But I’m on it now. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to circle the idea of America 250.[2] A couple of posts from the archives. A couple of reports on some interesting new projects that have crossed my  path.. A story or two. I’ll maybe even read one of the books from the To-Be-Read Shelves. [3]

Starting off, a post that first ran in 2015

Those of you who’ve been hanging out in the Margins for a while now know there are some types of history books that can be counted on to make me say “I want to read this”:

• Books that tell a story we think we know from a radically different perspective
• Books that deal with people outside the mainstream of history
• Books that tell a story I didn’t even know existed
• Books–oh, well, you get the idea.

In Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, historian Kathleen DuVal, author of The Native Ground, reminds us that the American Revolution was part of a larger global conflict involving France and Spain, and that Britain had 13 other colonies in North America and the Caribbean that were also affected by the war.

West Florida, which included much of what is now Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, had only recently become a British colony–part of the redistribution of imperial territories at the end of the Seven Years War– when the Continental Congress declared war on Britain. Located on the border between the British and Spanish empires, and a distant frontier for both, it was home to former French and Spanish citizens, British loyalists fleeing the disruptions of the revolution and well-organized Indian nations with their own agendas. The possibility of a Spanish invasion was real, and at least some of the colonists thought Spain was a better choice than Britain or France if push came to colonial shove.

DuVal considers how eight very different colonists–a second-generation African slave, a young Cajun with a deep-seated hatred of the British, leaders of the Creek and Chickasaw tribes and two British couples who chose different sides in the conflict–responded to the dangers and opportunities that the revolution brought to their doorsteps and the impact of those choices. While each of these characters stands in for a larger population, the complicated calculus of self-identity, self-interest and personal history that they use to make decisions about the world around them makes it clear that revolution and politics were always personal.

[1] A few new books on related subjects that are on my radar for your consideration:

Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution by Denise Kiernan  (Due out 6/23)

The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building by Brian Jay Jones

This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through American History by Beverly Gage

[2] It’s a slightly silly title, in my opinion. But Semiquincentennial does not roll off the tongue as easily as Bicentennial did.

[3] No promises

I just finished reading Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra. Here’s the short version—wow!

Here’s the slightly longer version: Beautiful prose.  Rich with insights.  Wonderful storytelling. Not necessarily in that order

I did not go into Chasing Beauty cold. Natalie and I became deadline buddies and fast friends in the months in which she finished Chasing Beauty and I finished The Dragon From Chicago. For many months, perhaps as much as a year, we spoke one or twice a week about our trials and our triumphs. We touched base via text and email more often than that.[1] I got to hear her thoughts on the craft of writing in general and aspects of Gardner’s life in particular. Moreover, I interviewed her twice for the Women’s History Month series here in the Margins, in 2021 and 2024. Those conversations gave me enormous respect for Natalie’s intelligence and wisdom,[2] as a writer and otherwise. But nothing could have prepared me just how good Chasing Beauty is.

The obvious approach would have been to simply write the story of the woman who created the Gardner museum. And Dykstra tells that story. But the museum is the crescendo to which she builds. In some ways, the book could just as readily be titled The Education of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Before Gardner could build the museum that now bears her name, she had to build what I think of as the museum in her head. With Dykstra as our guide, we watch Gardner work her way through grief and friendship. We travel with Gardner, both as she visits the larger world[3] and on her personal intellectual and aesthetic journeys through books and art, and music and art, and, philosophy (or perhaps more accurately, ideas) and art, and, well, art. We share what Dykstra describes as “Isabella’s on-going romance with objects” and her “greediness for experience.” We are swept along in the wake of a woman who was larger than life, and yet Dykstra also gives us moments in which to pause and enjoy a telling detail.

Over and over as I read I was stopped by sentences that were beautiful in its clarity, images that delighted me, or a telling piece of context that opened up Gardner’s story in time and space.

All the thumbs up!

[1] Did we grumble and bemoan our fates? Yes we did. Did we reminded each other how lucky we were to have these opportunities? Yes we did, though not as often as we grumbled.

[2] Not the same thing. in my opinion.

[3] Her time in Egypt and Japan caught my imagination in particular.

Fast-Talking Dames by Maria DiBattista is both a study of and homage to the fast-talking heroines of Hollywood comedies in the 1930s and 1940s. Like me, DiBattista discovered the women she writes about in her early teens, when she watched old movies after school and late at night. Like me, she saw them as a model to aspire to: classy, smart, smart-mouthed, witty (not quite the same thing as smart-mouthed, in my opinion), bold, and able to meet their male counterparts on equal terms, or even a bit ahead of them, in any given moment.

Some of the fun of Fast-Talking Dames, at least for this reader, is the skill with with DiBattista evokes the essence of movies I’ve watched many times, deepening my understanding of them with one-liner characterizations that any of her fast-talking dames would have been happy to deliver. For instance, discussing the rapid fire dialogue of His Girl Friday, arguably the fastest talking film in the genre, she describes Rosalind Russell as delivering her lines with “the assuredness of a large woman who knows she is taking up room and is enjoying the space allotted to her. “ Bingo![1]

DiBattista lays out common tropes on these comedies: madcap heiresses, spunky working girls[2] , blonde bombshells, and what she describes as “female Pygmalions” who educate and transform their male counterparts. She examines the careers of the queens of the genre—Katherine Hepburn,[3] Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers—as well as some of their lesser-known sisters.[4] All of which make for an engaging read for those of us who are fans of movies of this period

But DiBattista does not stop there. She also follows some fascinating scholarly paths that place her fast-talking dames in a larger context. She looks at them in the context of the long-standing and misogynistic discourse against mulier loquax (the talkative woman), which has its roots in classical Greece and has never gone completely away. She considers their place in the lineage of clever women in stage plays, ranging from Shakespeare through Noel Coward. She contrasts them to the the laconic heroes of Westerns produced in much the same period.[5] And she ends with the gradual dissapearance of the fast-talking dame as movies returned to more traditional values in the post-war era.

I came away from Fast-Talking Dames with a deeper understanding of and respect for a genre I have long loved, and a substantial list of movies I want to watch.  If you’re an old movie buff or a fan of smart (or smart-mouthed) broads, this one’s for you.

[1] If you’ll allow me one more: Discussing the “jubilant partnership” of Myrna Loy and William Powell, she states “there is nothing more optically exquisite in movie comedy than watching Myrna Loy, arching her brows, take in Powell’s droll manner with the bemused and appreciative air of a connoisseur.” Indeed.

[2] The spiritual ancestors of Mary Rogers in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, who was a more attainable model for many of us.

[3] In the course of looking at Katherine Hepburn, she convinced me to give Bringing Up Baby another try, if only because of the layers of meaning inherent in the title. Over the years I’ve shifted from finding the movie hysterically funny to finding it irritating. Possibly another viewing will shift it back.

[4] I wanted a word that was the female equivalent of brethren here, but didn’t find one that was quite right. Sorority and sisterhood have overtones that didn’t fit. And the actual equivalent, sistren, while popular in the late medieval period, fell out of use several centuries ago. Oh well. It was a pleasant little rabbit hole to spend sometime in.

[5] A contrast that at least some of her dames are well aware of. As one of them puts it, “I know that type—ungrammatical but strong.”

Most recently I stumbled across him on HathiTrust. I had given into the temptation to search for the name of the person I am researching—which is fun and easy—instead of squeezing out a few more sentences on a book proposal about her—which on that particular day was neither fun nor easy. There on the search list was book titled The Well-Knowns as seen by James Montgomery Flagg. Published in 1914, it is a collection of caricatures drawn by Flagg of famous people, including She Who Will Not Be Named, in some cases with a sharp-penned caption.[1]

Since I was in HathiTrust anyway, I did a quick search on Flagg. Whereas before I had gone “ho-hum” each time I looked him up, this time I was hooked.

The piece James Montgomery Flagg is best known for is the World War I recruiting poster in which a stern Uncle Sam looks out at the viewer and proclaims “I Want You for U.S. Army.” But that poster was simply one moment in a successful and varied career.

“Monty,”as he was called,  started early. His first published work appeared when he was twelve: a page of comical drawings in the popular children’s magazine St. Nicholas.[2] By his teens he was already working as regular freelance contributor for well known weekly magazines.

Flagg studied at the Art Students League[3] in New York for several years and then went on to study in London and Paris. Once back in the United States, his career as an illustrator took off.[4] He was facile and hard-working, producing an illustration a day in his studio on West 67th Street. His work appeared most often in the comic magazine Life, but he was also published in many other magazines, including Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Judge (another popular comic magazine), McClure’s, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post. He drew cartoons, including a series with a tramp character named Nervy Nat that ran in Judge magazine.[5] He illustrated serialized novels and short stories, most notably P. .G. Wodehouse’s “ Jeeves” stories, which appeared in Colliers. He produced magazine covers. He also illustrated popular books, including an early satirical novel by Edna Ferber, and created a series of posters with the combined title Girls You Know, featuring leading actresses of the time, as a promotion for short, silent films produced by Thomas Edison’s film company.[6]

In addition to illustrating the works of others, Flagg was also a writer:

• He created a series of illustrated books, with titles like Tomfoolery, Why They Married, and, my personal favorite, If: A Guide to Bad Manners. These books combined satirical rhymes on social issues with closely observed caricatures.
• After illustrating a number of popular romantic novels, he wrote a romance story of his own, The Adventures of Kitty Cobb, which told the story of a young woman making a life for herself in the big city. (Personally, I would say it is a gentle parody of the more serious, more romantic novels he illustrated.) It was serialized over twenty-five weeks in major newspapers across the United States before being collected into what would now be described as a graphic novel.[7] The serial was so popular that advertisers used her name to promote their products.[8] He followed Kitty Cobb’s success two years later with another illustrated serial titled A Girl You Know.
• His experiences with the Edison Studios led him to write several dozen silent movie scripts, including one for a movie in 1914 based on the Adventures of Kitty Cobb, in which Flagg played a cameo role as himself in the opening scene.  A  contemporary reviewer in Motion Picture News described him  as sitting “at his drawing table executing a sketch of the heroine at his usual mile a minute clip.”

When the United States entered World War I, Flagg was one of the illustrators who joined Charles Dana Gibson in his unofficial propaganda agency, the Division of Pictorial Publicity. Over the course of the war, Flagg created forty-six war posters for the United States government, the best known of which is the famous image of Uncle Same declaring “I Want You.” The image first appeared on the cover of the popular illustrated news magazine Leslie’s Weekly in 1916 over the caption “What Are You Doing for Preparedness?” It was inspired by an earlier poster by Alfred Leete featuring the British general Lord Kitchener in a similar pose.  Flagg based Uncle Sam on his own face in this and other posters, reportedly because he didn’t want to bother with finding a model.  If you look at them side by side, the resemblance is pretty obvious.

After Pearl Harbor, Flagg once again devoted his talents to the war effort, creating posters aimed at recruiting soldiers and war workers and selling war bonds. The government also resurrected the Uncle Sam poster:  why mess with a good thing?

When the war was over, Flagg, like other illustrators, found there was less demand for his work as magazines began to replace pen and ink drawings with color photographs. He pivoted to painting portraits until his eyes failed him shortly before his death at 83.

[1] I only recognized the names of about half of them, and even fewer of their faces. Such is the fleeting nature of fame.

[2] This occurred at least ten years before the magazine established the St. Nicholas League, a department that published the best work submitted by its young readers. E.B. White would later claim that “The fierce desire to write and paint that burns in our land today, the incredible amount of writing and painting that still goes on in the face of heavy odds, are directly traceable to St Nicholas.” A number of well known writers, including Bennet Cerf , William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E.B. White himself , were publsihed for the first time when they won a St. Nicholas League competition.

[3] If you think the Art Students League sounds familiar, that’s because it has shown up in several previous posts dealing with American illustrators. The school is hard to avoid if you are interested in 20th century American artists.

[4] He also received commissions for serious portraits, thanks to his wife, wealthy socialite Nellie McCormick, who happily pulled strings on his behalf until her untimely death in 1923, at the age of 56. She was eleven years older than Flagg and some of the sources snicker about the age and social differences between them. One claims “she appeared less wife than patron.” But Flagg seems to have been devastated by her death. This is what he had to say about her , and their relationship, in his autobiography: “Here was the beautiful woman who had turned down a number of rich suitors to marry a poor but promising artist who was madly in love with her…. Nellie was a St. Louis socialite and knew all the richest people in all the big cities; up to then a realm of society entirely beyond my knowledge.”

[5] The character was popular enough to appear in several Broadway revues, two live silent films, and an animated short in 1916.

[6] I only have my sources’ word for it that the women pictured were well-known actresses. I didn’t recognize any of them. See note one above.

[7] Available in HathiTrust if you want to take a peek.

[8] Whether they made arrangements with Flagg to use the Kitty Cobb brand is not clear.

Photo credit: John Halpern, Courtesy of Anne Frank House

My Own True Love and I recently spent a morning at an extraordinary exhibit about Anne Frank, at the Museum of Science and Industry[1], or as I suppose we should call it now, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. Created by the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, the exhibit does not focus solely on the often told and heartbreaking story of Anne’s life and death. It uses the Frank family’s experience as a lens for telling the broader story of the rise of the Nazis, the Holocaust, and what happened after the war to those who survived the death camps.

The exhibit is a brilliant example of the use of modern museum technology. It begins with the family’s privileged life in Germany before Anne’s birth and through her early childhood—all of which felt very new to me.[2] It does an excellent job of narrating the Nazi rise to power with a combination of a well-done audio guide,[3] film, photography, and artifacts— and then zooms in to consider the impact on the Frank family. Once the Franks are in Amsterdam, the exhibit once again gives us the larger context for their life in Amsterdam, before and after the arrival of the Nazis, alongside the specific experience of the Frank family. Again, much of this felt new to me.

The heart of the exhibit is a full-scale recreation of the Secret Annex in Amsterdam where the Frank family and four of their friends hid from the Nazis for two years. The recreation brought to life just how tight the space was—something that the flow of visitors emphasized. I don’t know if it was a deliberate design choice, but we were packed tightly enough at each stop through the annex that it triggered a bit of claustrophobia for me. The narrated account described the limitations on their lives and evoked their discomfort, fear, and monotony.

The annex recreation also serves as the narrative hinge for the exhibit. Once outside the annex, the exhibit follows family’s arrest, their movement through the camps, the deaths of the Frank family women, Otto Frank’s experiences after liberation, and the path to publishing Anne’s diary.

For me the most powerful moment came at a single panel after the report of Anne’s death—I’m not going to describe it because I don’t want to spoil the impact for any of you who make it to the exhibit.

The exhibit will be at the Museum of Science and Industry through early 2027.

[1] Wondering what Anne Frank has to do with Science and Industry?  The link is Jewish-American philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who was, among other things, the moving force behind the creation of the museum. (I will point out that he did not ask that it be named the Rosenwald museum.) The more I learn about Rosenwald, the more impressed I am.
[2] It’s been many years since I read The Dairy of a Young Girl, so it is not entirely clear to me what was new and what I had simply forgotten. However, I’m quite sure that I did not know that Otto Frank did a one year internship at Macy’s in New York, for instance.
[3] As some of you may know, I have historically been anti-audio guides. In this case, the auto-guide is absolutely essentially to the experience.

One of the major challenges historians face when writing about the lives of non-elite women of the past is the absence of sources. Sources written by men that describe their lives are rare. Those written by the women themselves are rarer yet. Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, by historian Amy Stanley, demonstrates how rich history can be when such sources are available.

The project began when Stanley became fascinated with a family archive that included dozens of letters written in early nineteenth century Japan by a rebellious woman named Tsuneno and the letters (and legal documents) created by her family in response. Together, these letters created a rare picture of the life an unconventional, non-elite woman, written in her own words.

Born in 1804 in a rural village, Tsuneno was the daughter of a Buddhist priest. She tried to settle into the traditional (and relatively privileged) life that her family expected of her, but it didn’t take. After three divorces and faced with another arranged marriage, she ran away to Edo (now Tokyo), then one of the largest cities of the world. Her life in Edo was always hard and often scandalous by the standards of her family and society. She made horrible decisions. She moved from tenement to tenement, took menial jobs that didn’t pay enough to support her, and married, divorced, and re-married a violent man from her home region. Her life can be summed up in a single line from one of her letters: “I ended up in so much trouble.”

Stanley places Tsuneno firmly in her historical context, creating a multi-layered picture of life in Japan in the decades before it was forcibly “opened” to the West by Commodore Perry’s fleet in 1854. Stranger in the Shogun’s City is a vivid and often lyrical portrait not only of Tsuneno, but of Edo, the city she loved.

In the course of reading around the edges of the book topic I’m exploring[1], I was surprised to come across a discussion of a book I found useful while writing my dissertation: Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture by literary scholar Bram Dijkstra. I found the way the author used Dijkstra’s work as a theoretical prop for her own arguments inappropriate, unconvincing, and actively annoying.[2] On the other hand, it has been at least 25 and probably closer to 40 years since I read Dijkstra, so I decided to take another look.[3]

Jean Delville. Idol of Perversity. 1891

The title, Idols of Perversity, comes from a graphite drawing by Belgian Symbolist painter and author Jean Delville (1867-1953) The painting has been described as embodying fin-de-siècle fascination with the femme fatale as a force of temptation, corruption, and hidden power; Dijkstra, in turn, is fascinated with that fascination.

Dijkstra describes his work as an “iconography of misogyny” —a term that seems more accurate than the “feminine evil” of the title. He explores a number of repeating themes as they appear in images drawn from the visual arts in the academic tradition of the late nineteenth century: sleeping women, dead women, women looking at themselves in mirrors, women with dangerous animals,[4] women as dangerous animals. Many of the works draw from classical mythology and medieval stories[5], though Dijkstra also looks at images of nineteenth century women through the same lens. All are erotic to some degree. (Not surprisingly, since Dijkstra links nineteenth-century discomfort with female sexuality and feminism through the book.) He enriches his arguments with related examples from poets, scientist, and social theorists of the period. His analysis of any given painting can feel far-fetched; the iterative effect is powerful.

In my memory, Idols of Perversity was lush, dense, and challenging. Certainly it was an intriguing model for my dissertation, in which I chased recurring themes from art and literature in the early nineteenth century. The book did not capture my imagination in quite the same way returning to it decades and thousands of books[6] later. I suspect that has as much to do with me as a reader as it does with the book itself.

[1] Nope. Still not prepared to put it out into the world.
[2] Yes, I have opinions. And your point?
[3] Procrastination comes in many shapes and sizes. There is a reason that my to-be-read piles never seem to get smaller.
[4] Lots of big snakes. Iconography is not always subtle.
[5] Mythological rapes and murders are easier for viewers to handle.
[6] Not an exaggeration.

In anticipation, I’m sharing a post from 2018 about an event that’s been on my mind lately.

On Memorial Day, My Own True Love and I make sure we attend a service in honor of the fallen. This year we were in Normandy on Memorial Day, enjoying a D-Day tour. In some ways, the entire tour was an extended Memorial Day experience, defined by General John Logan, who established the formal holiday in 1868,  as “cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foe.”

My Own True Love and I expected the Sunday before Memorial Day to be a gut-wrenching experience. The schedule included attending the official D-Day memorial service at the American Cemetery near Omaha Beach.* It soon became clear that the official service was too distant to have much impact. Instead our guide led us through the cemetery, telling us stories about fallen soldiers, love, loss, and heroism. The National World War II Museum, which organized the tour, had provided a flower arrangement and a large number of white roses. The members of the tour improvised a small service of our own. One member suggested that we leave the arrangement on the grave of an unknown soldier. Another suggested that the veterans in our group present the arrangement. It was a powerful moment. Tears were shed. (In fact, I am tearing up typing this after the fact.) As a ceremony, it had all the impact that the official celebration did not.(Leading me to suspect that intimacy is an essential ingredient in a Memorial Day service.) Afterwards, we scattered to place individual white roses on graves.**

As I walked back to the bus, I heard the sound of a lone bugle playing “Taps”–the end of the official celebration. I stopped to listen with a lump in my throat and an ache in my chest.

Remember the fallen.  Thank the living.  Pray for peace.

*Not the first time we’ve visited an official American cemetery abroad.  It is always a moving experience.   The Visitors’ Center at the cemetery in Normandy was closed due to the ceremony.  Rumor has it that the exhibits are excellent.  Quite frankly, I don’t think I could have handled any more.

**I would have liked to place mine on the grave of one of the four women buried in the cemetery. (I am pleased to say that one of the male members of the tour asked where they were buried before I could.) Unfortunately, they were all buried in a portion of the cemetery that was roped off to protect the ground due to recent weather conditions. While I am perfectly willing to kick open a door when there is a good reason, this didn’t seem to be one of these times.

For the most part, women of her time were not expected to go to college, but Lillian convinced her father to allow her to attend the University of California, even though he feared higher education would damage her marital prospects. She graduated in 1900 with a degree in English literature and a Phi Beta Kappa key. She was the first woman to be a University of California commencement speaker—the first of many firsts in her career. She completed a masters degree in English at Berkeley in 1902

In 1904, Lilian married a self-made construction engineer named Frank Gilbreth, who was ten years her senior and already known for his pioneering work in motion studies. They had twelve children,[2] which would be a good reason to be a stay-at-home mother today. Instead, Lillian worked with Frank as a full partner in his contracting firm.

In 1910, the Gilbreths closed the constrution company and opened their own consulting practice. Together they created time and motion studies using the new medium of film to analyze the best way for workers to perform task. They would film workers performing tasks, and then break them down into partial movements they called therbligs.[3] They produced more than 250,000 feet of silent black and white “micromotion” films from 1912 to 1924 as a means of making industrial processes and office tasks more efficient. They also used their home as a motion-study lab, using their children as guinea pigs. Their experiments included detailed analyses of motions to help find faster and more efficient ways to wash dishes, take baths, brush teeth, and perform chores like washing dishes.[4]

Their work took a new turn after Lillian went back to school at Brown University. She intended to get her PhD in English, but the man she wanted to work with refused to admit her to his classes, saying she would distract his male students[5]. Instead she enrolled in the psychology department. After she completed her PhD in applied psychology in 1915, she used what she had learned to suggest improvements in worker efficiency. Frank continued to focus on time and motion studies; Lilian thought about the workplace environment. She considered the impact of fatigue and motivation. She asked what workers need to be happier on the job. That question became the element that set the Gilbreth system of scientific management apart from their competitors.

When Frank died suddenly in 1924, the consulting business they had built together evaporated. Lillian found that their former clients were not willing to hire her. Lillian had always been a full partner in the business. She had co-authored the books and papers they wrote. She had revolutionized their approach to scientific management by thinking about how technology would affect the people who used it. And in 1921, she became the first woman inducted into the Society of Industrial Engineers. But the Gilbreths had never made her role obvious. Most of the clients had assumed Lillian was Frank’s assistant.

With eleven children[6] to support, and, as she pointed out, 44 years of college to pay for, Lillian created a solo career for herself by focusing on increasing workplace efficiency for jobs performed by women, using the same techniques she had developed with Frank. She worked for corporate clients—for example, she redesigned the cashier department at Macy’s department store, reducing the time new employees needed to become effective workers from four months to two days.

Working for General Electric, she also extended her ideas about workplace efficiency to the home. She conducted a large group focus test of some 4,000 women in order to learn about kitchen design and countertop heights—as best I can tell, she did not film women in the kitchen or time them with a stopwatch. She did, however,  run experiments in which her children made strawberry shortcake in traditional kitchens and in her proposed kitchen layouts.[7] Using that information she transformed the layout of the American kitchen. She invented things like the foot pedal trash can, refrigerator door shelves, and the electric mixer. She worked with manufacturers to redesign kitchen appliances for greater efficiency. Small changes, big impact.

And slowly, she earned the public reputation for engineering and efficiency that she should have had all along. Beginning in 1930, she began to do consulting work for the government on questions of civil defense and war production. She was the first woman engineering professor at Purdue—a position she held from 1935 to 1948. She taught at various times at Bryn Mawr, the Newark College of Engineering, the University of Wisconsin, MIT, and Rutgers. In 1965, she was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 1966, she received the Hoover Medal,[8] which is bestowed jointly by five engineering organizations for “great, unselfish, non-technical services by engineers to humanity” —the first, and until 2005 the only, woman so honored. She received 23 honorary doctorates and more than a dozen honorary memberships in professional societies.

She finally retired in 1968, at the age of 90.

[1] Bracken was the author of the I Hate to Cook Book, which was in its own way a feminist manifesto when it came out in 1960. Bracken, then a 42-year-old copywriter, received multiple rejections from male editors who told her women would not only not buy the book, they would be offended by the title. After a woman editor at Harcourt Brace took a chance on the book, three million women proved the male editors wrong. The book is funny, smart, and subversive.  But I digress.

[2]     One reason she and her husband had twelve children was they were proponents of eugenics. They believed white educated families should reproduce to keep America “pure”. Ick.

Lillian never overly repudiated her early belief in eugenics, but later in her career she pioneered designs to make it easier for people with physical disabilities to perform household tasks. When an interviewer asked her what she thought was her most important achievement, she answered promptly “My work for the handicapped—that is the one that has done the most good.

People are complicated

[3] Gilbreth spelled backwards. Creativity in one arena does not mean creativity in all arenas.

[4] Two of the children took their revenge for spending their a childhood as guinea pigs by writing a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in a with efficiency experts for parents, titled Cheaper by the Dozen. It was made into a movie with the same title starring Clifton West and Myrna Loy in 1950. New versions were released in 2003 and 2022, both of which have nothing to do with the original story other than the title and the trope of a family with twelve kids. I suspect you can guess which of the three I want to watch. But I digress, yet again.

[5] There is something pathetic about the idea that the mere presence of a woman would make it impossible for a room full of men to concentrate.

[6] The twelfth had died in childhood.

[7] I must admit, I wonder who taught the children to cook. Did they learn out of desperation?

[8] Herbert Hoover was the first to received the honor, in 1936.

In The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest To Crack An Ancient Code, Margalit Fox adds a new layer to the story of how the ancient script known as Linear B was deciphered.

In 1900, archaeologist Arthur Evans uncovered a cache of clay tablets in an unknown script on Crete. For fifty years, scholars across the world struggled to decipher Linear B without even knowing what language it encoded. In 1952, an amateur named Michael Ventris solved the puzzle with what is often presented as a single stroke of inspiration. In fact, Ventris’s inspiration was based on the work of another, largely forgotten, scholar– classicist Alice Kober. Working alone in her Brooklyn home, Kober created a new methodology for decoding the unknown script without the benefit of a bilingual text or a computer. She also identified the keys that allowed Ventris to make his imaginative leap.

In The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Fox returns Kober to her rightful place at the center of the story. She divides her story into three parts, focusing on the charismatic digger, Evans, the methodical detective, Kober, and the brilliant architect, Ventris in turn. She handles the mix of biography, archaeology, cryptology and linguistics with a sure touch. Technical discussions of how to decipher an unknown script written in an unknown language are as engaging as the lives of her protagonists.

In a satisfying conclusion, The Riddle of the Labyrinth ends where it begins, with the tablets themselves and what we have learned from them.

❦❦❦❦❦

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

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At least for now, it works! Many thanks to Denise Kiernan for including this tip in her recent newsletter.