer Isadora Duncan, and at least one woman who seems to have been famous for being famous. With one exception, the Black women she discusses are blues singers. The only place at which their experiences overlap is at the level of the wealthy salon hostesses Mabel Dodge and A’Leila Walker—and the contrast between the two is striking.

I have mixed feelings about All-Night Party, though that may say more about me than it does about the book. I could easily imagine myself as part of the world Scutts depicts in Hotbed; the lives Barnet shares seemed totally alien, even when there is considerable overlap between the two sets of characters. Nonetheless, reading the two in conjunction gave me a richer picture of a complex and fascinating time and place than either book would have provided alone.

Worth the time if you are interested in the period.

In Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Princesses of King Edward Longshanks, historian Kelcey Wilson-Lee tells the stories of the five daughters of Edward I of England and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, who survived into adulthood: Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth.

I’ve got to say the book has a shaky start.  Wilson-Lee sets up a questionable and unnecessary straw woman in her introduction:  a “popular” vision of medieval princesses as powerless and passive that she describes as built on “an empire of fairy stories, Hollywood films, theme parks and cheaply produced ball gowns.”  Personally, I’m not sure anyone believes in the powerless princesses she describes–not the little girls who wear those ball gowns with attitude* and certainly not anyone who would chose to read a book titled Daughters of Chivalry.  Maybe that version of princesses existed once upon a time, but my own memory of fairy tales includes a fair number of princesses who used every ounce of power they held to control who they married–something only one of the real-life medieval princesses in Daughters  of Chivalry managed to control.

That quibble aside, Daughters of Chivalry is an excellent book.

Like even the most elite medieval women,  Wilson-Lee’s  princesses left a spotty trail in the historical record, most often appearing in official chronicles in the context of their relationship with one of the men in their lives.   She fleshes out the picture of their lives using a variety of sources—most notably the account records for the various royal households**—plus a certain amount of informed speculation.

Wilson-Lee uses her sources to good effect.  She creates portraits of five clearly defined individuals. Joanna, for instance, frequently defied her father and took full advantage of the opportunities accorded to a young, wealthy widow in medieval society. Mary, who entered the convent of Amesbury at the age of six, had a taste for luxury and a gambling habit at odds with her vow of poverty. She also places the sisters within the larger context of royal women in the late medieval period, exploring questions of education, marriages (political and otherwise), widowhood, property, travel, and the role of royal women as political intercessors. Like the women she describes, Wilson-Lee never loses sight of the fact that what power these women enjoyed was derived from their relationship to the king, but she fully explores the nature of that power and how they used it.

*A year or two ago, I saw a little girl stomping through the aisles of my local grocery store wearing hiking books with a princess gown and carrying a sword.  I’m pretty sure she didn’t share Wilson-Lee’s “popular” vision of princesses.

**The nature of her sources means there is a lot of description of real-life princess dresses.  This is not a complaint.  Just an observation.

Back in March, I celebrated Women’s History Month here in the Margins with a series of mini-interviews with people who are involved in creating and studying women’s history. A lot of you seemed to enjoy it.  (I know I did.) So I’m thinking about doing it again in 2020.  If there is someone you think would be a good fit, let me know.

Two sentences early in Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World caught my imagination:

“What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric technologies were literally intertwined.”

I was predisposed to enjoy the book, which combines two of my favorite things—history and textiles—in a big picture exploration of commerce, technology, and civilization itself. But with those two sentences I was hooked. And I remained hooked for the entire book. If I had been reading in a hard copy instead of an e-galley, I would have put lots of exclamation marks in the margins and stuffed it full of sticky notes.

The Fabric of Civilization is a story of innovation, or more accurately a series of stories. Postrel convincingly argues that textiles have played a central role in the histories of technology, commerce, and civilization itself. She describes innovations in the creation of textiles, from the game-changing discovery of string in the Stone Age to current efforts to engineer “smart textiles.”* She explains the fundamental principles of spinning and weaving, and the unexpected relationship between weaving and binary code.** She considers how changes in textile manufacturing shaped the larger world, including the textile mills that sparked the Industrial Revolution and the search for better dyes that created the modern chemical industry. She looks at the development of information technologies as a result of long-distance textile trades: business letters in ancient Assyria, regular mail service in medieval Italy, double-entry bookkeeping in Renaissance Italy and the roots of modern banking in the need for international credit arrangements in the early modern era.

Postrel is writing history on a global scale, but she never loses sight of the people in her story. A woman weaver in ancient Assyria responding to changing market demands, the teenaged Niccolo Machiavelli*** mastering the “new math” of Hindu-Arabic numerals, paleoanthropologists attempting to reproduce prehistoric fibers, and modern textile chemists and engineers all play a role.

Combining exhaustive research with an accessible writing style, The Fabric of Civilization will appeal to both fans of micro-histories and to textile junkies interested in the history of their passion.

*I doubt that I’ll be an early adopter.

**She describes weavers as “visually trained people with strong number skills.” This was reinforced in my research for a piece on Afghan war rugs for MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. When one scholar asked an Afghan weaver how she translated images into rug patterns she said: “I don’t see it as a picture. I see it as numbers and I make it a song.” But I digress.

***I assume that most of you recognize the name Machiavelli, or at least the term machiavellian. A minor fifteenth century Italian diplomat, he is best known as the author of The Prince, a work of political philosophy that argues princes must see things as they are and take action accordingly, rather than act based on ideal principles.

When Nazi troops marched into Paris in June, 1940, the city surrendered without firing a shot.*

In When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 , historian Ronald C. Rosbottom explores face-to-face interactions between occupiers and occupied, the effect of the Occupation on daily life in Paris, its psychological and emotional impact on Parisians and its legacy of guilt and myth.

Drawing from official records, memoirs, interviews and ephemera, Rosbottom tells a story that is more complicated than simple opposition between courage and collaboration, though he offers examples of both. He discusses the fine line between survival and collaboration, the distinction between individual acts of resistance and the Resistance, and how occupiers and occupied utilized the hide-and-seek possibilities of Parisian apartment buildings. He considers the act of waiting in line both as an illustration of the difficulties of everyday life and as a replacement for forbidden political gatherings. Above all, he describes the Occupation as gradual constriction of Parisian life within ever-narrowing boundaries.

Rosbottom does not limit his discussion to the Parisian perspective. Some of the most interesting sections of When Paris Went Dark deal with the German experience in the city, a complex mixture of tourism, conquest, envy and isolation. His account of Hitler’s early-morning tour of the capital soon after its surrender is particularly illuminating about the Nazi Party’s ambivalence toward cities in general and Paris in particular.

When Paris Went Dark is an important and readable addition to the social history of World War II.

*I will admit with only the slightest embarrassment that when I think “Nazi occupation of Paris” the images that come to mind are straight out of Casablanca. That will probably never change. Because putting pictures in our heads–accurate or not–is one of the things great art does.

Take it away Caroline!

What path led you to Cornelia Hancock and why do you think it’s important to tell her story today?

I first encountered Cornelia Hancock through the paperback edition of her Civil War letters titled Letters of a Civil War Nurse, published by Bison Books in 1998.  Cornelia Hancock’s Civil War correspondence, letters mostly written to family, were published without context as a collection of her Civil War correspondence ten years after her death in 1937 and titled South After Gettysburg. In 1956 they were republished with a foreword by Bruce Caton. This edition contained some of her Reconstruction correspondence and again became a best seller.   Cornelia Hancock’s observations about war, politics, people and the events around her were acute, astute. and perceptive—she wrote in a voice singularly devoid of the Victorian flourishes that permeated the age.

The larger background picture of her first-hand account of a nation at war and the suffering it caused were evident, but—who were many of the people she was writing about? The famous were easy to know or find, but the common men and women, the nurses and doctors, her patients, each had a story I wanted to know.  What were the specific day-to-day events that surrounded her as she wrote that gave insight and depth to her Civil War world?

I wanted to know more about Cornelia’s world and Cornelia herself.  I thought other readers of her letters would want to know as well.  Her story today is valuable to readers and historians as a primary witness and acute observer of the Civil War.  In many histories of the period, and the Army of the Potomac, Cornelia is quoted. She writes from a woman’s perspective with eyes wide open.  The path she took, and the ground she broke, as she nursed the men of the Army of the Potomac, paved the way for other women to leave their homes and dedicate their lives to great causes.

Writing about a historical figure like Cornelia Hancock requires living with her over a period of years.  What was it like to have her as a constant companion?



I lived with Cornelia for many years.  Cornelia’s letters captivated me.  I finally decided to write a Civil War biography of her that would frame her letters and illuminate the world she navigated while revealing the determination, courage, and compassion of an extraordinary woman.  Periodically over the years, before my publisher gave me a contract to write, I would reread the letters.  I would travel to places she had worked during and after the war.  I contacted family members from her hometown in Hancock’s Bridge, New Jersey. Periodically between other projects, I would take up the search to locate the people she wrote about, to travel to the battlefields where she served, to try to understand Cornelia and her world.  After I received the contract from the publisher, I, like many biographers, submerged myself in research. She was a force to be reckoned with, but one that did not broadcast her accomplishments or publicize her work.  I often wondered what she would have thought about me writing a biography of her.  Would she have been pleased? Would she have wondered why she had become an object of fascination?  Would she have shunned the project? Would she have been flattered? Would she have found merit in her story? Even after all this time, I think she would have been ambivalent.

How did Cornelia Hancock fit into the larger history of nurses in the American Civil War?   What role did she play in the culture of social reform that followed the war?

To be a nurse during the Civil War took great courage.  Women who nursed during the war defied the norms of society.  Before the war, nursing took place in the home.  There were no trained nurses in America except a handful of Catholic nuns.  Army nurses were men– private soldiers “detailed” or ordered to nurse other soldiers. After the horror and mass casualties of First Bull Run, Dorothea Dix induced the Surgeon General to issue Circular No. 8, which gave the requirements for hired female nurses.  Women would step into the breach.  But “Good Women” did not seek to care for others outside their own homes. “Good Women” did not go out among strange men in the army to touch them, wash them, comfort them. Nursing outside the home was a low-brow, low-class, nasty thing to do.  Nursing called into question the virtue of the nurse.   Throughout the war Cornelia would be forced to defend her choices and her reputation.  Cornelia and women like her crashed through the Victorian mores that dictated a women’s life was confined to her home. Everywhere female nurses served survival rates improved.

After the war “female” nursing became an honorable profession.  After the Civil War, Cornelia, and many of these women, continued their contributions to the nation, working outside the home, and they would never turn back. Cornelia herself worked for the rest of her life as an educator, social worker, and urban engineer fighting to improve the lives of freed people, neglected children, and the underprivileged. Women’s work during the Civil War inspired new ways of thinking about women’s place in society.  Women like Cornelia paved the way for the women’s fight for full citizenship, legal and civil rights, social mobility, education, and a professional female work force. The war work of these women laid the foundation for women’s fight for female equality and the vote.

What was the most surprising thing you learned doing research for your work?

Not a surprise, really, but a hope that was dashed. I retrieved all of Cornelia Hancock’s existing personal correspondence and papers from Clements Library at the University of Michigan and The Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College. I combed through every bit. I was hoping to find answers to several open questions I had about her life, her relationships, and her world that her previously published correspondence did not shed light on. In writing the book I included some of her previously unpublished letters, and unpublished letters from family and friends, and wrote about the events that surrounded her as she wrote. I wanted to give the reader a fuller picture of her life and service.  Unfortunately, there were no real surprises in her unpublished letters, and some questions will go unanswered. We can speculate that Cornelia herself, and her literary executor, took pains to ensure that certain aspects of her life will forever remain hidden.

What is your favorite research tip for people interested in writing about less well-known women of the nineteenth century?

I don’t really have a favorite research tip.  I’m not a very methodical researcher either. Something I search for one thing or person and find something else entirely. Not dismayed, I know I will make use of unexpected research somewhere—for me the unexpected sometimes pays off.  I am a dogged researcher, though, and that has paid off many times.  I endure and continue to seek that one missing link, trying different avenues, and sometimes I do find the pot of gold under the rainbow.  When I’m looking for an obscure personality or even deepening my research on my subject I try to cast a wide net.  Of course, Newspapers.com and Find-A-Grave often provide some very interesting paths to explore that can yield great finds.  I also like to search out contemporary accounts—published diaries, letters, and memoirs of people from the era who may have had contact or similar experiences with my research subject.  Of course, I use genealogy sites, and sometimes a google search will strike an unexpected nugget.  I sometimes return to the old school and search bibliographies and indexes.  There is no one specific research tip I can recommend from my own experience except to keep at it– sometimes relentlessly.  We all know that no matter how hard you seek, sometimes you cannot find– and that’s hard to accept. Nevertheless, for me research is often the most enjoyable part of the journey in writing a book.

What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical woman?

The most challenging aspect of researching historical women, or anyone really, is getting to the heart of their motivations and what drives them and their relationships with the people they interact with during their lives.  Sometimes you cannot find what you are looking for and, therefore, you cannot write about it.  For example, there is circumstantial evidence that points to Cornelia Hancock having attended the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, when Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address.  This was one of the things I sought to find evidence of in my research.  I could not definitively substantiate her attendance through any hard evidence; therefore, it was left out of the book.  Regarding Cornelia’s relationship during the war with Dr. Dudley, whom she mentioned in so many of her letters, and her reasons for remaining unmarried—two questions I sought answers to—neither could be definitively answered.

It is evident from a close and systematic evaluation of her extant letters that there are gaps in the correspondence.  Perhaps these existing gaps can be surmised due to letters that simply did not survive, however, in some instances it is quite likely that Cornelia herself, or her literary executor scrubbed the correspondence.  It is certainly no secret that some letters were deliberately burned after Cornelia’s death by her niece before handing them over to her literary executor, Henrietta Stratton Jaquette, who subsequently published them in 1937.  This cleansing of personal correspondence is seen repeatedly in researching historic personalities.  We always decry the great loss to history, but the action is driven by a deep human need for privacy.

In addition to writing about the Civil War, you are actively involved in Civil War education and preserving Civil War battlefields. When did you first become interested in the Civil War and what sparked that interest?

I have been a member of the American Battlefield Trust and all its predecessor organizations since very early in the preservation movement.  In 2003 I was chosen as teacher of the year for the Civil War Trust.  In my personal life and in my teaching career I always supported preservation and place-based learning for my students.  The land can teach us so much.  Once these battlefields and historical properties are developed, they become lost forever.  I first became interested in preservation with the advent of the preservation movement in the late 1980s as reckless development began to roar through the nation.  As a teacher of American history, I was always an advocate of the National Parks and historical sites and places.  As for the history of the Civil War, the war is an enduring a lynch pin in the history of our nation. It was a war that preserved the nation. Cornelia Hancock’s letters provide an unforgettable panorama of suffering and endurance, grief and sacrifice, heroism and tragedy of that war. From overcrowded hospitals to battle scarred landscapes, she chronicled the human cost of war with honesty, compassion, and courage.  At the center of her world is a nation in crisis—and a young woman whose fearless devotion to the wounded and dying left an enduring legacy. The world Cornelia Hancock inhabited during the Civil War may seem distant, yet its echoes continue to shape our nation today.  We are still searching for a national unity that the war seemingly preserved with our country, but we Americans are still victims of so many of the divisive issues that the war failed to resolve.

Carolyn Ivanoff is a retired high school administrator, author, and independent historian.  She writes and speaks frequently on American history in a variety of formats and venues.  As an author, researcher, and presenter much of her work focuses on 19th century America including social, medical, and material culture, the American Civil War, and Connecticut.  At the heart of her research and published works are firsthand, primary source accounts of the people of the Civil War generation.  Carolyn Ivanoff is the author of two books, We Fought at Gettysburg-Firsthand Accounts by the Survivors of the 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry and Cornelia Hancock’s Civil War-A Heart Touched by Fire from Gettysburg to the Grand Review. As a presenter her programs include educational and historical presentations for museums, libraries, schools, community organizations, Civil War round tables, and living history venues.

For some time now, I’ve enjoyed the aviation adjacent stories that Kimberly Sheeter shares on LinkedIn. When I realized she had written a novel rooted in aviation history, titled Air Minded, I asked her if she would answer a few questions for us.

Take it away, Kimberly!

What inspired you to write Air-Minded?

Air-Minded started as a straightforward biography of the founder of the university where I work (and my master’s thesis in nonfiction writing). It morphed into narrative nonfiction and eventually into historical fiction because I was frustrated by my inability to explore the inner lives of the key figures.

It’s historical fiction with a bit of a fig leaf: Almost every character is a real person, in the right place at the right time. I had accumulated about 200 pages of footnotes before I finally called it quits on nonfiction. I tended to get rather chatty in those footnotes, somewhat like Bill Bryson. I love providing context. Possibly too much.

How did you walk the line between historical fact and fiction in Air-Minded?

I tried to stay close to the facts, largely because I discovered that facts regularly outperform my imagination.

The most George Saunders-like moment in the manuscript is a passage in which John Paul Riddle’s wife has a conversation with a UFO about her inability to connect with her husband. Granted, that sounds surreal. But consider the circumstances: Her marriage was disintegrating, she was receiving the wrong medication for early-onset multiple sclerosis and mixing prescription drugs with alcohol. She lived on the beach in Miami, and in 1947, reports of flying saucers were appearing up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

So it’s dramatic license, certainly, but with a foundation in historical plausibility.

What types of sources do you rely on to create rich fictional characters who are historically accurate?

I’m a Newspapers.com addict. I’ll happily spend hours reading grocery prices and society columns alongside the more obvious research material. I enjoy immersion. I also listen to music from whatever era I’m writing about.
Find a Grave can be a treasure trove, as can those Facebook pages called things like “You Might Just Be From [Insert Town].” I’ve also had wonderful luck with small-town librarians who still maintain files of old newspaper clippings. State and university archives are invaluable, although responses can sometimes be slow, probably because they’re understaffed.

There’s also a brilliant woman on YouTube who recreates fashions from different eras and demonstrates how all the pieces go on, including undergarments, accessories and the things a woman might carry. That was enormously helpful when I was writing Scandal Sisters, which spans from the Gilded Age through the 1930s.

I like knowing what things cost, what people wore, what they listened to and what they worried about. Those details make the past feel inhabited rather than researched.

Did you base your characters on real-life historical aviators?

My left brain definitely based John Paul Riddle on the early aviator of that name. I had access to university archival materials, including his correspondence. I also interviewed family members and invited them to weigh in on the draft.
My right brain may have snuck in a little of my own father, another farm kid who bought a biplane as soon as he could afford one and loved flying for the rest of his life.

What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?

My understanding of the events surrounding Earnest Pletch, the midair murderer featured in Air-Minded, was turned upside down when I discovered that his uncle had been institutionalized with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. An extended family member also told me about allegations of predatory sexual behavior involving Earnest.

Those discoveries forced me to reconsider my understanding of the family dynamics and how I portrayed them.

Sometimes research doesn’t simply fill in the blanks. It changes the picture altogether.

It’s obvious from your LinkedIn articles that you’re deeply interested in aviation history. When did you first get the aviation history bug?

I’ve worked for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for almost nine years. Deep, dark confession: I’m not inherently interested in aviation. I’m wildly curious about people, especially what obsesses them.

I see aviation as a particularly revealing lens through which to examine American culture. It was a technology that transformed what was possible, often faster than the law or society could adapt. I think we’re seeing a similar race today with artificial intelligence, between what we can do and what we should do.

Are you a pilot as well as a novelist and historian?

I’m considerably closer to being a novelist and historian, both of amateur standing, than I will ever be to becoming a pilot.

My earliest aviation memories involve throwing up in the back of my father’s biplane. Also, my eyesight, depth perception and spatial skills are abysmal. The world is a safer place with me in the passenger seat.

What are you working on now?

My next book, Black Hangar, is a history of aviation told through true crime. It’s nonfiction, so I’m back in my comfort zone for a while.

I’ve had enormous fun collecting killers, skyjackers, con men, impostors and people who were eccentric, to say the least. I’ve deliberately avoided cases everyone already knows and introduce readers to characters they’ve probably never encountered.

Take Mabel Boll, for example, who cursed Amelia Earhart as “the other woman” when the pilot she had hired opted to fly Earhart across the Atlantic first.

I do love oddballs and overlooked figures, as a writer and a reader.

Kimberly Sheeter has been on organization charts with a variety of titles but has always been a writer. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing and has been a promotional or technical writer for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Lockheed Martin, Disney, Scholastic Book Fairs, AAA, and almost every corporation that has ever held a conference in Orlando or Las Vegas. She has earned 13 American Business Awards (Stevies) and has served as a judge for the program. Her books include Walt’s Apprentice: Keeping the Disney Dream Alive (an as-told-to memoir) and the novels No Gifts, Please (as Bridget Shanahan), Scandal Sisters and Air-Minded. Her forthcoming Black Hangar explores aviation’s darker corners through true tales of crime, fraud and spectacularly bad judgment.

***

When we think about quilting, we tend to think about hand-crafted patchwork coverlets and puffy down coats. We don’t think about armor. But in fact, quilted armor played an important role in European warfare from the time of the Crusades through the sixteenth century.

The most basic form of quilted armor, the jack, was simple enough for a soldier or his wife to make at home: a sleeved coat made of two outer layers of linen, canvas, or fustion that enclosed a layer of padding, with small pieces of metal stuffed in the padding for extra protection.* The jack’s up-market relative, the brigandine, was made by a professional armorer and combined the flexibility of the jack with the protection of plate. Small metal plates were riveted to a canvas foundation, overlapped like scales for ease of movement. The scaled canvas was then covered with a rich material and a lining.

Whether made by a pro or run up by loving hands at home, so-called “soft armor” was surprisingly effective against sword cuts and arrows, though it provided no protection against a thrown lance or a mace. Even with the advent of metal armor, foot soldiers continued to wear fabric armor as their primary defense and knights wore padded garments in conjunction with chain or plate as an additional defense.

The use of quilted armor finally declined with the rise of firearms and heavy artillery at the beginning of the seventeenth century, only to reappear in the twentieth century in the form of the bulletproof vest.

* Sir Thomas Wyatt, who led a Protestant rebellion in England in 1554, had gold pieces sewn into his jack instead of the usual metal or horn scales so that he would have the dual protection of armor and ready money if he had to flee the country.

Yet, against all odds, Agnes Young McAlpin managed to alert next-door neighbors to her plight, rallying their support to rise up against her abusers. After escaping with her children to a safe house, she sued for divorce in a weeklong trial that made national headlines.

It’s an amazing story.

I’m delighted to have  Marcia back here on the Margins to talk about the book and how she wrote it.*

Take it away, Marcia!

What brought you to the story of Agnes Young McAlpin?  Why do you think it’s important to tell this story today?

For research related to another of my nonfiction books, I needed to look at early 20^th-century Pennsylvania newspapers, and they were filled with coverage of Agnes Young McAlpin’s divorce trial. Much as I tried to put on blinders and get my work done, I kept getting distracted by the small photo of her and the caption identifying her as an “educated” Alaskan seeking divorce from a dentist in Butler, about an hour outside Pittsburgh. “News of Her First-Born’s Death Was Withheld by Butler Family,” declared a subheading, while another added, “Baby’s Grave Is Hidden.”

Obviously, this was quite a story. A glance at other papers published around the same date showed that it was getting widespread coverage. Moreover, the press seemed to empathize with this woman, whom they identified as an Alaska Native—she was Haida—but one sufficiently assimilated to meet their approval. The Butler Eagle said it had expected Agnes McAlpin to be an Indian, Eskimo, or other “low-bred person,” only to find she was a “refined and cultured lady,” whom Kenneth had met in Alaska during the madness of the Klondike gold rush.

Then there were the villainous relatives: the mother- and sister-in-law from hell, who welcomed Agnes by showing her to a stark, unheated attic room, giving her the silent treatment, and concealing her from visitors. They told close friends they felt disgraced by Kenneth’s marriage to a woman they accurately described as “nearly a full-blooded Indian.” Instead of taking Agnes’s side, the husband spent most of his time away from home, ostensibly looking for work, but seldom finding any and never writing to Agnes. She bore him two children, but he refused to be seen with her in public. When she discovered she was pregnant a third time, he conspired with his female relatives to try to abort her against her will, forcing her to flee to Alaska in fear for her life.

Agnes’s story encompasses themes of colonization, racism, and domestic abuse that are relevant today. But I was drawn to it largely because, as one reader of my book put it, “Agnes did stuff.” Ignoring the McAlpins’ objections, she returned to Alaska twice, sometimes without money to buy food on the arduous journey. In Butler, she refused to stay in the shadows. Never mind that the McAlpins did their best to confine her to the attic.  Running after her children, or intercepting visitors in her in-laws’ absence, Agnes managed to meet and charm the neighbors. Many were longtime friends of the McAlpins, but Agnes recruited them to her side. When she was ready to sue for her divorce, they offered her a safe house and free legal services, which made her freedom possible.

Writing about a historical figure like Agnes Young McAlpin requires living with her over a period of years.  What was it like to have McAlpin as your constant companion?

It’s interesting that you ask. One of her neighbors, a so-called society matron, testified that Agnes was “good company,” and I agree. I was especially fortunate to find dozens of letters written by her, her husband Kenneth, and her in-laws, beautifully preserved and organized in a family collection. This gave me a window into Agnes’s thoughts and feelings, particularly the letters in which she unburdened herself to a young brother-in-law, Victor McAlpin, whom she thought she could trust.

Kenneth’s letters to Agnes and Victor were also preserved, affording me a look at the spouses’ differing views of the same events, with Kenneth always perceiving himself as the victim.  These and other missives from the mother-in-law, the sister-in-law, and the “other woman” who eventually entered the picture helped me bring these key players to life. I’m indebted to the descendants of Kenneth’s oldest brother, Archie, who kept the letters and allowed me access to them.

What type of sources do you rely on in writing about a non-elite woman from the past?

I’ve already mentioned newspapers and correspondence. I also made liberal use of the usual genealogical records: censuses, birth and death certificates, etc. For that, and to find clippings from Butler newspapers, which exhaustively covered the divorce trial, I relied on the staff and volunteers of the Butler Area Public Library.

Like everyone else, I also use search engines, and in this case Google was enormously helpful. Agnes had a father-in-law, Volney McAlpin, who felt sympathy for her and may have protected her, had he not died shortly after she arrived in Pennsylvania. A historical Alaskan newspaper told me that Volney had preceded Kenneth to Alaska, taking several trips there during his lifetime. Googling his unusual name, I learned that Volney had assembled a formidable collection of Haida and Tlingit artifacts, some of which his descendants donated to the American Museum of Natural History in 1945. Just a few years ago, one of these items ended up in an exhibit at the Bard College Graduate Center here in New York.

As a former journalist, I don’t hesitate to reach out to living people who might know anything, however peripheral, about someone from the past. I emailed the Bard anthropology professor who’d put together the exhibit. He referred me to a former graduate student of his who’d done extensive research on the Volney McAlpin Alaskan Collection at the natural history museum. He also told me the exciting news about the cache of letters, including some about a “Native girl” who had married into the family.

Through that connection, I contacted the family guardians of the letters, who invited me to come to Indiana and read them. I learned that the descendants were appalled to learn of Agnes’s mistreatment (which a grandson of Kenneth, related to him through his second wife, discovered in a genealogical search) and were willing to share her story. Indeed, since I began my project, that grandson has reached out to his Indigenous relatives in Alaska, and they’ve stayed in touch.

Agnes Young McAlpin had both Haida and European ancestry. You describe her as a “code switcher”: she had a European-style convent education but was also deeply aware of her Haida traditions.  Were there special difficulties in writing about a woman with cultural roots so different from your own?

There were definitely special responsibilities. Taking my cue from art historian Emily L. Moore, who has written about the New Deal totem pole restoration projects that employed one of Agnes’s sons, I made sure to identify myself as non-Native in all communications with potential sources.

Early on, I presented my project to the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, asking their opinion on whether I should proceed with a project, then tentatively supported by a Butler pastor, to memorialize the death of Agnes’s firstborn son by erecting a plaque in the cemetery where his grave is unmarked. The council made clear that, for questions like that, I had to talk to the family. For all my projects, I try to locate descendants, not always successfully. For this book, I saw that it was not optional.

With the help of the then-mayor of Ketchikan, AK, who is also a journalist and poet, I found that at that time, 2022, one of Agnes’s grandsons was alive at 93, although seriously ill.  His family, the Alaskan McAlpins, generously invited me to visit them, and I did, twice. The time I spent with them was a delight, and the grandson, who has since died, understood the basic outlines of my project and welcomed me. He’d always known that his grandmother went to Pennsylvania and had to free herself of some sort of intolerable situation. The family was pleased that I could fill in the details. I returned with scans of family photos and useful information. Best of all was spending time with them.

In California, I met two grandchildren of Agnes’s maternal aunt, Cecilia Baronovich Balenti, who was a few years younger than her niece. The two had been close before Agnes married and moved to Pennsylvania, and they revived their friendship later. Cecilia’s grandchildren shared with me photographs, news clippings, and their grandmother’s unpublished writings about her childhood memories of visiting relatives in a traditional Haida village, an experience that Agnes shared with her. The grandchildren also led me to a book, Alaska Silver, written by a white man once smitten with Cecilia, in which he describes Cecilia multiple times and mentions Agnes without naming her. That book deepened my understanding of Cecilia and filled in blanks about a period of Agnes’s life when, while still married, she experimented with living independently.

I also relied heavily on an extensive oral interview about Agnes’s family that one of her brothers, Walter Young, recorded in 1971. By then, Agnes had long been dead, but her brother mentioned her several times in the interview, which focused on their parents, the houses and fishing camps where they spent their childhoods, and the way their father, a hereditary clan chief, melded Christian and Haida traditions. The person conducting this interview—a Canadian anthropologist who was then in grad school—is still active in the field and remembers Walter. Agnes’s other brothers left other descendants whom I’ve talked to or texted, but these first-hand recollections, guided by an anthropologist’s questions, gave me the confidence to write about Agnes’s childhood.

What was the most surprising thing you found doing historical research for The Attic Wife?

That  Americans of that eraweren’t as buttoned up as we think. From researching my previous book, The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill, I already knew that abortion, though strictly criminal, was then commonplace. However, I didn’t expect to find abortion playing an important part in this book as well. Her sister-in-law, a licensed physician, had participated in a criminal abortion, for which she evaded legal consequences. She also oversaw the forcible attempts to abort Agnes, which sent Agnes fleeing to Alaska.

On a lighter note, I was delighted to find Agnes complaining in a letter that her husband thought “I’d be contented to sit on my ass the rest of my days.” Well said, but the phrasing surprised me!

What is your favorite research tip for people who want to write about obscure historical women?

Well, I can’t give advice about medieval times, but for American women alive in the late 19^th or early 20th century, you’ll probably be using newspapers, vital records, and, if you’re lucky, letters and diaries. To organize those, I’ll share some nuts-and-bolts tips about naming files. Attach a date to every one of your files in the format YYYY MM DD. Then alphabetizing them in File Explorer or Finder will put them into chronological order. It’s amazing how often this reveals cause and effect: earlier events set later ones into motion.

I often use very long file names. In addition to the date, I might include the title of a newspaper (to compare different reports on the same events) and a fragment of a quote you might use, so you don’t go nuts later searching for it. For example, to answer the question about things that surprised me, I searched File Explorer for “on my ass,” and voila!

Marcia Biederman is the author of five nonfiction books about remarkable American women, as well as three mystery novels. A former journalist residing in Brooklyn, New York, she has written more than 100 pieces for the New York Times on subjects ranging from ice dancing to automobile wheel repair, and her guest essays have appeared in the New York Daily News and the Hartford Courant.

For more information about Marcia and her writing, check out her website: https://marciabiederman.com/

*You can read other interviews with Marcia here and here:

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I always learn something new when My Own True Love and I head out on a Road Trip Through History.  Our recent expedition to Colonial Michilimacinac was no exception.

• I learned that eighteenth century cooks dried pumpkins as well as apples* and used pig bladders to seal crocks of prickled vegetables.

• I had long known that when push came to shove (so to speak) the bayonet was a more useful weapon than the musket to which it was affixed.  I had not previously known that with repeated firing the sides of the bayonet became coated with a greasy toxin that meant soldiers stabbed with a bayonet were unlikely to survive even a flesh wound. **

• I was introduced to wall guns–a weapon that combined the blasting power of a cannon with the mobility of a musket.  Obviously a besieged fort’s best friend.

But the thing that struck me the most forcibly was the difference between how the British and the French built log cabins in the wilderness.

The Anglo-American log cabin style is what I picture when I think of log cabins:  horizontal logs fitted together with notches and chinked with mud.

photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress

It is the form that evolved into WPA lodges, resort cabins, and Lincoln Logs.***

The French Canadian style of construction, known as poteaux en terre, or posts in the ground, used vertical timbers set into trenches, then weather-proofed with chinking and plaster.

It’s a small difference, I know.  But it somehow seemed emblematic of the larger  cultural differences that exploded into violence along the borders of the British and French colonies–a subject I’ll be coming back to in later posts.

*I may have learned about dried pumpkin before and simply blocked it out. I know it’s un-American, but I do not like pumpkin and cannot understand wanting to preserve it for future use.

**I’m not sure why this came as a surprise. Until the commercial production of penicillin in WWII, infected wounds were a major cause of death in warfare.

***Invented by John Lloyd Wright, the son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Really. I was as surprised as you are.

I am pleased to have Mary Lisa here to answer some questions about Selling Opportunity, Mary Kay, and what she learned from writing about the woman and business.

Take it away, Mary Lisa!

What path lead you to the story of Mary Kay Ash and her creation of Mary Kay Cosmetics?  Why do you think it’s important to tell this story today?

For a biographer, Mary Kay Ash was the best of both worlds: undocumented American history and the rags-to-riches story of a public figure.

She belonged to a demographic that historians don’t really examine. Mary Kay was a dutiful daughter and diligent student who believed every bromide she ever heard about hard work making dreams come true, over-performed in any task she was assigned, and yet still found herself in a dead-end marriage with two babies by the age of eighteen. As the success of her company demonstrated, she proved to be far from the only woman desperate for a second chance and self-invention.

Writing that story let me dig into the culture of evangelical capitalism, how we are brought up to define the American Dream, traditional gender roles, women’s access to capital, and a lot of other issues that are especially topical today.

All that, plus a page-turning personal history that ended up with Mary Kay being the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange and the only woman in Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time.

A man with that level of influence on American culture would have been the subject of a biography long ago.

Most of my readers will recognize the name Mary Kay as a product—and probably have opinions about direct selling as a business model—but know little about Mary Kay as a person.  (Me included before I read your book.)  Are there particular challenges in writing about a figure who is best known as a brand?

Women regard beauty brands as a referendum on taste. This is not a brand you’ll see on the cover of Vogue, so the biggest challenge is getting them to pick up the book.

Once you get past that, most people assume this book will be an endorsement of her brand and/or current MLM business models. It’s quite the opposite. But you have to read the book to realize that.

Writing about a historical figure like Mary Kay Ash requires living with her over a period of years.  What was it like to have Mary Kay as your constant companion?

After seeing so much video, reading so much publicity, and talking to so many people who knew her, I found myself thinking, “Hmmm . . . I bet she would have done this next. . . . “  I started developing a “spidey sense” about what she left out of her life story. Intuitions led me to biographical details that nobody else had been able to find: her parents’ divorce and remarriage, her sketchy stepfather, her first husband’s work at a nightclub known as a drug and gambling den, her financial bailout for her third husband, etc.

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

That anybody could write anything about Mary Kay and get away with it. Hard to imagine that happening in coverage of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or any other male CEO.

During her lifetime, Mary Kay made that work to her advantage. She was an easy story: campy, quotable, cooperative. No fact-checking needed. Even if the story was inaccurate or insulting, she would still send the reporter a thank you note. So she got a lot of coverage, which she used to build her brand.

How does your previous career as a beauty journalist inform your response to Mary Kay, and Mary Kay Cosmetics?



Mention the name Mary Kay Ash to a beauty editor and she will make a moue of distaste, perhaps followed by a graceful shudder. I’m sure that was one of the things that attracted me to the subject.

I left the beauty beat in 1997. Well before that, I was known as the cranky one who asked inappropriate questions at press conferences. Ruth Whitney, Glamour’s editor-in-chief, had recruited me as Beauty Features Editor in the early 1990s, a time when the magazine was using its considerable clout to promote Susan Faludi’s Backlash and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. Whitney added me to the magazine’s coverlines meeting and let me focus on ingredients stories and female entrepreneurship; both years that I was on staff, Glamour was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

I was not so lucky with other editors at other titles. The perks of being a top beauty editor were phenomenal, so it was not a job that most women willingly surrendered. But, one fine day, I found myself in a limo going from the Chanel sample sale to an all-the-caviar-you-can-eat event at The Four Seasons—bored with being a beauty editor—and I realized it was time to stop. My first book, Color Stories, put the nail in that coffin.

We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past and little-known women.  What are the challenges of writing about a prominent woman from the twentieth century?



People suspend their willingness to put themselves in another place and time. As history comes closer to their own lifetime, solipsism takes over. I’ve had people ask why Mary Kay didn’t jump on the bandwagon for second wave feminism. They don’t consider that, in Texas, it was illegal for a woman to open a bank account, take a job, or write a check without her husband’s permission—a law didn’t change until 1968 and a culture that didn’t change until much later.

You also find yourself playing whack-a-mole with the internet. For example: Type Mary Kay’s name into a search engine and Biography.com will dish up an official-looking factoid explaining that she was “hired away” by World Gift in 1952—which was a full year before World Gift was founded and at least two years before Mary Kay ever considered working for them. (Sadly, that one made it into a NewYorker.com piece: proof of how pervasive the disinformation can be.)

Selling Opportunity is as much—or more—a history of direct selling as it is a biography.  Why did you decide to take this approach?

There was no way to write about Mary Kay without writing about the business that consumed her every waking hour.

I was already a couple of months into the project before I learned that I was going to have to figure out a lot of the business history for myself. The major work on the subject, sociologist Nicole Woolsey Biggart’s wonderful Charismatic Capitalism, published in 1989, included a high-level history of early direct sales companies. But, as I tracked down original documents of those early companies, I found an ad hoc, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, improvisatory industry and not the organized, intentional enterprises described in her book. I also saw found brilliant African-American businesswomen, like Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker, who had not been mentioned.

So I took a different approach. Borrowing from my start as a reporter, I did “history from the ground up” documentation in imitation of my heroes Studs Terkel and the late Mike Wallace, who headed the Gotham Center for New York City, where I was listed as an “expert resource” from 2003–2015.

I saw Mary Kay as a figure who—like Henry Ford or Dale Carnegie—synthesized cultural influences and then sold that synthesis back to her customers. She was a one-woman historical feedback loop.

Readers have alternately described Selling Opportunity as a hagiography or as a hatchet job, depending on how they feel about Mary Kay Ash.  Why is Mary Kay such a polarizing figure?

Class prejudice. Mary Kay was as a working class Southern girl who became a teenage mother. She loved Liberace. She drove pink Cadillacs. She wore big wigs and the kind of jewelry that fashion magazines do not find to be in good taste. People either embrace that as authenticity or run far and fast in the opposite direction.

Regional prejudice plays a part too. Mary Kay is identified with traditional gender roles, the motivational speaking industry, the Southern Baptist Convention, and conspicuous consumption. Those are not topics beloved by legacy media.

Then there’s politics. Donald Trump ran an MLM. Betsy DeVos, his former Secretary of Education, is married to the CEO of Amway. His former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was a spokesman for a nutritional MLM. Lumping Mary Kay, who had a massive stroke in 1996 and died in 2001, with current MLM culture gives any pundit a lot of clicks.

Selling Opportunity straddles the boundary between biography and business history. How did you balance those components in telling Mary Kay’s story?

Mary Kay was an ideal subject—a one-woman history of direct selling. Her life touched on everything I needed to tell that story.

What she didn’t experience directly, she experienced indirectly through her many marriages. For example: Husband Number Two started with the old tea wagon traditions inherited from the 19th century, then moved to Fuller Brush, the company that changed the image of the door to door salesman; thanks to Husband Number Four, she had a sister-in-law who founded an outrageously successful company that later provided the model for Mary Kay’s own recruiting and rewards; Husband Number Five had been involved in one of the era’s most notorious network marketing scams. And so on . . .

Your previous book, Color Stories, is an engaging look behind the scenes in America’s beauty industry. Was it a challenge to make the leap to a historical narrative?

A lot happened between that book and this one.

Color Stories came out in 2002, after I made the switch from lifestyle to business reporting, a beat that tends to integrate lots of historical narrative. I was working full-time, finishing a master’s degree in the history of material culture, and writing an academic reference, The Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear (Bloomsbury, 2008). That book included hundreds of biographies and brand histories, so that gave me plenty of practice.

After that, I was looking at PhD programs when I won a Leon Levy Fellowship for Biography. That was a life-changing experience: I had a full year to research, develop Mary Kay’s story, and discuss my work with distinguished practitioners. When the fellowship ended, I also benefited from a year at the Wertheim Study of the New York Public Library.

Unfortunately, I had to put reporting on hold for a dozen years because I became a self-supporting single mom—that “Can you be in Shanghai by Saturday?” schedule doesn’t work when you’re raising a child—but I was able to sneak in some academic writing and conference presentations. It’s no coincidence that this book finally came out the same year that my son started college.


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

I changed my writing style for this book. Selling Opportunity uses a lot of idioms to help readers understand characters who used those tropes.

I also committed to a non-academic writing style. True, this book has over a thousand end notes, but I didn’t want it to read that way. Going back to Terkel and Wallace again, I am a fan of accessible history—that’s how I became a fan of your blog.

After her start as a reporter and editor on daily newspapers, Mary Lisa Gavenas became an editor at Mirabella, Glamour, and InStyle magazines, was twice a columnist for ELLE, and freelanced for publications ranging from Salon to Fast Company. Writing for both the academic and popular press, she is the author of Color Stories: Behind the Scenes in America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry (Simon & Schuster) and The Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear (Bloomsbury, 2008). Her current book, Selling Opportunity, a NYT Editors’ Choice, grew out of her fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Follow her online at https://marylisagavenas.com/