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NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN The Modern Period A Biographical

Dictionary

Prepared under the auspices of Radclijfe College

NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN The Modem Period A Biographical

Dictionary

Edited by

Barbara Sicherman

Carol Hurd Green with

Ilene Kantrov

Harriette Walker

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

COPYRIGHT © 1 9 8 0 BY RADCLIFFE COLLEGE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9

8 7 6 5

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Main entry under title: Notable American women. 1. Women—United States—Biography. I. Sicherman, Barbara. II. Green, Carol Hurd. CT3260.N573 1983 920.72'0973 83-12948 ISBN 0-674-62732-6 ISBN 0-674-62733-4 (pbk.)

ADVISORY

Jill K. Conway Carl Degler Cynthia Fuchs Epstein Gerda Lerner William E. Leuchtenburg

BOARD

Ellen Moers (deceased) Anne Firor Scott Eileen Southern Matina S. Horner (ex officio) Patricia King (ex officio)

Funding for research and editing was provided in part by grants to Radcliffe College from the Research Materials Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

CONTENTS

PREFACE INTRODUCTION BIOGRAPHIES A - Z CLASSIFIED LIST OF

ix XV 1-759

BIOGRAPHIES

ILLUSTRATIONS following page 296

Blanche Ames Ames The Sophia Smith Collection (Women's History Archive), Smith College Hannah Arendt

Wide World Photos

Josephine Baker

Culver Pictures

Emily Greene Balch Wellesley College

Margaret Clapp Library,

Gertrude Berg The Sophia Smith Collection (Women's History Archive), Smith College Margaret Bourke-White Ada Louise Comstock brary, Radcliffe College Gerty Cori

UPI The Schlesinger Li-

Mary W. Dewson Radcliffe College

Judy Garland

The Schlesinger Li-

The Schlesinger Library,

Ethel Sturges Dummer brary, Radcliffe College

Blanche Knopf

Wide World Photos

Hattie McDaniel

UPI

Emma Guffey Miller Radcliffe College Frances Perkins

The Schlesinger Library,

Brown Brothers

Sylvia Plath The Sophia Smith Collection (Women's History Archive), Smith College Hortense Powdermaker Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker Wide World Photos

Carl F. Cori

Mabel Wheeler Daniels brary, Radcliffe College

Ima Hogg Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin

The Schlesinger Li-

Culver Pictures

Ethel Rosenberg

Brown Brothers

Ruth St. Denis Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, UCLA Rose Schneiderman

Brown Brothers

Vida Scudder Margaret Clapp Library, Wellesley College Dorothy Thompson

Brown Brothers

Lillian Gilbreth

Brown Brothers

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein

Alice Hamilton

UPI

Sister Madeleva Wolff Notre Dame, Indiana

Lorraine Hansberry Malvina Hoffman

UPI UPI

UPI

St. Mary's College,

Picture research by Pembroke Research Consultants.

Herbert/Picture

PREFACE

The publication of Notable American Women in 1971 marked a new era in the writing of women's history. The three-volume biographical dictionary, the first full-scale scholarly work of its kind, appeared at a time when the women's movement, and its academic offshoot, women's studies, had created an unparalleled interest in understanding women's past. Recounting the biographies of hundreds of women who had made a distinctive contribution to American life, the volumes provided an essential research base for the study of American women over the centuries. As a work of collective biography, Notable American Women demonstrated women's achievements not only in such enterprises as primary education, nursing, and home economics, often designated as women's work, but also in fields where women's role had been little appreciated, in medicine and religion, for example, and in such mainstream historical movements as abolitionism and progressivism. The stimulus that the work provided to scholarship is already apparent in the burgeoning monographic literature on women's history. Beyond that, Notable American Women has attracted a wide general readership, as the search for roots, role models, and strategies for the future has increasingly led to a study of women's past. In response to public and scholarly demand, Radcliffe College and the Harvard University Press decided to undertake a supplementary volume that would bring the story of American women's achievements further into the twentieth century. The original work, edited by Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, spanned the years from 1607 to 1950. The volumes included only women who died before January 1, 1951, and only five of the subjects were born after 1900. For this reason, they could say little about women's activities or about what had happened to the women's movement after ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920. To help bring the story of American women up to date, the National Endowment for the Humanities provided funding for research and editing of a new volume, to include subjects who died between January 1, 1951, and December 31, 1975. Work on Notable American Women: The Modern Period began in July 1976 following the appointment of the editors and an advisory board of ix

Preface eight leading scholars representing several disciplines. The first task was the identification of potential subjects for the new volume. The editors conducted as wide a search as time and resources allowed, beginning with the reading of all the obituaries of women that appeared in the New York Times between 1951 and 1975. The research staff also examined professional journals, yearbooks, directories of manuscript collections, and state compilations of notable women; the project benefited greatly from the work done by many state bicentennial commissions. Because women's achievements are often inadequately recorded in published sources, the editors solicited suggestions for subjects from hundreds of professional, labor, political, cultural, social, scientific, and religious organizations, and from individuals—historians, practitioners in the many fields covered in this volume, and persons interested in specialized branches of women's studies. Requests for suggestions also went to all state libraries and historical societies, as well as to those of many cities. Recognizing that racial and ethnic prejudice have worked against the career aspirations of minority women, the editors and the advisory board made a particular effort to consult representatives of Afro-American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic American organizations, as well as individuals knowledgeable about the history of these groups. The achievements of black women, particularly in education, religion, politics, and the arts, are well documented in this volume. Asian, Hispanic, and Native American women are less well represented, a consequence of the history of these minorities in American society and of women within these groups. Nevertheless, a glimpse of the story of Puerto Rican feminism appears in the lives of Julia de Burgos and Maria Cadilla de Martinez, the emergence of Chinese women into scholarly careers is reflected in the biography of Rose Hum Lee, and the significant accomplishments of Indian women are suggested in the accounts of Ella Deloria and Alice Lee Jemison. Some 4,000 names emerged from the original search. Many major figures were obvious choices from the outset, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller, and Mary McLeod Bethune. Beyond these, however, the editors were conscious of the risks and problems involved in choosing among women whose lives had only recently ended, and who represented fields as diverse as film, anthropology, and engineering. In consultation with the advisory board, they devised four basic criteria for selecting subjects: the individual's influence on her time or field; the importance and significance of her achievement; the pioneering or innovative quality of her work; and the relevance of her career for the history of women. The durability of a career was also taken into account in making final selections. Concepts such as innovation and influence are susceptible of many interpretations. The editors and the board determined that, within the limitations imposed by the scope of a single volume, it was important not only to suggest the wide variety of fields in which women worked but also to take account of the diverse ways in which women have defined themselves and x

Preface made an impact on their culture—to include both those who moved beyond traditional roles and those who worked within them. In practice the criteria favored individuals who had founded new fields or institutions, those who had made important discoveries, and those who had worked to advance opportunities for their sex. Individuals who had succeeded in breaking barriers or in overcoming difficult odds in fields hitherto difficult of access for women received particular consideration, although the editors exercised caution in accepting claims of notable firsts. In defining an American career, all agreed that a foreign-born woman might be included if she had done important work in the United States and had significant influence here. Though this decision excluded women who came to the United States late in life, it permitted the inclusion of the remarkable group of émigrés from Nazi Germany and Austria who made especially important contributions in the sciences and social sciences, among them Hannah Arendt, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and Tilly Edinger. Americanborn women who spent most of their lives abroad were also included if their work met the other criteria. In making the final selections, the editors relied on consultants in many fields. Fifty-three lists of prospective subjects (narrowed down on the basis of preliminary research to approximately 2,400 names ) went for evaluation to more than seven hundred experts in all parts of the country, among them historians, specialists in many branches of women's studies, and distinguished practitioners who had often known some of the women suggested for inclusion. Though many choices became obvious at this stage, further extensive research was often needed before final decisions could be made. In the sciences as well as in other specialized branches of knowledge, individual evaluations had to be secured before a particular geneticist or pathologist could be chosen for inclusion. Knowing that family responsibilities more often restricted the opportunities of women than of men, the editors decided to include some individuals who had exerted an important influence on their city or region but were not well known nationally. Some promising subjects had to be eliminated because insufficient material existed on which to base a scholarly article. Eventually 442 women were selected for inclusion. A wide range of individuals—historians in several fields, novelists and literary critics, journalists, and scientists—contributed to this volume. Each was asked to do the impossible: to present within a very limited space the life and personality of a woman of achievement, while also evaluating her career and placing it in historical context. Contributors were expected to base their articles on primary sources, but in some cases a subject's papers had not yet been collected or were unavailable for research. Several collections of manuscript materials discovered during the course of the project have since been deposited in archives. Each article presents the basic information about the woman's life: the crucial dates, her ancestry, parents, birth order, education, marital status, xi

Preface children, and cause of death. Because many of the essays are the first, or among the first, scholarly biographical appraisals of their subject, such information was often difficult to establish. Birth dates proved particularly elusive and some have remained in question. Information from death certificates could be used only with caution; furthermore, because laws in some states and municipalities, including New York City, forbid the publication of cause of death and, in some cases, even the distribution of death certificates, that information is missing from a number of articles. In making selections, and in giving directions to contributors, the editors sought to produce a volume that would reflect new directions in women's scholarship and would be accessible to general readers as well. Beyond recording the essentials of the life and death of the subject, contributors and editors worked to shape the entries to indicate the reasons why a woman chose a particular way of life, the major stages in the evolution of her career, and the relationship between her public and personal life. ( In order to avoid anachronistic usage in the accounts of public careers, titles such as chairman have been retained. ) As family, friends, teachers and other mentors are of considerable importance in understanding how and why women have sought and attained a measure of achievement, the articles note such influences whenever possible. They consider, too, the responsibilities individual women assumed for parents, siblings, husbands, and children, and the effects of such commitments on their careers. In articles as brief as these must be, such concerns can receive only limited consideration, and difficult decisions had to be made. The choice of emphasis—like the choice of subjects for the volume—reflects both the requirements of a reference work and the ideas about women's history current in the late 1970s.

This book represents the contributions of many people. Our particular thanks go to Edward T. James and Janet Wilson James, who have given generously of their time and experience throughout the project. W e also wish to acknowledge the support of Radcliffe College and its president, Matina Horner, and of the Harvard University Press, its director, Arthur J. Rosenthal, executive editor Aida D. Donald, and managing editor Catherine Bayliss. Elizabeth Suttell, senior editor at the Harvard University Press, worked closely with the project and was consistently helpful and encouraging. Members of the advisory board provided thoughtful and important guidance throughout, contributing their time and their rich store of knowledge about American history in general and about women in particular. Special mention should be made of the late Ellen Moers, whose understanding of literary women was of inestimable value, and whose interest in the project is reflected in several outstanding articles. W e are also grateful for the advice offered by the several hundred consultants who evaluated lists of potential subjects or made individual recomxii

Preface mendations, and by the committee of consultants : the late Elizabeth Bishop, Mary I. Bunting, Eleanor Flexner, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan M. Hartmann, Lillian Hellman, Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, Alice Kessler-Harris, Katharine Kuh, Mary McGrory, Dorothy Porter, Alden Whitman, and Joan Hoff Wilson. Dr. Thomas Zant guided us through the difficulties of understanding and translating the information on death certificates into accurate and comprehensible language. Jeannette Bailey Cheek, Ann J. Lane, and Elizabeth Pleck made helpful comments on the introduction. The project would not have been possible without the dedicated assistance of librarians and archivists in hundreds of institutions across the country. Their generous responses to our numerous requests for biographical information not only saved us from many errors but also enabled us to track down new facts about some subjects. Elizabeth Mason and the late Louis M. Starr of the Oral History Research Office of Columbia University searched their files for references to all subjects in this volume. We were also fortunate in having the resources of Harvard's Widener Library and of other libraries within the University to draw on for research and checking; the Harvard Theatre Collection and its assistant curator Martha Mahard deserve special mention. The publishers kindly granted permission to quote from The Poems of John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Copyright © 1977 by Southern Illinois University Press. Central to the success of this project were the holdings of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College, whose staff, including director Patricia King, Barbara Haber, and Eva Moseley, were of unfailing assistance. The Schlesinger Library is the repository for research materials on subjects who appear in the volume as well as on those who were considered but not included. Students at the library schools of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, Emory University, San José State University, Western Michigan University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Simmons College, Drexel University, Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison provided biobibliographies which were of great value to contributors. The individual students are acknowledged in the relevant articles; we wish here also to thank their teachers, who made the assignments for Notable American Women and worked to ensure their usefulness. The biobibliographies are on file in the Schlesinger Library. We have benefited as well from a staff who gave more than time to the project, becoming engaged with the idea behind it and working harder than anyone imagines to complete the book. Harriette Walker was both project coordinator, responsible for the smooth functioning of the business end of the project, and editor for theater, entertainment, and film. In the latter capacity, she conducted research, suggested subjects and contributors, and contributed to the successful completion of many articles. As senior staff xiii

Preface editor, Ilene Kantrov was responsible for the editing of a disproportionately large number of the articles; in addition, she shared in the direction of the work of research assistants and staff editors. Joan Feinberg and Stephen Hyslop served the project over a long period, first as research assistants and then as staff editors. Christopher Corkery and Maria Kawecki also worked in an editorial capacity. During the early stages Catherine Lord and Marilyn B. Weissman served as primary researchers. Many individuals assisted in tracking down information on subjects and verifying the details of each article. Those who worked for more than a few weeks include Florence Bartoshesky, Christopher Cornog, Leslie Gould, Karen Reed Hadalski, Sheryl Kujawa, Carol Lasser, Blanche Linden, Cynthia McLoughlin, Dee Ann Montgomery, Linda ole-MoiYoi, Patricia Palmieri, Judith Schwarz, Joëlle Stein, Susan Wendell, Kate Wittenstein, and Shoshana Zax. A number of undergraduates also helped with our varied research and office needs: Mary Lou Brewster, Paula Grant, Kim Jones, Megan Lesser, Emily Schneider, and Elise Wang. In the final stages of the project Susan Jane Pizzolato served as an admirable proofreader. Clare McGorrian worked with élan as researcher, office worker, and proofreader. We were fortunate also in having Valerie Abrahamsen and Linda Lord on our office staff, and everyone on the project benefited from the wit, wisdom, and skills of Grace Clark, who not only typed the vast majority of articles and masses of correspondence, but also called our attention to inaccuracies, infelicities, and boners. Without the assistance of all these people, often working under great pressure, Notable American Women: The Modern Period could not have been completed. B.S. C.H.G.

xiv

INTRODUCTION

Notable American Women: The Modern Period offers the biographies of 442 women, spanning the years from the late nineteenth through the midtwentieth centuries. No work of collective biography can define an era or a group. What such a work can do, and what this volume sets out to do, is to present lives that are important in themselves and suggestive as well of the larger social and cultural issues of their time. The women who appear in these pages exemplify a wide variety of career patterns, philosophical outlooks, and personal styles. As notable women, they are by definition atypical. They are a small and highly select group, and their inclusion in one volume is in part the result of the historical accident of having died within a twenty-five-year period. Large generalizations about American women's lives drawn solely from this volume would therefore be misleading. Some comments about the subjects and their achievements may nevertheless be helpful to readers. The birth years of the subjects range from 1857 (Marian Nevins MacDowell) to 1943 (Janis Joplin). More than three quarters were born in the nineteenth century. As a group they were exceptionally long-lived: fewer than 12 percent died before the age of sixty, while almost half lived to be eighty or more. Most of the subjects were of white Protestant origin, many with American roots reaching back to the colonial period. They came from all parts of the country: the largest number were born in the mid-Atlantic states, followed in order by the midwest, New England, the southeast, the Great Plains, the west, and the mountain states. More than one-tenth of the subjects were born abroad, principally in Russia, Poland, and the AustroHungarian Empire; many of these were Jewish. By and large the subjects came from comfortable backgrounds or from families that encouraged the education of daughters. At a time when few women attended college or had careers, the vast majority of subjects received some education beyond high school. Close to half attained bachelor's degrees; twelve institutions provided almost half of these degrees, with nearly onethird coming from the Seven Sister colleges, led by Bryn Mawr and Smith. More than a third of the subjects received graduate or professional degrees: Columbia University granted the most master's degrees; the University of xv

Introduction Chicago (followed by Columbia) the most doctorates, and Johns Hopkins Medical School the most medical degrees. Though most of the subjects began life with either material or cultural advantages, many financed their own educations in whole or in part; the pages of the volume are crowded with women who began their careers as teachers in primary and secondary schools. Among those from less advantaged backgrounds, the principal avenues of mobility were in theater, film, labor, and business. Demographically, the subjects of this volume stand apart from their contemporaries : they married less often, had fewer children, and divorced more frequently. As in the earlier volumes, a large proportion—almost 40 percent— remained single. Thirty percent of the ever-married women had no children who survived infancy; over 45 percent raised one or two children, including adopted, step, and foster children, while fewer than 6 percent raised more than four. Of the married subjects, over 40 percent were divorced, some more than once. More than 10 percent of the married subjects were widowed either within the first ten years of their married lives or while their children were young. These demographic findings suggest that there was more than a little truth to the conventional wisdom that it was difficult for women to have both careers and children, or at least full-time careers and several children. Lillian Gilbreth, who had twelve children—the largest number—and a distinguished career as an engineer and psychologist, was unique. But combining a profession with three children was also uncommon. Those who managed to do so usually had the assistance of servants or relatives. Although a large proportion of the married subjects maintained their involvement in the world outside the home while their children were young, many began their sustained public efforts only after their children were grown. Whether single, married, widowed, or divorced, many subjects formed close and long-lasting bonds with other women, continuing the tradition of mutual support that had characterized women's lives in an earlier era. The subjects of Notable American Women: The Modern Period came to public attention for their achievements in many fields. Some continuities with those in the earlier volumes are apparent in the careers of such long-lived settlement leaders and reformers as Vida Scudder and Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, in the alliance of working- and middle-class women in the Women's Trade Union League (Rose Schneiderman, Mary Dreier), in the continued efforts of black women to provide educational opportunities for members of their race (Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Anna Julia Cooper), and in the leadership of women in the progressive education movement (Flora Cooke, Lucy Sprague Mitchell). The businesswomen in this volume, as in the earlier ones, often catered to a women's market, specializing in the cosmetics and beauty industries (Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Annie Turnbo-Malone), women's apparel (Hattie Carnegie), and products for children (Gertrude Muller). As in the cases of Ida Rosenthal and Margaret Rudkin, publicity for their products often emphasized xvi

Introduction the personalities of the founders and the home origins of their enterprises. The concern with public issues that motivated earlier reformers is reflected here in the lives of the many women who were active in the peace, labor, and settlement movements, and in those who sought to improve the well-being of women and children, through voluntary organizations or through such federal agencies as the Women's and Children's Bureaus. Women's resourcefulness in shaping organizations for the public good is particularly apparent in the biographies of several women who worked first with the YWCA, among them Edith Terry Bremer and Louise Leonard McLaren. It is seen as well in the many courageous black and white civil rights reformers whose work provides a history of the ongoing struggle for civil rights through such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Mary White Ovington, Daisy Lampkin), the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (Jessie Daniel Ames), the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Fellowship of the Concerned (Dorothy Rogers Tilly), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (Rubye Doris Smith Robinson). In addition to their efforts on behalf of civil rights, manv women, among them Dorothy Thompson and Fannie Hurst, were active in efforts to bring European refugees from Nazi Germany to the United States. Women's efforts to change society took a variety of forms. A few, notably Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Ella Reeve Bloor, and Anna Louise Strong, made careers as radicals, protesting against many forms of injustice. The ideal of a world without war motivated social reformers like Emily Greene Balch who saw the forms of injustice as interconnected. Others concentrated on a particular issue. The story of women's leadership in the birth control movement appears here in the lives of reformers such as Margaret Sanger and Katharine Dexter McCormick as well as physicians Lena Levine and Sophia Kleegman. Women such as Mildred Edie Brady and Persia Campbell played an important part in the consumer movement, while the prophetic writings of Rachel Carson influenced the conservation movement. Like its predecessors, this volume records the lives of several well-known musicians, entertainers, and actresses. Included here are singers in a variety of modes, from opera through gospel and jazz to rock. The passing of vaudeville is reflected in the careers of performers such as Gracie Allen and Fanny Brice, who successfully adapted their talents to the new medium of radio, while the transition from silent to talking motion pictures is marked by the stories of actresses who survived the transition as well as those who did not. The Hollywood star system is vividly recalled in the careers of Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe, while the problems of minorities in American culture are echoed in the film careers of Hattie McDaniel and Anna May Wong. The difficulties women had in establishing themselves as composers and instrumentalists are reflected here in the lives of Ethel Leginska and of Hazel Harrison, whose career also illustrates the barriers encountered by minority artists. xvii

Introduction In the theater, women successfully struck out in new directions in the twentieth century, making their mark not only as actresses but increasingly in other capacities as well: in the development of regional theater (Margo Jones), in the evolution of lighting and stage design (Jean Rosenthal, Aline Bernstein), and in the creation of children's theater (Winifred Ward). Katharine Cornell led her own company; Theresa Helburn was a moving force behind the Theatre Guild; and Margaret Webster became known as a foremost interpreter of Shakespeare for American audiences. Hallie Flanagan's achievements as head of the Federal Theatre Project provide a vivid reminder of the importance of women in the unparalleled national experiment of the Works Progress Administration's federal arts projects. There is continuity with the earlier careers of women in the lives of the several artists and writers included here. The work of composer Ruth Crawford-Seeger, fiction writer Flannery O'Connor, poet Marianne Moore, choreographer Doris Humphrey, sculptor Eva Hesse, and others reflects as well the experimental nature of the arts in the twentieth century. Women in this period also continued to create opportunities for artists as they had in the past. Marian Nevins MacDowell gave her life to creating and sustaining the MacDowell Colony; Mary Curtis Bok Zimbalist founded and fostered the Curtis Institute of Music; Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge worked to create an audience for chamber music in the United States and provided places for its performance. Katherine Dreier and Marion Bauer were ardent advocates of contemporary painting and music, while Natalie Barney and Mabel Dodge Luhan brought artists together and encouraged and inspired their work. Newer careers for women in the twentieth century reflect not only women's changing historical situation—more direct access to political power, for example—but also the growing specialization of modern life. In comparison to the earlier volumes, the proportion of women who made their mark in voluntary endeavors—as missionaries and women's club leaders, for example— is smaller. Nor are there as many generalists, the gifted amateurs who before the establishment of fixed professional boundaries moved easily and successfully among a variety of endeavors. Specialization is especially apparent in the careers of the physicians and scientists, many of whom became renowned for achievements of a highly technical nature. Most of the physicians in the earlier volumes, clustered in the women's medical colleges or hospitals and often concentrating on the care of women and children, worked in an essentially separate women's medical sphere. Some physicians in this volume, including Bertha Van Hoosen, founder of the American Medical Women's Association, and Esther Pohl Lovejoy, head of the American Women's Hospitals Service, remained staunch advocates of separate medical organizations for women. But the newer trend, necessitated in any event by the closing of all but one of the women's medical colleges, was to try to break down barriers and to enter the mainstream of medicine. While they were often promoted at slower rates than their male colleagues, several physicians in this volume held appointments in highly xviii

Introduction specialized fields in major academic and research institutions: Florence Sabin at Johns Hopkins and the Rockefeller Institute, Alice Hamilton at Harvard, and an impressive number at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University (Hattie Alexander, Dorothy Andersen, Virginia Apgar, and Virginia Kneeland Frantz). Several also became the first woman to serve as president of a specialized professional society. Given the limited opportunities for women in medicine during the early twentieth century, the successes of such women must be viewed as truly extraordinary. Scientists, working in a milieu that was inhospitable to women, sometimes proved remarkably resourceful in creating niches, usually on the margins of their profession, that permitted them to lead productive professional lives. The internationally recognized work of biologists Ethel Browne Harvey and Libbie Hyman was in marked contrast to their professional status, as measured by such indicators as academic appointments and research grants. Margaret Morse Nice, who was self-trained and held no academic appointment, was a world-renowned ornithologist. And two women won Nobel prizes, Maria Goeppert Mayer—who because of nepotism laws was long unable to obtain suitable employment—in physics, and Gerty Cori in medicine and physiology. The trend toward professionalization is apparent in fields more traditional for women, including home economics, nursing, and social work. Leaders of the home economics profession such as Agnes Fay Morgan, Katharine Blunt, and Hazel Kyrk placed increasing emphasis on training in the sciences and in economics. The efforts of nurses to upgrade their profession, recorded in the earlier volumes in such figures as Isabel Hampton Robb and Adelaide Nutting, were extended by their contemporary Lavinia Dock, and by Annie Goodrich and Isabel Stewart. Women's leadership in the professionalization of social work is especially striking, as social workers with advanced education gradually replaced the self-trained women and men who had opened and run settlements and other social agencies in the late nineteenth century. Some, like Edith Abbott, tried to incorporate the reform values of the settlement movement into the curriculum. Others were active in developing new specialties, including casework, group work, medical social work, and psychiatric social work. Women often found their opportunities in developing fields or in new specializations within established ones. The volume records the lives of several women who made their mark in the radio and television industries (station manager Judith Waller, writers Gertrude Berg and Irna Phillips, and television commentator and journalist Aline Saarinen). Also included are several major photographers whose work sketches a history of changing styles and attitudes toward photography as an art form and whose success illustrates the opportunities for women in that emerging field. Among scientists, too, several pioneered in new specialties: Anna Wessels Williams and Alice Evans in bacteriology, Maud Slye and Madge Macklin in genetics, Alice Hamilton in industrial medicine, and Elda Anderson in health physics. Women also xix

Introduction attained prominence as leaders and innovators in the new specialty of psychoanalysis; Karen Horney and Clara Thompson were early critics of Freud's theories of female psychosexual development. In the social sciences there were two pioneer demographers, Irene Taeuber and Margaret Jarman Hagood. Mary Beard articulated a theoretical base for the study of women's history. Constance McLaughlin Green was an early practitioner of urban history, while Mary Clabaugh Wright was among the first serious scholars of modern Chinese history. In addition to their primary vocations, many subjects took a deep interest in national and international affairs. World War I drew philanthropists, nurses, and volunteer Red Cross workers to the European front, while others participated in war-related activities at home. An important minority of women, however, opposed the war, and subsequently established a separate peace movement, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. That story is told in part in the life of Jane Addams in an earlier volume, and of Emily Greene Balch in this one; both women won the Nobel Peace Prize. Their interest in international affairs took many American women to conferences in Europe and Latin America in search of ways in which they could promote peace. This international outlook is strikingly illustrated by the large numbers who attended the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. Virginia Gildersleeve was the only woman member of the official United States delegation to the conference, but many others attended as representatives of organizations or special interest groups. A number of subjects subsequently took part in the work of the United Nations, as members of commissions and in other capacities that reflected women's international perspective. Of these, Eleanor Roosevelt's achievement in shaping the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the most notable. A few women were able to make careers in international affairs, among them Vera Micheles Dean, Esther Caukin Brunauer, and Muna Lee. The story of women who worked for passage of the nineteenth amendment, including not only the older generation of suffragists, but also younger women like Sara Bard Field and Lucy Burns, Alice Paul's important associate, is extended here. (Paul herself died in 1977, too late for inclusion in this volume.) The suffrage movement, particularly its more dramatic manifestations during World War I, has captured the imagination of many, and has led some to conclude that the women's movement died after 1920. These pages provide material, however, for a study of women's continued involvement in politics after passage of the federal suffrage amendment. Their activism took several, sometimes conflicting, directions. Leaders of the League of Women Voters, the successor organization of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (Maud Wood Park, Belle Sherwin, and Marguerite Wells), worked not only to educate the new voters, but also to attain social welfare legislation on behalf of women and children. In this latter goal they were joined by officers of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women (Lena Madesin Phillips), as well as by women from xx

Introduction labor and reform backgrounds (Mary Anderson and Mary van Kleeck). Other women, often younger, put feminist issues first, and worked through the National Woman's party for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (Anita Pollitzer, Mabel Vernon). Still others emphasized women's direct participation in the political process, whether through a major party (Emma Guffey Miller, Emily Newell Blair), or in a separate women's campaign (Anne Martin). Women sought and attained a wide variety of political offices. Southerners Nellie Nugent Somerville and Minnie Fisher Cunningham initially gained political power through their leadership of the temperance and woman suffrage movements in their states. Lawyers Florence Allen, Genevieve Cline, and Mary Bartelme, who cultivated ties to the woman suffrage and women's club movements as well as to their political parties, rose to the judiciary, while Annette Abbott Adams and Mabel Willebrandt each served as assistant attorney general of the United States; in a later period Frieda Hennock was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission. Women also served in Congress, beginning with Jeannette Rankin, who was elected even before passage of the nineteenth amendment. Like Rankin, most held office briefly, but representatives Edith Nourse Rogers and Mary Norton, Republican and Democrat respectively, became powerful figures during their long congressional careers. Probably the most interesting political story that emerges from these pages is the importance of women in the New Deal. The unique position of Eleanor Roosevelt, a social reformer and political figure in her own right by the time her husband became president of the United States, was central to this development. Roosevelt's close working relationship with Mary Dewson, head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, paved the way for high-level appointments of women in the federal government. The most important of these was Frances Perkins, who had already worked closely with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in New York state. Her appointment as the first woman cabinet officer not only symbolized women's new standing in the Democratic party, but also recognized women's long-standing efforts to reform industrial society through social legislation. There were other appointments as well, including Ellen Sullivan Woodward as director of the Women's and Professional Division of the Works Progress Administration; the first two female diplomats (Ruth Bryan Owen Rohde and Florence Jaffray Harriman); Mary McLeod Bethune in the National Youth Administration; and numerous participants on National Recovery Administration boards. Eleanor Roosevelt's leadership was felt too in the formation of a Washington women's press corps that included May Craig and Bess Furman. During these years women also attained significant positions in the federal bureaucracy, notably Jane Hoey in the Bureau of Public Assistance of the Social Security Administration, and Mary Switzer, later head of the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation. It is possible to view women's participation in the New Deal as the culmination of the tradition of progressive social reform, xxi

Introduction inspired especially by Jane Addams and Florence Kelley. Perkins and Dewson, among others, were the direct heirs of the earlier reformers. The history revealed by this volume thins out after World War II. The consequences of the McCarthy era appear in the stories of Esther Caukin Brunauer and Ethel Rosenberg, while fleeting suggestions of the histories of the new civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s are seen in the truncated lives of Rubye Doris Smith Robinson and Ann London Scott. The full story of women's participation in these events, and others, must await the future, as must an understanding of the collective impact of the lives of the women recorded in this volume. BARBARA

SICHERMAN

CAROL H U R D

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GREEN

NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN

Subjects who appear either in Notable American Women, 16071950, or elsewhere in Notable American Women: The Modern Period are designated by small capitals.

A for full-time study at the University of Chicago in 1903. Upon receiving a Ph.D. degree with honors in economics in 1905, Abbott accepted a Women's Trade Union League secretaryship in Boston and a research assignment for the Carnegie Institution. The award of a Carnegie fellowship took her in 1906 to England, where she studied at the University of London's University College and London School of Economics and Political Science. This experience shaped the direction and focus of Abbott's career. Exposed at the London School of Economics to the influence of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, she adopted their convictions about the need to abolish demeaning poor laws and establish programs to eradicate poverty. In addition, off and on during her stay in London, Abbott lived and worked in an East End settlement, where she began to learn about the poor person behind the statistics.

ABBOTT, Edith, Sept. 26, 1 8 7 6 - J u l y 28, 1957. Social work educator, social reformer. Edith Abbott was born in Grand Island, a small town on the Nebraska prairie, the second of four children and the older of two daughters of Othman Ali and Elizabeth (Griffin) Abbott. Her mother's parents, with other members of their substantial and close-knit Quaker-abolitionist family, emigrated in the late 1830s from New York to Illinois. Elizabeth Abbott, a graduate of Rockford Seminary in Illinois, had been a highly regarded high school principal. Othman Abbott, whose English ancestors were among the earliest settlers of New England, grew up in Illinois, served in the Civil War, and then settled in Nebraska. Active throughout his life in the practice of law and politics, he became Nebraska's first lieutenant governor. Both Edith and her sister GRACE A B B O T T identified with their mother's concern for the oppressed, her interest in progressive ideas and social reform, her pacifist beliefs, and her commitment to equal rights for women. Othman Abbott demonstrated a vigor and love of new experiences, and from the sharing of his legal experiences his daughters learned reasoned and orderly thinking. To benefit from better educational opportunities than the small town schools offered, Edith Abbott was sent at age twelve to Brownell Hall, a girls' boarding school in Omaha. She graduated in 1893, but was unable to go to college when a severe Nebraska drought and the national financial panic brought heavy losses to the Abbott family. Instead, she began teaching high school in Grand Island.

Upon her return to the United States in the fall of 1907, Edith Abbott served for one year as instructor of economics at Wellesley College. But she felt a strong commitment to coeducation as well as to what she and her sister termed "our western heritage." She preferred "the vigorous activity of Chicago's Halstead Street," where Hull House was located, to "the cool aloofness of a New England college for women." Aware of these

preferences,

SOPHONISBA BRECKINRIDGE,

then director of social research at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, and J U L I A L A T H R O P of Hull House offered her the opportunity to serve as Breckinridge's assistant. Abbott accepted and by the fall of 1908 she had joined her sister at Hull House, where they both lived most of the time until 1920, becoming associated with the remarkable women and men whom J A N E ADDAMS attracted to her cause. A far-ranging and effective partnership between the Abbott sisters began when Edith Abbott returned to Chicago. Strongly committed to common values and goals, the two put their different personality traits and competencies to work in complementary ways. Edith Abbott was the scholar; Grace Abbott, especially

Feeling a heavy responsibility to succeed and to become independent, Abbott combined correspondence courses, summer sessions, and then full-time work at the University of Nebraska to obtain an A.B. degree in 1901. She taught in the Lincoln, Neb., public schools for two years and attended the 1902 summer session at the University of Chicago, where she attracted the attention of economists James L. Laughlin and Thorstein Veblen. Aided by a small fellowship in political economy, Edith Abbott left Nebraska

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The long friendship and professional collaboration of Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge, remarkable for its absence of personal competition, was so close that it is often difficult to differentiate their individual contributions. They jointly established the Social Service Review in 1927, which became a highly esteemed and influential professional journal. As part of their attempt to establish a curriculum broad in scope and scholarly in method, the two women also launched the distinguished University of Chicago Social Service Series of books and monographs, making use of case records and public documents in a novel and striking way. Among these books, which became classics in social welfare, were two of Abbott's own studies, Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records (1924) and Historical Aspects of the Immigration Problem: Select Documents (1926). As a leading scholar of immigration, she spoke out for legislation that would restrict the exploitation of the foreign born. Her expertise was recognized by her appointment as chairman of the Committee on Crime and the Foreign Born of the Wickersham National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (1929-31). Abbott also contributed to the formulation of public policy on the issue of public assistance to the poor. A longtime advocate of a network of professional public social services, she attacked the evils of patronage in existing public welfare programs, and spoke out in the 1920s against tax subsidies to private agencies, which she believed would delay the development of basic public services. Persuasively outspoken about the outworn concept of local responsibility for public assistance, Abbott called on the federal government to assume leadership in providing relief to individual citizens affected by the deepening economic crisis of the 1930s. At the same time she staunchly held that make-work programs would not solve the relief problems of the period and that comprehensive social insurance measures were required. Her views on these issues appeared from 1911 on in professional journals, government bulletins, and such publications as The New Republic and The Nation, as well as in her book Public Assistance (1941). Edith Abbott was a beautiful woman, tall and slender, with blonde hair, brown eyes, and fine features. As she grew older, always working at a tremendous pace, her face showed lines of fatigue and stress; more and more she dressed plainly and rather severely. She had a keen sense of humor, but her wit sometimes had a biting edge, and, particularly after the death of

during her tenure as chief of the United States Children's Bureau ( 1 9 2 1 - 3 4 ) , took the initiative in translating knowledge into action. While they lived at Hull House, they worked for woman suffrage, a ten-hour law to protect working women, the admission of women to trade unions, the rights of immigrants, the improvement of tenement housing, and child labor legislation. Attempting to provide an exact base of knowledge for such efforts, Edith Abbott produced studies of Women in Industry (1910) and The Real Jail Problem (1915), and, together with Breckinridge, The Delinquent Child and the Home (1912) and Truancy and NonAttendanee in the Chicago Schools (1917). These were among the more than one hundred books and articles Abbott wrote on a wide range of topics. Always in her research and writing she sought to establish the facts to the end that rational solutions could be found to the problems of society. Adding her own insightful introductions and interpretations to documentary evidence, she built a sound historical, legal, and philosophical basis for the resolution of policy issues. Her work earned her the title "passionate statistician" in the pages of The Nation. Edith Abbott's most significant contributions to social work education came after 1920, when, with the School of Civics and Philanthropy in serious financial straits, she and Breckinridge helped to arrange its transfer to the University of Chicago. Renamed the School of Social Service Administration, it became the first graduate school of social work within a university. Rejecting as too narrow the prevailing apprenticeship model of training social workers in philanthropic agencies, Abbott was convinced that social work education belonged under university auspices where students could be offered a broad intellectual grasp of social issues. She was committed to making human services more scientific and insisted that social work education should include access to advanced social science courses and research facilities and that faculty teaching and research should be subject to rigorous standards of university scholarship. In 1924 Edith Abbott became dean of the SCIIQOI of Social Service Administration. Together with Breckinridge, she formulated a curriculum that included knowledge from political science, economics, law, medicine, and studies of immigration, labor problems, and governmental processes. Sent to work in the community, students were expected to apply scientifically disciplined methods of social investigation to document needed changes in public policy. Always the focus was on social reform and public social service administration.

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Adams her sister in 1939, her manner became more brusque. Abbott made heavy and uncompromising demands upon students for academic achievement and commitment to her goals. Some feared her; few if any forgot her. To all she offered a model of integrity, intellectualism, and commitment to social justice. After giving up her post as dean in 1942, Edith Abbott continued to teach and to edit the Social Service Review until her retirement in 1953. She spent the rest of her life with her brother Arthur in the family home in Grand Island, becoming increasingly infirm until her death there of pneumonia at the age of eighty.

Annette Abbott Adams began her law career as the first woman to handle federal prosecutions; she completed her career as the first woman appellate judge in California. She was born in Prattville (Plumas County), Calif., and her legal and political career was rooted in and grew with that state. Her father, Hiram Brown Abbott of Ohio, was a forty-niner who with her mother, Annette Frances (Stubbs), a Maine schoolteacher, ran a country store; he also served as justice of the peace. Hiram Abbott's rigid ideas about sex roles, as applied to Annette and her younger brother, and the local community's rejection of her mother—the best educated person in the county—as a school board member led to her early determination to be independent and successful despite her sex. She was drawn toward a legal career after her father's death when, then in her teens, she read the California code to give her mother business and legal advice.

[The major source is the large collection of personal and professional papers of Edith and Grace Abbott in the Joseph Regenstein Library, Univ. of Chicago, which includes a draft of a proposed book about Grace Abbott by Edith Abbott. Family correspondence is held by a niece, Charlotte Abbott, in Grand Island. There are manuscript materials in The Survey Papers at the Archives of Social Welfare Hist., Univ. of Minn., and the Neb. State Hist. Soc. An annotated bibliography of Edith Abbott's publications appears in Rachel Marks, "The Published Writings of Edith Abbott: A Bibliography," Social Service Rev., March 1958, pp. 51-56. Abbott's significant publications include Nat. Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, Report on Crime and the Foreign Born (1931); Social Welfare and Professional Education (1931; 2d ed. 1942); Some American Pioneers in Social Welfare: Select Documents with Editorial Notes by Edith Abbott (1937); and in the Social Service Rev.: "Grace Abbott: A Sister's Memories," Sept. 1939, pp. 351-407; "Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Over the Years," Dec. 1948, pp. 417-47; "Grace Abbott and Hull House, 1908-21," Sept. 1950, pp. 374-94, and Dec. 1950, pp. 493-518. Women in Industry was reprinted in 1918, 1969, and 1970. The Social Service Rev. published three accounts and evaluations of her career: Helen Wright, "Three Against Time: Edith and Grace Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge," March 1954, pp. 4153; Elizabeth Wisner, "Edith Abbott's Contributions to Social Work Education," March 1958, pp. 1-10; and Stephen J. Diner, "Scholarship in the Quest for Social Welfare: A Fifty-Year History of the Social Service Review," March 1977, pp. 1-66. Other sources of biographical information include Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., C, 371, and Current Biog., 1941. Additional information was provided by Martha Eliot, Katharine Lenroot, Robert Hutchins, Frank Bane, Dorothy Bradbury, Elisabeth Shirley Enochs, Arlien Johnson, Phyllis Osborn, Mary Macdonald, and Lillian Ripple. Death certificate supplied by Neb. Dept. of Health.]

After attending local schools and graduating from the State Normal School at Chico in 1897, Adams's first job was teaching in a country school. In 1901 she entered the University of California at Berkeley. She received a bachelor of letters degree in 1904, and returned again to teaching, taking a high school post in Alturas, Modoc County, in 1905. She broke tradition on marrying Martin H. Adams on Aug. 13, 1906, by continuing to teach; she also served as principal from 1907 to 1910. In that year, with the encouragement of John E. Raker, the county trial judge, Annette Adams entered Boalt Hall, the school of jurisprudence at Berkeley, and worked her way to the J.D. in 1912, the only woman in the graduating class. Although the school's dean recommended to Western Pacific Railway that it hire her as house counsel, the railway was not ready to employ a woman and she opened an office in Plumas County, where Judge Raker, by then a Democratic congressman, persuaded her to organize women for Woodrow Wilson's presidential campaign in the summer of 1912. Adams moved to San Francisco, leaving her husband behind, and by 1914 apparently allowed it to be assumed that she was a widow. Martin Adams lived in Susanville, Calif., until his death in 1947; the couple evidently did not divorce. Becoming president of the Women's State Democratic Club Adams worked throughout the Wilson campaign, promoting him as a supporter of women's rights. In 1913 she traveled to Washington to celebrate his victory and apply for a patronage appointment. On her return to San Francisco she started a practice with Marguerite Ogden, the daughter of an Alameda judge. The

LELA B. COSTIN

ADAMS, Annette Abbott, March 12, 1877-Oct. 26, 1956. Lawyer, judge.

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Adams practiced alone but handled San Francisco affairs for Jesse W . Carter, then a Redding attorney. He arranged a regular income for her from the California dental board and between 1927 and 1935 paid her to prepare and argue cases for his firm, exploiting the considerable legal talents which she could not market directly. During this time she won some significant water and public utility cases in the state courts as well as the notorious "Painless Parker" case ( 1 9 3 2 ) . She received $ 2 5 0 for taking the side of the professional board against Parker's inexpensive, business-sponsored dental services for the public.

firm took pro bono and criminal cases but its specialty was probate. Annette Adams's reward for her political work was the post of assistant United States attorney for the northern district of California. She received it not as a symbol of the Wilson administration's support for women's rights, however, but as the fruit of her heavy pressure through federal officials, Democratic party leaders, women's clubs, and her friends, Congressman Raker and the new United States attorney for northern California, John Preston. Especially resistant to her appointment was Attorney General James C. McReynolds, and it was not until after President Wilson named him to the Supreme Court that she was sworn in, on Oct. 13, 1914, as the first woman federal prosecutor. As assistant attorney she won important cases against the German consul in San Francisco and against a group of Hindu revolutionaries, both on grounds of conspiring to violate the neutrality law. In 1918 Wilson named her special United States attorney in San Francisco. She vigorously prosecuted radicals for sedition and after the war went after food hoarders and prohibition violators.

Annette Adams continued to participate in state and national Democratic politics after the 1920 Democratic defeat. Her aggressive campaign for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1923 was unsuccessful; she lost labor support because of her prohibition prosecutions and she blamed the passivity of women voters for her defeat. Working to involve women in the Democratic party organization, she won a commitment for half of the California delegate-at-large seats for the 1924 national convention to go to women. In 1932 she campaigned for Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee relied on her organizational skills for the development of clubs in northern California. As a political reward in 1933 Adams was invited to replace the Republican woman incumbent, Annabel Matthews, on the Federal Board of Tax Appeals. But she preferred to remain in California, and the appointment went to another California lawyer, Marion Harron. Early in 1935 Adams decided to campaign for the vacancy on the federal bench in the Northern District of California. She sought and gained the support of local Democratic leaders, legal colleagues, and women's groups, but the judgeship went to a male candidate. In 1935 President Roosevelt offered Adams a consolation prize, the post of assistant special counsel under John Preston to prosecute two important cases, one to secure restoration to the federal government of two sections in Elk Hills Naval Oil Reserve No. 1 and the other to recover compensation for oil and gas extracted by Standard Oil and other companies between 1 9 1 8 and 1932. She moved to Los Angeles, a city she did not like, and through brilliant and painstaking work at trial and appeal won both the land and a judgment of more than seven million dollars against Standard Oil. After another brief assignment for the Justice Department she returned home in 1939 to San Francisco. In 1942, Democratic Gov. Culbert Olson appointed Adams presiding justice of the three-

Knowing of Adams's prestige in California, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1920, invited her to become an assistant attorney general in Washington, D.C. She was sworn in late in June 1920, the first woman to hold the rank; her first duties were at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco garnering women's backing for Palmer. There she began her own bid for the vice presidential spot and received one token vote for president on the thirty-seventh ballot. In Washington beginning in August 1920 her maior assignment was to supervise the prosecution of violators of the Volstead Act, although she was not herself a prohibitionist. Also responsible for federal prisons, she had to ensure the efficient utilization of prison labor and supervise policy on the treatment of prisoners. She had a narrow view of prisoners' rights to health care and to privacy of mail, and followed the Palmer policy of valuing law enforcement more than freedom of speech or press. In August 1921 President Warren G. Harding replaced Adams with Republican M A B E L W I L L E BRANDT. Adams returned to private practice in San Francisco with her friend John Preston. Out of office, she criticized the country for being "hysterical about booze" and the government for the laxity of enforcement of prohibition laws. She also urged women to "bore from within" to gain their rightful place in government. When Preston went on the California Supreme Court,

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judge intermediate appellate court in Sacramento; in November 1942 she won election for a twelve-year term. In 1950 she was assigned for a single case to the California Supreme Court, the first woman to sit on the Court. Adams suffered from arteriosclerosis after 1947 and retired on Nov. 20, 1952, when her ten years of service entitled her to a pension. She died in Sacramento of myocarditis in October 1956. During her long political and professional career Annette Adams joined and led professional societies—including the prestigious American Law Institute—and many women's groups. Tall, slender, and attractive, she dressed in conservative but expensive style for work, but also enjoyed the informality of golf, horse-raising, and trips to her beloved California mountains. Early in her legal career she went to a voice instructor to lower her voice from soprano to baritone, to suit her advocate's role. From the 1920s into the 1950s, she shared her home with her brother. Annette Adams gained her power and public positions through a series of male sponsors, each of whom recognized her ability and her contribution to their careers. Although she once claimed that in common with other women lawyers she had a tendency to an inferiority complex, Annette Adams accurately gauged her own abilities and achievements. She paid her professional and political dues in full, and knew that only sex discrimination prevented her from reaching the highest legal positions in government and private firms.

tional information supplied by Gladys Morgan, her court reporter.] BEVERLY BLAIR COOK

ADAMS, Maude, Nov. 11, 1872-July 17, 1953. Actress. Maude Adams, one of the most popular actresses of her generation, was born Maude Ewing Adams Kiskadden in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was the youngest and only surviving child of James Henry Kiskadden, a businessman of Scottish descent, and Asenath Ann (Adams) Kiskadden, an actress; their twin sons had died shortly after birth. Annie Adams, as her mother was known professionally, was a Mormon whose parents had joined Brigham Young on his way to Utah in 1847. She became a member of Young's theatrical stock company and later, until her retirement in 1897, appeared on stage with her daughter. The Kiskaddens moved to Virginia City in 1874, and a year later moved to San Francisco. There, billed as "La Petite Maude," Maude Adams became a salaried juvenile on Oct. 1 7 , 1 8 7 7 , in a production of Fritz, a popular melodrama. She continued to play similar roles —frequently listed as "Little Maude"—in stock companies, until, at ten, she grew too tall for children's parts. While her parents remained in San Francisco, Maude was sent to school at the Collegiate Institute in Salt Lake City, where she lived with her grandmother. After her father's sudden death on Sept. 22, 1883, having already resolved to become a great actress, she left school to join the traveling stock company to which her mother then belonged. Maude Adams experienced a long and difficult theatrical apprenticeship before reaching New York in August 1888, where she first appeared as the maid in The Paymaster. The same year she played in E . H. Sothern's company and two years later in Charles Frohman's stock company, most notably as Nell in an 1891 production of Lost Paradise. In October 1892 Frohman, correctly appraising her talent, made Maude Adams leading lady to John Drew. Then, as later, she took infinite pains in studying her parts. After her initial success in The Masked Ball as Suzanne Blondet, she appeared with Drew for four seasons in a succession of light comedies. They last appeared together in Rosemary. Frohman had been urging Scottish playwright James Barrie to dramatize his novel The Little Minister, but the author was stymied. Attending a performance of Rosemary in 1896, Barrie saw Adams and hurried to the producer, exclaiming, "Behold my Babbie!" A year later, Adams, now head of her own company, made a dazzling sue-

[There are letters and other material relevant to Adams's career in the Jesse W. Carter, William Denman, and James Phelan collections, all in the Bancroft Library, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley. Information on Adams's federal work is in the records of the Dept. of Justice, Criminal Div., Nat. Archives, Washington, D.C., and Suitland, Md. Important opinions written by Justice Adams include San Diego Electric Railway Company v. State Board of Equalization, 200 P 2d 573 (1948) and People v. Gallow, 235 P 2d 660 (1951). The "Painless Parker" case appears as Parker v. Calif. Board of Dental Examiners, 14 P 2d 67 (1932). Biographical material appears in Arthur Dunn, "A Portia in the Federal Court," Sunset Mag., Feb. 1915; "New Post for Brilliant Annette Adams," Democratic Digest, March 1936; June Hogan, "Annette Abbott Adams, Presiding Justice," The Trident, Oct. 1950; and Joan M. Jensen, "Annette Abbott Adams, Politician," Pacific Hist. Rev., May 1966. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 27, 1956. The death certificate for Martin H. Adams gives his occupations as bookkeeper, clerk, and cook and lists him as the husband of Aneta A. Adams; her death certificate shows her as widowed. Both certificates were provided by the Calif. Dept. of Health. Addi-

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Adams

(Robbins, Maude Adams, pp. 2 0 3 - 4 ) . In 1921, after receiving an honorary A.M. from Union College, Adams moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and went to work with General Electric. There she conducted lighting experiments, displaying a competence which astonished the experts with whom she collaborated. After two years she developed an incandescent bulb widely used in color film, but failed to secure the patent. Advised to sue, Adams refused, not wishing such notoriety. In the mid-1920s, at the request of the editors of Ladies' Home Journal, Maude Adams wrote an account of her life. Written in the third person, "The One I Knew Least of All" appeared in seven installments between March 1926 and May 1927. She turned next to teaching, accepting in 1937 an invitation to become a professor of drama at Stephens College in Columbia, Mo. There Maude Adams gave the same devotion to her teaching that she had given to her acting. She directed plays as diverse as Everyman and Chantecler, and compiled an unpublished textbook, "The First Steps in Speaking Verse," which she used to teach choral reading. Her teaching became intermittent after 1946, and four years later she retired. In the face of immense popularity Maude Adams sought seclusion, and having experienced it during the summer of 1901 in a convent in France, she found a like refuge at the Cenacle Convent in New York City, where she often withdrew in strict secrecy from 1915 onward. In 1922 she gave to the Cenacle her large estate at Ronkonkoma, Long Island; she donated a second estate, at Onteora in the Catskills, in 1949. She had purchased both estates in 1900 and continued to divide her time between them until her death from a heart attack in 1953 in Tannersville, N.Y. As she had requested, she was buried in the private cemetery of the Cenacle at Ronkonkoma.

cess as Babbie; thus began a relationship between actress and playwright that continued until Barrie's death in 1937. Other glorious roles, all written by Barrie, followed: Quality Street (1901), Peter Pan (1905), What Every Woman Knows ( 1 9 0 8 ) , The Legend of Leonora (1914), and A Kiss for Cinderella ( 1 9 1 6 ) . Adams once said that whenever she acted, she was aware of one unseen spectator—Barrie. Maude Adams's affinity for James Barrie's art was based on a mutual gift of humor and pathos —and on a perception of fantasy as a vehicle of spiritual truth. "So much of Barrie's life is second nature to me that I have to remind myself that other people do not know it so well," she wrote her biographer. The affinity was never so obvious as in Peter Pan. In the summer of 1905, Adams spent a month in the Catskills preparing for the monumental role. She designed a costume different from the one used in the London production; it quickly became vogue and the round collar and peaked hat were copied by young and old. As the child who would not grow up, Maude Adams captivated audiences with her demure charm and grace, and with her voice, with its blend of laughter and tears. Peter Pan was the pinnacle of her career; she performed the role more than 1,500 times. Adams also appeared in the works of other playwrights, most notably in Rostand's L'AigIon (1900) and Chantecler ( 1 9 1 1 ) - a t which, during the opening performance, she received twenty-two curtain calls. Not immune to failure, she was miscast in The Squire of Dames (1896), and was not up to the breadth of range needed for tragedy. Adams herself admitted that she "was very bad as Juliet" in an 1899 production of Romeo and Juliet, but greatly valued her one appearance in Schiller's Joan of Arc, performed in the Harvard University stadium in June 1909. Peter Pan and Chantecler remained, however, her most unforgettable achievements. In November 1918, while on tour in A Kiss for Cinderella, she fell dangerously ill with influenza. Only after thirteen years did she act again, playing Portia to Otis Skinner's Shylock in a national tour of The Merchant of Venice. Early in 1934, Adams participated in a radio series of six plays. Then, playing Maria in Twelfth Night, she toured summer theaters, making her final stage appearance on September 8 at the Dennis Playhouse on Cape Cod. After this her only contact with the public was a cross-country lecture tour in January 1939. At forty-nine, Maude Adams began another life in the theater, first as a lighting designer. "As all my life had been in the theater, it was natural to turn to something akin, not too remote from my former profession," she explained

[The Maude Adams Coll. in the Library of Congress includes annotated typescripts and copies of her writings, among which are unpublished textbooks, "The First Steps in Speaking Verse"; "The Spoken Word"; and "A Pamphlet on English Speech and English Verse." Both the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library, and the Harvard Theatre Coll. have extensive clipping files. A biography by Acton Davies, Maude Adams ( 1 9 0 1 ) , depends in part on accounts by Annie Adams and David Belasco. Other biographies are Ada Patterson, Maude Adams: A Biography ( 1 9 0 7 ) , and Phyllis Robbins, Maude Adams: An Intimate Portrait ( 1 9 5 6 ) , and The Young Maude Adams ( 1 9 5 9 ) . See also Isaac F. Marcosson, Charles Frohman, Manager and Man ( 1 9 1 6 ) ; John Drew, My Years on the Stage ( 1 9 2 2 ) , a valuable study by her associate; Cyril Clemens, "Theatreana: Some Recollections of

6

Adler

Adler Maude Adams," Hobbies, Nov. 1953; H. I. Brock, "Her Light Still Glows in the Theatre," N.Y. Times Mag., Nov. 8, 1942; and Louise Dudley, "Notes on the Dramatic Theory of Maude Adams," Theatre Arts, Aug. 1954, an article read and approved by Adams. George D. Pyper, The Romance of an Old Playhouse (1928) provides background on theater in Salt Lake City. A portrait of Adams by Sigismond de Ivanowski (discussed in Century Mag., Dec. 1906) is in the Pioneer Memorial Theatre, Univ. of Utah. Obituaries appeared in the Salt Lake City Deseret News and Telegram and the N.Y. Times, both July 18, 1953; death record from the Register of Deaths, Tannersville, N.Y. Further information was provided by Adams's colleague at Stephens College, Zay Rusk Sullens, and by college officials; by Judith Kalin; and by the Religious of the Cenacle.]

move out in the spring of 1920. As she had little money, she accepted the assistance of an acquaintance, a gangster and bootlegger, who offered to pay her rent if he and his girlfriend could use her apartment as a meeting place. Adler began procuring for him and his friends, and her informal activities rapidly developed into a thriving business. When she had saved enough to finance a legitimate business Adler established a lingerie shop, but the shop failed after a year. Discouraged and penniless, in 1924 she went back to running a house. "In the world of the Twenties," she wrote in her autobiography, "the only unforgivable sin was to be poor"; adopting the credo that whatever is economically right is morally right, she determined "to be the best goddam madam in America."

COLUMBA HART, O.S.B.

A D L E R , Polly, April 16, 1 9 0 0 ? - J u n e 9, 1962. Madam.

Adler began a well-organized publicity campaign to make " 'going to Polly's' a euphemism for the world's most popular indoor sport." Short (four feet eleven), plump, dark-haired, and flamboyantly dressed, she became a familiar figure at New York's best-known nightclubs, spending freely, attracting attention to her beautiful girls, and providing material for newspaper columnists. Her shrewd business sense resulted in a skyrocket rise to popularity, and her liberal bribes to law enforcement officials kept her establishment open.

Polly Adler, manager of a prominent New York bordello, was born Pearl Adler in Yanow, Russia, the eldest of the two daughters and seven sons of Morris and Gertrude (Koval) Adler. The family was well off by Yanow standards, but her father, a tailor, left the family on occasion to travel to Berlin, Warsaw, and New York in search of more favorable business opportunities. While aiding the family at home, Polly began her education under the tutelage of the village rabbi. When Polly was twelve her parents sent her to the United States. For two years she lived in Holyoke, Mass., with family friends, the Grodeskys, doing housework for them and attending public school. Shortly after her fourteenth birthday she began work in the local paper mills. The next year she moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., and lived with her cousins Lena and Yossell Rosen, working successively in a corset factory, as a seamstress at home, and as a machine operator in a shirt factory. An attractive teenager eager to escape the grinding poverty of immigrant life, Adler refused the penniless suitor her relatives had chosen for her and instead sought glamour in the local dance halls. At the age of seventeen she was raped by her supervisor from the shirt factory. After a family quarrel and an abortion she moved to Manhattan, where she found part-time work, once more in a corset factory. Through a family friend Adler became acquainted with a young actress living on Manhattan's fashionable Upper West Side who introduced her to a world of show business celebrities and the flashy, flourishing world of the prohibition bootleggers. Disturbed by the actress's addiction to drugs, Adler wanted to

Adler moved farther downtown to a lavish apartment near the center of Manhattan, and at the age of twenty-four found herself with a business so successful that she had no time to devote to her private life. The patronage of her New York establishment ranged from the wits of the Algonquin Round Table to motion picture stars, business tycoons, and notable members of the social register set. In an effort to attract a more elite clientele, Adler also established a summer business in fashionable Saratoga Springs. She became increasingly estranged from her parents, who had come to the United States in 1923; although she visited them, she did her best to keep them from learning the nature of her work. In 1 9 3 0 - 3 1 the house received publicity, ironically, from a widespread crackdown on corruption in New York City government. Polly Adler became a frequent and sensational courtroom sight during investigations, led by Judge Samuel Seabury, which sought to determine the connections between prostitution, police payoffs, and organized crime. Adler was questioned about her many arrests, which had consistently failed to bring convictions, but she yielded no information on the witness stand. She admitted entertaining such notable underworld figures as George McManus, Jack "Legs" Diamond, A1 Capone, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, and Arthur

7

Akeley

Akeley ard Watson and Sarah Jane (Pittis) Jobe. Her father's family came to the United States from the west of England during colonial times. Richard Jobe, who was born in Missouri, fought in the Civil War, enlisting before he was sixteen. Her mother, born in Ohio, was also of English descent. Mary Jobe attended Scio College (later Mt. Union College) in Alliance, Ohio, and received her Ph.B. in 1897. She apparently taught school in Ohio before enrolling at Bryn Mawr in 1901 for two years of graduate study in English and history. While at Bryn Mawr, she taught at Temple College in Philadelphia (1902-03). Enrolling at Columbia University for an A.M. in history and English (1909), she simultaneously taught history at the Normal College of the City of New York, which became Hunter College; she remained on the Hunter faculty until 1916. During her years in New York, Mary Jobe's career as an explorer began. In 1909 she requested a month's leave to join an exploration party in British Columbia, but her travels as an explorer in the Canadian northwest seem to have begun in earnest in 1913. Studying the habitat of Indian groups in the region, she also explored the Canadian Rockies, and made several journeys into the Canadian wilderness for botanical research, mountain climbing, and photography during the summers of 1914 and 1915 and the winters of 1917 and 1918. Her goal was "to go whither we knew not . . . to do the individual thing which we ourselves had chosen, and to do it because, in obtaining a bit of real knowledge hitherto unobtained, it gave unmeasurable satisfaction" ("My Quest," p. 814). The Canadian government gave her a commission to explore and map the headwaters of the Fraser River and she also made the first two attempts to climb Mt. Sir Alexander, one of the highest peaks in the Canadian Rockies (then unmapped and unnamed). In recognition of her accomplishments, the Canadian government later named another of the highest peaks Mt. Jobe. Her work in Canada led to her nomination as a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society of London. Mary Jobe's interest in the energetic outdoor life led in 1914 to her purchase of land in Mystic, Conn., as a camp for girls. From the first full camp season in 1916 until the camp closed in 1930, she presided over Camp Mystic, where the daughters of the well-to-do learned the techniques of outdoor living and heard famous explorers such as Martin and Osa Johnson and Vilhjalmur Stefannson talk of their adventures. It may have been Stefannson who introduced her to the noted explorer Carl Akeley, whom

"Dutch Schultz" Flegenheimer, but asserted her independence from racket control over her operations. In 1935 Adler's house was raided as part of an investigation led by the young prosecutor Thomas Dewey into an alleged prostitution syndicate. Although this charge remained unproved, she served her only jail term (twentyfour days, under the alias Joan Martin) in May 1935 for possession of pornographic films. Although Adler considered retiring several times during the late 1930s and early 1940s she remained in business throughout World War II. In January 1943, while seriously ill with pleurisy, she was arrested for the last time. After charges were dismissed, she retired to the Los Angeles area, where she enrolled in a community college to continue her long-suspended formal education. She died of cancer in 1962 at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood. Her autobiography, A House Is Not a Home (1952), brought her international fame; a best seller, it was translated into eleven languages and later appeared as a movie. The book offers an intimate history of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as an inside view of life in a house. But Adler considered it significant above all as "an American success story." [The best single source on Adler is her autobiography, A House Is Not a Home; all quotations are from that source. The N.Y. Times covered her career and arrests; accounts in the N.Y. Journal, the N.Y. Graphic, and the N.Y. Daily Mirror are more colorful. Herbert Mitgang, The Man Who Rode the Tiger ( 1 9 7 9 ) , describes her role in the Seabury investigations. Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano ( 1 9 7 4 ) , details the case against Adler in the Dewey investigations. Reviews of her book appeared in Newsweek, June 8, 1953; Am. Mercury, Oct. 1953; and the N.Y. Times, June 14, 1953. Other biographical information is available in Celebrity Register ( 1 9 5 9 ) , and obituaries in Time, June 22, 1962, and the N.Y. Times, June 11, 1962. Her literary agent, Armitage Watkins, has some correspondence. In her autobiography Adler gives her parents' names as Isadore and Sarah; the names Morris and Gertrude Koval, and a birth date for Adler of April 16, 1899, appear on her death certificate, obtained from the Calif. Dept. of Health. Information for the death certificate was supplied by her brother. CAROL

S.

LASSER

AKELEY, Mary Lee Jobe, Jan. 29, 1878-July 19, 1966. Explorer, photographer. Mary Jobe Akeley, who "brought the jungle to Central Park West," was born Mary Leonore in Tappan, Ohio, the younger daughter of Rich-

8

Akeley

Akeley

she married in 1924. Two years later she went with him to Africa on an expedition designed to collect animal and plant specimens of the region for the Great African Hall he had planned for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Mary Jobe Akeley served as field assistant, safari manager, secretary, and photographer for the expedition; she made especially valuable photographs of lions and antelope as well as portraits of animals in their natural habitats. With Carl Akeley she went to Mount Mikeno in the Kivu District of the Belgian Congo to study gorillas, long a central interest of his. He planned a gorilla habitat for the Museum of Natural History and had also been asked by King Albert of Belgium to survey the recently established Pare National Albert and study the best means to provide sanctuary for the large primates.

Natural History. She surveyed the wildlife in Kruger National Park, and made a study of the Zulu and Swazi people, returning to the Museum with films of the customs and ceremonies of the tribes and with a renewed conviction of the need for a policy for wildlife conservation in the parks. Knowing that "a vanished species can never be recalled, that wild life is easily changed by upsetting the balance of nature, and that primitive men have many customs which should be preserved free from the influence of so called civilization," she saw her work as having both scientific and humanitarian goals. While her interests centered almost exclusively on Africa from the time of her marriage, Akeley did return to British Columbia in 1938 for a "journey of rediscovery" on the Canoe River. She also made a survey of the Canadian women's war effort and a study of Alaskan defenses, including Kodiak Island, in 1941. After World War II, Akeley returned to Africa to see the newly enlarged Pare National Albert and to visit her husband's gravesite. The next year, 1947, she was commissioned by the Belgian government to make another survey of wildlife sanctuaries and national parks in the Congo. She also filmed the great African mammals, several of them rare and almost extinct species, and collected plant accessories for the African habitats at the Museum of Natural History. Mary Jobe Akeley's work in Africa brought her international recognition, but more important it helped to inform the world that Africa's greatest treasures were being plundered almost to extinction. Her several books recognized the beauty and unique promise of Africa and her expeditions realized her desire "to continue to learn of the primitive, to arouse an interest in its preservation." Mary Akeley spent part of each year at the home she had built on Great Hill in Mystic, Conn., and she retired there. Until her death of a stroke in Stonington, Conn., in 1966, she remained on her hill, holding herself aloof from the town, a "fiercely independent" and legendary figure in the eyes of Mystic residents (Kimball, p. 1 1 ) .

Carl Akeley died suddenly of a fever in November 1926 and Mary Jobe Akeley took over as leader of the expedition. For several weeks she remained in the Pare National Albert, continuing her husband's study of the great gorillas. In addition she mapped much of Kenya, Tanganyika, and the Congo, and collected plants which, with her photographs, would be used to complete the exhibition at the Great African Hall. Before leaving Africa, she traveled to Uganda to do a photographic study of the pink flamingos indigenous to that region. On her return to New York in 1927, she became a special adviser and assistant at the Hall; dedicated in 1936, it was renamed in memory of Carl Akeley. In 1928, Mary Jobe Akeley was invited to Belgium to work on reports of the African expedition with J. M. Derscheid, the Belgian zoologist and conservationist who had worked with the Akeleys in the Congo. While there she received from King Albert the Cross of the Knight, Order of the Crown, in recognition of her work in Africa. She was also invited to participate in an effort to enlarge the national park and to initiate a broader program to preserve the large primates, an enterprise she welcomed. Her time in Africa had made her aware of both the destruction of African wildlife by game hunters and the debilitation of African tribal life by the influx of European settlers. She had become a crusader for the establishment of game preserves and a serious student of tribal customs and ceremonies, and worked to protect the African pygmies in the area of the Pare National Albert. Akeley returned to Africa in 1935, heading her own expedition to the Transvaal, Southern Rhodesia, and Portuguese East Africa to collect further materials for the Museum of

[The Am. Museum of Natural History has Akeley's personal papers, photographs, diaries, and newspaper clippings. The collection includes her 1941 application for a Guggenheim fellowship, from which unidentified quotes are taken. She published her report to the Museum on the 1926-27 Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy African Hall Expedition and Carl Akeley's journal of the expedition as Carl Akeley's Africa (1929). Adventures in the African Jungle (1930) and Lions, Gorillas and Their

9

Alexander

Alexander Neighbors ( 1 9 3 2 ) are based on studies made by Carl Akeley. Her other books are The Restless Jungle ( 1 9 3 6 ) , The Wilderness Lives Again: Carl Akeley and the Great Adventure (1940), Rumble of a Distant Drum (1946), and Congo Eden ( 1 9 5 0 ) . She also wrote numerous magazine articles, book reviews, and travel pieces on Canada and Africa. Those on her early explorations include "My Quest in the Canadian Rockies," Harper's Mag., May 1915; "Mt. Kitchi: A New Peak in the Canadian Rockies," Bull. Am. Geographical Soc., July 15, 1915; and three articles in Canadian Alpine Jour.: 6 ( 1 9 1 5 ) , 188-200; 7 ( 1 9 1 6 ) , 8 2 - 9 9 ; and 9 ( 1 9 1 8 ) , 7 9 - 8 9 . Among her writings on her husband and on the 1926-27 expedition are "Carl Akeley's Last Journey," World's Work, July 1928, and "In the Land of His Dreams," Natural Hist., Nov.-Dec. 1927. Several articles on her activities in the late 1920s and the 1930s appear in the N.Y. Times, for which she also wrote reviews and articles. Carol W. Kimball, "Camp Mystic in the Good Old Summertime," Historical Footnotes: Bull. Stonington (Conn.) Hist. Soc., Feb. 1978, includes some biographical information on Akeley, as do the obituaries in the Geographical Jour., Dec. 1966, and the N.Y. Times, July 22, 1966. A biobibliography by Janet Marie Harbour assisted in research. A death certificate was provided by Conn. Dept. of Health. Printed sources and the death certificate give Jan 29, 1888, as Akeley's date of birth. The 1878 date is confirmed by the 1880 U.S. Census and by records in the Bryn Mawr College Archives.] MARY

MCCAY

ALEXANDER, Hattie Elizabeth, April 5, 1901-June 24, 1968. Pediatrician, microbiologist. Hattie Alexander was born in Baltimore, Md., the second daughter and second of eight children of Elsie M. (Townsend) and William Bain Alexander. The ancestors of both her mother and her father, a merchant, were Scottish. The family lived in the heart of Baltimore, and Hattie attended the city's Western High School for girls. A partial scholarship enabled her to enroll at Goucher College where she was an enthusiastic athlete and a not very ambitious C student. Yet Alexander showed even then the qualities of character and intellectual tastes that later contributed to her success as a physician and a scientist. The college yearbook recognized her fundamental attributes: "Ambition fires her; hygiene claims her; kindness portrays her." Her interest in "hygiene" led her to prefer courses in bacteriology and physiology. After graduating from Goucher with an A.B. in 1923, Alexander worked for three years as a bacteriologist, first for the United States Public Health Service and then for the Maryland Public Health Service. She saved enough money to enroll in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

where she made a brilliant record. After receiving her M.D. in 1930, Alexander served a oneyear internship in pediatrics at the Harriet Lane Home in Baltimore. There she developed an interest, which was to be lifelong, in influenzal meningitis, a disease caused by Hemophilus influenzae (unrelated to the influenza virus). In 1931 Alexander interned at Babies Hospital of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, accepting at the completion of her service an appointment as instructor in the medical school's department of pediatrics. Thereafter she rose steadily in the ranks of the teaching and attending staff of this medical center, becoming full professor in 1958. From 1966 until her death, Alexander was professor emeritus and special lecturer in pediatrics, as well as consultant to the Presbyterian Hospital. At Babies Hospital, in the pediatric service of Rustin Mcintosh, Alexander was in full charge of the microbiological laboratory, which exercised both a service and a research function. She established such rigid standards that the laboratory soon became a model of excellence, the envy of the other pediatric services. She also undertook a heavy load of clinical teaching. A diffident and almost reluctant lecturer, Alexander excelled in the give-and-take of bedside teaching. Always she insisted on objective evidence to back up clinical judgment, training her students to develop a healthy skepticism. Her first research studies were in the diagnosis and treatment of bacterial meningitis, especially that caused by Hemophilus influenzae. Treatment of this disease by anti-influenzal serum prepared in horses had uniformly failed. But, learning that Rockefeller Institute scientists had prepared in rabbits a serum highly successful for the treatment of pneumonia, Alexander applied this knowledge to her own problem. She immunized rabbits with large doses of influenza bacilli and worked in collaboration with immunochemist Michael Heidelberger to determine in the test tube the potency of the serum thus obtained. In 1939 she reported that treatment with the rabbit serum had brought about complete cure in infants critically ill with influenzal meningitis—the first successful treatment of this previously fatal disease. In the early 1940s Alexander began experimenting with drug treatment, first with the sulfas and then with other antibiotics, and eventually succeeded in substantially reducing the mortality of influenzal meningitis. Noting the resistance to antibiotics often developed by cultures of influenza bacilli, she was one of the first to realize that this phenomenon was a consequence of genetic mutation. Thus she was led into the study of microbiological genetics, then just be-

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Allen

Alexander

Susan Finer assisted in the research for this article. Additional information was supplied by Alexander's brother, William B. Alexander.]

ginning to emerge as one of the most exciting biological sciences. Alexander immediately recognized the importance of the 1944 report by Rockefeller Institute scientists that they had been able to change the hereditary characteristics of pneumococci by means of the genetic constituent now known as DNA, a discovery that many others received with initial skepticism. In collaboration with Grace Leidy she developed techniques which made it possible in 1950 to produce hereditary changes in Hemophilus influenzae with DNA obtained from this organism, thus confirming and extending the work done at Rockefeller Institute. To the end of her life Alexander continued her research in genetics with other bacterial species and with various types of viruses. At the same time, she remained active on the wards and even extended her clinical studies to tuberculosis.

RENÉ DUBOS

ALLEN, Florence Ellinwood, March 23, 1 8 8 4 Sept. 12, 1966. Judge, lawyer, suffragist. Florence Allen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the third daughter of seven children of Clarence Emir and Corinne Marie (Tuckerman) Allen. Her seventeenth-century English ancestors had pioneered in New England; their descendants had settled in the Ohio and Pennsylvania wilderness and her parents were pioneers in the Utah territory. Florence Allen would pioneer in her own way, becoming the first woman on the Ohio Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals, as well as an active supporter of women's advances into all areas of public life. She was a favorite of her paternal grandfather, Edwin R. Allen, justice of the peace in Girard, Pa. Her maternal grandfather, Jacob Tuckerman, a graduate of Oberlin College, was an early advocate of higher education for women. Florence attended his school, New Lyme Institute, in Ashtabula County, Ohio, from 1895 to 1897, while her father served in Congress as the first representative from the state of Utah. Clarence Allen had passed the Utah bar, served in the state legislature, managed mines, and taught his children Greek and Latin; Florence Allen considered him a brilliant scholar and her best friend. She also admired the industry of her mother, the first student admitted to Smith College, who in addition to raising a large family was a leader of the Mothers' Congress and the Utah Federation of Women's Clubs.

The successful integration of achievements in theoretical biology with the practice of clinical medicine required skillful management of her time and much intellectual discipline. These qualities are reflected in the precision and organization of Alexander's writings, which won her in 1954 the Stevens Triennial Prize for the best essay on a medical subject. The recipient of many other honors, including the E. Mead Johnson Award for Research in Pediatrics ( 1 9 4 2 ) , she was the first woman to receive the Oscar B. Hunter Memorial Award of the American Therapeutic Society ( 1 9 6 1 ) , and the first woman president of the American Pediatric Society ( 1 9 6 4 ) . Alexander was a fun-loving person, fond of music, of travel, and of her speedboat; she also cultivated exotic flowers. With Dr. Elizabeth Ufford, her companion for many years, she lived in Port Washington, N.Y., until her death of cancer in New York City in 1968.

Florence Allen attended Salt Lake College from 1897 to 1899, and in 1900 matriculated at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where her father had once taught classics. Elected president of her freshman class and editor of the college magazine, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1904. The next two years were spent with her family in Berlin, Germany, where she studied piano and wrote on music for several English-language periodicals. Returning to Western Reserve, she received an A.M. in political science in 1908, and the following year entered the University of Chicago Law School. In 1910, however, she left Chicago at the request of F R A N C E S K E L L O R to work for the New York League for the Protection of Immigrants. In New York she lived at the Henry Street Settlement, assisted M A U D WOOD P A R K at the Col-

[Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center has compiled a list of some 150 articles published by Hattie Alexander. A list of publications and a curriculum vitae are also available from Goucher College. Sources of biographical information include Mary Jane Hogue, "The Contribution of Goucher Women to the Biological Sciences," Goucher Alumnae Quart., Summer 1951, pp. 21-22; Lenore Turner, "From C Student to Winning Scientist," Goucher Alumnae Quart., Winter 1962, pp. 18-20; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., J, 106 (with photograph). An evaluation of Alexander's work and appreciation of her personality are contained in Rustin Mcintosh's letter to the editor of Pediatrics, Sept. 1968, p. 544. Edward C. Curnen's memorial to Hattie Alexander, delivered July 29, 1968, is available from ColumbiaPresbyterian Med. Center. Obituaries appeared in JV.Y. Times, June 25, 1968, and Goucher Alumnae Quart., Fall 1968. A biobibliography prepared by

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Allen

Allen lege Equal Suffrage League, and became acquainted with other leaders of the social welfare and suffrage movements. She also enrolled at New York University Law School, which had a reputation for encouraging women students, and graduated second in her class in 1913. The school later established the Florence E. Allen scholarship fund. Admitted to the Ohio bar in 1914, Allen opened her own office in Cleveland, volunteered for legal aid work, and participated in local Democratic party politics. She also took on the legal chores of the Woman Suffrage party in Cleveland, arguing in favor of municipal suffrage for women before the Ohio Supreme Court and aiding in legal battles for presidential suffrage. Inspired by Maud Wood Park, and encouraged by HARRIET T A Y L O R UPTON, she spoke on women's rights in every Ohio county and across the United States.

judge concerned the constitutionality of the powers granted the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Private utility companies from nine southern and border states had sued the TVA, challenging the scope of its authority. Allen's legal and administrative abilities were tested by the trial, which ran for several weeks in 1937 and required consideration of masses of technical data. Her opinion upheld the right of the TVA to buy transmission lines from private companies, sell electricity generated by its dams, and build new dams. The ruling, which had widespread implications for New Deal public works programs, was upheld by the United States Supreme Court. The public attention she received at the time encouraged speculation that she would be elevated to the Supreme Court. But Allen had been correct in predicting in a 1934 letter, "That will never happen to a woman while I am living." Praised at her death as "a great patriot," throughout her career Allen had delivered speeches on the Constitution, which were later collected in This Constitution of Ours ( 1 9 4 0 ) . But her patriotism did not conflict with her strong desire for world peace, intensified by the loss of two younger brothers in World War I. She advocated a flexible use of international law to settle disputes and at a 1925 conference of women chaired by CABRIE C H A P M A N CATT, she spoke forcefully for the outlawry of war. In the 1930s she worked for good relations with Mexico at a series of church-sponsored seminars, and by 1948 she was calling for international cooperation in regulating space exploration. In addition to these efforts, Allen was active in the American Bar Association, chaired committees of the International Bar Association and the International Federation of Women Lawyers, and visited women law leaders in Europe and Asia. Florence Allen combined great ambition with common sense, pride with sensitivity, and humor with rectitude. She viewed life as a series of small personal and large social struggles. Although strong and stocky in appearance, she suffered illnesses which sometimes interfered with her reading, piano playing, and daily walks for pleasure and exercise. She also experienced continual financial distress, paying off a note she cosigned for friends before the depression, helping to support her parents, one sister, and a niece, and often finding her judge's salary insufficient to meet the costs of her national and international responsibilities. As a judge, Allen's aim was to perform so that the public and her peers would find female authority appropriate. The appreciation of her

A decade of work for woman suffrage developed large state and national female constituencies for Florence Allen. She considered running for the state legislature and later ran unsuccessfully in the 1926 Democratic primary for United States Senate and in the 1932 congressional election. She was more successful in achieving nonpartisan judicial office. Her first appointment was as assistant county prosecutor of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in 1919. After ratification of the nineteenth amendment, she announced her candidacy for common pleas court judge, and members of the Woman Suffrage party carried her petitions. She won support from unions, church and professional groups, newspapers, and both political parties, and ran first against nine male candidates. As the first woman on any general jurisdiction court, she set about improving judicial administration. In 1922, sixty-six Florence Allen Clubs canvassed the state to elect her to the Ohio Supreme Court by a large majority. Driving a Model T Ford, she campaigned to become the first woman on an appellate court of last resort, and was reelected in 1928 by a larger majority. In 1934 friends and supporters from labor, academic, business, and reform groups backed her nomination to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. They persuaded Ohio Senator Robert J. Bulkley and President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the political wisdom of ending the male monopoly in the federal court system and Allen was appointed. Attorney General Homer Cummings commented: "Florence Allen was not appointed because she was a woman. All we did was to see that she was not rejected because she was a woman" (To Do Justly, p. 9 5 ) . Allen's most notable decision as a federal

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Allen

Allen

fellow judges was particularly important to her, and she was satisfied at the end of her career that "judges who were at first opposed to women officials accepted us when we handled our work steadily and conscientiously" (To Do Justly, p. 96). Judge Allen retired in 1959; she was widely honored both before and after her retirement for her achievements on and off the bench. She died in 1966 of a stroke in Cleveland, Ohio. [The Florence E. Allen Papers at the Western Reserve Hist. Soc., Cleveland, Ohio, include personal and work diaries for 1901-66, notes on cases, opinion drafts, speeches, scrapbooks and clippings, and correspondence. A "Register of Papers" was prepared by Ellen B. Heinbach in 1971. Duplicates of some of these materials are in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Other books by Allen are To Do Justly (1965), a short autobiography, and The Treaty as an Instrument of Legislation (1952). Her support for women in public life rings through her article, "Participation of Women in Government," Am. Acad, of Political and Social Sci., Annals, May 1947, pp. 94-103. Allen's numerous appellate opinions can be found in the Ohio Reports, 1923-28, and the Federal Reporter, 1935-65. Sources of biographical information include "From Covered Wagon to the Judge's Bench," Youngstown, Ohio, Sunday Vindicator, Oct. 28, 1928; Grace Izant, "The Life Story of Ohio's First Lady," Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 6, 1935; Marion J. Harron, "In Memoriam: Honorable Florence Ellinwood Allen," Women Lawyers Jour., Fall 1966; Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, Ladies of Courage (1954), pp. 195-98; and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., LII, 111-12. The speeches given at the portrait presentation ceremonies and dinner for Allen's retirement show her relationship to the federal bar and bench: West's Reporter series 278 F 2d 4 - 3 5 (1960). Her portrait hangs in the federal building, Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Cincinnati, Ohio; other photographs can be found in the pictures collection of the Allen papers. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Sept. 14, 1966; death record provided by Ohio Dept. of Health.] BEVERLY BLAIR

COOK

ALLEN, Gracie, July 26, 1895-Aug. 27, 1964. Comedian, actress. Gracie Allen was born Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen in San Francisco, the daughter of Margaret (Darragh) and George W. Allen. Reputed to be the best clog- and buck-dancer in San Francisco, her father later taught dancing and physical education. The youngest of five (three older sisters and a brother), Allen first came on stage before the age of six at a benefit, in a dress suit and top hat, although she refused to wear the red whiskers that went with the costume. (Badly scalded as a baby, she was left with a scar on her right arm and always wore long-sleeved costumes.) When she was fourteen

13

her education at the Star of the Sea Convent School was interrupted when she joined her sister Bessie in a vaudeville act in Chicago, dancing the Highland reel. At sixteen, she was booked for "singles" in the San Francisco area, her mother serving as her dresser. Her first threedays' salary was fifteen dollars. Gracie Allen and her sisters joined an act called the Larry Reilly Company, playing colleen parts in a brogue that she had difficulty losing later on. As her sisters dropped out one by one, Gracie stayed on to become the star attraction, but quit after a quarrel over billing. She then worked a six-a-day act that featured Boylan Brazil as a smooth-talking jewelry salesman and herself as a simple country girl. Disgusted with poor bookings, however, she left the act in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., went to New York, and entered a secretarial school where she remained for three months. In 1922, Allen met George Burns (born Nathan Birnbaum), then a minor song-anddance man; in his words "she made me a success after years and years of failure." Initially, Allen played straight to Burns's comedy but Burns soon recognized that her set-ups got more laughs than his punch lines. The rewritten act, called "Sixty-Forty," was first booked in Newark, N.J., for $10 and initiated the soon-to-befamous combination of Gracie, the scatterbrained ingenue, and George, the long-suffering boyfriend. Gracie's persona of endearing dizziness differed from that of other "dumb Doras" then in variety by eschewing grotesque outfits and slapstick, by dressing with chic, and by dealing in what Burns called "illogical logic": "Gracie gets her laughs—we hope—because we often think the way Gracie talks, but we pride ourselves that we never talk the way Gracie thinks." Burns slowly developed her stage character from a wisecracker to a garrulous, flirtatious, addlepated flapper, rattling on about her relations: "My uncle eats concrete. Mother asked him to stay to dinner, but he said he was going to eat up the street." Despite what she reported as intense stage fright, Allen powerfully impressed reviewers, who found the act original, clean, and "devilish clever." It toured the Orpheum circuit at $400 a week. As "Dizzy," the act was booked for nineteen weeks on Loew's circuit, and a new version, "Lamb Chops," was signed to a six-year contract by the Keith theaters to tour the United States and Europe beginning in 1926. The success enabled Burns and Allen to marry in Cleveland, Ohio, on Jan. 7, 1926. (Burns had been married once before.) In London, they made so popular a debut on the BBC that their radio show was extended for twenty weeks. In 1930, after they

Allen

Allen appeared with Eddie Cantor at the Palace Theatre in New York, Cantor asked Allen to do a guest stint on his radio program. Their first joint appearance on American radio was on the Rudy Vallee show. That job was followed by two years on the Guy Lombardo show, which led to an offer from the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) of a contract for their own show, "The Adventures of Grade," which premiered on Feb. 15, 1932. By 1940 Burns and Allen had more than forty-five million listeners and made over $9,000 a week. Gracie's recurring, "Oh, George, I'll bet you tell that to all the girls" and "I don't get it" became national catchphrases, and "Grade Allen" a fond nickname for any female nitwit. Allen herself had only a minimal part in the development of her stage character. The radio scripts were written by three men and edited by Burns, to whom she entrusted all of her career decisions. The scripts were submitted to her only on the day of the broadcast, when she omitted all "smartalecky" or double entendre lines, coined characteristic remarks, and then went on the air giving a perfect illusion of spontaneity. Her freshness, staccato delivery, highpitched voice, and total unconsciousness of the studio audience contributed to her authenticity as a living zany in American mythology. Some of the most celebrated publicity stunts in radio history were connected with Gracie Allen's persona. In 1933 she began a radio search for an imaginary lost brother, popping up unexpectedly on soap operas, mysteries, and daytime serials in lunatic pursuit. In 1938, to make money for the China Aid Council, she exhibited a set of "surrealistic" pastels at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York; the works bore such titles as "Eyes Adrift as Sardines Wrench at Your Heart Strings." In 1940 Allen ran for president on the Surprise party ticket and received a few hundred write-in votes. Allen's first film was an improvised short subject made for Warner Brothers; she signed her first movie contract with RKO in 1930, transferring to Paramount a year later. Her cinematic career was trivial, consisting primarily of excerpts from the vaudeville routines or segments sandwiched into anthology films, although she managed to steal focus from W. C. Fields in International House (1933) and Six of a Kind (1934). She was also the first movie actress to have a film named after her: The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939), from the novel by S. S. Van Dine. Allen abandoned film work in the late 1930s to spend more time with her adopted children, Sandra Jean (b. 1934) and Ronald John (b. 1935). A decline in ratings made Burns and Allen

realize that audiences no longer accepted a bantering boy-girl relationship from a middleaged married couple. In 1945, moving to the National Broadcasting Company, they changed the format of their show to a domestic situation comedy; in October 1950, they transferred to CBS television in a highly successful biweekly series. Allen moved to television reluctantly, but filmed before a live audience, a process which required intensive rehearsals. In 1955, Burns and Allen added a brief excerpt from their old variety routines as the standard closing and their son Ronald joined them as a featured player, enhancing the sense of reality in the comedy. In the late 1950s Allen began to grow tense and withdrawn, and to suffer migraine headaches brought on, according to George Burns, by the "chronic strain of making like someone she isn't." She retired in 1958 on her doctor's orders, devoting her time to her grandchildren and to card-playing. On Aug. 26, 1964, the five-foot tall, auburn-haired comedian, who always protested that she had never enjoyed show business, suffered a heart attack and entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood where she died the next day. [Gracie Allen's papers have been deposited at the Univ. of Southern Calif. There are clipping files in the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library, and at the Harvard Theatre Coll.; also see back issues of Radio Guide and Radio Mirror. Allen's memoirs are reported in Katharine Best, "Nitwits of the Networks," Stage, May 1 and May 15, 1939, and "Gracie Allen's Own Story: 'Inside Me' as Told to Jane Kesner Morris," Woman's Home Companion, March 1953. Her one book, How to Become President ("The Gracie Allen Self-Delusion Institute," 1940), was actually written by Charles Palmer, and her column, which appeared in 125 newspapers, was similarly ghosted. A filmography appears in Who Was Who on Screen ( 1 9 7 4 ) . Columbia Records has issued two sets of recordings of Burns and Allen broadcasts from 1930 and 1933; recordings of their radio shows have also been released by Mark and by Radiola. George Burns gives much information in his two reminiscences, I Love Her That's Why ( 1 9 5 5 ) and Living It Up ( 1 9 7 7 ) , and in an interview in Educational Theatre Jour., Oct. 1975. See also the joint entry "George Burns and Gracie Allen" in Current Biog., 1951. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Aug. 29, 1964, and Variety, Sept. 2, 1964. Allen's birth date is most often given as 1902; the 1895 date is confirmed by the 1900 U.S. Census. A marriage certificate was provided by the Cuyahoga Cty. Probate Court, Cleveland; death record from Calif. Dept. of Public Health. Shirley Staples, who is preparing a doctoral dissertation at Tufts University relating Burns and Allen to the tradition of male-female comedy acts in American vaudeville, was of major assistance in preparing this article.] LAURENCE

14

SENELICK

Ames

Ames AMES, Blanche Ames, Feb. 18, 1878-March 1, 1969. Suffragist, artist, feminist. Blanche Ames, best known as a botanical illustrator and an advocate of birth control, was born in Lowell, Mass., the fourth of six children and third of four daughters of Adelbert and Blanche (Butler) Ames. Both parents descended from early settlers of New England. Her father, a native of Rockland, Maine, and a general in the Civil War, served as United States senator and governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction. Her mother was the daughter of Benjamin F. Butler, a Civil War general and later a congressman from Massachusetts, and Sarah (Hildreth) Butler, a popular Shakespearean actress. For most of Blanche's youth, the family lived in Lowell, where the Butlers owned woolen mills. Her father's investments in family flour mills in Northfield, Minn., meant long separations. Nevertheless, they were an unusually close and happy family, the parents taking an active role in the education of their children. Blanche learned golf, tennis, football, and yachting—her grandfather owned the yacht America. Privilege also meant learning selfdiscipline and the highest standards of conduct. "I have no doubt you will keep up the reputation of the family while we are away," General Ames wrote to his children in 1893. Blanche Ames graduated from Rogers Hall School in Lowell in 1895 and entered Smith College. There she excelled in art, played basketball, and was president of her class. She received an A.B. in 1899. In May of that year she displayed her early interest in women's rights: "I am out of temper because of the Debate in History: 'Resolved, that women should be given the right of suffrage,' and they put me on the negative side, me of all people!" On May 15, 1900, Blanche Ames married Oakes Ames (unrelated), an instructor in botany at Harvard University. "You and I are forming a contract . . . we have an equal voice," he wrote to her before their wedding. They settled in his home in North Easton, Mass., the site of the prosperous Ames Shovel and Tool Company. There the couple planned and built Borderland, an elaborate estate where they farmed and raised cattle. They had four children: Pauline (b. 1901), Oliver (b. 1903), Amyas (b. 1906), and Evelyn (b. 1910). The marriage of Blanche and Oakes Ames began a remarkable, lifelong collaboration in the discovery, study, and illustration of the world's orchids. Working from their extensive collection of living orchids as well as with dried specimens, Blanche Ames executed drawings and

15

analytical sketches of hundreds of new species which were published in a seven-volume series, Orchidaceae: Illustrations and Studies of the Family Orchidaceae ( 1 9 0 5 - 2 2 ) . Oakes Ames became the leading orchidologist of his day, serving as Arnold Professor of Botany at Harvard, and also becoming director of the Botanical Museum and supervisor of the Arnold Arboretum. Together they made numerous collecting trips around the world. They developed the Ames Charts, using water colors executed by Blanche Ames to show the phylogenetic relationships of the more important useful plants. Close collaboration was evident in their political activity as well. Both Republicans, they lobbied the Republican National Convention delegates in 1914 to support a suffrage plank. Blanche Ames was an officer of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage League, and her husband headed a men's suffrage league. She also produced a widely used series of prosuffrage cartoons with incisive captions. In 1918 she chaired a committee of Massachusetts women who organized a campaign against Sen. John W. Weeks, an opponent of the suffrage amendment. Her husband noted in his diary: "Walsh defeated Weeks. Blanche danced around the library table!" No issue was as central to Ames's belief in selfdetermination for women as birth control. In 1916 she cofounded the Birth Control League of Massachusetts (BCLM), an affiliate of the national group led by MARGAHET SANGER. Through debates, mass meetings, and private persuasion, the BCLM sought to make birth control a public issue. Ames used her social and political connections to enlist the support of prominent people. She also did research on maternal health statistics, planned a parents' petition to the Massachusetts Medical Society, and engaged in a public debate with leaders of the Roman Catholic church. In 1935 she resigned from the BCLM in protest over a fundraising advertisement that appealed to taxpayers by citing the 250,000 babies born to families on relief. When all attempts to modify the law prohibiting the dissemination of birth control information were defeated, Ames wrote: "Women must resort to their old expedient of self-help. They must tell each other how to regulate conception. Mothers must teach their daughters, since their doctors may not supply the means." She illustrated methods for making a diaphragm starting with a baby's teething ring, or a jam jar ring, and wrote down formulas for spermicidal jellies. Ames's strong belief in freedom of choice led

Ames

Ames her in 1941 to become a member of the corporation of the New England Hospital for Women and Children ( N E H ) , founded in 1862 to afford women medical care by members of their sex and to train women physicians and nurses. By 1950 the hospital was in financial difficulties, and its board of directors accepted recommendations to include men on the active staff. Ames objected, citing the original charter of the NEH, and when she became president of the board in 1952 she led a broad fund-raising effort to maintain the unique character of the hospital. A number of wealthy donors, including KATHARINE D E X T E R MCCORMICK, came to the aid of the NEH at Ames's request. The hospital survived, and in 1955 its directors established the Blanche Ames Fund for Medical Education of Women. At the age of eighty, prompted by references to Adelbert Ames as a carpetbagger in John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Ames began to compile data on her father's career. Her book, Adelhert Ames, Broken Oaths and Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1835-1933, a spirited defense of the career of General Ames, was published in 1964. She also painted many oil portraits of her father, one of which hangs at the state capitol in Jackson, Miss. Other oil paintings by Blanche Ames are displayed at Dartmouth College, Columbia University, and Phillips Exeter Academy. An avid inventor, Ames applied for patents on a hexagonal lumber cutter, propeller snares for catching low-flying enemy aircraft during World War II, and an antipollution toilet. During her last year of life she was involved in refurbishing the Oakes Ames Hall in North Easton, a prime example of the architecture of H. H. Richardson. She survived her husband by nineteen years, dying at Borderland of a stroke in 1969. In everything she did, Blanche Ames Ames was remarkable for her energy and commitment. Her daughter Pauline has written: "For her to have an idea was to act, no matter how difficult or how impossible. W7e were never allowed to say 'I can't,' even if we might think it."

4 3 ) , and some birth control literature. Her drawings and etchings of orchids are at the Ames Orchid Herbarium, Harvard Univ. Her book Drawings of

Florida Orchids was published in 1947. Biographi-

cal information is also found in Richard Evans Schultes, "Blanche Ames Ames, 1 8 7 8 - 1 9 6 9 : An Appreciation," Botanical Museum Leaflet, Harvard Univ., vol. 22, no. 7, 1969, and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., LIII, 573. Family background is contained in entries for Benjamin Butler, Adelbert Ames, and Oakes Ames, Diet. Am. Biog., vol. three, Supp. One, and Supp. Four, respectively, and in Blanche Butler

Ames, comp., Chronicles from the Nineteenth Century: Family Letters of Blanche Butler and Adelbert Ames, 2 vols. ( 1 9 5 7 ) . At Borderland, a state park, her art studio is intact; several of her portraits and suffrage cartoons are also there. Obituaries ap-

peared in the March 3, 1969, Boston Globe and

N.Y. Times. Further information was provided by Pauline Ames Plimpton, Susan Boone, William Nelson, Richard Schultes, and Lesley Garay. Death certificate was supplied by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] JANET NELSON FRIEDELL

AMES, Jessie Daniel, Nov. 2, 1883-Feb. 21, 1972. Antilynching reformer, suffragist. Jessie Daniel Ames was born in Palestine, Texas, the third of four children and the younger daughter of James Malcom and Laura Maria (Leonard) Daniel. Her mother had grown up on an Indiana farm, attended Battle Ground Methodist Institute, and taught briefly before marrying James Daniel, a Scots-Irish orphan from Buffalo, N.Y., who worked as a train dispatcher and telegraph operator. The family moved from Palestine to the small railroad crossing of Overton and then in 1893 to Georgetown, Texas. Loneliness clouded Jessie Daniel's early life. She admired her self-educated father, but he reserved his affection for his first-born daughter. As a student at the primary school and, later, at the college of Southwestern University, a Methodist school in Georgetown, her painful feeling of unworthiness hampered her friendships. Graduating in 1902, she faced what she regarded as the purgatory of spinsterhood. Her mother was a strong-willed Methodist church worker who nursed the sick and played an active role in community affairs, but the only female relative who might have provided a model for a dignified alternative to marriage was her father's half-sister ANNIE STURGIS DANIEL, an early suffragist and physician. James Daniel disapproved of his sister, however, and Jessie met her only after she had launched her own career. In 1905, Jessie Daniel married a friend of her father's, Roger Post Ames, an Army physi-

[Blanche Ames Ames's collected papers, diaries, and letters are part of the Ames Family Papers, Sophia Smith Coll., Smith College, as are notebooks of drawings, art albums, charts showing her theory of color, suffrage cartoons, and photographs of her oil paintings. The collection also contains Pauline Ames Plimpton, "Ancestry of Blanche Butler Ames and Adelbert Ames," a genealogy compiled in 1977. Pauline Plimpton also edited Oakes Ames: Jottings of a Harvard Botanist ( 1 9 8 0 ) . The Blanche Ames Ames Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, contain material on the New England Hospital, some of Ames's suffrage correspondence ( 1 8 9 2 - 1 9 1 9 ) , birth control correspondence ( 1 9 3 1 -

16

Ames

Ames

cian thirteen years her senior who had worked on Walter Reed's yellow fever experiments in Cuba. She saw her wedding as belated proof of her desirability as a woman. But the marriage was an unhappy one, marred by sexual incompatibility and financial problems. In 1907, Ames gave birth to a son, Frederick, and six years later to a daughter, Mary. During most of her nineand-a-half-year marriage, she and her husband lived separately; he practiced medicine in Central America, while she stayed with her parents or older sister and visited him periodically. In 1914, when Jessie Ames was pregnant with her third child, Lulu, her husband died of black water fever in Guatemala. A widow at thirty-one, with three young children to support, Ames began her emergence into public life. She and her mother, who had been widowed three years earlier, managed a local telephone company and shared in the care of Ames's children, the youngest of whom was crippled by polio in 1920. The self-confidence and economic independence Ames acquired in this period encouraged her incipient feminism. In 1916, with her mother's enthusiastic support, she organized a county suffrage association. As a protégée of Texas Equal Suffrage Association president M I N N I E FISHER CUNNINGHAM, Ames was soon writing and speaking in behalf of women's rights. She was elected treasurer of the state association in 1918 and, in this position, helped to secure suffrage for women in primary elections and to make Texas the first southern state to ratify the nineteenth amendment. Ames moved in many directions to mobilize newly enfranchised women. In 1919, she became the founding president of the Texas League of Women Voters (LWV) and was a representative of the National LWV to the PanAmerican Congress of 1923. She also served as a delegate-at-large to the national Democratic party conventions of 1920 and 1924 and as an alternate delegate to the convention of 1928. As an organizer and president of the Texas branch of the American Association of University Women and an officer of the Joint Legislative Council, the Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, and the Federation of Women's Clubs, she sought to enlist women behind the social welfare goals of southern progressivism. Unlike most of her allies, however, Jessie Daniel Ames soon perceived the limitations of the movement in which she found her start. The female voting bloc that she expected did not materialize. More important, her political work in an era dominated by the Ku Klux Klan forced her to confront the contradiction of a women's humanitarian reform movement that excluded black women from its ranks and racial oppres-

17

sion from its concerns. In 1924, she became director of the Texas council of the Atlantabased Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), as well as field representative for the southwest. Five years later, she moved to Georgia to accept the directorship of the Woman's Committee of the CIC. Jessie Daniel Ames made her major contribution to the interracial movement through the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), which she founded in 1930 and directed until its disbandment. The ASWPL proposed to use the moral and social leverage of enfranchised white women for preventing mob violence in the rural south. It hoped to affect public opinion by challenging the justification commonly given for lynching: that it was necessary for the defense of white womanhood. Ames collected statistics that showed that only 29 percent of lynch victims were accused of rape or other crimes against white women. She also encouraged women to dispute the stereotype of the vulnerable white female in need of protection. The ASWPL, which was sponsored and largely financed by the CIC, worked through existing women's groups, primarily Protestant women's missionary societies. It formed state councils in each southern state; council members garnered endorsements from other women's groups, solicited antilynching pledges from local women, and issued press statements denouncing the claim that lynchers acted "solely in the defense of womanhood." The organization's central strategies were, first, to convince police officials to protect their prisoners and bring mob members to trial and, second, to urge the wives and daughters of the men who lynched to act as a restraining influence on masculine violence. Like FRANCES WILLARD, who used temperance to channel women into the political arena, Jessie Daniel Ames sought to link mob violence to the special concerns of women and to lead them toward an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the roots and implications of lynching. She made ingenious use of southern institutions and of the modes of influence available to middle-class women. Her personal control over ASWPL policy, however, limited the group's ability to evolve in response to new issues and opportunities. Largely at her insistence, the ASWPL refused to lobby for federal antilynching legislation. Such a shift to federal initiatives, she feared, would undermine her own regional leadership position, divert attention from underlying social dynamics to legislative panaceas, and obviate the campaign's function as a means of liberation for white women as well as for blacks. Ames's obduracy on this issue

Ames

Andersen

helped alienate her from the thrust of southern liberalism in the New Deal era. With a decrease in the number of lynchings, the A S W P L dissolved in 1942. During World War II, Ames set in motion a series of conferences designed to reinvigorate the CIC. When, instead, the result of the conferences was the dissolution of the organization and its replacement by the Southern Regional Council, she was forced into reluctant retirement. From 1944 until 1968, she lived in Tryon, N.C., active in local Democratic party politics and vitally interested in world affairs, but no longer the dedicated, energetic reformer she had been for a quarter of a century. Friends remember Jessie Daniel Ames in her latter years as "animated, positive, and full of determination." But no amount of determination could compensate for her loss of the work in which she had achieved her greatest sense of authenticity and self-fulfillment. In a period of antifeminist reaction, she found herself prey to doubts about her own contravention of sex-role prescriptions. Forced out of the public arena, she proved vulnerable once more to the emotional isolation that had blighted her youth and young womanhood. In the late 1960s, suffering from crippling arthritis, Ames gave up her struggle to live alone and returned to Texas to be cared for by her younger daughter, Lulu. She died of pneumonia in 1972 at the age of eightyeight in a nursing home in Austin, Texas. [The Jessie Daniel Ames Papers in the Southern Hist. Coll., Univ. of N.C. at Chapel Hill, contain correspondence, clippings, and other materials concerning her work with the CIC and the ASWPL. The other principal MS. collection is the ASWPL papers, Trevor Arnett Library, Atlanta Univ., which contain correspondence and records of the association, records of state councils, and lynching data. The CIC Coll., also at Atlanta Univ., has correspondence and records by and related to Ames and her CIC work. Smaller holdings in the Dallas Hist. Soc. include biographical material, clippings, and other papers on the Texas woman suffrage campaign, the LWV, and Ames's Democratic party work. The Texas State Library in Austin has biographical data, professional correspondence, and papers on the LWV and the Texas Equal Suffrage Association. Private family papers and photographs are in the author's possession. Among Ames's own writings are Southern Women Look at Lynching (1937) and The Changing Character of Lynching (1942). For a fuller description and bibliography see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (1979). Also useful are Henry E. Barber, "The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942" (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Ga., 1967) and "The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching,

18

1930-1942," Phylon, Dec. 1973, pp. 378-89; Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (1962); John Shelton Reed, "An Evaluation of an Anti-Lynching Organization," Social Problems, Fall 1968, pp. 17282; Kathleen Atkinson Miller, "The Ladies and the Lynchers: A Look at the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching," Southern Studies, Fall 1978; and Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 18301930 (1970). Additional information was provided by Lulu Daniel Ames. Death record from Texas Dept. of Health.] JACQUELYN

DOWD

HALL

A N D E R S E N , Dorothy Hansine, May 15, 1 9 0 1 March 3, 1963. Pathologist, pediatrician. Dorothy Hansine Andersen was born in Asheville, N.C., the only child of Hans Peter and (Mary) Louise (Mason) Andersen. Her father, a native of the Danish island of Bornholm, grew up on a farm in Danville, Vt. He was a YMCA secretary and a member of the national advisory board of the YMCA. Her mother was a descendant of Sir John Wentworth, colonial governor of New Hampshire, and of Benning Wentworth, for whom the town of Bennington, Vt., was named. Following the death of her father in 1914, Dorothy Andersen moved her invalid mother to Saint Johnsbury, Vt.; Louise Andersen died there in 1920, leaving her daughter with not a single close relative. Dorothy Andersen graduated from Saint Johnsbury Academy ( 1 9 1 8 ) , Mount Holyoke College ( 1 9 2 2 ) , and Johns Hopkins Medical School ( 1 9 2 6 ) . Her first two papers, on the blood vessels and lymphatics of the ovary and fallopian tube of the sow, were accepted by Contributions to Embryology while she was still a medical student; research for these papers was done in the laboratory of F L O R E N C E SABIN. She taught anatomy for a year at Rochester School of Medicine before interning in surgery at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y. Unable to obtain a residency in surgery and denied an appointment in pathology because she was a woman, Andersen left Rochester to become an assistant in the department of pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University. At the same time she began postdoctoral research on the relationship of the endocrine glands to the female reproductive cycle. In 1930 Andersen was appointed to the teaching staff at the medical school, with the title of instructor in pathology. She received the degree of D.Med.Sc. from Columbia in 1 9 3 5 and that year moved to Babies Hospital at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center

Andersen

Andersen

as assistant pathologist. There she began a collection of infants' hearts with congenital defects to which she continued to add over the years. In December 1935 a child who had presented the clinical picture of celiac disease was found at postmortem examination to have a lesion in the pancreas. Her researcher's sixth sense alerted, Dr. Andersen searched for similar cases in the autopsy files and in the literature. Analysis of the collected material provided a clear picture of a previously unrecognized disease entity, which she called cystic fibrosis. Andersen presented the paper summarizing her research at a joint meeting of the American Pediatric Society and the Society for Pediatric Research in Cincinnati, May 5, 1938, and received the E. Mead Johnson Award for her discovery. The pathologist's task was now accomplished, but Andersen was unwilling to stop there. She began to search for a way of diagnosing cystic fibrosis in the living patient and for methods of saving patients from what was, at that time, certain death. Acquiring on her own the necessary skills of a chemist and clinical pediatrician, Andersen contrived techniques for obtaining duodenal fluid and analyzing its enzyme content, which ultimately enabled her to diagnose the disease. Some colleagues openly disapproved of her assumption of these new roles, but she ignored them. Appointed assistant attending pediatrician in 1945, Andersen continued her research on cystic fibrosis. Her major publications in the 1940s included papers on chemotherapy for respiratory tract infections in cystic fibrosis and on the genetics of this hereditary disease. The discovery by her research group of an increase of salinity in the sweat of cystics led to the development of a simple, definitive diagnostic test to replace the complicated one she had pioneered. From time to time Andersen digressed from the main thrust of her research to study and report on other problems that intrigued her, particularly glycogen storage disease. Dorothy Andersen was appointed chief of pathology at Babies Hospital following the retirement of Beryl Paige in 1952. She was a controversial figure at the hospital, where some staff members admired her with almost fanatical devotion while others criticized everything she did. Supporters cited the hours she spent helping others with their research projects, her outstanding talents as a teacher, and her consideration for her subordinates. Detractors complained of her disregard of convention and the untidiness of her person and of her laboratory. A tidy mind was important to her; superficial neatness was not. Ashes from the cigarette that

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usually dangled from the corner of her mouth were virtually a part of her costume, and her hair was always in disarray. Opponents condemned her hobbies, branding as unfeminine her penchant for canoeing, swimming, skiing, hiking, and carpentry. But Andersen's friends, including interns and residents, were delighted to spend weekends at her farm in the Kittatinny range of northwest New Jersey. At this farm she built with her own hands a fireplace and chimney, a new roof, and some of the furniture. Dr. Andersen belonged to no formal feminist organization, but she fought valiantly for professional equality, spoke out against sex discrimination when colleagues remained silent, and refused to pattern her life according to others' ideas of what was suitable for a lady. During World War II surgeons pioneering in open-heart surgery, whose knowledge of cardiac embryology and anatomy was limited, sought Andersen's assistance. Asked to develop a training program, she did so, using her collection of congenital cardiac defects as illustrations. The sessions proved so valuable that no surgeon who had failed to complete her course was permitted to open a child's chest in a Babies Hospital operating room. At the request of cardiologists from other hospitals, she agreed to conduct seminars for them as well. In 1958 Andersen became full professor at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her last major paper on cystic fibrosis (1959) dealt with the disease in young adults—a new category of patients; formerly all cystic fibrosis patients had died in childhood. During her last years she published several papers on cardiac malformations. Among her many honors were the Borden Award for research in nutrition ( 1 9 4 8 ) ; a citation for outstanding performance from Mount Holyoke College ( 1 9 5 2 ) ; and the distinguished service medal of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (conferred posthumously). Operated on for lung cancer in 1962, Andersen died of the disease the following year in New York City. [Dorothy Andersen's personal papers are held by one of her heirs, Bessie Coombs Haskell. A curriculum vitae and list of her publications are available from the Columbia Univ. College of Physicians and Surgeons. The research summarized in her D. Med. Sc. thesis was published as a series of nineteen papers, most of which appeared in the Jour. Physiology and Am. Jour. Physiology, 1932-38. Sources of personal information include an autobiographical sketch available from Mount Holyoke College; progress reports in the form of letters to the Commonwealth Fund, available at the Fund's New York City office; and Louise Andersen's application for membership in the Daughters of the Am. Revolu-

Anderson

Anderson tion. The eulogy given by Douglas S. Damrosch at the memorial service for Dr. Andersen was published in the Jour. Pediatrics, Oct. 1964, pp. 477-79. Obituaries appeared in The Stethoscope (published by the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center), April 1963, and the Jour. Am. Medical Assoc., May 25, 1963, p. 670. Additional information was supplied by Andersen's colleagues and friends, including Rustin Mcintosh, Paul A. di Sant'Agnese, Carolyn Denning, Hilde Bruch, Bessie Coombs Haskell, Ruth Terborgh Murray, and Marian Beman Chute.] LIBBY MACHOL

ANDERSON, Elda Emma, Oct. 5, 1899-April 17, 1961. Health physicist. A member of the team of scientists who developed the atomic bomb during World War II, Elda Anderson went on to become a leader in health physics, the study of radiation protection. She was born in the small Wisconsin town of Green Lake, the second of three children and younger daughter of Edwin A. and Lena (Heller) Anderson. Her father, a local automobile dealer and mortician, had been a foundling left on a doorstep in Green Lake; her mother had been brought to Wisconsin from Germany by her parents at about age six. As a child Elda was fascinated by numbers, and aspired to be a kindergarten teacher. In subsequent years, she set her ambitions on a scientific career, influenced by her sister, who served for a time as an assistant instructor of chemistry. Her entire family supported her academic plans, rather expecting her to achieve success because of her early display of intellectual ability. After graduating from high school in Green Lake, she attended nearby Ripon College, earning her A.B. in 1922. She then obtained a graduate assistantship in physics at the University of Wisconsin, which awarded her an A.M. in 1924. Later, in 1941, she received the Ph.D. in physics from Wisconsin. Elda Anderson began her career as a teacher. At Estherville Junior College in Iowa from 1924 to 1927, she served as dean of physics and mathematics, teaching those subjects as well as chemistry. She then returned to her native Wisconsin, where she taught science at Menasha High School before leaving in 1929 to help organize the physics department at MilwaukeeDowner College. There she served as professor of physics, becoming chairman of the department in 1934. Anderson's career took a dramatic turn in late 1941. On a sabbatical leave from teaching, she became a staff member in the Office of Scientific Research and Development at Princeton Uni-

versity. The office was a forerunner of the Manhattan Engineering District, and Anderson's work led her in 1943 to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, where she joined other scientists working at feverish pace to develop an atomic bomb. Part of the cyclotron group at Los Alamos, Anderson's research efforts dealt primarily with spectroscopy and experimental measurements of neutron cross-sections, vital to the successful construction of the bomb and also of use in nuclear reactor design. In the summer of 1945, she witnessed the "Trinity event," the explosion in the New Mexico desert of the first atomic bomb. Elda Anderson left Los Alamos in 1947 to resume the chairmanship of the physics department at Milwaukee-Downer College, teaching physics concurrently at Wisconsin State Teachers College. Classroom and administrative chores seemed tame by comparison to the hectic eighteen-hour days at Los Alamos, and in 1949 she returned to the field, becoming the first chief of education and training for the Health Physics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Health physics, the science of protecting people and their environment from the effects of ionizing radiation, was barely five years old when Anderson came to Oak Ridge; she spent the rest of her life there bringing it to maturity. In conjunction with several scientists who had pioneered in health physics, including Karl Z. Morgan and James C. Hart, she established a training program for the new discipline at Oak Ridge; she was also teacher and adviser to graduate fellows in health physics from 1949 on. She later cooperated with Vanderbilt University to inaugurate a master's degree program in the field. Anderson worked on several fronts to promote health physics as a profession. Abroad, she organized the first international course in her field at Stockholm in 1955, followed by courses in Belgium in 1957, and Bombay, India, in 1958. At home, she encouraged her students at Oak Ridge to seek independent status for their new discipline, contributing to the formation of the Health Physics Society in 1955. Anderson served as secretary pro tem, charter secretary, then from 1959 to 1960, as president of the society. In 1960 she also helped institute the American Board of Health Physics, a professional certifying agency, for which she acted as secretary, then chairman until her death. A member of various scientific groups, she was elected to the honorary societies Sigma Xi and Sigma Delta Epsilon and named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Anderson continued to perform research at Oak Ridge, publishing a Manual of Radiological Pro-

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Margaret Anderson, founder of the Little Review, was born in Indianapolis, the eldest of three daughters of Jessie (Shortridge) and Arthur Aubrey Anderson. Her father, of Scottish Presbyterian descent, was an electric railway executive who later became president of the Interurban Electric Lines which operated in five midwestern states. His father had brought his family west from Virginia and then deserted them when he joined the army during the Civil War. Jessie Anderson came from a distinguished Indiana political family.

tection for Civil Defense ( 1 9 5 0 ) , and developing a set of spectrometer standards in cooperation with L. J. Beaufait, Jr., one of her students. Elda Anderson was a slight woman, of medium height, with a warm smile and soft speech. Her solitary hobbies of gardening, music, and camping contrasted with her gregariousness among students, whom she lent both knowledge and counsel. To many new arrivals at the seemingly remote and primitive Oak Ridge site, she became a confidante and friend, dispensing small loans and an occasional nip from a bootleg bottle in times of distress. Anderson was stricken by leukemia in 1956, yet remained extremely active. Then in 1961 she developed breast cancer as well and died in April of that year at Oak Ridge Hospital. In her memory, the Health Physics Society established the Elda E. Anderson Award, providing a certificate and honorarium annually to an outstanding health physicist under the age of forty. The students she helped became Anderson's broader legacy, realizing her vision of a body of professionals devoted to the study of radiation's effects on human health.

After leaving high school in Anderson, Ind., in 1903, Margaret Anderson entered the twoyear junior preparatory class at Western College in Miami, Ohio. Her passion, however, was the piano, and by 1906, at the end of her freshman year, she left Western intending to have a beautiful life founded upon a love of ideas and music. In a major break with her prosperous family Anderson argued her case for freedom, particularly from the restraints of a socially ambitious mother. She taught herself typing and, with the encouragement of her gentle father, left home for Chicago in the fall of 1908, accompanied by her sister Lois.

[Documents concerning Anderson's efforts in the Health Physics Soc. and the Am. Board of Health Physics are on deposit in the Center for Hist, of Physics, Am. Inst, of Physics, N.Y. City. Anderson's important publications include "Education and Training of Health Physicists," Radiology, Jan. 1954, pp. 83-87; and "Isotope Milker Supplies Ba137 from Parent Cs-137," Nucleonics, May 1957, pp. 122-25. She also coauthored "Development and Preparation of a Set of Gamma Spectrometer Standards," Analytical Chemistry, 30 (1958), 1762-64, with L. J. Beaufait, Jr., and Paul Peterson; and three articles on neutron cross-sections for gold, boron, and hydrogen, published in Physical Review, 71 (1947), 272; 72 (1947), 729 and 1147-56. Anderson's role in the growth of her field is discussed in Ronald Kathren and Natalie Tarr, "The Origins of the Health Physics Society," Health Physics, Nov. 1974, pp. 419-28. See also Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., L, 281-82; and tributes by S. Marshall Sanders, Jr., Health Physics, Sept. 1968, pp. 217-18; and William Mills, Health Physics, Sept. 1969, pp. 403-4. Obituaries appeared in Oak Ridger, Oak Ridge, Tenn., April 18, 1961; Health Physics, 5 (1960), 244; and Physics Today, July 1961, p. 68. Family and personal information provided by Anderson's niece Roanne McConnell Klaver, and career information by numerous colleagues, including Karl Z. Morgan, J. C. Hart, John A. Auxier, Francis L. Bradley, Allen Brodsky, Natalie Tarr Millemann, Walter S. Snyder, and Mary Jane Cook Hilyer.]

A young woman of luminous beauty and refreshing exuberance, Margaret Anderson arrived in Chicago during a renaissance of the arts. At first guided by editor Clara E. Laughlin, she wrote book reviews for a religious weekly, The Continent. She then worked for Francis F. Browne as a bookstore clerk and also gained experience on the staff of his magazine, The Dial. She frequented the bohemian literary gatherings of Margery Currey and her husband Floyd Dell, attended performances at Maurice Browne's Little Theatre, and especially enjoyed recitals by pianists and singers. As a book critic for the Chicago Evening Post, under the tutelage of Floyd Dell, by 1913 Anderson was reviewing over one hundred books a week. Overwhelmed by drudgery, she hit upon a way to overcome her boredom. As she recalled it in the opening volume of her autobiography, My Thirty Years War ( 1 9 3 0 ) , the idea came after a day of depression: "In the night I wakened. First precise thought: I know why I'm depressed—nothing inspired is going on. Second: I demand that life be inspired every moment. Third: the only way to guarantee this is to have inspired conversation every moment. Fourth: most people never get so far as conversation; they haven't the stamina, and there is no time. Fifth: if I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer. Sixth: marvelous i d e a salvation. Seventh: decision to do it. Deep sleep."

RONALD L. KATHREN

ANDERSON, Margaret Carolyn, 1886-Oct. 19, 1973. Editor, writer.

Nov.

24,

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the magazine made significant contributions to the history of modern literature. In addition to introducing readers to Joyce, it also printed early works by Sherwood Anderson, GERTRUDE STEIN, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, HILDA DOOLITTLE, and others who were giving new directions to literature. As Frederic J. Hoffman later noted, without "the sacrifices and limitless enthusiasms of Margaret Anderson, it is quite likely that postwar American fiction and poetry would have been slower in its experimental course." HARRIET MONROE, editor of Poetry, described the editors as having a kind of courage she could never attain, the "courage to run into debt and print issue after issue without knowing, or indeed caring, where the money would come from to pay for it. And frequently it didn't come, and printers and editors alike were perilously near starvation" (Poetry, Nov. 1930, p. 9 8 ) .

With very little money and an indomitable will, Margaret Anderson launched the Little Review as a monthly in March 1914. Its central aim was the publication of creative criticism that "shall be fresh and constructive, and intelligent from the artist's point of view." The first number featured praise of feminism, Nietzsche, and psychoanalysis; it also included works by Chicago poets EUNICE T I E T J E N S , Arthur Davidson Ficke, and Vachel Lindsay. Through her compelling presence and her enthusiastic promotion of the magazine, Anderson attracted contributors and, initially, patrons. By fall the magazine included the poetry of AMY L O W E L L ; for the next two years Anderson both published and encouraged the Imagist poets. By late 1914 she was also featuring the anarchist writings of E M M A GOLDMAN, a choice which resulted in the loss of her principal backer. In early 1916 Jane Heap (1887-1964), a painter of English and Lapp descent who was born in Topeka, Kans., joined the Little Review. Heap had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905, and had studied painting in Germany and costume jewelry design at Chicago's Lewis Institute. After her arrival the magazine took on a new appearance with modern typographical design and reproduction of contemporary artists' works. Heap preferred to remain in the background, however, appearing on the masthead only as "jh," and her influence on the magazine has never been fully assessed. Anderson's association with Heap remained close until 1922. Initially charmed by her skills as a conversationalist, Anderson came to value Heap's "mind, her imagination, her formulations, her vision, her 'creativeness,' " and frequently cited Heap's influence on her. In March 1917 the editors moved the Little Review to New York. In the next years it became increasingly committed to literary experiment, publishing Dorothy Richardson, T. S. Eliot, and, most notably, James Joyce. From May 1917 to April 1919 Ezra Pound acted as foreign editor, contributing criticism, and attracting British and European writers, including Joyce. In 1918 the magazine began a serialization of Ulysses. During the three years in which the magazine ran installments of the novel, four issues were confiscated and burned by the Post Office Department. In December 1920 the editors were put on trial for obscenity; they were convicted and fined on Feb. 21, 1921. By fall of that year the magazine had become a quarterly for lack of funds and henceforth appeared only irregularly, suspending publication between 1926 and the final issue—published in Paris-in 1929. During the years of its American publication

In 1922 Margaret Anderson moved to Paris and in 1923 she turned over the editorship of the Little Review to Jane Heap. During that year she also adopted her sister Lois's two children for the duration of their mother's prolonged illness, although Jane Heap, as legal partner in the adoption, actually assumed the responsibility for their care and education. (The children later returned to their mother.) Anderson left the Little Review to share her life with the French singer Georgette Leblanc; she planned to study the piano, write, and serve as Leblanc's accompanist. Until Georgette Leblanc's death at their home in Le Cannet, France, in 1941, the two women lived together in a relationship of rare mutual understanding. Under Jane Heap's editorship, the focus of the Little Review shifted from literature to an emphasis on international experimental art movements such as dada and surrealism. Although Heap too moved to Paris in 1927, during the twenties she operated an art gallery on lower Fifth Avenue in New York City, where she exhibited the artists whose work appeared in the Little Review. In New York she organized both an International Theatre Exposition (1926) and the highly original Machine Age Exposition (1927). In 1924, at Jane Heap's urging, Anderson had begun to attend lectures at Fontainebleau-Avon given by George I. Gurdjieff. The philosopher and spiritual master, who taught that human beings merely "sleepwalk" unless awakened to full consciousness through stages of shocks and self-observation, became an important influence on her life. Although she never committed herself totally to his work, Anderson later recorded the depth of her experience in The Unknowable Gurdjieff (1962). The book was dedicated to

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Jane Heap, who no longer corresponded with her, but "without whose illuminations," she wrote, "I would have understood less of Gurdjieff's doctrine of the 'Fourth Way.' " On her return to the United States from France in 1942, Margaret Anderson met Dorothy Caruso (widow of the singer Enrico Caruso), with whom she lived for the next thirteen years. The second volume of her autobiography, The Fiery Fountains, appeared in 1951. After Dorothy Caruso's death in 1955, Anderson returned to Le Cannet, where she wrote "This Thing Called Love," based in part upon an unrequited love affair, and her final autobiographical volume, The Strange Necessity (1969). She dedicated this volume to the poet and novelist Solita Solano, who was Anderson's most challenging critic and also a devoted student of Gurdjieff. Although gifted in the arts of communication, Margaret Anderson seemed at last to fulfill herself most when alone, living at the Hotel Reine des Pres, writing, and listening to music. "I think life has been too kind to me," she concluded in an article for Prose (1971). "Even my losses, through death, have been transmutations." After much suffering from emphysema, she died of heart failure in 1973 at the Clinique Beausoleil in Cannes; she was buried in Notre Dame des Anges Cemetery besides Georgette Leblanc. [Much of the material on which this article and a forthcoming biography of Margaret Anderson are based may be found in the Janet Flanner-Solita Solano Coll. at the Library of Congress, in the extensive collection pertaining to the Little Review at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and in smaller collections at the Univ. of Chicago, the Houghton Library of Harvard Univ., the Newberry Library, and in private hands. Anderson's three-volume autobiography remains the best source of information about her life; the first two volumes were reprinted in 1969. Her other writings include "The Art of Prose," "Conversation," and "Chambre d'Hotel" in Prose 1970, 1971, and 1973, and The Little Review Anthology (1953, 1970). For further biographical information see Georgette Leblanc, La Machine ä Courage (1947). Frederic J. Hoffman in The Little Magazine (1946) and Jackson Robert Bryer in his remarkably thorough dissertation, "A Trial-Track for Racers: Margaret Anderson and the Little Review" (Univ. of Wis., 1965) have compiled the history of the magazine. See also Abby Ann Arthur Johnson, "The Personal Magazine: Margaret C. Anderson and the Little Review," So. Atlantic Quart., Summer 1976, pp. 351-63. For an account of Gurdjieff groups in Paris in the 1930s see Kathryn Hulme, Undiscovered Country (1966). Anderson's date of birth is often given as 1891; the 1886 date is confirmed by her sister Lois Anderson Karinsky, born in 1888. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y.

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Times, Oct. 20, 1973, and the Wash. Post, Oct. 22, 1973.] MATHILDA M. HILLS

ANDERSON, Mary, Aug. 27, 1872-Jan. 29, 1964. Labor leader, federal official. Mary Anderson, head of the federal Women's Bureau from 1920 to 1944, was born on her parents' farm near the small town of Lidkoping in southwestern Sweden. Magnus and Matilda (Johnson) Anderson had seven children, of whom Mary was the youngest and the fourth daughter. Sturdy in physique, she loved the outdoor work of the farm but shunned housework. Her only formal education came at a local Lutheran school, where she graduated at the head of her class. When a severe agricultural depression hit Sweden in the late 1880s, Mary and a sister, with their mother's encouragement, decided to migrate to America and join their oldest sister in the Michigan lumbering area. Crossing the ocean as a steerage passenger in 1889, the sixteen-year-old Mary, who knew no English, secured her first job as dishwasher in a lumberjacks' boardinghouse in Ludington, Mich. A succession of housework positions followed, until Mary and her sister Anna moved in 1892 to Chicago. After working briefly in a garment factory, Mary Anderson found employment as a stitcher at a shoe factory in West Pullman. The company failed in the depression of 1893, but by the fall of 1894 she had secured a steady job at Schwab's, a larger Chicago factory. Anderson's first contact with trade unionism came in 1899, when she and other women at her shop joined the International Boot and Shoe Workers Union. A year later she was elected president of the women stitchers' Local 94 and soon afterward became its representative on the union's citywide joint council and its delegate to the Chicago Federation of Labor. Through a fellow Chicagoan, Emma Steghagen, whom she later succeeded as a member of the union's national executive board ( 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 ) , Anderson first learned of the Women's Trade Union League ( W T U L ) ; she joined its Chicago branch in 1905. Thus began her long friendship with the League's president, M A R G A R E T DREIER ROBINS, whom she found a constant source of inspiration and support and "the finest person I ever knew" ( W o m a n at Work, pp. 3 7 - 3 8 ) . A hard-fought strike of Chicago clothing workers (1910-11) brought Anderson new responsibilities. The strike, in which the WTUL played an integral role, secured a trade agreement with the firm of Hart, Schaffner & Marx that provided arbitration machinery for worker

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grievances. But the employees, new to unionism and mostly young women, needed guidance to put the system into effect. For this job Robins picked Mary Anderson, who gave up working at her craft in July 1911 to become a salaried League organizer. For two years she made a daily round of visits to various of the company's forty shops, explaining trade unionism, hearing and responding to workers' complaints, and forestalling or ending a succession of wildcat strikes; during these two years she attended 570 meetings. Her part in this pioneering venture in industrial arbitration she later regarded as her most important achievement. Four years of general organizing work for the League followed, until World War I brought Anderson a new role. In April 1917 Samuel Gompers, labor representative on the Advisory Commission of the United States Council of National Defense, appointed her to a subcommittee on women in industry. Through the committee she met MAHY VAN K L E E C K , director of industrial studies of the Russell Sage Foundation. When in January 1918 van Kleeck was chosen to head a women's branch in the Army's Ordnance Department, she called Anderson to her staff. Six months later, the Department of Labor set up a wartime bureau, the Women in Industry Service, with Mary van Kleeck as director and Mary Anderson as assistant director. To her new post Anderson brought a firsthand knowledge of working women, a calm common sense, and the capacity to learn from experience. She absorbed much from van Kleeck, a seasoned administrator and social investigator. Her experience was further broadened by a mission for the National WTUL early in 1919. Margaret Dreier Robins, concerned that the labor representatives meeting in conjunction with the Paris Peace Conference included no women, sent Anderson and ROSE SCHNEIDERMAN to Paris to represent women workers. During the trip Anderson met women labor leaders in England and France; she made further such friendships that fall as a delegate to the WTULsponsored International Congress of Working Women in Washington. She remained an active member of the WTUL throughout her government career. In August 1919, following Mary van Kleeck's resignation, Anderson became director of the Women in Industry Service. Then pressure from the National WTUL and other women's groups secured an act of Congress in June 1920 converting the Service into a permanent Women's Bureau within the Department of Labor, and President Woodrow Wilson appointed Anderson as director. The Republican

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triumph that fall placed her tenure in doubt. Renewed support, however, from organized women and the strategic efforts of two prominent Republicans, H A R R I E T TAYLOR UPTON and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, moved President Warren G. Harding to reappoint Anderson, and her post was thereafter secure. From the start the basic mission of the Women's Bureau was to perform a fact-finding, coordinating, and advocacy role on behalf of women workers. Anderson hired able associates, worked closely and supportively with them, and inspired their loyalty and hard work. The Bureau's field investigations won a reputation for reliability. As early as 1925 Anderson was hailed as the best known and most popular woman in the federal service. Anderson got along well with the two Republican secretaries of labor of the 1920s, both old trade unionists like herself. Yet she welcomed the appointment in 1933 of FRANCES PERKINS as a person "who really understood our problems" and "a friend to whom I could go freely and confidently" ( W o m a n at Work, p. 183). The expected entree never materialized. Perkins, sensitive to prejudice against her as a woman, may have sought to distance herself from women's causes; but it seems clear that she and Anderson simply did not hit it off. While the failure puzzled and troubled Anderson, her disappointment was partly offset by the friendship of Franklin and E L E A N O R ROOSEVELT; she had known Franklin during World War I and Eleanor through the WTUL. President Roosevelt in 1933 insisted on appointing Anderson as chief of the United States delegation to the International Labor Organization, to the annoyance of Perkins (Margaret Dreier Robins to Raymond Robins, Aug. 21, 1939). Of medium height and stocky build, Anderson had fair coloring, penetrating blue eyes, and what MARY DEWSON once called "a poker face." By all accounts she was an effective public speaker; her sincerity, expert knowledge, and warm concern for working women far outweighed her Swedish accent and sometimes shaky English syntax. A supporter of woman suffrage, Anderson had become a naturalized citizen in 1915 when it looked as though Illinois women might get the vote. She kept her political preferences to herself while in government service but later confided that she had voted regularly for Democratic presidential candidates. Within the Women's Bureau and outside, she consistently and vigorously opposed the National Woman's party's proposed Equal Rights Amendment on the grounds that it would destroy hard-won protective legislation for wageearning women.

Andrus

Anderson

ANDRUS, Ethel Percy, Sept. 2 1 , 1 8 8 4 - J u l y 13, 1967. Educator, organization founder and executive.

Anderson's task at the Women's Bureau expanded in the early 1940s, as the Lend-Lease Act and the American war effort brought a new influx of women workers into defense plants. Applying the experience of World W a r I, Mary Anderson established procedures to assure women's access to jobs and training and to uphold high working standards. Then, disheartened by the failure of Frances Perkins to support an increase in the Bureau's budget to match its new duties, she retired in June 1944.

Ethel Andrus, founder of the National Retired Teachers Association and of the American Association of Retired Persons, was born in San Francisco, the second of two daughters of Lucretia Frances ( D u k e ) and George Wallace Andrus, a lawyer. Her father had moved to California from New York state. While in law school, he married Lucretia Duke, the daughter of a British sea captain who had remained in California after docking there on the day that gold was discovered. T h e family moved to Chicago after the birth of their daughters so that George Andrus could continue his law studies at the University of Chicago. His daughter later described him as a man who believed everyone should do some good somewhere; her career followed his belief.

H e r s u c c e s s o r w a s FRIEDA M I L L E R .

T o a large degree, Mary Anderson's work was her life. A fellow trade unionist, Pauline Newman, found her surprisingly lacking in intellectual curiosity. Remaining unmarried, Anderson lived in a succession of Washington apartments, at first with her sister Anna and, after Anna's death, with occasional government colleagues. She received an honorary degree from Smith College in 1941, and on her ninetieth birthday, in 1962, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg presented her the department's Award of Merit. She died at her Washington home a year and a half later, of a stroke.

E t h e l Andrus grew up in Chicago, graduating from Austin High School in 1 9 0 0 and attending the University of Chicago, where she received her bachelor's degree in 1 9 0 3 . From 1 9 0 3 until 1 9 1 0 Andrus taught English and German at Lewis Institute (later the Illinois Institute of T e c h n o l o g y ) , and worked at Hull House and at the Chicago Commons, two settlement houses. While teaching at Lewis, Andrus also took courses there, later ( 1 9 1 8 ) receiving a B.S. from the Institute.

By developing and backing Mary Anderson, the Women's Trade Union League made what was perhaps its most enduring contribution to American life. Anderson firmly established concern for the special needs of working women as part of federal policy, at a time when such protection seemed more urgent than equality of rights.

In 1910, Andrus moved back to California and remained there for the rest of her life. She taught for a year at Santa Paula High School and from 1 9 1 1 to 1 9 1 6 at the Manual Arts High School, where she was acting principal for one year. In 1 9 1 6 she b e c a m e vice principal and then principal of Abraham Lincoln High School in Los Angeles. T h e first woman high school principal in the state of California, she remained at the Lincoln School until her retirement. Committed to higher education for women, Andrus also became a student again, earning an M.A. ( 1 9 2 8 ) and a Ph.D. ( 1 9 3 0 ) from the University of Southern California. H e r dissertation, on the development of a high school curriculum for girls "based on a critical study of [their] nature and [their] needs," stressed the need for an education that would develop all of women's capacities.

[The basic manuscript sources are the Mary Anderson Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; the Margaret Dreier Robins Papers, Univ. of Fla. Libraries; and the Mary Winslow Papers, Schlesinger Library. The first two collections have been microfilmed as part of the Papers of the Women's Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders, to be issued with a detailed printed guide. The Schlesinger Library also has a taped interview of Mary Anderson by Esther Peterson (1963?) and a tape of the memorial services held at the Dept. of Labor, with remarks by Pauline Newman, Frances Perkins, and others. Anderson's official correspondence is in the records of the Women's Bureau in the Nat. Archives. The basic biographical source is her autobiography, Woman, at Work ( 1 9 5 1 ) , written with Mary Winslow. The only extended study of her career is Sister John Marie Daly, "Mary Anderson, Pioneer Labor Leader" (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown Univ., 1968). Gustavus A. Weber, The Women's Bureau ( 1 9 2 3 ) , is a brief administrative analysis. Other secondary sources include Union Labor Advocate (Chicago), Dec. 1905, pp. 19, 22; Current Biog., 1940; and George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins ( 1 9 7 6 ) . Death certificate supplied by D.C. Dept. of Human Resources.] EDWARD T.

T h e Lincoln School was a large urban institution which served over 2 , 5 0 0 students of varied ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. T h e school was plagued by a high delinquency rate, and the district was said to take a perverse pride in its lawlessness. Parents of the pupils were often suspicious of the school, the teachers,

JAMES

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Andrus

Andrus and the principal. In this milieu, Ethel Andrus began her campaign to give her students a sense of self and of community. Her goal was "to bring to each a sense of his own worth by treating him with dignity and respect, by honoring his racial background, not as a picturesque oddity, but as a valued contribution to the rich tapestry of American life." She intended that the school would help each student "to find fulfillment according to his own unique nature, then to find worthy of his respect his neighbor of a different race or color."

of Retired Persons ( A A R P ) . Open to all retired people over the age of fifty-five, the AARP extended the insurance and other benefits Andrus had won for teachers to a broad segment of the population. By 1958, she had already set up retirement readiness programs all over the United States, and had begun to make her organization a powerful lobbying force in Congress. In 1961, her work received recognition with her appointment to the advisory committee of the White House Conference on Aging. She had given the elderly in America a voice.

Ethel Andrus strove for twenty-eight years to make this goal a reality. While she was principal the delinquency rate in the neighborhood dropped sharply, and in 1940 the school and Andrus were awarded special citations by the judge of the juvenile court for East Los Angeles for this achievement. Also in 1940, the school was chosen by the National Education Association as its case study in Learning Ways of Democracy, a textbook used in schools all over the world. Not content just with teaching high school students, Andrus formed an Opportunity School for the parents of her pupils. The Lincoln Heights Adult Evening School offered courses of all types to members of the community and was a measure of the progress that Andrus had made in overcoming community hostility. Abraham Lincoln High became the center of the East Los Angeles community.

The second career of Ethel Andrus, serving the elderly in America, and later all over the world, was as rich and rewarding as the first had been. Andrus regarded the scarcity of jobs for older Americans as a national tragedy and consistently urged retired persons to try to begin second careers. For this purpose she established the Institute of Life Long Learning to provide classes and seminars geared to their needs. The first Institute opened in Washington, D.C., in 1963 and other centers followed in California and in Florida; the Institute's educational broadcasts were carried on more than 5 0 0 radio stations. She also established and edited Modern Maturity, the monthly AARP magazine.

When Andrus retired in 1944 to care for her ailing mother, her state pension was a little over sixty dollars a month. Although she herself had additional income, she realized that many teachers who had devoted their lives to the profession ended their days struggling to live on meager pensions. Her concern led her in 1947 to found the National Retired Teachers Association (NRTA). Under Andrus's leadership, the NRTA moved in a variety of directions to ensure a better life for its members. Since almost no health or accident insurance was then available for those over retirement age, she fought for low-cost insurance for retired teachers, reaching her goal with the establishment in 1956 of the nation's first health insurance plan for people over sixtyfive. She also established a low-cost mail-order pharmaceutical program to provide prescription medicines at reasonable rates. In addition, the NRTA created a retirement home (Grey Gables), a geriatric nursing home, a travel service, and a quarterly journal which Andrus edited. In 1958, under pressure from retired persons in other professions, Ethel Andrus founded and became president of the American Association

26

Andrus's philosophy on aging was similar to the philosophy that had guided her throughout her teaching career. She helped the elderly, as she had helped her students, by urging them to find and use their strengths and to accept their limitations without being victims of them. When Andrus died in Long Beach, Calif., in 1967, of a massive pulmonary embolism, she left two strong retirement organizations, a legacy of service to the community, and a commitment to the growing retired population of America. In 1973, the Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California was dedicated in memory of her work for the elderly. [Ethel Andrus's published articles include "An Experiment in Social Living," Jan. 1935; "Core Curriculum at the Lincoln High School," Jan. 1937; and "Social Living Classes for the Underprivileged," Nov. 1939, all in Calif. Jour, of Secondary Education. She also wrote "What the Girl of Today Asks of the School," Jour, of Am. Assoc. of Univ. Women, April 1932, and "Retirement Readiness," NEA Jour., April 1952. An unpublished autobiographical sketch, written in 1962, is available from the central office of the AARP in Long Beach, Calif. Andrus also edited the Jour, of the Assoc. of Retired Persons International and Dynamic Maturity. The Jan. 1968 issue of Modern Maturity, dedicated to Andrus, is the most extensive source of information on her life and work; unidentified quotations are taken from this source. Her obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times,

Apgar

Apgar July 15, 1967; death record provided by Calif. Dept. of Health. Dorothy Crippen, Andrus's niece and Associate Director of Publications and Membership Processing for the AARP, provided family information.] MARY

MCCAY

A P G A R , Virginia, June 7, 1 9 0 9 - A u g . 7, 1974. Physician, anesthesiologist. Virginia Apgar was born in Westfield, N.J., the younger of two surviving children and only daughter of Helen May (Clarke) and Charles Emory Apgar, an insurance executive interested in astronomy and wireless telegraphy. Apgar was fond of describing her family as one that "never sat down." From her father, an amateur musician, she acquired an interest in music, and the family often held impromptu living-room concerts. While attending public schools in Westfield, N.J., Apgar developed a fascination with medicine. An excellent student in the sciences, she nearly failed her cooking classes. Apgar entered Mount Holyoke College in 1925. She majored in zoology and minored in chemistry, while supporting herself by working in the college library, waiting on tables, and catching stray cats for comparative anatomy classes. In college, as in high school, she demonstrated the seemingly limitless energy which became her trademark. She played on seven varsity teams, reported for the college newspaper, acted in dramatic productions, and played violin in the orchestra. After receiving her A.B. from Mount Holyoke in 1929, she entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, as one of its few women students. She received her M.D. degree in 1933 and immediately began a prestigious internship at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in surgery, a field which women rarely entered. After two years and two hundred operations, Apgar decided not to complete her training in surgery, turning instead to the young field of anesthesiology. Having been convinced that as a woman she would be unable to support herself as a surgeon, Apgar also saw in anesthesiology an opportunity to do pioneering work. Previously, nurses had administered anesthetics, but as surgery grew more sophisticated, medical specialists started to take over the work. In search of the best training then available, Apgar began her instruction under the nurse-anesthetists at Columbia, and then studied with Ralph M. Waters at the University of Wisconsin and Emery A. Rovenstine at Bellevue Hospital in N e w York City. In 1938 she was appointed director of the division of anesthesiology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, thus be-

27

coming the first woman to head a department there. In her eleven years in this position, Apgar created an entire academic department that included a staff of physician-anesthesiologists, a program to train residents, and courses for medical students. In 1949 Columbia appointed her as its first full professor of anesthesiology, thereby recognizing anesthesiology as a distinct and increasingly important specialty; she also became the first woman to hold a full professorship there. That same year she chose to give up her administrative responsibilities as department head to devote herself to the study of anesthesia in childbirth, and it is for this work that she is best remembered. After years of clinical observation of newborns, she devised a scoring system— which measured the infant's heart rate, respiration, muscle tone, reflexes, and color—to predict which babies would need special medical attention in the crucial first minutes and hours of life. Presented in 1952, her system, known as the Apgar Score, became the standard means of evaluating infants immediately after birth. Apgar's research, which yielded more than sixty scientific papers, reflected the great depth and variety of her interests. Her other contributions to medicine were essentially practical and directly affected the care of her patients. At the base of her work lay a fundamental pleasure in taking care of people and an eagerness to be helpful. Nothing was too much trouble. She carried a child up nine flights of stairs when she learned that he was afraid of elevators. She kept in her handbag equipment to resuscitate or perform emergency tracheotomies on accident victims, claiming: "Nobody, but nobody is going to stop breathing on m e . " Apgar's deepening commitment to maternal and child health led her to Johns Hopkins University, from which she received a master's degree in public health in 1959, at the age of fortynine. Intended as a sabbatical, this year proved to be a turning point in her career. Instead of returning to Columbia she accepted an executive position with the National Foundation-March of Dimes in 1959 and devoted the rest of her life to fostering public support for research on birth defects. With missionary zeal, she traveled throughout the world, educating the public to the need for research into the prevention and treatment of birth defects and raising funds toward this end. Largely as a result of these efforts, the annual income of the National Foundation increased from $19 million when she arrived to $46 million at the time of her death. In addition to her work at the National Foundation, Apgar held the first faculty positions in

Apgar

Arbus

the United States which named birth defects as a subspecialty, serving as lecturer ( 1 9 6 5 - 7 1 ) and then as clinical professor of pediatrics (teratology) at Cornell University Medical College. In 1973 she was appointed lecturer in the department of medical genetics at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. A gifted and muchloved teacher—she taught on airplanes and in churches as well as in class—she was fond of using unorthodox methods. She taught medical students the anatomy of the spinal cord by having them feel her own unusually prominent coccyx; and in explaining the origin of various congenital defects to concerned parents, she often passed around a tiny preserved fetus which she carried in a bottle in her purse. After her rise to national prominence, Apgar received numerous awards including several honorary degrees. In 1973 she became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Medicine from the Alumni Association of the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons; the same year she received the Ralph M. Waters Award given by the American Society of Anesthesiology and was named Woman of the Year in Science and Research by the Ladies' Home Journal. Throughout her life she remained devoted to Mount Holvoke, serving as an alumna trustee from 1966 to 1971. Apgar never married, insisting: "It's just that I haven't found a man who can cook." She made her home in Tenafly, N.J., and cared for her mother who lived in the same apartment building. Maintaining her lifelong interest in music, she built her own stringed instruments and delighted in the tale of how she and a friend crept into the Presbyterian Medical Center late at night to steal a wooden shelf from a telephone booth because it was "just right" for the back of a viola which Apgar was making. Fishing, golfing, and stamp collecting were great loves and, long past the age of fifty, she began taking flying lessons, hoping one day to fly under the George Washington Bridge. Her fundamental optimism and mischievous wit pervaded everything in her life and shaped her attitudes toward her own career and the careers of other women. She insisted that "women are liberated from the time they leave the womb." Despite her acknowledged disappointment at not having become a surgeon, she believed that her sex had placed no obstacles in the path of her career; indeed, she transcended traditional boundaries, achieving prominence both as a scientist and as a humanitarian. In the last years of her life, Apgar suffered from progressive cirrhosis of the liver. She died in New York City at the age of sixty-five. A tall

28

and physically imposing woman who appeared in later years as "a kindly grandmother," Virginia Apgar was fiercely independent and active until the day she died. She bequeathed to medicine a legacy of knowledge which continues to affect the lives of women and of children who are yet to be born. [Apgar's personal papers, including office files, speeches, and biographical materials, are in the Williston Memorial Library, Mount Holyoke College. She wrote one book, Is My Baby All Right? (1972), coauthored with Joan Beck, and published numerous articles in scientific and popular journals. See especially "Proposal for a New Method of Evaluation of the Newborn Infant," Anesthesia and Analgesia, July-Aug. 1953, pp. 260-67. Two informative memorial tributes are Christianna Smith, "In Memoriam: Dr. Virginia Apgar '29," Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quart., Fall 1974, pp. 178-79; and L. Stanley James, "Fond Memories of Virginia Apgar," Pediatrics, Jan. 1975, pp. 1-4. See also Current Biog., 1968, pp. 25-27. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times and the Holyoke (Mass.) TranscriptTelegram, Aug. 8, 1974. L. Stanley James, Carleen M. Hutchins, and Lawrence Apgar provided useful information.] ROBERT J .

WALDINGER

ARBUS, Diane Nemerov, March 14, 1923-July 27 (?), 1971. Photographer. Diane Arbus was born in New York City, the second of three children and the older daughter of David and Gertrude (Russek) Nemerov. The son of Jewish immigrants from Kiev who settled in Brooklyn, Nemerov would eventually own Russeks Fifth Avenue, the fashionable fur and women's clothing store founded in the 1890s by his father-in-law, who had come to New York from Poland. Nemerov kept his family in affluence, preserving highly visible symbols of success: large apartments, first on Park Avenue, and after the depression on Central Park West, and a staff of servants. Arbus later viewed what she called her "nouveau" surroundings with a tentative humor. To her, it was a facade supported by a "humiliatingly gross kingdom" of fur salesmen. She felt painfully "exempt from circumstances," reduced to fabricating theories about the rest of the world from clues as rudimentary as the remarks of elevator men (Terkel interview). She told of such disparate but modest acts of rebellion as daring herself to stand on the window ledge of the apartment and asking her parents for a sewing machine to make her own clothes. All three children were educated at the progressive Fieldston School and encouraged by their father (who took up painting when he

Arbus

Arbus

retired) to study the arts. Arbus painted with the Russeks fashion artist, but soon stopped: "I had a sense that if I was so terrific at it, it wasn't worth doing, and I had no real sense of wanting to do it" (Terkel interview). She did not go on to college after graduating from Fieldston in 1940, but briefly studied fashion drawing. Although Diane Arbus later blamed her parents for leading her to expect that she would live "under the wing of a man" (Terkel interview), she married at eighteen, on April 10, 1941. She had met Allan Arbus, five years her senior, at thirteen, when he was a paste-up boy in the Russeks advertising department, and they had since seen each other as much as possible, often surreptitiously. Arbus was a choice the Nemerovs had to regard as inevitable, and they finally gave the couple their support.

teach her the technical craft of photography, at which she came to excel. Freed by the move from orthodox household routine, she could now explore in earnest the world to which she had never been exposed, build the courage she felt her mother had failed to teach her. "I seek danger and excitement now," she told Studs Terkel. "It may be frivolous of me, but . . . I've come to feel that you can only learn by being touched by something." Arbus called her work "collecting things" and chalked lists of subjects on a blackboard above her bed. They formed "a sort of contemporary anthropology": beauty contestants, families, giants, midgets, drag queens, fat ladies, junkie hippies, nudists, twins married to twins. She was drawn to and awed by those unprotected by the invisibility of normality, and attracted by eccentricity, whether physically determined or deliberately cultivated. She was fascinated, too, by the flaw in any public persona, the gap between "what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you" (Aperture monograph). Her portraits pose mythic riddles of identity: what is it to inhabit a body virtually indistinguishable from one's twin, to tower three feet above one's parents, to choose to appear either man or woman? Gradually overcoming her initial shyness, Arbus learned to approach strangers, make friends, follow leads, wait, and come back until she had her portrait and the tale of an adventure. Energetic, witty, charming, and capable of a genuine and disarming curiosity, she persuaded her subjects to reveal themselves in an act of conscious collaboration. In her last year, photographing the mentally retarded whom she found "enveloped in innocence" (Israel interview), she moved to pictures no longer catalyzed mainly by her presence.

Shortly after their marriage, Allan Arbus bought a camera for his wife. She rapidly learned the fundamentals in the darkroom at her parents' apartment building and in a short course with the photographer Berenice Abbott. Both Diane and Allan Arbus immersed themselves in the work of major photographers, and, with David Nemerov's unfailing encouragement embarked upon a career in the then relatively open field of fashion photography. They began by doing six or eight pictures a week for Russeks, and soon became prominent as a team. Diane Arbus did the creative work before the actual shooting, conceiving the approach to be taken; during the sessions, Allan, who handled the technical side, took over. Diane Arbus grew to hate the work. In a competitive field, and with two daughters (Doon, born in 1945, and Amy, born in 1954), the Arbuses lived by monetary brinksmanship. It was also a strenuous job, and she found little time for work of her own. She quit in 1957, after bursting into tears while describing her day to a dinner guest. Arbus's initial efforts to take pictures on the streets of New York were hampered by her diffidence in approaching people. A course with Alexey Brodovitch led her nowhere. The turning point came in 1958, when she began two years of study with Lisette Model, the Austrianborn documentary photographer who became a close friend. Model pushed her student, who had always felt vaguely that she had something significant to say, to identify her subject. Arbus started, in her daughter Doon's phrase, with "the forbidden." Although she moved with the children into her own apartment in 1960, she remained friends with Allan Arbus and relied on him to

Although a joint account with Allan provided partial security until their divorce in 1969, Arbus had to earn money independently. She taught (Parsons School of Design, 1965-66; Cooper Union, 1968-69; privately, 1970-71; Hampshire College, June 1971), photographed for publications such as Esquire and Harper's Bazaar, and researched press photography for the Museum of Modern Art (1971). She won two Guggenheim fellowships, in 1963 and 1966, and her reputation grew steadily within the photographic community. A 1967 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art aroused popular curiosity in her work and gained her imitators among photographers. She kept on, as her friend Marvin Israel said, "endlessly pursuing and pursued." Diane Arbus's body was found in her West-

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Arbuthnot

Arbuthnot

beth apartment on July 28, 1971; she had committed suicide one or two days before. After her death, she became a cult figure, both damned for voyeurism and lauded for compassion. A posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972—which later traveled throughout the United States and in Europe—drew vast crowds. In slightly over ten years, Arbus claimed as part of her material a world previously recorded by only a few photographers, brought new dimensions to documentary portraiture, and achieved an international reputation. [Important publications by Diane Arbus are "The Full Circle," Infinity, Feb. 1962, and "The Vertical Journey: Six Movements of a Moment within the Heart of the City," Esquire, July 1960. Most Arbus negatives and prints other than those in museum collections are part of the estate of Diane Arbus, of which Doon Arbus is executor. There is a clipping file, as well as a collection of her photographs, at the Museum of Modern Art. Papers held privately include letters, 1968-71, by Peter Crookston of the London Observer; papers for an honors literature class at Fieldston, by Elbert Lenrow; a transcript of a 1971 Arbus class, by the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, N.Y. A tape of Studs Terkel's interview with Arbus was provided by W F M T , Chicago. The Aperture monograph Diane Arbus (1972) is the best source of reproductions of photographs and also contains partial transcriptions of some interviews and classes. A comprehensive, annotated bibliography was compiled by Robert B. Stevens for Exposure, Sept. 1977. Major biographical sources are: Doon Arbus, "Diane Arbus: Photographer," Ms., Oct. 1972, pp. 4 4 - 5 3 ; Marvin Israel, "Diane Arbus," Infinity, Nov. 1972; and Anne Tucker, "Diane Arbus, 1 9 2 3 - 1 9 7 1 , " The Woman's Eye ( 1 9 7 3 ) , pp. 109-23. See also Peter Bunnell, "Diane Arbus," Print Collector's Newsletter, Jan.-Feb. 1973, pp. 128-30, and Susan Sontag, "Freak Show," N.Y. Rev. of Books, Nov. 15, 1973, pp. 13-19. Information about Arbus's death furnished by Campbell's Funeral Chapel, Manhattan. Assistance was also provided by interviews and/or correspondence with Allan Arbus, Doon Arbus, Gertrude Nemerov, Howard Nemerov, Renée Nemerov Sparkia, Spencer Brown, Allan Gussow, Marvin Israel, Elbert Lenrow, Joan Morgan, Neil Selkirk, Eugene Tulchin, and Adam Yarmolinsky.] CATHERINE

LORD

ARBUTHNOT, May Hill, Aug. 27, 1884-Oct. 2, 1969. Educator, children's literature specialist. When May Hill Arbuthnot died at the age of eighty-five, the fourth edition of her major work, Children and Books, was in preparation. In the preface to that volume, her collaborator said: "Her knowledge, her enthusiasm, her practical commonsense, and her boundless imagination have guided countless parents, teachers, librar-

30

ians, and students . . . May Hill Arbuthnot is still with us in her books, a wise and blithe spirit." Born in Mason City, Iowa, where her parents Frank and Mary Elizabeth (Seville) Hill, were visiting friends, May Hill spent some part of her early childhood years in Newburyport, Mass., where she and her brother attended school. She had a happy childhood in which books were enjoyed and shared; she later recalled that her "absorption in books" was the result of a "reading mother, a reading-aloud father, and the Book of Common Prayer," which gave her "a sensitivity to the beauty and power of words." The family moved frequently, and she also went to school in Minneapolis and Chicago, where she graduated from Hyde Park High School. Family finances prevented her from going immediately to college. In 1913 she received a kindergarten-primary supervisor's certificate from the University of Chicago; nine years later, she completed her Ph.B. degree at that university. At Chicago, she met the eminent educator William S. Gray, who later became her colleague in writing textbooks for children. May Hill received a master's degree from Columbia University in 1924. While working on her degree programs, she taught kindergarten, worked as a kindergarten director at tbe Superior (Wis.) State Normal School ( 1 9 1 2 - 1 7 ) , and participated in the teacher training program at the Ethical Culture School in New York City (1918-21). Between 1913 and 1922 she taught courses in children's literature at the summer school of the University of Chicago. In the fall of 1922 May Hill moved to Cleveland to become principal of the Cleveland Kindergarten-Primary Training School. Five years later the school was made a department of elementary education of Western Reserve University (later Case Western Reserve University). She became an associate professor of education, remaining at that rank until her retirement in 1950. A strong believer in the value of preschool education, May Hill established the first nursery schools in both Cleveland and the state of Ohio. The University Nursery School (located on the campus of Western Reserve) which she founded in 1929 became a nationally known laboratory school and, with the other day nurseries established under her direction, made Cleveland an important center for the study of early childhood education. They also brought her national recognition. From 1927 to 1929 she was national vice president of the International Kindergarten Union (later renamed Association for Childhood Education). In 1930 she was a member of the original committee for the White House Con-

Arbuthnot

Arbuthnot

ference on Children and three years later participated in a national committee concerned with the establishment of emergency nursery schools for the depression years. In 1932, at forty-eight, May Hill married Charles Crisswell Arbuthnot, a professor of economics at Western Reserve. He was always supportive of his wife's work and theirs was a notably happy marriage. Long active as a writer, lecturer, reviewer, and teacher of children's literature, May Arbuthnot's major contributions to the field did not appear until the 1940s. Between 1933 and 1943 she was review editor for children's books for Childhood Education; she later served in the same capacity for Elementary English ( 1 9 4 8 - 5 0 ) . In 1939, the friendship that had begun at the University of Chicago led William Gray to impress on Scott, Foresman, the publishing firm which he served as both editor and author, the advisability of inviting Arbuthnot to join the staff. With Gray she coauthored Basic Readers: Curriculum Foundation Series (1940, 1 9 4 6 ) , better known as the "Dick and Jane" books. For many years these were the major readers for more than half the children in the United States. As literary products, however, the books were not universally acclaimed. Perhaps for that reason the first edition of Arbuthnot's college textbook, Children and Books ( 1 9 4 7 ) , was not warmly welcomed. It is also possible that critics felt that Arbuthnot, as an educator, valued function over literary merit. As the years passed, however, the integrity of her work, her high standards of evaluation, and her insistence on the prime importance of literary quality made it inevitable that her eminence be recognized. While she was concerned with function, with how books were introduced to children and how they served in the teaching of language arts, she was even more concerned with the goals of reading enjoyment and of giving children the best in world literature— well-written books that stirred the imagination and awoke sympathy for others and an understanding of self. In the late 1970s, Children and Books, in its revised editions, remained the bestselling textbook on children's literature published in the United States. During the early 1950s, Arbuthnot edited a series of anthologies designed to provide reading-aloud material to accompany reading instruction in the elementary grades. Time for Poetry ( 1 9 5 1 ) , Time for Fairy Tales, Old and New ( 1 9 5 2 ) , and Time for True Tales ( 1 9 5 3 ) were published together in 1953 as The Arbuthnot Anthology. It, too, went into several later editions. Arbuthnot's later years were marked by

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honors, and by her continued contribution to her field. She received the Constance Lindsay Skinner Medal in 1959 from the Women's National Book Association for a distinguished contribution to the field of books, and the Regina Medal of the Catholic Library Association for distinguished contributions to the field of children's literature ( 1 9 6 4 ) . After their retirement from teaching, the Arbuthnots kept homes in both Cleveland and Pasadena, Calif.; Charles Arbuthnot died in 1963. Although beset by arthritis and failing eyesight, May Arbuthnot continued to write articles and revise her books into her eighties. In June 1969, Scott, Foresman announced the establishment of the May Hill Arbuthnot lectureship. She died the following October in a Cleveland nursing home of cancer. A woman who throughout her adult life had known material comfort, a lifelong Episcopalian, a Republican, a scholarly research worker, May Hill Arbuthnot might have become narrow in the intensity of her concentration on her work. She was, instead, a person of warmth and humor, broad-minded and compassionate. In all of her writing and lecturing she made readers and listeners conscious of the needs and rights of the poor, the members of minority groups, and the young; she valued intellectual curiosity and deplored narrow judgments. Her work was characterized by a dedication to bringing children and books together, and by a zeal tempered by her understanding of practical problems. Above all, she had that rare quality: a truly open mind. She made a permanent and significant contribution to children's literature. [The archives at Case Western Reserve Univ. has a public relations file on Arbuthnot, containing articles, some biographical data, a list of publications, a useful "Biographical Essay on May Hill Arbuthnot" by Gladys F. Blue, and a biographical sketch by Dora Lawthorn. There is no published bibliography, although Contemporary Authors (1974) lists all of her books and the revisions through 1972. The fifth edition of Children and Books appeared in 1977, with Zena Sutherland as primary author. New Basic Readers: Curriculum Foundation Series appeared in 1951, coauthored by Arbuthnot, Gray, and A. Sterl Artley; a revision of this series was published in 1956, with Marion Monroe as a fourth coauthor. Articles about her include Marie C. Corrigan and Adeline Corrigan, "May Hill Arbuthnot," Catholic Library World, Feb. 1964, pp. 337-39; Mary C. Austin, "May Hill Arbuthnot: Teacher, Author, Friend," The Alumnae Folio, Western Reserve Univ., March 1951; "May Hill Arbuthnot," Education, March 1958, pp. 446-47. Obituaries appeared in Library Jour., Nov. 15, 1969; Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 3, 1969. A biobibliography by Carol Crider provided useful information. Death certificate supplied by the Ohio Dept. of Health.] ZENA

SUTHERLAND

Arden

Arden

born. While she never legally changed her name, she used Graham seldom except in horse racing circles. Recognizing that the real profits lay in cosmetics, Elizabeth Arden got in on the ground floor of the new industry. She gradually introduced face makeup, which had not been used by "respectable" women, under the guise of facial treatments. Ignoring the war that had just broken out in Europe, in 1914 Arden went to Paris, where she had a facial in nearly every beauty establishment in that fashion-conscious city. The only exception, she later insisted, was the salon of "that woman," as she always referred to Rubinstein. She was impressed by the striking effects produced by the skillful use of mascara and eye shadow, then quite new.

ARDEN, Elizabeth, Dec. 31, 1878?-Oct. 18, 1966. Entrepreneur. Between 1920 and 1940, swift and significant changes occurred in ideas of feminine grooming. Influenced by motion pictures and by the growth of the toiletries industry, these changes were also importantly the work of two women, Elizabeth Arden and her greatest rival, H E L E N A RUBINSTEIN.

Elizabeth Arden was born Florence Nightingale Graham in the village of Woodbridge, near Toronto, Ont., Canada, the fourth of five children and third of four daughters of William and Susan (Tadd) Graham. Her father, a Scotsman, and her mother, from Cornwall, England, had emigrated to Canada after their marriage, and leased a tenant farm in Woodbridge. Susan Graham died when Florence was still a child, and the children were reared in near poverty. Even a small allowance which her mother had obtained for the children from an aunt ended before Florence could finish high school. She moved aimlessly from one job to another—dental assistant, cashier, stenographer—until she decided to follow her brother, William, to New York. By then she was thirty years old. Florence Graham knew that few women were blessed with the smooth, fair complexion that at thirty made her look ten years younger. But she soon realized that a fine complexion need not depend upon chance. In 1908, as the modern cosmetic industry was about to be born, she took a clerical job with Eleanor Adair, whose beauty salon, in which "facials" were given, was one of the first of its kind. Graham insisted that Adair teach her the art of giving facials, and soon was pronounced to have "healing hands." At this critical stage she recognized, like the true entrepreneur, that she would never get anywhere working for somebody else. In 1909 she and Elizabeth Hubbard, who made and sold beauty products, opened a salon, under Hubbard's name, at 509 Fifth Avenue. The two strong-minded women failed to get along, and Hubbard left to open her own salon. Florence Graham, with a small loan from her brother, lavished upon the little shop the talent for elegant decor for which she was to become famous. The entrance featured a red door with brass name-plate. Wondering what to call herself, she hit upon the name Arden while, she said, reading Tennyson's poern Enoch Arden. If she merely had the sign painter scrape Hubbard off the front window of the salon, she realized, she could save a large bill for the gold leaf work. So Elizabeth stayed, and Elizabeth Arden—the woman and the business—was

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In 1914 Arden also opened a small shop in Washington, the first of many branches. By the 1920s, her main business was in creating makeups for her customers, and in the sale of creams and other cosmetics. Among other products, she introduced a fluffy cream, Amoretta, which proved a great improvement over old-fashioned greasy preparations. As the range of cosmetics that respectable women considered proper increased, Arden was ready with such innovations as lipsticks to match not only one's skin coloring but one's clothing as well. She ultimately added hairdressing, advice on diet and exercise, and both ready-made and custom clothing to her services; at one time or another she operated salons in over 100 different locations throughout North and South America and Europe. Cosmetics sales soon outpaced the salons in dollar volume, and ultimately made up for losses in the salons. The person who ran this branch of the business for nearly twenty years was her first husband, Thomas Jenkins Lewis, whom she had met in 1914 while applying for a loan in the bank where he worked; they were married on Nov. 29, 1915. The union succeeded better as a business partnership than as a personal relationship. She divorced Lewis in 1934 and in 1942 married Prince Michael Evlanoff, a Russian émigré from whom she was divorced in 1944. Meanwhile, her business continued to grow, in spite of or perhaps because of the depression. By 1930 she had achieved a place just within the magic circle of New York society, largely by cultivating E L I S A B E T H M A R B U R Y , member of a prominent old New York family, influential literary agent, and house mate of the popular interior designer E L S I E DE W O L F E . Arden had a short-lived radio program in the 1930s; she also opened a health resort at Maine Chance Farm, her former country home in Mount Vernon, Maine. In 1947 she opened an-

Arden

Arendt

other in Phoenix, Ariz. She loved travel, and did her duty in sponsoring charity balls which were probably the best advertising investment she made. But for the most part she worked industriously at the business, of which she owned every share of stock, and saw annual sales grow to $60,000,000. Her other real passion was horses. Her Maine Chance Stables in Lexington, Ky., won purses totaling $ 5 8 9 , 0 0 0 in 1945, more than any other stable. In 1946 her racing success won her a place on the cover of Time magazine, and in 1947 her horse, Jet Pilot, won the Kentucky Derby. Elizabeth Arden fits the classic model of the entrepreneur as closely as any other man or woman in the history of American business. She was innovative and even inventive, but her forte was in recognizing good ideas, putting them into effect, and making them succeed. Although she mastered the pose of the demure little girl who wanted everything to be pink, she drove home her message with the force of a steel executive. "Hold fast to life and youth," her advertisements warned, and she never stopped working. When she died in New York in her eighty-eighth year, she was still the sole owner of the business. Her legacies included $4,000,0 0 0 to be divided among longtime employees of the company. Another $ 4 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 went to her sister Gladys (Vicomtesse de Maublanc), who had worked for Arden, helping to develop the wholesale business, initiating the first sales trips, and expanding the business into France, where she ran the Paris and Nice salons. Most of the remainder went to her brother William's surviving daughter, Patricia Young, who had been Arden's constant companion. The business was sold to Eli Lilly and Company to satisfy government inheritance taxes. Apparently she could not conceive of a life for Elizabeth Arden after Florence Graham was gone. [Material published during Elizabeth Arden's lifetime is highly undependable, especially as to her date of birth. The Office of the Registrar General, Toronto, Ont., has no record of her birth for the period 1876-80. The 1878 date is used by Alfred Allan Lewis and Constance Woodworth, Miss Elizabeth Arden (1972). This book, prepared with the cooperation of relatives and former employees, marshals the important facts, but is not a definitive biography. Earlier articles, which better capture the spirit of the times in which she lived, include a profile in the New Yorker, April 6, 1935; "I Am a Famous Woman in This Industry," Fortune, Oct. 1938; the Time cover story, May 6, 1946; Hambla Bauer, "High Priestess of Beauty," Sat. Eve. Post, April 24, 1948. There is also an entry in Current Biog., 1957; obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times,

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Oct. 19, 1966, and the Oct. 28, 1966, issues of Time, Life, and Newsweek.] ALBRO

MARTIN

ARENDT, Hannah, Oct. 14, 1 9 0 6 - D e c . 1975. Philosopher, political theorist.

4,

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, the only child of Paul Arendt, an engineer, and Martha (Cohn) Arendt. Both parents had been born in Königsberg, East Prussia, to middle-class Jewish families of Russian descent. Several years after their daughter's birth, the Arendts moved back to Königsberg, where Paul Arendt was institutionalized in 1911 with tertiary syphilis. He died in 1913, as did his father, Max Arendt, a leader in the Jewish community, who had also been very close to Hannah. Arendt was precocious as a child, learning to read before she entered kindergarten. Her mother was a broadminded, progressive woman, and a Social Democrat; she was very supportive of her daughter, even when Hannah was expelled from the gymnasium for a breach of discipline. In 1920 Martha Arendt married Martin Beerwald, a merchant with two teenage daughters, and the Beerwald home became a center for Arendt's talented young friends. For two years ( 1 9 2 2 - 2 4 ) Arendt prepared for the abitur, the final examination for university entrance, by auditing courses at the University of Berlin and working with a private tutor. An attractive but shy young woman, she enjoyed company but was also given to long periods of solitary reading and poetry writing. Arendt's university career began in 1924 at Marburg, where she studied Greek, New Testament theology with Rudolf Bultmann, and philosophy with Martin Heidegger, who became a close friend. She spent one semester at Freiburg studying with Edmund Husserl, and then went to Heidelberg where she received a doctorate in philosophy in 1929. Her dissertation, Der Liebeshegriff hei Augustin, was supervised by Karl Jaspers, who became like a second father for her. Both Heidegger's and Jaspers's philosophies shaped Arendt's later work, supplying her with insights and categories to which she gave a specifically political turn. In 1929 Arendt married Gunther Stern, a writer whose pen name was Gunther Anders. While he worked on his habilitation in philosophy, Arendt, supported by a stipend from the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, began writing Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. This biography of the late eighteenth-century Berlin salon hostess (not published until 1 9 5 7 ) stresses the personal

Arendt

Arendt struggle Varnhagen waged to accept her Jewish identity. Arendt's work was interrupted by her flight from Germany in 1933. She left Berlin after a week of imprisonment by the Gestapo, having been arrested not for harboring communists, as she might have been, but for collecting materials on German anti-Semitism at the behest of Zionist friends. Arendt was not a Zionist, but she was sympathetic to Zionism, particularly as advocated by her friend Kurt Blumenfeld, the leader of the German Zionist Organization. Arendt took refuge in Paris, where she worked for various Jewish organizations, including Youth Aliyah, and joined refugee discussion circles, including one that met at the home of the literary critic, Walter Benjamin. Her marriage to Stern, which had begun to dissolve by the time he left Berlin for Paris early in 1933, ended in 1936 when she met Heinrich Blücher, a non-Jewish Berliner of working-class origins who was, until 1939, a communist. Shortly after their marriage in 1940, Arendt and Blücher were interned for six weeks in separate camps in the south of France. During the German occupation of Paris, they were able to escape and, with Arendt's mother, they secured visas and sailed to New York in the spring of 1941. During the war, living with Blücher and her mother in a New York rooming house, Arendt wrote a political column for the German-Jewish weekly Aufbau in which she called for the formation of a Jewish army and discussed Jewish history. Helped by other Europeans, including Paul Tillich, Salo Baron, and Waldemar Gurian, she placed essays in Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Frontier, and the Review of Politics. Blücher worked in factories until he found a position at the National Broadcasting Company preparing German-language broadcasts; Martha Arendt kept their house and did factory piecework. Slowly, the Blüchers were able to make enough to live without help from friends. They learned English, relishing every new idiomatic expression, but their circle was German-speaking until after the war, when they began to meet "the American friends"—Alfred Kazin, Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, Phillip Rahv, and others. Arendt was employed as a director of research by the Conference on Jewish Relations ( 1 9 4 4 4 6 ) , and as a part-time teacher of history at Brooklyn College. From 1946 to 1948 she was a senior editor at Schocken Books. During these years she also wrote for Partisan Review, the Review of Politics, and The Nation, and published articles in support of a binational ArabJewish state in Palestine. These articles came to the attention of Judah Magnes, the president of Hebrew University, who invited her to work

34

with him in advocating a binational state. When that campaign failed, Arendt turned her attention away from exclusively Jewish concerns. Drawing on her published essays, she began to write The Origins of Totalitarianism, a three-part work tracing the history of antiSemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism, and stressing the unprecedented nature of the totalitarian form of government. Arendt's was the first major study of totalitarianism published after the war and, particularly in the 1950s, it was enormously influential. The book is intricate, with many themes developed simultaneously; the main theme is the decline and fall of the eighteenth-century nation-states of Europe with their stable class structures. Arendt charted the nineteenth-century emergence of the bourgeoisie as a political force bent on imperialistic expansion and showed how this emergent group's actions and ideologies—particularly racism—undermined the nation-state, rendering "superfluous" or stateless those to whom the nation-state had given place, meaning, and political rights. Eventually, even the bourgeoisie was drawn into the collapse of the nations, and from that came "the masses," those without collective interests, the atomistic members of mass movements like Nazism. Mass society is the precondition for totalitarian regimes, with their ideologies of world conquest and their essential means—total terror. Particularly in the first edition (subsequent editions were heavily revised) Arendt issued a call for European federation, an ideal she shared with Heinrich Blücher, who advocated a "League for the Rights of Peoples" to supplant the lost "Rights of Man" theories. Blücher's collaboration on The Origins of Totalitarianism was crucial; although he had almost no formal schooling, he was Arendt's political mentor, and until his death in 1970 he continued to influence her thought. Blücher was never a writer, but he was an enthusiastic talker and a successful teacher of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City and at nearby Bard College. When The Origins of Totalitarianism appeared in 1951—the year she acquired United States citizenship—it was immediately acclaimed and Arendt emerged as a historian and political thinker of importance. The book's success allowed Arendt and Blücher to leave the rooming house for an apartment, and it led to opportunities for her to pursue her work under easier financial circumstances. Despite her pleasure in its success, Arendt was uncomfortable with the publicity she received. She was, and remained, reticent, uneasy in public, and very protective of her privacy. She had a wide

Arendt

Arendt and appreciative circle of acquaintances—many would have agreed that she was the most incisive, intelligent person they had ever met—but few ever came to know her well. In 1952 Arendt received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to begin a study of the Marxist elements of Soviet totalitarianism, a dimension of her subject which she had left for a separate treatment. (Many critics had noted that The Origins of Totalitarianism did not fully substantiate its claim that Bolshevism was, in form, like Nazism.) The study outgrew her original conception and she shifted its focus, evolving a series of categories for considering the vita activa, the active life. In articles and in lectures at leading universities throughout the 1950s Arendt developed the ideas of her next book, The Human Condition (1958), in which she emphasized man's properly political capacities, action and speech, and distinguished these from work and labor. Arendt considered these activities in light of the fundamental conditions of human existence—plurality, natality, mortality, life itself, worldliness, and earthboundness—and in light of a vast historical shift, from the classical period, when each activity had its place in the private or the public realm, to the modern period when both private and public realms atrophied and a hybrid realm, called the social, emerged. In six essays published in 1961 as Between Past and Future, Arendt further developed her idea that the social realm had, in the modern world, usurped the public realm, the realm for action and speech. In "What Is Authority?" for example, she considered "the Roman trinity"— religion, authority, tradition—and asked how authority might exist without the images of future reward and punishment supplied by religion and the images of past origins or foundations supplied by tradition. Between past and future, in the modern situation, Arendt looked for a concept of authority—not rulership, not raisons d'état, not power, not violence—in which foundations and new initiatives, precedents and actions, could combine. This led her to the most important modern political phenomenon, revolution, in which liberation and constitutionmaking or -founding can combine. In 1959 Arendt was invited to Princeton as a visiting professor, the first woman full professor at that institution. There she delivered the lectures that later became On Revolution (1963), which focused on the American version of the revolutionary council system, local township government. In comparison to her writings of the 1940s, which were calls to resist loss of personal identity, chauvinistic nationalism, and the general deterioration of political life, her work

35

in the 1950s was constructive, informed by a qualified hope for the possibility of political renewal. In the spring of 1961, as a reporter for The New Yorker, Arendt attended the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her report on the trial appeared in the magazine in February and March 1963. Amid a growing controversy, she prepared it for book publication as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964). Disputes arose over three aspects of Arendt's account: the issues she raised about the legality of Eichmann's trial and the inadequacy of existing legal categories to deal with a "crime against humanity"; her portrait of Eichmann as a banal, thoughtless man, no demon and no psychopath; and her presentation of the role of the European Jewish Councils (Judenrate) in the implementation of the Nazis's deportation and extermination policy. The debates on matters of historical fact and interpretation overshadowed the philosophical issues implicit in the book's subtitle; they also alienated Arendt from many she had considered to be friends. Although she faced the controversy courageously, she was shocked and hurt by its vehemence. Preoccupied with the arguments over her book and with her duties as a professor with the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought (1963-67), Arendt wrote only essays in the mid-1960s. "Truth and Politics," her response to the Eichmann debate, was included in the revised edition of Between Past and Future (1968). Much of her work during these years, however, reappeared in Men in Dark Times (1968), a diverse collection of portraits of modern men and women who offered, in their lives and works, "some illumination," which she believed "even in the darkest times we have a right to expect" (p. ix). These portraits of courage reveal Arendt's abiding concern with personal integrity and dignity. In 1962 and 1966, the two volumes in English of Karl Jaspers's The Great Philosophers, which Arendt edited, appeared. She lectured widely in America during the 1960s and traveled to Europe almost yearly to lecture and to visit with friends, including Heidegger and Jaspers. Arendt accepted a professorship at the New School for Social Research in 1967 and gave courses which contributed to "Thinking and Moral Considerations" (Social Research, Autumn 1971), and to her final work, the philosophical study that became The Life of the Mind. Her plan to return to her "first amour," philosophy, was interrupted several times as she stopped to analyze the tumultuous events of 1968, the Pentagon Papers, and the Watergate

Arendt

Arendt scandal. Arendt's political essays of the late 1960s and early 1970s are collected in Crises of the Republic (1972), which is dedicated to her closest American friend, the writer Mary McCarthy. The Life of the Mind, published posthumously in two volumes in 1979, was to have consisted of three parts-: "Thinking," "Willing," and "Judging." It was conceived as a complement to The Human Condition; the earlier book had considered the vita activa, the later one would deal with the vita contemplativa. Arendt had nearly completed the first two parts, but hardly begun the third, when she died in her New York apartment in December 1975 of heart failure. In the last months of her life, there were two public acknowledgments of the worldwide influence of Arendt's work: the Danish government's Sonning Prize for "contributions to European civilization," and the American Political Science Association's Lippincott Award for a work of enduring and exceptional quality, which went to her 1958 book, The Human Condition. The traditional relation of the active and contemplative lives was the focus of Arendt's study and criticism over the course of her thirtyfive years in America. Most western philosophers, she thought, had looked upon the political realm from without, from above. Arendt, who refused the title philosopher and called herself, until the last years of her life, a political theorist, wanted to avoid that traditional perspective. In the major books which precede The Life of the Mind she considered, first, what politics means, setting out to define what is properly political, namely action and speech. From this fundamental orientation toward public action, a host of conceptual distinctions followed. She set apart "the political space," the space in which men act purposively through words and deeds, from what she called "the social," by which she meant the relations men develop for the maintenance of life. Acting together in the political space, human beings can attain power, Arendt believed. She distinguished power from violence, which she saw as an instrument or means which did not stem from cooperative action and which could not, therefore, secure power for any but a short period. Acting and speaking are always limited, but there are compensations, Arendt pointed out: the outcomes of human action are unpredictable, but promises protect human beings from this unpredictability; actions are irreversible but the act of forgiveness can redeem the doers; human actions disappear from memory, but poetry and history preserve them for future generations. Revolutions, she believed, are successful only

insofar as their end is the establishment of free institutions within which citizens can act together. She emphasized the council system— which she saw as the spontaneous outgrowth of revolution—as the political form which most effectively offered space to those who wished to act, and warned that representative government neglected such grassroots institutions at its peril. A place for the "public happiness" of speaking and acting is the condition of freedom. Forms of government can therefore be assessed according to the space they offer for such action; revolutions can be judged by whether or not they lead to constitution-making. In looking at revolutions in history, Arendt saw only the American revolution as having been successful in these terms, as the Constitution had emerged from it as a commonly agreed on principle of authority. The distinctions that made up Hannah Arendt's political philosophy were complemented by the series of distinctions she began to elaborate in The Life of the Mind: between knowing and thinking, science and philosophy, the pursuit of truth and the search for meaning. Arendt "located" thinking, which she called "a silent dialogue between me and myself," far from the political realm. She tied it, however, to the human ability to project into the futurewilling—and to judge the past, and suggested that thinking has a political role in times when most are swept up unthinkingly in political movements. She asked and replied affirmatively: "Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever comes to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evildoing or even actually 'condition' them against it?" Even when she applied her conceptual schemes to studies of particular events Arendt often baffled her readers, as neither her schemes nor her specific analyses could be conventionally classified as conservative or liberal, reactionary or progressive. She was never a political activist or what she called an intellectual streetfighter, but neither was she a contemplative in the traditional sense. Although she was profoundly disturbed by the events of her age and the tendencies she saw in them, particularly by the transformation of politics into social administration, it is inadequate to call her a pessimist. Such categorizations are tied to philosophies of history, which Arendt felt deflected truly political understanding: "Each time the modern age had reason to expect a new political philosophy it received a philosophy of history instead."

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Arendt

Arnstein

Hannah Arendt's work was as highly regarded in the United States as that of any postwar political philosopher; internationally, she was perhaps the best known American theorist of her generation. In the twentieth century, theorists of many persuasions, including philosophers of history, have seen the need to bridge the gap between philosophy and politics. Arendt's great contribution was that she understood that this bridge could tiot be built unless the entire range of political concepts, formulated while the gap was open, was reexamined and rethought. To this end, she cleaned and polished the tarnished words of political discourse, uncovering their original meanings and linking them together again to articulate a new science of politics. Participants in public and private discussions felt this articulation process going on as Hannah Arendt practiced distinction-making and sorted concepts, using a story to illustrate, a poem to illuminate, a joke to startle. Her mother had been amused when her five-year-old played school at home—immer ist Sie die Lehrerin, she wrote in a journal—and so Arendt remained, always the teacher. [A collection of Arendt's papers, manuscripts, and correspondence, numbering over 30,000 items, is in the Library of Congress. Correspondence with Jaspers and Heidegger is in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, Fed. Rep. of Germany. An archive of articles on Eichmann in Jerusalem and on the controversy surrounding it is in the Leo Baeck Inst., N. Y. City, and a bibliography is available in R. Braham, The Eichmann Case: A Source Book (1969). Arendt's response to a book-length critique, Jacob Robinson, And The Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1965), appeared in the N.Y. Rev. of Books, Jan. 20, 1966, and was collected, with other articles, in R. Feldman, ed. Hannah Arendt: The Jew as Pariah (1978). Also see Friedrich A. Krummacher, ed., Die Kontroverse: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann und die Juden (1964). Many of Arendt's essays remain uncollected; six early essays appear in Die Verborgene Tradition (1976). Excerpts from The Life of the Mind appeared in the New Yorker, Nov. 21, 28, and Dec. 5, 1977; the book was published in two volumes, Thinking and Willing, edited by Mary McCarthy (1978). Melvyn Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (1979), a collection of essays on her ideas with commentary by Arendt, contains a bibliography. A biography by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is forthcoming. For analysis of Arendt's thought see Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (1974). The Spring 1977 issue of Social Research was devoted to Arendt; Peter Stern and Jean Yarbrough discuss her as a teacher in "Hannah Arendt," Am. Scholar, Summer 1978. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 6, 1975; in PS (newsletter of the Am. Political Sei. Assoc.), Summer 1976; and (by Judith Shklar) in the New Republic, Dec. 27, 1975.

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Reminiscences appeared in "Talk of the Town," the New Yorker, Dec. 22, 1975, and the N.Y. Rev. of Books, Jan. 22, 1976 (by Mary McCarthy) and May 13, 1976 (by Robert Lowell).] ELISABETH

YOUNG-BRUEHL

ARNSTEIN, Margaret Gene, Oct. 27, 1 9 0 4 Oct. 8, 1972. Public health nurse, nursing educator. Known for her work in promoting systematic research on health care among nurses, Margaret Arnstein was born in New York City, the second of four children and younger daughter of Leo and Elsie (Nathan) Arnstein. Her parents were second-generation Americans of GermanJewish descent, who engaged in the social and cultural activities of the Jewish tradition but did not follow its religious practices. Leo Arnstein, a graduate of Yale, was a successful businessman who became New York City welfare commissioner and president of Mt. Sinai Hospital. Both parents were closely associated with the Henry Street settlement, Elsie Arnstein taking part in its vocational advisory service. The children all later served in health-related fields. Margaret's interest in nursing and public health developed early, encouraged by L I L L I A N W A L D , the founder of Henry Street and a close family friend. Graduating in 1921 from the Ethical Culture School in New York, Margaret Arnstein attended Smith College, where she received the A.B. in 1925. She went on to earn a diploma from the New York Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing in 1928 and an A.M. in public health nursing from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1929. She then served five years as staff nurse and later supervisor at the Westchester County Hospital in White Plains, N.Y. After receiving her master's degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University ( 1 9 3 4 ) , she applied her training first as consultant nurse in the Communicable Disease Division of the New York State Department of Health ( 1 9 3 4 3 7 ) , then as a teacher of public health and nursing in the University of Minnesota's Department of Preventive Medicine (1938—40). Eager to resume field work, Arnstein returned as consultant nurse to the New York Department of Health in 1940. There she stimulated field studies in public health nursing, an activity which became the focus of her career. Seeking to bring the nursing profession abreast of the dramatic changes in health care, she later observed that this goal had been delayed because nurses, preoccupied with patient care, rarely had the chance to contribute to the analysis of health issues; yet many

Auerbach

Arnstein nurses had "an intuitive grasp of the ways in which their patient might fare better." Arnstein designed field studies to analyze and systematize the observations and insights of nurses and to explore ways of modernizing their profession. Also interested in using applied research in the public health field, she collaborated with physicians in 1941 on a study of the contributing factors in the incidence of respiratory infections and coauthored with Gaylord Anderson the widely used text Communicable Disease Control ( 1 9 4 1 ) . She went on leave from the New York Department of Health to work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration ( 1 9 4 3 - 4 5 ) , advising nurse training programs in the Balkan countries. In 1946 Margaret Arnstein began a twentyyear career in the United States Public Health Service, rising to chief of the Division of Nursing in 1960. During these years, she directed national field studies on nursing and helped individual hospitals conduct their own research to improve patient care. Even as an administrator and consultant with an international reputation, she often outpaced her colleagues in visiting the programs under her jurisdiction, whether in urban ghettos or Appalachia, finding new ideas in the field and putting them to use. She also studied health issues abroad, preparing for the World Health Organization A Guide for National Studies of Nursing Resources ( 1 9 5 3 ) , and directing in 1956 the first International Conference on Nursing Studies in Sèvres, France. She took leave from the government for a semester in the spring of 1958 to become the first holder of the A N N I E w. GOODRICH Chair of Nursing at Yale. In 1964, while still affiliated with the Public Health Service, Arnstein moved from the Division of Nursing to the Office of International Health. There, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Agency for International Development, she joined American and British physicians to study health service needs in developing countries. As part of the project, Arnstein visited India, concluding that much could be learned from nurses and midwives in the field and that planned parenthood programs must be accompanied by improvements in child welfare: "Before Indian families can accept the principle of birth control, they must be shown that their present children have a good chance of living" (Smith Alumnae Quart.). Leaving government service in 1966, Arnstein spent a year as professor of public health nursing at the University of Michigan, then became dean of the Yale School of Nursing until her retirement in 1972. She died of cancer at her apartment in New Haven, Conn., in October 1972.

Margaret Arnsteins contributions to public health nursing were widely recognized. She received several honorary degrees and became the first woman to be awarded the $10,000 Rockefeller Public Service Award ( 1 9 6 5 ) ; she also received the Sedgwick Memorial Medal, the highest honor of the American Public Health Association, in 1971. Free from serious illness until that year, she led an active life of travel, hiking, and tennis, while also enjoying the arts. Cancer slowed her down but did not immobilize her. Into her last week, Arnstein maintained her own calendar and received calls from around the country. She faced death securely, as she had the other challenges of living. [The Margaret Arnstein Papers, including notes of speeches and articles, course outlines, consultant reports, correspondence between 1956 and 1972, and a curriculum vitae, are in the Nat. Nursing Archives, Mugar Library, Boston Univ. Published writings include: "Secondary Attack Rates in Pneumonia," Am. Jour. Public Health, Feb. 1941, with Edward S. Rogers and Morton Robins; "Nursing in UNRRA Middle East Refugee Camps," Am. Jour. Nursing, May 1945; "Public Health Work in England: How It Is Like and Unlike Ours," Am. Jour. Public Health, Jan. 1947; "Research in the Nursing Field," Am. Jour. Public Health, Aug. 1950; "A Training Program for Nurses' Aides and Auxiliaries," Hospital Management, July 1956; International Conference on the Planning of Nursing Studies (1957), with Ellen Broe; and "Training Nurses for Research Work," Internat. Nursing Rev., Oct. 1959. Useful articles on Arnstein include "Yale Nursing School Alumnae Meet New Visiting Professor," New Haven Sunday Register, Feb. 23, 1958; and "We See by the Papers," Smith Alumnae Quart., Winter 1966. An obituary (with photograph) appeared in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 9, 1972, and a tribute by Myron Wegman in Am. Jour. Public Health, Feb. 1973. Information was also derived from personal acquaintance and from her brother Robert Arnstein. Death certificate supplied by Conn. Dept. of Health.] NANCY MILIO

AUERBACH, Beatrice Fox, July 7, 1887-Nov. 29, 1968. Business executive, philanthropist. Beatrice Fox Auerbach, the elder of two daughters of Moses and Theresa (Stern) Fox, was born in Hartford, Conn., into a mercantile dynasty. (Her father had one daughter by a previous marriage who died in early adolescence. ) Both her grandfathers were part of the antebellum German-Jewish migration, and both had established locally important dry goods stores—Gerson Fox in Hartford about 1845 and Ferdinand Stern in Newburgh, N.Y., about 1857. Moses Fox took over the ever-enlarging Hartford store after the death of his father. Eventually his elder daughter inherited a major

38

Auerbach

Auerbach

share of the stock in the store as well as the family's style of personalized business management. Beatrice Fox attended local public and private schools and spent some time at the BenjaminDeane School, a private boarding school in New York City. She later joked that she had never received a diploma, "not even from Sunday School." Throughout her youth she often traveled in Europe with her family; on one such trip she met her future husband. On April 15, 1911, Beatrice Fox married George Auerbach, whose father had been among the first Jewish settlers in Salt Lake City, Utah, and a founder of its largest non-Mormon department store. George Auerbach worked in the family business. Beatrice Auerbach, a small, slight woman of great verve and charm, fulfilled family expectations by devoting herself to household and community affairs. The couple had two daughters, Georgette Fox (b. 1916) and Dorothy Brooks (b. 1919). G. Fox & Company was destroyed by fire in 1917, and, when Moses Fox decided to rebuild, George and Beatrice Auerbach were persuaded to move to Hartford. There George Auerbach took a major role in managing the new and enlarged store, and became secretary-treasurer of the company. In the 1920s, the Auerbachs bought Auerfarm, where they raised prize Guernsey cows, and, as her children grew, Beatrice Auerbach extended her community activities and commitments. The death of her husband in 1927 marked a turning point in her life. She went to work for her father, at first part-time, but gradually increasing her managerial responsibilities. Her aging, ailing parents moved into her home, and a household staff helped care for the extended family. When Moses Fox died in 1938, Beatrice Fox Auerbach became president of G. Fox & Company. Beatrice Auerbach ran G. Fox & Company from 1938 until 1965. During that time the business reportedly increased tenfold, making Fox's the largest privately owned department store in the country, and the largest in business volume between Boston and New York. More important, Auerbach was among the pioneers in such labor programs as the five-day-week, retirement plans, medical and nonprofit lunch facilities for employees, and a revolving fund (the Theresa Stern Fox Fund) to lend employees interest-free money in times of personal crisis. Fox's was also the first large department store to hire black employees for positions which offered advancement. Many of Auerbach's merchandising practices were also bold or innovative: a statewide toll-free telephone order department, free delivery service, and fully

39

automated billing. By 1959 an eight-milliondollar addition was required for floor space; it included Centinel Hill Hall, famous throughout the state for its free meeting facilities for nonprofit organizations. Although her daughters' husbands eventually became key figures in the company's operation, Auerbach remained president until 1965, when she supervised the exchange of the privately held stock of Fox's (owned by herself, her sister, and the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation) for about forty million dollars worth of the publicly held stock of the May Department Stores Company. Auerbach's activities as a philanthropist and civic leader were consonant with her ideas about the role of a wealthy and cultivated woman in business. She supported and served on the boards of several schools, hospitals, and cultural organizations. One of her earliest and most continuous philanthropies, an example of her concern about professional education for women, was the Auerbach program in retailing and allied arts at Connecticut College for Women. From 1938 to 1959 the program provided an undergraduate major that combined academic preparation and apprenticeship. In 1941 she established the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation which helped finance educational and civic activities. Her carefully planned educational philanthropies were recognized by honorary degrees and citations from several colleges and universities. An important beneficiary of the Auerbach Foundation was the Service Bureau for Women's Organizations, founded in 1945. The bureau trained women's groups in techniques of community organization and engaged in topical studies that made it an informational resource for organizations throughout the state. The Service Bureau also became a center of local concern about international affairs and served as the host organization for the State Department's foreign visitor program. These activities also reflected Auerbach's growing interest in international affairs as she sought to reestablish contact with her European suppliers after World War II. Accompanied on a series of trips through Europe, Africa, and the Far East by Chase Going Woodhouse, a former congresswoman and professor at Connecticut College and then director of the Auerbach Service Bureau, she had an opportunity to look at the problems as well as the products of the countries they visited. By the time she died in Hartford in 1968, Beatrice Fox Auerbach had earned national recognition as an innovative merchandiser and a civic-minded philanthropist. [The Utah Biographic Sketches Coll. at the Bancroft

Baker

Baker

America," Am. Jewish Hist. Quart., Sept. 1976, pp. 137-54. Entries on Auerbach, her husband, her father, and her grandfather can be found in Rabbi Morris Silverman, Hartford Jews, 1659-1970 (1970). Biographical information about her maternal grandparents is in Wallkill Valley Publishing Association, The Historic Wallkill and Hudson River Valleys A.D. 1913, pp. 8 ^ 8 5 . The history of her husband's family is outlined in Leon L. Watters, The Pioneer Jews of Utah (1952), Studies in American Jewish History, no. 2, published by the Am. Jewish Hist. Soc. A biobibliography prepared by Glenda Hughes assisted in the research for this article. Additional information was provided by Auerbach's daughter Georgette Koopman and by Chase Going Woodhouse. Birth record supplied by Conn. State Dept. of Health.]

Library, Berkeley, Calif., contains information on the Auerbach family. Beatrice Fox Auerbach's uncatalogued personal papers are in her former home, donated to the Univ. of Hartford by her daughters. A collection of photographs of the Fox family, including Beatrice Fox Auerbach, is at the Jewish Hist. Soc. of Greater Hartford. The annual reports and other records of the Auerbach Service Bureau for Conn. Organizations (formerly the Service Bureau for Women's Organizations) have been deposited in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. The best published source of information about her travels, public appearances, statements, honors, and awards is the file of clippings at the Hartford Courant. In particular see a series of eight articles by Roger Dove, "Inside a Great Store," April 10April 17, 1955. Auerbach's career is also outlined in Irene D. Neu, "The Jewish Businesswoman in

DOROTHY ANN

LIPSON

B BAKER, Josephine, June 3, 1906-April 1975. Entertainer.

12,

Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Mo., the daughter of Carrie Martin McDonald, who was of African ancestry; her father, Edward Cason, was said to be of Spanish descent. Her mother later married Arthur Baker and had three other children, a son and two daughters. The family was desperately poor. They lived in East St. Louis, 111., when the riots occurred there in 1917; the memory of white thugs burning and killing in her neighborhood affected Josephine Baker deeply. A born entertainer who starred in basement theatricals as a child, Baker ran away from home at the age of thirteen to join a traveling vaudeville company. Her natural dancing and comic ability attracted attention and within three years she was appearing on Broadway, both in shows by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake ( Shuffle Along, 1921) and at the famed Plantation Club. Baker traveled to Paris with a show called La Revue Nègre in 1925. Since black entertainers and their hot jazz had caught on in the United States, the show's promoters hoped Parisians would respond similarly. But there was too much tap dancing, a dance form unknown to the French and horrible to their sensitive ears. The show soon closed and Baker was stranded in Paris. Fortunately, the director of the Folies Bergère, famous for its lavish sets and scantily

40

clad performers, decided to introduce a black act into the revue currently at the Folies and auditioned the members of La Revue Nègre who had remained. Baker's comic style attracted him, and she became the first black to star in a solo revue on the Paris stage. Clad in a G-string made of bananas and little else, she was supposed to do a dance number only, but the excited audience reaction stimulated the natural performer in her. She put on a one-woman show. She danced, she scat-sang, she clowned, and in a burst of abandon she leaped into the air and landed in a prop banana tree. It was pure vaudeville, but to the French it was the epitome of the new hot jazz, and the audience went wild. For the next four decades, Baker would evoke the same kind of excitement, for she never did the same thing twice. Billed only as "Josephine," she became a symbol of everything spontaneous, madcap, and full of the driving energy that was associated with jazz, not only in Paris but in the rest of Europe and in Latin America as well. She lived accordingly. Her lavish wardrobe, crowds of suitors, menagerie of exotic pets, and impulsive behavior became legendary. But Baker was unsuccessful in achieving two things she wanted: motherhood and stardom in the United States. In 1937 she married Jean Lion, a wealthy industrialist, and converted to Judaism. She also became a French citizen. The marriage effectively ended after Baker had a miscarriage in 1938, although she and Lion were not divorced until 1941. When World War II began, Baker went to

Balch

Baker work for the Red Cross. Soon she was approached by the French Resistance because her entrée into the upper levels of European society and the ease with which she traveled about Europe made her valuable as a gatherer of intelligence. She eagerly accepted the assignment, and her work for the Resistance and her tireless entertaining of troops in Africa and the Middle East earned her the highest French military honors. After the war, Baker plunged into another cause. With her second husband, Jo Bouillon, a successful band leader whom she married in 1947, she took steps to create a "showplace for brotherhood" at Les Milandes, her property in the Dordogne. There, they planned to raise adopted children of all races and religions. Baker eventually adopted twelve children. But her vision of Les Milandes as a World Village with accommodations for hundreds of tourists became ever more complicated and costly to realize. To finance her dream, she had to go back to work. Returning to the stage in the early 1950s, Baker was as successful as ever, and her success, coupled with her annoyance at an incident at the Stork Club in New York City, led to her involvement in yet another cause. In October 1951, while on tour in the United States, Baker was refused service at the Stork Club. Columnist Walter Winchell was in the club at the time. After Baker berated him for not coming to her aid, Winchell launched a vicious attack on her, branding her a communist and charging that she had consorted with Nazis and fascists during the war. The charges were completely unfounded, but the blot on Baker's name remained. In the United States, she began a crusade for racial equality. She refused to appear anywhere in her native country where blacks were not admitted and succeeded in integrating theaters and night clubs from Miami to Las Vegas. In 1963, at the climax of the famous March on Washington, she stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial with Martin Luther King, Jr., and delivered an impassioned speech to the huge crowd. Baker failed to achieve her World Village. By the late 1950s, she and Bouillon were separated. Bills for construction and staff at Les Milandes were astronomical, and she could not earn enough to pay them. In 1969, wrapped in an old blanket and clutching a kitten, Josephine Baker was dragged from her chateau, and Les Milandes was sold at auction for debts, for a fraction of its value. Nor did she realize her dream of an ideal arc-en-ciel tribù (rainbow family). By returning to work she had deprived her children of what they needed most—her

presence. Starved for her attention, they could not be managed by the succession of nurses and nannies and tutors who cared for them after Bouillon left. Princess Grace of Monaco provided a villa for Baker and the children who were not away at school, and in 1973 the irrepressible Baker made a comeback. She triumphed at Carnegie Hall and in April 1975 she repeated her success on the Paris stage. Two days after her last performance she died of a stroke. In the 1970s Josephine Baker considered the possibility of a film biography, but the project never materialized. As she told reporters in Los Angeles in 1973: " I would like to meet the woman who has the courage even to play my life story in a film . . . I do not believe the woman exists who would have the courage to have lived it as I have done." [The principal sources are Josephine Baker, Les Mémoires ( 1949); Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine, translated from the French by Mariana Fitzpatrick (1977); and Stephen Papich, Remembering Josephine ( 1976). Articles about her include "Josephine," Ebony, Dec. 1973; Charles L. Sanders, "A Farewell to Josephine," Ebony, July 1975; and Gossie Harold Hudson, "Not for Entertainment Only," Negro Hist. Bull., March-April 1977, pp. 682-83. Also see the entries in Current Biog., 1964, and Wilhelmena S. Robinson, Hist. Negro Biographies, vol. II (1968). The Biog. Encyc. and Who's Who of the Am. Theatre (1966) lists Baker as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, recipient of the Croix de Guerre (1939-45) and the Rosette de la Résistance, and NAACP Woman of the Year (1951). An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, April 13, 1975. Confirmation of her date of birth and her father's name was provided by the U.S. Passport Office. Several sources report that Baker's first marriage was to her manager, Pepito Abbatino, but this cannot be confirmed.l

41

JIM

HASKINS

KATHLEEN

BENSON

BALCH, Emily Greene, Jan. 8, 1867-Jan. 9, 1961. Peace advocate, social reformer, economist. Emily Greene Balch's steadfast labor for freedom and cooperation among individuals and peoples brought her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. Of old New England origin, she was born in Jamaica Plain, Mass., near Boston, the second daughter and second of the six surviving children (five girls and one boy) of Francis Vergnies and Ellen Maria (Noyes) Balch. Her father, a Harvard graduate and enlisted man by choice in the Civil War, served as secretary to Senator Charles Sumner before starting his career as a Boston lawyer. Her mother, who had

Balch

Balch

been an advanced student at the Ipswich Female Academy in Byfield, Mass., taught school in Mattoon, 111., before her marriage. The Balches, liberal Unitarians, examined religious and ethical precepts critically and Emily made their demanding standard her own. The family was close, with grandparents and unmarried aunts living in the home or nearby. Irish domestics helped with the children. Emily Balch remembered her mother as "quick-tempered and loving . . . the center of my life and its chief influence as long as she lived." Seventeen when her mother died, she then found in her selfless, learned father her most important guide and model. Though reserved and self-effacing, Emily Balch became a leader at Miss Catherine Ireland's School in Boston, where teachers nurtured independence of thought. At Bryn Mawr College, which she entered in 1886, she studied widely in the classics, philosophy, and modern languages before she found in economics a field which had a direct relation to "the social question." Earning her A.B. in 1889, she became the first recipient of the Bryn Mawr European Fellowship. The faculty perceived her as a woman of "unusual ability" and "extraordinary beauty of moral character." She herself hoped she would "not get lost in study or pursue it for pleasure beyond its best measure for my purpose, unknown to me as yet." Balch was dissatisfied with her pursuit of political economy at the Sorbonne (1890-91), for she studied the poor but met not one. The American Economic Association published the results of her research as Public Assistance of the Poor in France (1893). Eager for practical experience, Balch apprenticed herself to Charles W. Birtwell of the Boston Children's Aid Society. She found stimulus in working with such reform-minded Boston Brahmins as M A R Y MORTON K E H E W , and with trade union leaders John F. and M A R Y KENNEY O'SULLIVAN. More important, at Felix Adler's Summer School of Applied Ethics in 1892, she made friends of three contemporaries, J A N E A D D A M S , K A T H A R I N E C O M A N , a n d VIDA S C U D D E R .

A founder of Denison House, Balch agreed to head the new Boston settlement until her college classmate H E L E N A STUART DUDLEY arrived. By then she had rejected a career in social work, deciding that she could have greater impact as a college teacher by awakening "the desire of women students to work for social betterment." Encouragement and financial assistance from her father led to brief study at the Harvard Annex (1893) and the University of Chicago (1895). She also spent a year at the University of Berlin (1895-96) that included travel with

42

fellow student MARY KINGSBURY (SIMKHOVITCH) . Balch began her academic career at Wellesley College in 1896 as assistant to Katharine Coman in an economics course. Her own innovative courses treating socialism and Karl Marx, immigration, the theory of consumption, and the economic roles of women, drew on her experiences as a reformer. During the Wellesley years Balch served on numerous state commissions, including the first commission on minimum wages for women in the United States; she became cofounder and president of the Boston Women's Trade Union League (1902), supported striking workers, and spoke out against racial discrimination and class exploitation. In 1906 she declared herself a socialist and three years later she and Vida Scudder organized a socialist conference in Boston. Because of her radical extracurricular activities, Balch advanced slowly on the academic ladder. But in 1913 she received a five-year appointment as professor and chairman of the department of economics and sociology. By this time she had also established herself as a scholar of distinction. Her major work, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (1910), was a comprehensive study of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, for which Balch did two years of research in the United States and abroad. The book was unique not only in presenting the first-hand viewpoints of immigrants but also in countering the nativist racial assumptions of her society. Not bound by conventional attitudes toward women, Balch believed that as an unmarried professional she could take personal risks for the public good. World War I was her proving ground. A pacifist since the Spanish-American War, she took an active role in working for an early peace and joined the American delegation to the International Congress of Women at The Hague (1915). There she saw women from belligerent and neutral countries struggle with their differences and reach agreement on a plan to bring about peace by instituting continuous mediation before armistice. As one of the envoys chosen to gain support for the plan, Balch visited the neutral Scandinavian countries and Russia, and later conferred with British leaders and with President Woodrow Wilson. Although nothing came of these efforts, she remained hopeful about the prospects for peace, and in 1916 took part in the International Committee on Mediation in Stockholm, supported by Henry Ford. Based in New York City during a sabbatical (1916-17) and an unpaid leave (1917-18), during which she wrote for The Nation, Balch became a political activist. She opposed the war, conscription, and espionage legislation, and defended the civil liberties of conscientious objec-

Balch

Balch

tors and the foreign born. She served as liaison among peace groups including the American Union Against Militarism (the predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union), the national Woman's Peace party with Jane Addams as president, the more outspoken Woman's Peace party of New York led by CRYSTAL EASTMAN, and the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League. In 1917 Balch helped found the Emergency Peace Federation and supported its even more radical successor, the People's Council of America, an organization that called for a new social order. Unlike most reformers of her generation, Balch acceded to the flamboyant tactics of her young associates. She was conspicuous in newspaper accounts of mass meetings and demonstrations that linked her name with the socialist-Bolshevist fringe of pacifists. In 1919 the trustees of Wellesley College voted not to renew Balch's appointment, which had expired the previous year. At fifty-two, she was without a job or the security it had provided. Yet she ignored suggestions that she make her "firing" into an academic freedom case; she had knowingly risked her position in order to live her faith. As she wrote Wellesley's president, she could not "reconcile war with the truths of Jesus' teaching." During this period of crisis, Balch's religious convictions sustained her. Joining the London Society of Friends in 1921, for the rest of her life she found in Quakerism support for her vision of openness and cooperation. Significantly, this choice coincided with her rejection of socialism, which she believed had become too narrowly identified with Marxism. Balch was an important participant in the International Congress of Women held in Zurich, in May 1919, which issued the first public criticisms of the Versailles Treaty and established itself as a permanent organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom ( W I L P F ) . Balch, serving as paid international secretary-treasurer until 1922, set up the oifice in Geneva, established guidelines for the new organization, and made its primary focus the study and elimination of the causes of war. Setting out to influence the development of the new League of Nations, Balch lobbied for enlarging its membership, democratizing its structure, and recognizing the rights of minorities. She took special satisfaction in the admission of Albania in 1921 and in the League's protection of women and children deported from Asia Minor. She did not expect the League of Nations to resolve national and political rivalries, but perceived that the organization could bring peoples together through joint economic, scientific, and cultural efforts.

43

In 1922 Balch resigned from her demanding executive post. Thereafter her far-ranging influence in the WILPF was as a voluntary leader. She held many offices in the organization, serving as one of three cochairmen of the executive committee (1929-31), taking a brief second term as international secretary, this time without pay (1934-35), and succeeding Jane Addams as president of the American section (1931) and as honorary international president (1937). But Balch's leadership was much more than a matter of formal titles. A tireless writer, traveler, and organizer, she had a talent for enlisting the cooperation of diverse individuals and groups in the cause of peace. She had organized the third international congress in Vienna in 1921, traveling extensively in central Europe and the Balkans to encourage women to attend. She promoted peace education at several of the WILPF's summer schools, and in time she also helped develop sections of the organization in fifty countries. Holding together the WILPF's mixed international constituency—which included, among others, supporters of international revolution and absolute pacifists—was no easy feat. While some colleagues found Balch too patient, most recognized her genius for steering a group to consensus. Balch also undertook special missions for the WILPF. In 1926, with five other Americans, including two black women, she investigated conditions in Haiti, which had been occupied by United States marines since 1915. The resulting study, Occupied Haiti (1927), edited and written primarily by Balch, recommended removal of the troops and restoration of selfgovernment to the native black population. In 1930 President Herbert Hoover established an official commission; its conclusions, similar to those of the WILPF group, brought the occupation to an end in 1934. A gradualist in her work for peace, Balch remained flexible and pragmatic, judging each situation on its merits. Thus, despite her strong advocacy of disarmament and endorsement of the 1928 Kellogg-Briahd Pact to outlaw war, she believed that Germany should be allowed to rearm because other nations possessed that right and because clandestine rearmament seemed to her more dangerous. She also advocated the use of collective economic and political force to prevent war, urging President Hoover in 1932 to institute sanctions against Japan for invading Manchuria. During later crises in Ethiopia and Spain, she circulated proposals for mediation. In Refugees as Assets (1939) she appealed to the United States to welcome refugees from Nazi Germany on economic and cultural as well as humanitarian grounds. Deeply concerned

Balch

Balch about the threat of Hitler's domination of Europe and his treatment of the Jews, after Pearl Harbor Balch chose what she considered the lesser evil and supported the United States war effort. Unlike some interventionists, she did not resign from the W I L P F . Rather she encouraged its members to aid the JapaneseAmericans detained in camps in the United States. T h e idea of nominating Emily Balch for a Nobel Peace Prize originated with Mercedes Randall, who had met Balch as a young protester during World War I and had worked with her during the 1930s. Randall, with the help of her husband, Professor John H. Randall, Jr., found support for Balch's candidacy among distinguished leaders in many fields who attested to her courage, judgment, and dedication on behalf of people irrespective of race, religion, class, sex, or nationality. With this award the Nobel Peace Prize Committee recognized not only Balch herself but also the work of the W I L P F , affirming women's separate leadership in effecting social change. Balch, who shared the prize with John R. Mott of the Student Christian Movement, thus became the second American woman honored with the prize, the first being Jane Addams, with whom she felt the deepest personal kinship. After 1924, when the Jamaica Plain home she had shared with relatives became too expensive to maintain, Balch moved to Wellesley, Mass., where she created her "Domichek," the separate wing of a house owned by college friends. She lived frugally on a modest income that was augmented by occasional subsidies from affluent friends. Diminishing funds and old age forced Balch to spend her last four years in the Mt. Vernon Nursing Home in Cambridge, Mass. She died there of pneumonia in January 1961. Emily Balch, the plainest of gaunt New Englanders, had the gift of Yankee humor expressive of her common sense. T h e enduring impression she gave to all who met her was of an inner radiance and serenity. To the end she was outspoken on any issue of concern to her. During the cold war she did not condemn communism for those who chose it, but neither did she condone passivity in the face of Soviet expansion. At the height of China's isolation from the world, Balch wrote a poem, "A Letter to the Chinese People" ( 1 9 5 5 ) , declaring that ideological differences need not be a "barrier to love." To her delight, it was translated for its Chinese audience. Balch comprehended the layers of history that shape individuals, families, and nations. Valuing her own New England past, out of her respect for different cultural traditions she ultimately

44

identified herself as a citizen of the world. On a deeper level, Balch remained essentially private, trying to "live not only in the ordinary dimensions but also . . . in that other dimension which we call God." A fragment of her writing catches the limitless, enigmatic aspiration Emily Greene Balch held for human beings: "Speak of the great things/ Above Peace, above Freedom./ These are means, not ends." [Emily Balch's papers are in the Swarthmore College Peace Coll. Also at Swarthmore are the Mercedes M. Randall Papers and those of WILPF and other peace organizations. There is Balch material in the Wellesley College Archives; the Erin-Go-Bragh Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; and the O. G. Villard Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard Univ. Trustees minutes are in the Office of the President, Wellesley College. For a complete list of Balch's prolific writings see Mercedes M. Randall, ed., Beyond Nationalism: The Social Thought of Emily Greene Balch (1972), pp. 243-49. Of particular interest are "Who's Who Among Pacifists: The Position of the Emergency Peace Federation," March 20, 1917, in the Balch papers on microfilm, Swarthmore College Peace Coll.; "The Effects of War and Militarism on the Status of Women," Publications of the American Sociological Society, 1915, pp. 39-55; Balch's letter to Jane Addams, in Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (1930), p. 197; Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results, with Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton (1915, 1972); Balch's tribute to Jane Addams in Beyond Nationalism, pp. 205-11; "The Earth Is My Home," in Beyond Nationalism, pp. 238-39; and The Miracle of Living (1941), a collection of poems. Mercedes M. Randall, Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch (1964), is a full-length biography. See also John Herman Randall, Jr., Emily Greene Balch of New England, Citizen of the World (1946); Elizabeth Stix Fainsod, "Emily Greene Balch," Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bull., May 1947; and Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants (1956), chap. 9. For studies of American peace movements see Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1965 (1965); Charles Chatfield, For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914—1941 (1971); and Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1941-1960 (1969). For perspectives on the young radicals with whom Balch worked in World War I see The Reminiscences of Frances Witherspoon and Tracy Mygatt (1966), New York Times Oral History Program, in the Oral History Coll., Columbia Univ.; Four Lights (1917), the antiwar periodical for which Balch wrote occasionally (available at the Swarthmore College Peace Coll.); and Blanche Wiesen Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (1978). Two doctoral dissertations were useful: Blanche Wiesen Cook, "Woodrow Wilson and the Antimilitarists, 1914-1917" (Johns Hopkins Univ., 1970), and Barbara Steinson, "Female Activism in

Bambace

Bambace World War I: The American Women's Peace, Suffrage, Preparedness, and Relief Movements, 1914— 1919" (Univ. of Michigan, 1977). Helpful information was provided by Brand Blanshard, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Dorothy Detzer Denny, Patricia A. Palmieri, Anne-Margaret Osterkamp Lewenz, Bernice Nichols, Barbara Sicherman, and Wilma Slaight. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 11, 1961.] BARBARA

MILLER

SOLOMON

B A M B A C E , Angela, F e b . 14, 1898-April 3, 1975. Labor organizer and leader. Angela B a m b a c e was born in Santos, Brazil, to Italian parents, Antonio and Giuseppina (Calabrese) Bambace. Her father, the owner and operator of a small shipping company, had migrated to Brazil from Calabria, her mother from Sicily. Angela was the oldest of their three surviving children (two girls and a b o y ) ; a younger sister died in childhood. After moving back to Calabria in about 1900 when Antonio B a m b a c e became ill, the family emigrated to N e w York in 1901, settling in E a s t Harlem. There Giuseppina B a m b a c e found work trimming plumes for ladies' hats in order to support her children and ailing husband. At age eighteen, after attending high school, Angela Bambace started to work as a bookkeeper and clerk in a laundry. In 1918 she and her sister, Maria, went to work as operators in a shirtwaist factory, and the following year participated in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union ( I L G W U ) organizing strike. Both Bambace daughters developed reputations as effective organizers among Italian women; visiting workers' homes, they appealed to fathers to let their daughters participate in union activities. Giuseppina B a m b a c e sometimes marched with her daughters on the picket line, rolling pin in hand, to protect them from thugs hired to beat up strikers. In June 1919 Angela B a m b a c e married Romolo Camponeschi, a man chosen by her father who had emigrated from Rome and worked as a waiter in a Manhattan hotel. After the marriage, she left work to stay at home. The couple had two sons: Oscar, born in 1920, and Philip, born in 1923. During this period, she supported Italian-American antifascist and anarchist causes, including the defense of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. These activities conflicted with her husband's conventional views on politics and the role of women. In 1925 she decided to return to work, not only to supplement her husband's income but also to resume her organizing career. Taking a job as a dressmaker in a Manhattan shop, Angela Camponeschi became embroiled

45

in a power struggle within the I L G W U . She grew close to communists in the union, including Charles and Rose Zimmerman; joining the party herself, she backed communist-supported elements in several locals in their efforts to gain control of the I L G W U ' s governing board. The attempt failed, however, and her commitment to the union outlived that to the Communist party, which she left in 1929 following the party's expulsion of the Zimmermans for factional deviation. This period of intense political involvement also brought changes in Camponeschi's personal life. In 1927 she and her husband were divorced; soon after he won custody of their children, using her radical activities as evidence against her. Resuming her maiden name, Angela Bambace sought friendship among those who shared her convictions: Clara Larson, an anarchist who had emigrated from the Ukraine, became one of her closest comrades, and Luigi Quintilliano, an Italian anarchist writer and organizer, her companion. Working for the I L G W U and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America from 1927 to 1933, B a m b a c e expanded her predominantly Italian network of colleagues to include a number of Jewish union officials, welcoming them to the Flushing, N.Y., home she purchased and shared with her mother. While no longer their legal guardian, she remained close to her two sons for the rest of her life. In 1934 David Dubinsky, president of the I L G W U , acting on the recommendation of union leaders, including Charles Zimmerman, offered Bambace an important temporary assignment in Baltimore. Union efforts in that city had been slowed by the refusal of male cloakmakers to extend membership to less well-paid women in the industry; Bambace responded by organizing a local composed entirely of women. She fought against manufacturers' efforts to manipulate National Recovery Administration codes and expanded the work of the I L G W U by following "runaway" shops into small communities where they hoped to avoid union influence. Remaining in Baltimore, she assumed responsibility for dress and cotton shops with a high percentage of women workers and soon began to conduct organizing drives in outlying districts, serving as assistant manager of the I L G W U ' s Maryland Department. She also became involved in New Deal politics, modifying her earlier radical views and encouraging union members to support prolabor politicians. Bambace reunited her family in her new environment: Luigi Quintilliano joined her in the late 1930s, and both her sons attended Maryland colleges and later settled nearby. She also

Bancroft

Bambace retained close ties with friends and family in New York, including her mother, whose Flushing home remained a center for weekend gatherings. During World War II, her duties increased as war production stimulated the cotton garment branches of the industry in Virginia, West Virginia, and southern Pennsylvania. Bambace was appointed manager in 1942 of the newly created Maryland-Virginia District, which included all but the cloakmakers in Baltimore. Keeping in constant touch with union organizers in the field from her Baltimore office, she made a special effort to fight the prejudices she encountered in the upper south—the anti-Semitism directed against the union's largely Jewish leadership and the racism encountered by the black workers it recruited. Bambace became an important figure in the trade union movement despite the limited leadership opportunities it afforded to women. In New York, as a member of the Italian Dressmakers' Local 89, she could not advance beyond business agent; in Baltimore, however, operating in a looser power structure, she progressed from district manager to chief official of the Upper South Department (formerly the Maryland-Virginia District) in 1947. She achieved success as an administrator as well as an organizer, helping to establish an outpatient clinical service for union members in 1956 and a pension fund the following year. She was elected a vice president of the ILGWU's General Executive Board. The first non-Jewish woman to hold the post, her appointment reflected the increasing role of Italians in the union. Angela Bambace's career of service extended from her union to the broader problems of its communities. She was active in war relief programs, Histadrut (the Zionist labor movement), the Italian American Labor Council, the Americans for Democratic Action, and the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy named her to his Commission on the Status of Women. Retiring as a vice president of the I L G W U in 1972, into her last year she remained alert to the issues of labor and social justice to which she had responded with determination for nearly six decades. She died in Baltimore of cancer in April 1975.

tore Amico, Gli Italiani e L'Internationale Dei Sarti Da Donna Di Storie E Memorie Contemporanee (1944), p. 42. See also Marianne Alexander, "Angela Bambace, 1898-1975: Labor Organizer," in Winifred Helms, ed., Notable Maryland Women (1977), pp. 14-16; A. D. Glushakow, A Pictorial History of Maryland Jewry (1955), pp. 131-32; and Who's Who in Labor (1946), p. 15. An obituary appeared in the Baltimore Sun, April 4, 1975. Information provided by the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the Museum and Library of Maryland Hist., both in Baltimore, and by her sister, Maria Bambace Capraro, her sons, Philip Camponeschi and Oscar Camp, and by Charles and Rose Zimmerman, Clara Larson, Abraham and Edith Rosenfield, Margaret Frank, Edward Milano, May Lewis, Sarah Barron, Dora Feleman, and Henoch Mendelsund. Death certificate provided by Md. Dept. of Health.]

[Sources for a study of Angela Bambace are scarce. The Immigration Hist. Research Center, Univ. of Minn., St. Paul, holds some personal correspondence, photographs, and clippings on Bambace's career; it also houses the papers of her brother-in-law Antonio Capraro. Records beginning about 1939 for the Upper South Dept. of the ILGWU are deposited at the union's archives in N.Y. City. Bambace's role in the 1919 East Harlem strike is mentioned in Salva-

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J E A N A. SCARPACI

BANCROFT, Jessie Hubbell, Dec. 20, 1 8 6 7 Nov. 13, 1952. Physical education specialist. Jessie Bancroft, the first woman to direct a physical training program in a large public school system, was born in Winona, Minn., the daughter of Susan Maria (Hubbell) and Edward Hall Bancroft. Both parents came from New York, and both were of English ancestry. Edward Bancroft, like his father a pioneer in the development of rail transportation, had been superintendent of the Syracuse Northern Railway before moving westward with the railroads and settling in Winona, where he met his wife. After Jessie was born, the family moved to New York for a period of time, but returned to Minnesota during her teenage years. Bancroft's earliest interests in systematic exercise developed out of concern for her own health. Not a robust teenager, in the early 1880s she attended a lecture on exercise, diet, and hygiene. Becoming interested in the subject, she took private lessons to learn more about the exercises. In 1888 Bancroft attended the Minneapolis School of Physical Education to study anatomy, physiology, Swedish and German gymnastics, and the techniques of directing exercises for groups. Still undecided about whether she wanted to teach physical education, she enrolled at the Winona State Normal School ( 1 8 8 8 - 8 9 ) , completing the two-year kindergarten training course in one year. She decided, however, to choose physical education because it offered "larger possibilities for the future and greater assurance of my own health." Since it was difficult to find regular employment in an emerging field dominated by men, and not yet firmly established as a field for women, Bancroft began teaching "parlor classes" in various types of exercise. She also gave exer-

Bancroft

Bankhead

cise demonstrations at "churches, welfare societies or schools, using for the purpose a public hall, church, or assembly room, with admission charged and receipts divided between the society and the lecturer." After two years of this nomadic lecture circuit through Illinois and Iowa, she left the midwest to go to the Harvard Summer School of Physical Education (1891), one of the first schools of its kind. There she studied applied anatomy, mechanics of exercise, and dance gymnastics, and gained a "broad, eclectic view of 'systems' of exercise." Encouraged by friends to seek a teaching position in New York City, she soon learned that physical education there was not the advanced profession she had expected. Only after visiting all the teaching agencies and many of the private schools for girls in the city, and seeking the help of her friends, did she secure a series of part-time positions. For the next two years she lectured and taught at several schools and colleges. These part-time positions led to Bancroft's appointment in 1893 as director of physical training in the Brooklyn Public Schools, a post she held until 1903 when Brooklyn became one of the boroughs of New York City. In the reorganization of the city's physical training department in 1904, Bancroft was appointed assistant director for the New York City Schools, a post she held until her retirement in 1928. Bancroft attained both positions with neither a college degree nor the medical degree which was the chief credential of physical educators at the time. Her work was characterized by numerous and diverse accomplishments. She organized a graded course of gymnastic exercises for use by classroom teachers; classified games according to age groups and introduced them into the school curriculum; and added light apparatus to the exercise program, resulting in the establishment of the first public school gymnasium. She also used anthropometric measures of thousands of children in adjusting school furniture to their sizes and established methods for sight and hearing tests, reorganizing classroom seating from the results. Bancroft was a prolific lecturer and writer, publishing seven books and numerous periodical articles aimed at arousing interest in physical education. Her book Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium (1909; rev. ed. 1937) was considered "the most comprehensive and scholarly book on games then published in English" (Gerber, p. 3 6 1 ) . A modest and reserved individual who felt keenly her lack of formal education, Bancroft nevertheless played a significant role in the development of public school physical education. She also founded and was president of the American Posture

47

League. Her research was used to apply new principles to foot measuring and shoemaking; to the manufacture of school, factory, and office furniture; and to seating in subway trains. Honored for her accomplishments, Bancroft was the first woman to receive the Gulick Award for distinguished service in physical education ( 1 9 2 4 ) ; the first woman member of the American Academy of Physical Education; and the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Springfield College ( 1 9 2 6 ) . She was the first woman to serve as executive secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education (later the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation). Following her retirement Bancroft lived and traveled in England, France, and Italy. She died in Pittsfield, Mass., in 1952 of a heart attack. [For insight into Bancroft's professional ideas see her own works: School Gymnastics, Free-Hand ( 1 8 9 6 ) , Recess Games ( 1 8 9 5 ) , School Gymnastics with Light Apparatus (1897), The Posture of School Children ( 1 9 1 3 ) , Handbook of Athletic Games for Players, Instructors, and Spectators ( 1 9 1 6 ) , and numerous articles in the Am. Physical Education Rev. beginning as early as 1898. The best source of information on her career is her autobiography, "Pioneering in Physical Training," in the supplement to the Research Quart., Oct. 1941, pp. 6 6 6 - 7 8 (unidentified quotations are from this source). Additional biographical information may be found in Janice Carkin, "Recipients of the Gulick Award" (Ed.D. diss., Stanford Univ., 1952); Ellen Gerber, Innovators and Institutions in Physical Education ( 1 9 7 1 ) , pp. 3 5 7 - 6 2 ; and a short sketch in Emmett Rice, John Hutchinson, and Mabel Lee, A Brief History of Physical Education (5th ed., 1969), pp. 3 2 9 30. Her professional contributions are detailed in George J. Fisher, "Jessie H. Bancroft, EducatorAuthor-Pioneer-Philanthropist," Am. Physical Education Rev., Oct. 1924, pp. 4 7 6 - 8 0 ; Albert K. Aldinger, "Reports of Local Societies," Am. Physical Education Rev., Nov. 1924, pp. 5 4 0 - 4 3 ; and Ruth Evans, "Jessie H. Bancroft," Jour. Health, Physical Education and Recreation, May-June 1960, p. 50. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Nov. 14, 1952, with a photograph. Death certificate supplied by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] MARY

L.

REMLEY

BANKHEAD, Tallulah Brockman, Jan. 3 1 ( ? ) , 1902-Dec. 12,1968. Actress. Tallulah Bankhead, with sheer perseverance and with little help from studios or agents, successfully made herself famous. Her eccentricities were staggering, her performances varied enormously, and most of her career was devoted to mediocre exhibitions of her legendary style. But no stage actress in this century has been so sue-

Bankhead

Bankhead

cessful at molding her own life into a stunning theatrical role. Although her father at one time aspired to a theatrical career, it was into a prominent political family that Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born in Huntsville, Ala. Both her father and her grandfather had long careers in the United States Congress, her father, William Brockman Bankhead, serving as House speaker from 1936 to 1940. Tallulah's mother, Adelaide Eugenia (Sledge) Bankhead, died only weeks after the birth of Tallulah, her younger daughter, and the two girls were raised in turn by aunts, by grandparents, and, at times, by their father. It was from her paternal grandmother that Tallulah got her universally recognized first name. She revered her father, spoke glowingly of her family and her southern heritage, and predictably became an active Democrat, campaigning vigorously for Roosevelt, Truman, and Stevenson well before it was customary for entertainers to involve themselves in politics. Although the Bankheads were Episcopalian, Tallulah was educated in a number of Catholic girls' schools. In 1917, after her photograph won a contest in Picture Play Magazine, she abandoned school and won her family's consent to attempt an acting career in New York. A few low-budget films and her first stage appearance as an extra in The Squab Farm (1918) followed. But more important, by chance she and an aunt took a room at the Algonquin Hotel, the focal point of New York's theatrical and literary set. There she made numerous acquaintances (one of them, the actress Estelle Winwood, remained throughout Bankhead's life her most devoted friend), attracting them not only with her stunning looks but with the deliberately outrageous manners she was already cultivating. Although no important engagements resulted, she won a recommendation from British producer Charles Cochran, and, in what must surely have been the major decision of her career, sailed for England early in 1923. In very little time, Bankhead became a sensation in London, both as an actress with an enormous following (especially among the "gallery girls," young women in cheap seats who idolized her) and as a model for the "bright young things," the new generation that had emerged from the war determined to abandon the proprieties of the Edwardian age. In the eight years she spent in London, which she later called the happiest of her life, she appeared for the most part in dreadful plays; exceptions were Noël Coward's Fallen Angels (1925) and Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted (1926). But her roles were what her public

48

craved: daring creatures, dressed in Mayfair chic, dedicated to insouciant wit. In 1931 Bankhead succumbed to the lure of money and returned to America to make pictures for Paramount, which tried, with no success at all, to make her a "femme fatale" in the mold of Marlene Dietrich. Bankhead's various attempts at film acting were failures, with the exception of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat ( 1 9 4 4 ) , which won her the New York Film Critics' Award as Best Actress. The films themselves were no doubt to blame, although Bankhead's rather mannered acting and her impulses to crowd-pleasing were certainly better suited to the stage than to films. She came very close, however, to landing Scarlett O'Hara, the most sought-after film role in history. Bankhead's stage presence, which her contemporaries praised more than any other aspect of her acting, was in part a product of her stunning appearance. Although she was only five feet three, she dominated audience attention with her large, rather sorrowful eyes, luxurious blonde hair, and, particularly, her famous baritone voice. Most of her New York plays were memorable only because she was in them, but in 1939 Bankhead appeared in what she always considered her greatest role: the predatory Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's vicious portrayal of the postbellum south, The Little Foxes. With both play and actress receiving vast acclaim, Bankhead, for the first time, found herself regarded as a serious actress. She delighted in this new image and in 1942 showed herself worthy of it in a far more daring part, the "eternal temptress," Sabina, in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. Bankhead also appeared in plays by Clifford Odets, Jean Cocteau, Philip Barry, and George Kelly. Never afraid of the unusual play or the daring role, at the same time she preferred acclaim and a long run to real artistry. Consequently, she spent much of her time with badly written, shoddily produced plays on the road, or with lengthy runs of revivals such as Noël Coward's Private Lives and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. She yearned for great parts, but not enough to keep her away from easier successes, and Regina and Sabina remain the roles for which she is remembered. Bankhead was hindered too by her lack of training, either realistic or classical. Although she always insisted that acting should be entirely instinctive, her talents were definitely limited, as her one disastrous attempt at Shakespeare clearly revealed: she appeared as Cleopatra in 1937. Actor John Emery, who played Octavian in that production, was her only husband; they

Bankhead

Bara

were married Aug. 31, 1937, and divorced June 13, 1941. In the 1940s, Bankhead began working more and more in radio-and later, television—which, along with her lecture tours and nightclub and stock appearances, brought her to millions who had previously known her only by her vast reputation. Whether in guest appearances or as the hostess of "The Big Show" ( 1 9 5 0 - 5 2 ) , the National Broadcasting Company's starstudded radio attempt to forestall the inevitability of television, Bankhead always played the same role: the woman of wealth and sophistication at sea in the real world. She handled these assignments effectively, and it is unfortunate that the rise of television corresponded with her physical decline, since her stylized comedy may have been ideally suited to the new medium. In the theater, however, Bankhead was slipping, and her last stage appearance, in Williams's revision of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1964)—said to have been written for her—was a disaster. For some time she had been succumbing to a dependency on alcohol and pills and rapidly was reduced to appearing only in unfortunate parodies of her once-esteemed image: her last role was the Dragon Lady in the American Broadcasting Company's "Batman." Bankhead died in New York of emphysema complicated by pneumonia. How good Bankhead was can no longer be answered since her few films are no measure of her abilities. She certainly lacked the versatility of such a contemporary as K A T H A R I N E C O R N E L L , while the numerous shallow parts she played kept her from displaying the depth of a Vivien Leigh. Least of all could she ever subordinate herself to a script as any number of character players can effectively do. Her stature must depend on the strength of the Tallulah legend, a monumental achievement, to be sure, but one which must inevitably fade with time. [The Tallulah Brockman Bankhead Coll. in the Ala. Dept. of Archives and History, Maps and MSS. Div., consists of personal and family correspondence (1916-51) and press clippings (1917-69). An uncataloged collection of photographs, letters, scripts, and scrapbook items is in the Walter HampdenEdwin Booth Theatre Coll. and Library, N.Y. City. Bankhead's autobiography, Tallulah, appeared in 1952. Largely ghostwritten by Richard Maney, it cannot be entirely trusted. The most complete biography, Lee Israel, Miss Tallulah Bankhead (1972), is overly derogatory. Brendan Gill, Tallulah (1972), first published as a profile in the New Yorker, Oct. 7 and 14, 1972, includes a brief life, numerous photographs, and a full record of films, plays, and radio and television appearances. Kieran Tunney,

49

Tallulah—Darling of the Gods: An Intimate Portrait (1973), is a rather sentimental memoir. Biog. Encyc. and Who's Who of the Am. Theatre (1966) contains an almost complete list of her film and theater credits. See also Current Biog., 1941 and 1953, and obituary in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 13, 1968. No birth record is available, and Lee Israel presents some evidence that she was horn around Feb. 12, 1902, not Jan. 31.] JOHN

DAVID

SHOUT

BARA, Theda, July 20, 1885-April 7, 1955. Film actress. Theda Bara was born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio, the oldest of three children and elder daughter of Bernard and Pauline Louise (de Coppet) Goodman. She always kept her year of birth a secret, feeling that a woman who would tell her real age would tell anything. Her father was a prosperous Jewish tailor from Poland; her mother, born in Switzerland of French parents, was in the hair products business before her marriage. Goodman graduated from Cincinnati's Walnut Hills High School in 1903 and attended the University of Cincinnati from 1903 to 1905. Although her early theatrical career is obscure, she was apparently encouraged by her family, who moved to New York around 1905. In 1908, as Theodosia de Coppet, she appeared on Broadway in Molnar's The Devil. But she had no stirring success on the stage, and when in 1914 she was offered the leading female role in the film A Fool There Was, she readily accepted. She would later say proudly that she was one of the few who came into the movies directly as a star. The film was based on a Broadway play inspired by Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Vampire" and portrayed the machinations of a woman who ensnares and ruins a prosperous married man. Goodman was given a new name, Theda Bara (derived from the middle name of her maternal grandfather). She and her family approved sufficiently to change their names legally to Bara in 1917. A whole personality was fabricated for her as well, and Theda (pronounced Thayda) Bara became one of the most successful examples of press agentry. Readers of fan magazines were told that Bara was Arab spelled backwards; that her whole name was an anagram for Arab death; that she was born on an oasis in the shadow of the sphinx; that she was a child of exotic parents; that she had been a star of the Parisian theater. In order to preserve her mystery, Bara was kept distant from the public and from interviewers, and her rare personal appearances were carefully staged. Although the

Barker

Bara facts about her life were apparently available by 1915, journalists, as well as the public, preferred to foster the legend. Photoplay in September 1915 said that it chose "to disbelieve those stupid people who insist that Theda Bara's right name is Theodosia Goodman and that she is by, of, and from Cincinnati." A Fool There Was, released in 1915, was a significant box office success, helping to establish William Fox as a major producer. It also became the prototype of countless other films (many starring Bara herself) depicting a woman destroying a man. Bara's victims were wrecked morally, financially, and even physically, and seemed to die from sexual excess. Previously, films had most often depicted women as good and vulnerable creatures—hard-working seamstresses or faithful wives. American movie audiences in a puritanical age had seen nothing like this "bad" woman, and they flocked to see how she exercised her seductive talents. Men enjoyed her scanty clothes, her earrings, and her spangles. A number of women grew irate at this "husband stealer," wrote her vicious letters, and even defaced lobby posters. However, many women were avid fans, and adopted her sultry costumes, heavy makeup, and so-called exotic ways. A Fool There Was, with its famous line, "Kiss me, my fool!" made Theda Bara an institution. A new word entered the English language: to vamp, meaning to seduce, and the term vampire signified a Bara-like person until Béla Lugosi restored its former meaning. Between 1914 and 1919 Bara appeared in thirty-nine movies for Fox; only the first one survives. Her famous parts included Carmen and the notorious title role in Cleopatra ( 1 9 1 7 ) , in which she was scantily clad and rather busily seductive. The film was censored heavily in some states. Bara did not like being typecast and appeared as a poor girl in The Two Orphans ( 1 9 1 5 ) and as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet ( 1 9 1 6 ) . But audiences did not want their stars to break their molds. Like Mary Pickford (d. 1979) who was compelled to play the adolescent, Theda Bara was doomed to be the vamp. Although Bara at times relished her parts and enjoyed her eventual $4,000 a week salary, her portrayal of woman was not kind to her sex. In defense, she explained her role as the vengeance of women on men. The woman vampire is loved but does not love in return; she exploits men for their money and their sex, and, when they are exhausted of both, abandons them. The absurdity of Bara's vamp personifications seemed to go unnoticed by the public at first, but after much repetition and much imitation,

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by other stars and other studios, as well as some healthy satire, the exotic woman soon became ridiculous. After her contract with Fox ended in 1919, Bara announced that she wanted to be a "symbol of purity" and that her purpose was "to spread happiness." No one seemed to be interested in the new Bara and she reverted to type in a poor play, The Blue Flame, which was received with derision when it appeared on Broadway in March 1920. Although audiences laughed at it, they liked her, and the play did well at the box office on tour. In 1921 Bara married one of her film directors, Charles J. Brabin, and the couple had one of Hollywood's few successful marriages. She tried to make a comeback in The Unchastened Woman ( 1 9 2 5 ) , appeared in a Hal Boach comedy, Madame Mystery, in 1926, and then retired from the movies. Bara showed no bitterness. She and her husband lived in Beverly Hills and entertained frequently. Short, bosomy, and a trifle plump, Bara became a hostess famous for her gourmet meals. Her mother lived nearby, and she retained a strong sense of family. In February 1955 Bara entered a hospital in Los Angeles where she died two months later of cancer. [The Theda Bara Coll. in the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library, contains photographs, portfolios, scrapbooks, press books, reviews, and manuscript notes about Bara and her early years in Cincinnati. Additional material is in the Robinson Locke Scrapbooks in the same library. The Harvard Theatre Coll. has a clipping file. Cumulated Dramatic Index, 1909-1949, and Mel Schuster, Motion Picture Performers (1971) contain bibliographies of articles about Bara. Sources of information about her life and career include DeWitt Bodeen, "Theda Bara," Films in Review, May 1968, pp. 266-87 (which contains a list of her films); Alexander Walker, The Celluloid Sacrifice: Aspects of Sex in the Movies (1966); and an entry in Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. The 1885 birth date is confirmed by the U.S. Census (1900), which also shows her to be the oldest of three children. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, April 8, 1955; a death record was provided by Calif. Dept. of Public Health. Additional information was provided by Bara's goddaughter, June Millarde.] ARTHUR

LENNIG

B A R K E R , Mary Cornelia, Jan. 20, 1879-Sept. 15, 1963. Educator, labor leader. Mary Cornelia Barker was born in Atlanta, the eldest of three daughters of Dora Elizabeth (Lovejoy) and Thomas Nathaniel Barker. Both parents were of English descent, her father the son of a sea captain in the Bahama Islands, her mother the daughter of a plantation owner and local preacher in Greenville, Ga. Both were

Barker

Barker trained as teachers. They lived briefly in Atlanta before settling in Rockmart, Ga., where Thomas Barker was employed at the Methodist-affiliated Piedmont Institute and Dora Lovejoy Barker taught in the local public schools. Mary Barker entered Agnes Scott Institute in Decatur, Ga., in 1894. After her father's sudden death in 1896 the rest of the family moved to Decatur to live with Dora Barker's retired father. Living with her mother and sisters, Barker completed the diploma normal course and graduated from Agnes Scott College in 1900. She began her teaching career with oneyear appointments in the small Georgia communities of Stockbridge and McDonough, followed by two years at the Decatur Orphans Home. In 1904 Mary Barker commenced her forty-year career with the Atlanta public schools, teaching until 1921 and then serving as principal of the Ivy Street School ( 1 9 2 2 - 2 3 ) and the John B. Gordon School ( 1 9 2 3 - 4 4 ) . Barker and her two sisters, both educators, maintained a home in Atlanta throughout their adult lives; their mother lived with them until her death in 1931. Mary Barker's life combined dedication to public education and the teaching profession with an allegiance to the American labor movement. A proponent of John Dewey's philosophy of education, she was a creative force in the classroom, offering students an innovative curriculum and the newest teaching methods. A stern disciplinarian and a meticulously organized administrator, as a principal Barker combined the best of traditional school regime with the most stimulating of progressive techniques. She believed that administrators should operate schools democratically and protect both the rights of students and the freedom of teachers. Likewise, she encouraged teachers to work for better teaching conditions. Central to Barker's notion of teachers' rights, autonomy, and participation in the educational process was the development of a professional organization. In 1905 she was a founding member of the Atlanta Public School Teachers' Association (APSTA); by 1907 two-thirds of the teachers in the system had joined. Barker served on the board of the association and supported the group's efforts to increase salaries, to fight favoritism in the renewal of teacher contracts, and to assist the city's board of education in obtaining additional financial support for the schools. In early 1919 the city council finally met the association's demands for a significant salary increase. In May of that year an APSTA committee of which Barker was a member recommended affiliation with the American Federation of Teachers ( A F T ) . The membership

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approved, and the group became Local 89 of the three-year-old national union. In January 1920 Barker was one of five delegates of the teachers' union who took their places in the Atlanta Central Labor body, proud to be consummating the alliance between teachers and organized labor. For Atlanta's organized teachers, affiliation with the AFT and the Atlanta Federation of Trades meant increased clout with the board of education on the issue of salary increases, and a new sense of community responsibility. During Barker's tenure as president of the local, from 1921 to 1923, issues ranged from the perennial salary question to the matter of continuing education for teachers and the passage of a tenure law. In 1924 she vigorously supported the AFT's campaign for adoption of the constitutional amendment to end child labor. Barker gave Local 89 the firm leadership it needed in its early years and her demand that public officials, the school administration, and especially teachers themselves value and support the local had wide impact. For Barker personally, alignment with the AFT offered new opportunities for leadership. She attended her first national AFT convention in 1923 and in 1925 that body, in need of strong direction in an era of declining support, chose her as its third president. The AFT was then under both internal and external attack and membership had dropped precipitously. Under Barker's direction a special organizing fund was established, and by 1930 there had been a 50 percent increase in membership. During her sixyear presidency, the AFT adopted a specific legislative program advocating the improvement of school facilities, reduction in class size, the abolition of "factory standards" of production for schools, just compensation for teachers, and the provision of opportunities for all children to receive an adequate education. The program also dealt with the issues of academic freedom and tenure. Barker worked to protect the rights of members to speak freely and participate openly in union affairs. From early in her career Mary Barker was especially concerned about the welfare of southern women workers, particularly those who labored long hours in factory jobs for inadequate wages. In 1926 she was invited to join the organizing committee of the Southern Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. The school, directed by LOUISE MCLAREN, brought together workers from textile mills, garment factories, and the tobacco industry to teach them economics, principles of organizing, and labor history and train them as labor leaders. From 1927 until 1944 Barker chaired the

Barney

Barker school's central committee, finding there a community of women whose commitment to democracy in education and to the organization of women workers paralleled her own. A leader in the biracial movement in Atlanta, Mary Barker belonged to the Atlanta Urban League, the Committee on Interracial Cooperation, and the American Civil Liberties Union. She served on the board of the Phyllis Wheatley Branch of the local YWCA and encouraged black teachers to organize a union and negotiate for an equal salary schedule. In the thirties, Barker supported numerous appeals for political justice, including the campaign to free Angelo Herndon, a black communist convicted in Atlanta under an 1866 law of inciting insurrection. Despite her poor health in the years following her retirement in 1944, Barker remained active in organizations committed to social change, and retained both her sense of public responsibility and the security of her convictions. She died at her home in Atlanta of heart failure in 1963.

Tommie Dora Barker, and recollections of Barker as teacher and principal were provided by Frances Waggoner Strother. A biobibliography by Stephen H. Dew assisted in the research for this article. Death certificate supplied by Ga. Dept of Public Health.] MARY E.

FREDERICKSON

BARNEY, Natalie Clifford, Oct. 31, 1876-Feb. 2, 1972. Salon hostess, writer. Natalie Barney, hostess of a literary salon in Paris, was born in Dayton, Ohio, the elder of two daughters of Alice (Pike) and Albert Clifford Barney. Both of her grandfathers had made large fortunes, which left her parents and eventually Natalie and her sister, Laura, independently wealthy and free to follow their inclinations. Her mother was a remarkable woman who studied painting under Whistler and other masters and became an accomplished artist as well as a generous patron of the arts. Natalie's father, heir to a fortune made in building railroad cars, seems never to have done much of anything. He was chiefly interested in the social life of Washington, D.C., where the family moved when the girls were growing up, and Bar Harbor, Maine, where they spent summers. The two girls received their earliest education from a French governess and their first regular schooling at a boarding school, Les Ruches in Fontainebleau, while their mother studied painting in Paris. Before she entered her teens, Natalie Barney was completely bilingual, able to express herself with equal ease in French and English. She completed her formal education at Miss Ely's School for Girls in New York City (1894), spent the following summer on a European tour, and stayed on for another seven months in Germany, taking lessons in the violin, which she played quite well. Natalie Barney was born with every advantage—not only wealth but beauty, talent, intelligence, and an extraordinary magnetism. Launched in society in Washington at the age of eighteen, she enjoyed dancing and flirting with the rich and titled young men who courted her assiduously—French and English as well as American—and even went so far as to become engaged to several of them. But she had discovered at an early age that she was only attracted to her own sex, and she was destined to become the most daring and candid lesbian of her time. Returning to Paris in 1898 with her mother and sister, she became notorious when one of the great courtesans of the belle époque, Liane de Pougy, published the story of her seduction by a young American woman in a thinly disguised novel, Idylle saphique (1901).

[The principal manuscript sources are the Mary C. Barker Papers in the Emory Univ. Special Collections, which include correspondence, organizational records, clippings, and other printed material; and the Atlanta Public School Teachers' Assoc. Papers in the Southern Labor Archives at Ga. State Univ., which include correspondence, records of conventions and meetings, financial and other reports, office files, clippings, newsletters, and pamphlets. The papers of Mary Barker's sister Meta Barker are in the Atlanta Hist. Soc. Coll. Articles by or about Mary Barker were published in the AFT's Am. Teacher magazine, March 1928, Oct. 1930, and Feb. 1964, and in the Jour, of Lahor, published by the Atlanta Federation of Trades, 1925-40. Her article, "The Public-School Teacher Awakes" appeared in The Labor World Supp., May 1, 1931. Information about her career is available in the American Lahor Jear Book for 1926 and 1932. Other sources that include references to her work are the Commission on Educational Reconstruction, Organizing the Teaching Profession: The Story of the American Federation of Teachers ( 1 9 5 5 ) ; William Edward Eaton, The American Federation of Teachers, 1916-1961: A History of the Movement (1975); loseph W. Newman, "A History of the Atlanta Public School Teachers' Association, Local 89 of the American Federation of Teachers, 1 9 1 9 - 1 9 5 6 " (Ph.D. diss., Georgia State Univ., 1 9 7 8 ) , and "The Social Origins of Atlanta's Teachers: 1881, 1896, 1922," Urban Education, April 1976, pp. 115-22; Aileen W. Robinson, A Critical Evaluation of the American Federation of Teachers ( 1 9 3 4 ) ; Wayne J. Urban, "Organized Teachers and Educational Reform During the Progressive Era: 1 8 9 0 - 1 9 2 0 , " Hist, of Education Quart., Spring 1976, pp. 3 5 - 5 2 . An obituary appeared in Am. Teacher, Feb. 1964, p. 19. Information about the Barker and Lovejoy families was supplied by Mary Barker's sister

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Barney

It was but the first of a number of novels about Natalie Barney's many love affairs. By this time Natalie Barney was launched on a writing career of her own, having published in French a volume of love poems, Quelques portraits-sonnets des femmes ( 1 9 0 0 ) , illustrated by her mother. She continued to write until her old age, not only poetry but drama, fiction, memoirs, and epigrams, but never to take her writing very seriously. Instead, she believed in making her life a work of art, of which her writings were merely the by-product: her poems were addressed to the women she loved, her dialogues expressed her Sapphic ideals, her plays were designed as entertainments to be performed by friends. Barney's early work is occasionally interesting for her emancipated views, although even as a feminist she seems never to have dedicated herself wholeheartedly. She did attempt to encourage women writers, giving receptions in her salon in celebration of new books by friends and establishing in the late 1920s an Académie des Femmes to give women writers an opportunity to read from their work. For some years she gave an annual prize to a woman writer, named in honor of Renée Vivien, a fragile English poet who died young, with whom Barney had had a celebrated love affair. Most of Barney's writing is in French, as she found its spirit more akin to her own than English. Like her mother, she also preferred Paris and the company of creative people to the fashionable society of Washington. After 1902, when the death of her father left her financially independent, she settled permanently in Paris. There she exercised all her charms, not only in her love affairs but also in cultivating the friendship of writers, scholars, and statesmen, older men for the most part, who appreciated her personal radiance, intelligence, and wit. Her most famous conquest was of the writer Remy de Gourmont who, old and disfigured by illness, had become a complete recluse. He made Barney famous by addressing her in his Lettres à l'Amazone, essays inspired by their conversations and published in the influential fortnightly Mercure de France during 1 9 1 2 - 1 3 . In 1909 she had moved to a house at 2 0 rue Jacob that was to become a literary landmark, the setting for her international salon. Here Natalie Barney found her true calling, presiding over her weekly receptions for some sixty years. The salon—at its height in the 1920s and 1930s—provided a focus for her best writing, which appeared in the form of epigrams and memoirs. The epigrams give some idea of the conversation of the salon, distilling its essence in wise and witty observations, most of them

her own, as suggested by the title of one collection, Pensées d'une Amazone ( 1 9 2 0 ) . Her three volumes of memoirs, of which the best known was Aventures de l'esprit ( 1 9 2 9 ) and the best Souvenirs indiscrets ( 1 9 6 0 ) , chronicle her literary friendships and provide a roster of those who came to the salon at one time or another. She included such names as Rilke, D'Annunzio, Valéry, Cocteau, Gide, Colette, Bernard Berenson, Max Jacob, and GERTRUDE STEIN, but omitted others who came but were less known in France—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Edith Sitwell, Janet Flanner, and Djuna Barnes. Barney's last book was another volume of memoirs, Traits et portraits ( 1 9 6 3 ) , completed in her eighty-seventh year. She continued to conduct her salon almost to the end. But long before this the salon had become an anachronism and dwindled to a small band of frail survivors. Natalie Barney herself had long outlived her own era and all her contemporaries. The last to go was her beloved friend the painter ROMAINE BROOKS, who died in December 1970. After a relationship that survived more than fifty years, they became estranged in 1969, Brooks refusing to share Barney's love and home with a third woman, Janine Lahovary. Devastated by Brooks's death, Natalie Barney lived on for a little more than a year as an invalid in the Hôtel Meurice in Paris. She died there quietly at the age of ninety-five. [Natalie Barney's papers are at the Fonds Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, which has published a catalog, Autour de Natalie Clifford Barney (1976), comp. François Chapon, Nicole Prévôt, and Richard Sieburth. Some of her letters and other MSS. are in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Univ. Two biographies have been published, both with illustrations : George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters (1976), and Jean Chalon, Portrait d'une Séductrice (1976), translated as Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney (1979).] GEORGE WICKES

BARNEY, Nora Stanton Blatch, Sept. 30, 1 8 8 3 Jan. 18, 1971. Civil engineer, architect, suffragist. Nora Blatch was born in Basingstoke, England, where her English father, William Henry Blatch, owned a brewery. Her mother, HARRIOT STANTON B L A T C H , and her maternal grandmother, E L I Z A B E T H CADY STANTON, descendants of pre-revolutionary English settlers in America, led successive generations of the American women's rights movement. Nora's younger sister and only sibling died in childhood, and Nora was raised with the help of a governess. The Blatches

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to winning the vote for women in New York state. She was a key member of the Women's Political Union, editing its publication, Women's Political World, and serving first as executive secretary and later as president of the organization upon her mother's resignation from that post in 1915. She marched, made street-corner speeches, and rode on horseback in a parade across the state in 1913 as part of the organization's dramatic efforts to publicize women's demands for the vote, finally granted in 1917. Like her mother, she later worked through the National Woman's party for a federal Equal Rights Amendment and opposed protective legislation for working women. In 1919 she married Morgan Barney, a successful naval architect who designed yachts and commercial boats. The Barneys had two children, Rhoda (b. 1920) and John (b. 1922). In 1923, with money from her father's estate, Nora Barney established herself as a real estate developer in Greenwich, Conn. Earlier she had done some work as an architect and developer on Long Island, beginning around 1914. But in Greenwich, building homes became a full-time venture. While completing a house, she moved in with her family, including her childhood nurse and governess, who now cared for Barney's three children. Once the house was sold, the family moved to another semifinished dwelling. Finally, in 1935, Nora Barney designed a waterfront home in Greenwich for her family and they settled there permanently. She continued to build large, gracious, traditional, and expensive residences for the wealthy suburban community. Until her death at home of a stroke in January 1971, she made her living primarily from real estate development, although in 1934 she accepted an appointment as an engineering inspector for the Public Works Administration in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Morgan Barney died in 1943. In her later years, Nora Barney remained politically active. World War II aroused her concern for achieving peace and in her pamphlet World Peace Through a Peoples Parliament (1944) she argued for the creation of a democratic house of world government consisting of one woman and one man representing sixty different economic and professional groups. She hoped such a body would cut through ideology and nationalism and give women a large role in winning peace. Barney supported Henry A. Wallace for president in 1948 and urged an immediate cease-fire in Korea four years later. In 1950, she was investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for her membership in the Congress of American Women. Though she never testified, Barney

lived in a large house in Basingstoke where British suffrage leaders and members of the Fabian Society were frequent visitors. During the 1890s, the family traveled often between England and the United States, before moving to New York City when William Blatch retired. In 1901, after graduating from the Horace Mann School in New York, Nora Blatch entered Cornell University. Her high math aptitude and the scarcity of women in the field led Blatch to study civil engineering: she was elected to Sigma Xi, an honorary scientific society, and worked on a survey of New York state water resources. Blatch also organized a woman suffrage club at Cornell before graduating cum laude in 1905, the first woman at Cornell to receive a degree in civil engineering. After college, Nora Blatch worked from 1905 to 1906 as a draftsman for the American Bridge Company and for the New York City Board of Water Supply the following year. In 1906 Blatch met Lee de Forest, an American inventor who developed the radio vacuum tube. Blatch studied electricity and mathematics with Michael Pupin at Columbia University in order to become de Forest's laboratory assistant. Married in February 1908, Lee and Nora de Forest spent their honeymoon in Europe demonstrating radio equipment to win contracts for de Forest's newly organized company. Despite her husband's wish that she stop working, Nora de Forest became involved in the company's manufacturing and criticized its financial practices; her judgment proved accurate for the company soon failed. These professional strains were accompanied by personal ones. When she became pregnant, Nora de Forest moved alone to a rented cottage near the company factory in New Jersey; after the birth of their daughter, Harriet, in June 1909, the de Forests filed separately for divorce. Nora de Forest then returned to New York City, where she worked first as assistant engineer and chief draftsman for the Radley Steel Construction Company for three years, and then as an assistant engineer for the New York Public Service Commission. In May 1912, she was granted a divorce; she received custody of her daughter and the legal right to use her maiden name. (She does not seem to have used it, however.) She drew public attention in 1916 in another court case, this one involving the American Society of Civil Engineers. The first woman member of the ASCE, Nora de Forest was dropped from the society when she passed the age limit for junior status; her suit for reinstatement was unsuccessful. Throughout this period, from 1909 to 1917, Nora de Forest devoted much time and energy

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denounced the committee's investigations in a letter to Representative John Wood, describing the movements for racial justice and sexual equality as profoundly American. A forceful, energetic woman, Nora Barney combined political activism with professional success. In her writings and her life, she revealed a strong sense of continuity with the democratic and feminist tradition of which her grandmother and mother had been an important part. She carried that tradition forward by her insistence that women seek full legal and professional, as well as political, equality. [Nora Stanton Barney's publications include an engineering article, "Discussion on 'Works for the Purification of the Water Supply of Washington, D.C.,' " Transactions of the Am. Soc. of Civil Engineers, Dec. 1906, pp. 400-8. Barney also wrote two other pamphlets, Women as Human Beings (1946) and Life Sketch of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1948). Barney's life and thought is best traced in letters and articles which appeared in the N.Y. Times between 1909 and 1945. Other sources include Lee de Forest, Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee De Forest (1950); Georgette Carneal, A Conqueror of Space: an Authorized Biography of the Life and Work of Lee De Forest (1930); and Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years (1940), which contains two photographs of Barney. For the House Committee on Un-American Activities profile of Nora Stanton Barney see 81st Cong., 2d sess., House Report 1953 (1950), pp. 102, 103. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 20,1971, and Civil Engineering, April 1971, p. 87. Barney's high school graduation date is confirmed by the Horace Mann School; death certificate provided by Conn. Dept. of Health. Additional information was provided by Barney's children, Rhoda Barney Jenkins and John Barney. They have a collection of their mother's correspondence as well as photographs of her and of many of the houses she designed.] TERRY

KAY

ROCKEFELLER

BARRON, Jennie Loitman, Oct. 12, 1 8 9 1 March 28, 1969. Judge, lawyer, suffragist, community leader. Jennie Loitman was born in Boston's West End, the third of four daughters of Morris and Fannie (Castleman) Loitman, Jewish immigrants who had left eastern Russia to escape the tsar's conscription. Their Boston home became a center for new immigrants, for whom Jennie's mother, who knew five languages, acted as interpreter. The Loitmans worked in the needle trades until Morris Loitman became an agent for New York Life Insurance Company. A founder of the Hebrew Progressive Lodge, he often took Jennie to meetings where he would stand her on a table to recite poetry.

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Jennie Loitman's parents brought up their daughters as they would have raised sons; three of them later became professionals. After graduating from Girls' High School in 1907, together with her two older sisters, Jennie entered Boston University, earning her A.B. ( 1 9 1 1 ) , L L . B . ( 1 9 1 3 ) , and L L . M . ( 1 9 1 4 ) . To meet her college expenses, she taught Americanization classes and worked in the Women's Educational and Industrial Union's department of law. Becoming active in the woman suffrage movement, she organized Boston University's league for equal suffrage. She was invited by MAUD WOOD PARK to speak at open-air meetings of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government and later took part as a street-corner speaker in the successful New York suffrage campaign in 1917. Loitman married her childhood sweetheart, Samuel Barron, Jr., a distant cousin, on June 23, 1918. Barron, who had come to Chelsea, Mass., from the Ukraine as a child, had recently graduated from Harvard Law School. He was always supportive of his wife's career goals. Together they set up a Boston law firm, Barron and Barron; Jennie Barron remained in practice with her husband until 1937. She also continued her work for women's rights. As president of the Massachusetts Association of Women Lawyers, Barron organized the successful campaign to allow women to become notaries ( 1 9 1 8 ) . Working with the League of Women Voters ( L W V ) in its efforts to organize the newly won women's vote, she served as chairman of the state League's committee on uniform laws and as delegate to a federal commission on uniform marriage and divorce laws. She also wrote the national L W V statement arguing for women's service on juries. After the birth of her daughters Erma ( 1 9 1 9 ) and Deborah ( 1 9 2 3 ; died 1 9 5 6 ) , Barron increasingly emphasized the values of motherhood and family in her work. She later had a third daughter, Joy (b. 1 9 3 1 ) . Soon after Erma entered public school, Barron ran for a seat on the five-member Boston School Committee. Although she was active in the Woman's Republican Club, she gained support from a nonpartisan group of women. Running on the slogan "Put a Mother on the Boston School Committee," she received the second highest vote. T h e only woman member from 1926 through 1929, Barron exposed substandard school conditions and advocated an adequate building program. She also urged the appointment of a Yiddishspeaking attendance officer. Barron decided not to seek reelection in 1929 because she could not accomplish her goals. In that year's mayoralty race, she campaigned for

Barry

Barron the candidate opposing James Michael Curley, focusing on school issues. Curley attacked her on the false charge of having secured an old brewery for storing school supplies instead of supporting new school construction. Barron retaliated in a dramatic midnight radio appeal, accusing him of smearing "the fair name of all womanhood in Boston," but Curley won the election. Despite this defeat, Barron was well connected politically. She became a director of the Home Owners Federal Savings and Loan Association, which her husband acquired and reorganized in 1933, with the support of her brother-in-law Joseph Grossman, a prominent Republican and member of the Governor's Executive Council ( 1 9 3 3 - 3 7 ) . Barron reentered public life in 1934, beginning her thirty-year career as a judge. She was appointed by the governor as a special justice (part time) of the Western Norfolk District Court, serving until 1937. Concurrently she served as an assistant attorney general for Massachusetts ( 1 9 3 4 - 3 5 ) . Her greatest opportunity came in 1937 when the governor named her an associate justice of the Boston Municipal Court, a position she held from 1938 to 1959. The first woman in the Commonwealth to become a full-time judge and the only woman until 1977 to serve on the nine-member court, she was known for her empathy with defendants. Her decisions were pragmatic ones, emphasizing the reconciliation of families and rehabilitation rather than upholding the letter of the law. She often placed youthful offenders on probation, rather than in prison, sometimes assigning them to do volunteer community work. In 1959 Barron was elevated to associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court, and became known for encouraging litigators to settle their own differences. The first woman to hold the associate justice position, she served until her death. Over the years, Barron served on the boards of many organizations, particularly in the Jewish community. As first president of the Women's Auxiliary of Beth Israel Hospital from 1926 to 1929, she pulled together separate auxiliaries to form essential support for a new building. She also served on the first board of the Brandeis University National Women's Committee ( 1 9 4 9 - 5 5 ) , as first president of the New England Women's Division of the American Jewish Congress, and on the national boards of Hadassah and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. In 1955 she was the only woman delegate to the first United Nations Congress on crime prevention. Throughout her career, Barron remained close to her family, who assembled at her table every Friday night for the beginning of the Sabbath.

In 1959, the year in which she also received an honorary L L . D . from Boston University, Barron won the honor she considered her greatest achievement: American Mother of the Year. To celebrate the Barrons toured Europe, Israel, and the Soviet Union. In 1 9 6 3 they visited the Far East and Africa under the People to People program. T h e Barrons observed their fiftieth anniversary in June 1968; Sam Barron died a week later. Less than a year later, Jennie Loitman Barron died in Beth Israel Hospital in Boston a few days after suffering a heart attack. [A small collection of Barron's papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, includes biographical material, articles by and about her, and speeches. Her LWV pamphlet, Jury Service for Women (Dec. 1924), is in the library's Woman's Rights Coll. The library also has Dick Home, "Women Who Won," typescript, W E E I - C B S radio broadcast, Aug. 25, 1960, in which Barron and several other women speak about the suffrage movement. Clipping files are available at the School of Public- Communication, Boston Univ., the Boston Herald-American, and the Boston Globe. Barron's career can be traced in Manual for the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1929-30 through 1977-78, and Proc. of the School Committee of the City of Boston, 1926-29. See also Durward Howes, ed., American Women, 19351936, and Dorothy Thomas, ed., Women Lawyers in the United States (1957). An obituary appeared in the Boston Globe, March 29, 1969. Additional information was provided by Barron's sisters Rose Loitman and Dr. Clara Loitman Smith, her daughter Erma Barron Wernick, and Judge Jacob Lewiton. Death certificate from the Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] POLLY

WELTS

KAUFMAN

B A R R Y , Iris, March (?) 1 8 9 5 - D e c . 2 2 , 1969. Film historian and critic, writer. Iris Barry knew earlier and perhaps better than anyone the importance of motion pictures. From 1913 on she went to the movies steadily, and by the time she died, she had seen more than 15,000 films and "made a profession of her vice." She organized an exceptional film archives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and it was her work that led to the serious consideration in the United States of film as art. Iris Barry was born Iris Sylvia Crump in Washwood Heath, near Birmingham, England, probably in March 1895—the year the movies were invented. She was the daughter of Alfred Charles Crump, a brass founder, who left the family while she was a baby, and Annie Crump, a gypsy-like woman with a fondness for fortunetelling and crystal-gazing. Iris's mother and grandparents, who were dairy farmers, raised

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her and sent her to convent school, first in England and then to the Ursuline Convent in Verniers, Belgium. Although she passed the qualifying examinations for Oxford in 1911, her entry was deferred, and she went to France. World War I intervened, and she returned to Birmingham where she worked at routine jobs, went to the movies as often as possible, and wrote verse. Some of her poems were published in Poetry magazine and caught the attention of Ezra Pound, with whom she began to correspond. Eager for the literary life, in 1916 or 1917 she went to London. She was, in her words, "serious as all get out and fairly fresh out of a convent, an only child and a solitary one, very romantic." Pound introduced her into the liveliest circle of artists and writers of the time, including the author and painter Wyndham Lewis, just returned to London from the front. He and Barry became lovers, and Lewis was the father of her two children, a son born in 1919, and a daughter born in 1920. The children were raised by Iris Barry's mother and only came to know their mother later in life. During these early years in London Barry proved herself a clever and resolute young woman. She knew everyone there was to know, tried various jobs, and not only went to the movies every day but also began writing about them, having been given the chance to review films for theaters controlled by business executive and film enthusiast Sidney Bernstein. Her first book, Splashing Into Society, an amusing story about art and success, was published in 1923, and in the same year she was invited to review films for the Spectator. The first woman film critic in England, for four years she wrote bright and penetrating criticism for the magazine. Soon after joining the Spectator, she married its literary editor, Oxford poet Alan Porter. Barry soon established herself as a devoted cinéaste of rare talent with an omniscient knowledge of films. In 1925, with Sidney Bernstein, filmmaker and writer Ivor Montagu, and others, she took on the censors and the film trade to found the London Film Society, the first organization to promote and support the showing of films. Her second book, Let's Go to the Pictures (1926), about "why we slink into the cinema and what happens to us there," was a trenchant and illuminating analysis of the cinema as both entertainment and art. In 1925 Barry became film critic for The Daily Mail, but that job ended in 1930, when she was fired for writing an unfavorable review. Her marriage to Alan Porter, which seems not to have had much importance for either of them, ended as well, though both left England for the United States,

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he to teach English at Vassar College, and she to make her own way in Hollywood and New York. (Porter died in the early 1940s.) Iris Barry arrived in New York, as she had in London, with little money but with much ingenuity and intelligence. She confidently established herself in the circles of such wealthy patrons of art as Philip Johnson and Kirk and Constance Askew and thus gained entry into the Museum of Modern Art. In 1932 she was hired to begin its library; three years later the Film Library was established and Iris Barry was there to become its first curator. Her knowledge and her undeviating devotion to the cause of the cinema made her outstandingly qualified to accumulate, catalog, preserve, exhibit, distribute, and circulate films, and to begin the process of defining the motion picture as an art form. The task was enormous: she had to win the attention and understanding of the motion picture industry, collaborate with the trade, and convince Hollywood and others that films were art and should be respected and saved in order to be seen again and again. To these ends Iris Barry wrote innumerable catalogs, screen programs, and film notes for the museum bulletins and for Film Library publications. She also began immediately to acquire films, going first to Hollywood to win over that community to her cause, and in 1936 making the first of many trips to Europe to visit film archives, and to search for and collect films. She also lectured and taught, developed film programs for distribution to colleges and museums, and published two more books, a translation of The History of Motion Pictures by Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach (1938), and D. W. Griffith, American Film Master (1940). In 1939 Barry became the founder-president of the International Federation of Film Archives, a significant achievement for the cause of film study, preservation, and cooperation among supporters of the cinema. Iris Barry became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1941. She married again in the early 1940s; her second husband was John E. "Dick" Abbott, a Wall Street financier who shared her interest in film. He became the first director of the Film Library at the Museum of Modern Art. Barry was generally regarded as the more intelligent and talented of the two and the marriage seems to have been one of convenience. Abbott eventually moved on to other administrative positions within the museum and Barry became director as well as curator of the Film Library. By 1950 they were divorced. Barry left the museum for Europe at the

Barrymore

Barry

Pound Period," The Bookman, Oct. 1931. The best published sources on her life are Ivor Montagu, "Students of Film Throughout the World Have Lost Their Most Respected Pioneer," Sight and Sound, Spring 1970; Alistair Cooke, "To Iris Barry (18951969)," N.Y. Times, Jan. 18, 1970; and Arthur Knight, "I Remember MOMA," The Hollywood Reporter, April 21, 1978. See also Russell Lynes's informative book, Good Old Modern (1973). An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 23, 1969; the London Times published an obituary, Jan. 1, 1970, and a tribute, Jan. 3, 1970. A baptismal record, confirming her parents' names and giving the date of baptism as June 2, 1895, was provided by the parish of Saltley, Birmingham. Correspondence and conversations with friends of Iris Barry including Margareta Akermark of the Museum of Modern Art, Arthur Knight, Elsa Lanchester, Jay Leyda, Dorothy Miller, Ivor Montagu, Elodie Osborne, Alan Porter, Paul Rotha, and Virgil Thomson, were invaluable.]

end of 1949 and did not return; the reasons for her departure remain unclear. In that year, she had been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for her work on behalf of French film. She continued as the museum's representative abroad, attending film festivals, acquiring movies for its collection, and encouraging film scholarship, but she seldom returned to New York. With a young Frenchman named Pierre Kerroux she settled in Fayence, Var, in the south of France, where they gardened, renovated houses, and opened an antique shop. In 1955, suspected of communist sympathies, she had difficulty renewing her United States passport, but after friends at the museum confirmed her affiliation the problem was resolved. By 1969 Iris Barry was ill, alone, and, as had often been the case throughout her life, in need of money; loyal and affectionate colleagues and friends from the museum came to her aid with funds for hospital bills and expenses. She died that year of cancer in Marseilles after a dramatic, pioneering life, full of loves and adventures, as well as difficulties and regrets, and marked always by her determination to get what she wanted for herself and for films.

MISSY

DANIEL

BARRYMORE, Ethel, Aug. 16, 1879-June 18, 1959. Actress. Ethel Barrymore was born in Philadelphia, Pa., into a family of actors and grew up amid the emblems and traditions of a theatrical dynasty. She was the only daughter and second of three children of Anglo-American matinee idol Maurice Barrymore and comedienne

[There is no collection of Iris Barry's papers. Some of her correspondence with Ezra Pound is published in the Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (1950) and there are unpublished letters between them in the Poetry Coll. at the State Univ. of N.Y. at Buffalo. There is also interesting correspondence with Wyndham Lewis in the Cornell Univ. Library and with Virgil Thomson in the Yale Univ. Music Library. The Humanities Research Center of the Univ. of Texas has some letters, and unpublished letters exist between Barry and Nelson A. Rockefeller, with whom she maintained a very warm correspondence, and with museum director A. Everett Austin, in whose house she lived in Fayence. In addition to the books mentioned above, Barry wrote a novel, The Last Enemy (1929—published in England as Here Is Thy Victory)-, Portrait of Lady Mary Montagu (1928); and countless film reviews and articles about motion pictures. The Film Index (1941), for which she wrote the foreword, is the beginning of a good bibliography for many of these pieces. Let's Go to the Pictures was published in the United States as Let's Go to the Movies. Important articles include "The Museum of Modern Art Film Library," Sight and Sound, Summer 1936; "Challenge of the Documentary Film," N.Y. Times Mag., Jan. 6, 1946; "Why Wait for Posterity?" Hollywood Quart., Jan. 1946; "Retrospect with Lament and Motto," Sat. Rev. of Lit., Aug. 6, 1949; and "The Film Library and How It Grew," Film Quart., Summer 1969. She also wrote the preface to Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (1939), and to Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination (1944). For information about her earlier years see her article, "The Ezra

georgiana

e m m a

d r e w

barrymore.

Her

ma-

ternal grandparents were Irish-American comedian John Drew and actress-manager l o u i s a l a n e d r e w , whose English parents and grandparents were also performers. Both of Ethel's brothers, Lionel and John, became prominent actors. Ethel Barrymore was raised largely by her grandmother, manager of the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, and saw her parents infrequently. Her mother, who had converted to Catholicism, had Ethel baptized a Catholic, and she was sent at age six to the Academy of Notre Dame, a convent boarding school in Philadelphia. In May 1893, she was taken from school to accompany her ailing mother to California, and she handled funeral arrangements when Georgiana Barrymore died in Santa Barbara in July. Ethel Barrymore remembered her mother as "the gayest and most gallant person I have ever known." She later praised the "naturalness" of her mother's acting, "twenty-five years ahead of her time," and credited Georgiana Barrymore with her technique of throwing away a comedy point. In the fall Ethel returned to the convent school, but after her father's remarriage in 1894 she was sent to Montreal. There she joined her

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grandmother and her uncle, Sidney Drew, at the Academy of Music, where she made her stage debut as Julia in Sheridan's The Rivals. "I had thought I was going to be a great pianist," she wrote in Memories: An Autobiography (1955). "I had never known I was to go on the stage . . . But suddenly there was no money, no Arch Street Theatre, no house, and I must earn my living." Louisa Drew soon left for New York and Barrymore went on tour with her uncle and the company. Then in 1895 she was sent to New York to join her grandmother and her other uncle, light comedian John Drew, Jr. He arranged for a three years' apprenticeship ("some understudying chores and a little tray carrying") with him and his costar, MAUDE ADAMS, under the management of Charles Frohman. The young actress played the rustic servant Priscilla in Drew's production of Rosemary in New York and on the road; she went to London in the summer of 1897 to support William Gillette in Secret Service, and afterwards appeared with S ; r Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Barrymore remained under Charles Frohman's aegis until his death in 1915, and continued as a member of the Frohman organization until 1921. She joined the stock company at his Empire Theatre in 1898, toured as comedy adventuress Stella de Gex, her first leading role, in Frohman's road production of His Excellency the Governor in 1900, and in 1901 advanced to stardom as Madame Trentoni in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. In all, Barrymore's association with Frohman embraced twenty-five separate plays, in many of which she played ingenue roles. On March 14, 1909, Barrymore married Russell Griswold Colt, son of United States Rubber Company board chairman Samuel Pomeroy Colt. During intervals between productions, she bore three children. Samuel Pomeroy, born in 1909, Ethel Barrymore, born in 1912, and John Drew, born in 1913, often accompanied their mother on cross-country tours. Barrymore had bolted Frohman in 1911, in the absence of an acceptable script, to play Kate, the liberated typist in The Twelve-Pound Look. The play initially achieved only thirtytwo performances, but—intermittently in vaudeville—"was to serve as a life-saver for the next twenty years." She returned to the Frohman management for such long-running successes as Tante (1913), Our Mrs. McChesney (1915), and The Lady of the Camellias (1917). But in 1919 she defied Frohman's successor, Al Hayman, by spearheading the Actors' Equity contract strike, starring in outlaw Equity benefits,

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and, as the union's appointee, initialing the resulting five-year pact with the New York producers. In Déclassée (1919), Barrymore broke the Empire Theatre house record with 200 sold-out performances, made a sensation on tour, then played another season in New York. During the early twenties, both her career and her personal life foundered for a time. She was legally separated from her husband in 1921, and divorced him in 1923 on grounds of desertion and nonsupport. Although Barrymore obtained the divorce, as a Catholic she considered it "merely legal," and she never remarried. On the stage, she failed as Juliet in Arthur Hopkins's 1922 revival of Romeo and Juliet, and The Laughing Lady (1923) was panned by the New York critics. A 1923 production of The School for Scandal, with Barrymore as Lady Teazle, ran for only one week. She won praise in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray in 1924 and in Shakespearean roles (Portia, Ophelia) with Walter Hampden, but her next real triumph in the theater did not come until 1926, when she starred as Constance Middleton in The Constant Wife. She played this part on Broadway for 295 performances and toured in the play for over two years. In 1928, as Sister Garcia (aging through the play from nineteen to seventy) in The Kingdom of God, she opened the Shuberts' Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York. Barrymore successfully met a new challenge with the title role in Scarlet Sister Mary (1930), in which she portrayed a black woman and spoke her lines in the Gullah dialect of South Carolina. In 1931 she collapsed on stage in Denver during a performance of The School for Scandal. The tour folded and, with other unsuccessful tours, placed her in severe financial straits. She had almost no work until 1934, with the exception of a film in 1932 and a month (July 1933) of five-a-day appearances in The Twelve-Pound Look. Subsequent unemployment, relieved only by occasional performances on radio and a short tour in The Constant Wife during the winter of 1935—36, eventually led to her despairing announcement in August 1936 that she would "never appear in another play." But the National Broadcasting Company forestalled Barrymore's retirement with a radio series in which she acted half-hour abridgements of her most popular plays. Acquiescing to a series of character parts in the late thirties, Barrymore created for American audiences the memorable role of Miss Moffat, the Welsh schoolmistress, in Herman Shumlin's 1940 production of The Corn Is Green. It ran for fourteen months in New York and for two years on the road. Barrymore's final

Bartelme

Barrymore Broadway venture was Embezzled Heaven ( 1 9 4 4 ) , which also prospered but was suspended by her near-fatal bout with pneumonia. Her last performance before a theater audience was in The Twelve-Pound, Look for an American National Theatre Academy benefit, Jan. 29, 1950. In her last years, Barrymore continued to act in the movies and for television. Her movie career had begun in 1914, with a five-year foray into silent films. She starred in The Nightingale, for which she reputedly earned $15,000, The Awakening of Helena Richie, and ten others. As the czarina, at a reported fee of $57,000 for eight weeks' work, she later costarred with brothers Lionel and John in the 1932 sound feature Rasputin and the Empress. In the forties her national tour of The Corn Is Green had been curtailed in California so she might costar with Cary Grant in None But the Lonely Heart. Her portrayal of the frumpy charwoman Ma Mott in this film earned her an Academy Award as best actress in 1944. Settling in Palos Verdes, Calif., Barrymore appeared in twenty films from 1946 through 1957. She made her network television debut in 1953, and performed in various drama and comedy-variety series through the mid-1950s. Ethel Barrymore, for good or ill, epitomized the star system. The focus of a real Barrymore cult from her earliest starring days, the beautiful actress inspired imitators of her hairstyle, her regal walk, her cool, fierce, Barrymore eyes, and her low, breathless, haunting voice (which detractors found monotonous). Like her illustrious forebears and her famous brothers, she readily managed transitions from comedy to drama and, in her later years, to eccentric parts. She believed that "the thought running through the person's mind is what the actor has to capture . . . Years of experience at acting give a player the ability to call on his thought and be sure of it. It's like a good serve at tennis." Barrymore made her last public appearance during a testimonial for her seventy-eighth birthday; she died in 1959 of a pulmonary infarction at her Beverly Hills apartment. [The Robinson Locke Scrapbooks in the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library, are the best source of information on Barrymore's career. Cumulated Dramatic Index, 1909-1949, lists articles and books by and about the Barrymores. In addition to her autobiography, Barrymore wrote "My Reminiscences," Delineator, Sept. 1923-Feb. 1924, and "How Can I Be an Actress?" Ladies' Home Journal, March 15, 1911. Other major sources of information are Hollis Alpert, The Barrymores (1964); Robert Downing, "Ethel Barrymore, 1879-1959," Films in

Review, Aug.-Sept. 1959; Barbara Birch Jamison, "Ethel Barrymore—In Mid-Career at 75," N.Y. Times Mag., Aug. 15, 1954; S. J. Woolf, "Miss Barrymore Refuses to Mourn the 'Good Old Days,' " N.Y. Times Mag., Aug. 13, 1939; a book by Barrymore's press agent, Richard Maney, Fanfare (1957); and Current Biog,, 1941. Additional background about the Barrymore family can be found in Lionel Barrymore with Cameron Shipp, We Barrymores (1951), and James Kotsilibas-Davis, Great Times, Good Times; The Odyssey of Maurice Barrymore (1977). Most sources give Barrymore's birth date as Aug. 15, 1879, but her birth record from the City of Philadelphia gives Aug. 16. A death record was provided by the Calif. Dept. of Public Health. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 19, 1959. Photographs are in the autobiography as well as in Alpert and Jamison.] PAT

M.

RYAN

BARTELME, Mary Margaret, July 24, 1 8 6 6 July 25, 1954. Lawyer, judge. Mary Bartelme was born in Chicago to Jeannette (Hoff) and Balthazar Bartelme. Both parents had emigrated from Alsace, and her father worked in the building trades. During much of her life, Mary Bartelme continued to live with her older brother, Alfred, and her younger sister, Adeline. After graduating from Chicago's Western Division High School in 1882, Mary Bartelme attended the Cook County Normal School and then taught in Chicago schools for eight years. In 1892 she entered Northwestern University Law School, graduating in 1894, the only woman in her class, m y r a b r a d w e l l , a prominent Illinois lawyer, encouraged Bartelme's career and published the young woman's thesis, "Spendthrift Trusts," in the Chicago Legal News. Bartelme won first prize in a case annotation competition sponsored by the American Law Register and Review in 1895. She had been admitted to the Illinois bar in 1894 and, after her admission to the United States bar in 1896, she began private legal practice in Chicago. With her appointment in 1897 by the governor of Illinois as public guardian for Cook County, Bartelme began a lifetime of public service. Until 1913 she served in this office, assuming responsibility for the placement of orphans. Mary Bartelme's major contribution to juvenile reform occurred within the Chicago juvenile court, which she helped to establish in 1899, along with other members of the Chicago Woman's Club. In 1911, during the "white slave" scare which heightened concerns about female delinquency, and after an investigation of the probation department raised criticisms of the court, juvenile court judge Merritt W. Pinck-

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Bartelme

Bass

ney recommended the appointment of a woman probation officer to hear the cases of delinquent girls. He chose Mary Bartelme to fill the new office of assistant to the judge. Bartelme began hearing cases on March 3, 1913, in private judge's chambers. The press and public were excluded in order to protect the reputations of the ten- to seventeen-year-old offenders, most of whom were charged with immoral behavior or incorrigibility. Bartelme interviewed each girl and her parents, attempted to gain the child's confidence, and took her side when necessary. She then made her recommendation to the judge, who almost automatically acted upon it. A grand jury that investigated this arrangement in 1915 commended Bartelme's work. Journalists wrote about her "court of another chance" for girls and praised her "professional mothering." One of Bartelme's methods earned her the nickname "Suitcase Mary." With financial support from local women's clubs, Bartelme established residential halfway houses for dependent girls ( 1 9 1 4 ) and "semidelinquent" girls ( 1 9 1 6 ) . The first such residence was in her own home. Whenever a resident left one of the homes, she received a suitcase full of clothes, which, Bartelme believed, would enhance the girl's selfesteem. Women's groups continued to support three Chicago area residences bearing her name long after Bartelme had retired. For ten years Bartelme served as assistant to the judge of the juvenile court. Then in 1923, possibly motivated by the recent enfranchisement of women, the county Republican party nominated Bartelme as a candidate to complete the unexpired term of a Cook County Circuit Court judge. She won the election. As associate justice of the juvenile court she continued to hear girls' cases, but now had complete judicial authority. In 1927 she won election to a full six-year term and became the presiding judge of the juvenile court, a position she held until her retirement in 1933. In social outlook, Bartelme typified Progressive era social feminists and juvenile reformers. She had advocated woman suffrage as early as 1895, held office in the Chicago Suffrage Club, and belonged to the League of Women Voters. She supported the work of the Juvenile Protective Association and helped raise funds for the Institute for Juvenile Research. Along with her Chicago colleagues J U L I A L A T H R O P and J A N E ADDAMS, Bartelme believed that female delinquency resulted in part from the lack of respectable amusements for urban youth. She called for chaperoned dances to replace dance halls, sex education to warn girls of temptations, and the extension of the minimum age for women's em-

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ployment to sixteen in order to keep girls in school. Women parole and police officers, she felt, should process the cases of female offenders. Although like other Progressives she criticized institutional commitments for delinquents, court records show that she herself sentenced girls to reformatories more frequently than she placed them on probation. In 1933 Mary Bartelme retired to Carmel, Calif., with her sister, her brother, and her niece. There she enjoyed over twenty years of tending her gardens and household. She died in Carmel of a stroke at the age of eighty-eight. [A newspaper clippings file at the Northwestern Univ. Archives is useful for tracing Bartelme's career. Some Bartelme letters appear in the Ethel Sturges Dummer Papers at the Schlesinger Library, RadclifFe College. Bartelme discussed her views in "Woman's Place at the Bar," Chicago Legal News, 43 (1911), 370; "The Opportunity for Women in Court Administration," Am. Acad, of Political and Social Sci., Annals, March 1914, pp. 188-90; and "Prevention Not Punishment," Dept. of Elementary School Principals Bull., 11th Yearbook, April 1932, pp. 521-24. The reports of the Chicago juvenile court, in the Charity Service Reports, Cook Cty., 111., contain aggregate data on court cases and describe the origins and operation of Bartelme's court, as does Helen Rankin Jeter, The Chicago Juvenile Court (1922). On Bartelme's legal education and early career see the Chicago Legal News for 1894, 1895, and 1900. Her court is described in the N.Y. Times Mag., May 25, 1913, p. 4 (with photograph), and in Betsy Greenbaum, "The Court of 'Another Chance' Where Judge Mary Bartelme Presides," Woman Citizen, Aug. 1927, pp. 12-14. See also the Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XLVII, 626. Obituaries appeared in the July 26, 1954, issues of the N.Y. Times and Chicago Tribune. A biobibliography prepared by Sally Nichols assisted in the research for this article. Death certificate supplied by Calif. Dept. of Health Services.] ESTELLE B. FREEDMAN

BASS, Charlotta Spears, Oct. 1880?-April 12, 1969. Editor, civil rights reformer. For more than forty years Charlotta Bass edited The California Eagle, the oldest black newspaper on the west coast. She was born in Sumter, S.C., the sixth of eleven children and third of four daughters of Hiram and Kate Spears. Leaving South Carolina sometime before 1900, she went to live with her oldest brother, Ellis, in Providence, R.I. There she worked as office help and advertising solicitor for a local newspaper. In September 1910 she went to Los Angeles, planning what she called a two-year health recuperation stay; she remained a California resident for the rest of her life. In Los Angeles she took a job collecting and

Bass

Bass soliciting subscriptions for The Eagle newspaper, then edited by John Neimore. Plagued by ill health, he came increasingly to depend on Spears to run the paper. In May 1912, after Neimore's death, The Eagle's new owner, a Captain Hawkins, handed the paper over to Spears on the promise of future payment. Recognizing that she would have to print social items to keep her readership, Spears determined also that the paper (renamed The California Eagle) would discuss the important issues of the day for the "patriotically inclined." Also in 1912 Joseph Bass, a founder of the Topeka (Kans.) Plaindealer, came to California. He became editor of The California Eagle and he and Charlotta Spears were married. She subsequently became managing editor. Under their combined direction the paper began to wage its "fearless war against segregation and discrimination." Charlotta Bass campaigned against D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, calling it "the big lie," and she vociferously opposed the injustice to black soldiers in the 1917 Houston, Texas, race riot. The same year, she supported the establishment in southern California of the Progressive Educational Association, which marked the beginnings there of interracial organization in defense of Negro and other minorities' rights. After World War I Charlotta and Joseph Bass battled the Ku Klux Klan; in 1925 the Klan brought the paper to court on libel charges. The Eagle won the case and continued its fight against racism. In the 1930s the Basses supported the nine black defendants in the Scottsboro (Ala.) trials, backed organizing efforts among waterfront workers, and opposed labor racketeering. They also joined A. Philip Randolph in his struggle to end discriminatory hiring practices on the railroads. Charlotta Bass was one of the organizers in 1930 of the Industrial Business Council, designed to encourage blacks to go into business and to work against discriminatory employment practices. She also organized a militant integrated group, the Home Protective Association, which defended the right of blacks to live in formerly all-white neighborhoods and fought to abolish restrictive covenants. Running The California Eagle on her own after her husband's death in 1934, Charlotta Bass also became increasingly prominent in civic and political affairs. A longtime Republican, in 1940 she served as western regional director for Wendell Willkie's presidential campaign. In 1943 she became the first Negro grand jury member for the Los Angeles County Court. Two years later she ran unsuccessfully as a "people's candidate" for City Council from the Seventh

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District. Her platform emphasized job security, a building plan to construct houses for those in need of shelter, and other progressive measures. During the years immediately after World War II, Bass intensified her campaigning for civil rights and civil liberties. She again fought the Klan and the barbarous lynching which plagued the south, particularly in the summer of 1946, and joined other national black leaders in calling for the establishment of a permanent fair employment practices committee. She also supported the Hollywood Ten. With the growing repression of the left during the late 1940s her outspoken crusading led to suspicion of her as "un-American" and in 1946 she was called before the Tenney Committee, the California version of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. With her mounting awareness of the failure of the traditional parties to address civil rights issues, Bass abandoned the Republican party to become a founding member of the Progressive party, led by Henry A. Wallace. In 1948 she supported Wallace's presidential candidacy, serving as national cochairman of Women for Wallace, presiding over the candidate's Los Angeles appearances, and traveling to Philadelphia as a candidate to the party's national convention. During the next two years she traveled extensively, going in 1950 to Paris and to Prague for the Peace Committee of the World Congress. There Bass supported the "Stockholm Appeal," calling for a ban on the atomic bomb. Later that year she was a delegate at the World Student Congress in Prague and made a brief visit to the Soviet Union. Describing her visit in a November 1950 article in Soviet Russia Today, she praised the lack of racial discrimination there. Returning to California, Bass ran unsuccessfully for Congress in the Fourteenth Congressional District on the Independent Progressive party ticket. Two years later the Progressive party, fragmented by the question of support of United States action in Korea, chose her as vice presidential candidate, the first black woman to run for the nation's second-highest office. For president, the party nominated California attorney Vincent Hallinan, a strong supporter of civil liberties who was then serving a jail sentence for contempt of court. During the campaign Bass stressed with pride, "Win or lose, we win by raising the issues." Denouncing both Democrats and Republicans as in favor of war and as antilabor and anti-Negro, Bass and Hallinan linked domestic and foreign policy issues, calling for an end to the cold war, an immediate cease-fire in Korea,

Bass

Bass an end to poverty in the United States, and equal rights for minorities and for the oppressed of the nation and the world. Praised by W. E. B. Du Bois as representing "black America and American womanhood," Bass made an analogy between the plight of women and of blacks, noted the small number of women serving in Congress, and urged women to run for political office. Hallinan and Bass received a very small percentage of the vote (0.2 percent according to Gerald Gill), but their campaign focused attention on significant issues. Bass had retired from The California Eagle in the early 1950s. In 1960, after a lifetime of crusading, she published Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper, her autobiography and the biography of the paper. Over the years Charlotta Bass had encouraged many young blacks to enter the professions, and had provided jobs and training on the Eagle. In retirement she established a library for neighborhood youth in the garage of her home in the Elsinore section of Los Angeles. She died in Los Angeles in April 1969, as the nation again confronted the issues of racism and violence to which she had called attention and which she had worked to eradicate. [Charlotta Bass's library and some of her papers are at the California Library for Social Studies in Los Angeles. The Schomburg Coll. of the N.Y. Public Library and the Moorland-Spingarn Coll. at Howard Univ., Washington, D.C., both have clipping files on Bass. There are some letters from her in the Calvin Benham Baldwin Papers, Univ. of Iowa. Her acceptance speech for the vice presidential nomination appeared in the Nat. Guardian, April 2, 1952, p. 3. Biographical information is scanty; Forty Years is the best source. An entry appears in Harry Ploski, ed., The Afro-American: The Negro Almanac ( 1 9 7 6 ) . On her candidacy see Gerald R. Gill, " 'Win or Lose—We Win'; The 1952 Vice Presidential Campaign of Charlotta A. Bass," in Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images ( 1 9 7 8 ) . Bass's year of birth frequently appears as 1890 and her place of birth as Little Compton, R.I. The birth date, place, and family names from U.S. Census 1880 and 1900. Death record from Calif. Dept. of Public Health gives 1874 birth date. Assistance provided by Arthur Freed, Sheryl Kujawa, and Joseph Spears.] ANDREW CAROL

BUNI

HUKD G R E E N

BASS, Mary Elizabeth, April 5, 1876-Jan. 26, 1956. Physician. Elizabeth Bass, founder of an outstanding biographical collection on medical women and lifelong advocate of women physicians in the south, was the first of four daughters and second of

eight children born to Isaac Esau and Mary Eliza (Wilkes) Bass. The family home was located in Carley, Marion County, Miss., where Isaac Bass ran a gristmill and a dry goods store. After losing his property during the depression of the mid-1890s, he moved his family to Lumberton, Miss. (1899), and established a large pecan nursery. Elizabeth's mother, whom she deeply loved and admired, was well known for her sense of humor and took an active interest in the welfare of her community. Both of Elizabeth's parents were devout Baptists. Wishing to remain free to dance, however, they did not join the church until 1882, eight years after their marriage. A sense of loyalty, duty, and honesty pervaded the Bass household; "none can work as hard as a Bass" was a commonly spoken tribute. Elizabeth Bass attended Bunker Hill and other nearby elementary schools and assisted teachers in these schools while attending Columbia (Miss.) High School. She graduated in 1893, and received teaching certificates from normal schools in 1892 and 1896. Bass taught in public schools in Mississippi and Texas for several years, until her older brother, Charles, who had graduated from the Tulane School of Medicine in 1899, encouraged her and her sister Cora to study medicine. Because women were not allowed in the medical schools of the south, the sisters matriculated at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1900. After graduating in 1904 they, like Charles, began private practice in New Orleans. In reaction to the policy that barred women doctors from the city's existing clinical and hospital facilities, Elizabeth Bass and five other women established in 1905 a free dispensary, in a house loaned by a friend. Hospital beds were added two years later and the institution—one of five American hospitals founded and managed by women practitioners—was dedicated in 1908 as the New Orleans Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children (later the Sara Mayo Hospital). Women physicians in New Orleans now had adequate medical facilities, which they used to provide medical care to women and children of limited means. In December 1911 Elizabeth Bass and Edith Ballard became the first women faculty members of the School of Medicine at Tulane University. After two years Bass advanced from assistant demonstrator of surgical pathology (nonsalaried) to instructor in the laboratory of clinical medicine, receiving a salary of $500 for the academic year 1914-15. In the same year the administration permitted women to matriculate as medical students, a decision undoubtedly influenced by the Equal Rights Association

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Bass

Bass of New Orleans. Bass was a member of this women's group, which lobbied aggressively for woman suffrage and improved child labor laws. She taught pathology, clinical laboratory diagnosis, bateriology, and clinical medicine during her thirty years at Tulane, becoming a full professor in 1920. An excellent teacher, she took a personal interest in her students, providing friendship, counsel, and money to those in need, especially women students. Through her work with professional and social organizations, Elizabeth Bass did much to advance the cause of women physicians. She became the first woman elected to active membership in the Orleans Parish Medical Society ( 1 9 1 3 ) , serving as secretary (1921 and 1922), vice president ( 1 9 2 3 ) , and editor of the Society's bulletin ( 1 9 3 9 ) . In 1915 she joined the recently founded Women Physicians of the Southern Medical Association, becoming first vice president in 1919, and president from 1925 to 1927. As a member of the Medical Women's National Association (later the American Medical Women's Association), she served as fifth president ( 1 9 2 1 - 2 2 ) and contributed essays and a column to the Association's journal. In 1924 she became secretary of the Section of Pathology for the Southern Medical Association, and subsequently vice chairman ( 1 9 3 8 ) and chairman ( 1 9 3 9 ) of that section. Bass enjoyed traveling and attended conferences in Canada, France, Sweden, Austria, Italy, and Greece. Chosen to represent the United States at international forums, she was a delegate in 1928 to the first Pan Pacific Women's Conference, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, and was a representative at the conferences of the Medical Women's International Association held in Stockholm ( 1 9 3 4 ) and Edinburgh ( 1 9 3 7 ) . A trim, slender, well-dressed woman, she also participated in the cultural and social endeavors of many women's groups in New Orleans and was a devoted member of the famous Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré. When Elizabeth Bass resigned from the Tulane faculty in 1941, she was professor of clinical laboratory diagnosis in the Graduate School of Medicine and associate professor of medicine in the School of Medicine. Because of the shortage of doctors during World War II, she returned to private practice and became house physician at the Jung Hotel, where she had lived for many years. During the 1940s Bass devoted time to expanding her extraordinary collection of manuscripts, correspondence, pictures, press clippings, pamphlets, and books by and about women in medicine. The collection served as a basis for her numerous historical and biograph-

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ical essays, and for a regular column on outstanding women physicians, "These Were the First," published in the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association ( 1 9 4 6 - 5 6 ) . During the latter half of 1949, Bass decided to cease medical practice. She spent much time caring for her aged mother at the family home in Lumberton, returning to New Orleans periodically for meetings and social functions. In 1952 Elizabeth Bass received the Alumni Achievement Award from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, and in 1953 the American Medical Women's Association presented her the Elizabeth Blackwell Centennial Medal Award. She died of cancer in 1956 at the Foundation Hospital in New Orleans and was buried in Lumberton. After her death, her friends at Tulane established the Elizabeth Bass Memorial Medical Student Loan Fund as a tribute to her lifelong dream of improving opportunities for women in the profession of medicine. [The Elizabeth Bass Coll. on Women in Medicine, located in the Matas Medical Library of Tulane Univ., consists of some 290 monographs and 1,400 clippings and pictures on women in medicine. It also contains the MS. of Bass's unpublished book, "History of Medicine in Louisiana." Correspondence between Elizabeth Bass and Florence Sabin is located in the Sophia Smith Coll., Smith College. The alumnae file of the Medical College of Pa. contains some useful information. Bass's own writings, all in the Jour. Am. Medical Women's Assoc. (JAMWA), include "Dispensaries Founded by Women Physicians in the Southland," Dec. 1947, pp. 560-61; her acceptance speech for the Elizabeth Blackwell Centennial Medal Award, Sept. 1953, p. 307; several articles on aspects of clinical medicine; and a number of tributes, obituaries, and histories of women physicians. Articles about Bass include: "In Memoriam Elizabeth Bass, 1876-1956," Bull. Orleans Parish Medical Soc., April 9, 1956; "In Memoriam," JAMWA, Sept. 9, 1956; Durward Howes, ed., American Women, 1939-40, p. 57; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XLV, 350; James P. Morris, "Elizabeth Bass, M.D. (1876-1956), Tulane's Woman Pioneer in Medicine," Tulane Medicine, Spring 1973. Details of family history can be found in Ivan E. Bass, Wilkes Family History and Genealogy (1965); Ivan E. Bass, Bass Family History (1955); Rudolph Matas, "Dr. Charles C. Bass: An Appreciation," Mississippi Doctor, Aug. 1943. Other published sources include Vera Morel, "Dr. Elizabeth Bass Assembles Notable Collection," Mississippi Doctor, Aug. 1943, and an unsigned note, "Women Physicians of the Southern Medical Association," JAMWA, Dec. 1947. For information regarding various organizations to which Bass belonged see A. E. Fossier, History of the Orleans Parish Medical Society 1878-1928 (1930), which contains a photo, and C. P. Loranz, A History of the Southern Medical Association (1960). Obituaries appeared in New Orleans States, Jan. 28, 1956; New Orleans Times-Picayune, Jan. 28, 1956; N.Y.

Bauchens

Bauchens

Times, Jan. 28, 1956; and Jour. Am. Medical Assoc., March 31, 1956.] CHESTER MELINDA

BURNS NELSON

BAUCHENS, Anne, Feb. 2, 1881?-May 7, 1967. Film editor. Anne Bauchens was one of the earliest and most distinguished of American film cutters. In a craft that has had many women practitioners, she was the first woman to receive an Academy Award for film editing, and the first recipient of the ACE, the Achievement Award of the American Cinema Editors. Born in St. Louis, she was the only daughter and older child of Luella (McKee) and Otto Bauchens, a porter who was of German-American descent. Anne Bauchens aspired to become an actress. In St. Louis she studied drama under actordirector Hugh Ford, while working as a telephone operator at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She also studied gymnastics and dancing and eventually left for New York to try her luck on Broadway. Unsuccessful, she became a secretary in a real estate firm. When that company went bankrupt, Anne Bauchens found employment as secretary to William C. DeMille, well-known playwright and incipient film director. Shortly after, he was called to Hollywood by his brother Cecil B. DeMille to set up the first studio scenario department. Anne Bauchens soon followed. Fascinated by the movies, Bauchens took to the studio job immediately, assisting C. B. DeMille on the set as well as serving as his brother's secretary. She created the position of script clerk, the indispensable production secretary who records every detail of individual film shots so that they can be properly matched for later assemblage or editing. In 1917 a studio crisis arose, requiring someone to edit a film left unassembled by a director. William DeMille recommended Bauchens for the task, personally guaranteeing to reimburse the studio if her work proved unsatisfactory. It did not—and she entered upon a new career. With C. B. DeMille she coedited his film We Can't Have Everything (1918). Dissatisfied with the editing on the first two films of his career, DeMille had been serving as his own editor; after working with Bauchens he entrusted to her the sole editing responsibility for all of his films. Between 1918 and DeMille's death in 1959, Bauchens's professional life was entirely meshed with his. She became one of the seven "loyal female followers" who made up the center of his staff, and edited the remaining thirty-nine films of his prestigious career. Sometimes called "Trojan Annie . . . because

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she can take so much," in the early days Bauchens worked sixteen- to eighteen-hour days when a movie was in the editing phase; even in her seventies she was known to work ten to fourteen hours a day. A small, soft-spoken woman, she had confidence in her own skills and was willing to argue with DeMille over points of editing and interpretation. "Annie is stubborn," an acquaintance once commented, "and Mr. DeMille is three times as stubborn. If they disagree, one of them has to bring the other around because neither of them will give in" (Sammis, "Film Editor Indefatigable"). Although Bauchens once commented that she had never been thanked by the actors whose work she had improved through her editing, DeMille appreciated her value to him. He would not sign a contract for a film unless it was specified that Bauchens be the editor, explaining: "That is not sentiment, or at least not only sentiment. She is still the best film editor I know" (DeMille, p. 120). Film editing is essentially a collaborative art, seldom recognized by the public and requiring the kind of self-effacing devotion which Anne Bauchens brought to it. Her skills brought her the Academy Award in 1940 for the editing of North West Mounted Police and three nominations for the Oscar: in 1934 for Cleopatra, in 1952 for The Greatest Show on Earth (for which she also received the ACE), and in 1956 for the last of DeMille's epic films, The Ten Commandments. More than any other film of Bauchens's career, The Ten Commandments, made when she was seventy-five, demanded all of the skills she had learned and taught to others over the years. For the movie, DeMille used sixteen cameras and shot more than 100,000 feet of film. She had to reduce the footage to 12,000 feet while retaining and heightening the drama of the story. It was, DeMille noted, "the most difficult operation of film editing in motion picture history." Earlier DeMille epic films had prepared her for the task: for Union Pacific (1938) she had had to blend the work of two directors and reduce the film from 14,000 to 10,000 feet; The Greatest Show on Earth required massive editing to bring it down to two hours and thirty-one minutes. Interviewed when she was working on The Ten Commandments, Bauchens compared film editing to magazine editing: "You must make the story flow evenly . . . splice in the close-ups and the distance shots so the audience is not conscious of any break in the story." Earlier, in her contribution to We Make the Movies (1937), one of the first serious volumes to explain the techniques of filmmaking to the public,

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Bauer Bauchens had discussed her concept of film editing. The editor's main concern, she believed, was to tell the story well: "Unusual angles should not be employed merely for their own interest, unless they are effective in telling the story. The moment the audience is aware of the various cuts and devices used, the story will suffer." Anne Bauchens gave most of her life to her work, although she also enjoyed gardening and was active in church and civic organizations. A movie fan, she had her favorite actors—Wally Reid was her "all-time favorite"—and she felt that the love of the dramatic which had sent her in search of an acting career had been satisfied through her work. With DeMille's death in January 1959, Bauchens retired from film editing. Her final work for DeMille was a tribute to him, published in France the year after her death. After suffering a stroke, Anne Bauchens died of pneumonitis in 1967 at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. Over more than forty years in Hollywood, her work had helped to establish the standards of her craft. [There are clipping files on Bauchens in the Herrick Library, Acad, of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and in the Am. Film Inst., both in Beverly Hills, Calif. Bauchens wrote two articles: "Cutting the Film," in Nancy Naumburg, ed., We Make the Movies ( 1937 ) ; and a "témoignage" in Michel Mourlet, Cecil B. DeMille ( 1 9 6 8 ) . Biographical information is scanty and repetitive. See Phil A. Koury, "A Very Handy Lady with the Shears," N.Y. Times, April 6, 1947, sect. II, p. 4; William Waller, "She 'Cuts' Those Super Movies," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 3, 1947; Constance Sharp Sammis, "Film Editor Indefatigable," Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 11, 1957, p. 4; Art Arthur, "A Tribute to Anne Bauchens," Am. Cinema Editors Mag., Feb. 1961; and Evelyn Scott, Hollywood When Silents Were Golden ( 1 9 7 2 ) . Many works dealing with C. B. DeMille have material on Bauchens; see Donald Hayne, ed., The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille ( 1 9 5 9 ) ; William C. DeMille, Hollywood Saga ( 1 9 3 9 ) ; Gene Ringgold and DeWitt Bodeen, The Films of Cecil B. DeMille ( 1 9 6 9 ) ; Gabe Essoe and Raymond Lee, DeMille: The Man and His Pictures ( 1 9 7 0 ) ; Phil A. Koury, Yes, Mr. DeMille ( 1 9 5 9 ) ; and Charles Higham, Cecil B. DeMille ( 1 9 7 3 ) . Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times and the L.A. Times, both May 9, 1967. A death record, provided by the Calif. Dept. of Public Health, gives her birth date as Feb. 2, 1882, but the 1900 U.S. Census gives a date of February 1881 and lists her as Rosanna. HAROLD J .

SALEMSON

BAUER, Catherine Krouse, May 11, 1905-Nov. 22, 1964. Housing expert, planner. Catherine Bauer, whose work helped lead to

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the passage of the first federal housing act in the United States, was born in Elizabeth, N.J., the oldest of three children (two girls and a boy) of Jacob Louis and Alberta Louise (Krouse) Bauer. Her father, as chief highway engineer for the state of New Jersey, achieved some fame for his pioneering designs, such as cloverleafs and banked curves. Through her mother, who frequently took the children on nature walks, Catherine Bauer acquired a love of the outdoors; she became an avid swimmer and hiker, and an ardent supporter of conservation efforts. From early childhood Bauer exhibited a rebellious nature. She clashed with her mother, a strong-minded, domineering woman, and openly ridiculed her old-fashioned, middleclass ways. Known to her friends as "Casey," she possessed a quick intelligence, a lively sense of humor, and a frank and forthright manner. Bauer attended the Vail-Deane School for Girls in Elizabeth, and went on to Vassar College. She transferred to Cornell University for her third year to study architecture, but returned to graduate from Vassar in 1926. After graduation she spent a year in Paris, living alone in a rented apartment on the lie Saint Louis, and associating with an arty and intellectual bohemian group. She wrote several articles on the new functionalist domestic architecture of Europe, one of which later appeared in the New York Times Magazine (April 15, 1928). Returning to New York with no particular career objective, she held various routine jobs until 1928, when she became advertising manager at the Harcourt Brace publishing house. A bright and engaging conversationalist and a rebel against established taste and standards, Bauer made the acquaintance of writers and social critics, and was accepted into their circles. Her most important friendship was with Lewis Mumford, who was to become her intellectual mentor and close friend. He helped to cure her of a sterile aestheticism by calling her attention to the social dimensions of architecture, an awareness that shaped her future career. The depression having cost Bauer her job, she returned to Europe in 1930 to examine architectural developments in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany, as well as in France. Her study of new European housing communities and her introduction there to the new social, technical, and economic research on housing, transformed her from a "dilettante" into a housing reformer and convinced her that an entirely new kind of human environment was not only possible but inevitable. Upon her return to New York in 1931 she became the executive secretary of the Regional Planning Association of America (established in 1923 by Lewis Mum-

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Wurster, a prominent Bay area architect ten years her senior, whom she married on August 13, 1940. While Bauer and her husband developed separate careers, their professional interests overlapped. In 1943 they moved to Cambridge, Mass., where a year later Wurster became dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Catherine Bauer taught a seminar on housing at Harvard University and participated in the ongoing arguments about urban development. In August 1945, at the age of forty and after several miscarriages, she gave birth to a daughter, Sarah Louise, known as Sadie. The Wursters returned to Berkeley in 1950; from that time until her death in 1964 Bauer taught at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, becoming professor of city and regional planning and associate dean of the College of Environmental Design. With seemingly boundless energy, Catherine Bauer not only taught but served as consultant to local, national, and international agencies; she was an active contributor to the urban development programs of the United Nations. She also wrote articles, gave speeches, and traveled throughout the country and abroad on behalf of a campaign for better housing communities. She called for active citizen involvement in planning and managing housing communities, and came to see the public housing movement as giving off a "fatal charity smell." Bauer had hoped that American architects would be challenged by the sociological implications of the housing program. But a failure of architectural imagination coupled with the parsimonious federal legislation (which set strict limitations on dwelling unit and design costs) had resulted instead in a housing program that seemed to her in 1957 to be in a "dreary deadlock." Public housing advocates, she acknowledged, had too uncritically embraced functionalist architectural theories and had thus given inadequate attention to subtler aesthetic values and basic social needs. Throughout her career, Bauer urged the balance of social and aesthetic concerns in housing and urban planning. She was among the earliest to warn that urban renewal would result in removing people from their neighborhoods. She argued for diversity in housing scale and for public and private support of community facilities. Actively interested in the form and structure of metropolitan areas, she pleaded for the unification of housing and transportation policies and regional land controls. Her critical study of such issues, "Framework for an Urban Society," served as a basis for the 1960 report of

ford and other architects, economists, and social critics). The association challenged the remedial and restrictive approach that characterized most housing legislation and sought instead to set housing activity within the broader framework of regional planning. Encouraged by Mumford, Bauer submitted an article on the architectural aspects of modern housing in Germany to a contest sponsored by Fortune magazine. It won first prize and was published in the May 1931 issue ("Prize Essay: Art in Industry," pp. 9 4 - 1 1 0 ) . Overnight Bauer became known as an expert on housing. From May 1931 to the spring of 1932 she published nine articles on art and architecture in The New Republic, Creative Art, and Arts Weekly, where she was a member of the staff. In the summer of 1932 she returned to Europe as Mumford's research assistant, gathering information on European housing communities for a series of articles he was to write for Fortune. After three articles had appeared, the series was canceled as too radical and Mumford persuaded Bauer to use the mass of unused material she had helped collect as the basis for a book. In Modern Housing (1934) Bauer described the northern European housing movement not merely as a demonstration of advanced architectural design but as proof that an organized demand for quality housing at a price accessible to all could bring results. A comparable housing movement could develop in the United States, she believed, if those having a direct stake in new, low-cost housing—the workers and consumers—similarly took an active role in its development. In the spring of 1934 Bauer helped to organize the American Federation of Labor Housing Conference (LHC) to promote the involvement of labor in the move to create a federal housing program. As executive secretary of the LHC, Bauer succeeded in establishing some seventy-five local labor housing committees; their efforts were the principal political force behind the 1937 Wagner-Steagall Housing Act, the country's first public housing legislation. In 1936 Bauer received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to study housing in Scandinavia and the Soviet Union, the first Guggenheim award in that field. When the United States Housing Authority was established in 1937 to administer the public housing program, she became director of research and information. The federal bureaucracy was not to her taste, however, and in 1940 she began her teaching career, going to the University of California at Berkeley as Rosenberg Professor of Public Social Services. There she met William Wilson

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Bauer the President's Commission on National Goals. Catherine Bauer was a founding member of the National Association of Housing Officials, a member of the board and vice president of the National Public Housing Conference, and an honorary member of the American Institute of Planners. In November 1964 her important contribution to the housing movement in the United States was cut short by her death from a brain concussion and exposure, the result of a fall during a hike on Mount Tamalpais in California. [Catherine Bauer's papers, dating from her arrival in California in 1940 to her death in 1964, are in the Bancroft Library at the Univ. of Calif, at Berkeley. LHC files are in the State Hist. Soc. of Wis. "Framework for an Urban Society" was published in President's Commission on Nat. Goals, Goals for Americans (1960). She also wrote Labor and the Housing Program (1938); A Citizens Guide to Public Housing (1940); and Social Questions in Housing and Town Planning (1952). Important articles include "Housing: Paper Plans or a Workers' Movement," in Carol Aronovici, ed., America Can't Have Homing (1940); and Social Questions in Housing Cahill and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., eds., Art in America in Modern Times (1934); "Elements of English Housing Practice," in Modern Architecture in England (1937); "Redevelopment: A Misfit in the Fifties," in Coleman Woodbury, ed., The Future of Cities and Urban Redevelopment (1953); and "The Form and Structure of the Future Urban Complex," in Lowdon Wingo, ed., Cities and Space: The Future Use of Urban Land (1963). An early autobiographical statement, "We Present Catherine Bauer in Her Own Words," is in Jour, of Housing, Nov. 1944, pp. 27 and 31. For biographical information see Mary Mix Foley, "Housing's White Knight Is a Handsome Blonde with Brunette Economic Ideas," Architectural Forum, March 1946, pp. 116-19; Suzanne Stephens, "Voices of Consequence: Four Architectural Critics," in Susana Torre, ed., Women in Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective (1977); and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., LI, 268-69. Susan Cole, "Catherine Bauer and the Public Housing Movement: 1926-1937," (Ph.D. diss., George Washington Univ., 1975), provides background and details on Bauer's activities and bibliography. Her relationship with Lewis Mumford is reflected in his My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle (1979). Bauer's body was found on Nov. 23, 1964; a death record was provided by Calif. Dept. of Public Health. Further information was provided by Bauer's sister, Elizabeth Bauer Kassler, by her daughter, Sadie Wurster Super, and by Frederick Gutheim, Lewis Mumford, Coleman Woodbury, and Ernest J. Bohn.]

Walla, Wash., the youngest of seven children, five of whom survived. Her father, Jacques Bauer, a grocer and amateur musician, and her mother, Julie (Heyman) Bauer, an accomplished linguist and language teacher, were both French-born Jews. After her father died in 1890 the family moved to Portland, Ore. Marion Bauer attended the public schools there, and then St. Helen's Hall, where her mother taught and from which she graduated in 1903. Soon afterward she moved to New York City to live with her eldest sister, Emilie Frances, a pianist and writer who had become established as a music critic there. From her sister, who had helped to care for her as a child, Marion Bauer received her first serious music lessons as well as consistent encouragement and financial assistance. In New York she began to study piano and harmony with the composer Henry Holden Huss; she also began to compose, at first chiefly songs. In 1906 Bauer went to France, where she studied piano with Raoul Pugno, the noted violinist. He encouraged her to compose and arranged for her to study harmony with Nadia Boulanger. Thus Bauer became one of the first Americans to study with this great French teacher. In 1907 Bauer returned to New York, where for the next four years she taught piano and theory and herself studied with Eugene Heffley. During this period her first published song, "Light," was introduced by the famous contralto E R N E S T I N E SCHUMANN-HEINK. In 1910 and 1911 Bauer studied counterpoint and form with Paul Ertel in Berlin. When she returned to America, the publishing firm of Arthur P. Schmidt offered her a seven-year contract for her songs, and she also began to work with the conductor Walter Henry Rothwell. As she gained confidence, Bauer started to compose piano works, choral pieces, and chamber music. She wrote a tone poem for violin and piano, Up the Ocklawaha ( 1 9 1 3 ) , for her friend, violinist MATJD P O W E L L . Other works of this period include Fair Daffodils ( 1 9 1 3 ) , a trio for women's voices; The Lay of the Four Winds ( 1915), for men's voices; and Allegretto giocoso ( 1 9 2 0 ) , for eleven instruments, her most ambitious work up to that time. In 1923 Bauer returned to Europe for a third time, again to France. She later described this period as one of the richest of her life, for she studied fugue with the celebrated teacher André Gédalge and met many prominent musicians and composers. But her sister fell ill, and in January 1926 Bauer returned to New York to be with her, remaining there until Emilie Bauer's death later that year.

SUSAN COLE

BAUER, Marion Eugenie, Aug. 15, 1887-Aug. 9, 1955. Music educator, composer. Marion Bauer, an influential advocate of modern music and musicians, was born in Walla

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Throughout her career, Marion Bauer was a prolific writer and a popular teacher. She had begun quite early to write for music journals, and in 1925 she published the first of several popular books on music history, How Music Grew, written with Ethel Peyser. After her return from Europe she replaced her sister as New York correspondent for Musical Leader, a post she retained for the rest of her life. She also joined the faculty of New York University, where she remained for iwenty-five years. In 1928 Bauer became a lecturer on contemporary music at the Chautauqua Institute, and she returned nearly every summer for over twenty years. She also taught summer sessions elsewhere, and in the early 1940s she joined the faculty of the Juilliard School as well. In addition to these activities, Bauer continued to compose, especially chamber, choral, and orchestral works. Notable among her chamber works are Fantasia quasi una sonata, for violin and piano ( 1 9 2 8 ) ; a string quartet first performed in 1928; Sonata for viola and piano (1935); Concertino for oboe, clarinet, and string quartet ( 1 9 3 9 - 4 3 ) ; and a trio sonata for flute, cello, and piano (1951). Of her large works, Symphonic Suite for Strings, opus 34, was given its premiere at Chautauqua in 1941; American Youth Concerto for piano and orchestra was performed in New York in 1943; China, for chorus and orchestra, was performed at the Worcester Festival in 1945; and the tone poem Sun Splendor was performed by the New York Philharmonic under Leopold Stokowski in 1947. In her own compositions Bauer retained a largely impressionist style, in the vein of Claude Debussy and Charles Griffes, whose music had made a deep impression on her in her youth. But her later works show increasing use of dissonance, and in her teaching and writing Bauer was a tireless champion of more innovative styles. Urging music teachers to use modern pieces to accustom young pupils to dissonance and other "unusual" sounds, she gave lecture recitals to explain modern music to the general public. She also served on the executive board of the League of Composers, an organization influential in promoting contemporary American music. In addition to two more books written with Peyser, Music Through the Ages (1932) and How Opera Grew (1955), Bauer wrote Twentieth Century Music (1933) and Musical Questions and Quizzes (1941) and contributed articles to music encyclopedias and journals. Highly regarded by other musicians and musicologists, she was honored upon her retirement from New York University by a program de-

voted entirely to her works, which was given at New York's Town Hall in May 1951. Bauer spent her last summer completing the book How Opera Grew at the South Hadley, Mass., home of her longtime friend and colleague, Harrison Potter. She died there of a heart attack in 1955, a few days before her sixty-eighth birthday. [How Music Grew was revised in 1939; Music Through the Ages, in 1946; Twentieth Century Music, in 1947. Representative of Bauer's writings on modern music is her article "Why Not Teach Music of Today?" Associated Music Teachers League Bull., Nov. 1951. A brief autobiographical sketch by Marion Bauer is included in David Ewen, ed., American Composers Today (1949) and Composers Since 1900 (1969). Claire R. Reis, Composers in America (1947), and Madeleine Goss, Modem Music Makers (1952), contain biographical information as well as lists of Bauer's compositions. See also Gdal Saleski, Famous Musicians of Jewish Origin (1949); Irwin A. Bazelon, "Woman with a Symphony," The Baton, March 1951; Olin Downes, N.Y. Times, May 9, 1951; and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XLIII, 121. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Aug. 11, 1955, and Musical Leader, Sept. 1955. Additional information for this article was supplied by Harrison Potter; a biobibliography prepared by Annette Le Clair assisted in the research. A death record was provided by Mass. Dept. of Public Health. A fuller treatment appears in Christine Ammer, Unsung: A History of Women in American Music (1980).] CHRISTINE

AMMER

BEACH, Sylvia Woodbridge, March 14, 1887Oct. 6, 1982. Bookshop proprietor, publisher. In 1922, when no English or American publisher would risk it, Sylvia Beach, a minister's daughter, brought out a legally obscene book, James Joyce's Ulysses. The book was published under the imprint of Shakespeare and Company, an American bookshop and lending library that Beach established in Paris in 1919. In the 1920s Shakespeare and Company became a focus of expatriate literary activity, Beach herself an important, if unheralded champion of modern literature. To her bookshop and the writers who frequented it, to Joyce above all, Sylvia Beach brought a sense of service often found in the women of American clerical families. Her mother, Eleanor Thomazine Orbison, was born in India, the daughter of a medical missionary whose colonial ancestors founded the Allegheny town of Bellefonte, Pa. In 1880, as a student at Bellefonte Academy, she became engaged to the Bev. Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, a ninth generation Presbyterian minister, then a Latin

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for the openness and excitement of Montparnasse. Among Beach's earliest customers were such expatriate writers as Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, and GERTRUDE STEIN, to whose studio Beach later escorted, among others, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. She was to be disappointed by Anderson's defection to Stein, but Hemingway, who called himself her "best customer," remained a favorite. Beach was also uniquely supportive of women writers not ordinarily welcomed by Stein, including McAlmon's wife, Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), and Bryher's intimate friend, the poet HILDA DOOLITTLE, Janet Flanner ( 1 8 9 2 - 1 9 7 8 ) , and Katherine Anne Porter.

teacher recently graduated from Princeton College. Upon their marriage in 1882, the couple went to Baltimore. There the second of their three daughters was born and christened Nancy, a name soon changed at the mother's insistence to the patronymic, Sylvia. From Baltimore the family moved to Bridgeton, N.J., and in 1901, to Paris, where Sylvester Beach had been appointed assistant pastor of the American Church and director of an American student center. During these early years in France, Sylvia Beach, whose chronic migraine headaches prevented regular school attendance, received the only formal education she ever acknowledged—two or three months in a restrictive Lausanne school. In 1906 her father began his final ministry, as pastor of the prestigious First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, N.J. Among his parishioners were Woodrow Wilson and his family. The Beaches' "veritable passion for France" took them back frequently, however, and inspired in Sylvia Beach an interest in contemporary French literature. In 1917, with her younger sister Cyprian, then a popular screen actress, she came to wartime Paris to pursue her studies "at the source." They took her to La Maison des Amis des Livres, the Left Bank bookshop of Adrienne Monnier. With Monnier, an approachable and dedicated bookseller, Beach developed a personal and professional friendship that would last almost forty years and make the rue de l'Odèon the center, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, of "the Franco-AngloAmerican literary world of Paris." Monnier's shop, established in 1915 as "the first lending library in France," was a gathering place for many of the writers Beach admired and wished to make better known at home—André Gide, Paul Valéry, Valéry Larbaud, and LéonPaul Fargue. It was initially Beach's intention to open a branch of La Maison in New York, an idea that "had become an obsession" by the time she returned to Paris after nine months as a Red Cross volunteer in Serbia. Her regret was brief, however, when the project appeared prohibitively expensive. Through Monnier, she soon saw the possibilities of an English-language bookshop in Paris, where the cost of living was low and she could count on the Frenchwoman's help and experience. On Nov. 19, 1919, financed by her mother's life savings, Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in the rue Dupuytren. Later, with the help of her older sister, Holly, the shop was moved to 12 rue de l'Odèon, across from La Maison. The opening anticipated a wave of American tourists and expatriates anxious to exchange the social and literary suppressions of their country

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For these "pilgrims of the twenties," a term Beach preferred to Stem's "lost generation," Shakespeare and Company quickly became an indispensable stopping-off place. It was at once a post office, bank, and informal club, a conduit to the editors of little reviews and Paris-based American publishers, and, most important, a place where apprentice writers could count on the reassurance and resourcefulness of the proprietor. James Joyce and Sylvia Beach met on July 11, 1920; the next day he began his regular visits to Shakespeare and Company. In 1921 official censorship prevented Harriet Weaver in England and MARGARET ANDERSON and Jane Heap in the United States from publishing Ulysses in its uncut entirety. Joyce was close to despair. "My book," he told Beach, "will never come out now." With characteristic impetuosity, she asked for the "honor" of seeing that it did. The task of publishing Ulysses was enormous. Beach engaged a Dijon printer and solicited subscriptions to the first edition. As the author struggled against deteriorating eyesight, Beach all but single-handedly prepared the barely decipherable manuscript for the printer, nearly ruining her own sight in the process. She allowed Joyce the unheard-of privilege of composing a third of Ulysses on corrected proofsheets, yet managed to have the first two copies of the novel delivered to Paris in time for the author's fortieth birthday on Feb. 2, 1922. Subsequently Beach was called upon by Joyce to act as unpaid agent, private secretary, business manager, occasional nursemaid, and constant maid-of-all-work, receiving a daily "grocery list" of tasks to perform. In spite of a contract that promised her payments from future publishers, she was pressured by a friend of Joyce into resigning her rights to Ulysses after its eleventh printing in 1933, the year the Supreme Court permitted its publication in the United States. Beach received no royalties from

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the Random House editions of Ulysses and suf- Reflective reviews of her autobiography are by fered financially during the depression, when Justin O'Brien, "What Is She?" Reporter, Oct. 1, 1959; Alice B. Toklas, New Republic, Oct. 19, 1959; many of her American customers left Paris. In Janet Flanner, New Yorker, Oct. 24, 1959. See also 1936, the year she received the Legion of Honor, Richard Ellman, James Joyce (1959); W. G. Rogers, Shakespeare and Company had to be rescued Ladies Bountiful (1968); Noel Riley Fitch, "An by a committee of her French friends, joined by American Bookshop in Paris: The Influence of Hemingway and T. S. Eliot, who sponsored a Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company on Amerbenefit series of readings from their works. ican Literature" (Ph.D. diss., Wash. State Univ., What the depression could not accomplish, 1961). A biobibliography by Karen Knight assisted the Nazi occupation did. In December 1941, the discovery of these and other sources.] H E R B E R T R. H A B E R Beach refused to sell a copy of Finnegans Wake to a German officer who threatened to confiscate the contents of the shop. Within two hours, she BEARD, Mary Ritter, Aug. 5, 1876-Aug. 14, 1958. Historian, feminist. had them removed to a vacant apartment above her own and all traces of Shakespeare and ComMary Ritter Beard, who provided an intelpany eradicated. Beach herself was later inlectual foundation for women's history, was terned for some seven months in Vittel but born in Indianapolis, the third of six children returned to the rue de l'Odèon in time for its and the elder of two daughters of Narcissa liberation and the dramatic return of Heming(Lockwood) and Eli Foster Ritter. Both her way, at the head of a squad of French and father, a lawyer devoted to temperance and American soldiers, on Aug. 26, 1944. Beach never reopened her shop. The climax Methodism, and her mother, an academy-educated woman who had taught school, came from of what she ironically called her "official period" occurred in 1959, when she organized and pre- westward-migrating southern Protestant families. During Mary's girlhood the Ritters lived pared the catalog for a Paris exhibition devoted comfortably in a suburban part of Indianapolis. to writers she had known there in the twenties. The same year saw the publication of her autoMary Ritter extended the horizons of this biography and an honorary degree from the Unisecure world when she left, at sixteen, to study versity of Buffalo. On "Bloomsday," June 16, political science, languages, and literature at 1962, Beach spoke at the dedication of Dublin's DePauw University in Asbury, Ind., a Methodist Martello Tower, the site of the opening chapter institution attended by her father and all her of Ulysses, as a center for Joyce studies. It was siblings. There she met Charles Austin Beard her last service for the author, who died the year ( 1 8 7 4 - 1 9 4 8 ) , a young Indianan of similar backShakespeare and Company closed. On Oct. 6, , ground. Ritter graduated in 1897 and taught 1962, she was discovered in her apartment ' high school German in Indiana before she marabove where her bookshop had been, the victim ried Beard in March 1900. apparently of a heart attack. Her ashes were Marriage provided one element of continuity brought to the family plot in Princeton, her in Mary Ritter Beard's life. Her interest in the papers to the Princeton University Library. history, needs, status, and social views of her sex provided another. That interest was first manifest in her involvement in the woman suf[The Beach papers at Princeton consist primarily of material relating to her bookshop. See Howard Rice, frage and women's trade union movements. Jr., "The Sylvia Beach Collection," Princeton Univ. Influenced, as was Charles Beard, by the reform Library Chronicle, Autumn 1964, pp. 7—13. Photocurrents of the 1890s, she immersed herself in graphs of Beach and her friends may be found in social action in England immediately after her her autobiography, Shakespeare and Company marriage. At Oxford, where her husband was (1959). Her other writings include introductions studying history and helping to found the workto her translation of Henri Michaux's A Barbarian in Asia ( 1949 ) and to a collection of essays, Our ingman's college Ruskin Hall, Mary Beard plunged into the woman suffrage movement. Exagmination Round His Fortification for IncaminaHer involvement familiarized her both with tion of Work In Progress (1962). A memorial edimilitant tactics and with the needs and priorities tion of Mercure de France, Aug.-Sept. 1963, contains her account of wartime imprisonment, "Inof working-class women. turned," and remembrances by T. S. Eliot, Archibald Returning to New York in 1902, a year after MacLeish, Allen Tate, Janet Flanner, and others. the birth of their daughter Miriam, the Beards Her relations with Joyce are documented in Jane enrolled at Columbia University. Mary Beard's Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver iconoclastic combination of graduate study in (1970); with Monnier in The Very Rich Hours of sociology with young motherhood lasted only Adrienne Monnier, translated with an introduction until 1904. Whether family considerations or and commentaries by Richard McDougall (1976).

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Beard

Beard

denying that women had legitimate grievances, she maintained that feminist protest from the eighteenth century to the twentieth had devalued women's history by expounding women's subordination. Beard's work consisted therefore in bringing to light women's neglected past: through her historical studies, such as On Understanding Women (1931) and Woman as Force in History ( 1 9 4 6 ) ; through her collections of documents, America Through Women's Eyes (1933) and Laughing Their Way: Women's Humor in America ( 1 9 3 4 ) ; in her unique study guide, "A Changing Political Economy as It Affects Women"; and in her brilliant 1942 critique of the omissions and distortions about women in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Moreover, in the 1930s Beard attempted to establish a World Center for Women's Archives to preserve the records of women's lives. Although she led a group of women in incorporating and setting up an office for the archives in New York, the project failed for lack of funds and support.

intellectual predisposition dictated her termination of graduate study is not clear. For the duration of her scholarly life she criticized academic narrowness and remained bent on selfeducation instead. In 1907 she bore a son, William. Shortly afterward she joined the National Women's Trade Union League in organizing the New York shirtwaistmakers' strike of 1909 and in protesting the Triangle factory fire. She also entered the mainstream of the woman suffrage movement, as a fundraiser and organizer, in 1910, and within a year was editing The Woman Voter, published by the Woman Suffrage party of New York. Her special interest in working women led her in 1912 to resign the editorship to concentrate instead on the Wage Earners' League, the Woman Suffrage party's adjunct for working women. When a militant faction within the national suffrage movement coalesced around the leadership of Alice Paul ( 1 8 8 5 1977), Beard was won over. She spoke, wrote, organized, and raised money in cooperation with Paul's Congressional Union (later the National Woman's party) between 1913 and 1917. When her support lapsed in the 1920s it was because she gave priority to protective legislation for working women, and consequently opposed Paul's Equal Rights Amendment.

The years in which Mary Beard pursued her "calling" as woman's historian (Lane, p. 8) were also those in which she collaborated with Charles Beard to produce a justly famous series of volumes of American history. Their first, the highly praised The Rise of American Civilization (1927), has been called "probably the most successful synthesis in American historical writing" (Beale, p. 2 6 3 ) . Besides that series, which had an extensive general audience, the Beards coauthored three textbooks for classroom use. If in her own work Mary Beard sought to combat what she saw as a false and pernicious impression that "all history is but the story of the 'man's world,' " the historical syntheses written with her husband were attempts to implement her vision of integrated human knowledge. That vision colored, but did not wholly inform, the structure and content of the coauthored volumes. Comprising social, economic, cultural, intellectual, and political history, and characterized by grand interpretive sweep, the series took more cognizance of women's roles and contributions than any comparable survey. Although it is impossible to separate their individual contributions to the volumes, Charles Beard has received most of the credit for them. Such was the reward of a prolific woman scholar married to an even more prolific and more famous man.

Gradually Beard found her authentic vocation in writing and lecturing, rather than in activism. Her first book, Woman's Work in Municipalities (1915), published when she was thirty-nine, and her second, A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1920), focused on social reform and the working class. Subsequently Beard gave rein to her interest in universal questions about women in a succession of books, speeches, and articles. From her apprenticeship in Progressive social reform, political agitation, and labor organization, she brought to her scholarship pragmatism, political savvy, and a profound awareness of the significance of class and gender. To these she added intellectual flexibility and vision. She did most of her writing at the bustling home in Milford, Conn., where the family had moved after Charles Beard resigned his Columbia University professorship in 1917 in protest against the firing of three colleagues who had opposed American entry into World War I. Mary Beard brought a unique point of view to her writing. Insisting that women's contributions were central to human society, she drew a direct connection between women's primary responsibility for the care of life and their potential for enacting progressive social change. She refused to see women merely as subject to or victimized by male domination. Without

In the 1940s, frequently facing hostility from male academics and indifference or hostility from professional women, Beard intensified her lecturing and writing efforts to transform the curricula of higher education to encompass women's points of view. At seventy, she published her best book, Woman as Force in His-

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Berg

Berg

tory. In it she developed her critique of nineteenth-century feminists' emphasis on women's subjection, locating their mistake in a misreading of women's status in English common law. Harshly reviewed by male historians when first published, the book served as a beacon for feminist scholars rediscovering women's history two decades later. Mary Beard continued her compelling interest and diverse projects in women's history into old age. She outlived Charles Beard by a decade, and spent her last years in Phoenix, Ariz., where she died of kidney failure in 1958 after a long illness. A feminist at heart who decried the counterproductiveness of feminist ideology, a polemicist for woman's point of view whose real goal was to integrate human culture, a woman whose ideas about her sex shared more with her grandmother's and granddaughter's generations than with her own, Mary Beard embodied paradox. Yet she lived a highly unified life, symbolized by her working relationship with her husband. She refused to accept a definition of sexual equality that expected women to conform to male-defined standards, and maintained instead that genuine autonomy and self-confidence for women would emerge from a more complete knowledge of their own past. [Mary Beard destroyed the bulk of her personal papers. What remains can be found in small collections at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; and the DePauw Univ. Archives. The papers of the Nat. Woman's party at the Library of Congress contain some information on her early activist days. In addition to the works mentioned above, Beard wrote The Force of Women in Japanese History ( 1 9 5 3 ) and The Making of Charles A. Beard ( 1 9 5 5 ) ; she collaborated with her husband on America in Midpassage ( 1 9 3 9 ) and The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States ( 1 9 4 2 ) . Ann J. Lane's excellent compilation, Mary Ritter Beard: A Sourcebook ( 1 9 7 8 ) , contains the only extensive appraisal of Beard's life and work, judicious selections from her writings, and a thorough bibliography. Other useful evaluations are Berenice'A. Carroll, "Mary Beard's Woman as Force in History: A Critique," Mass. Rev., Winter-Spring 1972, and Carl N. Degler, "Woman as Force in History by Mary Beard," Daedalus, Winter 1974. See also Howard K. Beale, ed., Charles A. Beard: An Appraisal ( 1 9 5 4 ) . An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Aug. 15, 1958; death record provided by Ariz. Dept. of Health.] N A N C Y F. COTT

B E R G , Gertrude Edelstein, Oct. 3, 1899-Sept. 14, 1966. Radio, television, and screen writer, actress.

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Gertrude Berg, who became famous on radio and television as Molly Goldberg, was born in New York City, the only child of Jacob and Dinah Netta (Goldstein) Edelstein. An important source for her humor and knowledge of Jewish life was her paternal grandfather, Mordecai Edelstein, an immigrant from Russian Poland. In the decade before World War I, her father, who had worked in the restaurant business, undertook the operation of a Catskill mountain boardinghouse at Fleischmanns, N.Y., where the young Gertrude Edelstein began writing entertainments to amuse the vacationers. Her mother assumed responsibility for the management of the hotel kitchen and did the bookkeeping. As a teenager, Gertrude Edelstein attended Wadleigh High School in New York City but did not graduate. In 1918 she married Lewis Berg, a student from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a guest at the hotel. After a brief stint on a Louisiana sugar plantation where Lewis Berg worked as an engineer, the couple returned to New York City where their children Cherney ( 1 9 2 2 ) and Harriet ( 1 9 2 6 ) were born. Lewis Berg continued to work as a mechanical engineer and manager of Arbuckle Brothers Sugar Refinery until the 1940s. With the advent of commercial radio, both Bergs saw the potential for capitalizing on Gertrude's playwriting skills. Going to radio station W M C A in the hope of selling a script, she instead found herself hired to read recipes in Yiddish for Consolidated Edison commercials. As she spoke no Yiddish, she read from phonetic translations. A year later, she developed her first radio series, "Effie and Laura," which was canceled after a single performance. Fortunately, she tried again, this time drawing upon the immigrant experience of her grandparents' generation and her own knowledge of Jewish family life. On Nov. 20, 1929, Gertrude Berg began broadcasting "The Rise of the Goldbergs," the radio program which catapulted her to celebrity status and made her one of the most successful women writers in the history of the entertainment industry. The program quickly gained an audience and in 1931 picked up a sponsor, Pepsodent; the series then ran without interruption, six times a week, for three years. In 1934, the troupe began a personal appearance tour of vaudeville houses in key cities. When "The Rise of the Goldbergs" was discontinued in 1934 because Pepsodent was having business difficulties, the sponsor received 30,000 letters of complaint within the first month. Berg then came up with the idea for "The House of Glass," a half-hour serial about a Catskill mountain resort that was broadcast for a few months in 1935 but never reached

Bernstein

Berg the popularity of the Goldberg series. During the winter of 1936, Berg temporarily relocated herself in Hollywood and wrote screenplays for producer Sol Lesser and child star Bobby Breen. In the summer of 1937 her family joined her in California; that August, before returning to New York, Berg signed a one million dollar contract, committing her to five more years of writing and starring in the Goldberg series. From 1938 until 1945, the program was carried by both NBC and CBS, allegedly making it second only to "Amos 'N* Andy" in the annals of radio popularity. Berg wrote all her own scripts and acted the part of the central character, the mother, Molly Goldberg. Her radio family remained basically the same for the next two decades. Her husband, Jake Goldberg (played by James R. Waters), was a cloak and suiter in the garment trades; Rosalie (played by Rosalyn Silbur) and Sammy (played by Alfred Ryder and others) were their children. Over the years the family moved, the children grew up and began to date, and Sammy went off to war. In each fifteenminute segment, Molly, a good-natured meddler, involved herself, her Jewish relatives, and her polyglot New York neighbors in a variety of problems which inevitably gave her the opportunity to moralize about human behavior. While the character Berg created displayed elements of her own personality and values, her private domestic arrangements were a far cry from the struggling Goldbergs. In the midst of the depression, Berg had the resources to employ three persons to help her manage her domestic life and maternal responsibilities. Millions of Americans were involved in the problems and delights of the Goldberg family. Both the volume and character of Berg's fan mail indicate that a significant portion of the audience found the program inspirational as well as amusing. Listeners from diverse religious and geographical backgrounds commented on the manner in which Molly "symbolized the importance of Motherhood," while the program "stressed home and family as the nucleus of society." Considered by many as good as any sermon, "The Rise of the Goldbergs" was an important secular source of moral inspiration. This wide national acceptance and benevolent interest in the aspirations of the Goldberg family were important to those in the Jewish community who feared radio's potential as an additional source of Jewish stereotyping. The Jewish Daily Forward complimented Gertrude Berg for the authenticity of both her dialect and her portrayal of Jewish life. In fact, American Jews wrote Berg consistently, both to comment on those programs which portrayed their re-

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ligious observances and to request her support in fund raising on behalf of American and European Jewry. She responded with increasing regularity, as the specter of fascism grew, intermingling her work for Jewish groups with participation in the larger war effort. Fan mail from non-Jews indicated that "The Goldbergs" was widely perceived as a catalyst in the development of interfaith and interracial understanding. "You are doing a masterly job of fighting anti-Semitism," wrote a typical Christian listener who considered Molly, Jake, and the kids to be close friends. Non-Jews identified with the family's quest for improved economic and social status and liked Molly Goldberg's homiletics, often more American than ethnic. The successful transition of "The Goldbergs" to television in 1949 was seen by CBS as a model, "pointing to a reservoir of program talent and ideas," drawn from radio. With an estimated thirteen million viewers, Berg's opening line for each show, "Yoo hoo, Mrs. Bloom," became a national cliché. In 1950, the National Academy of Television Arts and Science awarded Gertrude Berg an Emmy for her role as Molly Goldberg. Berg's career on the stage and in films was, to a large extent, based on her identity as Molly Goldberg. She appeared on Broadway in Me and Molly ( 1948) and in a 1951 film entitled Molly. Her other theater credits include A Majority of One, for which she received an Antoinette Perry Award in 1959, and Dear Me, the Sky Is Falling ( 1 9 6 3 ) . Gertrude Berg died in New York City of a heart condition, while she was in production for the starring role in The Play Girls, a script based on her idea. [The best source of information on Gertrude Berg's professional life is the Gertrude Berg Coll., George Arents Research Library, Syracuse Univ. It includes correspondence, scrapbooks, radio and television scripts, and published materials. Her autobiographical work Molly and Me ( 1961 ) documents her career. See also The Rise of the Goldbergs ( 1931 ) and the Molly Goldberg Cook Book (1955), with Myra Waldo. Biographical information is contained in Current Biog. 1941, 1960; Who Was Who in America, vol. IV ( 1968 ) ; Biog. Encyc. and Who's Who of the Am. Theatre (1966); and a N.Y. Times obituary, Sept. 15, 1966. Personal information was supplied by Lewis Berg, her husband, and Harriet Berg Schwartz, her daughter.] JOAN

JACOBS

BRUMBERG

B E R N S T E I N , Aline Frankau, Dec. 22, 1 8 8 0 Sept. 7, 1955. Stage and costume designer. Aline Bernstein was America's first woman theatrical designer to achieve professional im-

Bernstein

Bernstein

portance. In a working career that stretched from the mid-1920s to the early 1950s, Bernstein became one of a half dozen designers whose work represented the best of the American theater. She was born Hazel Frankau in New York City, the elder of two daughters of Rebecca (Goldsmith) and Joseph Frankau, an actor of German-Jewish ancestry. Her father chose the name Hazel, but her mother had it changed to Aline. She was raised in the actor's milieu of theatrical boarding houses and drafty backstages. Following the early deaths of both parents (her mother in 1895 and her father in 1897), Aline became the ward of her Aunt Rachel Goldsmith, who was addicted to drugs. Fortunately, Tom Watson, who had been a close friend of the family, perceived in her drawings a definite talent. A member of the board of directors of the New York School of Applied Design, Watson arranged for Aline to receive a scholarship to study drawing there. She later studied with Robert Henri, one of the most important American painters of the early twentieth century. Aline Frankau married Wall Street broker Theodore Bernstein on Nov. 19, 1902. They had two children, Theodore (b. 1904) and Edla (b. 1906). In the years following her marriage, Aline Bernstein focused mostly on portrait painting, but she also started working at the Henry Street Settlement as a backstage volunteer on productions and pageants presented by her friends the Lewisohn sisters. Alice (18841972) and IRENE LEWISOHN were wealthy young women who started the Neighborhood Playhouse in an attempt to bring the European "art theatre" movement to America. Between 1915 and 1924, Bernstein served her apprenticeship at the playhouse, designing and executing costumes for at least fifteen plays. By 1924 she had also begun working part-time for the Theatre Guild. That year she turned out her first significant designs—for The Little Clay Cart at the Neighborhood Playhouse. This production of the ancient Indian classic marked Bernstein's emergence as a major designer of sets and costumes. She captured a simplicity and beauty in her unified visual treatment that was based on the Rajput style of miniature painting. In the summer of 1925 Bernstein met the writer Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), twenty years her junior, and began an affair which lasted more than five years. She urged Wolfe to abandon his awkward attempts at playwriting, and, while they were touring Europe together, he began work on his first novel, Look Home-

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ward, Angel (1929). Bernstein also became his financial benefactor and his unofficial agent, eventually finding a publisher for his work. Esther Jack, a major character in Wolfe's The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), is based essentially on Bernstein. She in turn wrote and published novels and short stories, some of which—the final story in the volume Three Blue Suits (1933) and the novel The Journey Down (1938)—were based on Wolfe's early days in New York City. Bernstein was very disturbed when the relationship with Wolfe ended; her marriage, however, survived. Meanwhile Bernstein's career as a theatrical designer progressed rapidly. At the Neighborhood Playhouse in the fall of 1925 she designed the settings and costumes for the first American production of The Dybbuk. Her famous expressionistic designs for this classic Jewish folktale were more and more grotesquely distorted as the play reached its climax with a leap into mysticism. Some of her satiric designs for the Grand Street Follies, an annual parody of the Broadway season performed from 1924 through 1929 at the Neighborhood Playhouse, were strikingly apt in their burlesque of the visual styles of various designers. In early 1928 Bernstein began working with Eva Le Gallienne at her Civic Repertory Theatre. During the next four years she was the resident designer for the Civic Repertory company, turning out an average of five shows each year. Her major contribution at the Civic was the unit setting she created for the later seasons. She designed a basic neutral skeleton frame which, with the addition of dozens of different inserts, doors, and windows, could accommodate almost any dramatic need. This concept of design allowed the Civic to save large sums of money during the early years of the depression and to continue to run in repertory fashion. Both the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Civic Repertory Theatre had closed by 1934, but Bernstein continued working with the Theatre Guild and other independent producers. One such production matched her with playwright Lillian Hellman and director Herman Shumlin, for Hellman's first play, The Children's Hour (1934). The three worked together again on four other Hellman scripts between 1934 and 1949. After a brief stint in Hollywood, designing two RKO spectaculars for the 1935 season (She and The Last Days of Pompeii), Bernstein gladly returned to New York to design such well-known plays as Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939, sets only), The Male Animal, by James

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Bethune

Thurber and Elliott Nugent (1940, sets only), and Samuel Taylor's The Happy Time (1950). From 1943 to 1949 she was an instructor in costume design and consultant to the Experimental Theatre at Vassar College. At the age of seventy, Bernstein won an Antoinette Perry Award for her costume designs for the opera Regina ( 1 9 4 9 ) ; she also designed three other shows that season. Her last project as a designer for the stage was the creation of the costumes for the off-Broadway production of The World of Sholom Aleichem in 1953. In addition to her long and stunning career as a theatrical designer, Aline Bernstein helped Irene Lewisohn to establish the Museum of Costume Art, which became the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a collection of authentic clothing from different periods and countries. She succeeded Lewisohn as president of the institute in 1944 and held that position until her death in New York in 1955. Bernstein's technical expertise and experience were of great importance in making the collection a valuable source for costume designers and scholars alike. [A collection of Aline Bernstein's unpublished notebooks, drawings, and photographs is in the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library. The William B. Wisdom Coll., Houghton Library, Harvard Univ., contains substantial correspondence between Bernstein and Wolfe, and some between Bernstein and numerous Wolfe scholars. In addition to the books mentioned, her publications include her autobiography, An Actor's Daughter (1941); The Martha Washington Dollbook ( 1 9 4 5 ) ; the novel Miss Condon ( 1 9 4 7 ) ; Masterpieces of Women's Costume of the 18th and 19th Centuries (1959); "Scissors and Sense," Theatre Arts Monthly, Aug. 1925; "Off-Stage: A Harp String Breaks," Vogue, Dec. 1939; "In Production," Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 1940. A biography, Aline, by Carole Klein was published in 1979. Mike Barton, "Aline Bernstein: A History and Evaluation" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana Univ., 1 9 7 1 ) , has an extensive bibliography. Other sources of information about her life and career include Alice Lewisohn Crowley, The Neighborhood Playhouse ( 1 9 5 9 ) ; Norris Houghton, "The Designer Sets the Stage: Aline Bernstein," Theatre Arts, Feb. 1937; Eva Le Gallienne, At 33 ( 1 9 3 4 ) ; Florence Von Wien, "Women Who Are Stage Designers," Independent Woman, May 1946; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., X L V I I , 598; and entries in the Diet. Am. Biog. on Wolfe (Supp. Two) and Bernstein (Supp. Five). John Skally Terry, ed., Thomas Wolfe's Letters to His Mother Julia Elizabeth Wolfe (1943), provides some evidence that Bernstein attempted suicide in March 1931. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Sept. 8, 1955. An excellent photograph is in Theatre Arts, Feb. 1951. Marriage certificate supplied by Office of the City Clerk, City of N.Y.] MIKE

A.

BAliTON

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BETHUNE, Mary McLeod, July 10, 1875-May 18, 1955. Educator, civil rights reformer, federal government official. Mary McLeod Bethune was the most influential black woman in the United States through more than three decades. Her remarkable skills as a leader and her ability as an orator enabled her to translate the problems of Afro-Americans into terms that brought national attention. Although she favored conciliation over confrontation, she persisted throughout her career in seeking for all blacks, but especially for black women, the opportunity for education and for the chance to emerge from the social and political invisibility that kept them oppressed. Battling for the creation of united Afro-American political and organizational efforts, she pushed blacks to a keener recognition of the federal government's potential to advance the race, and to an awareness that they should work to influence government policies. Born near Mayesville, S.C., Mary McLeod was the fifteenth of seventeen children of Sam and Patsy (Mcintosh) McLeod. Her parents were slaves freed as a result of the Civil War. After the war, they farmed and did domestic work. Even with freedom, the McLeods had few material or cultural advantages, a situation aggravated during the post-Beconstruction era as whites gained political control of the overwhelmingly black Sumter County. Yet, in 1871 they had begun purchasing land where they built a cabin and grew mostly corn and cotton. Her family recognized and nurtured Mary's abilities as a leader and inspired her to work hard and believe in Christian teachings. Mary McLeod's schooling began at a small black mission school near Mayesville. She quickly mastered its offerings and with the help of a scholarship went in 1888 to Scotia Seminary (later Barber-Scotia College) in Concord, N.C., a Presbyterian school for black girls that emphasized religion and industrial education. The school was conducted by a faculty of both blacks and whites, enabling Mary McLeod to develop greater confidence in both racial groups. She took the normal and scientific course which qualified her to teach, and graduated in 1894. In July of that year, again through a scholarship, she entered the Bible Institute for Home and Foreign Missions (later the Moody Bible Institute) in Chicago to prepare for a career as a missionary to Africa. After a year's stay, she applied to the Presbyterian Mission Board for an assignment only to learn that it had no openings in Africa for black missionaries. Mary McLeod went instead to teach at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in

Bethune

Bethune

Augusta, Ga. There she met LUCY LANEY, the dynamic black founder and principal of the school, who became McLeod's model for serving others. After a year, she returned to South Carolina to teach at Kindell Institute in Sumter, where she met Albertus Bethune, five years her senior, formerly a teacher but then a menswear salesman. They were married in May 1898 and moved to Savannah to further his business career. Their only child, Albert McLeod Bethune, was born in 1899. Later tKat year the family moved again, as Mary McLeod Bethune went to Palatka, Fla., to open a Presbyterian mission school. Albertus Bethune did not share his wife's missionary ardor, however. Their marriage foundered and they separated; Albertus Bethune died in 1918. After five years in Palatka, Mary Bethune resettled in Daytona Beach, Fla., to establish a school for girls patterned after Scotia Seminary. Daytona had a rapidly increasing black population for whom public education was not available; it also had a large number of wealthy northern whites who might be called on to support a school. Beginning with only $1.50, Bethune collected dry goods boxes for benches, begged for other essentials, and in October 1904 opened her school in a rented house with six students, five little girls and her own son. With Bethune's business skills and the assistance of much of the black community and of some influential whites, the school's growth was phenomenal. Mary Bethune's powerful personality and indomitable energy pervaded all aspects of her well-administered school. A deeply religious person, she did all she could for the school and trusted in God to promote its development. Like most other black schools of the period, the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute stressed religion and industrial education; emphasis was placed on the production and handling of food to meet the school's needs and to provide income. But Bethune also championed the need for broader educational, social, and political opportunities for blacks. After World War I, she devoted increased attention to the high school program and to encouraging ambitious students to attend college. In 1920, underlining her belief in the importance of black participation in all aspects of American life, she led a successful black voter registration drive for recently enfranchised women, despite threats from the terrorist Ku Klux Klan. Well aware of her own worth, she wanted her students and other black women to transcend society's barriers and to develop "Self-Control, Self-Respect, Self-Reliance and Race Pride." The Daytona Institute was also deeply in-

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volved in the life of the local black community through a variety of programs, including celebrated Sunday afternoon community meetings which brought black and white visitors to the campus. In 1911 Bethune established under the school's sponsorship a much-needed hospital for blacks in Daytona; the school maintained it until 1927 when it was taken over by the city. Her skills as an administrator were reflected in the school's expansion. In less than twenty years the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for girls acquired twenty acres and had an attractive campus with eight buildings and a farm. In 1923, the school employed a faculty and staff of 25 for a student body of 300 girls. Although most were in the elementary grades, the secondary and teacher-training programs were growing. Bethune's next step was to transform Daytona Institute into a college. In 1923 she won the crucial sponsorship of the Board of Education for Negroes of the Methodist Episcopal church in her drive to make this change. The board merged the school with Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, thus making it coeducational. Although Bethune's deepest interest was the education and development of women, she was flexible enough to accept the new arrangement and reoriented the curriculum. In 1929 the institution was officially renamed Bethune-Cookman College. Three years later it was recognized by the regional accreditation agency as a standard junior college and in 1936 the high school department was discontinued. In 1943, the college conferred degrees in teacher education upon its first four-year graduates. Mary McLeod Bethune maintained firm personal control over the college until June 1936 when she began a second career with the federal government in Washington, D.C. She continued as president of Bethune-Cookman until December 1942, however, reflecting a tendency to dominate that also marked other areas of her life. As a college president, she took on the enormous task of raising funds. The college had almost no endowment, so Bethune had to solicit financial support from whites. Traveling through both the south and the north to woo potential donors, she used her talent as a singer to present Negro songs and her even greater talent as an orator to tell her life's story. Bethune sometimes suppressed her outrage at racist practices to appear positive and understanding and on occasion even minimized the overwhelming segregation and discrimination of the era, saying in a 1915 interview, for example, that Daytona offered "a fair measure of justice to the negro." Her basic approach, however, was to stress the identity of interest between the

Bethune

Bethune races and to a large extent she obtained funds from sympathetic individuals through carefully cultivated personal relationships. In the early years of the depression the college was in severe financial need, but in April 1934, through Bethune's eiforts, the General Education Board awarded the school a $55,000 grant. While directing the school, Mary McLeod Bethune rose to national prominence through her work with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). From 1917 to 1924 she served as president of the Florida Federation of Colored Women, which opened a home for "wayward" and delinquent girls in Ocala during these years. In 1920, she founded and became president of a regional association which developed into the Southeastern Federation of Colored Women. Four years later her work culminated in the presidency of NACW, an office regarded by many as the highest to which a black woman could then aspire. During her four years as head of the Association, she continued its commitment to a scholarship fund and to the preservation of the Frederick Douglass home in Washington, D.C., as a national memorial. She also worked aggressively to project a positive image of black women to whites through her travels in the United States and abroad and through NACW affiliation with the National Council of Women. By her oratory and her example Mary McLeod Bethune inspired black women to greater levels of service. Most important, however, she strengthened the structure of the 10,000-member organization by revising the constitution, improving the Association's periodical, National Notes, and in other ways promoting greater communication between members. Through a strenuous financial campaign, she succeeded in establishing in Washington, D.C., the organization's first fixed headquarters, and employing its first paid executive secretary. In December 1935, in New York City, Bethune created the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), formed by uniting the major national black women's associations. Although she remained active in the NACW, she had come to believe that its member federations and clubs were too deeply involved in local matters and too much oriented toward self-help for the association to speak as the authoritative national voice that black women needed. Serving as president of the NCNW from its founding until December 1949, she focused the Council's activities on segregation and discrimination especially as they aifected black women, on the cultivation of better international relationships through visitation programs and attendance at

international conferences, and on national liberal causes. She also represented the NCNW at the 1945 founding conference of the United Nations. To strengthen the organization, Bethune expanded the membership by creating chapters in major cities. She again established an impressive permanent headquarters in Washington, D.C., employed a full-time staff, and launched the Aframerican Woman's Journal. Forceful and articulate, Bethune was a natural leader. She served as president of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, vice president of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Her support was important to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, as well as to the National Urban League and the NAACP. Her greatest influence as a black leader came, however, through her role in the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was she who primarily educated E L E A N O R R O O S E V E L T (whom Bethune had met through her NCNW work) on the problems of blacks in the United States. And, with the exception of NAACP executive secretary Walter White, she was the only black who then had access to the White House. In August 1935, through Eleanor Roosevelt's influence, Bethune was appointed to the thirtyfive-member National Advisory Committee to the National Youth Administration (NYA). The agency's primary purpose was to help young people both in and out of school to find work during the depression and later during the World War II defense effort. Bethune used her relatively minor advisory position as a springboard; in June 1936 she was put in charge of Negro affairs within the NYA and in January 1939 became director of the division of Negro affairs. Like a number of other blacks who entered the federal government as specialists on Negro problems during the New Deal, she was responsible for ensuring that an equitable share of her agency's program went to blacks. Although this ideal was generally unrealized, especially in terms of proportionate expenditures for black youth as compared to white, Bethune influenced the agency to adopt nondiscriminatory policies and to recognize special black needs. She persuaded the NYA to expand the office of Negro affairs at the national level, to employ black administrative assistants at the state level, and, when the agency adopted a regional structure in 1942, to employ regional Negro affairs representatives. Bethune also guided the NYA toward broadening Negro participation in the school aid program, where she succeeded in creating a special fund, administered through her office, for Negro graduate stu-

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dents and Negro colleges. In the training program for youth out of school, she pressed for opportunities for blacks to learn skilled trades and argued for programs to assist black youth in finding jobs. Though her demands generally went unheeded during the depression, her persistent efforts later resulted in the employment of some NYA-trained Negro youth in defense industries that had not previously hired blacks. T h e aggressive and indefatigable Bethune did not limit her concern to the NYA, but effectively and self-confidently assumed the role of advocate to the government for all black interests. It was, she believed, her "sacred trust" to interpret to the administration "the dreams and the hopes and the problems of my long-suffering people." Since blacks across the country hailed her as a charismatic leader and believed that she understood their problems, Bethune could speak with authority as an individual. But she knew, as a political leader, that she needed in addition a unified power base. Believing in the efficacy of widespread cooperative efforts among blacks—an important factor in the founding of the N C N W - i n August 1936 she organized the Federal Council on Negro Affairs. Popularly called the black cabinet, the Council was an informal group of blacks in government who worked together to strengthen Negro support of the New Deal and to promote nondiscrimination in government facilities, greater opportunities for government jobs, and prevention of government actions potentially harmful to Negroes. The black cabinet met weekly at Bethune's home and she was its influential "mother superior" (Sitkoff, p. 8 1 ) , urging that its energies be directed to the support of the emerging drive for civil rights. Bringing to the group her prestige and her power as dispenser of NYA funds to black communities, she strengthened its will and voice, and succeeded in creating a channel of communication between civil rights organizations and the national administration. In turn, the Federal Council increased attention in the black press and among blacks across the nation to the political process and to government opportunities for blacks. Bethune also drew on her national power and influence to gain government support for two important National Negro Conferences, in January 1937 and January 1939. Sponsored by the NYA and widely covered in the press, these conferences spotlighted the plight of blacks in the United States and provided a forum through which blacks could make policy recommendations to the government. Backed by the N C N W , the Federal Council, and the National Conferences, all of which she

dominated, Bethune personally urged President Roosevelt to advance civil rights and continually appealed to Eleanor Roosevelt to promote Negro interests. She apparently concentrated, although with indifferent success, on trying to have blacks appointed to top level jobs, believing that this was an essential step toward elevating the Negro people. Outside the NYA, she was generally able to secure only particular exceptions to common discriminatory policies and procedures. Bethune also worked for civil rights reform outside government channels. She marched and picketed businesses in Washington that refused to hire blacks, spoke and demonstrated in support of the drives to free the nine defendants in the Scottsboro case and to gain rights for black sharecroppers in the south, and was a regular and effective speaker at conferences of the NAACP and other civil rights organizations. Speaking to white organizations, she often cultivated a down-home style that attracted listeners : "You white folks have long been eating the white meat of the chicken. W e Negroes are now ready for some of the white meat instead of the dark meat" (quoted in Ross, p. 5 ) . In addition, Bethune had to represent the administration to her race. Traveling throughout the country, she cast the New Deal and black participation in it in the most favorable light possible. With the coming of World W a r II, she exhorted blacks to forget "traditional customs of social standing, caste, and privilege" in order to unite with their fellow Americans to win the war. She hailed the president's executive order 8802 ( 1 9 4 1 ) banning racial discrimination in government and defense industries. Personally loyal to the Roosevelts, she separated Franklin Roosevelt in her mind from the Democratic party, especially its flagrantly racist southern wing, and clung fervently to his idealism. She was even more devoted to the president's wife, who supported Bethune's national activities and her college, and led others in the administration to solicit her counsel on racerelated issues. Mary McLeod Bethune left government when the NYA ceased operation in 1944; she resigned as president of the N C N W in 1949 to go into retirement at her home in Daytona Beach, which she transformed into an educational foundation. She remained a popular public figure, receiving many honors as a black leader and in January 1952 traveling to Liberia as a United States representative to the second inaugural of President William Tubman. In April of that year, the Board of Education of Englewood, N.J., canceled her engagement to speak in a public school because some whites had branded her a communist. Undaunted, she continued to champion

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Bethune democratic values and faith in the American creed until she died in 1955 from a heart attack at her home. She was buried on the campus of Bethune-Cookman College. Using a style of leadership characterized by negotiation and cooperation with white leaders, Mary McLeod Bethune struggled for Negro equality in an era when there was no national commitment to improve the inferior status and material condition of blacks in American life. Her career has been compared to that of Booker T. Washington; like his, her public views were sensitively attuned to the racial climate of the times and her ever-increasing advocacy of Negro equality reflected the gradual improvement of race relations. Though she tended to overpower those about her and on occasion to gloss over unpleasant truths in the interest of political harmony, Bethune was a dazzling and magnetic personality. She had a keen understanding of human behavior, the ability to inspire others by her words, and the facility to adapt to changing times. As one of the most influential black leaders of her day, and as the most prominent black woman, she received many honors and awards. Blacks and whites, both the famous and the obscure, respected and honored her as the personification of achievement and dignity. [The Mary McLeod Bethune Papers at the Bethune Fdn., Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona Beach, Fla., include papers dating from about 1915 to 1955 dealing with the varied aspects of Bethune's life, and photographs. A smaller and more narrowly focused group of Bethune's papers are located at the Amistad Research Center, Dillard University, New Orleans. Bethune's activities in black women's organizations are recorded in the Mary Church Terrell Papers at the Library of Congress, and in the Nat. Archives for Black Women's History, NCNW, Washington, D.C. Papers relating to Bethune's federal government work are in the NYA records, Record Group 119, Nat. Archives, and in the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.; there are also limited references to her work in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers and in the Aubrey Williams Papers, both at the Roosevelt Library. An extensive annotated bibliography can be found in Dolores C. Leifall and Janet L. Sims, "Mary McLeod Bethune—The Educator," Jour. Negro Education, Summer 1976, pp. 342-59. Representative of Bethune's writings are: "I'll Never Turn Back No More," Opportunity, Nov. 1938, pp. 324-26; "Certain Unalienable Rights," in Rayford Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants (1944), pp. 248-58; "My Secret Talks with FDR," Ebony, April 1949, pp. 4 2 51; "The Negro in Retrospect and Prospect," Jour. Negro Hist., Jan. 1950, pp. 9-19; and most notably, "My Last Will and Testament," Ebony, Aug. 1955, pp. 105-10. She also wrote a weekly column for the Pittsburgh Courier in the late 1930s and for the

Chicago Defender in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bethune has been the subject of three idealized biographies: Catherine Owens Peare, Mary McLeod Bethune (1951); Emma Gelders Sterne, Mary McLeod Bethune (1957); and Rackham Holt, Mary McLeod Bethune: A Biography (1964). Important accounts of Bethune's school include: Helen W. Ludlow, "The Bethune School," Southern Workman, March 1912, pp. 144-54; Clara Stillman, "A Tourist in Florida," The Crisis, Feb. 1924, pp. 171-74; Sadie Iola Daniel, Women Builders (1931), pp. 79-106; James P. Brawley, Two Centuries of Methodist Concern: Bondage, Freedom and Education of Black People (1974); and Florence L. Roane, "A Cultural History of Professional Teacher Education at Bethune-Cookman College" (Ed.D. diss., Boston Univ., 1965). For Bethune's leadership in the NACW see: Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Lifting as They Climb (1937) and National Notes, 1913-35, scattered issues of which are located at the Tuskegee (Ala.) Inst. Library. The founding of the NCNW is reviewed in the Council's Women United: Souvenir Year Book (1951). The major studies of Bethune's government career are: B. Joyce Ross, "Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Youth Administration: A Case Study of Power Relationships in the Black Cabinet of Franklin D. Roosevelt," Jour. Negro Hist., Jan. 1975, pp. 1-28; and Elaine M. Smith, "Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Youth Administration," in Mabel E. Deutrich and Virginia C. Purdy, eds., Clio Was a Woman: Studies in the History of American Women (1979). See also Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks (1978) and the entry on Bethune in Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. De Witt Dykes provided information on the death certificates of Patsy McLeod and Albertus Bethune, the birth certificate of Albert McLeod Bethune, and other documentation. A death certificate was provided by the Fla. Dept. of Health and Rehabilitative Services.] ELAINE M.

SMITH

BLAINE, Anita Eugénie McCormick, July 4, 1 8 6 6 - F e b . 12, 1954. Philanthropist. Through wide-ranging and often adventurous philanthropy in education, social welfare, and the cause of world peace, Anita Blaine carried forward through her long life the tradition of Progressive reform. She was born in Manchester, Vt., the fourth of seven children (five of whom survived) and the second of three daughters of Cyrus Hall and N E T T I E F O W L E R MCCORMICK. Cyrus McCormick, of Scots-Irish descent, achieved national prominence as the inventor and manufacturer of the reaper and was known as well for his philanthropies. Nancy Marie Fowler (later called Nettie), the daughter of a storekeeper and small manufacturer of English descent, attended several seminaries before her 1858 marriage to Cyrus McCormick;

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she became a well-known philanthropist and businesswoman. Anita McCormick was schooled by tutors and governesses in France, New York City, and Chicago because of her father's business-related travels. She graduated from the Kirkland School in Chicago in 1884. She was somewhat introspective and given to critical self-examination, a trait reinforced by her strict Presbyterian upbringing. From her mother she absorbed a strong sense of Christian stewardship and duty, tempered by a love of nature, and an interest in education and social welfare. On Sept. 26, 1889, she married Emmons Blaine, a lawyer and businessman and the son of James G. Blaine, who was defeated by Grover Cleveland in the presidential election of 1884. A son, Emmons Jr., was born in 1890. After the death of her husband two years later, she devoted her attention to the education of her son and to philanthropic activities. Like her parents, Anita Blaine believed that personal wealth was a trust to be used for the good of others. The McCormicks gave extensively to religious organizations and were preoccupied with rural life and activities. In contrast Anita Blaine, who developed some antipathy toward religious organizations, oriented her philanthropy toward secular concerns, especially toward the solution of urban problems. Her concerns and methods reflected those of her era. Whereas her mother favored an individualistic approach to giving, she supported the trend toward scientific investigation and more organized philanthropy and served as a member of many charity societies, committees, and boards. Nettie McCormick's beliefs in stewardship and humanitarianism were transmuted in Anita Blaine into the Progressive ideals of organization and group cooperation. Convinced that the world's wealth was unjustly distributed and repelled by the idea of competition, she suggested in a 1910 speech that a portion of the national wealth be allocated to a public organization for more equitable administration. Anita Blaine's concern for her son's educational future broadened her own interests. In 1897 she enrolled him in the laboratory school of the Cook County (subsequently the Chicago) Normal School, headed by the noted Progressive educator Francis W. Parker. She shared Parker's beliefs in the child-centered approach, in learning by doing, in the school as a preparation for future life, and in the value of nature study. In 1899 she founded the Chicago Institute, with Parker as head, to train teachers and educate children according to Progressive methods; the Institute was merged into the University of Chicago School of Education in 1901. In the same

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year Anita Blaine founded the Francis W. Parker School, to be directed by FLORA, COOKE, one of Parker's most trusted followers. She contributed more than three million dollars to the school during her lifetime. Blaine was also a member of the Chicago Board of Education from 1905 to 1907, and served on its Juvenile Court and Truancy committees. Increasingly concerned for the city's poor, Anita Blaine contributed to and participated in a number of social welfare organizations. In 1900, she and J A N E ADDAMS formed the City Homes Association, which sought to investigate tenement conditions in Chicago; Blaine was appointed chairman of its tenement committee. She also served on the board of the Bureau of Charities and on the National Child Labor Committee. After 1912, she devoted her philanthropic activity less to social welfare groups and more to cases of individual need. Urban reform, she felt, had largely been accomplished. After her son's death from influenza in 1918, Anita Blaine's philanthropic and organizational activities became the focus of her life. The entry of the United States into World War I had turned her attention to international concerns, and after the war she became an ardent advocate of world cooperation. She campaigned for American entry into the League of Nations and was a financial backer of the League of Nations Association until the late 1930s. She also promoted international cooperation through her involvement in the World Foundation and the World Citizens Association, of which she became vice chairman. During the 1940s her activities became more political in nature. Despite the fact that her family had been Republican, she became a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, favored aid to Britain and France, and urged a declaration of war against Germany in May 1941. In 1943 she gave $100,000 to Madame Chiang Kai-shek for the aid of Chinese war orphans. A supporter of the 1945 San Francisco Conference and of the United Nations, in 1948 she contributed over one million dollars to establish the Foundation for World Government, which advocated the limitation of national sovereignty, the enforcement of world law, and the complete control of atomic development. During the 1948 election campaign Blaine backed the Progressive party and the candidacy of Henry Wallace. In the following years she made substantial contributions to two fledgling New York papers, The Daily Compass, which she hoped would popularize the idea of world government, and the more radical National Guardian. Blaine underwent an operation in December 1949 from which she never fully recovered; she remained

Blair

Blair in ill health until her death in Chicago from bronchial pneumonia in 1954. In her later years, Anita Blaine seemed odd to some; she was also accused of being a radical and a socialist. A determined and vivacious woman, in some ways she was personally eccentric; she reportedly felt, for example, that big hats caused mental strain, and she refused to buy any hat that weighed more than four ounces. She was also very effective. During her lifetime, Anita Blaine's philanthropies totaled over ten million dollars; she willed another twenty million dollars (out of an estate of thirtyeight million dollars) to charitable causes, notably to the New World Foundation, for the improvement of education and social welfare. Her activities both reflected and stimulated the growth of the American reform tradition in the early twentieth century. [Blaine's papers are in the McCormick Coll., State Hist. Soc. of Wis. They total 1,117 boxes and include letters, business papers, copies of her writings, diaries, and information relating to her estate and those of her husband and son. Papers of the latter two are also in the McCormick Coll. For a more extended description of the Blaine papers see Margaret R. Hafstad, ed., Guide to the McCormick Collection of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (1973), pp. 28-38. The Chicago Hist. Soc. has some Blaine items, including several speeches made in her memory in 1955: "My Grandmother," by Nancy Blaine Harrison; "Mrs. Blaine and the Francis W. Parker School," by Charlotte Kuh; and "Mrs. Blaine —Citizen of the World," by Katharine Taylor. The Newberry Library, Chicago, has several unpublished articles on Blaine. See Gilbert A. Harrison, A Timeless Affair: The Life of Anita McCormick Blaine (1979) and Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. Brief references can be found in Charles O. Burgess, Nettie Fowler McCormick: Profile of an American Philanthropist (1962); Stella Virginia Roderick, Nettie Fowler McCormick (1956); and Jack K. Campbell, Colonel Francis W. Parker: The Children's Crusader (1967). See Cedric Belfrage and James Aronson, Something to Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian, 1948-1967 (1978), for an account of Blaine's involvement with that paper. Obituaries appeared in the Chicago American and Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 13, 14, 1954; Chicago Daily News, Feb. 13, 1954; N.Y. Herald Tribune, Feb. 14, 1954; N.Y. Times, Feb. 13, 1954; Newsweek and Time, both Feb. 22, 1954.] BRUCE

WHITE

BLAIR, Emily Jane Newell, Jan. 9, 1877-Aug. 3, 1951. Suffragist, feminist, Democratic party official, writer. In 1910 Emily Newell Blair was a "contented" Missouri wife and mother; by 1924 she was vice president of the Democratic National Committee, its only woman national officer. Born in

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Joplin, Mo., she was the oldest daughter of James Patton and Anna Cynthia (Gray) Newell. After graduating from high school in Carthage, Mo., in 1894 she enrolled at the Woman's College of Baltimore (later Goucher College). Her father, a Civil War veteran, was a successful mortgage broker, but when he died there was not enough money for her to continue her education. Needed at home to help bring up and educate her younger brother and three sisters, she returned after one year in college. She attended classes at the University of Missouri but did not graduate, and she taught school. On Dec. 24, 1900, Emily Newell married Harry Wallace Blair, a law student. He established a law practice in Carthage and they became the parents of a daughter, Harriet, and a son, Newell. She lcept house, did some civic work and, because her husband was interested in politics, worked for candidates for county office. Although she enjoyed her husband and children she wanted to do something in addition, to move out "of the narrow confines into a larger sphere." In 1909 Emily Newell Blair sold her first short story to a national magazine. Over the next few years her writing was published in Cosmopolitan, Harper's Magazine, Woman's Home Companion, and other magazines. With the money she earned she hired help for the house and children to free herself to write. Around 1910, when the woman suffrage campaign was revived, Blair began her active career in politics. She saw the law that prevented women from voting as denying civil rights as well. A woman had "no property rights, no parental rights, practically no economic freedom, since professions, trades and business were closed to her," she later recalled (Missouri Hist. Rev., April 1 9 2 0 ) . Determined to gain political power for women, she joined the Missouri Equal Suffrage Association, and in 1914 became press and publicity chairman and the first editor of the Missouri Woman, a monthly suffrage publication. A diminutive woman, Blair's gentle manner concealed a cool analytical mind and a strong will. She used her charm to win over the Missouri press, which to a large extent backed her cause. She also persuaded both the state Parent-Teachers Association and the Federation of Women's Clubs to endorse the Missouri Woman as their official organ, thus securing broad support. Blair rose to national prominence during World War I. When the war broke out she became vice chairman of the Missouri Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense, a preparedness agency. Her work was so effective that she was appointed to the executive

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committee of the council's national Woman's Committee. Based in Washington, and chaired by suffrage leader ANNA HOWARD SHAW, the committee was charged with providing "a direct and organized channel through which the government could convey to women its requests and directions for war work" (Interpretative Report, p. 18). Blair, who was in charge of news and publicity, learned about women's problems throughout the country and about the workings of national politics. With her husband, who had served overseas during the war, Emily Newell Blair returned to Joplin in 1919. Her official history of the Woman's Committee, which appeared in 1920, emphasized the potential for political power among organized women and the role women could play in government when they had the vote. After the passage of the nineteenth amendment, Blair helped found the League of Women Voters in 1920 but then rejected it, feeling that nonpartisanship was not an effective use of the vote. Neither did she join the more militantly feminist National Woman's party. Blair believed there were only two ways for women to get political power: by holding office and by becoming effective in political organizations. She joined the Democrats and began to work for the party. In 1920 the Democratic party added one committeewoman from each state, doubling its National Committee. These women were appointed, not elected, however, and they had no voting power. Blair worked with others to put pressure on the party, and in 1921 women were elected to the National Committee and had the same votes as the men. Elected that year to represent Missouri, Emily Blair was soon chosen by the committee as national vice chairman with particular responsibility for organizing women voters and for women's activities. She worked hard: in the next two years she made 200 speeches in twenty-two states, organized more than 2,000 Democratic Women's Clubs, and built up regional training programs for women party workers. She was reelected to the Democratic National Committee in 1924 and chosen first vice president. Serving until 1928, she prepared a history of the Democratic party, an organization primer, and many leaflets. Blair also helped to found the Woman's National Democratic Club, serving as its secretary from 1922 to 1926 and as its president in 1928. Reviewing the results of ten years of suffrage in a 1930 interview Blair concluded that women had accomplished little with the vote; they had neither solidarity nor power and, in fact, had slipped backwards. She wondered if it had been a mistake to join men in the existing parties, and noted that her acceptance of the argument that

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women must work along party lines had led to nothing more than individual recognition for herself. She had not been able to create a position of power for other women. A "new feminism" was needed, Blair believed, to urge women to run for public office and to support them when they did. Blair continued her writing career, focusing on books and the home as well as on feminist topics. She was associate editor of Good Housekeeping magazine from 1925 to 1933, and published a book on decorating, The Creation of a Home, in 1930. A novel, A Woman of Courage, appeared the following year. In 1933, when the Democrats regained the presidency, Blair returned with her husband to Washington where she was appointed to the Consumers' Advisory Board under the National Industrial Recovery Act, serving as its chairman in 1935. She then turned again to free-lance writing, but published little. Her last public office was a 1942 War Department appointment as chief of the women's interests section in the department's bureau of public relations. In 1944 Emily Blair suffered a stroke which incapacitated her; she died in Alexandria, Va., seven years later. [There are a few letters in the Sue Shelton White Papers and some clippings in the Woman's Rights Coll., both at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Blair's writings also include The Woman's Committee, U.S. Council of Nat. Defense: An Interpretative Report ( 1 9 2 0 ) ; Letters of a Contented Wife ( 1 9 3 1 ) ; "Are Women a Failure in Politics?" Harper's Mag., Oct. 1925, pp. 5 1 3 - 2 2 , and two articles in The Woman's Journal, " W h y I Am Discouraged about Women in Politics," Jan. 1931, pp. 2 0 22, and "Putting Women into Politics," March 1931, pp. 1 4 - 1 5 , 29. She wrote an introduction to the history of suffrage activity in Missouri in the Missouri Hist. Rev., April-July 1920, which also contains an article by Mary Semple Scott, "The Missouri Woman," on Blair's suffrage work. An interview with Blair by Mary Carroll, "Wanted—A New Feminism," appeared in Independent Woman, Dec. 1930, pp. 499 and 544. For information on her life and activities see Ernestine Evans, "Women in the Washington Scene," Century Mag., Aug. 1923, pp. 5 0 7 17; Anne Hard, "Emily Blair 'Politician,'" Woman Citizen, April 1926, pp. 1 5 - 1 6 ; and a profile in Missouri Hist. Rev., Fall 1968. The entry in Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five, is particularly useful. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times and Wash. Post, Aug. 4, 1951; death record provided by Va. Dept. of Health.] MARGOT JERRARD

BLANCHFIELD, Florence Aby, April 1, 1882May 12,1971. Nurse, military officer. Florence Blanchfield, superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps and the first woman commis-

Blanchfleld

Blanchfield

dramatic increase in the number of nurses during World War II—from a few hundred to over 50,000. Among her innovations were the establishment of training schools to teach nurses military regulations, and the assignment of nurses to hospitals near the front lines to provide surgical nursing care. The Army Nurse Branch of Technical Information in the Surgeon General's Office, which she helped to create, informed the public about the work of army nurses and aided recruiting efforts. T o gain a better understanding of nursing care and to oversee the welfare of the army nurses, Blanchfield toured extensively in war areas. Florence Blanchfield's major interest and accomplishment was obtaining full military rank for nurses, for which she worked tirelessly with Congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton ( 1 8 8 5 1977) and others. In 1944 temporary full military rank was granted. T h e Army—Navy Nurse Act of 1947 secured permanent status, and Blanchfield received the first regular army commission held by a woman in the United States. In 1945 the army awarded Blanchfield the Distinguished Service Medal for "devotion to duty" and "administrative and executive ability of the highest order." She also received the Florence Nightingale Medal from the International Red Cross ( 1 9 5 1 ) and West Virginia's Distinguished Service Medal ( 1 9 6 3 ) . In 1978 the army named the United States Army hospital under construction in Fort Campbell, Ky., in her honor. In addition to writing articles on military nursing and participating in nursing associations, Blanchfield took courses in business, public speaking, English composition, and dressmaking. Her car provided a major interest and pleasure which prompted her to study automobile mechanics. An avid sports fan, she was also pleased when the army named a tennis trophy after her. After Col. Blanchfield's retirement from the A N C in 1947, she traveled and worked with Mary W. Standlee on a manuscript history of the ANC. Asked in 1964 about her current interests, she replied: "They are the same as ever, an intense interest in the nursing service, its professional progress; the broadening educational field . . . together with the art of nursing." Blanchfield shared a home with a sister and brother-in-law in Washington, D.C., where she died in 1971 at Walter Reed General Hospital of atherosclerotic heart disease.

sioned in the regular army, was born in Front Royal, Va., the second of three daughters and fourth of eight children of Mary Louvenia (Anderson) and Joseph Plunkett Blanchfield, a stonemason and cutter. Her father was of English and Irish ancestry; her mother's ancestors were German and French. Shortly after her birth the family moved to Oranda, Va. Florence attended public school in Walnut Springs, Va. ( 1 8 8 9 - 9 8 ) , and the Oranda Institute, a private school ( 1 8 9 8 - 9 9 ) . Florence Blanchfield's mother practiced nursing, and her maternal grandfather and an uncle were physicians. All three Blanchfield daughters became trained nurses; the youngest, Ruth, later studied under Florence. In addition to the family orientation toward medicine, the illness and eventual death of a favorite brother influenced Florence Blanchfield's choice of career. She graduated from South Side Hospital Training School for Nurses in Pittsburgh in 1906, and, while engaged as a private duty nurse, undertook postgraduate study in Baltimore at Dr. Howard Kelly's Sanatorium and at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She then held supervisory positions at Pittsburgh's South Side and Montefiore Hospitals, and served as superintendent at Suburban General Hospital in Bellevue, Pa. ( 1 9 0 9 - 1 3 ) . Determined to broaden her experience and knowledge of nursing, in 1913 Blanchfield joined the staff at Ancon Hospital, Panama Canal Zone. She returned aboard one of the first ships to sail through the newly opened locks. Turning to industrial nursing she became emergency surgical nurse at the United States Steel Corporation plant in Bessemer, Pa. ( 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 ) . Blanchfield briefly resumed her former position in Bellevue but resigned to join the Army Nurse Corps ( A N C ) in 1917, serving during World War I in Angers and at C a m p Coetquidan, France. Although she returned once again to Bellevue in 1919, Blanchfield's wartime experiences drew her to a career in the military, which promised more opportunities for nurses. Having chafed under the orders of officers who knew little of nursing, she vowed to work toward gaining full military status for nurses. Blanchfield reentered the A N C in 1920 and completed tours of duty in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Michigan, Indiana, Georgia, the Philippines, and China. She joined the Surgeon General's staff in Washington in 1935, became lieutenant colonel in 1942, and was promoted to superintendent of the A N C in 1943, receiving the rank of colonel. As superintendent, Colonel Blanchfield was an effective administrator who oversaw the

[The official records of the ANC are with those of the Surgeon General's Office, Record Group 112, Nat. Archives. Additional materials, including correspondence, speeches, memorabilia, and photographs, are in the Col. Florence A. Blanchfield Coll.,

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Bloor

Nursing Archives, Mugar Library, Boston Univ., and the U.S. Army Center of Military Hist., Washington, D.C. Her writings include "The Needs of the Army Nurse Corps," Am. Jour. Nursing, Nov. 1943, pp. 991-92, and "New Status in Military Nursing," Am. Jour. Nursing, Sept. 1947, pp. 603-05. The main biographical sources are Doris W. Egge, "A Concise Biography of Colonel Florence Aby Blanchfield, ANC," prepared in 1974 for the U.S. Army Center of Military Hist.; Edith A. Aynes, "Colonel Florence A. Blanchfield," Nursing Outlook, Feb. 1959, pp. 78-81; and Current Biog., 1943. Blanchfield was interviewed by Evelyn Dent for the Wash. Star, Feb. 23, 1964. Also helpful are Mary M. Roberts, The Army Nurse Corps Yesterday and Today (1957), and Edith A. Aynes, From Nightingale to Eagle: An Army Nurse's History (1973). An obituary appeared in the Wash. Post, May 14, 1971. Family information was provided by Florence Blanchfield's sister, Ruth Orndorif. Although almost all sources give her year of birth as 1884, a birth record provided by the Va. Dept. of Health confirms the 1882 date. A death certificate was supplied by D.C. Dept of Public Health.] LINDA J .

HENRY

BLOOR, Ella Reeve, July 8, 1862-Aug. 10, 1951. Radical, labor organizer, journalist, suffragist. Ella Reeve Bloor was born on Staten Island, N.Y., to Harriet Amanda (Disbrow) and Charles Reeve; she was the oldest of ten children (three girls and seven boys). Her father's Dutch and English ancestors had settled on Staten Island in the eighteenth century; her mother's family, French and English in origin, had arrived in Connecticut in the seventeenth century. Ella grew up on Staten Island, and later in Bridgeton, N.J., where her parents enjoyed a certain social standing. Her father was a relatively prosperous owner of a drugstore there, and her mother was active in the community. After attending local public school, and then, briefly, the Ivy Hall Seminary, Ella was taught at home by her mother. When Harriet Reeve died in childbirth in 1879, Ella, as the oldest daughter, became responsible for tending her younger siblings. Although her mother had intensely disliked intolerance and social pretense, Ella's parents— and especially her father—had tended toward conservative political and religious beliefs. Therefore, when Ella Reeve became interested in social and political reform in her teens she sought out her great-uncle, Dan Ware, an abolitionist, greenbacker, Unitarian, and freethinker, who introduced her to the works of the agnostic Robert Ingersoll. Ella Bloor later acknowledged her uncle's strong influence on her intellectual development.

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At the age of nineteen, following her father's remarriage, Ella Reeve married Lucien Ware, Dan Ware's son. An aspiring lawyer, Ware had been a court stenographer at the trial of the Molly Maguires, radical miners accused of conspiracy. Over the next eleven years Ella Ware gave birth to six children: Pauline (b. 1882), Charles (b. 1883), Grace (b. 1885), Helen (b. 1887), Harold (b. 1889), and Hamilton Disbrow (b. 1892); Pauline and Charles died, on the same day, in 1886. During these years, her associations with Quakers and Unitarians introduced her to the issues of women's equality and woman suffrage. She also became active in the Ethical Culture Society in Philadelphia, and in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, serving as president of its branch in Woodbury, N.J., where the Wares had moved. Becoming interested in the labor movement, she organized Philadelphia streetcar workers in the early 1890s. Increasing tension between Lucien and Ella Ware over her political activities caused the marriage to deteriorate; a separation was followed by divorce in 1896. For several years after the separation, Ella Ware enjoyed her independence and explored possible occupations. She took courses at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote two children's books, and contributed occasionally to newspapers. With her children, she lived in the Utopian community of Arden, Del., which had been established by single-taxers and socialists. In 1897 she married Louis Cohen, a socialist associated with Daniel DeLeon, who later worked for the Socialist party. He was also a persistent but quite unsuccessful entrepreneur. After the birth of two children, Richard in 1898 and Carl in 1900, the couple separated in 1902 and later divorced. Ella Cohen then embarked on her long and contentious career as a political activist. Her interest in improving the status of women continued throughout her life. She advocated communal sharing of basic housekeeping duties in a 1903 article for Wilshire's Magazine, and participated in both the 1913 Ohio referendum campaign for the woman suffrage amendment and the mass demonstration of suffragists in Washington, D.C., at the time of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. Initially a supporter of the National Woman's party, she later opposed the organization and its Equal Rights Amendment as antilabor. She also fought for women's interests in the Socialist and Communist parties. But it was to labor organizing and left-wing politics that she most fully devoted her energies and talents. Eugene Debs, whom she met in

Bloor

Bloor 1895, had convinced her of the necessity for socialism. After working for a time with Daniel DeLeon's Socialist Labor party, Ella Cohen joined the Socialist party soon after its founding in 1901. In 1905 she moved to Connecticut, where she became a state organizer for the party and also wrote for the Waterbury (Conn.) American. A particularly blunt article on child labor practices in the state cost her this job. In 1906 her friend Upton Sinclair, who had lived at Arden, persuaded Ella Cohen to investigate the Chicago meat-packing industry. She was to gather evidence for a government investigating commission to document the charges Sinclair had made against the industry in The Jungle. Richard Bloor, a young pottery worker and fellow socialist, went along to protect her. Sinclair, who feared that the public would be scandalized by an unmarried team of investigators, convinced her to publish her reports under the name Ella Bloor. She later denied any romantic attachment, but the reports became well known, and so did the reporter. Although the pair soon split up, she continued to use the name Bloor for the rest of her life. After her Chicago trip, Ella Bloor spent the next dozen years organizing for the Socialist party and for various labor unions, including the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers. A state organizer for the party in Connecticut, she also traveled frequently, visiting party locals in Ohio, West Virginia, and southern Illinois on one swing, rallying support for the strikers at Ludlow, Colo., and at Calumet, Mich., on others. Her efforts in the coal fields earned her honorary membership in the United Mine Workers of America. During this period she also ran for political office on the Socialist party ticket, first in Connecticut and later in New York. Bloor joined those socialists who opposed World War I as imperialist, and came to the aid of individuals arrested for antiwar activities. She served as field organizer for the Workers' Defense Union, which, with E L I Z A B E T H G U R L E Y F L Y N N and others, she had formed to raise money and support for the legal defense of political prisoners and conscientious objectors. Denied the right to speak at a number of meetings, Bloor was slated for arrest during the postwar Red Scare; she managed to escape, at one point fleeing Worcester, Mass., leaving all her possessions behind. In 1919 Ella Bloor—who had been disillusioned by the support of many Socialist party leaders for the war—participated in the formation of the Communist party. For the rest of her life she worked assiduously on its behalf.

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As a trade union delegate to the Red International of Labor Unions conference in Moscow in 1921, she made her first visit to the Soviet Union. Four years later, at the age of sixty-three, Bloor set off on an exhausting cross-country tour for the Daily Worker. Hitchhiking from New York to San Francisco, she held recruiting and subscription meetings in several dozen cities along the way. Through the International Labor Defense, Bloor was also active in the unsuccessful campaign to free Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Continuing her work in labor organizing as well, she appeared frequently in the coal fields, traveled to Gastonia, N.C., to raise support for arrested strikers, and participated in demonstrations of the unemployed as they began their hunger marches on Washington in the early 1930s. By the 1930s Mother Bloor, as she had come to be called, was in considerable demand as a speaker; in her seventies, she still traveled extensively for the Communist party. She went to the Dakotas in 1930 to take charge of the party's election campaign and to win support for the United Farmers' League. There she met Andrew Omholt, a farmer and Communist candidate for Congress in North Dakota, who soon became her third husband. On another cross-country tourin 1936, she campaigned for the party's national candidates, and in the late 1930s worked in its organizing drives in eastern Pennsylvania. In 1937 she returned to the Soviet Union as an honored guest at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Bloor undertook her last major campaign during World War II: on several multicity tours, she spoke at public rallies and private meetings, granted interviews, and made radio talks on the theme of "Win the War Against Fascism." In addition to serving the party as a speaker, Bloor was also a member of its Central Committee from 1932 to 1948. Throughout her career, Bloor had to make a variety of arrangements for the care of her children. In the early years she sometimes took one or two with her on speaking tours, while the older children were on occasion placed in boarding schools. When the children were older, she kept in touch through a blizzard of letters, and saw them when her travels permitted; Bloor also occasionally took one or another granddaughter with her. While the children resented her absences, they supported her work and remained emotionally close to her; two sons also worked for the Communist party. Always an activist, Ella Bloor had little interest in ideological debates. She served the Communist party as a perpetual and indefatigable

Bloor

Blunt

organizer; her role was to build support, recruit members, and rally morale for the party's programs. Her singular objective seemed to be, as Life magazine described it, "to make life happier for the world's unfortunates." To this end she suffered over thirty arrests—one at the age of seventy-two for assault and inciting to riot—innumerable threats of physical violence, and frequent harassment by police and vigilantes. In 1937 Ella Bloor retired to eastern Pennsylvania; soon after, she and Andrew Omholt acquired a working apple farm near Coopersburg. She frequently noted how much she liked "her first real home." At the age of eighty-nine, she died of a stroke in a convalescent home in Richlandtown, Pa. [Ella Bloor's personal papers, temporarily stored at Hollins College, contain approximately 2,000 personal letters, transcripts of speeches, programs, clippings, photographs, and personal souvenirs. Her children's books are Three Little Lovers of Nature ( 1 8 9 5 ) and Talks about Authors and Their Works ( 1 8 9 9 ) . Much information is contained in Bloor's autobiography, We Are Many ( 1 9 4 0 ) , although it is occasionally unreliable. Ann Barton's Mother Bloor: The Spirit of '76, a pamphlet published in 1937, provides a brief biographical account. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn writes of Bloor's work and character in her autobiography, The Rebel Girl ( 1 9 7 3 ) , and in Daughters of America: Ella Reeve Bloor and Anita Whitney ( 1 9 4 2 ) . There are references to Bloor in The Reminiscences of Charles E. Taylor in the Oral History Collection, Columbia Univ. See also Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. Bloor's Socialist party activities are mentioned in James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925 ( 1 9 6 7 ) . Her Communist party experiences are referred to in Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism ( 1 9 5 7 ) , and American Communism and Soviet Russia ( 1 9 6 0 ) , and in Joseph Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 19431957 ( 1 9 7 2 ) . William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party of the U.S. ( 1 9 5 2 ) , notes Bloor's assertion of women's rights within the party. Upton Sinclair's Autobiography ( 1962 ) speaks of her role in investigating conditions in meat-packing plants. Radical newspapers such as the N.Y. Call, the Daily Worker, and Farmers Nat. Weekly chronicle her travels and labors. Life, July 26, 1937, contains a good photograph and brief assessment of her activities. Additional information for this article was obtained from F B I documents released under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act and from interviews with Bloor's contemporaries. Information on the number of children in the Reeve family comes from Genealogy of the Descendants of Joseph Ware (1891; rev. 1 9 2 2 ) . An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Aug. 11, 1951; death record provided by Pa. Dept. of Health.] L.

EDWARDS

RICHARD C.

THOMAS

EDWARDS

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BLUNT, Katharine, May 28, 1876-July 29, 1954. College administrator, home economics educator, nutritionist. Katharine Blunt was born in Philadelphia, the first of three daughters of Stanhope English and Fanny (Smyth) Blunt. Her father, a distinguished professional soldier then stationed at the Frankford Arsenal, was an expert in gunnery and small arms who retired as a full colonel after serving as commander of the Rock Island (111.) Arsenal and the Springfield (Mass.) Armory. He spent part of his early career as an instructor at West Point. Until Katharine Blunt became determined to attend college, none of the women of her comfortable, upper-middle-class family had aspired beyond finishing school. Blunt attended the Porter School in Springfield, Mass., and in 1894 entered Vassar College, from which she received her A.B. in 1898. After graduation, Blunt spent four years at home at the urging of her family, doing church and civic work, before resuming her education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1902. The following year she took the first of two appointments at Vassar, serving as an assistant in chemistry. She left Vassar in 1905 for further scientific training at the University of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1907. That same year Blunt accepted the post of instructor in chemistry in the domestic science department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y. Returning to Vassar in 1908, she remained there as instructor in chemistry until 1913, when she entered the department of home economics at the University of Chicago as assistant professor. She was named associate professor in 1918, when she began serving informally as the department chairman; she became full professor and official chairman of the department in 1925. During Blunt's tenure, the department grew to seventeen staff members and produced many outstanding researchers, administrators, and nutritionists. Concerned with the importance of establishing home economics as a profession, she worked to gain acceptance of home economics as an appropriate subject of instruction and to plan a scientific curriculum for training professionals. In a 1928 tribute the American Home Economics Association observed that her administration had enhanced the quality of graduate work in the field, and that Blunt's own devotion to research had provided an invaluable example to students. Her major research field was nutrition, and she did valuable work on calcium and phosphorus metabolism and on the basal metabolism of women and children. In 1917 Blunt was drafted from her duties at

Blunt

Bogan

the university to work for the United States Department of Agriculture and the Food Administration as an expert on nutrition. For the war effort, she wrote pamphlets on food conservation and collaborated with Florence Powdermaker ( 1 8 9 4 - 1 9 6 6 ) to prepare food conservation lessons which were disseminated to colleges and later published as a textbook, Food and the War ( 1 9 1 8 ) . Throughout this period of heavy administrative and public service commitments, Blunt continued to publish articles on food chemistry and nutrition in scholarly journals. Her work culminated in 1930 with the publication of Ultra-Violet Light and Vitamin D in Nutrition, a summary of research in the field, written with Ruth Cowan. The book was praised for its usefulness to both professional and lay readers concerned with public health and welfare. During these years Blunt also served as editor of the University of Chicago's Home Economics Series. In September 1929, Katharine Blunt was named the third president of Connecticut College for Women, a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1911. The first woman to hold the post, she applied her administrative skills to enlarging the college's physical plant, increasing its financial resources, and upgrading its faculty. These improvements resulted in the institution's accreditation in 1932. A wealthy woman, Blunt was not only a skilled fund raiser, but personally generous to the college. When she retired in 1943, Connecticut College was on a sound financial basis and boasted twenty-one buildings, about 7 5 0 students, and a faculty of over 100. Recalled to the presidency in 1945, she retired again the following year. A vigorous and gregarious person, Blunt was determined that education should prepare the college woman for a life of active public service and stimulate an interest in civic concerns. The college, she believed, should train women so that their desires for public service do not "evaporate into vague benevolence, but develop into well-considered action." She invited many outstanding women whose lives exemplified this ideal—among them J A N E ADDAMS, A L I C E HAMILTON, FRANCES PERKINS, a n d

ELEA-

NOR ROOSEVELT—to speak on the campus. Blunt was active in many professional and civic organizations and served from 1924 to 1926 as president of the American Home Economics Association. She was on the Connecticut State Board of Education ( 1 9 3 1 - 4 0 ) , and devoted much time and interest to local groups in New London. As a young woman, Katharine Blunt enjoyed the outdoors, went mountain climbing, and

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traveled widely. The love of travel persisted into old age, and she made trips to Turkey and Israel in her retirement. In her last years, Blunt suffered from progressive blindness, but was otherwise healthy until incapacitated in July 1954 by a broken hip. While in a New London hospital recovering from this injury, she died of a pulmonary embolism. [Some letters and documents concerning Katharine Blunt's tenure at Conn. College are in the college archives in New London, Conn., along with some of her journal articles and several pictures. During her time at the Univ. of Chicago, Blunt's scholarly work was published regularly in professional journals, including the Jour. Biological Chemistry and the Jour. Home Economics. After she became president of Conn. College, her speeches appeared in a number of educational journals; for example, see the Jour. Assoc. of Am. Univ. Women, Oct. 1938. A brief biography of Blunt by Gertrude Noyes appeared in Conn. Teacher, Jan. 1950. There are substantial entries in Current Biog., 1946, and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., B, 385. References to her personality occur in Irene Nye, comp., Chapters in the History of Connecticut College (1943). On her Chicago career see Marie Dye, Home Economics at the University of Chicago 1892-1956 (1972), and Home Economists: Portraits and Brief Biographies of Women Prominent in the Home Economics Movement in the United States (1929). Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, July 30, 1954, and Jour. Home Economics, Sept. 1954. Personal information for this article was obtained from Gertrude Noyes and Louise Potter. Death certificate was provided by Conn. Dept. of Health.] JANICE LAW TRECKER

BOGAN, Louise, Aug. 11, 1 8 9 7 - F e b . 4, 1970. Poet, critic. Louise Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, the second child and only daughter of Mary Helen (Shields) and Daniel Joseph Bogan. Both parents were of Irish descent. Her paternal grandfather left Londonderry as a boy to become a captain of sailing vessels out of Portland Harbor, Maine, and her mother's people, to whom the poet felt she owed her Celtic gift for language and her remarkable energy, came from Dublin. Louise Bogan spent her childhood in New Hampshire and Massachusetts milltowns, where her father held various white-collar jobs in paper companies. She learned to read at the relatively late age of eight, finding refuge from her family's insular and troubled existence in Grimm's Fairy Tales and the adventure stories belonging to her older brother Charles, who was killed in World W a r I. As described in Bogan's journals, her mother was a beautiful, tempestuous, unhappy

Bogan

Bogan

woman, who quarreled with her husband and on occasion disrupted the family with unexplained absences which were particularly hard on her daughter. During one such absence, in 1907, Bogan was sent as a boarding student to Mount St. Mary's Academy in Manchester, N.H., where she conceived the ambition of becoming an opera singer. In March 1909, the Bogan family, now reunited, moved from Ballardvale, Mass., to Bosten. The city's cultural advantages and the rigorous classical education she received at the Girls' Latin School (191015) soon awakened Bogan to the difference between provincial life and high civilization. But she had entered an alien world as well, where "it was borne in upon me, all during my adolescence, that I was a 'Mick,' no matter what my other faults or virtues might be." From this realization came her lifelong antipathy to snobbery and pretension. At the age of fourteen, Louise Bogan began to write verse; by seventeen, she had mastered the essentials of English versification and developed an elegant prose style. Like the young T. S. Eliot, Bogan was especially influenced by Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement. Upon graduation from high school, Bogan enrolled for a year (1915-16) at Boston University. Although she published a number of apprentice poems in the Boston University Beacon, she was finding her home life oppressive, and, to break away, married a young army officer, Curt Alexander, in September 1916. She accompanied him to the Panama Canal Zone, where, in October 1917, she gave birth to her only child, a daughter, Mathilde. She also published her first mature poems in 1917, in Others, a magazine devoted to experimental verse. By the time Curt Alexander died in 1920, Bogan had been living alone in New York for at least a year; by 1921, her poems had begun to appear in The New Republic and other magazines. After a year in Vienna (1922), she published her first book, Body of This Death (1923). The volume received considerable critical acclaim, and established Louise Bogan as one of the foremost lyric poets of her generation. Bogan relied on her mother for help in caring for her child, while she struggled to make a living, working in a bookstore, and later, through her friend Margaret Mead (1901-1978), finding a cataloging job at Columbia University. In July 1925, Louise Bogan married Raymond Holden, poet and former Princeton classmate of Bogan's good friend, the critic Edmund Wilson. The couple spent nearly a year in Santa Fe, N.M., for reasons of Holden's health, and then bought a fruit farm in Hillsdale, N.Y., where

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the subsequently peaceful months found issue in Bogan's second book, Dark Summer (1929). Containing her two longest poems, "The Flume" and "Summer Wish," as well as such lyrics as "Simple Autumnal" and "Come, Break with Time," the collection was marked by a formal perfection which demanded comparison "with the best songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (Winters, 247). On Dec. 26, 1929, a fire destroyed the Hillsdale house, and with it the books, letters, and manuscripts gathered over the previous decade. Determined to start anew, Bogan and Holden went back to New York early in 1930, but Bogan soon began to show signs of discouragement and exhaustion. In March 1931 she wrote her first poetry review for The New Yorker, beginning her thirty-eight-year association with the magazine, but she soon suffered an emotional collapse. With the benefit of psychiatric attention, she began to regain strength, exorcising despair and unsealing the past in a series of superb prose memoirs, "Journey Around My Room," "Dove and Serpent," and "Letdown," published in The New Yorker in 1933 and 1934. Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, Louise Bogan traveled through Italy, France, and Austria in the spring and summer of 1933, hoping to find new bearings as a poet. She came back to New York to be confronted with the failure of her marriage, as Raymond Holden had become involved with another woman. His betrayal opened the psychic wounds inflicted during her childhood, and once again she suffered an emotional collapse. Bogan emerged from this ordeal a changed woman, however, and the poems published in The Sleeping Fury (1937) bear witness to her hard-won liberation from rage and despair. Discovering the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in 1935, Bogan embraced his belief in the necessity of openness to emotion and acceptance of oneself and one's past; from his principles of spiritual and artistic freedom she drew the vision of existence she henceforth brought to her work as both poet and critic. Laboring so hard for autonomy and insight, Louise Bogan passionately opposed the 1930s tendency to bend art to political dogma and insisted that art's true source lay in private experience. Writing at the time of her mother's death in 1936, she asserted: "What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals." It was "a sin and a shame," she added, "to try to organize or dictate" emotions. Evicted from her apartment in 1935, divorced

Bogan

Bogan

in 1937, responsible for the support of her father and the education of her daughter, Bogan faced difficulties with courage, humor, and an extreme devotion to responsibility. Writing to Edmund Wilson about the delay of a promised poem, she reminded him that she was "a housewife, as well as a writer; I have no one to sweep floors or get meals . . . All these tasks are very good for me, but they are tasks I never can allow to slip." By 1940, Bogan's daughter was living on her own, though remaining good friends with her mother. Having faced her furies, Bogan was able to give free play to her spirit in the occasional and epigrammatic verse of Poems and New Poems ( 1 9 4 1 ) . She continued to write verse departments for The New Yorker, although for five years ( 1 9 4 3 - 4 8 ) she did not write a poem. In 1 9 4 5 - 4 6 , she occupied the Chair in Poetry at the Library of Congress, and in 1948 began a new career as a teacher with visiting lectureships at the University of Washington and the University of Chicago. In the same year, she collaborated with her friend Elizabeth Mayer on translations of Goethe and Ernst Jünger; in later years she translated Valéry with May Sarton and Jules Renard with Elizabeth Roget. In 1951, Bogan published a critical history, Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950, and in 1954, Collected Poems, 1923-1953, followed a year later by Selected Criticism. As a critic, Bogan was just, witty, and generous, both with poets of her own generation and with such younger talents as Richard Eberhart and Richard Wilbur. At her best as a correspondent, her letters to Theodore Roethke and May Sarton are models of insight into the problems of artistic growth. Those addressed to such friends as Rolfe Humphries, Edmund Wilson, and the scholarcritic Morton Dauwen Zabel show as well her gift for burlesque and parody. From time to time in the 1950s and 1960s, Bogan worked on her memoirs, left unfinished at the time of her death, and published posthumously in The New Yorker ( 1 9 7 8 ) . Although poems were "given" to her rarely, she wrote the magnificent "Song for the Last Act," "March Twilight," and "Night" in these years. A visit to Boston in 1965 revived painful memories and precipitated her last severe depression, out of which came the three superb lyrics with which she closed her final collected edition, The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968 ( 1 9 6 8 ) . Living in increasing seclusion, Bogan never stopped working; she had only recently approved the text of her collected criticism, A Poet's Alphabet ( 1 9 7 0 ) , when she died in February 1970, alone

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in her Washington Heights apartment, from a heart attack. Although most often identified with the severe tradition of the seventeenth-century lyric, Louise Bogan's poetry was nourished by the technical discoveries and spiritual concerns of such modern masters as Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Auden. With major gifts, she forged a perfect minor mode out of her unparalleled ear for rhythm, purity of diction, and variety of cadence and filled her meditative and dramatic lyrics with the seasons and terrain of her New England childhood, transformed into symbol by "memory and desire." She wrote about the divided heart and the deceiving mind which must face truth, and be chastised into peace, love, and a part in the unconscious life of the universe. In W. H. Auden's words, what is most impressive about Bogan's poems "is that unflinching courage with which she faced her problems, her determination never to surrender to self-pity, but to wrest beauty and joy out of dark places." Surviving her quarrel with the world, and such quarrels as she may have had with herself, she could look back, late in life, and say: "Ignorant, I took up my burden in the wilderness/ Wise with great wisdom, I shall lay it down upon flowers." [The Louise Bogan Papers in the Amherst College Library contain correspondence, drafts of poems, short fiction, critical notes, journals, and notebooks. There is no biography; the author is preparing a critical volume with biographical foundations. For the most complete view to date see Ruth Limmer, ed., What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970 (1973), and "Louise Bogan: From the Journals of a Poet," New Yorker, Jan. 30, 1978. See also Bogan's reply to a questionnaire, "The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions," Partisan Rev., Fall 1936. There are two bibliographies, both incomplete: William Jay Smith, Louise Bogan: A Woman's Words (1970), and Jane Couchman, "Louise Bogan: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials, 1915-1975," in two parts, Bull, of Bibliography (1976). For critical assessments see Yvor Winters, "The Poetry of Louise Bogan," New Republic, Oct. 16, 1929, and W. H. Auden, "Louise Bogan," Proc., Am. Acad, of Arts and Letters, Nat. Inst, of Arts and Letters (1970). Obituaries appeared in the New Yorker, Feb. 14, 1970, and the N.Y. Times, Feb. 5, 1970. There are photographs of Bogan in Nancy Milford's review of What the Woman Lived, in N.Y. Times Book Rev., Dec. 16, 1973. Information was also provided by Ruth Limmer, executor of the Bogan estate.] ELIZABETH

BOK, Mary Louise Curtis. See Louise Curtis Bok.

PERLMUTTER

ZIMBALIST,

Mary

Boole

Boole BOOLE, Ella Alexander, July 26, 1858-March 13, 1952. Temperance leader. Ella Boole, fifth president of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union ( W C T U ) , was born in Van Wert, Ohio, the oldest of three children and elder of two daughters of Rebecca (Alban) and Isaac Newton Alexander, a prominent lawyer. Both parents were natives of Ohio. A paternal great-grandfather migrated from Scotland to Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century; her mother's ancestors were English. Ella Alexander grew up in a scholarly, pious environment. From her father, who had edited a free-soil newspaper and during Reconstruction became an ardent advocate of the rights of freedmen, she acquired a lifelong belief in the power of law to effect reform. Her mother also provided a strong model of social responsibility. A bright, serious student, Ella Alexander was educated in the public schools of Van Wert, then studied classics at the College of Wooster, where she excelled in natural science and developed a flair for public speaking. She earned an A.B. in 1878 and, also from Wooster, an A.M. in 1881. From 1878 until 1883 Alexander taught high school in Van Wert, conducted a Sunday school class at the First Presbyterian Church, and lectured at teachers' institutes. At one of these conferences she met William Hilliker Boole, a twice-widowed Methodist minister thirty-one years her senior. They were married July 3, 1883, and moved to William Boole's pastorate in Brooklyn, N.Y. They had one child, Florence Alexander (b. 1887); three daughters from William Boole's former marriages were also part of the family. Influenced by her husband, an active prohibitionist and temperance orator, Ella Boole joined a local union of the WCTU in 1883. Displaying a talent for organizing new unions and for increasing membership, by 1891 she had become vice president of the New York state union. After her husband's death in 1896, income from her temperance work and speaking engagements, supplemented by an inheritance from her father, supported the family. In 1898 Boole was elected president of the New York WCTU, a position she held until 1925, except for six years during which she felt called to serve as corresponding secretary of the Woman's Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church (1903-09). During her tenure as state president, the New York union shifted from the tactic of collecting petitions to the practice of exerting pressure by writing legislators directly. Boole became an extremely skilled lobbyist and spoke frequently

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at hearings in Albany. In addition to temperance, she applied her energies to other issues she believed were of special concern to women, including protective legislation for women and children in industry, the establishment of special courts and separate deputies for juvenile offenders, and woman suffrage. At the national level, Boole participated in successful efforts to remove liquor from military locations, Indian reservations, and government buildings. In 1913 she attended a Washington demonstration in support of a national prohibition amendment and delivered an eloquent speech in its favor from the Capitol steps. After the eighteenth amendment was passed, she worked for its ratification in the New York legislature. The enfranchisement of women encouraged Boole to take an even more active role in politics. At the request of the League of Women Voters, she ran for the Senate in 1920 against the incumbent James W. Wadsworth, who had voted against prohibition, woman suffrage, and child labor laws. After losing to him in the Republican primary, she ran in the general election on the Prohibition party ticket, adopting the slogan "Send a mother to the Senate," and conducting a vigorous campaign. Although she lost, she received over 150,000 votes, mostly from upstate. Two later bids for the Senate in 1922 and 1926 were also unsuccessful. Elected in 1925 to succeed ANNA ADAMS GORDON as president of the National WCTU, Boole set as her main goal the retention of prohibition and directed a campaign of education to increase public support. In 1927 she organized a conference in Washington, D.C., where WCTU members lobbied their representatives for better law enforcement. In the presidential campaign in 1928, Boole urged her membership to support the candidacy of Herbert Hoover and later claimed that the votes of southern women accounted for Hoover's strong showing in that region. As public sentiment for prohibition declined in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Boole increased her efforts to retain the eighteenth amendment. She wrote a history of women in the temperance movement, spoke throughout the country on social and economic benefits of prohibition, and exhorted her followers to place principle above party by voting for dry candidates. At the National WCTU convention of 1933, Boole attempted to rally the opponents of repeal by delivering her annual address on radio. Perhaps sensing defeat, at that meeting she resigned as head of the national organization; she continued, however, as president of the World's WCTU, a post she had held since 1931. As head of the international organization,

Boole

Borchardt

Boole focused her energies on peace and disarmament, abolition of the international drug traffic, and the condition of women around the world. She had displayed an interest in peace earlier, joining in 1925 with C A R B I E C H A P M A N C A T T and other leaders of women's organizations in calling for a Conference on the Cause and Cure of War. During World War II, Boole's correspondence with all member nations sustained the World's W C T U . After the war she was instrumental in securing recognition for the international organization by the United Nations. Ella Boole retired as president of the World's W C T U in 1947, at age eighty-eight. During the last twenty years of her life, she also held executive positions in several national organizations as well as in the International Temperance Union. She died of a stroke in 1952 at the Brooklyn home she shared with her daughter and stepdaughter. A large woman of dignified bearing, Ella Boole, an ordained deaconess in the Presbyterian church, was always strongly motivated by her religious beliefs. She was described by contemporaries as a person of "unassailable integrity" and as "a born organizer." In devoting her life to moral reform, Boole exemplified what she herself referred to as "the organized civic conscience of women." [The minutes of the National WCTU, which contain records of Boole's terms of office and her annual addresses, are found in the annual report of each convention; these, together with the Union Signal, are located in the WCTU headquarters, Evanston, 111. The minutes, records, and publications of the N.Y. state WCTU are in its headquarters in Syracuse, N.Y. Boole's correspondence while secretary of the Woman's Board of Home Missions is held by the Presbyterian Hist. Soc. in Philadelphia. Her writings consisted chiefly of temperance articles for WCTU publications, as well as Give Prohibition Its Chance (1929). Other principal sources are The Reminiscences of Ella A. Boole (1950), in the Oral History Coll., Columbia Univ., and Frances W. Graham, Sixty Years of Action: A History of Sixty Years' Work of the W.C.T.U. of the State of New York (1934). See also Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., B, 492, and XXXVIII, 53132; Helen E. Tyler, Where Prayer and Purpose Meet (1949); Stanley Walker, "With Ella in the Desert," Outlook and Independent, April 9, 1930; Owen P. White, "The Same Old Fight," Collier's, Nov. 5, 1932. Information about Boole's father is in R. Sutton, History of Van Wert and Mercer Counties, Ohio (1882). The N.Y. Times carried an obituary on William Boole, Feb. 25, 1896, and one on Ella Boole, March 14, 1952. A biobibliography compiled by Sally Lohr assisted in the research for this article.] SUSAN DYE

LEE

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BORCHARDT, Selma Munter, Dec. 1, 1 8 9 5 Jan. 30, 1968. Educator, lawyer, labor leader and lobbyist. Selma Munter Borchardt was the only daughter and second of three surviving children of Newman and Sara (Munter) Borchardt, both born in Germany. Newman Borchardt served as an officer during the Civil War, then went west to work as a civilian quartermaster for the United States Army, fought in the Indian wars, and held government appointments in Custer County, Mont. The Borchardts had four children who died in the west before they returned to the east where Selma and her brothers were born in Washington, D.C. Selma Borchardt graduated in 1914 from Washington's Central High School, completed an A.B. degree at Syracuse University in 1922, and a B.S. in education, also at Syracuse, the following year. In 1933 she graduated from the Washington College of Law (later American University College of L a w ) . Four years later she received an A.M. in sociology from Catholic University where she continued graduate work, completing all of the requirements for a Ph.D. in sociology except for the dissertation. Despite the breadth and quality of her formal education, "the trade union movement," she insisted, "has been my greatest teacher." Borchardt eventually combined careers as a teacher, lawyer, and labor lobbyist, but began her professional career as a playground instructor. In 1919 and 1920 she directed teacher training for Montgomery County, Md., and then served as supervisor of the county's rural schools ( 1 9 2 0 - 2 1 ) . She joined the faculty of the Washington, D.C., public schools in 1922. Although she developed a sizable legal practice and was admitted to the select group of lawyers permitted to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States, she chose to remain a teacher. Until her retirement in December 1960, except for an educational leave to serve on the Wartime Education Commission ( 1 9 4 1 - 4 5 ) , Borchardt worked in public education. She was chairman of the English department at Washington's Eastern High School when she retired. The Washington school district where Borchardt taught formed a charter local of the American Federation of Teachers ( A F T ) and she quickly became active in the teachers' union. In 1924 she became a vice president of the A F T , and the following year organized its Research Department. From 1929 until 1955 she also served as secretary of the Education Committee of the American Federation of Labor ( A F L ) . Both the A F T and the A F L made extensive use of Borchardt's legal talent, which she

Borchardt

Borchardt

volunteered in the cause of education and labor. For more than thirty years she acted as congressional representative for the A F T , representing the union in the capital and publishing annually an extensive report of her activities. As a labor lobbyist Borchardt first worked with A F L legislative representative Edward McGrady, who later became assistant secretary of labor, and with MAUD WOOD PARK, president of the League of Women Voters. Among the legislation she promoted on behalf of the teachers' union were bills calling for federal aid to raise teachers' salaries, to provide health services for children, to eradicate adult illiteracy, to aid public school construction, and to provide loans and scholarships to needy students (Am. Teacher, Oct. 1950, pp. 2 5 - 2 6 ) . Early in the 1930s Borchardt joined with such noted educators as John Dewey, Henry Linville, and George Counts to rid the A F T of radical influence. She cautioned the teachers to be on their guard equally against communists and against the police state methods being used to control them. The job of keeping communist propaganda out of the classroom was the teachers' alone: "If you don't do it," she told them, "you ought to be fired." She also believed that only professionally trained educators were competent to make educational judgments and opposed attempts by noneducators to control curricula or textbook content. In addition to her congressional liaison work for organized labor, Borchardt drafted legislation and monitored its passage through Congress for the national board of the YWCA and the Women's Bar Association. She chaired the Subcommittees on Federal Aid to Education and Child Labor Standards for the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, a national clearinghouse for the legislative work of women's groups which had a common interest in education and in welfare programs. Although a champion of women's rights, like many other women in the labor movement she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment on the grounds that it denied women the benefit of protective legislation. Borchardt was active in a number of other organizations of educators, both national and international. In 1927 she became a director of the World Federation of Education Associations ( W F E A ) , an organization that promoted cooperation among educators of all nations. She served until the federation disbanded in 1946. From 1931 until her retirement she was the consultant on education for the American Association of University Women. She was also a director and a member of the Educational Planning Committee of the Institute of World Studies ( 1 9 4 6 - 4 8 ) , which operated resident

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study centers throughout the world. In addition, Borchardt wrote extensively and traveled widely in the cause of education, accepting as many as 2 0 0 speaking invitations a year. Borchardt's knowledge and talents were recognized by appointments to government commissions. In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt named her to the National Advisory Board of the National Youth Administration (NYA). As the only classroom teacher on the NYA national board, she chaired the Subcommittee on Coordination of Training Programs with Schools and Colleges and directed her efforts toward drafting and implementing work-study programs. During World War II she served as the teacher member of the United States Office of Education Wartime Commission, and as director of its High School Victory Corps ( 1 9 4 1 - 4 3 ) . In 1946 Secretary of State James F. Byrnes appointed her to the United States Commission on UNESCO, where she served on the committee which drafted the U N E S C O charter. She remained a delegate until 1951. Throughout her long career as an educator within the labor movement Selma Borchardt addressed the problems of child welfare, juvenile delinquency, and child labor. In 1930, 1940, and 1950 she was a delegate to the White House Conferences on Children and Youth and in 1955 to the White House Conference on Education. Deploring the disintegration of the American family, which she blamed largely on the development of fast foods, she told a 1954 teachers' union convention that the passing of the American dining room and the tradition of families eating together were the root cause of juvenile delinquency. Borchardt retired from her teaching job in 1960 and in 1962 from her positions as vice president and legislative representative of the A F T ( 1 9 2 4 - 3 5 and 1 9 4 2 - 6 2 ) . She died of arteriosclerosis in a Washington, D.C., nursing home in 1968. [The Selma Borchardt Coll., Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State Univ., consists of 89 linear feet of documents from 1911 through 1967; it includes correspondence, minutes, reports, speeches, press releases, and notes. The bulk of Borchardt's writings were published by the AFT's Am. Teacher and other educational and trade union journals. A list of studies she conducted for the AFT and WFEA is in the entry in Who Was Who in Am., V. As president of the Washington Women's Trade Union League, 1925-27, she wrote a regular column for the Washington Herald on the problems of working women. Philip Taft, United They Teach: The Story of the American Federation of Teachers (1974), describes Borchardt's role in the AFT's anticom-

Bourke-White

Bourke-White

she made the first of a number of photographic surveys through the Soviet Union. This trip yielded about 800 photographs, of which 40 were printed, along with a text, in Eyes on Russia ( 1 9 3 1 ) . The context and direction of her life changed again during the mid-1930s when she shifted her interest from industrial to human subjects. A Fortune assignment to cover the droughtstricken Dust Bowl area of the midwest resulted in "The Drought" (Fortune, Oct. 1934). This early social documentary is a poignant account of the havoc wrought by a combination of economic depression and mismanagement of land. The drought experience, Bourke-White said later, "was the beginning of my awareness of people in a human, sympathetic sense as subjects for the camera and photographed against a wider canvas than I had perceived before" (Portrait of Myself, p. 110).

munist campaign. Death certificate supplied by D.C. Dept. of Public Health.] DONALD L .

HAYNES

BOURKE-WHITE, Margaret, June 14, 1904Aug. 27, 1971. Photographer. Margaret Bourke-White, commercial and industrial photographer and photojournalist, was born in New York City, the second child of Joseph and Minnie (Bourke) White. Her father was a successful engineer-designer in the printing industry; her self-taught mother worked on publications for the blind. When she began college at age seventeen, at Rutgers University summer school, Margaret White's interests were in engineering and biology. While at Columbia University in 1922 and 1923, she studied photography with Clarence H. White; as a student of herpetology at the University of Michigan ( 1 9 2 3 - 2 5 ) , she also took pictures for the yearbook. In 1925 she married Everett Chapman, a graduate student in engineering at the university. The marriage lasted only a year. After her divorce in 1926 she began using the hyphenated compound of her middle and last names.

In 1935 Bourke-White, along with Alfred Eisenstaedt and other renowned photographers, joined the as yet unborn Life magazine, designed by publisher Henry Luce as a vehicle for photojournalism. Sent on her first assignment to a dam under construction at New Deal, Mont., she photographed a variety of engineering forms and, on her own initiative, also produced a human interest picture story of nearby frontier towns. The editors, struck by the combination of industrial objects and people, used her material for the cover and lead article of the first issue (Nov. 23, 1936).

Bourke-White also attended Western Reserve University before matriculating as a senior at Cornell University, where she received an A.B. in 1927. At Cornell, she made an impressive and painterly photographic record of the campus, an idyllic region defined by gorges, hills, and valleys. The romance of nature, however, soon gave way to the romance of technology. Along with many other artists working in the 1920s and 1930s, Bourke-White became a partisan of the machine esthetic, discovering and celebrating the beauty of the products of modern technology. In 1927 she moved to Cleveland to begin a photographic career as a specialist in architectural and industrial subjects. Within two years she had not only mastered her medium but also managed to articulate the basis of her work to a wide audience. In the September 1929 issue of World's Work, she stated with assurance that "whatever art will come out of this industrial age will come from the subjects of industry themselves, which are sincere and unadorned in their beauty, and close to the heart of the people." A turning point in Bourke-White's adventurous career occurred in 1929 when she began working as one of the first photographers for the new Fortune magazine. She established a studio in the Chrysler Building in New York City and worked half the year for the magazine and the other half as a commercial freelancer, developing a successful advertising business. In 1930

Also in 1935 Bourke-White met the writer Erskine Caldwell, who was planning a documentary account of sharecropper life in the south. They agreed to collaborate; writer and photographer traveled together for several months during 1936, documenting the appalling living conditions of southern sharecroppers. The resulting book, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), is probably the most historically significant single work of Bourke-White's career. Its pictures are grouped to illustrate environmental, social, and personal decay. A number of the people photographed, suffering from malnutrition, are grotesquely malformed; rusted hulks lie beside rotting shacks; desperate faces express a lifetime of futility. Bourke-White and Caldwell, who were married in 1939 and divorced in 1942, also collaborated during the late thirties and early forties on two timely books: North of the Danube (1939), a sketch of life in Czechoslovakia before the Nazi takeover, and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941), a panoramic survey of the United States shortly before its entrance into World War II. They were in Moscow during the

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Bourke-White spring and summer of 1941 when the Germans attacked the city, and they covered the events in words and photographs. Bourke-White was the only foreign photographer in the USSR at the time. After the United States entered the war, Bourke-White received accreditation as an official Army Air Force photographer, her work to be used jointly by the military and Life. She went to England as American B-17 squadrons were assembling for attacks on the Continent, and when Air Force action shifted to North Africa, she moved with it. Denied permission to fly with the men, she traveled instead on a ship which was torpedoed near North Africa. Later she was allowed to accompany a mission, participating in a January 1943 raid on a German airfield at El Aouina, north of Tunis. In Italy, she photographed the extraordinary violence in Cassino Valley, and during the closing days of the war she moved along the Rhine with General George Patton's Third Army, recording the last days of the Third Reich. Entering death camps, she produced, among many pictures, "The Living Dead of Buchenwald" (1945), a classic in the history of photography. Life continued to send Bourke-White abroad after the war ended. Her first postwar assignment was to India, where she worked intermittently through 1948. While there she produced the famous "Gandhi at His Spinning Wheel" (1946). In 1949 and 1950 she did a number of studies of life in South Africa, and during the Korean War she concentrated on the human aspects of guerrilla warfare, on families split by opposing political allegiances. Margaret Bourke-White's career was cut short by Parkinson's disease; by the mid-fifties its effects had curbed her professional activities, and she fought the illness until her death in 1971 at Stamford, Conn. As a photojournalist the substance of her work was news, not art. Yet among the hundreds of thousands of works that she produced are some of the most successful artistic statements of the twentieth century. [Margaret Bourke-White's publications not cited above include U.S.S.R. Photographs (1934); Shooting the Russian War (1942); They Called It "Purple Heart Valley" (1944); "Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly" (1946); Halfway to Freedom: A Study of the New India (1949); A Report on the American Jesuits (1956), with John La Farge, S.J.; and Portrait of Myself (1963). For an extensive sampling of her photographs see Sean Callahan, ed., The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White (1972). Theodore M. Brown, Margaret Bourke-White,

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Photojournalist (1972), contains a complete bibliography of her publications as well as a full account of her career. See also Anne Tucker, ed., The Woman's Eye (1973). William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973), provides a contrasting opinion of You Have Seen Their Faces. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Aug. 28, 1971.] THEODORE

M.

BROWN

BOW, Clara Gordon, July 29, 1905-Sept. 27, 1965. Film actress. Clara Bow, renowned for her film personification of sexuality in the 1920s, was born into poverty in Brooklyn, N.Y. She was the third and only surviving child of Sarah (Gordon) and Robert Bow, who were of French, Scottish, and English ancestry. Her childhood was fraught with tragedy. A good friend burned to death despite Bow's efforts to save him. She was close to her father, a waiter and handyman, but he was often unemployed and deserted the family for varying periods of time, leaving Bow to care for her mother, who was chronically depressed. Bow believed that her mother attempted to kill her when she was sixteen. Permanently hospitalized two years later, Sarah Bow died soon after. In response to early privations, Clara Bow became both a devoted movie fan and a tomboy. She left school during the eighth grade to work as a receptionist. In 1921 Bow won a "Fame and Fortune" beauty contest sponsored by three movie magazines, but it did little to promote the promised film career. She landed a part in Beyond the Rainbow (1922), only to have her footage cut. (It was restored after she attained stardom.) Soon, however, director Elmer Clifton, who liked her magazine photographs, cast her in the low-budget Down to the Sea in Ships. The film became a popular success, and Bow received excellent reviews. Now determined that his daughter succeed, Robert Bow brought her to the attention of agent Maxine Alton, who negotiated Bow's first contract with Preferred Pictures in Hollywood in 1923. The contract paid her fifty dollars a week for three months, plus her fare to Hollywood. Her success in films was testimony to Bow's real talent as well as to her willingness to accept long working hours and difficult schedules. By the end of 1924 she had made thirteen films and was regularly referred to as a rising star. From the first she was cast as a flapper, a popular figure borrowed from novels and from real life, whose free and easy ways presumably mirrored the emancipated young woman of the 1920s. Other actresses had already established the type

Bow

Bow in films. But Clara Bow became overwhelmingly identified as the flapper after Elinor Glyn, a popular and flamboyant English author and scriptwriter, singled out Bow as possessing "It," Glyn's idiosyncratic euphemism for sex appeal; the word had recently captured the public fancy. Paramount, the studio to which Bow had moved in 1925, now trumpeted her to the public and cast her in a film dramatization of Glyn's novelette, It ( 1 9 2 7 ) . The role established Bow's epic stature: soon the volume of her fan mail was greater than that of any other Hollywood actress. In her films, Bow exuded both an earthy sensuality and a childish innocence, accompanied by frenetic and flirtatious movement. Her figure was boyish; her face pixyish; her hair red. Before Bow's time, most female "sex symbols" had derived from European models of exotic, sophisticated sensuality. Bow combined the innocence of Mary Pickford (died 1979) with the guile of T H E D A B A R A and added her own distinctly American brashness and vitality. She became a symbol for an age which combined a freer sensuality with lingering Victorian propriety. The plots of her flapper movies, including the bestknown— The Plastic Age (1925), Dancing Mothers ( 1 9 2 6 ) , and It—were all similar. Bow played a lower-class working woman who gained a certain emancipation through dancing, smoking, drinking, and wearing short skirts. But beneath her rebellious behavior her morality was strict: the flapper was a "nice" girl and invariably left her job for marriage. Off the screen Bow led a sensational life. Her love affairs with such men as director Victor Fleming and actors Gilbert Roland and Gary Cooper were Hollywood legends. Independent, brash, and unsophisticated, she made no attempt to become part of the group of film actors who lived like aristocrats and dominated Hollywood's film society. She seemed happiest with extras, crew members, and her own servants. Bow's closest intimate was probably her father, whom she supported in various business enterprises while he lived in her home. By the late 1920s a number of scandals threatened both her career and her emotional stability. The wife of a Texas doctor who had been Bow's lover sued her for alienation of affection. In 1931 she prosecuted her then secretary and companion, Daisy DeVoe, for embezzling funds. The experience was traumatic, particularly when DeVoe, in retaliation, released to the press letters containing alleged details of Bow's love affairs. For some time Bow had suffered from overwork, depression, and insomnia and had had periodic nervous breakdowns. Fear that she had

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inherited her mother's mental instability haunted her. Shortly after the DeVoe affair, she retired from the screen and moved to Nevada to live quietly with Rex Bell (George F. Beldam), a rancher and minor movie actor who later served as Nevada's lieutenant governor. A secure man of strong character, he provided stability in her life. In December 1931 she and Bell were married. Bow returned to Hollywood in 1932 to make the successful Call Her Savage, followed in 1933 by Hoopla, a financial and critical failure. As a result of bad reviews, her inability to summon her old energy for work, and her desire for a family, Bow retired permanently from the screen. Bow's first son, Rex Anthony, was born in 1934; her second, George Robert in 1938. Though settled in Nevada, she periodically returned to Hollywood with her husband. For a time in the mid-1930s she owned a Hollywood coffeehouse, and for some weeks in 1947 she was the mystery voice, Mrs. Hush, on radio's most popular program, "Truth or Consequences." By the early 1950s marital discord and increasing emotional difficulties prompted Bow to move permanently to Los Angeles to be near her psychiatrists and the sanitarium where she was occasionally hospitalized. For the most part, she lived quietly at home and spent her time swimming and watching television. Clara Bow died at her home of a heart attack in 1965. Many critics judged Bow to be a talented actress and regretted her identification with the flapper role. Still, she was an artistic success in several nonflapper parts, including roles as a World War I ambulance driver in Wings ( 1 9 2 7 ) and an illegitimate halfbreed and prostitute in Call Her Savage. The common belief that she failed in sound movies is debatable, although given her restless acting style, she found the stationary microphone supremely frustrating. Bow herself recognized that her own personality meshed with that of the screen flapper, but she grew to hate the role. In the 1930s a more mature symbol of beauty replaced the flapper. Ironically, just when more varied parts might have been available, Bow's emotional instability made it impossible for her to continue her career. [Clipping files of articles about Bow's life and career, photographs, and reviews of her films are located in the Margaret Herrick Library, Acad, of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills; the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art; and the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library. A bibliography of articles and obituaries on Bow appears in Mel Schuster, Motion Picture Performers: A Bibliography of Magazine and Periodical Articles, 1900-1969 ( i 971). The major biography is Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein, The "It" Girl: The

Bowen

Bowen

Incredible Story of Clara Bow (1976). James Robert Parish, The Paramount Pretties (1972), contains a lengthy biographical and critical essay, as well as annotated credits for all her films. Brief interpretations of Bow's career are contained in Alexander Walker, The Celluloid Sacrifice: Aspects of Sex in the Movies (1966); Norman Zierold, Sex Goddesses of the Silent Screen (1973); and David Thomson, ed., Biog. Diet, of the Cinema (1975). Background information is in Lary May, "Reforming Leisure: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry, 1896-1920" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Calif., Los Angeles, 1977). For earlier biographical accounts, based on interviews with Bow, see Rudy Behlmer, "Clara Bow," Films in Review, Oct. 1963, and Adela Rogers St. Johns, "Clara Bow: My Life Story," Photoplay, April 1928. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Sept. 28, 1965. The death certificate supplied by the Calif. Dept. of Health lists acute drug intoxication as a significant condition contributing to death but not related to the terminal disease.] LOIS w .

BANNER

B O W E N , Catherine Shober Drinker, Jan. 1, 1897—Nov. 1, 1973. Biographer, essayist. Catherine Drinker Bowen was born on the Haverford (Pa.) College campus, the youngest of six children (four sons and two daughters) of Aimée Ernesta (Beaux) and Henry Sturgis Drinker. She grew up in a talented, loving, competitive family for whom, according to her son, Ezra, "excellence was the starting point." In an active household presided over by a gentle but demanding father and a supportive, domestic mother, Catherine Drinker developed the three great passions of her life—family, music, and writing. She could trace her ancestry to the first American-born English child in Pennsylvania, and the "vigor and sinew" of her family's history was always a source of strength (Family Portrait). Drinker was influenced, too, by her mother's sister, the portrait painter C E C I L I A B E A U X , and by her brothers who, she recalled, "had spurred themselves—and me—to competition." Her oldest brother, Harry, a lawyer, shared with her a love for music. Another brother, Philip, invented the iron lung, and a third, Cecil, served as dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. At the time of Catherine Drinker's birth, her father was general solicitor of the Lehigh Valley Railroad. In 1905 he became president of Lehigh University and the Drinker family moved to Bethlehem, Pa. At first tutored by local school mistresses and young Lehigh faculty, Catherine was sent in 1905 to Miss Kellogg's dame school where she was pleased to find herself for the first time surrounded by her equals,

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instead of by her older brothers and beautiful sister. After a brief period in 1 9 0 7 - 0 8 at a school attended by the daughters of wealthy steel magnates, she enrolled at the Moravian Academy in Bethlehem, Pa. Between the ages of eleven and eighteen Catherine Drinker was only occasionally in school as she traveled widely with her mother and sister, Ernesta, and later her father; Henry Drinker's interest in engineering projects took them to the Panama Canal before the Culebra Cut was completed and to the Suez Canal. From 1914 to 1916 she attended St. Timothy's School in Catonsville, Md. Drinker's early love of music led her to consider a career as a violinist and she enrolled at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore after graduation from St. Timothy's. She continued to study at Peabody and subsequently at the Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School) in New York, because, as she explained later, she loved it. Throughout her life she was a talented and enthusiastic violinist. Catherine Drinker married Ezra Bowen, an associate professor of economics at Lehigh University, in 1919. T h e couple moved the next year to Easton, Pa., when he became head of the economics department at Lafayette College. Catherine Bowen began her writing career by winning a ten-dollar prize in a contest sponsored by the Easton Express. During the next few years she sold her first stories and began writing a daily column for the paper, stopping just before the birth of her first child, a daughter, Catherine Drinker ( 1 9 2 4 ) . Her son, Ezra, was also born in Easton ( 1 9 2 7 ) . Bowen credited her husband with starting her writing: "And once I saw my product in print, nothing mattered but to get on with the work" ("We've Never Asked a Woman Before," p. 8 5 ) . Bowen's first two books appeared in 1924: The Story of the Oak Tree, a children's book, and A History of Lehigh University. In the latter, a commissioned study, she was identified as the daughter of Dr. H. S. Drinker '71 and wife of Professor Ezra Bowen '13. Asked in later years why she had never written the biography of a woman she replied that "a woman's biography—with about eight famous historical exceptions—so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career." Rufus Starbuck's Wife, her only novel, appeared in 1932. Praised for its sympathetic characters and psychological accuracy, this semiautobiographical account of the stresses in a marriage between two talented people offers valuable insights into her developing independence and self-definition. Catherine and Ezra Bowen separated in the 1930s (they were di-

Bowen

Bowen vorced in 1936) and she and her children returned to Lehigh to live with her parents. In 1939 she married Thomas McKean Downs, a surgeon. The marriage lasted until his death in 1960. During the 1930s Bowen tried various literary forms. In 1935 she published a charming and widely read book of essays on music and amateur musicians, Friends and Fiddlers. Her sensitivity to music was evident in her next project as well: "Beloved Friend": The Story of Tchaikowsky and Nadejda von Meek ( 1 9 3 7 ) , was the first of the series of distinguished biographies on which Catherine Drinker Bowen's reputation rests. That venture led to Free Artist: The Story of Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein (1939), a study of the pianists who had helped to popularize Tchaikovsky's music. A diligent researcher in printed sources, for this book she traveled to the Soviet Union in 1937 for firsthand experience of scenes and atmosphere. Disappointed by her discovery of some less than desirable characteristics in the private lives of various musicians, Bowen determined to write about a good man. Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family (1944) began her series of biographies of men involved in forming and interpreting the constitutional government of the United States. Although Holmes's literary executors refused her access to all unpublished material, Bowen's extensive research resulted in a superb portrayal of urban life in Boston and Washington as well as a remarkable range of character portraits. For the second book in this series, John Adams and the American Revolution (1950; reissued 1976), Bowen was again refused permission to read unpublished material and she embarked on five years of research. The book continued in the pattern of what critics called "fictionalized biography," a term to which Bowen objected. "The facts on which my narrative is based are available to everyone," she pointed out. "I aim not to startle with new material but to persuade with old" ( J o h n Adams, p. 6 2 ) . Bowen went on to seek "the foundations of our constitutional government" in the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, specifically in the life of Edward Coke. With the enthusiastic support of her husband, she undertook what became a six-year research effort. At Cambridge, Coke's university, she encountered many obstacles: "Even Bluebeard did not consider women more expendable than does a Cambridge don," she later remarked. The work caused a temporary breakdown in health but resulted in her greatest book, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke, 1552-1634 (1957). Here Bowen "turned once and for all to writing

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biography that contained no fictional devices and documented every quotation." In 1957 she received the Phillips Prize, given by the American Philosophical Society for "the best essay . . . on the science and philosophy of jurisprudence"; she was also invited to membership in the society. The following year The Lion and the Throne won a National Book Award. Francis Bacon, discovered during her research on Coke, fascinated Bowen because of his genius and his literary style, as well as his courage in adversity. (She rejected opportunities to write about men who had not themselves written well.) In Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man (1963), a series of essays on Bacon in crucial periods, she offered a more relaxed, though equally meticulous approach to biography. The book was probably Bowen's favorite among her own works. In the last of her books on the development of constitutional government she moved away from individual biography. Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention (1966), the fifth of her books to be a Book-ofthe-Month Club selection, succeeded, a reviewer noted, "much better than any previous book" on the subject, in "present [ing] a vivid recreation of the 'tenseness of the moment'" (Greene, pp. 2 1 8 - 1 9 ) . Bowen described her work methods in three collections of essays: The Writing of Biography (1951), Adventures of a Biographer (1959), and Biography: The Craft and the Calling (1969). "Writing biography is exciting business," she said, and the biographer must examine and record with excitement and precision "the nature or motivation of man." Her view of history as shaped by individuals led Bowen to focus on character and personality. To create the proper atmosphere she surrounded her work area with portraits of her subject and his contemporaries and pored over the material until she could hear the person speaking in his own authentic voice. Challenging professional historians for draining the life from history, Bowen also resented the condescension of some historians toward popular books, observing that "books that are well written seemed doomed to popularity; the public is avid for history." Biography was not a lesser art; rather, she argued, it was a craft requiring "so total an effort that one's life actually must be planned around it." Family Portrait ( 1 9 7 0 ) , the biography of Bowen's family, reveals little about herself and nothing of her marriages. Nonetheless the abiding values in her life emerge clearly: love of family, a deep appreciation of the past and of old age; deep respect for hard work; and an

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Bowen

unflagging zeal for achievement, for doing something worthwhile. She felt she had an advantage as a woman in perceiving character because women "are trained from childhood to notice the relationships between people." A strong supporter of the rights of women to exercise their talents independent of home and family, in a speech near the end of her life Bowen observed that "no woman of spirit can focus her entire life on the raising of two children"; she must also use her "vital energies in national causes, world causes." At the time of her death Catherine Drinker Bowen was working with "zest and the sense that work was sacred" on a study of Benjamin Franklin. The book was published posthumously in 1974 as The Most Dangerous Man in America: Scenes from the Life of Benjamin Franklin. Following a year's illness Catherine Drinker Bowen died at seventy-six of cancer, in Haverford, a mile from the place of her birth. [Bowen's papers, which include correspondence, notes, and drafts, are at the Library of Congress. Other articles by Bowen of interest to the biographer are: "An Alumna Looks Back—and Ahead," St. Timothy's School Alumnae Bull., Spring 1951; "Discipline and Reward: A Writer's Life," Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1957, pp. 8 7 - 9 2 ; "The Nature of the Artist," Scripps College Bull., 1961; "We've Never Asked a Woman Before," Atlantic, March 1970, pp. 82—86; " F o r American Women Again It Is the Time to Move Mountains," Smithsonian, July 1970, pp. 2 4 - 3 1 . A comprehensive biographical memoir by Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., is in the Am. Phil. Soc. Yearbook, 1974 ( 1 9 7 5 ) . Ezra Bowen, Henry and Other Heroes: An Informal Memoir of High Dreams and Vanished Seasons (1974) gives a son's warm and appreciative recollection of his mother in the course of his own autobiographical memories. For an insight into Bowen's personality see Harvey Breit, "Talk with C. D. Bowen," N.Y. Times Book Rev., July 2, 1950, and Robert Clurman, "Talk with Mrs. Bowen," N.Y. Times Book Rev., March 16, 1957. A short film in which Bowen discusses her work, Catherine Drinker Bowen: Other People's Lives, is in the Free Library of Philadelphia. Important reviews of Bowen's books include Henry S. Commager on Yankee from Olympus, in Weekly Book Rev., April 23, 1944; C. H. Mcllwain on The Lion and the Throne, in Am. Hist. Rev., Oct. 1957; and Jack P. Greene on Miracle at Philadelphia, in Am. Hist. Rev., Oct. 1967. See also the entry in Contemporary Authors ( 1 9 6 9 ) and in Current Biog., 1944. Obituaries in the Phila. Inquirer, Nov. 2, 1973, and the N.Y. Times, Nov. 3, 1973, include useful summaries of her life and work. Further information was given by Ezra Bowen and by Barbara Rex, her editor and longtime friend. A biobibliography by Frank Friedman, Diane Lovelace, and Donna Zientek assisted with research. A death record was provided by Pa. Dept. of Health.] MABGARET

STEINHAGEN

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BOWEN, Louise deKoven, Feb. 26, 1859-Nov. 9, 1953. Philanthropist, community leader, suffragist. Louise deKoven Bowen was born in Chicago, where she devoted most of her adult life to the support of social welfare efforts. The only child of Helen (Hadduck) and John deKoven, a successful banker, she was the granddaughter of Edward Hiram Hadduck, who built a large fortune through investments in land that eventually became the center of Chicago's Loop. Louise deKoven grew up conscious of this wealth; her grandfather informed her one day that he had just sold the corner of Washington Street and Wabash Avenue "for a good sum," one he promptly divided between Louise and her mother. At the same time, she was taught to be responsible for her inheritance, learning that "God would hold me accountable for the manner in which I used my talents." Louise deKoven's interest in social work developed gradually. As a youth she enjoyed the privileges accorded Chicago's elite and attended the prestigious Dearborn Seminary, graduating at sixteen near the top of her class. About that time she appealed to her pastor at St. James Episcopal Cathedral for appropriate social service work. He reluctantly offered her a Sunday school class of "bad boys," a responsibility other more experienced church members had refused. Louise deKoven took on the task and quickly established order and discipline—her trademarks throughout her social service life. She led the class for eleven years, attracting many new members and establishing for their benefit one of the first boys' clubhouses in Chicago, the Huron Street Club. This experience helped shape her commitment to child welfare and the prevention of juvenile crime. DeKoven's Sunday school work ended with her marriage to Chicago businessman Joseph Tilton Bowen on June 1, 1886. The Bowens had four children: John deKoven (b. 1887), Joseph Tilton, Jr. (b. 1889), Helen Hadduck (b. 1891), and Louise deKoven (b. 1893). While maintaining social service activities, Louise deKoven Bowen spent much of her early married life raising her children and managing complex households in Chicago and at their summer estate in Bar Harbor, Maine. Bowen's career took a critical turn about 1893, when J A N E ADDAMS, founder of Hull House, asked her to help with the settlement's fledgling Woman's Club. Bowen accepted, guiding the neighborhood women in parliamentary procedure and debate; during her seventeen years as an officer of the organization, it grew to a membership of over 2,000. She became a Hull House

Bowen

Bowen trustee in 1903 and beginning in 1907 served as treasurer. A financial mainstay of the settlement, what funds she did not provide herself, she raised from others. Some of Bowen's key welfare efforts grew out of her association with Hull House. In the late 1890s she joined Jane Addams and her Hull House colleague J U L I A L A T H R O P on the Juvenile Court Committee of Chicago; Bowen later became its president. Seeking separate treatment and counsel for young offenders, the committee succeeded in establishing the Juvenile Court and Detention Home across the street from Hull House. After the city of Chicago and Cook County assumed responsibility for that institution in 1907, the Court Committee reorganized itself as the Juvenile Protective Association, with Bowen as first president. There she supervised research, carried out in large part by Jessie Binford (1876—1966), examining the moral and physical effects on young people of poor working conditions, racial prejudice, prostitution, and popular entertainment. Among such studies, Bowen herself wrote The Colored People of Chicago ( 1 9 1 3 ) . The following year she published a book, Safeguards for City Youth at Work and at Play. Louise deKoven Bowen was a vital link in the social welfare network of her city and nation. She possessed not only access to power and money, but also the leadership ability and commitment to see that ideas for welfare programs became realities. Acting on the advice of A L I C E H A M I L T O N , in 1911 she pressured the managers of the Pullman Company, of which she was a stockholder, into acknowledging health hazards to Pullman workers and improving medical facilities. Through her friend Cyrus McCormick, she then obtained a minimum wage for women employed at the International Harvester Company. In 1912 Bowen raised more than $12,000 to provide food for the children of striking garment workers, took part in a suffragist march on the Republican National Convention in Chicago (she lectured nationally for woman suffrage), and supported the efforts of the Progressive party that fall. She later returned to the Republican fold as a national committeewoman from Illinois. A figure to be reckoned with in Chicago, she monitored charges of municipal corruption as president of the Woman's City Club, and investigated requests for financial assistance as vice president of the United Charities ( 1 9 1 1 15). For all her diverse activities, Bowen's attention rarely wandered far from Hull House. During her years as its treasurer, she personally funded the construction of two settlement buildings, the Woman's Club and the Boys' Club, and

donated to Hull House a seventy-two-acre summer campsite in memory of her husband, who had died in 1911. Bowen's loyalty to Hull House survived World War I, which she supported, while Jane Addams became one of the nation's leading pacifists. After Addams's death in 1935, Bowen was the moving force in the settlement, serving as president of the board for nine years. Small in stature, with a straightbacked carriage and determined tread, she handled all situations with brisk authority, brooking no opposition. She saw herself as the guardian of the image and ideals of Addams as she understood them, a stance which brought her into conflict with succeeding head residents of the settlement. Although Bowen's need to be involved in all managerial decisions sometimes caused consternation, Hull House as an institution might not have survived the death of Jane Addams without Bowen's financial support and organizational abilities. Bowen was honored on numerous occasions by Hull House, and by other civic and educational groups. Her long service as an adviser and financial contributor to hospitals and health organizations was recognized in 1939, when she was made a citizen-fellow of the Chicago Institute of Medicine. She ceased most of her official activities in 1944, at the age of eightyfive, yet remained honorary president of both Hull House and the Juvenile Protective Association. Bowen underwent an operation for cancer in October 1953, and died the following month of a stroke at her Chicago home. [The Louise deKoven Bowen Papers in the Chicago Hist. Soc. consist primarily of three scrapbooks containing some correspondence as well as newspaper clippings, photographs, and other memorabilia relating to her public life. In addition there is a collection of Bowen correspondence, clippings, articles, and photographs in the Jane Addams Memorial Coll., Univ. of 111. at Chicago. The papers of Hull-House Associates and of the Juvenile Protective Assoc., also at the Univ. of 111., provide information on Bowen's activities. Bowen offered accounts of her own life and career in three books: Growing Up with a City (1926), a useful, though uneven, autobiography; Baymeath (1944), written for and about her family; and Open Windows: Stories of People and Places (1946), which includes a tribute to Jane Addams. See also Mary E. Humphrey, ed., Speeches, Addresses and Letters of Louise deKoven Bowen, Reflecting Social Movement in Chicago (1937). Helpful secondary sources include Allen Davis and Mary Lynn McCree, eds., 80 Years at Hull-Home (1969), and Anthony Piatt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (1969), which includes a critical portrait of Bowen and her efforts at moral reform. Bowen is included in Who Was Who in America, III; and Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. An

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obituary appeared in N.Y. Times, Nov. 10, 1953; death certificate furnished by 111. Dept. of Public Health.] MARY LYNN

MCCREE

BRADY, Mildred Edie, June 3, 1906-July 27, 1965. Consumer advocate, editor, journalist. Mildred Edie Brady, a central figure in the history of the Consumers Union, was born in Little Rock, Ark., the only daughter and eldest of three children of Maude (White) and Stewart Carson Edie. Both parents were natives of Missouri and of Scots-Irish ancestry. Stewart Edie, a pharmacist, worked in and then refurbished a series of drugstores and restaurants in several states before settling down to employment by a chain of drugstores in Kansas City, Mo. Absorbed in his work, he provided his children with a strong sense of professional dedication and pride. Maude Edie, the thirteenth child of a poor family, was a self-educated woman who had become an expert railroad telegraph operator at age twelve. A perfectionist who felt she must continually prove herself, she instilled in her children the same need to excel. Because both parents worked and because of the frequent moves and changes of schools, Mildred Edie and her brothers early became self-reliant. After the family settled in Kansas City, around 1920, she attended Northeast High School. An honor student, she graduated in 1923 and entered a junior college in Kansas City. Her college career was stormy; after being expelled from the first school for her work on an irreverent student newspaper, she studied for some time at two other midwestern colleges, but never graduated. During these years her main interests were literature and theater. She lived briefly in Chicago, working at various jobs, including modeling. Also during this period her parents were divorced; they later remarried. In 1929, rebelling against her family and her midwestern origins, and seeking wider experience, Mildred Edie moved to New York City. Not long after her arrival she married an old boyfriend, Gerald Fling, editor of a hotel trade journal. (They divorced in 1931.) For a time she worked under E D I T H ISAACS as associate editor of Theatre Arts Monthly. Then in 1930 she met Dexter Masters, editor of Tide (an offshoot of Time), a publication concerned with the world of marketing and advertising, who hired her to work for him. For Tide she reported on the boom period in American advertising, focusing particularly on the impact of New Deal programs on the business. Within a few years she was recognized as a knowledgeable reporter and analyst of Madison Avenue as well as of

Washington. Along with Masters, she met and became friendly with people in the worlds of theater, journalism, and politics, and with the leaders of the new consumer movement. Among these leaders were Frederick J. Schlink, head of a new publication, Consumers Research, and his colleague Arthur Kallet. When in 1935 a series of internal conflicts resulted in a strike at Consumers Research, Edie did a major story on the situation for Tide. Also in 1935, Edie met Robert Brady, an economist and author of The Spirit and Structure of Fascism. They began living together the following year, and she later took the name Brady, but they could not marry because his first wife would not grant a divorce. (They were married in Berkeley, Calif., in 1956.) The couple had two daughters. In 1936 Arthur Kallet and others split from Consumers Research to found Consumers Union (CU), a competing organization. Dexter Masters became editor of CU publications and Mildred Edie and Robert Brady joined the new group, which conducted and publicized laboratory tests of consumer products and services. Robert Brady, who was then a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where the couple had moved, became vice president of the organization; Mildred Edie became manager of the short-lived western branch of CU, which was established at her suggestion. Her early work for CU consisted mainly of writing, editing, and promotion. Mildred Edie Brady remained active in the consumer movement through the 1940s, while also building a considerable reputation as a writer for national magazines. In 1940 she went to New York as managing editor of the reform publication Friday and then helped to launch a new weekly publication for CU. Called Bread ir Butter, it dealt with the inflationary tendencies of a defense economy. She worked briefly during World War II in Washington, D.C., for the Consumer Division of the Office of Price Administration, and she edited a Washington consumer newsletter for McCall's. In April 1947 she wrote a famous article for Harper's Magazine based on an investigation of therapist Wilhelm Reich and some of his associates. Her work also appeared in Collier's and The New Republic. In 1950 Mildred Brady rejoined CU as a feature writer for Consumer Reports. From her base in California, which provided a rich field for consumer reform, she produced a series of investigative reports on marketing practices. Business in California enthusiastically endorsed so-called "fair trade laws," designed to restrain product competition by means of resale price

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Braun maintenance restrictions, and banks and financial institutions there welcomed the new era of easy credit and small down payments. Uniquely in that state, she could discern the impact of new marketing practices and the decline of price competition. In 1958 Dexter Masters, who had become executive director of CU four years earlier, brought Brady to Mount Vernon, N.Y., as editorial director and senior editor of Consumer Reports. Her work focused on such themes as truth in lending, truth in packaging, product safety, restraint of trade, and price fixing, and she urged the passage of strong legislation to protect the consumer in these areas. In 1961 Brady's story "The Great Ham Robbery" focused public concern on the practice of injecting hams with water to increase their weight. Though she was burdened by Robert Brady's illness (he suffered a stroke in 1952 and was an invalid until his death in 1963), Mildred Brady was through the 1950s and early 1960s an influential and creative force in the consumer movement, as well as a mainstay of Consumer Reports. She participated in the International Organization of Consumers Unions, founded in 1960, and lectured on the role of consumer testing before technical groups in the United States, Europe, and Asia. A careful journalist who, in her words, "did her homework," she articulated the consumer position on a wide range of national and international issues, and her investigations laid the groundwork for the rise of world consumerism. When she died of heart failure in 1965, while in the midst of a conference with CU leaders about product standardization, Consumer Reports paid tribute to her "intelligence and drive" in guiding the publication and noted the widespread impact of her work. [Copies of articles and speeches by Mildred Brady are in the CU archives in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Biographical material is nearly nonexistent. Brief obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, July 29, 1965, and Consumer Reports, Sept. 1965. A tribute to Brady in Consumer Reports, Oct. 1965, includes comments from a number of public officials at her death. Further information for this article was provided by her brother Leslie Edie, by Judy Syfers, and by Dexter Masters.] COLSTON

WARNE

BRAUN, Emma Lucy, April 19, 1889-March 5, 1971. Botanist, conservationist. Emma Lucy Braun, one of the truly dedicated pioneer ecologists of the first half of the twentieth century, was an original thinker in the fields of plant ecology, vascular plant taxonomy,

plant geography, and conservation. Throughout her life, E. Lucy Braun, as she preferred to be known, gathered facts from the field, garden, and laboratory. She synthesized them into over 180 publications, including four books. Her work, coinciding with the recognition of plant ecology as a scientific discipline in the United States, was instrumental in the development of that discipline. Born in Cincinnati, Braun was the younger of two daughters of Emma Moriah (Wright) and George Frederick Braun, a school principal. Her paternal ancestors were of German-French descent, her maternal ancestors of English origin. Braun's early interest in the natural world, like that of her older sister, Annette (1884-1978), was fostered by their parents, who took the girls to the woods and identified wildflowers. Their mother was especially interested in botany and had prepared a small collection of dried pressed plants for study. Braun received her primary and secondary education in the Cincinnati public schools. At the University of Cincinnati she earned an A.B. in 1910, an A.M. in geology in 1912, and a Ph.D. in botany in 1914. (Her sister had obtained a Ph.D. from the university in 1911.) At the same institution Braun was an assistant in geology (1910-13), assistant in botany (1914-17), instructor in botany (1917-23), assistant professor of botany (1923-27), associate professor of botany (1927—46), and professor of plant ecology (1946-48). Early retirement from teaching allowed her to conduct research in areas of special interest that resulted in field work and significant publications nearly to the end of her life. Braun's early scientific publications in plant ecology dealt with the physiographic ecology and vegetation of the Cincinnati region, the unique vegetation of the unglaciated limestone in Adams County, Ohio, and the forests of the Illinoian Till Plain of southwestern Ohio and of the Cumberland Plateau and Mountains in Kentucky. From this research she developed a classic book, Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America (1950). Based on twenty-five years of field study and over 65,000 miles of travel, the book gives a comprehensive and coordinated account of the entire hardwood forest. It lays the foundation for the measurement and evaluation of all future ecological changes in the hardwood forest and remains her most remembered and lasting scholarly achievement. Braun also contributed extensively to the field of floristics and taxonomy of vascular plants. In the 1920s and 1930s she catalogued the flora of the Cincinnati area and compared it with the flora of the same region a hundred

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years earlier. This study, one of the first of its type in the United States, provided a model for comparing the changes in a given flora over a span of time. Her other writings included a key to the deciduous trees of Ohio, articles on selected plants of southwestern Ohio and eastern Kentucky, descriptions of plants new to science, and An Annotated Catalog of the Spermatophytes of Kentucky (1943). With these contributions as a foundation and the desire to continue advancing knowledge of the flora, in 1951 she organized an Ohio Flora Committee within the Ohio Academy of Science. Its objective was to prepare a comprehensive study of the vascular flora of Ohio. Braun chaired the committee and moved the project forward by writing two authoritative books, The Woody Plants of Ohio: Trees, Shrubs, and Weedy Climbers, Native, Naturalized, and Escaped; A Contribution Toward the Vascular Flora of Ohio (1961), and The Monocotyledoneae: Cat-tails to Orchids (1967). The field studies Braun conducted led naturally into the study of plant distribution. She expanded on the theory that the southern Appalachians were the center of the survival of plants during glaciation and that from there the forest communities spread. This phytogeographic knowledge culminated in an extensive analytical summary, "The Phytogeography of Unglaciated Eastern United States and Its Interpretation," published in 1955 in Botanical Review. Braun's ideas on the origin of the prairie elements within the forest constitute an often overlooked but innovative viewpoint. Although she drew freely from the work of others, her botanical and ecological studies diverged from those of her contemporaries, exhibiting originality in methodology and philosophy. Braun's varied contributions to conservation were also significant. She wrote articles stressing the importance of saving natural habitats, founded the Cincinnati chapter of the Wild Flower Preservation Society, and edited the society's national magazine, Wild Flower. Particularly concerned about the prairie remnants in Adams County, Ohio, she fought to save natural areas and to establish preserves. Annette Braun, an entomologist who became internationally known as an authority on Microlepidoptera (moths), accompanied and assisted her sister in her field studies. Retaining the strict way of life of their parents, the sisters lived together in Mount Washington, in suburban Cincinnati. Their home and garden, surrounded by mostly natural, undisturbed woods, contained an area they called the science wing, which served as their laboratory. Their garden was an experimental one, where many rare and

unusual plants were transplanted for close observation and study. E. Lucy Braun's stature in the scientific community is well demonstrated by her election as the first woman president of both the Ohio Academy of Science (1933—34) and the Ecological Society of America (1950). For her achievements, she received many honors and awards, among them the Mary Soper Pope Medal for achievement in the field of botany (1952) and a Certificate of Merit from the Botanical Society of America (1956). She died of congestive heart failure in her home at the age of eighty-one and is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati. [Braun's Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America was reprinted in 1964, 1967, and 1972; The Woody Plants of Ohio was reprinted in 1969. The major biographical source is Ronald L. Stuckey, " E . Lucy Braun ( 1 8 8 9 - 1 9 7 1 ) , Outstanding Botanist and Conservationist: A Biographical Sketch, with Bibliography," Mich. Botanist, vol. 12, March 1973, pp. 83-106, which contains a complete list of Braun's popular and scientific writings. Two popular articles are Perry K. Peskin, "A Walk Through Lucy Braun's Prairie," The Explorer, vol. 20, no. 4 ( 1 9 7 8 ) , pp. 1 5 21 (with photographs), and Lucile Durrell, "Memories of E. Lucy Braun" Sixth North American Prairie Conference, Proceedings ( 1 9 8 0 ) . For more technical background on the history of plant ecology in North America see Paul B. Sears, "Plant Ecology," in Joseph Ewan, ed., A Short History of Botany in the United States ( 1 9 6 9 ) , and Robert P. Mcintosh, "Ecology Since 1900," in Benjamin J. Taylor and Thurman J. White, eds., Issues and Ideas in America ( 1 9 7 6 ) . An obituary appeared in Ohio Jour. Science, July 1971, pp. 2 4 7 - 4 8 . Annette Braun provided family information. A death certificate was supplied by Ohio Dept. of Health.] RONALD L .

STUCKEY

BRECKINRIDGE, Mary, Feb. 17, 1881-May 16, 1965. Nurse-midwife, organization founder. Mary Breckinridge, founder and director of the Frontier Nursing Service and pioneer in American midwifery, was born in Memphis, Tenn. First daughter and second of four children of Clifton Rodes and Katherine (Carson) Breckinridge, she was descended from old southern families through both her parents. Her mother had been born on a Louisiana plantation, and her father, a cotton planter and commission merchant, was the son of John C. Breckinridge, United States vice president and Confederate general. Because her father served as a United States representative from Arkansas, Breckinridge spent most of her childhood in Washington, D.C., where she was educated by governesses.

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When he was appointed American minister to Russia during the 1890s, the family moved to Saint Petersburg. Breckinridge attended the Rosemont-Dezaley School in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1896 to 1898, when she returned to the United States and enrolled in the Low and Heywood School in Stamford, Conn. In 1899 she returned to live with her parents in Arkansas. She found life at home frustrating and "chafed at the complete lack of purpose in the things I was allowed to do." In 1904 Mary Breckinridge married Henry Ruffner Morrison, who died of appendicitis in 1906. Deeply grieved, she sought some way to make her life useful. Deciding she would like to care for children, in February 1907 she entered Saint Luke's Hospital School of Nursing in New York City, graduating as a registered nurse in 1910. At her ailing mother's request, Breckinridge returned again to her family in Fort Smith, Ark. On Oct. 8, 1912, she married Richard Ryan Thompson, president of Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women in Eureka Springs, Ark., where she taught French and hygiene. A son, Breckinridge, was born in 1914, followed in 1916 by a daughter, Mary, who died within six hours of her birth. Just after his fourth birthday, the adored Breckie was taken suddenly ill; he died on Jan. 23, 1918. Once again Mary Breckinridge turned to nursing as an outlet for her sorrow, with an intensified commitment to "raise the status of childhood everywhere" in memory of her own children. In June 1918 she left her husband and with their divorce in 1920 legally resumed use of her maiden name. To meet wartime need, Breckinridge volunteered to serve with the American Red Cross in France. While awaiting an assignment, she spent several months as a public health nurse in Boston and Washington, D.C. Finally embarking for Europe after the armistice, under the auspices of the American Committee for Devastated France, headed by ANNE MORGAN, Breckinridge organized disaster relief in Vic-sur-Aisne and inaugurated a special program to provide food and medical care for children and pregnant and nursing women. She later regarded this work as the most important preparation she had for founding the Frontier Nursing Service. Her work in France and several visits to England convinced her that the nurse-midwife was the "logical response to the needs of the young child in rural America," and she determined to introduce the position to an area of the United States neglected by other social and medical agencies. After her return from France in 1921, she prepared for this work at Teachers

College, Columbia University, through studies in public health nursing with ADELAIDE NUTTING and others. In the fall of 1923, she departed for London to enroll at the school of the British Hospital for Mothers and Babies, where four months later she was certified as an English midwife. After an additional postgraduate course at the York Road General Lying-in Hospital in London, Breckinridge joined the Midwives Institute in 1924. She completed her program of self-preparation with a trip to Scotland to observe the Highlands and Islands Medical and Nursing Service, which in its effective delivery of medical care to a widely scattered population was to serve as the direct model for the Frontier Nursing Service. Breckinridge had earlier explored the Kentucky mountain area she aspired to serve, surveying its existing medical personnel, which consisted of elderly, untrained midwives and no licensed physician. Although she had never lived in Kentucky, her family was well known there; moreover, the challenge of bringing services to such an isolated area appealed to her, and the state's health commissioner was supportive. Early in 1 9 2 5 Breckinridge began her nursing experiment in Leslie County. By May she had enlisted support from prominent citizens in founding the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies, which in 1928 became the Frontier Nursing Service ( F N S ) . For the first three years Breckinridge underwrote the entire operation with capital inherited from her mother. She hoped that the undertaking would demonstrate the effectiveness of nurse-midwifery as a solution to America's alarmingly high maternal and infant death rate, and therefore determined to keep complete statistics. Since most of the residents of Leslie County lived in areas inaccessible by roads, the Service was designed around outpost nursing centers, each approximately ten miles apart. T h e nursemidwives, who traveled on horseback, were no more than five or six miles from any patient. Breckinridge viewed the hospital, which opened at Hyden in 1928, and the physician who was its medical director, as "the palm of a hand from which fingers radiate in several directions." The FNS provided preventive as well as crisis nursing and within five years claimed responsibility for serving the medical needs of more than 1,000 rural families. Staff members of the F N S also formed the nucleus of what became in 1929 the American Association of Nurse-Midwives. Breckinridge directed the project, edited its quarterly bulletin, and raised funds, traveling to speak on behalf of the Service in major American cities. A tiny woman, the "blessed old gray-

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haired critter" beloved by the Kentucky mountaineers was at the same time an effective speaker and fund raiser among the wealthy, some of whom were old family friends. Although they sometimes despaired of her unfashionable clothes, and self-administered haircuts, they nevertheless supported Breckinridge's cause. Her administrative and practical skills were complemented by a deep spirituality, and, as a member of the London Spiritualist Alliance, she maintained an active interest in psychical research. Always close to her family, Breckinridge brought her widowed father to live with her. The success of the FNS in lowering the rate of death in childbirth in the area it served to substantially below the national average has served as a frequently cited proof of the potential of nurse-midwifery as a method of delivering quality health care services at a manageable cost. The recipient of many honors, Mary Breckinridge remained the director of the F N S and editor of its bulletin until she died, of leukemia and a stroke, in Hyden, Ky., at the age of eighty-four. The FNS, the Hyden Hospital, and the Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery, a training program for nurse-midwives which she had established in 1939, continued to flourish after her death. [Mary Breckinridge destroyed her personal papers after completing her autobiography, Wide Neighborhoods: The Story of the Frontier Nursing Service (1952). Quotations are from the autobiography. A few Breckinridge letters survive in the Louis I. Dublin Papers, Nat. Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md. Her articles, both signed and unsigned, appear in the Frontier Nursing Service Quart. Bull., which she edited from 1925 to 1965. Other writings by Breckinridge of particular interest include "The Nurse-Midwife—A Pioneer," Am. Jour, of Public Health, Nov. 1927, and "Is Birth Control the Answer?" Harper's, July 1931. Useful secondary sources include Caroline Gardner, Clever Country: Kentucky Mountain Trails (1931); Judy Barrett Litoff, American Midwives, 1860 to the Present (1978); Ernest Poole, Nurses on Horseback (1932); Barbara Schutt, "Frontier's Family Nurses," Am. Jour, of Nursing, May 1972; Katherine Elliott Wilkie and Elizabeth R. Mosely, Frontier Nurse: Mary Breckinridge (1969); Carol Crowe-Carraco, "Mary Breckinridge and the Frontier Nursing Service," Register, Ky. Hist. Soc., July 1978. Information about Breckinridge's private life was gathered in part from correspondence and interviews with her sister-in-law, Dorothy Throckmorton Thomson Breckinridge, and with Peggy Elmore of the FNS, and Amelia Martin of the Fort Smith (Ark.) Hist. Soc. Assistance in the research for this article was provided by a biobibliography prepared by Lauren K. Lee. Photographs of Breckinridge appeared periodically in the Frontier Nursing Service Quart.

Bull, during her editorship. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, May 17, 1965; death record from Ky. Registrar of Vital Statistics.] DREW GILPIN FAUST

B R E M E R , Edith Terry, Oct. 9, 1885-Sept. 12, 1964. Organization founder, social worker. Edith Terry Bremer, pioneer leader in immigrant social service work and founder of the International Institute movement, was born in Hamilton, N.Y., the second of three children and elder daughter of Benjamin Stites and Mary (Baldwin) Terry. Her father, a descendant of Northwest Territory pioneers, had graduated from Colgate University in 1878 and served as a Baptist minister. At the time of Edith's birth he was teaching history at Colgate, and in 1892 he became professor of English history at the University of Chicago. Her mother, of English ancestry, was the daughter of a Baptist minister. Edith Terry grew up in Chicago and received an A.B. from the University of Chicago in 1907. While attending the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy ( 1 9 0 7 - 0 8 ) , she did field research on women in industry for the Chicago Women's Trade Union League. This experience turned her interest to the problems of immigrants, as did her work as a field investigator for the Chicago Juvenile Court ( 1 9 0 8 ) under the direction of j u l i a l a t h r o p . She then served as a special agent for the United States Immigration Commission, and as a resident at the University of Chicago Settlement and at the Union Settlement in New York City. In 1910, she began work with immigrant girls as a national field secretary for the National Board of the YWCA in New York. On Sept. 4, 1912, Edith Terry married Harry M. Bremer, a resident at the Greenwich House settlement in New York City and later a special agent with the National Child Labor Committee. Edith Terry Bremer made her most important contribution to immigrant social welfare as founder and leader of the International Institute movement. Concerned that the existing public and private agencies serving immigrants largely ignored women, she established the first International Institute in New York City as a YWCA experiment in December 1910. Its purpose was to assist newly arrived and second-generation immigrant girls and women by providing English classes, recreational and club activities, and assistance with employment, housing, naturalization, and other problems. Most of the Institute's teaching, visiting, counseling, and casework was conducted by nationality workers —trained social workers who were immigrants themselves.

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The advent of World W a r I temporarily diverted Bremer's attention from establishing new International Institutes. She assumed direction of work for foreign-born women under the YWCA's W a r Work Council and was also chiefly responsible for the recruitment and training of the Polish Gray Samaritans, young PolishAmerican women who went to Poland to do postwar relief and social service work. After the war, the International Institute movement proliferated, and by the mid-1920s, fifty-five Institutes had been established, primarily in industrial cities with large ethnic populations.

proval, Edith Bremer founded the National Institute of Immigrant Welfare (which became the American Federation of International Institutes in 1 9 4 4 ) . This new national agency took over the functions of the YWCA's Bureau of Immigration and Foreign-Born and became the umbrella organization for the International Institutes, most of which separated from their local YWCAs. Bremer became executive director of the new agency, which continued to oversee the efforts of the individual International Institutes, and worked to reform and humanize the immigration laws and to promote cultural pluralism.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, as head of the YWCA's Department of Immigration and Foreign Communities (renamed in March 1932 the Bureau of Immigration and Foreign-Born), Edith Bremer provided inspiration and central direction for the International Institutes. She helped local YVVCAs organize new Institutes, made field visits to advise on programs, sponsored annual meetings of Institute workers, and publicized the immigrant cause in articles and speeches. Through a stream of newsletters and memos from the national office, she alerted Institute workers to new developments in immigration law and urged sensitivity in dealing with ethnic communities. During these years, Bremer also testified as an expert witness at congressional hearings on immigration policies and lobbied in Washington for more flexible and humane immigration laws. In 1927, she was awarded the Order of the White Lion by President Thomas G. Masaryk of Czechoslovakia for her immigrant welfare work.

During World War II the agency sought to secure fair treatment for immigrant aliens and eliminate conflicts among different ethnic groups. It subsequently aided in the resettlement of European refugees, displaced persons, and Japanese-Americans who had been incarcerated during the war. In the postwar years, Bremer remained active in a number of organizations dedicated to the assistance of immigrants and refugees. She retired as executive director of the American Federation of International Institutes in 1954, but from 1955 to 1958 served as acting director of the International Institute of New York, the agency she had founded in 1910. Edith Terry Bremer died in 1964 of cancer at her home in Port Washington, N.Y., and was survived by her husband. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times following her death, Edward Corsi, a former United States commissioner of immigration, paid tribute to Bremer's "passionate concern for people of all nationalities and the tireless effort she devoted to the welfare of immigrant and refugee, to helping them adjust to American life and to encouraging their contribution toward . . . a richer and more varied America."

Bremer formulated a philosophy for the International Institute movement which opposed the ruthless Americanization and forced assimilation common in the postwar years. In a 1911 report, she had rejected the "prevailing notion that work for immigrants must be either shaking hands on Ellis Island or making them learn English." As the movement developed, she gradually elaborated a policy of cultural pluralism. Institute nationality workers not only engaged in traditional settlement work, but also, following Bremer's ideas, tried to foster a sense of cultural identity among newcomers. They encouraged pride in the immigrant heritage, advocated cooperation and understanding among ethnic groups, and urged immigrants to retain their languages and folkways while simultaneously learning American ways. At the same time, they encouraged Americans to understand immigrant customs and recognize ethnic contributions to American life. In December 1933, after several years of discussion and planning, and with Y W C A ap-

[There is no collection of Edith Terry Bremer papers, but four manuscript collections have information about her work in the International Institute movement: the archives of the Nat. Board, YWCA, N.Y. City; the YWCA papers in the Sophia Smith Coll., Smith College; the Edward Corsi papers, the George Arents Research Library, Syracuse Univ.; and the Am. Council for Nationalities Service papers, at the Immigration History Research Center, Univ. of Minn., which contain the papers of the Am. Fed. of International Institutes. Bremer's writings include "Education for 'Immigrant Women': What Is It?" Educational Foundations, 1916; "Foreign Community and Immigration Work of the National Young Women's Christian Association," Immigrants in America Rev., Jan. 1916; "Our International Institutes and the War," Nat. Conference of Social Work, Proc., 1918; "The Foreign Language Worker in the Fusion Process," Nat. Conference of Social Work, Proc., 1919; The International Institutes in Foreign Community Work: Their Program and Phi-

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losophy (1923); "Immigrants and Foreign Communities," Social Work Yearbook, 1929 (1930); "Development of Private Social Work with the Foreign Born," Am. Acad, of Political and Social Sci., Annals, March 1949; three articles in The Survey, May 15, 1924, Jan. 15, 1925, Dec. 15, 1930; and two dozen articles in the YWCA magazine, Association Monthly (renamed Womans Press in 1922), 1913-34. A photograph appears in Womans Press, Nov. 1927. Useful secondary sources are: Mary S. Sims, The Natural History of a Social Institution— the Young Women's Christian Association (1936); Julia Talbot Bird, "Immigrant Women and the International Institutes of the Young Women's Christian Association" (M.A. thesis, Yale Univ., 1932); Raymond A. Mohl, "The American Federation of International Institutes," in Peter Romanofsky, ed., Greenwood Encyc. of Am. Institutions: Social Service Organizations (1978), vol. I. The latter also contains a useful bibliography. Edith Terry Bremer's birth date and information about the Terry family were provided by the Colgate Univ. Archives. See also Who Was Who in America, I (1942), and an obituary in the Port Washington News, Sept. 17, 1964; death record provided by N.Y. State Dept. of Health.] RAYMOND A. MOHL

BRICE, Fanny, Oct. 29, 1891-May 29, 1951. Comedian. Fanny Brice made America laugh for forty years. Like many other great comedians, she was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She was the second daughter and third of four children of Rose (Stern) Borach, who emigrated from Hungary at age ten, and Charles Borach, known as "Pinochle Charlie," who was a heavy-gambling, happy-go-lucky Alsatian. Fanny grew up in Newark, N.J., where her parents eventually owned seven saloons. While Rose ran the businesses, Pinochle Charlie spent the profits and encouraged young Fanny to sing on tables and bartops. Finally, Rose sold the saloons, left Charlie, and moved with her children to Brooklyn, where she went into the real estate business. Like her mother, Fanny later became a strong, independent, professional woman with marital problems. Even as a girl, Fanny knew performing was to be her life, and theater audiences were to be her best teachers. By the age of fourteen, she had quit school, won her first amateur contest, and taken the name of family friend John Brice. At fifteen, she discovered that she was too tall and skinny to become a chorus girl in the age of the short, chunky chorine, so she learned to rely on her talent and humor, not her figure. In 1910, while she was touring on the Columbia burlesque circuit, Irving Berlin gave her a song

to perform called "Sadie Salome," a Yiddish dialect parody of the Salomé dance. For her first performance of it, Brice wore a heavily starched sailor suit that made her squirm and make faces as she sang. The audience loved it, and from then on she built her act on parody, dialect, and physical humor. Brice quickly moved to stardom in the Ziegfeld Follies and the other major forms of contemporary show business—vaudeville, musicals, drama, movies, and radio. Her big break came in the Follies of 1910, in which her first number earned her twelve encores. Blending serious material like the pathos of "Second Hand Rose" (who "never had a t'ing that ain't been used") and the heartbreak of "My Man" with comedy numbers that included lampooning Camille, vamping THEDA BAHA, and tripping through "The Dying Swan," Brice became Florenz Ziegfeld's greatest female star. She was in nine Follies from 1910 to 1936; she toured big-time vaudeville, headlining at the Palace Theatre in New York in 1923; and she was in a number of musicals, from The Honeymoon Express (1913) and Music Box Revue (1924) to Fioretta (1929), Sweet and Low (1930), and Crazy Quilt (1931). Her only stage failure was Fanny (1926), a serious drama. She also made six movies, including My Man (1928), The Great Ziegfeld (1936), and Ziegfeld Follies (1946). Brice, who was forceful and blunt, always insisted on controlling her own material. Even in her first big break, the 1910 Follies, she refused to change her song lyrics at the orders of producer Abe Erlanger, who fired her before Ziegfeld smoothed things over. "Fanny had a consideration for artistic integrity that I've never encountered elsewhere," Katharine Hepburn noted. Brice became a household word to a new generation because of radio and her most distinctive character, "Baby Snooks," a devilish infant whose impish wisecracks made audiences think about the human condition as they roared with laughter. Brice had created Snooks in 1912 for vaudeville, but she did not develop her onstage until Sweet and Low and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934 and 1936. Snooks appeared on radio in 1936 on "The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air" and was a regular on "Good News," starting in 1937, and "Maxwell House Coffee Time." In 1944 Brice began her own very popular "Baby Snooks" radio show, which ran until her death. But Brice's personal life lacked the happiness and fulfillment that she found professionally. On Feb. 14, 1910, while touring with the revue College Girls, she impulsively married Frank

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White, a barber from Springfield, Mass.; they probably never lived together and she divorced him in 1913, the year after she began living with dashing gambler Jules W . " N i c k " Arnstein, whom she married on Oct. 18, 1 9 1 8 . She could accept Arnstein's squandering of her money and his two jail terms for fraud and theft ( 1 9 1 5 - 1 7 , 1 9 2 4 - 2 5 ) , but she could not accept his infidelity. She divorced him in September 1 9 2 7 but never stopped loving him, despite her marriage to producer Billy Rose, which lasted from 1 9 2 9 to 1 9 3 8 . With Arnstein, she had two children, Frances (b. 1 9 1 9 ) and William (b. 1 9 2 1 ) , who were raised by servants while Brice worked. She spent as much time with her children as possible, but she missed the full family life that she felt her career precluded. " I didn't want my daughter to have a career," she reflected. "Because if a woman has a career, she misses an awful lot. And I knew it then, that if you have a career, then the career is your life." Brice's career proved that women could excel as comedians without exploiting their sexuality or making fools of themselves or other women. She did not joke about her home life or about domestic topics. She based her career on what the Literary Digest in 1 9 3 4 called her "talent for sly dissection of all that is fake and preposterous." W h e t h e r parodying opera singers, fan dancers, evangelists, cockneys, Indians, boxers, or royalty, she always did it with humanity and sensitivity. "Because when I did a character," she explained, " I was that character." Based on human nature as it was, Brice's humor had a timeless appeal. As film director George Cukor observed, " F a n n y was one of the great, great clowns of all time." In 1951, a few months before her sixtieth birthday, Brice died in Los Angeles of a stroke. [The Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library, has a clipping file on Brice. The only full-length biography of Brice, from which the quotations here are taken, is Norman Katkov's The Fabulous Fanny ( 1 9 5 3 ) . Weak on facts and details of her career, it is still very valuable for insights into Brice as a person, combining interviews with her friends and family and her unpublished autobiography. For details of Brice's career see Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five, and Current Biog., 1946. Information and reminiscences on her early career are in Eddie Cantor, As I Remember Them ( 1 9 6 3 ) , and Niven Busch, Jr., Twenty-One Americans ( 1 9 3 0 ) . A sketch of her life and career is in Marjorie Farnsworth, The Ziegfeld Follies ( 1 9 5 6 ) . A birth certificate provided by the N.Y. City Municipal Archives reflects changes made in 1950; marriage certificate for Fannie Borach and Frank White from Mass. Dept. of Public Health; death record from Calif. Dept. of Public

Health. Her obituary appeared in the N.Y. May 30, 1951.]

Times,

ROBERT C. TOLL

B R O N N E R , Augusta Fox, July 22, 1 8 8 1 - D e c . 11, 1966. Psychologist. Augusta F o x Bronner, clinical psychologist and expert on juvenile delinquency, was born in Louisville, Ky., to Hanna ( F o x ) and Gustave Bronner, a wholesale milliner. Both sets of grandparents had migrated from Germany, and her maternal grandfather had been a leader of the Jewish community of Louisville and a founder of the Reform Temple. T h e Bronners were comfortable financially, and Augusta grew up in a close-knit, richly cultured family. Her relationships with her brother, one year older, and two older male cousins were close and competitive; she took a maternal and protective attitude toward her younger sister. Bronner's mother and her independent maternal grandmother both urged her to pursue a career; she was not required to learn to do housework. After attending schools in Cincinnati, where the family lived for several years, and in Louisville, Bronner graduated from public high school in Louisville in 1 8 9 8 . From the age of six she had wanted to b e a teacher, and she entered Louisville Normal School. E y e problems caused Bronner to drop out after one year, and she spent a Wanderjahr in Europe with an aunt. Returning, she finished normal school in 1 9 0 1 ; later that year she took over an unruly class of fourth graders, whom she quickly brought under control. In 1 9 0 3 she went to Teachers College, Columbia University (B.S., 1 9 0 6 ; A.M., 1 9 0 9 ) , where she held a position grading papers for Edward L . Thorndike, the creative educational psychologist. From 1 9 0 6 to 1911, Bronner taught English in Louisville at the girls high school from which she had graduated. Her experiences with students were extremely rewarding; in later years, in the clinics, she took special responsibility for adolescent girls. After her father died in 1911, Bronner returned to Teachers College, acting again as Thorndike's assistant. She studied with both the theoretically oriented Columbia psychologists and the practical-minded psychologists at Teachers College, but inclined toward the latter. For her dissertation she conducted a study of groups of girls to determine the relationship between mental defect and delinquency. Mental testing was just beginning, and retardation was often regarded as a cause of delinquency. Bronner's dissertation, completed

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Bronner and published in 1914, became a standard work showing that character rather than intelligence distinguished the offenders from the others. In 1913 Bronner attended the Harvard summer school course given by William Healy ( 1 8 6 9 - 1 9 6 3 ) , a Chicago neurologist, on the motivations of juvenile offenders. Healy had begun research on juvenile delinquency in 1909, at the instance of E T H E L STURGES D U M M E R and other associates of Hull House. Seeking to draw conclusions only after thorough physical, psychological, and social investigation, he pioneered in the individual study of delinquents. Healy recognized Bronner's interest and ability and offered her a position as psychologist at the Chicago Juvenile Psychopathic Institute that he headed. Because their work in Chicago was limited to research, both Bronner and Healy came to feel frustrated by their inability to follow up diagnosis with understanding treatment. Learning from Bronner that some Boston philanthropists were interested in his type of work, Healy agreed to move, knowing that there would be effective social agencies available to give treatment there. The Judge Baker Foundation (later Guidance Center), the model for hundreds of child guidance clinics in the United States and abroad, opened in 1917 with Healy as director and Bronner as assistant director. In her early work with Healy, Bronner did most of the psychological testing; she also interviewed adolescent girls and sometimes younger children. As the guidance center expanded, Bronner increasingly did the administrative work and most of the supervision of psychologists and social workers, while Healy supervised the medical work. By 1930 Bronner felt the need for more administrative authority and was named codirector. After Healy's wife died, Bronner married him, in September 1932. The only change that marriage made in their professional collaboration was to facilitate their working together evenings and weekends, while complicating administration of the clinic when they took vacations together. For some years Bronner had continued to publish on her own. The Psychology of Special Abilities and Disabilities ( 1 9 1 7 ) , which was reprinted several times, was important not only in emphasizing the limitations of mental testing but also in helping to inspire the vocational testing movement. Her widely cited article, "Attitude as It Affects Performances of Tests" ( 1 9 1 6 ) , similarly emphasized the affective factors that help determine test results. But increasingly Bronner published jointly with Healy. They worked closely together, and sometimes

one, sometimes the other, made a first draft from a jointly composed outline. Together they had a powerful influence on both clinical psychology and criminology. A Manual of Individual Mental Tests and Testing ( 1 9 2 7 ) , a fundamentally important guide, appeared just as the mental testing movement was getting under way. After about 1930, when they began to combine treatment with diagnosis, they were able to do remarkable pioneer work in following up their cases. Particularly significant was their development of the widely adopted "team" concept in psychiatric practice —which brought the psychologist, the social worker, and others into a case conference with the physician. The prototypical nonphysician who came on an equal basis, Bronner scheduled the case conferences and oversaw the many students who served in residence at the clinic. Over the years she also did much outside lecturing, to the public, at Boston University and Simmons College, and in special courses, such as one offered jointly with Healy to F B I agents in training. Bronner, who served as president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association in 1932, limited her influence by failing to publish results of a number of interesting psychological research projects and by deliberately staying in Healy's shadow. Another limiting factor was Healy and Bronner's joint decision to keep the Judge Baker Guidance Center small enough to be personal. Nevertheless her work enriched the fields of mental testing, mental health, and criminology. She also aided, both directly and indirectly, countless children who had deviated from the norms of society. Bronner and Healy planned to retire during World War II, but lack of staff kept them on the job until late 1946. After 1950 they lived in Clearwater, Fla. Bronner died at home in December 1966. [The Judge Baker Guidance Center is establishing an archives in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, that will contain some Bronner papers, but most of her papers were destroyed upon her retirement. Some of the Center's informal publications contain photographs of Bronner at work. There are occasional Bronner letters in the Ethel Sturges Dummer Papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. A full but still incomplete list of Bronner's publications may be found in Author Index to Psychological Index, 1894 to 1935 (I960), and Psychological Abstracts, 1927 to 1958 (1960), vols. 1 and 2. "Attitude as It Affects Performances of Tests" appeared in Psychological Rev., July 1916. In addition to such standard biographical directories as The Psychological Register, the main source of information is a type-

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Brooks script of oral history interviews with Healy and Bronner conducted in 1960 and 1961 by John C. Burnham, copies of which are available at the Judge Baker Guidance Center and at the Houghton Library, Harvard Univ. The chief published autobiographical account is William Healy and Augusta F. Bronner, "The Child Guidance Clinic, Birth and Growth of an Idea," in Lawson G. Lowrey and Victoria Sloane, eds., Orthopsychiatry, 1923-1948, Retrospect and Prospect (1948), which also contains a useful bibliography. An obituary appeared in the Boston Globe, Dec. 12, 1966. A biobibliography prepared by Kathy Blythe was useful in preparing this article.] JOHN

c.

BUBNHAM

B R O O K S , Romaine, May 1, 1 8 7 4 - D e c . 7, 1970. Artist. Romaine Brooks was born Beatrice Romaine Goddard in Rome, Italy, where her American mother, Ella (Waterman) Goddard, was staying after being deserted by her husband, Major Harry Goddard. Both parents were of English ancestry and had been born in Pennsylvania. Harry Goddard's father was a well-known preacher, and the Waterman family were wealthy owners of coal mines. Romaine was the youngest of four children, three girls and a boy. (The eldest daughter died in infancy.) The object of Ella Goddard's European travels was to seek help for her much-loved son, Henry St. Mar, who already, at age seven, showed signs of being mentally disturbed. Because he was more manageable when Romaine was with him, much of her childhood was spent as his companion and keeper. St. Mar's madness, however, seemed mild to Romaine compared to the more exacting and autocratic madness of their mother, who was both vindictive and entirely unpredictable. When Romaine Goddard was only six or seven her mother left her with their laundress in a crowded New York tenement while she took St. Mar to Europe to consult another physician. An arrangement for money to be forwarded each week for her care was soon forgotten, but after almost six months she was rescued by her grandfather's secretary and sent to the Chestnut Hill, Pa., home of an aunt and uncle. They chose St. Mary's Hall, an Episcopal school in Burlington, N.J., where Romaine Goddard stayed for four years ( 1 8 8 2 - 8 6 ) before joining her mother and brother in London, Two years later she was placed in a convent school in northern Italy, returning for holidays to Menton, in southeastern France, where her mother had three villas. From 1891 until 1893 she attended a private finishing school in Geneva and then

boarded with a family in Paris, where she studied music and art ( 1 8 9 3 - 9 5 ) . Forbidden by her mother to draw, she could only indulge her talent and love for drawing while she was away at school. Finally, when she was twenty-one, after briefly attempting a singing career, Goddard set off for Rome to study painting. With the help of the Waterman family lawyer, her mother was prevailed upon to give her a monthly allowance of 3 0 0 francs, just enough for a meager living. In Rome Goddard attended the free Scuola Nazionale during the day and the Circolo Artístico in the evenings. In the summer of 1 8 9 9 she discovered the island of Capri, where she felt very much at home, enjoying its beauty, making friends, and starting to paint portraits, some of which she sold. Her peaceful life in Capri was disturbed in December 1901 when she received word that St. Mar had died. Summoned to Nice, she was caught again in the maelstrom of her mother's irascible nature. But her mother was seriously ill with diabetes, of which she died within a year. Goddard inherited the family fortune, becoming financially independent. She returned to Capri, resuming her friendships there including that with Charles Lang Freer, donor of the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Freer urged her to go to London to see the paintings of his friend James McNeill Whistler and to settle in Cornwall where Whistler had worked. This she did, after an "ephemeral marriage" to John Ellingham Brooks, an English dilettante who accompanied her to London, but whom she shortly discarded, giving him an annuity. Finding that the vivid colors she had used at Capri were not appropriate for the landscape of England, Romaine Brooks spent long hours at St. Ives in Cornwall training her eyes to detect and her brushes to note down an endless variety of grays. She found the resulting subtle palette most congenial and continued to use it during her entire career. By 1908 Brooks felt that she was ready to seek an artistic career in Paris. Furnishing her apartment there in her customary color scheme of black, white, gray, and beige, she produced a dramatic effect comparable to that of Whistler's white rooms in London some years before. She became well known as an interior decorator among her friends in Parisian society, who also clamored to have her paint their portraits. In 1 9 1 0 she was invited to exhibit her paintings at the prestigious Galeries Durand-Ruel in Paris. Claude Roger-Marx, in his introduction to the catalog of the exhibition, described the paintings as "faithful effigies, innocent of fraud," in which "the soul is identified with the flesh," and

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Brooks the aesthete Robert de Montesquiou called her a "thief of souls." The most striking painting in the exhibition, a reclining nude entitled "White Azaleas," was one of a series for which the model was Ida Rubinstein, who had been introduced to Paris in 1909 by Sergei Diaghilev as Cleopatra in the first of his Ballet Russe presentations. Brooks was fascinated by Rubinstein, finding in her thin, lithe figure the living incarnation of her own artistic ideal. In " L e Trajet" (The Crossing), a symbolic painting in the art nouveau manner, a lovely nude closely resembling Rubinstein rests on a long, unadorned white wing floating over an extensive black background. In Brooks's only formal portrait of Rubinstein she appears as a rare beauty, wrapped in a flowing black cloak with sharply highlighted white revers. In 1912 Brooks painted an incisive portrait of the poet and playwright Gabriele D'Annunzio called "The Poet in Exile." D'Annunzio, who had settled in Paris after bad debts barred him from his native Italy, became her close friend; she said that knowing him lifted her out of a state of despondency. A group of sonnets he wrote to accompany her 1914 painting of Rubinstein, " L a France Croisée," inspired by the outbreak of World War I, was exhibited with the canvas to benefit the Red Cross. For most of World War I she lived in Italy, settling in Venice to be near D'Annunzio, who was taking a heroic role in Italy's aerial combat. Around 1915 Romaine Brooks first met N A T A L I E C L I F F O R D B A R N E Y , an American writer whose Paris salon was frequented by Marcel Proust, André Gide, D'Annunzio, Paul Valéry, and Remy de Gourmont, as well as by members of a circle of lesbian artists and writers. Brooks and Barney formed a passionate friendship and lived together during most of the next forty years. Brooks's work had three important showings, giving a comprehensive view of her achievement, in 1925. Thirty-five paintings were exhibited first at the Galerie Jean Charpentier in Paris, then at the Alpine Club Gallery in London, and finally at Wildenstein's in New York. As fine as any of her paintings was her selfportrait: it depicts an isolated figure whose face expresses a temperate calm and a strength that defies the twilight of color and the ruined landscape behind her. A triumph of introspection and perception, the painting reflects her postwar belief that she was an outcast. After the 1 9 2 5 exhibitions Brooks withdrew further into herself and began to concentrate entirely on her drawings. At the same time she decided to write about her life with her mother

and her brother, calling the document "No Pleasant Memories." As she reconstructed this nightmare existence she produced more than a hundred drawings which represent the most exciting, original aspect of her art. Linear fantasies, resembling the visions of Poe, Wilde, and Valéry, they are strange, mysterious, and poetic, and display a passionate intelligence that commanded the respect and admiration of some of the foremost critics of her time. Brooks returned to the United States in 1935 for a show of her drawings at the Arts Club of Chicago; she then lived for a time at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Returning to Europe just before the outbreak of World War II in 1939 Brooks, with Natalie Barney, left France for Florence. They later moved to nearby Fiesole, where they lived until 1967. Despite a cataract in one eye, which she diagnosed and treated herself, Romaine Brooks still painted even in her eighties. In her final years she lived increasingly as a recluse, with a housekeeper as her only companion. Barney had returned to Paris and was living with another woman. Romaine Brooks died at her home in Nice at the age of ninety-six. [There is no collection of Brooks's papers. Reproductions of her work appear in the privately printed Romaine Brooks: Portraits—Tableaux—Dessins (1952) and Romaine 70 Dessins (n.d. ). There is a biography by Meryle Secrest, Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks ( 1974); it includes a bibliography. Another major biographical account is the introduction by Adelyn Breeskin to Romaine Brooks: "Thief of Souls" (1971), the catalog of an exhibition at the Nat. Coll. of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution. A brief biographical sketch and evaluation of her work is in Linda Nochlin and Ann S. Harris, Women Artists (1977). See also George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney (1977), and Jean Chalon, Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney (1979).] A D E L Y N D.

BREESKIN

BROWN, Charlotte Eugenia Hawkins, June 11, 1883?—Jan. 11, 1961. Educator, school founder. Charlotte Hawkins Brown was born Lottie Hawkins in Henderson, N.C., the daughter of Caroline Frances Hawkins (sometimes called Carrie) and Edmund H. Hight. Caroline Hawkins was a direct descendant of the English navigator John D. Hawkins through her mother, a former house slave named Rebecca. Educated in the elementary department of Shaw University, Caroline Hawkins early imbued her daughter with high cultural and educational aspirations. T h e prospects of increased opportunities

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Brown caused the large Hawkins clan to move in the late 1880s to Cambridge, Mass. By this time Caroline Hawkins had married a man named Willis who helped support the family by doing odd jobs, including brick masonry. Lottie Hawkins helped out by caring for infants and working for the hand laundry operated by the Willises. Such industry did not prevent her from attending grammar school and the Cambridge English High School, where she excelled academically. With the approach of high school graduation in 1900, Hawkins decided to upgrade her name, becoming Charlotte Eugenia. It was during the same period that she by chance encountered ALICE F R E E M A N PALMER, president of Wellesley College. Hawkins so impressed Palmer with her intelligence that she provided the financial aid and sponsorship which enabled Hawkins to attend the two-year State Normal School at Salem beginning in 1900. Much to the amazement of her mother, who was a strong influence throughout her life, Hawkins left Salem at the beginning of her second year. (A later réévaluation of her record resulted in her being granted a diploma. ) Through another chance encounter, on a train, Hawkins had been recruited by a representative of the American Missionary Association to teach in one of its schools near McLeansville (later Sedalia), N.C. Influenced by her exposure to liberal New England thinking and to the cause of racial uplift preached at the family's Union Baptist Church, Hawkins had decided to use her talents and skills for the education of blacks in the rural south. She started teaching in October 1901 at Bethany Institute, in little more than a run-down country church. When the American Missionary Association phased out the school the following year, it was taken over by the Sedalia community with Hawkins determinedly at its head. She returned for a time to New England, giving concerts at resorts to raise funds for the school that in 1902 she renamed the Palmer Memorial Institute in memory of her mentor. Though it began as a rural grammar school with emphasis on agriculture and manual training, Palmer was to exercise an influence in education and social circles understandable only in light of the dedicated and dynamic personality of its leader. Hawkins's single-minded determination perhaps accounts for her less than five years of marriage to Edward S. Brown. Brown taught school in New Orleans before completing his education at Harvard University, where he met Charlotte Hawkins, who was in Cambridge often and attended summer school at Harvard in 1901 and 1909. They were married in 1911. He served as both a teacher and dormitory

head at Palmer until they separated and he relocated in another school farther south. Although she had no children of her own, Charlotte Hawkins Brown raised the three daughters of her widowed half brother, Mingo, and the two daughters and two sons of her mother's sister, Ella Brice. She also cared for her ailing mother, who spent her final days at Palmer, dying in 1938. Despite these family responsibilities, Brown built Palmer into a thriving school which graduated its first accredited high school class in 1922. Through her lifelong fund-raising efforts, she won contributions both from wealthy northerners and from southerners and was able to expand the physical facilities of Palmer and increase its staff and enrollment. Dedicated to interracial cooperation, Brown introduced exchange programs and encouraged interracial contact in cultural activities. She integrated the school into the Sedalia community, working on local health problems and urging blacks to vote and seek home ownership. Until 1937, when the town opened a public school, Palmer was subsidized by the county to educate local children. Thereafter, it was forced to rely exclusively on private funding, and focused on its secondary and junior college levels (the latter introduced in the mid-1920s). Palmer's reputation and that of its founder increasingly attracted black middle-class students from other parts of the country. The school was recognized for its strong academic program, which emphasized the arts, self-discipline, and cultural attainments. By 1941, with the publication of her book The Correct Thing to Do, to Say, and to Wear, Brown had become known as the "First Lady of Social Graces." She was invited to lecture at many schools and colleges about her interests in education and interracial cooperation, as well as her views on manners and morality. Her growing reputation as an educator brought Brown honorary master's degrees and honorary doctorates from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Wilberforce University in Ohio, Howard University, and Tuskegee Institute. Her avid pursuit of excellence in the academic achievements and character development of Palmer students did not preclude her serving other institutions in which she believed. Brown was a founding member of the National Council of Negro Women. From 1915 to 1936 she served as president of the North Carolina State Federation of Negro Women's Clubs, and she was also president of the North Carolina Teachers Association ( 1935-37). In 1945 she was a Council of Congregational Churches delegate to England and spoke at the Congrès International des

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Femmes in Paris. Brown was the first black woman selected for membership in the Twentieth Century Club of Boston (1928), an organization honoring distinction in the fields of religion, education, art, and science. She also served on the national board of the YWCA, and was the first black woman on the North Carolina Council of Defense (1940). Despite her accomplishments, she never missed the opportunity for self-improvement, taking advanced courses at several universities. Charlotte Hawkins Brown retired as president of Palmer Memorial Institute in 1952, but remained active as vice president of the board and director of finances until 1955. After a lingering illness, she died of heart failure in Greensboro, N.C., in 1961, a decade before Palmer was forced to close because of financial difficulties. For nearly a half century, Charlotte Hawkins Brown had set her mark upon American education, graduating young black men and women into leading colleges and universities from which they went forth to leadership positions in their professions and communities throughout the country. [The Charlotte Hawkins Brown Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, contain speeches, correspondence, biographical material, memorabilia, and materials concerning the Palmer Memorial Institute. The vertical file and aids index at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, N.Y. Public Library, also has material on Brown and the Palmer Institute; papers concerning her work with the Nat. Council of Negro Women are in the NCNW's Nat. Archives for Black Women's Hist., Washington, D.C. Her other publications are Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South ( 1 9 1 9 ) and a series of articles, "The Correct Thing," in Norfolk Jour, and Guide, 1940. The best published sources of information are a biography by Constance Marteena, The Lengthening Shadow of a Woman ( 1 9 7 7 ) ; Sadie I. Daniel, Women Builders (1931); Who's Who in Colored America, 1927 and 1 9 3 0 - 3 2 ; and "A Bit of New England in North Carolina," Brown American, Summer 1958. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 12, 1961. Additional information for this article was provided by Wilhelmina Crosson, and Salem State College. Most sources list Brown's year of birth as 1883, although it is sometimes given as 1882 or 1884. No birth record is available. Death certificate supplied by N.C. Board of Health.] RUTH ANN STEWART

BROWN, Margaret Wise, May 23, 1910-Nov. 13, 1952. Children's author. Margaret Wise Brown, innovator in the field of picture books, was born in New York City, the second of three children and elder daughter of Robert Bruce and Maude Margaret (John-

son ) Brown. Her mother was born in Kansas, her father in Missouri. Robert Brown, an executive with the American Manufacturing Company, was the son of Benjamin Gratz Brown, governor of Missouri (1871-73). When Margaret was three the Browns moved from Brooklyn to Whitestone Landing, Queens, a suburban community near Long Island Sound. There the children had a profusion of pets—rabbits, squirrels, guinea pigs, goldfish, a cat, and a dog. After attending Long Island schools, Margaret Brown went to the Chateau Brillantmont School in Switzerland and to Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Mass. She received her A.B. in 1932 from Hollins College in Virginia (which her mother had also attended), majoring in English. Her ambition to become a writer was temporarily dampened by a writing course she took at Columbia University; she felt that she would never master the technique of plotting a short story. In 1935 she enrolled in the Bureau of Educational Experiments (later the Bank Street College of Education) in New York City. LUCY SPRAGUE MITCHELL, who ran the school, encouraged Brown to try writing for preschool children and to follow the precepts of the Hereand-Now ideas that Mitchell herself had originated : to tell stories about the child's own world from the child's point of view, free from fantasy, fairy tales, and talking animals. While Brown soon moved beyond didactic explanations, Hereand-Now concepts influenced much of her work. She enjoyed testing stories by reading preliminary drafts aloud to children; upon becoming a member of the Bureau's publications staff she read manuscripts in progress to the children in the model school's nursery and kindergarten classes. Even after leaving Bank Street, Brown continued to "borrow" classes of three- to five-yearolds to use as "guinea pigs." The children reacted to the presence of any element that was complicated, false, or adult, suggested new subjects and ideas, and indicated words and phrases they liked. They were interested in sights, smells, tastes, and textures, and were excited by contrasts, similarities, and surprises. Within two years (1937-38) Brown wrote five books, translated and adapted stories for The Children's Year (1937), contributed to the second Here and Now Story Book, and edited The Log of Christopher Columbus. Her first book, a fairy tale reminiscent of a Chekhov story, was When the Wind Blew ( 1937), about an old, old lady with a toothache, seventeen cats, and a kitten who comforted her. In 1938 Harper published The Streamlined Pig and E. P. Dutton The Fish with the Deep Sea Smile, a collection of Brown's stories. The same year she became

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Brown an editor at William R. Scott's publishing house, and within twelve months three of her books appeared under the Scott imprint: Bumblebugs and Elephants ( 1 9 3 8 ) , The Little Fireman ( 1 9 3 8 ) , and Noisy Book ( 1 9 3 9 ) . In the last, a blindfolded dog named Muffin listens to the city's noises and identifies their sources, with assistance from any five-year-old who is hearing the story being read. Noisy Book's success led to Country Noisy Book and The Seashore Noisy Book ( 1 9 4 1 ) , Indoor Noisy Book ( 1 9 4 2 ) , The Noisy Bird Book ( 1 9 4 3 ) , The Winter Noisy Book ( 1 9 4 7 ) , The Quiet Noisy Book ( 1 9 5 0 ) , and The Summer Noisy Book ( 1 9 5 1 ) . Of this series Brown wrote that "their design and creation came right from the children themselves— from listening to them, watching them and letting them into the story . . . I was merely an ear and a pen" (Hollins Alumnae Mag.). Margaret Brown left editing in 1941. By the mid-forties she was completing six or seven books a year, more than Scott or any one publishing house could handle. Harper became her main publisher, and Ursula Nordstrom her chief editor; in all, Harper issued thirty-four of her books, including Goodnight Moon ( 1 9 4 7 ) and Wait till the Moon Is Full ( 1 9 4 8 ) , and acquired five of the Noisy Books from Scott. She was also published by ten other firms, among them Doubleday, Random House, Simon and Schuster, and T. Y. Crowell, and she used several noms de plume, such as Golden Macdonald, Timothv Hay, and Juniper Sage—the last for the six books on which she collaborated with Edith Thacher Hurd. She was concerned about the quality of her texts and made sure that the same high standards were met by the illustrations and the physical design of her books, including the way the pages turned—the "only action," she said, of a picture book. She worked with forty different artists, including Garth Williams, Leonard Weisgard, Clement Hurd, Esphyr Slobodkina, Jean Chariot, Remy Charlip, and Charles Shaw, striving for a perfect match between the text and its depiction—a goal that ordinarily involved numerous revisions in both. Brown once remarked that she finished the rough draft of a book in twenty minutes and then spent a year polishing. In fifteen years ( 1 9 3 7 5 2 ) she produced more than a hundred books and wrote the lyrics for twenty-one children's records—drawn, in most cases, from her written works. Margaret Brown lived and worked in New York City. She had an apartment and a studio —a small, ancient (ca. 1810) wooden farmhouse in the back yard of a Manhattan apartment building—and summered in Vinal Haven, Maine, in an isolated house that once belonged to a

granite cutter. She was seldom without her Kerry Blue terrier, Smoke, or his successor, Crispian. She was unmarried, but was contemplating marriage when she died unexpectedly in 1952 at Nice, France, after an operation. Her books increased in popularity after her death, and many were republished. In the late 1970s, after more than a quarter of a century, almost half of all the work she completed was in print —proof of its classic quality. [A collection of Margaret Brown's books and MSS. and some biographical material is at the Westerly Public Library, Westerly, R.I. An essay, "Writing for Children," appeared in Hollins Alumnae Mag., Winter 1949. For additional information on her work see: Barbara Bader, American Picturehooks (1976); Louise Seaman Bechtel, "Margaret Wise Brown, 'Laureate of the Nursery,' " Horn Book Mag., June 1958; Bruce Bliven, Jr., "Child's Best Seller," in The Finishing Touch (1978), reprinted from Life, Dec. 2, 1946; Lucy Sprague Mitchell, "Margaret Wise Brown, 1910-1952," Children Here and Now: Notes from 69 Bank Street, vol. I, no. 1, 1953; and an entry in Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. The essays by Bliven and Bechtel are accompanied by photographs. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Nov. 15, 1952; Publishers Weekly, Nov. 22, 1952; Time, Nov. 24, 1952; and Newsweek, Nov. 24, 1952.] BRUCE BLIVEN,

JR.

BRUNAUER, Esther Delia Caukin, July 7, 1901-June 26, 1959. International affairs specialist, federal official. Esther Brunauer was born near Jackson, Calif., the older of two daughters—an earlier girl had been stillborn—of Ray Oakheart and Grace Elizabeth (Blackwell) Caukin, both native Californians of English stock. Her father, an electrician, moved frequently in construction jobs, and served for a time as postmaster of Sierra Madre. A strong liberal whose beliefs verged on socialism, he later wrote a book about his economic theories. Her mother began work as a clerk in 1903; an active suffragist and one of the earliest supporters of Woodrow Wilson, she was rewarded in 1914 for her tireless campaign work with the position of receiver of the United States Land Office, apparently one of the earliest federal appointments for a woman. During the first eight years of public school in the Berkeley-San Francisco area, Esther Caukin moved thirteen times. She graduated from Girls' High School in San Francisco in 1920 by living with friends and relatives during her parents' absence. Entering Mills College, she became the protégée of President A U R E L I A H E N R Y R E I N HARDT, receiving her B.A. in 1924. By 1927 she had completed a Ph.D. in history at Stanford University, aided by a fellowship from the

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American Association of University Women (AAUW). She then joined the AAUW headquarters staff in Washington, D.C., in charge of its international education program, a position she filled until 1944. Notable among her contributions there was the International Problem of the Month Series. She made numerous visits to Europe, attending councils of the International Federation of University Women. Esther Caukin was married on July 8,1931, to Stephen Brunauer, a Hungarian who had arrived in the United States in 1921 and later became a commander in the United States Navy. A chemist, his research and writings led to international recognition. The Brunauers had three children: Louis (July-December 19.34), Kathryn (b. 1938), and Elizabeth (b. 1942). Once the children arrived, Brunauer led an exceedingly busy life, balancing both family and professional responsibilities. In 1936, her mother-in-law came from Hungary to assume the major responsibility for running the home. In 1933, with a fellowship from the Carl Schurz Foundation, Esther Brunauer spent a year in Germany, becoming an eyewitness to the rise of Adolf Hitler. At the University of Berlin, she concentrated her studies on the effects of the Nazi revolution and ideology on all aspects of German life, and even secured an interview with Hitler. She returned to speak with authority at congressional hearings and elsewhere on the Nazi threat to the United States. In the ensuing years Brunauer's brilliant and tireless work helped to make the AAUW the best informed women's organization in the country on foreign affairs; she also played a vital role in the association's decision in May 1941 to advocate all-out aid to the Allies ("Women on the Ramparts," p. 20). Her official report on national defense in relation to foreign policy, National Defense, Institutions, Concepts, and Policies (1937), was later credited by Admiral W. H. Standley, then Chief of Naval Operations, as being "largely responsible for converting various pacifistic organizations in this country and thus making possible an immediate program of rearmament" (Dept. of State Bulletin, April 10, 1950, p. 576). She became a founder of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and chaired the committee that established the Women's Action Committee for Victory and Lasting Peace (1943-44). In March 1944, Brunauer joined the United States Department of State as a specialist in international organizational affairs. She became heavily involved in drafting plans for the United Nations and particularly for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In February 1946

she became the third woman in the United States to hold the diplomatic rank of minister when she was appointed the United States representative on the Preparatory Commission to UNESCO. Thereafter she served as senior adviser at general conferences in Paris, Mexico City, Beirut, and Florence. Her outstanding service with UNESCO won wide recognition and national awards as well as the high praise of important public officials. In early 1950, at the height of her professional career, Brunauer's world came crashing down. On February 11 of that year Senator Joseph R. McCarthy mentioned her name as one of four cases justifying his claim that there were communists in the Department of State. In the following weeks her case was highly, even sensationally, publicized and such prominent individuals as Milton S. Eisenhower defended her. Brunauer was fully cleared by the State Department's Loyalty Board and by a Senate subcommittee, chaired by Senator Millard B. Tydings, which denounced as "a fraud and a hoax" McCarthy's charges that Brunauer was a "security risk" because of such alleged communist-front activities as associating with Alger Hiss at the United Nations San Francisco Conference. In the meantime, Stephen Brunauer, having been cleared by the Navy Department four times, refused to subject himself to a fifth clearance; he resigned. The State Department then suspended Brunauer in April 1951 and terminated her employment in June 1952. Of the many great men and women who knew Esther Brunauer, none believed that the Department had acted fairly or that there was a shred of evidence to support McCarthy's accusation. It was a tragedy of the time that McCarthy, later shown to be a compulsive liar, was able to destroy the public career of such a capable and dedicated woman. After her dismissal Esther Brunauer worked briefly for the Library of Congress. The Brunauers moved to Evanston, 111., in September 1952, and she worked in the Chicago area as associate director of the Film Council of America and as an editor for Rand McNally and Company. Her final position was as textbook editor for the Follett Publishing Company. She died quietly in Evanston in June 1959 of a heart condition. [Sources are scanty and widely scattered. This article is based chiefly on selected correspondence and papers in the custody of Stephen Brunauer and D. H. Brunauer, Potsdam, N.Y., and Kathryn Brunauer Horvat, Deerfield, III.; selected papers provided by the national headquarters of the AAUW and the Alumnae Office of Mills College; and government documents. Among Brunauer's many works

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Buck published by the AAUW were: European Diplomacy ( 1 9 3 0 ) ; Germany, the National Socialist State ( 1 9 3 4 ) ; Russia, A Study Course ( 1 9 3 1 ) . She also contributed many articles to the Jour, of the Am. Assoc. of Univ. Women. Other significant articles or pamphlets by Brunauer include: "A Course for American Women at Oxford University," School and Society, Feb. 6, 1932; "Facing the Nazi Menace," Vital Issues, June 1941; "Women on the Ramparts," Vital Issues, July 1941; Has America Forgotten? Myths and Facts About World Wars I and II ( 1 9 4 1 ) , published by the Am. Council on Public Affairs; International Council of Scientific Unions, Brussels and Cambridge ( 1 9 4 5 ) , published by the Dept. of State; "The Peace Proposals of December, 1916-January, 1917," Jour, of Modern Hist., Dec. 1932, a condensation of her dissertation; "Power, Politics and Democracy," Am. Acad, of Political and Social Science, Annals, July 1941; " T h e United States in the Transition to a New World Order," International Conciliation, April 1942. For her positions on critical foreign policy issues see government reports of hearings in which she participated, including two documents from the Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives: Hearings, Am. Neutrality Policy, 75th Cong., 1st sess., April 11-28, 1939 and May 2, 1939, and Hearings, Membership and Participation by the United States in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 79th Cong., 2nd sess., H. J. Res. 305, April 3 - 5 , 1946. See also U.S. Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, State Dept. Employee Loyalty Investigation, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., Pursuant to S. Res. 251, 1950. Articles about Brunauer and McCarthy's allegations appear in the U.S. Dept. of State Bulletin on March 27, 1950, April 10, 1950, and April 23, 1951. Helpful secondary articles include: "A Sketch and Portrait," Independent Woman, Nov. 1936; "Two Women Appointed to Important Policymaking Posts," Independent Woman, April 1946; "Brunauer Enigma," Newsweek, April 23, 1951; and Current Biog., 1947. See also Ray O. Caukin, Economics and American Democracy (1955).] BETTY MILLER

UNTERBERGER

BUCK, Pearl, June 26, 1892-March 6, 1973. Writer. Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck, extraordinarily productive author and humanitarian, was born in Hillsboro, W. Va., in the home of her maternal grandparents, where her parents, Absolom and Caroline (Stulting) Sydenstricker, were on furlough from Presbyterian missionary work in China. She was the third of four daughters and the fifth of seven children, only three of whom reached maturity; Pearl grew up as the elder daughter. Her forebears had migrated to America to find religious freedom—her father's from Bavaria in the 1760s, her mother's from Utrecht in 1847.

Taken to China as an infant, the American missionary child grew up in the worlds of East and West, becoming "mentally bifocal," a process detailed in her autobiography, My Several Worlds (1954). Her early education consisted of her nurse's Chinese legends, her father's biblical readings, basic instruction and American history from her mother, and her own reading of Victorian novelists, especially Dickens. She often won the prize offered by the Shanghai Mercury, an English newspaper, for the best children's writing. After her family's escape during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion and their furlough in America, Pearl received private tutoring in Chinese subjects until 1905. She then attended missionary and boarding schools until 1910, when she went to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia, where she excelled. After earning her B.A. in 1914 she held a teaching assistantship in psychology until recalled to China later that year to nurse her ill mother. Returning to politically restive China, Pearl ran her parents' household, taught in a boys' school, and studied Chinese literature. Readily attracted to John Lossing Buck, a young, handsome American agricultural expert, she married him in May 1917 after a brief courtship. They moved to North China, where she gained the knowledge of peasant life she portrayed so memorably in later books. After the birth of a daughter in March 1920, and Buck's subsequent hysterectomy in New York, they moved south to the University of Nanking, where he taught agriculture, she English literature. In 1922, Buck began writing articles and short stories about China which appeared in various American magazines. During a leave in America in 1924-25, learning that her daughter was mentally retarded, she responded characteristically: while caring for the child at home, she took a master's degree in English at Cornell University, wrote an essay on "China and the West" to win the $200 Messenger Prize in History, and adopted another daughter. Back in China, she helped support her enlarged family by teaching at Southeastern ( 1 9 2 5 - 2 7 ) and Chung Yang Universities ( 1 9 2 8 - 3 0 ) , as well as at Nanking ( 1 9 2 1 - 3 1 ) . Compelled by creative and financial need, she began to write longer works. Her first novel perished in the 1927 revolutionary uprising in Nanking, in which the Bucks narrowly escaped death. In 1929, after placing her retarded daughter in the Vineland (N.J.) Training School, she returned to China and devoted herself to writing. Finding an agent's name in a handbook, she submitted an expanded short story, set in China, about the clash of old and

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new values—Buck's favorite theme. After many rejections, it was published in 1930 as East Wind: West Wind by the fledgling John Day Company, headed by Richard J. Walsh. Their publication of her next, most famous, novel, The Good Earth (1931), transformed her life. Buck's realistic, sympathetic portrayal of a Chinese peasant family, the first in Western literature, proved an unprecedented success. Heading the best-seller lists for months, it sold nearly two million copies, ^was translated into over thirty languages, inspired a Broadway play (1932) and an award-winning Hollywood film (1937), received the Pulitzer Prize (1932), and figured in the innumerable later awards and honorary degrees given its author. The novel's exotic subject, its focus on universal processes in man and nature, and its lucid, flowing style (mentally translated from Chinese, according to Buck) attracted a worldwide audience. Buck's subsequent books, including two successors to The Good Earth published as The House of Earth trilogy (1935), were successful. Few have remained highly esteemed, however. Most memorable are a novel, The Mother ( 1 9 3 4 ) , with its pioneering scenes of childbirth and abortion; her two-volume translation of the famous Chinese saga, Shui Hu Chuan ( 1 9 3 3 ) ; and the companion biographies The Exile and The Fighting Angel (both 1936), the stories of her parents, whom she deftly made symbols as well as vivid individuals. During a sabbatical at Cornell in 1932, Buck grew closer to her publisher-editor, Richard Walsh. They were married on June 11, 1935, after her divorce from Lossing Buck from whom she had separated in China in 1934. After her remarriage, Buck followed a disciplined writing schedule, compelled still by both her innate creativity and her obligations as the main family support. She published from one to five books annually, while managing the expanding farm she had bought in Perkasie, Pa., a New York City apartment, and, later, properties in Vermont. She also supervised all the help for her offices and residences, and for her six adopted and two foster children, who came from a variety of racial backgrounds. Buck now began to treat American subjects and themes in a more conventional, journalistic style in novels like This Proud Heart (1938). A dramatization of her own conflict between work and marriage, the work met with less favor than her earlier novels. In 1938, however, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, awarded for her earlier portrayals of China and for her parents' biographies. Although some objected because

she was a woman, too young, and not really American, the award revived her reputation and self-confidence, and convinced her to write for the masses, as Chinese novelists did. Her subsequent works, often serialized first in popular magazines, were always readable and informative. They sold very well in America and even better abroad, where even into the 1970s she remained widely translated. Because of their frequency, facility of plot and characterization, and, perhaps, their special appeal to women, her books were increasingly ignored by serious critics and academics. When the United States entered the Second World War, one which Buck had anticipated, she devoted her talents to the Allied effort. Long active in United China Relief, she provided data for servicemen's Asian guidebooks and wrote radio plays for broadcast to China. As China's most famous Western interpreter, she publicized the war there in three novels—of which Dragon Seed (1942) is the best known and most timeless—as well as in propagandistic fiction which generated both sympathy and funds. In such essay collections as Of Men and Women (1941) and American Unity and Asia ( 1 9 4 2 ) , she strove to clarify the war's underlying issues, prophesying that ignorant white imperialist, racist, and sexist attitudes would undermine the Allied struggle as well as any future peace. Her advanced ideas on women's rights and responsibilities were lost on a war-absorbed public. She also tried to disseminate knowledge of Asia through the East and West Association, which she founded in 1941 to bring cultural figures from Asia to America; through Asia Magazine, which she and Walsh owned and directed from 1941 to 1946; and even through juvenile fiction such as The Chinese Children Next Door (1942), involving young Asians and Americans, and later The Big Wave ( 1 9 4 8 ) . As the war ended, Buck continued to foster international understanding with her five "Talk Books." Based on extended interviews with knowledgeable participants, the books publicized important historic developments. These included the effect of the 1917 Russian Revolution (Talk About Russia, 1945), events in Germany between 1914 and 1933 ( H o w It Happens, 1947), and interracial problems (American Argument, 1949). Changing Asia continued to provide material for Buck's postwar fiction which, however, seemed less compelling as the subjects became more remote from her own experience. Her novels about prewar China, such as Pavilion of Women (1946), featuring a distinguished, mature heroine, and Imperial Woman ( 1 9 5 6 ) , a

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Buck history of the last Empress, are more convincing than the four novels she published between 1949 and 1973 that dramatize the excesses in Communist China—and anticommunist America—both of which she abhorred. Her study of an interracial marriage, The Hidden Flower ( 1 9 5 2 ) , partly set in occupied Japan, her two portrayals of India (1953, 1970), and even her ambitious history of Korea, The Living Reed (1963) are also lacking in immediacy. Despite their varied literary quality, the books all sold widely and helped to inform readers about Asian countries. Buck also wrote novels set wholly in America, often drawing on her family's experiences to explore subjects from the post-Civil War to the present. She issued the first five ( 1 9 4 5 - 5 3 ) under the pseudonym, "John Sedges," lest she be dismissed, especially by male critics, as too prolific, or only competent to write about China. The first "Sedges" novel, The Townsman (1945), won particular praise for its accurate depiction of early Kansas. Reverting to her own name, she published Command the Morning ( 1 9 5 9 ) , a carefully researched account of the development of the atomic bomb. Her concern with the negative implications of nuclear science was also reflected in her Broadway play, "Desert Incident" ( 1 9 5 9 ) . Though the play failed, she characteristically utilized the experience in a credible novel about the theater, The Rainbow (1974). In 1956, with producer Tad Danielewski, she had cofounded Stratton Productions, Inc., which generated various theater, television, and film projects, none commercially successful. However, these varied literary activities helped to make her an effective president of the Authors' Guild, Inc. ( 1 9 5 8 - 6 5 ) . Though she continued to advocate freedom and peace for all peoples, Buck disbanded the East and West Association (1951) during the cold war when any interest in Asia, especially in Communist China, was suspect. She then focused her humanitarian impulses on disadvantaged children. In 1949 she founded Welcome House, an adoption agency for AsianAmericans, which prompted two nonfictional books, Children for Adoption and Welcome Child (both 1964). Long privately engaged in mental retardation work, she courageously publicized her experiences with her retarded daughter in The Child Who Never Grew ( 1 9 5 0 ) , described advances in the field in three other nonfictional works, and began to help state and national organizations. These activities, together with the care of her adult and adolescent children, travel, French and dance lessons, and a deepening relationship with Harvard philos-

opher William Ernest Hocking, kept her going through the difficult years of her husband's illness and death ( 1 9 5 3 - 6 0 ) . She recounted this period in A Bridge For Passing ( 1 9 6 2 ) , and fictionalized her early widowhood in The Goddess Abides ( 1 9 7 2 ) . In 1964 Buck founded the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to assist fatherless, and often stateless, half-American children throughout Asia. As its head, she appointed Theodore F. Harris, a young dance instructor from whom she had taken lessons. His experience in organizing charity balls proved valuable in raising funds. Their developing companionship and early work for the Foundation, largely endowed by Buck's properties and royalties, was related by both of them in For Spacious Skies ( 1 9 6 6 ) . The Foundation's concerns also inspired the novel The Neiv Year (1968) and a moving children's story, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (1967), while its needs prompted the publication of an earlier autobiographical fiction, The Time is Noon (1967 [written 1937]), and two essay collections. In 1969, a Philadelphia Magazine article accused Harris of misusing Foundation funds for private purposes, causing his resignation despite Buck's loyal support. Both later moved to Danby, Vt., where Harris had established Creativity, Inc., a multipurpose firm which also managed most of Buck's later projects. She continued to publish both adult and juvenile fiction, most written earlier, and general works such as Pearl Buck's America (1971) and Pearl Buck's Oriental Cookbook ( 1 9 7 2 ) . In 1973, in her eighty-first year, weakened by heart attacks and by gall bladder and lung surgery, she died of lung cancer in Danby. She left a contested estate and many manuscripts. Some have been issued posthumously, including a volume of poetry, Words of Love (1974), and several short story collections. Buck's controversial last years and her overwhelming productivity as author of over one hundred books, as well as countless speeches, articles, and scripts, have obscured her enduring literary and humanitarian achievements. It is those achievements which make her an eminent world figure. [Many of Buck's MSS. are at the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Fdn., Hillsboro, W. Va., and most have been cataloged by Mary Lee Welliver in a master's thesis, "Pearl S. Buck's Manuscripts: The Harvest of Half a Century" (W. Va. Univ., 1977). The other sizable collection of Buck materials is in the Lipscomb Library, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, Va. Lucille Zinn, the Birthplace Fdn. bibliographer, has prepared a bibliography, "The Works of Pearl S. Buck," for the 1979 Bull, of Bib-

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liography. A biobibliography by Lucy B. Flynn lists several reference book entries. Theodore Harris, Pearl S. Buck, A Biography, 2 vols. (1969 and 1971), written with Buck's cooperation, contains a bibliography of her books through 1967. Paul A. Doyle, Pearl S. Buck (1965), a short, useful critical study, includes a selected list of secondary sources. Other helpful secondary sources include Cornelia Spencer, pseud. [Grace S. Yaukey, Buck's sister], Exile's Daughter: A Biography of Pearl S. Buck (1944); Irvin Block, The Lives of Pearl Buck (1973); Michael H. Hunt, "Pearl Buck-Popular Expert on China, 1913-49," Modern China, Jan. 1977, pp. 33-63; Greg Walter, "The Dancing Master," Philadelphia Mag., July 1969, pp. 55-59, 11226; Frederic H. Birmingham, "Pearl Buck and The Good Earth of Vermont," Sat. Eve. Post, Spring 1972, pp. 70-73fF.; Thomas Lask, "A Missionary Heritage," N.Y. Times, March 7, 1973, p. 40; and Helen F. Snow, "Pearl S. Buck, 1892-1973: An Island in Time," New Republic, March 24, 1973, pp. 28-29. See also reviews by Elizabeth Janeway, "The Optimistic World of Miss Buck," N.Y. Times Book Rev., May 25, 1952, and V. S. Pritchett, "Command the Morning," Scientific American, July 1959, pp. 159-60. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, March 7, 1973. Other information is based on records from Cornell Univ.; Washoe Cty. Court, Reno, Nev.; and Rutland Cty., Vt., Dept. of Health (death record) and Superior Court (Trial re Estate, July 22-26, 1974); and on interviews and correspondence with Buck's relatives, friends, associates, and lawyers. Portraits of Buck are in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., and the Buck Birthplace Fdn., W. Va., and the Buck Fdn., Pa., both National Historic Sites.] J A N E R.

COHEN

B U H L E R , Charlotte Bertha, Dec. 20, 1 8 9 3 Feb. 3, 1974. Psychologist. Charlotte Biihler was born in Berlin, the older child and only daughter of Rose (Kristeller) and Hermann Malachowski. Her father was an innovative and talented architect who helped to build the first department store in Germany. Of Slavic Jewish background, he rose to a position of prominence and affluence. Rose Malachowski, a beautiful and ambitious woman, poured into her daughter her own aspirations and frustrations. Bored with her upper-class life, she resented the constraints on women of her class that had prevented her from pursuing a career as a singer. Charlotte found her parents somewhat remote, but was very close to her brother, five years younger, with whom she enjoyed music and hiking. From both parents she acquired a deep interest in culture (she later wrote about aesthetics and literature even while establishing herself as a psychologist). Encouraged by her father's nurturance, but also driven by her mother's ele-

gance and unrequited brilliance, the schisms that would later torment Charlotte Biihler developed early. A visionary with gaping blind spots, she had a love of humanity and a sense of superiority to the commoner, a tremendous warmth and an imperious coldness. At seventeen, Charlotte Malachowski became interested in psychology following a period of severe religious doubt. She had been baptized a Protestant, a common practice among upperclass Jewish families trying to escape the antiSemitism rampant in Germany. But her doubt was a matter of questioning the existence of God rather than of denominational choice. Rejecting her pastor's advice that she accept the catechism on faith, she read widely in the works of the great metaphysicians and philosophers of religion. She concluded that metaphysical problems could not be solved by studying religion, and decided to inform herself about the nature of thought processes. She disagreed with the view of the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, whom she read at this time, that thought is merely a matter of associations, and began to conduct experiments on her own. After attending private schools, Malachowski entered the University of Freiburg in 1913, where she studied medicine, philosophy, and psychology. The following spring she went to the University of Kiel. There she fell in love with a handsome geographer who became a shell-shock casualty during the early days of World War I, leaving her a "war victim by proxy." She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Berlin ( 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 ) under Carl Stumpf, a pioneer experimental psychologist. With characteristic independence, Malachowski refused Stumpf's offer of a graduate assistantship—an unprecedented honor for a woman—because she wished to study thought processes rather than feelings. Stumpf referred her to Oswald Kiilpe, a leading investigator of thought processes, whose psychological laboratory at the University of Munich was one of the foremost in Europe. After Kiilpe's death in December 1915, a few months after she had arrived in Munich, his chief assistant, Karl Biihler ( 1 8 7 9 - 1 9 6 3 ) , returned from the battlefield to take over his mentor's work. Even before meeting Biihler, a physician and a psychologist, Malachowski had learned that he was conducting experiments for studying thought process similar to those she had improvised earlier. Teacher and pupil were drawn to each other and married on April 4, 1916. They had two children, Ingeborg (b. 1 9 1 7 ) , and Rolf (b. 1 9 1 9 ) , who were cared for by a governess. Charlotte Biihler completed her Ph.D. at Munich in 1918 with a dissertation

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Biihler on thought processes. The same year she published a highly original study of fairy tales and children's fantasies. For the next twenty years, Karl and Charlotte Biihler produced and inspired innovative work in psychology. While most European psychologists were oriented toward physics, the Biihlers took a biological approach, becoming central figures in the development of new research methods. They worked at the Dresden Institute of Technology, where Charlotte Biihler became the first woman privatdozent ( 1 9 2 0 - 2 2 ) . In 1923 she received one of the first Rockefeller Exchange fellowships and went to the United States to study with psychologist Edward Thorndike at Columbia University. The behaviorist methods she encountered there reinforced her own devotion to direct observation. On her return, she joined her husband at the University of Vienna, where he had become head of the psychology department. At Vienna she helped her husband found and run a psychological institute and herself became head of an innovative child psychology department. Charlotte Biihler concentrated initially on the periods of childhood and adolescence. For a study of the psychic life of adolescents, she collected diaries (which she knew from her personal experience to be significant) and made major use of the life biography approach that became one of her major contributions to research. Published in 1922 as Das Seelenleben des Jugendlichen, the book on adolescents established her as an important psychologist. At the institute, she and her students pioneered in conducting experimental studies on the child during the first year of life. By 1925 she was editing her own monograph series in child psychology. A major European authority on childrearing, she believed that her work on the sequences of child development had also influenced such American psychologists as Arnold Gesell. But although she made her reputation in child psychology, she always viewed that field as part of the general subject of developmental psychology. This remained her greatest interest, and she explored it in Der Menschliche Lebenslauf ah Psychologisches Problem (1932), one of her best-known books. The Vienna years were happy and productive. Biihler wrote each morning at her desk and published regularly, amassing a long bibliography of significant contributions. She and her husband were surrounded by a lively group of graduate students, including E L S E F R E N K E L (-BRUNSWIK) and Paul Lazarsfeld. Then in 1938, Charlotte Biihler learned while abroad that her husband had been detained by the Nazis because of her Jewish background. Their

possessions were confiscated and they were stripped of their positions. The sought-after and touted Biihlers became just another refugee family. After living for two years in Oslo, the Biihlers came to the United States in 1940. For the next five years they took a succession of posts and moved from place to place. Charlotte Biihler taught at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and at the City College of New York. She took up the practice of clinical psychology (which initially consisted chiefly of administering psychological tests) and became chief clinical psychologist at the Minneapolis General Hospital. In 1945, the year Charlotte Biihler became a citizen, she and her husband moved to Los Angeles to be near their son. There she worked as chief clinical psychologist at the Los Angeles County General Hospital ( 1 9 4 5 - 5 3 ) and as assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine ( 1 9 4 5 - 5 9 ) . But never again were significant research funds or facilities available to her. Undaunted, she began a successful private practice in individual and group psychotherapy, adapting her ideas to the by-then predominantly Freudian outlook of the Americans. Still a prolific writer, in 1962 she published one of her most important books, Psychologie im Leben unserer Zeit. Charlotte Biihler, along with Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Viktor Frankl, arranged what became known as the Old Saybrook Conference which in 1964 gave birth to the humanistic psychology movement. The movement became an important force in American psychology, emphasizing (in contrast to both the Freudian and behaviorist approaches) the importance of growth and self-fulfillment as motives of human behavior. The excitement of this evolving approach helped somewhat in Biihler's efforts to overcome the mourning that followed her husband's death in October 1963. She became president of the new Association for Humanistic Psychology ( 1 9 6 5 - 6 6 ) , and wrote two books: The Course of Human Life, with Fred Massarik (1968), and An Introduction to Humanistic Psychology, with Melanie Allen ( 1 9 7 2 ) . As a member of this group, which shared her religious and holistic interests, Charlotte Biihler finally found a secure professional niche in her adopted country. Remaining vitally involved in her work during her last years, Biihler tried to validate her theory of human behavior which encompassed both tension-reduction and growth motivations. By 1972, however, she was physically incapacitated

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Burchenal and returned to her children in Stuttgart, Germany. She started a practice there, but yearned for "her country, America," and for the intellectual companionship she had lost. Charlotte Bühler died in her sleep in Stuttgart in February 1974 following a series of strokes. [James Birren conducted oral history interviews in 1967-68; tapes and transcripts are located in the archives of the Am. Psychiatric Assoc., Washington, D.C. A collection of Bühler's papers, including letters to and from colleagues, drafts of published and unpublished MSS., and personal correspondence, are in the possession of Melanie Allen. A bibliography of Bühler's work through 1969 appears in Revue de Psychologie Appliquée, vol. 19 (1969), 141-47. The major published source on Bühler's life is her autobiographical statement in Psychologie in Selbsdarstellungen, ed. Ludwig J. Pongratz and others (Berne, 1972), pp. 9-42, also available in pamphlet form. There is information in Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien, vol. 265, Karl Bühler, Die Uhren der Lebewesen und Fragmente aus dem Nachlass (Vienna, 1969). See also Contemporary Authors (1965); Psychological Register, vol. 2 (1929); Int. Encyc. Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Neurology, II (1977); Robert J. Havighurst, "Charlotte Bühler, December 20, 1893February 3, 1974," Human Development, vol. 17 (1974); Fred Massarik, "Charlotte Bühler: A Reflection," Jour. Humanistic Psychology, Summer 1974. June Clee's excellent biobibliography was of assistance in writing this article. Information was also derived from personal acquaintance; Susan Wendell provided research assistance. Background material may be found in Bernard Bailyn and Donald Fleming, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 (1969).] MELANIE

BURCHENAL, Elizabeth, 1959. Folk dance educator.

ALLEN

1876?-Nov.

21,

Elizabeth Burchenal, who generated a widespread and enduring interest in folk dance and the folk arts, influenced not only the American physical education movement, but also the social, cultural, and recreational life of the United States, Canada, and Europe. Through her work, she enriched the lives of both the sophisticated and the unworldly, and she helped to break down barriers between them. Born in Richmond, Ind., Elizabeth Burchenal was introduced early to music, dance, and internationalism by her musician mother, Mary Elizabeth (Day) Burchenal, and her father, Judge Charles Henry Burchenal. Mary Burchenal, a native of Ohio, bore six children: Elizabeth Burchenal was her second child and the second eldest of four daughters. Judge Burchenal, who traced his paternal ancestors to the earliest English settlers of Maryland, was an attorney

who refused a political career; he was a lover of literature and art, family and friends. Burchenal once said that her career began in childhood when European visitors, warming up in her "musically gifted family circle, passed many an hour dancing and singing songs of the old country." She accompanied her mother on horseback to remote mountain cabins to chat and "surreptitiously to pick up what they could of musical interest." Maintaining her interest in music, literature, and dance, Burchenal graduated in 1896 with an A.B. in English from her hometown college, Earlham, and went to Boston to study at Dr. Sargent's School of Physical Training (later affiliated with Boston University). Initially interested in Sargent's medical approach to physical education, she directed the Medical Gymnasium in the department of orthopedics (later Boston Children's Hospital Medical Center) after receiving her Sargent diploma in 1898. From 1898 until 1902 Burchenal also taught in and ran physical education programs in Chicago and Boston. Her interest in the role of dance in education had been aroused by the dance educator Melvin Gilbert. In 1903 Burchenal joined the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, with the intention of implementing Gilbert's belief that dance should be incorporated in physical education. Contact with the New York immigrant population convinced her of the value of folk dance in particular; with that realization, her career was launched. Yielding to the persuasive encouragement of Luther Gulick, then director of physical training in the New York City public schools, Burchenal went to work for the city, accepting positions of increasingly greater authority and scope. As executive secretary of the Girls' Branch of the New York Public Schools Athletic League ( 1 9 0 6 - 1 6 ) , she taught athletics and folk dancing to teachers. In this position and as inspector of athletics for the New York Department of Education (1909—16), she provided models for the entire country by introducing folk dancing into the public school curriculum and by organizing folk festivals such as the gigantic May Day celebrations in Central Park. Burchenal's influence extended to other countries as well. In 1913, impressed by the sight of 2,000 girls folk dancing in a Manhattan public school, the Irish Lady Aberdeen persuaded Burchenal to train a group of teachers in Ireland. By the end of the year, national folk dances were introduced into the Irish schools as part of the standard physical education program. Burchenal traveled throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe both to train teachers of folk dance and, as there were very

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Burchenal few known dances, to gather source material. Frequently joined by her younger sister Emma Howells, who was her piano accompanist, she lived in isolated communities and participated in every type of folk occasion and celebration, notating dance steps while her sister took down the accompanying music. Burchenal's research resulted in the publication of some fifteen volumes of collected folk dances, which for decades were the authoritative reference sources in the field. In 1916, resigning from the Public Schools Athletic League, Burchenal became assistant state inspector of the Military Training Commission of the New York State Department of Education ( 1 9 1 6 - 1 8 ) . By promulgating her philosophy of vigorous, wholesome, character-building, but noncompetitive athletics for all girls, she was influential in framing early policies on female athletics in schools. Also in 1916, Gulick convinced her of the need for a national folk dance organization and persuaded her to head it. Thus the American Folk Dance Society was formed; and Burchenal, joined by her older sister, Ruth, began to provide direction to a nationwide movement. She gave demonstrations and lectures and spoke at conferences, teaching the value of folk dancing as "a spontaneous emotional expression of every-day life." It was also, as she wrote in The Playground (Oct. 1920), one of the few opportunities for people of different nationalities to join together "unembarrassed by differences in language, viewpoint, education, social status, culture, religion, occupation, dress and manners." Appointed jointly by the United States Department of Labor and the National Recreation Association as special national representative of the War Workers Community Service (1918-22), Burchenal helped ease racial and ethnic conflicts through her social, recreational, and cultural programs. In 1929 the American Folk Dance Society became a division of a new, larger organization, the National Committee of Folk Arts, which Burchenal, again with the help of her sister Ruth, directed from its inception until a few years before her death. She headed the Folk Arts Center in New York, which housed a museum, a library, and a national information bureau, and she established an Archive of American Folk Dance. As America's leading authority on folk dance and the folk arts, Burchenal represented the United States at various international congresses and festivals. With a research fellowship from the Oberlaender Trust she studied folk dances in rural Germany for two years (1933-34); she also chaired several national and international committees and organizations and received many honors, including

physical education's highest, the Gulick Award (1950). Elizabeth Burchenal died in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1959. Memorial services for her ended with a uniquely appropriate tribute: the floor was cleared, the music began, and the mourners joined hands to dance her favorite folk dances. [The Elizabeth Burchenal Papers, Mugar Library, Boston Univ., contain Burchenal's personal library of about 500 volumes, scrapbooks of clippings, correspondence, materials related to the Folk Arts Center, and other Burchenal memorabilia, including photographs. Her books include Folk-Dances and Singing Games ( 1 9 0 9 ) , American Country Dances (1918), and Rinnce Na Eirann: National Dances of Ireland ( 1 9 2 4 ) . Who's Who in America, 1954-55, has a bibliography of her volumes of collected folk dances. The best sources of information about Burchenal's career and philosophy are Janice W. Carkin, "Recipients of the Gulick Award" (Ed.D. diss., Stanford Univ., 1 9 5 2 ) , and Ellen W . Gerber, Innovators and Institutions in Physical Education (1971), also an excellent source of information about the early physical education movement; it contains a useful, though incomplete, bibliography of Burchenal's short articles. Josephine Dorgan, Luther Halsey Gulick (19.34), and Norma Schwendener, A History of Physical Education in the United States ( 1 9 4 2 ) , also contain information about Burchenal and the early physical education movement. Frances Drewry McMullen, "Folk Dances for Fox Trots," Woman Citizen, June 1927, and a piece by Emma Bugbee in the N.Y. Herald Tribune, May 31, 1943, are informative popular articles. The latter has a photograph, as do Schwendener and an obituary in the Jour. Health, Physical Education and Recreation, May 1, 1960. Census information for 1880 indicates that Burchenal was born between June 12, 1875, and June 11, 1876, and that her name at birth was Flora Elizabeth. Family and friends confirm that, in keeping with family tradition, she pronounced her name "Burchenelle." Valuable information for this article was provided by George Makechnie, Mabel Lee, and Selden Day Burchenal. Death record supplied by N.Y. City Dept. of Health.] MARILYN

B.

WEISSMAN

BURGOS, Julia de, Feb. 17, 1914?-July 6, 1953. Poet, journalist. Julia de Burgos is significant not only for the exquisite poetry she wrote but also because of the example of freedom that her unorthodox pattern of life and behavior provided to the Puerto Rican women of her times. She was born Julia Constancia Burgos Garcia in Carolina, Puerto Rico, the oldest of thirteen children of Paula Garcia de Burgos and Francisco Burgos Hans. Only seven of the children survived to maturity. Her father farmed and worked for the Na-

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Burgos

tional Guard, but the family remained very poor. Contributions from townspeople allowed Julia to attend the local school. She grew up in the humble rural barrio of Santa Cruz, near a tributary of the powerful Rio Grande de Loiza. The river would later be a recurrent and haunting subject in her poems, transformed into the image of a lover: "Muy señor río mío. Río hombre. Unico hombre/ Que ha besado en mi alma al besar en mi cuerpo" ("Río Grande de Loíza"). Her childhood, in the poet's words, was a "poem to the river." Classmates at the University of Puerto Rico High School in San Juan, where Julia de Burgos enrolled in 1928, remember her as a shy, sensitive, and brilliant girl. From early on, she was committed both to learning and to social change. When she completed her secondary education with honors (1931), she entered the University of Puerto Rico. After receiving a teaching certificate, she began work in the rural town of Naranjito in 1933. The following year she married Ruben Rodriguez Beauchamp; they were divorced in 1937. After her marriage, she worked for a day care center run by the Puerto Rico Emergency Reconstruction Administration (PRERA). In 1936-37 she wrote librettos for the Escuela del Aire (School of the Air), a division of the Department of Education of Puerto Rico which broadcast educational programs. Her first published poems appeared in 1937 in a private edition: Poemas Exactos A Mí Misma (Exact Poems to Myself). The following year she published Poema en Veinte Surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows) and in 1939 Canción de la Verdad Sencilla (Song of the Simple Truth), a celebration of love, which merited an award from the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature. Julia de Burgos left Puerto Rico early in 1940. She went first to New York, where she wrote for newspapers and pursued further studies. Later that year, with her lover, she moved to Cuba, where she also worked as a journalist; in Cuba as in New York she suffered social isolation. In 1941 she enrolled at the University of Havana to study philosophy and literature but returned to New York in 1942. She worked at a variety of jobs and, the following year, married for the second time; her husband was Armando Marin, a poet and writer who was devoted to her. With the friendship and support of members of the Circle of Ibero-American Writers and Poets (CEPI), she continued to write. Between 1943 and 1945 she worked for Pueblos Hispánicos, a publication founded in New York by the Puerto Rican poet, Juan Antonio Corretjer. She wrote editorials, news stories, and interviews, and won

a second Institute of Puerto Rican Literature prize for one of her editorials (1945). A woman of great sensibility, rebellious spirit, and exceptional intelligence, Julia de Burgos no doubt felt imprisoned by circumstances. Her discomfort with social ills, her love for Puerto Rico, and her preoccupation with justice and death, all come out in the torrents of her poetry with its richly emotional metaphors. She firmly believed in the need for social reform and for the radical improvement of living conditions for the working class in Puerto Rico; she was also a staunch supporter of political independence for the island. As a poet, Julia de Burgos deserves to be ranked with such major contemporary poets as the Uruguayan Juana de Ibarburu. Her poems reveal her gift for lyricism, while their erotic content and their cosmic symbolism provide autobiographical glimpses into a troubled and pagan soul which often felt itself lost and abandoned. In "Donde Comienzas Tú," she described herself metaphorically: "Soy ola de abandono, derribada, tendida,/ sobre un inmenso azul de sueños y de alas." Her work shows the influence of Luis Llorens Torres, perhaps the most famous of Puerto Rican poets, who saw in her a "propensity for Kantian abstraction." The influence of modernism and of the work of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda can also be felt in such poems as "Rio Grande de Loíza," "Nada," and her most frequently anthologized poem, "A Julia de Burgos." In that poem, and in "Yo Misma Fui Mi Ruta," de Burgos calls attention sharply to the restrictions imposed on women by a society that forces them to live by laws and by social and ethical patterns not of their making. Because she was dedicated to the cause of social change, de Burgos may often have felt that what she had to say was more important than how she said it; literary craftsmanship thus gave way at times to her impulse to speak out and to her irredentist theories. She believed poetry should be both a means to self-discovery and a herald of new truths; as such it could become a weapon against the dead forms of the past, a weapon of the revolution. In "A Julia de Burgos" she looked forward to the coming of revolution: "Cuando las multitudes corran alborotadas/dejando atrás cenizas de injusticias quemadas,/ . . . yo iré en medio de ellas con la tea en la mano." In her last years, Julia de Burgos was often ill. She suffered from alcoholism and was frequently hospitalized for treatment of cirrhosis of the liver. In 1952 she was operated on for papaloma of the vocal cords. The following July she died tragically in New York of pulmonary

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Burns

disease. Her body was found in the street, taken to Harlem Hospital, and later buried in the potter's field. Some days later Armando Marin and friends from the CEPI were able to find out what had occurred and had her body returned for burial to Puerto Rico, near the Rio Grande de Loíza. A posthumous volume, El Mar y Tú y Otros Poemas, appeared in 1954. Seven years later the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, following a resolution by the Puerto Rican legislature, published her collected works, the Obra Poetica of Julia de Burgos, "Criatura del Agua." [A volume of selections from her work, Cuadernos de Poesía, Jtdia de Burgos, was published in 1964. The most complete biographical discussion is contained in Yvette Jiménez de Baez, Julia de Burgos: Vida y Poesía ( 1966), which also includes commentary on the poems and a bibliography. See also Josefina Rivera de Alvarez, Diccionario de Literatura Puertorriqueña, vol. I (1974); Adolfo de Hostos, Diccionar'o Hi her lonely, freakish, often maimed, and usually violent characters a dignity and significance that can never again be denied them. [Some of Flannery O'Connor's papers are in the O'Connor Coll. in the library of Georgia College, Milledgeville, Ga. The remainder are in the possession of her mother, Regina Cline O'Connor. In addition to the books mentioned above, O'Connor wrote the introduction to a book by the Dominican Nuns of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cancer Home in Atlanta, Ga., A Memoir of Mary Ann (1962). The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor appeared in 1971. Her occasional prose was collected by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, eds., Mystery and Manners (1969). Sally Fitzgerald has also edited The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor (1979) and is preparing a biography. There is an abundance of critical material. For a bibliography of work by and about O'Connor see Robert E. Golden, Flannery O'Connor and Caroline Gordon: A Refer-

ence Guide (1977). Especially useful discussions of her work are Stanley Edgar Hyman, Flannery O'Connor (1966); Carter W. Martin, The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor (1969); David Eggenschwiler, The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor (1972); Miles Orvell, Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor (1972); Martha Stephens, The Question of Flannery O'Connor (1973). An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Aug. 4, 1964.] SALLY

FITZGERALD

O'CONNOR, Julia. See PARKER, Julia O'Connor. O'HARA, Anne. See MARTIN, Anne Henrietta. O M L I E , Phoebe Jane Fairgrave, 1902-July 17, 1975. Aviator.

Nov.

21,

Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie, whose career extended from the barnstorming days of the early pilots to the period of growing aviation bureaucracy, was born in Des Moines, Iowa, only daughter and second child of Andrew and Madge (Traister) Fairgrave. Her father, born in Ohio of Scottish and English parents, was a saloonkeeper and had a stable, though modest, income. Her mother's parents came from Illinois and Indiana. When Phoebe was twelve, the family moved to St. Paul, Minn. She attended Madison School and Mechanic Arts High School, graduating in 1920. For a few months she studied at the Guy Durrel Dramatic School in St. Paul and worked briefly as a secretary, but quickly discovered that office work was not for her. Unable to forget an air show she had seen, Phoebe Fairgrave bought four rides in an airplane at Curtiss Field, then used an inheritance from a grandfather to buy her own airplane at a cost of $3,500. Hoping to explain this expenditure to her parents, Fairgrave, still only seventeen and untrained as a pilot, went to the offices of Fox Moving Picture Company and sold $3,500 worth of assorted aerial stunts for the movie series The Perils of Pauline. Years later she recalled: "Dad thought I was crazy. Mother had more faith. She thought that if I was going to do it I was going to do it and that's all there was to it." Madge Fairgrave's faith in the set purpose of her daughter's mind was fully justified. Phoebe Fairgrave's resolution belied her diminutive stature, which sometimes proved a handicap, as when most instructors at Curtiss refused to teach her to fly because she was "too young and too little." One instructor agreed. He was Vernon Omlie, former army captain and World War I bombing instructor and at the time a stunt pilot and teacher for Curtiss. In the two

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Omlie

Omlie

years before their marriage on Jan. 22, 1922, he taught her to fly and piloted her while she fulfilled the contract with Fox and barnstormed the country in "death-defying" acts, which included wing-walking and parachuting. "It was not the approach to aviation that either of us wanted but, since aviation was not taken seriously then, it was the only way to make a living at it," she said later. The Omlies did have opportunities to demonstrate the practicality of aviation. In 1921, during a forest fire in the northwest, they acted as aerial spotters, and during the Mississippi flood of 1927 they patrolled levees, flew in medicine and supplies, took out stranded survivors, and carried mail. In competitive flying Phoebe Omlie set a number of records and recorded several firsts for women aviators. In April 1921, at eighteen, she became the first woman in the world to do a double parachute drop (using two parachutes cut loose at separate intervals). The following July 10 she set a new world's record parachute jump for women, jumping from 15,200 feet. During the next ten years she received the first federal pilot's license and the first aircraft and mechanic's license ever issued to a woman; she was also the first woman to enter the Ford National Reliability Air Tour ( 1 9 2 8 ) . In 1929 Omlie set an altitude record for women of 2 5 , 4 0 0 feet and won the Women's Air Derby. She set four records at the National Air Races in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 and 1930, and the next year won the Transcontinental Handicap Air Derby and set another record at Cleveland. Together Phoebe and Vernon Omlie opened the first airport in Tennessee at Memphis and established one of the first flying schools in the country. Phoebe Omlie's business career in aviation began when she instructed in and operated the Memphis school in 1923. Much of her racing was done in Monocoupe airplanes, and though aircraft manufacturers commonly sponsored pilots by furnishing aircraft, it was an unusual distinction for the Mono Aircraft Corporation to appoint Omlie as assistant to the president of the company, a position she held from 1928 to 1931. She toured the United States and South America, promoting the company's aircraft and the cause of aviation. Omlie joined politics and aviation when in 1932 she suggested the use of a plane in the presidential campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt. She flew over 5,000 miles in the campaign, ferrying speakers for the Democratic National Committee. After the election she visited President Roosevelt and reportedly reminded him that Napoleon I had a woman as his chief-of-airstaff (in charge of balloons). Roosevelt ap-

pointed her to the post of technical adviser, to serve as liaison between the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the Bureau of Air Commerce. The first woman government official in aviation, she held the post from 1933 until 1936. After Vernon Omlie's death in a commercial airplane crash in 1936, Phoebe Omlie resigned her government position and returned to Tennessee to work toward the realization of some of their mutual goals: tax reforms to return aviation taxes to aviation usage and the establishment of state government-sponsored schools for training civilian pilots. She succeeded in both efforts, and the Tennessee schools later became the model for the national Civilian Pilot Training program. Omlie also helped to implement and teach a preparatory curriculum in aviation introduced into Tennessee's high schools, and later copied by other states. In 1941 Omlie returned to Washington, D.C., to serve as senior private flying specialist with the Civil Aeronautics Administration ( C A A ) . In that capacity she further promoted the national air marking work which she and AMELIA EARHART had begun years before. Their aim was to aid pilots by painting markers on roofs throughout the country. Omlie also headed and coordinated a joint Works Progress Administration and Office of Education project to train 5,000 airport ground personnel. During this period, incensed by the removal of women from the Civilian Pilot Training schools, she asked to be loaned to Tennessee in order to open a school for the training of women instructors. T h e school won national publicity, and the program spread to other states. Her instructors ended up teaching in the very schools from which they had been removed. In 1942 the National Education Association gave her a citation for her contribution to American education. Returning to Washington in 1943, Omlie held a series of posts with the CAA. In 1952, deeply troubled by what she called the socialization of the aviation industry, she resigned. Distressed and disillusioned, Phoebe Omlie then invested most of her life savings in a cattle ranch in Mississippi, but the ranch failed and she lost her investment. Little is known about the ensuing years, except that she became increasingly concerned about federal intervention in all phases of life, and tried to organize support for the return of control of school systems to the states. In 1967 she revisited Washington to lobby for this cause, and told a reporter: "I'm a crusader." Omlie's dwindling funds helped to bring the crusade to a halt, although until her death of lung cancer in Indianapolis, Ind., in 1975, she continued her attempts to coordinate various

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Ovington

conservative groups around the country into a coherent organization. [Information about Omlie's early life and beginning in aviation may be found in the files of the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press and in the alumni records of the St. Paul Mechanic Arts High School. The Tenn. Dept. of Transportation, Bureau of Aeronautics, has a file on Omlie that includes newspaper clippings on her training program for women flight instructors. The best published source is Charles Planck, Women With Wings (1942), which devotes several chapters to her career and includes tables of her competitive flying records. Jean Adams, Margaret Kimball, and Jeanette Kimball devote a colorful chapter to her in Heroines of the Sky (1942). See also Gene Slack, "Tennessee's Airwomen," Flying, May 1943, and Who's Who in Aviation, 1942-43. Additional information for this article was provided by Patricia Harpole, Earl M. Rogers, Lida Lisle Greene, Madge Rutherford Minton, Nick A. Komons, and Patricia O'Malley Strickland. Death certificate supplied by Ind. Board of Health.] GENE SLACK

SCHARLAU

OVINGTON, Mary White, April 11, July 15, 1951. Civil rights reformer.

1865-

Mary White Ovington, a founder and board chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the third of four children, and second of three daughters. Her parents, Ann Louise (Ketcham) and Theodore Tweedy Ovington, endowed her with a legacy of abolitionism and Unitarian free thought that paved the way for her career as a social reformer. Theodore Ovington's china and glass importing firm, Ovington Brothers, provided the income for a comfortable and cultured upper-middleclass life throughout most of Mary White Ovington's childhood and adolescence. The most powerful intellectual influence on the young Ovington was the Rev. John White Chadwick, minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Brooklyn Heights. Under his guidance, she was tutored in a gospel of optimistic evolutionism, social reform, and woman's rights. Her early education at private schools in Brooklyn Heights was capped by three years at Packer Collegiate Institute ( 1 8 8 8 - 9 1 ) , followed by two years at Radcliffe College ( 1 8 9 1 - 9 3 ) , then known as the Harvard Annex. There, Ovington's moderate reform inclinations took a more radical turn under economic historian William J. Ashley. Henceforth she always looked at social problems through the analytical framework of class. When the depression of 1893 played havoc with her father's business, Ovington was forced to leave college. She became registrar of Pratt

Institute in Brooklyn and then head worker ( 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 0 3 ) at Greenpoint Settlement, a Prattsponsored project housed in a model tenement, which she helped to found. Located in a working-class, immigrant district, the settlement was an invaluable training ground for Ovington's later work with blacks, whose problems she always believed were due as much to class as to race. She became vice president of the Brooklyn Consumers' League and assistant secretary of the Social Reform Club in New York. The Reform Club linked her to progressive reform throughout the city and cemented her belief in socialism; she joined the Socialist party of America about 1905. Abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass were family heroes, but Ovington's parents taught her that emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments had put an end to "the Negro problem." It was not until 1903, when she was thirty-eight, that a speech by Booker T. Washington at the Social Reform Club made Ovington aware of racial discrimination in the north. From that time until her death Mary White Ovington's life was dedicated to the achievement of racial equality. Becoming a fellow of Greenwich House, a settlement headed by m a r y k i n g s b u r y s i m k h o v i t c h , and doing social work there among blacks, Ovington began in 1904 a study of black Manhattan. Focusing particularly on housing and employment problems, her work resulted in 1911 in publication of Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York. In the course of her research, Ovington met New York's black leaders, learned from them about community problems, began a correspondence with black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, tried unsuccessfully to establish a settlement house for blacks, and lived for a time as the only white in a black tenement. She reported on what she learned for several publications, including the New York Evening Post and Charities. Her close associations with blacks brought her occasional notoriety: lurid newspaper accounts followed a biracial dinner in a New York restaurant at which she had sat next to a black man. For a time her reformist energies focused almost exclusively on two organizations that were precursors of the National Urban League: the National League for the Protection of Colored Women and the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes in New York. But for her deepening friendship with Du Bois, she might have become a founder of the gradualist Urban League. Instead, her sympathies lay with the militant neoabolitionists of Du Bois's Niagara Movement and she became one of a select number of white associate members.

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Ovington Ovington joined a handful of white reformers in founding the NAACP. Following a virulent race riot in Springfield, 111., in August 1908, a meeting was called the following May that led to the formation of the biracial protest group, initially known as the National Negro Committee. The goals of the new organization—to end racial discrimination and segregation and to push for the attainment of legal and civil rights, including the franchise—were radical for their day, and challenged Booker T. Washington's leadership of the black community. From the start, Ovington was a member of the inner circle that made key decisions and set the organization's tone. She was also involved at its New York headquarters on a day-to-day basis. For almost forty years she served the NAACP in numerous decisionmaking positions: board member, interim executive secretary, chairman of board committees, vice president, acting chairman of the board, chairman, and treasurer. But her influence went far beyond her official duties: no matter what the title, she was a minister without portfolio who helped articulate policy, raise money, create new branches, lobby against discrimination, and organize the national office. Above all, she was a conciliator and a buoyant spirit in the face of persistent racism. Ovington had a genius for personal relations that was indispensable. If conflicts between key leaders had not been contained, there would have been no NAACP. For there was not enough institutional momentum—no stable of dependable big donors, few well-established branches, no string of courtroom or legislative victories— to ensure its survival. Ovington's central role was to keep publicity director Du Bois and chairman Oswald Garrison Villard at arm's length, at least for a time. Although Ovington tried to act as mediator, she was partial to Du Bois. She considered him the great genius of his race and the man who made the NAACP a credible force in black communities; he was not only a powerful personality but also the sole black among the NAACP national leadership. For his part, Du Bois regarded her as a friend and loyal ally. He also considered her one of two white associates who was entirely free of race prejudice. Her mediation lasted until late 1914, when Villard resigned as chairman. By January 1919, when Mary White Ovington took over as chairman of the board, the NAACP could boast of 44,000 members in 165 branches and a number of symbolic if practically insignificant victories before the United States Supreme Court. Blacks had been appointed to most executive positions at the national office, in keeping with her view that qualified blacks should assume most of the leadership even as

the NAACP remained open to all races. This organizational maturity, combined with Ovington's cordial relations with executive secretary James Weldon Johnson, the first black to hold the job, determined the shape of her leadership. Her work in this period focused on organizational nuts and bolts—fund raising and the maintenance of branches—and continued in-house diplomacy. Ovington's diplomatic skills were reserved for patching up relations with disaffected branches and for dealing with Du Bois, whose prickly personality made it difficult for her to be both boss and friend. Ovington's reform interests were varied. A feminist, pacifist, and anti-imperialist, she invariably subordinated these concerns to her NAACP work. She used the platform of The New Review, for instance, to call for the "destruction of masculine despotism" and to chide her socialist colleagues for their indifference to the plight of blacks and women. As NAACP chairman, she tried, unsuccessfully, to pressure suffrage organizations into lobbying for voting rights for black women. Although not a strict pacifist (she believed violence had been necessary to destroy slavery), she opposed United States participation in World War I. And she encouraged NAACP efforts in the 1920s to end United States occupation of Haiti and European colonialism in Africa (via Du Bois's Pan African Congress movement). Perhaps her single most important contribution as chairman came in 1923 after several years of fruitless lobbying in Congress on behalf of the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill; she persuaded the NAACP to redirect its energies, for over a decade, toward securing equal federal aid for black and white school systems. The decision was a key first step toward the direct assault on separate-but-equal school systems that was not begun in earnest until the late 1940s. In January 1932, Ovington resigned as chairman and became NAACP treasurer. The resignation was a sign that under executive secretary Walter White, whom she labeled a "dictator," she could no longer be the conciliator she once was, even though she agreed with him on key substantive issues. As an elder NAACP stateswoman, Ovington took a major role in the debates triggered by the depression. When Du Bois, no longer on speaking terms with her because of ideological differences, championed "voluntary segregation" in 1934, she stood by the NAACP's goal of integration. When the Committee on Future Plan and Program sketched out an NAACP future based on economic radicalism, she again sided with traditionalists like White and assistant secretary Roy Wilkins. Although she was still a socialist, she

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believed that advocacy of radicalism would destroy the NAACP's base in the black middle class without assuring a new constituency to replace it. In both cases, her views coincided with the majority view in the NAACP inner circle. Always reticent about herself, Ovington's writings nonetheless provide insight into her character and beliefs. In her "Book Chats," reviews distributed to some 250 newspapers by the NAACP News Service during the 1920s, Ovington applauded the cultural pluralism and vitality of the Harlem Renaissance, even while chastising its writers for what she regarded as a preoccupation with sex. Her enthusiasm was tempered too by her reluctance to embrace the exaltation of race found in some Renaissance literature. Ovington also wrote Portraits in Color ( 1 9 2 7 ) , profiles of black leaders; The Walls Came Tumbling Down ( 1 9 4 7 ) , an autobiography that is better described as a popular history of the NAACP; The Shadow ( 1 9 2 0 ) , a poorly written novel of mistaken racial identity; and several children's books. Throughout her life, Ovington remained close to her family. She lived and often traveled with her mother until the latter's death in 1927. She then lived alone for a time in a Greenwich Village apartment (which she sublet to black friends, insisting that they remain despite threats from other tenants). When the depression reduced her income, she moved in with her brother and sister-in-law; after retiring from the NAACP in 1947, she lived with a sister in Auburndale, Mass. In her final years, Ovington suffered from hypertension and bouts of depression. She died in July 1951 at a nursing home in Newton Highlands, Mass.

[The most important manuscript sources are: the Mary White Ovington Papers, Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State Univ.; Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress; W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Univ. of Mass., at Amherst; Oswald Garrison Villard Papers, Harvard Univ.; Joel E. Spingarn Papers, Howard Univ. and the N.Y. Public Library. Other autobiographical accounts are an unpublished fragment in the Ovington Papers at Wayne State and the "Reminiscences" Ovington wrote for the black weekly, Baltimore AfroAmerican, Sept. 1932-Feb. 1933. Ovington also wrote Hazel (1913) and Zeke: A School Boy at Tolliver (1931), both novels for juveniles; The Upward Path, a Reader for Colored Children (1920), compiled with Myron Thomas Pritchard; and The Awakening (1923) and Phillis Wheatley (1932), both plays designed to recruit members to the NAACP. Among Ovington's more significant magazine articles are "The Status of the Negro in the United States," New Review, Sept. 1913, pp. 744-49; "Socialism and the Feminist Movement," New Review, March 1914, pp. 143-47; "The United States in Porto Rico," New Republic, July 8, 1916, pp. 244-46, and July 15, 1916, pp. 271-73. Ovington's role in the NAACP is explored to some extent in Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1909-1920 (1967), and B. Joyce Ross, J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939 (1972). The only biography is Daniel W. Cryer, "Mary White Ovington and the Rise of the NAACP" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Minn., 1977). Death certificate provided by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] DANIEL W .

CRYER

OWEN, Ruth Bryan. See ROHDE, Ruth Bryan Owen.

P PARK, Maud May Wood, Jan. 25, 1871-May 8, 1955. Suffragist, civic leader. Maud Wood Park, first president of the League of Women Voters, was born in Boston, the eldest of three children (two girls and one boy) of James Rodney and Mary Russell (Collins) Wood. James Wood, who had been a scout for Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War, was a member of the Boston police force, and later founded his own detective agency. Maud Wood attended the St. Agnes School in Albany, N.Y., graduating in 1887 as class valedictorian.

She taught school first in Bedford, Mass., and then at Chelsea High School, saving enough money to enter Radcliffe College in 1895. A brilliant student, she graduated summa cum laude after three years. At Radcliffe, as at the St. Agnes School, Wood found herself surrounded by antisuffragists. One of two students in a class of seventy-two to favor votes for women, Wood and her friend INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE (IRWIN) brought A L I C E STONE B L A C K W E L L to Radcliffe to present the case for suffrage; both young women joined the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association ( M W S A )

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Park soon after. In 1897, while still a student, Wood secretly married Charles Edward Park, a Boston architect. After making their marriage public in 1898, the couple lived near Denison House, a settlement in Boston's South End, where Maud Wood Park was introduced to the work of social reformers. Charles Park died in 1904. Park was active in suffrage and civic work in Boston for more than fifteen years. She was elected chairman of the M W S A in 1900. The following year, at the request of the wealthy Boston philanthropist and suffragist P A U L I N E AGASSIZ SHAW, she became executive secretary of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government ( B E S A G G ) , an organization which sought to "combine efforts to secure suffrage for women with direct activities for civic betterment." As leader and cofounder of B E S A G G , which became a forum for the social feminist concerns of the younger and more progressive faction of the Massachusetts woman's movement, Park helped to organize the first Boston Parent-Teacher Association, encouraged immigrant women to form civic clubs, and strove to convert Bostonians to woman suffrage. Park also did much to enlist the interest of college-educated women in suffrage. Having been surprised to find herself the youngest delegate present at a 1900 meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association ( N A W S A ) , the following spring she and Inez Haynes Gillmore organized the first chapter of the College Equal Suffrage League ( C E S L ) . An able organizer and charismatic speaker since her college debating days, in 1904 Park began to organize C E S L chapters in New York state. For the next three years she traveled around the country organizing college women. In 1908, NAWSA finally agreed to sanction a national C E S L . Park, who had resigned from her Massachusetts suffrage positions in 1907, became vice president, a position she held until the organization disbanded in 1916. Park continued to travel for another three years. After visiting the western suffrage states and spending some time in a San Francisco settlement, in March 1909, with fellow suffragist Mabel Willard, she departed for a round-theworld trip to study women in other countries, especially in Asia. The eighteen-month tour, financed by Pauline Shaw, provided the material for a series of well-paid lectures which Park gave around the country on her return. On August 20, 1908, she had secretly married Robert Hunter, a member of the Hartford Players and a New York theatrical agent. Separated by their work, Park and Hunter did not live together, but met in hotels during Park's lecture tours and

later spent vacations together in her Maine home. This second marriage, never made public, was known only to a few close friends. Returning to Boston in 1910 to resume her paid position with B E S A G G , Park discovered that the tactics of Massachusetts suffragists now included open-air meetings, parades, and publicity stunts. She initially found the street meetings distasteful, but soon adjusted her speaking style to them. Although the novel techniques helped to revitalize the suffrage movement in the state, the Massachusetts referendum campaign of 1915, which Park helped to organize, was unsuccessful. Following NAWSA's adoption in 1916 of the "winning plan" of CAKRIE CHAPMAN CATT to combine agitation for a federal suffrage amendment with continued campaigns at the state level, Park was persuaded by Catt to join NAWSA's Congressional Committee. In January 1917 she went to Washington, D.C., to head the "front door lobby," a designation that symbolized the idealism of the woman suffrage movement. Park and her colleagues, while eschewing bribery and offers of political favors, ran an efficient and pragmatic campaign that depended on reasoned arguments, persuasion, and careful grassroots organization. Through an intricate political network they kept informed of the suffrage views of each member of Congress. They also used any social and political influence they could muster. Park's colleague Helen Hamilton Gardener worked on her next-door neighbor, speaker of the House of Representatives Champ Clark, to win him over to the creation of a woman suffrage committee in order to circumvent the "gentlemen's agreement" to defer general legislation while war measures were being considered. T h e new committee reported favorably on the suffrage amendment, which the House passed in January 1918 by a twothirds majority. T h e Senate followed in June 1919, and the nineteenth amendment was officially proclaimed as adopted in August 1920 following ratification by the states. In 1919 Park "reluctantly agreed" to become the first president of the League of Women Voters ( L W V ) , the nonpartisan organization to educate the new voters which Catt had proposed as the successor to NAWSA. Elected to office the following year, she assumed a social feminist stance. Park asserted that the League's purpose should be to promote "reforms in which women will naturally take an interest in a greater degree than men—protection for working women, for children, public health questions, and the care of dependent and delinquent classes, extension of the Children's Bureau, extension of education's power in government."

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From the moment she accepted, she later recalled, "I felt as if an avalanche of work had fallen upon me." Euphoric over their recent victory, feminists in the LWV adopted a program of thirty-eight legislative measures. The League, which attracted only a fraction of the former membership of NAWSA and was constantly short of funds, participated with nine other women's organizations in the Women's Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC), organized in 1920 to work together for social feminist goals and to continue the front door lobby. Park became its permanent head. As a new conservatism settled over Washington, social legislation faced rough sledding, but the WJCC was largely responsible for two important pieces of legislation: the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 and the Cable Act of 1922 which granted independent citizenship to married women. The League also served as a pressure group for the Children's Bureau and worked in the states to end child labor and promote other social measures. As League president, Park alternated her work in Washington with lecture tours around the country, trying to persuade young women to join the organization. Despite her successes, these years were often difficult. In early 1924 she fell ill with a serious strep infection and did not fully recover for several months. The same year a vicious red-baiting campaign was launched against the women's movement, and conservatives attempted to link the League with the "international socialist-pacifist movement." (Park was a staunch Republican.) The child labor amendment also went down to defeat in the states. At the same time, Park faced a disturbing break with her old colleague and friend Carrie Chapman Catt, who had devoted most of her time to the peace movement after 1920. Unfamiliar with the efforts of the WJCC, Catt publicly claimed in 1922 that the LWV had been responsible for the passage of Sheppard-Towner. When Park tried to soothe ruffled feathers by emphasizing the joint collaboration of several women's organizations, Catt accused Park of favoring Republican women and of undermining the League. Catt was so angry that she did not even reply to Park's letter offering to resign the presidency. Park continued in that office until 1924 when, sick and emotionally exhausted, she handed the gavel of the LWV to B E L L E SHERWIN.

After retiring from the League, Park began work on a vacation home in Cape Cottage, Maine, and lectured in eastern cities and on college campuses, assessing the state of the

women's movement. She reappeared in Washington to support the World Court Committee in 1925 and served in 1926 as a legislative counselor for the LWV. The following year she extended her lecture tour to the southern states and made a last public visit to Washington to support the extension of the Sheppard-Towner Act, an effort that failed. Following the death of Robert Hunter in 1928, Park, who had studied drama at Radcliffe, took up playwriting. Lucy Stone, written in 1936, was performed by the Federal Theatre Group in Boston three years later. In 1943 Park and Edna Stantial, a former secretary of BESAGG, prepared a large body of materials related to the women's movement in Massachusetts which they gave to Radcliffe College. These became the nucleus of the Woman's Rights Collection of the Schlesinger Library. Park sold her Maine house in 1946, and moved to Boston, where she at first lived in hotels and then with Guy and Edna Stantial in Melrose, Mass. She died in Reading, Mass., in 1955 of a stroke. Park was in many ways typical of the generation of suffrage leaders who succeeded ANNA HOWARD SHAW a n d JULIA WARD HOWE. S h e a n d

her colleagues brought a tough-minded efficiency and militancy to the suffrage movement that contributed to the success of the final push for the nineteenth amendment. She later said that while Catt had been the architect of the nineteenth amendment, she had been the builder, and her Front Door Lobby, published posthumously in 1960, remains a fascinating account of her years in Washington. The reticence that so marked her personal life worked to her advantage as a lobbyist, for politicians and movement leaders alike knew that she could be trusted with a confidence. A woman of great executive ability, Park seemed to thrive on appeals for membership and funds, and on grassroots organizing. Admitting that she often found it easier to speak to groups than to individuals, she was nevertheless a woman of great charm who drew both men and women to her cause. She rarely used notes, but she impressed most of her hearers by her concise, wellorganized, and personal delivery. Her old friend Inez Haynes Irwin said of Park in 1955: "I was always admiring the length, breadth and height of her mind. It had great floor space." [Some of Park's papers, mostly clippings, typewritten notes, photographs, and plays, can be found in the Woman's Rights Coll. at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, along with records of the MWSA, CESL, and BESAGG. Information about Park's work can also be found in the manuscript collections of the LWV, WJCC, NAWSA, and the papers of

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Parker Carrie Chapman Catt, all in the Library of Congress. Some of Park's papers are still in the possession of Edna Lamprey Stantial of Chilmark, Mass. Park edited and contributed several chapters to Victory, How Women Won It; A Centennial Symposium 1840-1940 ( 1 9 4 0 ) . For biographical accounts see Lois Bannister Merk, "The Early Career of Maud Wood Park," Radcliffe Quart., May 1948; Catherine I. Hackett, "The Lady Who Made Lobbying Respectable," Woman Citizen, April 19, 1924; the entry in Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five; Nat. Cye. Am. Biog., A, 5 2 6 - 2 7 . For the context of Park's work in the woman's movement and some biographical information see Lois Bannister Merk, "Massachusetts and the Woman Suffrage Movement" (Ph.D. diss., Radcliffe College, 1956; rev. microfilm ed., Library of Congress, 1 9 6 1 ) . See also Sharon Hartman Strom, "Leadership and Tactics in the American Woman Suffrage Movement: A New Perspective from Massachusetts," Jour. Am. Hist., Sept. 1975, 2 9 6 - 3 1 5 ; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States ( 1 9 5 9 ) ; J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s ( 1 9 7 3 ) . Edna Stantial provided information useful in the preparation of this article. A copy of the marriage license provided by Conn. Dept. of Health confirms Park's marriage to Robert Hunter; death record provided by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] SHARON

HARTMAN

STROM

PARKER, Dorothy Rothschild, Aug. 22, 1893June 7, 1967. Writer. Dorothy Parker was born during her parents' vacation in West End, N.J. Shortly after, the family moved back to the West Seventies in New York City; there, fittingly, destined to be an urban muse, she spent her girlhood. The youngest and perhaps unwanted child of Eliza (Marston) and J. Henry Rothschild, she had an older brother and a sister nine years her senior. She was never close to either and in later years spoke of them and her family seldom; she disliked, vehemently and unforgivingly, her father and stepmother. Henry Rothschild was Jewish by descent; his first wife, Dorothy's mother, was Scottish. A solid member of the middle class, Rothschild worked in the garment industry. After Eliza Rothschild's early death, he remarried a strict and, if her stepdaughter is to be believed, cruel Roman Catholic. The young Dorothy Rothschild was sent for her primary education, over her protest, to New York's Blessed Sacrament Convent. Later, she attended the progressive, academically rigorous Miss Dana's School in Morristown, N.J.; she received her diploma in 1911. Some time between her father's death in 1912, and 1916, she began her real life, the only life she ever found worth discussing in later

years: she found a room by herself at a boardinghouse on 103d Street and Broadway in New York City, and she took on the city in a permanent gesture. An ardent supporter of suffrage, though not an activist one, a chain smoker, ultra-feminine in her petite, dark beauty, addicted to large floppy hats and an eccentric version of haute couture, flattering and acid by turns, "masculine" in her ambition and tough brilliant wit, Dorothy Rothschild was ready to enter, and star in, the exciting creative life just starting its legendary swirl in prewar New York. She supported herself by playing the piano for a dancing school. Then in 1916, Frank Crowninshield, the dapper editor of the modish pioneering magazine Vanity Fair, accepted one of her poems for publication, and soon found her a job writing advertising captions for Vogue, which he also edited: "Brevity is the soul of Lingerie" is perhaps the most famous. In 1917, Dorothy Rothschild married Edwin Pond Parker II, a conventional Wall Street man from an old Hartford, Conn., family. That year she joined the Vanity Fair staff, becoming its drama critic in 1919. She became intimate friends with Robert Sherwood, soon to be a famous playwright, and Robert Benchley, on his way to popularity as one of America's greatest twentieth-century humorists. From this triumvirate and the newspaper group consisting of Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woollcott (both writers for the New York World), and Harold Ross, who would found The New Yorker in 1925, developed the famous cluster of metropolitan wits who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel's Round Table and exchanged highly formal criticisms off and on the printed page. In the most bitter moments of her later years, Parker would still fondly say of these early days: "We had more fun!" When she was fired in January 1920 from her Vanity Fair job for a drama review too cutting to please the powerful theatrical interests whose advertising sustained the periodical, Benchley and Sherwood resigned too, in protest. All three eventually found jobs elsewhere. For a time Benchley and Parker shared an office and attempted to go into business as free-lance writers. They failed. By 1922, she was writing for the Saturday Evening Post's comic page, "Short Turns and Encores." In public, her softly murmured one-liners made comic history. To a young man complaining superciliously that he couldn't bear fools, she replied: "That's odd. Your mother could." Another young man she pronounced "a rhinestone in the rough." Parker incarnated "style" in an urban age that valued nothing more highly. No party of the Smart Set

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Parker could succeed without her, and few had to try. But by the midtwenties a pattern emerged of success cut short by what seems almost willful failure. That, as well as less psychological concerns, began to alter Parker's life. Edwin Parker had gone off to war in 1918. When he returned in 1919, the marriage foundered. He drank, liked Hartford, and had little to say. Parker drank, but life in Hartford was unthinkable, and although she tried to make up witty stories about "Eddie," he came to bore her. They separated soon after the war, not without pain, and divorced in 1928. Succeeding love affairs brought Parker misery. To court unhappiness, as some say Parker did, is hardly the same thing as enjoying it. In 1923, after an abortion, Parker tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide. She tried again in 1925. The woman whose bons mots were among New York's most prized self-advertisements, was having, as she told a bartender, "not much fun." Writing helped, but not enough. A play, Close Harmony, a satire of suburban life on which she collaborated in 1924 with Elmer Rice, failed. In 1926, a collection of her light, ironic, bitter, skillful verse, grimly entitled Enough Rope, was put out by Boni and Liveright and became a hit. Its success meant surprisingly little to her. Poet Parker mocked her own masochism: "I loved them until they loved me." She repeated her poetic success with Sunset Gun in 1928, Death and Taxes in 1931, and Not So Deep As a Well in 1936. Critics were enthusiastic about her elegant toughness and the public was impressed by Parker's sophisticated style, her tone of ennui amid pain, her role, in Irwin Edman's words, as "a Sappho who could combine a heartbreak with a wisecrack." Her readers had little inkling how great was the pain, how deeply Parker despised the ennui and distrusted the wisecracks. One way out was politics and, though her politics were sometimes confused, Parker was never less than serious about them. In 1927, the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston on the day after her thirty-fourth birthday. Parker, always on the side of the underdog, had campaigned actively against the death sentence; she was never the same after what she and countless others considered their murder. She continued nonetheless to move, like many of the Algonquinites, among the rich set of the Jock Whitneys and Averell Harrimans, accepting their hospitality and the drinks that she increasingly needed, although never writing kindly of them. She could support striking waiters at the Waldorf-Astoria and cross a picket line at the club '21' within days; yet she meant something genuine, if unclear,

when she said in 1934: "I am a communist." She worked against Franco in the Spanish civil war, and in old age told an interviewer that going to Spain was "the proudest thing" she ever did. She came to reject the wit of the old Algonquin circle, her own included, as "a shield, but . . . not a weapon." In Hollywood, where she went in the early thirties with her second husband, Alan Campbell, she made her antifascist, proleft views conspicuous enough to get herself, and the politically conservative Campbell, blacklisted in the 1940s. When she died in 1967, she left most of her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr. Like other writers who went to Hollywood for the money it offered, Parker found the experience hateful: "I never did a picture I was proud of, and there never was a picture that was proud of me." About money in itself, Parker never cared: she earned much, spent more, and in later days, nearly starving, would leave large checks in her possession uncashed. But she wrote to earn money, and Hollywood offered a great deal. With Campbell and on her own she worked on the scripts of more than twenty films, including the original version (1939) of A Star Is Born. The other films were negligible except for The Little Foxes (1941), for which she and Campbell wrote additional dialogue and scenes for her friend Lillian Hellman's screenplay. She was proud, however, of her involvement with the Screenwriters' Guild in their struggle to unionize the profession. Parker's conflict-laden relationship with the mediocre writer Campbell, bisexual and eleven years her junior, evolved over the years into a routine of contempt and complaisance with surprising staying power; it survived marriage (1933), divorce (1947), remarriage (1950), separation (1953), and reunion (1956), lasting until Campbell's death in 1963. They had both welcomed her pregnancy in 1935; a miscarriage in her third month was tragic. Despite their ups and downs, despite Dorothy Parker's drinking, and her penchant for young, beautiful shallow men who exploited and humiliated her, in the late 1920s and the 1930s she found her literary voice, and a brilliant one it was. In 1929, she received the O. Henry short story prize for "Big Blonde," the painful saga of Hazel Morse, an aging, alcoholic whore totally dependent on men, who tries in vain to kill herself. Parker had begun to publish her sketches in the midtwenties in The Bookman, Scribners, and The New Yorker, and she continued to produce stories through the midforties. They are, as she well knew, her special claim to fame. In 1930, Parker brought out a collection called Laments for the Living; in 1933, After Such Pleasures. In addition, she did

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a skillful and witty job reviewing books for The New Yorker as "Constant Reader" beginning in the late twenties. She sprinkled her page with devastating judgments: over A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner, she reported, "Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up." Writing for Esquire in the fifties, she early hailed such controversial talents as Vladimir Nabokov and S H I R L E Y JACKSON. Parker's last play, Ladies of the Corridor ( 1 9 5 3 ) , despite its commercial failure, was a painfully honest, if loosely structured, study of women; it yielded two interesting short stories, "I Live on Your Visits" and "Lolita." Dorothy Parker was probably, as Edmund Wilson and others believed, the only real artist in the Algonquin group. Gifted with a perfect ear, she was, with Ring Lardner whom she admired deeply, the greatest dialogue writer of her age. With the exception of Ernest Hemingway, she was the clearest, sharpest stylist among her contemporaries, possessed, in her phrase, of a "disciplined eye and a wild mind." Mistress of what she called the "he said, she said" story, Parker recounted the utter barrenness of New York society men and women: their alcoholism, their malicious games, their careless exploitation of their social inferiors, maids, blacks, poor relatives. Parker's special subject was oppression, particularly female oppression, and the most common misreading of her work is to take her apparent contempt for her society women at face value. Her compassion, founded on shrewd power of analysis, is as omnipresent as her satire; she usually lets the readers see, if they will, why her upper-class women cannot act, or change, just as she implicitly exposes the system of exploitation that crushes her more attractive victims. Her stories reveal that Parker was more profoundly political as an artist than she was as an activist. Parker's female characters are all prisoners of the present. Her finest stories, with the exception of "Big Blonde," occur in a matter of hours, or even minutes, and the reader is given no information that reaches beyond the confines of that fixed span. It is always punitively now, in Parker's witty hell, and now is always a social occasion. Parker demonstrates woman's lot as the compulsion to overarticulate; she perceives feminine socialization as a process by which a girl learns that silence is intolerable and her women talk themselves, as they are meant to, into inferiority. Economics eluded Parker; men offhandedly dictating society's menus, not men aggressively running capitalist enterprises, were the incarnations of the ruling class who fascinated and angered her. She never depicted female solidarity, but no one etched more sharply

the obstacles in its way. Women in Parker's tales are in deadly competition for a limited number of the exceedingly paltry prizes only men can award them; and they scorn each other and themselves for being dumb enough to compete. They suffer pain without dignity, the shallow hysterical pang that springs from social climbing, rejection, and insecurity. Comic for the disarray of values it signifies, the pain she chronicles is nonetheless sharp, awful, unmistakable, and makes genuine politics, not to speak of social change, impossible. Parker as a writer never regained the heights she attained in the thirties. She accomplished little after 1953; in New York City, in June 1967, alcohol and a heart attack finally finished off the small woman who had written so often of death. In the fifties, she judged herself with characteristic harshness: "I didn't make it" as a writer, she told a Paris Review interviewer. Years before, she'd confessed to a friend that she was "wasting" her talent by drinking, by living the New York life. Waste there was indeed; and suffering fully proportionate to the wit she summoned to shape it into the sharp bitter structures of her prose. But Parker was, as she had hoped, "a tough quotable female humorist," and more. Destined to scrutinize society in its most meaningless and cruel phases, Parker analyzed and charted waste itself. W e will never cease to need her brilliantly etched maps of our empty places. [Parker's work, with the exception of the plays which were published separately in the year of their production, can be found almost complete in The Collected Dorothy Parker (1973). Parker's most important statements about her work are in Malcolm Cowley, ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1958), and in Donald Ogden Stewart, Fighting Words (1940). There is an interview with Parker (June 1959) in the Popular Arts Project, Oral History Coll., Columbia Univ. Contemporary Authors: Permanent Series has a bibliography and a complete list of film credits. The standard and readable biography is John Keats, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (1970); he lamentably fails to date or locate Parker's individual pieces. Also useful are Lillian Hellman's chapter on Parker in An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (1969); Wyatt Cooper, "Remembering Dorothy Parker," Esquire, July 1968; Richard Lauterback, "The Legend of Dorothy Parker," Esquire, Oct. 1944; Robert E. Drennan, The Algonquin Wits (1968); James R. Gaines, Wits End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table (1977); Margaret Case Harriman, The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table (1951); Vincent Sheean, Personal History (1937); William Shenahan, "Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker," Rendezvous, vol. 3 (1968); and Alexander

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Parker Woollcott, "Our Mrs. Parker," in While Rome Burns (1934). Interesting contemporary dramatizations of Parker are found in George Oppenheimer, Here Today (1931); George C. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Merrily We Roll Along (1934); and Charles Brackett, Entirely Surrounded (1934). Lillian Hellman is Parker's literary executor. The N.Y. Times obituaries of June 8 and 10,1967, are laudatory and anecdotal.] ANN

DOUGLAS

PARKER, Julia Sarsfield O'Connor, Sept. 9, 1890-Aug. 27, 1972. Labor leader and organizer. Julia O'Connor Parker, union organizer best known for her leadership of New England telephone workers, was born in Woburn, Mass., the second daughter and youngest of four children of John and Sarah (Conneally) O'Connor. Her parents had emigrated from Ireland to Massachusetts, where John O'Connor earned his living as a leather currier. Julia attended parochial schools in Woburn and public high school in Medford, Mass.; upon her graduation in 1908 she began work as a telephone operator in Boston. Her involvement in the labor movement, which lasted forty-five years, began in March 1912 when she joined the newly formed Boston Telephone Operators' Union, organized by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) with the assistance of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). Quickly rising to prominence in the new union, O'Connor was part of the nine-woman committee that achieved the union's recognition in negotiations with top national company officials after a threatened strike in 1913. The WTUL, established in 1903 to organize women workers and promote protective legislation, introduced O'Connor to larger social and political causes. She became involved with the league in 1912, serving as president of the Boston chapter from 1915 to 1918 (the first working woman to attain that office), and as a member of the national executive board from 1917 to 1926; in 1919 she went as a delegate to the First International Congress of Working Women. From 1914 until 1916 she was a workers' representative on the board appointed by the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission to determine a minimum wage for women retail workers. For four months in 1916, O'Connor attended the WTUL's training school in Chicago; she emerged critical of what she considered the school's condescension toward its worker-students and its insufficient attention to field organizing. Her feelings reflected a larger conflict of values within the WTUL between working women who stressed union organizing

and their middle-class allies, more concerned with legislative reform. Following a near-strike in Boston in 1913, telephone operators across the country began to organize, but they were denied full representation in the IBEW, largely because of the male members' fear of "petticoat rule." An autonomous department for the telephone operators was finally established within the IBEW in 1918, and O'Connor was elected its president, a post she held until 1938. During World War I, when the telephone service came under government ownership, O'Connor served as the only labor representative on the Ryan Commission, whose function was to advise Postmaster General Albert Burleson on wages and working conditions in the telephone service. In January 1919, protesting Burleson's hostility toward organized labor, O'Connor resigned from the commission, and in April she led the New England Telephone Operators' Union in a six-day strike to compel action on its long-ignored wage demands. Completely paralyzing telephone service in five New England states, the strike was one of the few in the wave of postwar strikes to end on favorable terms for the workers. On leave of absence from her IBEW post for four months, O'Connor visited Europe in 1921 to observe labor conditions in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy. A highly talented and prolific writer, O'Connor described British and Irish working conditions in a series of articles for The Union Telephone Operator, the magazine of the IBEW Telephone Operators' Department. Active in the postwar peace movement, O'Connor delivered a 1921 Armistice Day address calling for an end to war and militarism at the Women's Mass Meeting on Disarmament in Washington, D.C. In the postwar climate of hostility to organized labor, the Telephone Operators' Department quickly declined from its peak in 1919, when it had boasted 18,000 members in 200 locals. Confronted with Bell Telephone's efforts to form a company union, and shrewdly anticipating the loss of jobs that would result from the telephone dial system, in 1923 O'Connor called for a strike for shorter hours and higher wages in New England, the only region in which the union continued to be strong. But some leaders of operators' locals, accusing O'Connor of authoritarianism, failed to respond to the strike call, and the two-month strike ended in the union's total defeat. The telephone operators would not return to the IBEW for nearly fifty years. O'Connor continued her activity in the labor movement after her marriage in 1925 to Charles Austin Parker, a reporter for the Boston Herald.

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The couple secured the services of a housekeeper to care for their two daughters, Sarah, born in 1926, and Carol, born in 1928. An ardent supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Julia O'Connor Parker was associated with the labor division of the Democratic National Committee in the presidential campaigns of 1932, 1936, and 1940. Under the National Recovery Administration, as I B E W representative, she testified in 1934 at hearings to determine labor standards in the telephone industry. Parker assailed the dial system because it displaced telephone operators, caused extra effort for the customer, and demeaned telephone work. From 1939 until her retirement in 1957, Parker was employed as an organizer for the American Federation of Labor ( A F L ) . Required to spend much time away from her Boston home, she placed her daughters in boarding schools. After managing successful campaigns among chemical workers in New York state, she was assigned to the AFL's southern campaign, working throughout the south and southwest from 1944 until 1947. In early 1945, Parker toured industrial establishments in Britain as part of a four-woman delegation sent by the United States Office of War Information to study war production and labor conditions. The AFL transferred her in 1947 from the south to its Boston regional office, where for the remainder of her career she participated in campaigns to organize Bridgeport Brass, General Electric, and the Fore River shipyards. Surviving her husband by twelve years, Julia O'Connor Parker died in Wayland, Mass., in 1972 of arteriosclerotic heart disease. [The most useful sources on Julia O'Connor Parker's career are Life and Labor, publication of the National W T U L ; the papers of the National W T U L at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the IBEW's Jour, of Electrical Workers and Operators; and The Union Telephone Operator, publication of the Telephone Operators' Dept., IBEW. Julia O'Connor's "History of the Organized Telephone Operators' Movement" appeared in a six-part series in The Union Telephone Operator, Jan.-June 1921. See also Gladys Boone, The Women's Trade Union Leagues in Great Britain and the United States ( 1 9 4 2 ) ; Alice Henry, The Trade Union Woman ( 1 9 1 5 ) ; Mass. Minimum Wage Commission, Preliminary Report on the Effect of the Minimum Wage in Mass. Retail Stores, Bull. No. 12, Nov. 1916; Stephen H. Norwood, "Laboring Women: The New England Telephone Operators' Union 1 9 1 2 - 2 3 " (M.A. thesis, Columbia Univ., 1975). An interview with Sarah Parker Swerbilov yielded valuable information about her mother's career and family background. An obituary appeared in the Boston Globe, Aug. 29, 1972; death record provided by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] STEPHEN H. NORWOOD

PARKHURST, Helen, March 7, 1887-June 1, 1973. Educator. Helen Parkhurst, founder of the Dalton Plan of Education, was born in Durand, Wis., the eldest of three children (two boys and one girl) of Ida (Underwood) and James Henry Parkhurst. Her father, of English and Welsh ancestry, was a hotel keeper and civic leader. Her mother, of Scottish ancestry, was a teacher. Ida Parkhurst's influence was strong and supportive. Even as a young girl Helen knew she wanted to teach. She spoke later of a "fortunate childhood" made possible by parents who allowed her to "roam and learn at her own will." After attending primary and secondary schools in Durand, Helen Parkhurst received her B.S. from the River Falls Normal School of Wisconsin State College in 1907. Her career had begun even before college graduation, when she was hired in 1904 by the rural school district in Pepin County, Wis., to teach in a one-room school serving forty farm boys of all ages. She met this challenge by using each corner of the room for a different subject and by having the older boys help the younger ones when she was not instructing them. In 1909-10, while teaching at the Edison School in Tacoma, Wash., Parkhurst realized that some of the ideas she had developed originally out of necessity were innovative and productive. Influenced also by Mind in the Making, a book by an American psychologist and educator, Edgar James Swift, she continued to test and develop her ideas. In 1910 she formulated her Laboratory Plan, a system intended to reorganize the physical and social structure and alter the purpose of a school. It was later renamed the Dalton Plan after the Massachusetts town that in 1918 first used it in a public school. Parkhurst's plan was based on her belief that children learn most effectively in a situation that permits freedom of choice and allows them to progress at their own pace. To this end curriculum became secondary to living and working together in a shared, common community. She explained that "there is no such thing as a subject on the Dalton Plan. With us it is living on the Dalton Plan." Freedom, interaction with teachers and students of all ages, and budgeting of time were the three main features of the plan. Within that framework there were three objectives: to tailor each student's program to his or her interests and abilities, to enhance the student's sense of responsibility toward others, and to promote both independence and dependability. Instead of classrooms there were subject laboratories and each student was free to move from one to the other as individual pro-

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Parkhurst grams dictated. School work was broken up into contracts, one for each month of the year. Each student agreed to accomplish monthly assignments in different subjects at an individually determined pace. Although Parkhurst was determined to have her own school in which to put her theory into practice, this goal was not easily attained. For several years she trained others to teach—from 1911 to 1913 at the Central State Teachers College in Ellensburg, Wash., and from 1913 to 1915 as head of the primary training department at Central State Teachers College in Stevens Point, Wis. In 1914, on leave from Stevens Point, Parkhurst was appointed by the Wisconsin State Department of Education to report on the Montessori method of education. She enrolled m the International Montessori Teachers Training, in Rome, then being taught by Maria Montessori herself. Parkhurst became a disciple. Montessori later asked her to direct her exhibition classroom at the San Francisco World Exhibition. In 1917-18 Parkhurst headed the teacher training department of the Montessori training college in New York, the first person authorized by Montessori to train teachers. By then Parkhurst was living in New York City, where she had moved in 1916. With enormous energy, strong will, and great ambition, she set out to establish her school. In New York she gained the financial backing of some prominent businessmen, and started her first classes in a private school she named the Children's University School. Renamed the Dalton School in 1920, it was extraordinarily successful and educators soon came from all over the world to observe Parkhurst's plan in action. In 1922 her book, Education on the Dalton Plan, was published in England; it was subsequently translated into fifty-eight languages. During the 1920s and 1930s Parkhurst was honored for her work by many countries and was decorated by both the Chinese Republic and the Emperor of Japan, whose citation declared her "officially married to her work." In 1957 Queen Juliana of the Netherlands honored her for her influence on Dutch education. Though Parkhurst became internationally known, it was only in England and Japan, where several Dalton schools still existed in the 1970s, that the Dalton Plan really took hold. In the United States there was initial enthusiasm but, except for the school in Massachusetts and the prestigious one in New York, the plan as such was never accepted in its totality. Like other progressive education plans it emphasized flexibility, responsibility, and creative interaction, and like them it was modified and adapted to particular needs.

In 1942 Parkhurst resigned from the Dalton School after more than twenty years as its head, and went to Yale University (M.A., 1943), where she was the first Yale Fellow in Education. As a fellow, she taught sociology as well as continuing her own research. After 1947, Parkhurst entered yet another stage in her career, becoming an award-winning broadcasting celebrity. From 1947 to 1950 she did a weekly program, first on radio and later on television, called "Child's World," in which children discussed their problems. Other programs included "Growing Pains," a radio series for teenagers, and "The World of Sound," a program with blind children. She also made some 300 recordings with children on psychological subjects which were used in psychology courses throughout the country. Parkhurst's energy never slackened; from 1952 to 1954 she taught at the College of the City of New York and during the period from 1950 to 1963 she also found time to publish three books. Working fourteen to sixteen hours a day at the age of eighty-six, Parkhurst was writing a book about Montessori and another on her childhood memories when she died of a pulmonary embolism in New Milford, Conn., in 1973. A lecture hall at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point is dedicated to her memory. [The archives of the Dalton School in New York City contain much material, including unpublished lectures, reports, and an extensive bibliography on the Laboratory Plan and its implementation. Yale Univ. has tapes of some lectures given by Parkhurst while she was a Fellow in Education. Parkhurst's other books are And They Found Jimmy (1947), a novel; Exploring the Child's World (1951); Growing Pains (1962); and Undertow (1963 ). Biographical sources are few. Most helpful were papers, press releases, and biographical notes from the archives at the Univ. of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, where some of her papers and recordings are kept. See also Evelyn Dewey, The Dalton Laboratory Plan (1922) and the entry on Parkhurst in the Biog. Diet, of Educators (1978). Her brother, A. Alden Parkhurst, gave insights into early family relationships and into Helen Parkhurst's character and temperament. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 4, 1973; death record provided by Conn. Dept. of Health.] MARILYN

MOSS

FELDMAN

PARSONS, Louella Oettinger, Aug. 6, 1881Dec. 9,1972. Journalist. Louella O. Parsons, the influential Hollywood columnist, achieved a power few women of her time could approach. A New York Times obituary noted that she "ruled as a queen," and

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imperial titles aptly described both the range of Parsons's influence and the personal manner in which she exercised it in an industry that crowned and deposed the stars who ruled the American popular imagination. Born in Freeport, 111., to Joshua and Helen (Wilcox) Oettinger, of German and Jewish descent, Louella Oettinger's early life was thoroughly small town and middle class. Her father, who died when Louella was eight, had married into a clothing manufacturing family and was a prosperous clothier by the time of his death in 1890. Of five children born to the Oettingers, only Louella, the eldest child, and a younger brother survived. Growing up in Dixon, 111., and nearby towns, Louella remained in the narrow confines of the world to which she was born. She graduated from Dixon High School in 1901, attended Dixon College and Normal School, and, on Oct. 31, 1905, married a local realtor, John D. Parsons, with whom she had her only child, Harriet, in 1906. The marriage, never a happy one, ended, according to Parsons's account, with John Parsons's death in World War I. Some evidence, however, suggests a divorce. She was married for a second time, probably to Jack McCaffrey, a riverboat captain (Eells, pp. 3 8 40). But Parsons's romanticized versions of her life included neither the divorce nor a second unsuccessful marriage. Blurring the lines between fact and fantasy played an important part in the career Parsons began in 1910 as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. She supplemented her meager salary by writing scenarios for the pioneer motion picture production company, Essanay Studios, where she first met the movie people who would remain her friends and material for the rest of her career. The job at Essanay resulted in Parsons's first book, How to Write for the Movies (1915), a manual for aspiring screenwriters. But Parsons always considered herself a newspaperwoman first. In 1914 she began writing one of the earliest movie columns in the United States, for the Chicago Record-Herald. Thereafter, news for Parsons meant news about the movies and the people who made them. As she was developing this form of news into an art, both Parsons's power and that of her Hollywood subjects increased. She moved to New York in 1919 to write first for the New York Morning Telegraph and then for the New York American. In 1923 Parsons became movie editor of the Hearst-owned American, and in 1925 publisher William Randolph Hearst made her movie editor for Universal News Service. After a year spent in Palm Springs, Calif., recovering from tuberculosis, she moved her operations to Hollywood in 1926. From then on, her

special talent, Hearst's powerful support, and the enormous scope of the Hearst syndicate placed Louella O. Parsons at the center of a Hollywood world which each year grew in significance as a playground and battlefield of twentieth-century culture. Parsons developed a technique perfectly fitted to the requirements of this world in which actors and actresses became "personalities" whose lives and work merged to become mythological creations. Her columns freely mixed details about the private lives and public careers of her favorites, making them more accessible to an audience whose loyalty depended on its ability to identify with the stars. At the same time, she allowed her readers to experience vicariously the glamour of her subjects' lives. Parsons could make or destroy careers because few, even of the most prominent stars, could survive without the audience identification and participation which her column provided. Throughout the thirties and forties, Parsons consolidated her power and position (frequently challenged by competitors, above all by HEDDA H O P P E R ) as the liaison between Hollywood and the world. Her news reached readers across the country and abroad through a network of syndicated columns reported to have numbered over six hundred. Parsons's ambition was matched only by her energy. While writing a daily column, she frequently contributed features to movie magazines; hosted a number of successful radio programs, most notably "Hollywood Hotel" ( 1 9 3 4 - 3 8 ) ; appeared in a film of the same name; went on a theater tour; and wrote two semiautobiographical books, The Gay Illiterate (1944) and Tell It to Louella (1961). Parsons was often criticized—for her weight, her grammar, and her frequent factual errors— but she was feared, and her power awed even the great movie moguls. She was also loved, for her exuberance, her generosity, and her genuine commitment and service to the industry she publicized. "Tell It to Louella" became Parsons's informal by-line and few failed to obey. She loved to play with and entertain the greats of the world she managed—Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Rita Hayworth, among others— at the same time that she used them, sometimes viciously, for her own ends. With a network of informants, she worked tirelessly to describe to an eager public a world, part fact, part fiction, in which acting for a camera, frequent marriages and divorces, and extravagant galas and premieres all merged into a haze of illusion. On Jan. 5, 1930, Parsons married Henry Watson Martin, a physician. Their happy marriage lasted until his death in 1951. Her real and often public aifection for Docky, as she called

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him, and her lifelong pride in and solicitude for her daughter, Harriet, strong as they were, never interfered with her service to Hollywood. Through her marriage, Parsons became a deeply committed convert to Catholicism, a faith which provided her with strength and consolation through the height of her career and during her later lonely years in a changed Hollywood. Although she wrote her last by-line in 1964, the power and the glamour had faded by the late 1950s, and Parsons's efforts to keep up with the latest stars and the teenage rock music world were to no avail as Hollywood and Parsons had passed their zenith. "Hollywood," Parsons concluded in Tell It to Louella, "is and has been my life." She died after a long series of illnesses, of a stroke, in Santa Monica, Calif., in 1972. [Parsons's columns appeared in the L.A. Examiner, 1926-65. She also wrote Jean Harlow's Life Story (1937). Tapes of her radio broadcasts are available at the Doheny Library, Univ. of Southern Calif. The Reminiscences of Louella O. Parsons is in the Oral Hist. Coll., Columbia Univ. Parsons's published accounts of her life were abbreviated and embroidered. George Eells provides further essential details and some corrections in Hedda and Louella (1972). Biographical information is also contained in Thomas Wood, "The First Lady of Hollywood," Sat. Eve. Post, July 5, 1939; "Hollywood's Back Fence," Time, Jan. 24, 1944; and Current Biog., 1940. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (1975), and Ezra Goodman, The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood (1961), provide background on the world within which Parsons prospered. W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (1961) profiles the publisher whose support and newspaper power underwrote Parsons's influence. Obituaries appeared in the L.A. Times and the N.Y. Times, Dec. 10, 1972. A birth record was supplied by Stephenson Cty. Clerk, Freeport, 111. A marriage certificate for Parsons and Martin, from the Calif. Dept. of Health Services, gives evidence for a second marriage and gives her mother's maiden name as Wilcox, not Stine, as it appears in other sources. A death record was provided by the Calif. Dept. of Health Services.] PAULA S. FASS

PATTERSON, Alicia, Oct. 15, 1906-July 2, 1963. Newspaper editor and publisher. Alicia Patterson was born in Chicago to a Scots-Irish newspaper family whose beginning in the business she traced back to her greatgreat-grandfather, James Patrick, who founded an Ohio weekly in 1819. Her great-grandfather, Joseph Medill, directed the Chicago Tribune from 1855 to 1899; her grandfather, Robert W. Patterson, was an editor of the Tribune under Medill; and her father, Joseph Medill Patterson, was first an editor of the Tribune and later founder of the New York Daily News. More-

over, her father's sister, ELEANOH M E D I L L P A T owned and operated the Washington Times-Herald. Alicia Patterson was the second of three daughters of Joseph Patterson and his first wife, Alice (Higinbotham) Patterson, daughter of a partner in Chicago's Marshall Field & Company department store. She recalled her mother as a brave woman who had ridden in an airplane as early as 1911 and hunted on horseback. Alicia's earliest years were spent rather humbly on a farm in Libertyville, 111., where her father, avowing socialism, had exiled himself from the Tribune. He returned to the Tribune and a substantial income about 1910, and sent his four-year-old daughter for a time to Berlin to live with a family and learn German. During her childhood, Alicia's father tried to train her in personal courage with demanding tests, including jumping horses and high diving; she felt he raised her to be the son he did not have. Her early education was in Chicago, at the Francis Parker School and the University School for Girls, but she was later sent to a series of finishing schools. Dropped by schools in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in Maryland for infractions of rules, she surprised her parents by graduating second in her class from the Foxcroft School in Virginia. But she had not reformed; she was dropped from another school in Rome and, accompanied by her mother and a sister, led a prankish life in Europe until she was nineteen, when she returned to Chicago for her coming-out party. Even in her early adulthood her father persistently managed her life, although he did little to encourage her interest in the newspaper business. When she announced her desire for a career, however, he gave her a job on the New York Daily News, which he had founded in 1919. Beginning in 1927, she spent some months in the News promotion department before getting her chance as a reporter. A raw cub, she was assigned a major story on a divorce case and committed an error in the names of the principals that, so the story goes, involved the paper in a libel suit. In addition, she had displeased her father by joining her fellow reporters in the local speakeasies. She was peremptorily sacked and sent back to Chicago. Still directing her life, her father encouraged her marriage, in 1927, to James Simpson, Jr., son of the chairman of the board of Marshall Field & Company. They separated after a year and were divorced in 1930. Meanwhile, Patterson traveled to Indochina to hunt game, and, with her father, learned to fly. She became a transport pilot and, in 1930, set two women's TERSON,

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Patterson speed records for intercity flights. On Dec. 23, 1931, she married a friend of her father, Joseph W. Brooks, an insurance broker and aviator. She dabbled in journalism through the 1930s, writing articles on flying for the family's monthly magazine, Liberty, and returning to the Daily News in 1932 as a part-time book reviewer. The marriage to Brooks gradually dissolved and ended in divorce in 1938. Then in 1939 Patterson's life took a new, definite turn. On July 1, she married Harry F. Guggenheim, sixteen years her senior, heir to a copper fortune and a former ambassador to Cuba. She later called him "the man who emancipated me from purposelessness." He urged her to find a serious life's work and, because her talent and inclination lay in newspaper work, they scouted the east for a newspaper to buy. Ultimately they purchased the remnants of the short-lived Nassau Daily Journal, with a small plant in Hempstead, Long Island. Guggenheim held 51 percent of the stock in the new enterprise, and Alicia Patterson 49 percent, but from the start she was in full charge of creating the newspaper. Newsday had no corporate connection with the McCormick-Patterson enterprises and Joseph Patterson offered only informal counsel. Against his advice, Alicia Patterson produced a three-column tabloid in a neat, modern typographical format, which soon won awards. Through her policy of keeping separate columns for news and advertisements she improved the paper's appearance. She selected the name, Newsday, from entries in a contest. Newsday s first issue appeared on Sept. 3, 1940, in a printing of 30,000; there were 11,000 paid subscriptions. At the time, the new publisher hoped only to overtake the other daily in Nassau County, which had a circulation of nearly 32,000. This goal was reached by the time Newsday was two years old. Profitability was a more distant objective, and before the paper broke even, around 1947, it had required an investment of $750,000. But the costly early years had prepared the way for Newsday to take full advantage of the postwar population expansion in its two home counties, Nassau and Suffolk. Intense, irreverent coverage of local news, striking investigative journalism, the establishment of editions directed to particular areas, and aggressive circulation-seeking policies all contributed to its success. The paper expanded to a larger plant in Garden City, N.Y., in 1949; by 1954, its circulation exceeded 200,000. In her success, Patterson had the help of an able staff, but it was her decisions and, sometimes, her fiery temper, that shaped the paper. She intended, she said

in 1959, to make Newsday "readable, entertaining, comprehensive, informative, interpretive, lively, but still sufficiently serious-minded so that no Long Islander will feel compelled to read any New York City paper." Patterson was also responsible for the independent political character of Newsday. The paper supported both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, while on the local level it successfully opposed an established Republican machine. When in 1940 and 1960 she and her husband differed during a campaign, Guggenheim published a separate statement, while his wife offered Newsday's endorsement in an editorial. Her political independence was one of the causes of her growing estrangement from her father. Joseph Patterson, an early New Deal supporter, broke with Franklin D. Roosevelt on foreign policy, but Newsday continued to support the administration. His second marriage, to a long-time associate, the journalist Mary King (1885-1975), ended Alicia Patterson's hopes that she might eventually have a voice in operating the Daily News. About a year before his death in 1946, Joseph Patterson changed his will to leave control of the News to a trusteeship, with his wife sitting in a trustee's chair originally reserved for his daughter. Alicia Patterson spent her remaining years concentrating on Newsday, which, under her guidance, became the largest suburban newspaper in the country and the twelfth largest evening newspaper in the United States. For exposing a labor racketeer, the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1954. Patterson hoped one day to retire and be succeeded by her niece and nephew, Alice and Joseph Medill Patterson Albright. But on June 20, 1963, she entered Doctors Hospital in New York City for surgery on ulcers; she died twelve days later when doctors could not stop the bleeding. For the first time in 143 years no member of the Medill-McCormick-Patterson dynasty was running a newspaper. Harry Guggenheim took charge of Newsday as acting editor and publisher and remained its chief executive officer until May 1970, when he sold his interest to the Times Mirror Company, publishers of the Los Angeles Times. Although her chief legacy was the creation of a successful and intelligent newspaper, Alicia Patterson also provided in her will for the encouragement of young journalists. With a million-dollar endowment, the Alicia Patterson Fund has given a year of travel and study to dozens of its fellows. [The most detailed accounts of Alicia Patterson's life

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Pearce are her own "This Is the Life I Love," as told to Hal Burton, Sat. Eve. Post, Feb. 21, 1959 (source of the quotations); Charles Wertenbaker, "The Case of the Hot-Tempered Publisher," Sat. Eve. Post, May 12, 1951; "Alicia in Wonderland," Time, Sept. 13, 1954; and the entry in Current Biog., 1955. Obituaries appeared in Newsday, July 3, 1963; the JV.V. Times, July 3, 1963; Editor ir Publisher, July 13, 1963. Information on Newsday can be found in The Newsday Story (1977), a pamphlet published by the newspaper; Jerry Walker, "Alicia's Newsday Has 'The Patterson Touch,' " Editor ir Publisher, Aug. 14, 1948; and in the Pulitzer Prize exhibit files on microfilm in the journalism library, Columbia Univ. For background on the McCormick-Patterson family see John Tebbel, An American Dynasty (1947), and Leo E. McGivena and others, The News: The First Fifty Years of New York's Picture Newspaper (1969). A biobibliography prepared by Sarah Collins provided valuable assistance in the research for this article.] JAMES

BOYLAN

P E A R C E , Louise, March 5, 1885-Aug. 1959. Pathologist, physician.

10,

Louise Pearce, one of the principal figures in developing the drug tryparsamide to control African sleeping sickness, was bom in Winchester, Mass., the eldest of two children and only daughter of Susan Elizabeth (Hoyt) and Charles Ellis Pearce, a cigar and tobacco dealer. Both parents came from nearby Chelsea, Mass. The family moved to California some time after 1889, and Louise attended the Girls' Collegiate School in Los Angeles ( 1 9 0 0 - 0 3 ) . She received her A.B. in physiology and histology from Stanford University in 1907, and after spending two years as a student at the Boston University School of Medicine, entered the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with advanced standing in 1909. She received her M.D. in 1912 and then took a year's internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1913 she joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (later Rockefeller University) in New York City as a fellow in the laboratory of Simon Flexner, director of the Institute. Following Paul Ehrlich's introduction in 1910 of Salvarsan, an organic compound containing arsenic, for the treatment of syphilis, Flexner hoped to find new arsenical drugs that would be effective against sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis). The disease, which was caused by a microscopic parasite, Trypanosoma gambiense, and transmitted by the tsetse fly, was then disastrously prevalent in equatorial Africa. Flexner assigned Pearce and Wade Hampton Brown, a pathologist in his laboratory, to test compounds synthesized by two of the Institute's chemists, W . A. Jacobs and Michael Heidel-

berger. Finding a compound, later known as tryparsamide, to be highly effective in destroying the infectious agent in animals, Pearce and Brown announced the happy result in the Journal of Experimental Medicine in 1919. To test the drug on humans, Pearce went alone in May 1920 to what was then Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo. With laboratory and hospital facilities placed at her disposal, during the next few months she treated seventy-seven patients in all stages of the disease. Working on a scientifically planned program, beginning with graded single doses of tryparsamide, and following the results through microscopic tests, she achieved spectacular results: the parasites were driven from the circulating blood within days and totally eradicated within weeks. Mental symptoms cleared up and general health was restored in a large proportion of even the severest cases. This triumph of combined chemical, pathological, and clinical skills deeply impressed the Belgian government, which awarded Pearce the Order of the Crown of Belgium. In 1953 the still grateful Belgians summoned her to Brussels to receive the King Leopold II Prize—a check for $10,000—and a second decoration, the Royal Order of the Lion. Her three colleagues in the investigation were also honored. Pearce was promoted to the rank of associate member of the Rockefeller Institute in 1923. Thereafter her story is one of patiently detailed experimental study of major problems in the biology of infectious and inherited disease. Working closely with Wade Hampton Brown, she made important contributions to syphilology and to cancer research. From 1920 to 1928 the two investigators worked out a thorough description of experimental syphilis in rabbits, which they found resembled human syphilis in many respects. Their observations were therefore valuable to students of immunity in the human disease and to physicians engaged in treating syphilitic patients. They also discovered in one of their rabbits a small cancer of the scrotum which they were able to propagate by implanting bits of the diseased tissue in other rabbits. The Brown-Pearce tumor, for many years the only known transplantable tumor of the rabbit, was studied in cancer research laboratories all over the world. Around 1929 Pearce and Brown began the selective breeding of rabbits in order to study the congenital malformations and spontaneous diseases they had often observed in their animals. Three devastating epidemics of rabbit pox, a virus disease resembling human smallpox, delayed their progress, but Pearce and her junior colleagues isolated the virus—thus gaining for science from the disaster. The colony out-

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grew the Institute's animal house, and in 1935, Pearce, Brown, and hundreds of rabbits were transferred to the animal pathology branch in Princeton, N.J. By 1940 more than two dozen hereditary diseases and deformities were represented in the rabbit colony. By then Brown had suffered an incapacitating illness, and Pearce carried on the research alone. Following Brown's death in 1942, Pearce discontinued almost all breeding and began to write up their findings on achondroplasia and osteopetrosis. She took the remaining records with her when she retired in 1951, and published a few more papers, but the files contained far more data than she could work up; after her death they were destroyed. One of the foremost American women scientists of her day, Pearce received numerous honors. She was visiting professor of syphilology at Peiping Union Medical College ( 1 9 3 1 - 3 2 ) . A member of many medical and public organizations, including the scientific advisory council of the American Social Hygiene Association, she did much to advance the cause of women in medicine and science. Especially important was her contribution to the Woman's Medical College, Philadelphia, which she served first as an elected member of the Board of Corporators ( 1 9 4 1 - 4 6 ) and then as president (1946-51). Preeminently the professional physicianscientist, Dr. Pearce left few traces of her personality in the official record. Surviving friends recall her as a cordial and hospitable woman, who appreciated the social amenities, and had a fondness for fine clothes, jewelry, books, and art. A vigorous individual, possessed of an incisive mind, Louise Pearce not only held her own in conversation with male colleagues, but also enlivened the rather sedate atmosphere of the Rockefeller Institute. Pearce spent her last years at Trevenna Farm, the home she shared in Skillman, N.J., with the novelist Ida A. R. Wylie. A frequent vacationer in England and France, she fell ill on shipboard returning from Europe in 1959, and died a short time later in New York Hospital. [There is no collection of Pearce's papers, but her correspondence with Simon Flexner during her 1920 stay in Africa is in the Flexner Papers, Library of the Am. Philosophical Soc., Phila. There is a file on Louise Pearce, consisting of scattered correspondence, newspaper clippings, and photographs, in the Archives of the Medical College of Pa.; minutes of the Board of Corporators for the period 1941-51 are also available there. The Johns Hopkins Medical School has Pearce's personal collection of books on syphilis, which she bequeathed. Pearce's experiences in the Belgian Congo are recorded in "Studies on the Treatment of Human Trypanosomiasis with Tryparsamide," Jour, of Experimental Med., Dec. 1, 1921,

Supp. I. An extensive bibliography, and a photograph, are included in the memorial of Pearce by Marion S. Fay in Jour, of Pathology and Bacteriology, Oct. 1961, pp. 542-51. See also the memorials in Trans, and Studies of the College of Physicians of Phila., April 1961, pp. 167-68, and Jour. Am. Med. Women's Assoc., Aug. 1960, p. 793; for an account of the campaign against sleeping sickness see George W. Corner, A History of the Rockefeller Institute (1964), pp. 144-49. Useful information was provided by Thomas B. Turner of Johns Hopkins. Pearce's given name on both her birth certificate, which was supplied by the Mass. Dept. of Public Health, and in the 1900 U.S. Census appears as Louisa. See also Boston City Directory, 18801890. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Aug. 11, 1959; confirmation of death date, which is sometimes given as Aug. 9, 1959, came from N.Y.C. Dept. of Health.] GEORGE W . CORNER

P E L L , Anna Johnson. See Johnson Pell.

WHEELER, Anna

P E N N I N G T O N , Mary Engle, Oct. 8, 1 8 7 2 Dec. 27, 1952. Chemist, refrigeration specialist. Mary Pennington, authority on refrigeration of perishable food, was born in Nashville, Tenn., the elder of two daughters of Henry and Sarah B. (Molony) Pennington. Soon after her birth, the family moved to West Philadelphia to be nearer to Sarah Pennington's Quaker family, the Engles. There Henry Pennington established a large label manufacturing business and shared his hobby of gardening with his older daughter. It was a library book on medical chemistry, not botany, however, that sparked an interest in science in the twelve-year-old Mary, who startled her teachers by requesting instruction in chemistry. After graduation from high school, she gained admission in 1890 to the Towne Scientific School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied chemistry and biology. Her parents, although surprised by her pursuit of a scientific career, supported her studies. By 1892 Pennington had completed the requirements for a B.S., but was denied the degree because of her sex, receiving instead a certificate of proficiency. She continued her graduate work, majoring in chemistry, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1895. After two more years at the university, as a fellow in botany, she then spent a year at Yale as a fellow in physiological chemistry. Returning to Philadelphia in 1898, the enterprising Pennington was not discouraged by the lack of opportunities for women scientists. After consulting a number of local physicians

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and obtaining their promises of business, she opened her own Philadelphia Clinical Laboratory. There she conducted bacteriological analyses and quickly won a reputation which led to her appointment as a lecturer at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, a position she held until 1906. She was also the head of the city health department's bacteriological laboratory, where her first assignment directed her to the problem of impure milk. Her research into methods of preserving dairy products led her to develop standards of milk inspection that were subsequently adopted by health boards throughout the country. In persuading producers and processors that cleanliness and improved methods of preservation could be profitable, Pennington developed the approach she would follow in ensuing years. Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, chief of the Bureau of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture, and an old friend of the Pennington family, followed Mary Pennington's Philadelphia career with interest. By 1905 he had asked her help in checking on reports of successes in preserving food by refrigeration. She passed civil service examinations as M. E. Pennington, and in 1907, before Department of Agriculture officials were aware of her sex, she was appointed as a bacteriological chemist. Wiley named her chief of his bureau's new Food Research Laboratory in 1908. In the same year she attended the First International Congress of Refrigeration, surprising the other delegates —all male—by delivering an address in Wiley's place. At Pennington's insistence, the new laboratory was established in Philadelphia. Its mission was to aid implementation of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Under Pennington's direction, it became a center for research in the handling and storage of food. Her early studies, aimed at devising methods to prevent the spoilage of eggs, poultry, and fish, resulted in the development of techniques subsequently adopted by the food warehousing, packaging, transportation, and distribution industries. Pennington supervised a staff that eventually grew from four to fifty-five, but always remained involved in the practical work of the laboratory as well as in negotiations between government agencies and food dealers. After firsthand investigations of the poultry industry, for example, she invented a sharp-pointed knife whose use in killing chickens made it easier to pluck and handle them. Pennington came to public attention during World War I when she conducted experiments with railroad refrigerator cars. The story spread that she rode in the cars to check their tempera-

tures; in fact, she rode in the caboose. Twentyfive years later refrigerator cars were still built according to the standards she recommended in 1917. Her work during the war with the perishable products division of Herbert Hoover's Food Administration earned her a Notable Service Medal. In 1919 Pennington left the Department of Agriculture to direct the research and development department of the American Balsa Company, manufacturers of insulating materials, in New York City. The job paid double her government salary. Three years later she again set out on her own, establishing a consulting office in New York. Her clients were packing houses, shipping firms, and warehousers, who sought her expertise in the handling, transportation, and storage of perishables. The work sent her on trips across the United States; she spent about half her time on the road, logging up to 50,000 miles a year. During her years as a consultant, Pennington continued her pioneering work on food preservation, and developed a new interest—frozen foods. Her accomplishments ranged from the design and construction of refrigerated warehouses, coolers, and household and industrial refrigerators to original research on frozen poultry and frozen food processing. Over the years, she wrote and published extensively in technical journals, government bulletins, and magazines; she was also coauthor of a book, Eggs (1933). Known widely for her pioneering work, she received several honors, including, in 1940, the American Chemical Society's Garvan medal, which annually honors a woman chemist. She was the first female member of the American Society of Refrigerating Engineers and the first woman elected to the Poultry Historical Society's Hall of Fame. She never retired; at the time of her death she was vice president of the American Institute of Refrigeration, and still maintained her New York office. Pennington lived a quiet personal life, returning from her frequent travels to a penthouse apartment on Riverside Drive. There she raised flowers on her terrace, and enjoyed serving her friends foods bought frozen, according to principles she had developed. She remained all her life a member of the Society of Friends. Mary Pennington died in New York at the age of eighty. [Correspondence documenting Pennington's work in the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture is in the files of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Nat. Archives. A number of her bulletins, articles, and speeches are listed in the Diet. Catalog of the Nat. Agricultural Library, 1862-1965, vol. 4 7 ( 1 9 6 9 ) . For biographical

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material see Edna Yost, American Women of Science (1943); Alice Goff, Women Can Be Engineers (1946); Ethel Echternach Bishop, "Mary Engle Pennington," in Wyndham Miles, Am. Chemists and Chemical Engineers (1976); Barbara Heggie, "Profiles: Ice Woman," New Yorker, Sept. 6, 1941. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 28, 1952; Chem. and Engineering News, Jan. 1953; Refrigerating Engineering, Feb. 1953; Am. Egg and Poultry Rev., Jan. 1953; and Ice and Refrigeration, Feb. 1953. Information was also furnished by Mary Betts Elderfield and Ethel Echternach Bishop.] VIVIAN

WISER

PEREIRA, Irene Rice, Aug. 5, 1907-Jan. 11, 1971. Painter. Irene Rice Pereira, a leading geometric abstract painter in the 1930s and 1940s, was born in Chelsea, Mass. She was the second of four children and three daughters of Hilda (Vanderbilt) Rice, a native Bostonian of Dutch-German descent, and Emanuel Rice, a Pole who had immigrated to the United States as a child. When Irene was about five her father moved the family and his grain business to Pittsfield, Mass. Soon after, they settled in nearby Great Barrington, where Emanuel Rice owned a bakery. Approximately three years later the family moved again, spending a year in Boston before settling in Brooklyn, N.Y. Hilda Rice sketched routinely at home, a habit that encouraged her two older daughters, Juanita and Irene, to pursue painting as a career. Irene Rice attended Brooklyn's Eastern District High School, switching from the academic to the commercial course in 1922 when her father died. Forced to work as a secretary to help support the family, she attended night classes in dress design at the Traphagen School, in art and design at Washington Irving High School, and in literature at New York University. From childhood on she maintained an interest in literature and a determination to become a poet. Although still employed as a secretary, by the age of nineteen Rice was determined to be an artist. In 1927 she enrolled in night classes at the Art Students League, where she studied first with Richard Lahey and then with Jan Matulka, in whose class she met the painter Burgoyne Diller and the sculptor David Smith. (Smith remained a close friend throughout his life.) Although she received conventional instruction in life drawing, painting, and composition, Rice was also exposed to more up-to-date ideas, particularly Cubism. In 1929 Irene Rice married Humberto Pereira, a commercial painter born in Barbados. They settled in Greenwich Village, where she was to

reside nearly all her life. Completing her studies at the League by 1931, she left New York and embarked on a trip to Europe and North Africa. In Paris Pereira studied briefly at the Academie Moderne where Amedee Ozenfant was then serving as critic. Ozenfant was a founder of Purism, the art movement that, in the aftermath of Cubism, sought a reconciliation between pure form and the imagery of real life. Her experience at the Academie encouraged Pereira, when she returned to New York in 1932, to begin a series of paintings of machinemade objects: generators, funnels, ventilators. The major painting of this period is Man and Machine (1936). Another significant experience during the year abroad occurred on an expedition to the North African desert. Her deep response there to the infinity of space equaled in intensity the perception she had formed, as a child, of light as the embodiment of life-giving spirit. Following her return to New York, Pereira began to emerge as an important artist. Three individual exhibitions were held in 1933, 1934, and 1935 at the American Contemporary Art Gallery in New York City. In 1936 and 1937 she taught design synthesis and a materials lab at the Design Laboratory, a school founded under the Federal Art Project and planned to resemble the Bauhaus, uniting fine arts with commercial design. She also began to explore the physical properties of a broad range of materials, including plastic, glass, metal, and paper. Turning completely to abstraction in 1937, she attempted to represent in her painting her response to light and space, which had evolved into a personal vision of the structure and meaning of the universe. Believing that light, shadow, and space might be expressed directly by materials and construction rather than represented illusionistically, by 1938 Pereira began to use geometric forms placed nonillusionistically flush with the surface, the whole given textural interest by a variety of paint techniques and materials. At the same time, she sought aesthetic equivalents for modern mathematical and scientific discoveries. By 1940 she was experimenting with multiplane constructions using transparent materials, principally parchment and glass. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Pereira was involved with the politics of contemporary art in the United States and was an active member of the American Artists' Congress. Her work was appreciated by both camps of advanced thinking among artists of the pre-World War II generation, the surrealists and the post-cubist abstractionists, although she was stylistically closer to the latter group. In 1939 she showed both at the Julien Levy Gallery—Levy was the earliest champion of surrealism in New York—and with

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the American Abstract Artists, a group committed to geometric abstraction. Three years later Pereira's paintings were included in exhibitions at Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim's gallery where Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and André Breton served as jurors for group shows and where the younger American artists of what was to become the New York School exhibited their work. In 1944 she received her own show at this gallery and first exhibited her paintings on glass in two planes. Pereira's journey to artistic individuality in these years was accompanied by personal isolation. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1938, and her younger sister, Dorothy, with whom she had close bonds, died in 1941. However, in 1942 Pereira married George Wellington Brown, an engineer, with whom she shared her growing interest in experimentation with materials. Professionally, she continued to be known as I. Rice Pereira. Appreciated by friends for her fastidious taste, Pereira excelled as a cook and dressed fashionably, often in clothes made from her own designs. Simultaneously working on several pieces, she regularly painted nine hours a day and wrote at night. A mastectomy in 1943 forced her to become ambidextrous. Major recognition came as Pereira's paintings were bought by museums and included in important group shows, for instance, "Fourteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art (1946). In 1953 she was given a major retrospective by the Whitney Museum of American Art. However, during the 1950s Pereira was rejected by modernism's major New York forum, the Museum of Modern Art, because of what were perceived as her philosophical and aesthetic differences from the then prominent New York School. Divorced from her second husband in 1950, Pereira married the Irish poet and translator George Reavey, who introduced her to literary circles where she felt more at home than in the New York art world of the time. She found museum, gallery, and magazine people increasingly involved with "chaos, and the disappearance of man into a void," and with existentialism rather than with the idealistic philosophy (particularly that of Giordano Bruno) by which she was influenced. Her philosophy was elaborated in several books, including Light and the New Reality (1951) and The Transformation of Nothing and the Paradox of Space (1952). Divorced from Reavey in 1959 and still alienated from the art world, Pereira found comradeship with such prominent women in literature and the arts as Caresse Crosby, Frances Steloff, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, Charmion

von Wiegand, and Sybil Moholy-Nagy. In 1963 she converted to Catholicism. Suffering from emphysema, Pereira was forced by deteriorating health to abandon her beloved Greenwich Village. She died in 1971 in Marbella, Spain, where she had been under the care of her brother. [The Irene Rice Pereira Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, contain autobiographical MSS., correspondence, and diaries. These are available on microfilm at the Archives of Amer. Art. in Washington, D.C. The Emily Genauer Papers at the Archives contain important letters describing Pereira's philosophy. Pereira's published writings include The Nature of Space (1956); The Lapis (1957); Crystal of the Rose (1959), a volume of poems; The Transcendental Formal Logic of the Infinite: The Evolution of Cultural Forms (1966). The best collected bibliography is in the catalog published by the Andrew Crispo Gallery in 1976. Important secondary sources are John I. H. Baur, Loren Maclver, I. Rice Pereira (1953), the catalog of the Whitney show; Current Biog., 1953; James Harithas, "I. Rice Pereira, American Painter-Writer," Vogue, June 1970, p. 129; Gilbert Rohde, "The Design Laboratory," Am. Mag. of Art, Oct. 1936, pp. 638-43; and Eleanor Tufts, Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists (1974), pp. 233-38. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 13, 1971, and Newsweek, Jan. 25, 1971. Additional information has been supplied by James Rice, the artist's brother, and Djelloul Marbrook, her nephew.] ELISABETH

SUSSMAN

PERKINS, Frances, April 10, 1880-May 14, 1965. Social reformer, federal official. The first female cabinet member in the nation's history, Frances Perkins brought to her position as secretary of labor three decades of commitment to social reform. Of Franklin D. Roosevelt's original cabinet appointments, only she and Harold L. Ickes endured from 1933 to 1945. Born in Boston, Mass., she was the older of two daughters. She was christened Fannie Coralie Perkins, but later changed her name first to Frances C. Perkins and then, simply, to Frances Perkins. When she married in 1913, she insisted upon retaining her maiden name, a decision that she subsequently defended in court. The daughter of Frederick W. and Susan (Bean) Perkins, Frances Perkins grew up in a comfortable, middle-class, Republican household of devoted Congregationalists whose origins reached back to the farms in northern Maine. Two years after her birth, the family moved from Boston to Worcester where her father started a wholesale-retail stationer's business. In Worcester, Perkins received her primary

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and secondary education; her father enrolled her in the Worcester Classical High School, an overwhelmingly male institution. From 1898 to 1902, Perkins earned her A.B. at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. Although she majored in chemistry and physics, she was particularly influenced by an economic history course with Anna May Soule: Soule's students surveyed working conditions in industrial Holyoke, and they also read Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, a book to which Perkins would repeatedly return. In her senior year, she heard an address by FLORENCE KELLEY, general secretary of the National Consumers' League, and it was Kelley, recalled Perkins, who "first opened my mind to the necessity for and the possibility of work which became my vocation" (Columbia Oral History Coll., Book 2, p. 260). Upon leaving Mount Holyoke, Perkins moved through a series of part-time teaching positions, engaged in volunteer work with various social organizations in Worcester, taught for a full year at Monson (Mass.) Academy, and then in the autumn of 1904 accepted an offer to teach physics and biology at the Ferry Hall School in Lake Forest, 111. She began to spend her free hours at Chicago settlement houses, especially Hull House. Making her rounds to collect wages for workers who had been cheated, she also visited the homes of the poor and received her first exposure to labor unions. Perkins headed east in 1907, and for the next two years she served as general secretary of the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association. While in Philadelphia, she joined the Socialist party, and she also found time for graduate courses in economics and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Influenced by Simon N. Patten, she came to the conclusion that practical remedies—not the more visionary doctrines of the socialists—held out the best chance for improving the lot of the nation's labor force. In the election of 1912 she supported not Eugene V. Debs but Woodrow Wilson. In the meantime, Perkins had left Philadelphia for New York City, the place she would call home until her death. Recipient of a fellowship from the Russell Sage Foundation, she participated in a survey of the Hell's Kitchen district during the summer of 1909, earned an A.M. in economics and sociology at Columbia University (1910), and published her first article, "Some Facts Concerning Certain Undernourished Children," in The Survey (Oct. 1910). Of far greater significance, Perkins succeeded Pauline Goldmark as secretary of the New York Consumers' League (1910-12). Perkins's tenure with the Consumers' League,

though brief, was extraordinarily eventful. Working closely with Florence Kelley, Perkins drew attention to sweatshop conditions in bakeries and lobbied in Albany for industrial reform. She also taught at Adelphi College, took additional courses at Columbia, marched in suffrage parades, and spoke at street corners on behalf of votes for women. Moreover, she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of March 25, 1911, in which 146 workers, mainly women and children, died. Perkins emerged from the experience with unshakable memoriesmemories of young women poised on window ledges in attitudes of prayer before they jumped to their deaths. Aroused to a new burst of energy, Perkins in 1912 worked for passage of a fifty-four-hour bill in the New York legislature. Thanks in part to the cooperation she received from State Senator Alfred E. Smith, the measure came to a vote. At that point, however, an amendment was tacked on that exempted canneries from the fifty-fourhour limitation. Faced with the choice of swallowing this watered-down version, or, as Kelley recommended, scuttling the entire proposition, she accepted compromise. Perkins, as a friend approvingly described her, was "a half-loaf girl: take what you can get now and try for more later" (Martin, p. 98). Perkins had her bill, and the next year cannery workers were also covered. In the aftermath of the Triangle fire, Perkins resigned as secretary of the New York Consumers' League (she continued to sit on the board of directors) and took a similar position with the Committee on Safety of the City of New York, an organization designed to aid the State Factory Investigating Commission. Traveling throughout the state, Perkins unmasked employers who were jeopardizing the health and safety of their workers. By the time the Commission had disbanded in 1915, the New York legislature had passed a number of progressive measures. These successes, her biographer has noted, led Perkins "to develop a lifelong conviction that the best way to improve conditions for workers was through legislation, not unions" (Martin, p. 120). In a private ceremony on Sept. 26, 1913, Frances Perkins married Paul Caldwell Wilson, an economist for the Bureau of Municipal Research in New York. Some time in the spring of 1915, she lost an infant shortly after its birth but then, in 1916, a daughter—Susanna Winslow Wilson—was born. Even with her new responsibilities as wife and mother, Perkins kept busy with unpaid jobs. In 1918, however, her husband lost most of his money through imprudent investments, and volunteer work was no longer

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a possibility. During the 1920s, her husband became ever more susceptible to prolonged depression and sporadic employment. From 1930 to his death in 1952, Paul Wilson spent considerably more than half his time in institutions. Perkins paid him almost weekly visits, even when secretary of labor. Never self-pitying about her predicament, Perkins was fortified by a deep religious faith (she had become a devout Episcopalian); she was also sustained by the causes to which she was so strongly devoted. When Alfred E. Smith ran for governor in 1918, Perkins had worked in his campaign. Smith triumphed, and he appointed her to an $8,000-a-year position as a member of the New York State Industrial Commission. The first woman to occupy this post, and the highestpaid state employee in the United States, Perkins took charge of the Bureau of Mediation and Arbitration, reorganized the Factory Inspection Division, and went into the field to settle strikes. At Smith's urging, she formally joined the Democratic party and traveled to San Francisco in 1920 for her first Democratic National Convention. Over the next three decades, she exerted influence upon Democrats to include social legislation in the party platform, particularly legislation affecting women. When Smith lost his 1920 reelection bid, Perkins marked time as executive secretary of the Council on Immigrant Education, and then came back to her old position when Smith, in 1922, won the first of three successive gubernatorial contests. On the New York State Industrial Board (previously called the Industrial Commission), Perkins administered the Workmen's Compensation Act: in this capacity, she almost invariably sided with those who had been injured. Moreover, she concerned herself with child labor. On Jan. 1, 1926, Smith named her to the chairmanship of the Industrial Board, and two years later he appointed her industrial commissioner of the state of New York, an office to which Franklin D. Roosevelt also appointed her during his two terms ( 1 9 2 9 - 3 3 ) as governor. Using the leverage her powerful offices allowed, Perkins from 1927 to 1933 helped give New York state a reputation as a model of progressive approaches to employer-employee relations. Restoring the New York Bureau of Women in Industry, she advocated protective legislation for women rather than the Equal Rights Amendment advocated by Alice Paul (1885-1977) and the National Woman's party. She also watched with satisfaction as the fifty-four-hour law became forty-eight, cheered the extension to all workers of one day's rest in seven, and strengthened factory inspections. Although frustrated by the legislature's failure to enact a minimum

wage law, she kept this issue at the top of her reform agenda. With the stock market crash of 1929, Perkins faced new tests. Spending more time in Albany, she enrolled Susanna in private school, and also continued to retain governesses. Appalled by Herbert Hoover's optimistic unemployment estimates, she denounced the president's cautious response to the depression. Meanwhile, she urged Governor Roosevelt to act. As one of the governor's inner circle, she sat with the New York Committee on the Stabilization of Industry, testified in Washington on behalf of the WagnerGarner Emergency Relief and Construction Act, battled for state unemployment insurance, advocated regional solutions to joblessness, and assisted New York's Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. Sent to Great Britain by Roosevelt, she studied that nation's public employment offices and system of unemployment compensation. A frequent guest in the Roosevelt home, Perkins by 1932 had fully recovered from an initial skepticism about the governor, a skepticism dating back to the days when, as a young assemblyman, he had initially dragged his heels about the state's fifty-four-hour law. Perkins never hesitated in backing Roosevelt's presidential ambitions, and she openly supported him well in advance of the Chicago nominating convention. But because her husband's health was reaching a particularly critical juncture, her role in the campaign was limited. In the wake of Roosevelt's triumph, rumors began to circulate that Perkins might well become the first woman appointed to the cabinet. When she learned that women such as J A N E ADDAMS, GRACE A B B O T T , and M A R Y DEWSON were pushing for her nomination as secretary of labor, Perkins wavered. Believing that a person from the ranks of organized labor should receive the appointment, she suggested that a female trade unionist be named. As her resistance crumbled, she wanted Roosevelt to know that she expected the administration to dedicate itself to liberal social policies and that she would have to spend her weekends with her family in New York. Unfazed, Roosevelt insisted she accept, for he considered her "his most loyal friend," a person who had "no axe . . . to grind" (Bernstein, p. 10). Perkins at last relented. "I had been taught long ago by my grandmother," she recalled, "that if anybody opens a door, one should always go through" (Bernstein, p. 10). Perkins entered the portal, and on March 4, 1933, she was sworn in at the age of fifty-two. When organized labor learned of the appointment, the reaction, as Robert Moses put it, was "a good deal like that of habitués of a waterfront

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saloon toward a visiting lady slummer—grim, polite, and unimpressed" (Fortune, p. 78). Perkins fielded the criticism from labor leaders graciously, humbly indicated that she considered her position anomalous, and lauded William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor. Her performance was effective, and labor soon learned that the broad-faced, earnest woman in the tricorn hat was a friend. From 1933 to 1945, Perkins's devotion to Roosevelt was unflagging. When Roosevelt addressed labor, Perkins almost invariably assisted with the speech. As the New Deal took shape, Perkins helped draft legislation, including the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the public works section (Title II) of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Walsh-Healey Government Contracts Act, the Social Security Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Roosevelt valued her advice in making several of his appointments, and he depended on her to maintain harmonious relations with union leaders. At Perkins's urging, Roosevelt brought the United States into the International Labor Organization in 1934. Perkins also displayed an adroitness in implementing New Deal legislation, and her efforts on behalf of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) were especially herculean. When, for instance, she attempted to address steel workers in Homestead, Pa., neither the employers nor town officials would provide her with a suitable hall. Chased away from the mill, she spotted the United States flag flying atop the local post office. Marching resolutely onto federal property with a throng of steel workers trailing in her wake, she fielded questions about NRA, listened attentively as workers complained of United States Steel's coercive tactics, and assured the men they now had the right to organize and bargain collectively. Employers, distressed by Perkins's prolabor stance, frequently accused her of encouraging union violence. Perkins, in response, held that "collective bargaining . . . and labor's efforts to organize are not disorder" (Fortune, p. 7). During the bloody labor wars of 1934—the San Francisco Dock Strike, the Minneapolis Truck Strike, the Great Textile Strike—she leaned on employers to bargain in good faith. Knowing full well that owners had far more power than their employees, she publicly upbraided some of the nation's most recalcitrant executives. Candid talk and determined action earned Perkins the enmity of the political right, and in 1939 Representative J. Parnell Thomas offered a resolution instructing the House Judiciary

Committee to inquire whether she should be impeached for refusing to deport Harry Bridges, the Pacific coast longshoremen's leader accused of being a communist. In a dramatic appearance before the Judiciary Committee, Perkins called for fair play for the embattled Bridges, and Thomas's impeachment effort fizzled. Right-wingers had no legitimate reason to worry about Perkins's alleged radicalism. Just as she deplored hardheaded employers, she exhibited little patience with militant unionists or with labor's fratricidal combat. Her efforts to unite the AFL and the CIO inspired John L. Lewis to call her "woozy in the head." Toward the Communist party, she expressed disdain. Its principles and methods, she once stated, were "destructive and disintegrating . . . unsound and untrue" (Fortune, p. 94). Perkins made some of her greatest contributions during the New Deal years, not to abstruse philosophical debate, but to the unglamorous, day-to-day work of rebuilding the Department of Labor. Under Perkins's guidance, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was purged of racketeers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was greatly expanded, the Division of Labor Standards was established, the Women's and Children's Bureaus turned in highly competent performances, and an upgraded Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service gained the confidence of most labor leaders. While union spokesmen could not always afford to extol her in public, most came to feel that the Department of Labor had developed into an effective instrument of government—one that promoted the welfare of wage earners. To feminists, however, Perkins had erred when she publicly stated that during the depression married working women should leave their jobs so that unemployed men could be hired. That the labor department was led by a woman through the nation's most severe depression never disappeared as an issue, but it certainly receded. Those who attended the Broadway musical "I'd Rather Be Right" must have considered ludicrous its portrayal of the cabinet's only female member as a person interested solely in chitchat. The contrary was true: she had followed her father's advice not to squander her time "with vaporings" (Fortune, p. 78). Typical Perkins speeches contained not idle speculation but facts and figures, leading one reporter to describe her as a "colorless woman who talked as if she swallowed a press release" (N.Y. Times, May 15, 1965). While she could be pedantic to the point of being schoolmarmish, she could also be feisty and humorous. Once she was asked whether her sex had handicapped her in public life. "Yes,"

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Perkins she replied, "in climbing trees" (N.Y. Times, May 15, 1965). At the outbreak of World War II, Perkins balanced her disdain for the "outrageous inhumanity of the Axis nations" (Survey, Feb. 1946, p. 38) with a desire to uphold gains made by the working class during the New Deal years. She tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Roosevelt and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover from fingerprinting aliens, opposed the forced conscription of labor, and fought to uphold labor standards despite the exigencies of total mobilization. On women's issues, she continued to steer a moderate course: she opposed the registration of female workers for national labor service; she spoke against the creation of child care centers under the wartime Lanham Act; and, to the dismay of more advanced feminists, she once again opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. With the death of President Roosevelt, Perkins served briefly under Harry S Truman. Resigning from Labor effective July 1, 1945, she returned to duty when Truman asked her to join the Civil Service Commission; she served in this capacity until the inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. In the meantime, Perkins augmented her income by delivering public lectures, most of them on university campuses. She also found time to write The Roosevelt I Knew (1946, 1964), a book, as she conceded, unabashedly "biased in his favor." On Dec. 31, 1952, her husband died, and Perkins was now free to leave New York City for longer periods of time. In the fall of 1957 at the age of seventy-seven, she began an affiliation with Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and her professorship there lasted until her death, in New York City following a series of strokes, in May 1965. Throughout her career, Perkins displayed considerable modesty toward her own accomplishments. She should have been less selfeffacing, for hers had been a remarkable life. Her selfless dedication to social justice had been unwavering. Her imprint upon wages and hours legislation, social security, and the Department of Labor had been enormous. She had made her way through a world of men without losing a strong sense of her own identity in particular, or her commitment to the interests of women in general. Resolute without being doctrinaire, she had been, as her college motto had enjoined her to be, "stedfast"—steadfast in creating a more just industrial society. That was to be her most enduring monument. [Frances Perkins's papers were dispersed to several repositories, notably the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park. The most significant collection outside

the Nat. Archives, however, is at Columbia Univ., especially her 5,000-page deposition for the Columbia Oral History Coll. The Dept. of Labor Records at the Nat. Archives are essential, in particular those of the Office of the Secretary: General Subject File. There are interesting glimpses of Perkins in the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service Records, at the Federal Records Center, Suitland, Md., as well as in the Franklin D. Roosevelt MSS. Perkins began work on a biography of Alfred E. Smith, which Matthew and Hannah Josephson completed as Al Smith, Hero of the Cities: A Political Portrait Drawing upon the Papers of Frances Perkins ( 1 9 7 0 ) . Perkins's articles are voluminous in number, almost always succinct, and tend to recite findings of surveys in which she participated. Her livelier, more self-revealing efforts include "Do Women in Industry Need Special Protection?" Survey, Feb. 15,1925, pp. 5 2 9 - 3 1 ; "Eight Years as Madame Secretary," Fortune, Sept. 1941, pp. 76-79ff. ; and "The People Mattered," Survey, Feb. 1946, pp. 3 8 - 3 9 , a warm tribute to Harry Hopkins. Of secondary works on Perkins, the most exhaustive is George W. Martin's highly favorable biography, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins ( 1 9 7 6 ) . Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 19331941 ( 1 9 7 0 ) , is a rich evocation of labor struggles during the 1930s and of Perkins's role therein. Helpful articles on Perkins's earlier years include Augusta W. Hinshaw, "The Story of Frances Perkins," Century, Sept. 1927, pp. 596-605, and Inis W. Jones, "Frances Perkins, Industrial Crusader," World's Work, April 1930, pp. 64-67, 114. For her years as secretary of labor see Russell Lord, "Madame Secretary: A Profile," New Yorker, Sept. 2, 9, 1933, a generally favorable treatment, and Marguerite Young's hostile attack, "Frances Perkins, Liberal Politician," Am. Mercury, Aug. 1934, pp. 3 9 8 - 4 0 7 . Of the many obituaries see in particular N.Y. Times, May 15, 1965. Perkins gave her birth year as 1882, but the birth record provided by the Mass. Dept. of Public Health gives 1880.] CHARLES

H.

TROUT

PERRIN, Ethel, Feb. 7, 1871-May 15, 1962. Physical education specialist. Ethel Perrin was born to Ellen (Hooper) and David Perrin, a merchant, in Needham, Mass. She had a brother eight years her senior. Educated in private schools, Perrin enrolled at the Howard Collegiate Institute, a boarding school in West Bridgewater, Mass., in 1888. There she was first exposed to formal physical training in twice-weekly lessons given in a makeshift gymnasium by a graduate of Dudley Allen Sargent's Boston gymnastics school. Sargent's method reflected the period's interest in formal gymnastics and in the curative effect of exercise for women. Graduating in 1890, Perrin enrolled at Amy Morris Homans's fledgling Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (BNSG). There she and Senda Berenson, who also had an illustrious

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Perrin career in physical education, were strongly influenced by Homans's conviction that physical training prepared women physically and mentally for motherhood. Perrin became a partisan of Swedish gymnastics, which was taught at the school "as a sort of religion." After completing her training in 1892, Perrin was invited to teach at the BNSG. She later described the Swedish system as the "I yell, you jump method." During her years at BNSG Perrin coauthored One Hundred and Fifty Gymnastic Games (1902) with five other BNSG alumni, and, with Mary Seely Starks, another graduate, wrote A Handbook of Rhythmical Balance Exercises (1906). In 1899 she represented the school at the Conference on Physical Training organized at the behest of the National Education Association (NEA). The conference developed the principle of modification—the belief that men's sports should be modified to suit women's perceived physical and social limitations. This theory, which dominated women's sports through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, guided Perrin's thinking throughout the rest of her career. After leaving the BNSG in 1906 Perrin substituted as director of physical education at Smith College (1906-07) and at the University of Michigan (1907-08). During this period she began to modify her approach to teaching gymnastics, which became more informal and individualized. In 1908 she became the girls' physical education director at Detroit's Central High School, in charge of the first girls' gymnasium in the city's schools. A year later she was appointed supervisor of physical education for the Detroit public schools. There she instituted a program of nonspecialized, modified, minimally competitive, and largely intramural sports for girls, while building a department of 7 professionals into one of 365. Remaining in Detroit until 1923 (the last three years as assistant director of health education), Perrin gained influence nationwide through her writings and other activities. The State of Michigan Course of Study in Physical Education, which she designed in 1914 with Wilbur P. Bowen and others, was used across the United States, becoming a model for public school physical education courses. Active in such young or expanding organizations as the NEA, the American Physical Education Association (APEA), and the Middle West Physical Education Society, Perrin participated in shaping their policies and helped to modernize and professionalize her field. In 1920 she became the first female vice president of the APEA. When a coalition of government, community, and education groups organized in 1923 as the National

Amateur Athletic Federation (NAAF)—becoming the country's largest athletic association— Perrin was named an executive officer of its Women's Division. In this position she helped to set standards for women's physical education programs throughout the country. In 1923 Perrin left the Detroit public school system to become associate director of the Health Education Division of the American Child Health Association (ACHA). For the next thirteen years she traveled, spoke, and wrote extensively on the role of physical education in health education. In the 1925-26 school year alone, she gave eighty-one talks at various colleges and school districts. Her publications in this period included Play Day: The Spirit of Sport (1929), coauthored with Grace Turner under the imprint of the NAAF Women's Division. The minimally competitive, "play for its own sake" athletic philosophy that Perrin and her colleagues advocated for women was held out as an alternative to the exclusive, commercialized, specialized approach characteristic of men's athletics. But it was based on the belief that women's physical potential was limited, and Perrin opposed the early rudiments of the equal rights sports movement for women. For example, through the ACHA and the Women's Division of the NAAF, she campaigned against women's expanding participation in the Olympics and for modified rules as in women's basketball. She argued that menstruation handicapped women and that strenuous, competitive effort undermined rather than promoted female health. In 1936, when the ACHA was subsumed under the American Association for Health and Physical Education, Ethel Perrin retired and turned to dairy farming at her Rocky Dell Farm in Brewster, N.Y. She became in 1946 the eleventh person and second woman to receive the Luther Halsey Gulick Award for distinguished service in physical education. Perrin died at her farm in 1962 at the age of ninety-one. [A curriculum vitae and other biographical material on Ethel Perrin are in the Wellesley College Archives, which also holds the BNSG records; the BNSG became the department of hygiene at Wellesley. Perrin's articles appeared in the Am. Physical Education Rev., Sportswoman, Jour. Health and Physical Education, and Mary Hemenway Alumnae Assoc. Bull. Characteristic of her writings are "Athletics for Women and Girls," Playground, March 1924, pp. 658-61; "More Competitive Athletics for Girls—But of the Right Kind," Am. Physical Education Rev., Oct. 1929, pp. 473, 476; "When Sport Takes On a New Significance," Sportswoman, Feb. 1931, pp. 7 - 8 , 29; and "The Confessions of a Strict Formalist," Jour. Health and Physical Education,

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Pesotta Nov. 1938. An autobiographical sketch appeared in Research Quart., Supp., Oct. 1941, pp. 682-85. Other major sources of biographical information are Janice W. Carkin, "Recipients of the Gulick Award" (Ed.D. diss., Stanford Univ., 1952), which evaluates Perrin's philosophy and contributions to physical education; Marjorie Bouve, "Ethel Perrin— Humanist," Sportswoman, March 1931, pp. 7-8; Jay B. Nash, "The Gulick Award, 1946," Jour. Health and Physical Education, Sept. 1946, pp. 405, 448; and Dorothy La Salle, "In Memoriam—Ethel Perrin," Jour. Health, Physical Education and Recreation, Sept. 1962, pp. 76, 79. The only information about her early life comes from the 1880 U.S. Census, which indicates that Ethel Perrin lived in Newton, Mass., with her mother, her brother, and an aunt. Birth record supplied by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] STEPHANIE L.

TWIN

P E S O T T A , Rose, Nov. 20, 1896-Dec. 7, 1965. Labor organizer and leader. Rose Pesotta was born Rose Peisoty in the city of Derazhnya in the Russian Ukraine. Her parents, Itsaak and Masya Peisoty (the name became Pesotta in the United States), were grain merchants who tended together a small business inherited from Masya Peisoty's aunt. Rose was the second of their six daughters and eight children. While not wealthy, the family seems to have lived comfortably, employing a hired girl to help with the housework. Itsaak Peisoty was a leader in the town's Jewish community and an important part of its intellectual and cultural life. Rose, like her sisters, learned Hebrew and Russian at home, then attended Rosalia Davidovna's private girls' school for two years. After that she was tutored at home, reading widely through the eclectic assortment of literary and political works scattered about the house and attic. When her older sister, Esther, was radicalized at the age of fifteen, Rose followed after, joining a Derazhnya underground democratic circle, whose anarchist teachings she adhered to all her life. She brought the idealism and spirit of these early days to her later career as a trade union organizer. In 1913, resisting pressure from her parents to marry, Rose Peisoty migrated to New York, where her sister was already working in a shirtwaist factory. Rose took a similar job within the year, joining Local 25 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union ( I L G W U ) , the organization which remained her base for the next fifty years. In 1915 she helped Local 25 set up the ILGWU's first education department, and five years later was elected to the local's executive board. Taking advantage of the growing workers' education movement, she attended the

Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in 1922 and then studied at Brookwood Labor College ( 1 9 2 4 - 2 6 ) . True to her anarchist commitments, she actively defended Sacco and Vanzetti after their conviction, while opposing attempts by communists to take over the ILGWU, a position which earned her the trust of the union's leaders. In the late 1920s, the I L G W U turned to Pesotta for help in organizing women garment workers. She became a paid staff member in 1933, when the union sent her to Los Angeles to organize dressmakers in a notoriously antiunion environment. Her success there drew national attention and contributed to her election as a vice president of the I L G W U in 1934. For the next ten years, Pesotta traveled to such cities as San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and San Juan, organizing for the union. A charismatic person, she had the ability to break through ethnic and religious barriers in her work, as she demonstrated in Montreal in 1937, winning a drive among predominantly Catholic, French-Canadian garment workers despite the opposition of local labor leaders and the church. Her reputation was such that the I L G W U lent her to striking auto workers in Flint, Mich., and to rubber workers in Akron, Ohio, during the massive industrial organizing drives of the late 1930s. In her many campaigns, as she emphasized in a 1942 speech, Pesotta tried to avoid "ruling from the top," seeking instead to "train the workers to take care of themselves." Pesotta's popularity among workers earned her a degree of autonomy at the I L G W U . Still, her independent, outspoken approach created some tension among the union's top leaders who, she often felt, did not fully support her. She attributed part of her isolation within the leadership to her position as the only woman vice president on the union's General Executive Board. In 1942, she chose to return to her old shop as a sewing machine operator, and two years later she refused to run for a fourth term as vice president. At the convention she denounced what she asserted was the union's policy of having only one woman on its governing board despite the fact that 85 percent of its 305,000 members were women: "Some day I hope the membership will take this so-called rule and throw it out the window." Pesotta's outburst was characteristic. A vital and volatile woman, she could rise from depression and despair to periods of inspired activity. All her life she shared warm friendships with a large group of men and women. Twice in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, she lived with men in relationships that were never formalized, preferring the freedom of long and deeply

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Phillips

rooted friendships to the ties of marriage. After 1928, when her mother arrived from Russia, the two lived together sporadically and maintained an affectionate relationship. Pesotta was also close to her niece Dorothy Rubin. After she returned to the ranks, Rose Pesotta resided in the ILGWU's cooperative apartments in New York City; she still engaged in various union activities. She also wrote two autobiographical books: Bread upon the Waters (1944), devoted to her years as an organizer, and Days of Our Lives (1958), which recalled her childhood in Russia. When she learned she had terminal cancer, she went to Miami, Fla., where she died in December 1965. She left behind a union stronger for the thousands of members she brought to it. [The major collection of Pesotta papers, consisting of diaries, letters, and clippings, is at the N.Y. Public Library. Additional letters can be found in the David Dubinsky Papers, and scattered through other collections, at the ILGWU Archives, N.Y. City. The Jewish Labor Bund Archives in N.Y. City house a single file of Pesotta letters relating mainly to the 1920s. Pesotta wrote occasional articles on her organizing experiences published in various issues of Justice, the ILGWU newspaper, during the 1930s. Her short convention speeches can be found in the ILGWU Proceedings for 1922, 1924, 1934, 1937, 1940, 1944. Her work is discussed in several articles, including John C. Cort, "Trouble in Montreal," Commonweal, June 15, 1945, pp. 2 1 4 - 1 7 ; Maxine Seller, "Beyond the Stereotype: A New Look at the Immigrant Woman, 1 8 8 0 - 1 9 2 4 , " Jour. Ethnic Studies, Spring 1975, pp. 5 9 - 7 0 ; and Alice Kessler-Harris, "Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union," Labor Hist., Winter 1976, pp. 5 - 2 3 . Pesotta is cited in Who's Who in Labor ( 1 9 4 6 ) , p. 277; an obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 8, 1965. Information was provided by Sonya Farber, Leon Stein, and Henoch Mendelsund; death certificate from Fla. State Registrar.] ALICE

KESSLER-HARRIS

PHILLIPS, Irna, July 1, 1901-Dec. 22, 1973. Radio and television writer. Irna Phillips, one-time Queen of the Soap Operas, was the youngest of ten children (several of whom did not survive to maturity) born to Betty (Buxbaum) and William S. Phillips, German Jews who migrated to Chicago in the latter half of the nineteenth century. William Phillips, who died when Irna was eight, owned a small dry goods and grocery store above which the family lived. Years later, Irna remembered herself as "a plain, sickly, silent child, with hand-me-down clothes and no friends," who sought emotional refuge in books and makebelieve. As a student in the Chicago public schools,

Irna Phillips dreamed of becoming an actress, but at the University of Illinois (she had transferred from Northwestern), a drama coach warned that, despite her talent, she had "neither the looks nor the stature to achieve professional success." After graduating in 1923 with a B.S. in education, a disheartened Phillips taught speech and drama for a year at a junior college in Fulton, Mo., and then for five years at a normal school in Dayton, Ohio. In 1930, Chicago radio station WGN, for which she had worked without pay during her vacations, asked Phillips to write and perform in "a family drama." The result was "Painted Dreams" (sometimes considered radio's first soap opera), a ten-minute daily serial set in Chicago and centering on the widowed Mother Monahan (acted by Phillips and presumably based on her mother), her grown daughter, and neighbors. For the first time in her life, Phillips later recalled, she was happy. Two years later, when WGN prevented the transfer of "Painted Dreams" to the National Broadcasting Company, Phillips quit the station to sell the network a "new" soap, "Today's Children," a barely disguised version of her earlier serial. By 1938, when Phillips discontinued "Today's Children" (apparently in response to her mother's death and despite sponsor protests), it had become radio's most popular daytime serial. A year earlier, Phillips had launched two other soaps destined for more enduring fame: "The Road of Life," featuring medical intern Dr. Jim Brent, and "The Guiding Light" (created with Emmons Carlson), featuring the Rev. John Rutledge and by the 1970s the longest running soap in broadcast history. With this substitution of professional people for the simple, humbly educated characters who had until then been heroes and heroines of daytime radio, Phillips established a personal trademark and triggered a proliferation of soap-opera doctors, lawyers, nurses, social workers, and educators. Other successes followed, among them "Woman in White" (1938), "The Right to Happiness" (1939), "Lonely Women" ( 1 9 4 2 ) in 1943 it became "Today's Children" as Phillips recycled an old title—and "The Brighter Day" (1948). Her formula, Phillips confided, was to appeal to the "instincts" of self-preservation, sex, and family (Fortune, June 1938). By 1943, with five serials running concurrently and six assistant writers cranking out daily dialogue, she was earning $250,000 a year, making her, reported Time, "America's highest-paid aerial litterateuse." Meanwhile, as Phillips later recalled, she was "weather[ing] several unhappy love affairs,"

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Phillips including one with a man who refused to marry her when he learned she could not bear children. She never married, but at forty-two (her mother's age when she was born), she adopted an infant boy (Thomas Dirk Phillips) and a year and a half later, a girl (Katherine Louise Phillips). Television meant the beginning of the end for radio soap opera but not for Phillips, who has been called "the single most important influence on television soaps" (Edmondson and Rounds, p. 4 0 ) . Over more than twenty years, her television credits included "The Guiding Light" (1952), "The Brighter Day" (1954), "The Road of Life" (1954), "Another World" (1964), "Days of Our Lives" (1965), and "Love Is a Many-Splendour'd Thing" (1967), as well as television's most successful daytime serial, "As the World Turns" (1956). In 1964, she became a consultant to "Peyton Place," television's first successful evening serial. In 1973, Phillips died in Chicago of a heart attack. For a woman who had subjected her heroines to nearly unremitting travail and at least occasional ecstasy, Phillips had, to all appearances, led a remarkably uneventful personal life, sharing her mother's bedroom until she was thirty-seven, and, according to her son, preferring always the companionship of a handful of old friends and colleagues. Together with Elaine Carrington and Frank and Anne Hummert, Irna Phillips created soap opera. Among her specific contributions are said to be the tease ending, the use of organ music to set mood and bridge scenes, and the "cross over" or appearance of a major character from one serial in a subordinate role on another. She was also among the first to employ such stock devices as the amnesia victim and the murder trial. Despite such ploys, critics have usually considered Phillips's serials less melodramatic and better written than most. They were also less frenetic, each episode typically built around two characters engaged in serious discussion. Sententiousness, too, marked her style, whether in Reverend Rutledge's sermons (collected in book form, they sold almost 300,000 copies one year) or in the sentimental epigraphs which frequently opened her shows. Phillips's soaps, true to the genre, featured virtuous, long-suffering heroines whose lives centered on marriage and motherhood. Though keenly aware of the ironic distance between this female domesticity she celebrated and her own eager pursuit of a career, Phillips was always an outspoken foe of feminism, warning it would weaken women's commitment to home and encourage sexual license.

In her last years, Phillips increasingly deplored the trend of TV soaps toward sensationalism—"rape, abortion, illegitimacy, men falling in love with other men's wives . . . murder, followed by a long, drawn-out murder trial." Yet her own television serials had exploited, even pioneered such subjects ("As the World Turns" sired soapland's first illegitimate baby), and her radio serials, though more diffident about sex, had helped pave the way. The heroine of "Right to Happiness" fell in love four times (once with her widowed mother's fiancé), married twice, divorced one husband, accidentally shot the other, was tried for his murder, and bore a child in jail—all in the space of four years. Politically, too, Phillips had been willing to violate taboos, but her sponsors proved more timid. In the mid-1960s, they prevented her efforts to have her stories reflect such contemporary social issues as the struggle for civil rights. From time to time, Phillips attributed her success as a writer to everything from her limited vocabulary ("my greatest asset") to the inspiration of her mother. A more likely explanation lies, as one history of soap opera suggests, in "her superb inventiveness, her vast energy, and her unwaveringly clear sense of the emotional center of the audience mind" (Edmondson and Rounds, p. 4 0 ) . [Irna Phillips's papers, including correspondence and scripts, are at the Univ. of Wis., Madison. Her soaps also include, on radio, "Masquerade" ( 1 9 4 6 ) , which ran for a year and a half and, on television, "Our Private World" (spin-off of "As the World Turns" ), which lasted only one summer ( 1965 ). For a time, too, she was writer of radio's "Young Dr. Malone." "Every Woman's Life Is a Soap Opera," by Irna Phillips as told to Helen Markel, McCall's, March 1965, gives Phillips's own sentimental but highly revealing account of her life and career. Helpful discussion of Phillips's place in the history of soap opera is provided by: John Dunning, Tune in Yesterday ( 1 9 7 6 ) ; Madeleine Edmondson and David Rounds, From Mary Noble to Mary Hartman ( 1 9 7 6 ) ; and Raymond William Stedman, The Serials ( 1 9 7 1 ) . Also valuable is the entry in Current Biog., 1943. Other fairly comprehensive articles based on interviews with Phillips include "Life as Soap Opera: The Story of Irna," Chicago Daily News, Jan. 12-13, 1974; "Script Queen," Time, June 10, 1940; and "Writing On: Irna Phillips Mends with Tradition," Broadcasting, Nov. 6, 1972. See also "Irna Phillips's Ghost Writers," Variety, Aug. 5, 1942; "Queen of the Soap Operas," Newsweek, July 13, 1942; "The World Has Turned," N.Y. Times Mag., Sept. 8, 1968; and Maurice Zolotow, "Washboard Weepers," Sat. Eve. Post, May 29, 1943. A death certificate was supplied by the 111. Dept. of Public Health. Further information was provided by Phillips's son, Thomas Dirk Phillips.]

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EVELYN CATHERINE

SHAKES

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Phillips

PHILLIPS, Lena Madesin, Sept. 15, 1881-May 21, 1955. Feminist, lawyer, organization executive. Lena Madesin Phillips, a founder of both the National and International Federations of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, was born Anna Lena Phillips in Nicholasville, Ky., to William Henry and Alice (Shook) Phillips. She was their only child, but she had three half brothers and a half sister from her father's previous marriage. From the age of eleven, when she changed her name to Lena Madesin (a corruption of médecin) in honor of her half brother George who was then studying medicine in France, she preferred to be called Madesin. The Phillipses were among the original settlers to come from Virginia to Nicholasville in 1780. William Phillips achieved prominence in Jessamine County politics, continuously winning election as county judge from 1874 to 1917. Alice Phillips raised her daughter in the strict Southern Methodist church. A talented musician herself, she imbued Madesin with the desire to become a concert pianist. Her daughter later recalled: "My father gave me his personality, but my mother impressed it with her character and ideals . . . Under the spur of her will and ambition I obtained an excellent educational foundation" (Sergio, p. 11). After graduating in 1899 from Jessamine Female Institute in Nicholasville, Phillips entered the Woman's College of Baltimore (later Goucher College). She switched to Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory of Music in 1902 to study the concert piano; however, a fall which damaged the nerves in her right arm ended her concert career. She returned to Nicholasville, and tried for twelve rather unhappy years to make a career out of music despite the frustration of her ambitions. For two years she headed the music department at Jessamine Institute, then tried unsuccessfully to sell the popular songs she had composed. After her mother died in 1908, Phillips ran the household for her father, and, two years later, opened a music academy with a friend. She taught music, organized musical groups, and also campaigned with Judge Phillips until June 1915, when she suffered a nervous breakdown. When she recovered, Phillips set out in an entirely new direction, entering the University of Kentucky Law School that autumn. In 1917 she became the first woman to graduate from the law school, receiving an LL.B. with honors. She had barely begun practicing law in Nicholasville when World War I changed her life. Her work as secretary-treasurer of the Kentucky War Fund Committee of the National War Work

Council of the YWCA attracted the attention of the organization's national officers, who asked Phillips to become one of its eleven field secretaries. She declined the offer, saying, "I would not leave my father, my home, my profession, for anything of which there are eleven" (Sergio, p. 33). She did agree to undertake a national survey of business and professional women and in 1918 became the executive secretary of the YWCA's National Business Women's Committee. Her work with the committee, which had been initiated to coordinate the business women's war efforts, showed Phillips the need for an ongoing organization to advance the interests of business and professional women, to aid the entry of more women into the professions, and to promote cooperation among women. To these ends, she planned a meeting, with YWCA support, which was held in St. Louis in 1919. There the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs (NFBPWC) was founded, and Phillips was elected its first executive secretary. In that capacity she established the organization's executive offices and engineered the publication of the first issues of Independent Woman, its official journal. Intending to pursue her legal career, Phillips resigned as executive secretary in 1922 and enrolled at New York University Law School, receiving an LL.M. in 1923. In New York she began living with Marjory Lacey-Baker, an actress; they remained together until Phillips's death. Admitted to the New York bar in 1924, she set up her own law practice, and became one of the city's leading women lawyers. In the late 1920s, however, she became increasingly absorbed in the work of the NFBPWC. After resigning as executive secretary, Phillips had served as membership chairman from 1922 to 1926 and was elected president from 1926 to 1929. Then and later she sought to keep the NFBPWC alive to social and feminist issues. At the 1924 convention she fought to have the federation support the child labor amendment despite its being denounced as communist. In the 1920s Phillips strongly advocated equal pay for women, and in 1933 she endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment. With Phillips's backing, the 1934 convention of the NFBPWC passed a declaration which read in part: "Because there can be no economic security for any class or group unless there is economic security for all, we demand for women employment, appointment, salaries and promotions on equal terms with men." She also tried to involve the organization in peace efforts, such as endorsement of arms limitation and the World Court. In the late 1920s Phillips sought another

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means to promote international understanding. Beginning in 1928, she undertook a series of tours through Europe, aiming at the establishment of an international federation of business and professional women. In 1930, a year after she stepped down as president of the national federation, becoming honorary president, the international federation became a reality. Phillips was elected president and led the IFBPWC until 1947, when she became honorary founderpresident. She continued to travel to Europe nearly every year to promote the international federation. During World War II, she toured Great Britain and Sweden as a representative of the Office of War Information (OWI) and met with members of the federation in those countries. In 1945 the OWI assigned her to a special mission on behalf of business and professional women in Europe. In addition to her ongoing activities on behalf of the federations, and her leadership of a number of other women's, consumers', and educational organizations, Phillips was a prolific writer. A frequent contributor to Independent Woman and other magazines, in 1935 she had given up her law practice altogether to become the associate editor of Pictorial Review. Besides providing an income, the position allowed her to speak to greater numbers of women than ever before. She wrote a column which appeared monthly until Pictorial Review ceased publication in 1939. In the 1940s Phillips twice ran unsuccessfully for political office. Always interested in politics, in the 1920s she had been a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and served as campaign manager in the successful bids of Joseph V. McKee for local offices in New York. Her federation activities precluded active involvement in politics until 1942 when, havin • moved to Westport, Conn., she was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the Connecticut legislature. Her most controversial political venture was her 1948 candidacy for lieutenant governor of Connecticut on the Progressive party ticket. Her abiding concern for peace led her into Henry Wallace's party, and in a 1948 letter to a friend she anticipated the attacks her decision would provoke: "I have taken my stand with Henry Wallace . . . Of course it is worth one's reputation to do so. A Communist is now being discovered under every bush and I am prepared to be smeared once more." In her continued efforts to expand the international federation, Phillips set out in May 1955 for a conference in Beirut, Lebanon, to study the organization of professional women in the Middle East. En route she died in Marseilles, France, following surgery for a perforated ulcer.

[The Lena Madesin Phillips Papers, which include personal and professional correspondence, news clippings, articles, speeches, and photographs, are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. The only biography, Lisa Sergio, A Measure Filled: The Life of Lena Madesin Phillips Drawn from Her Autobiography (1972), is based on the papers; all quotations come from this source. Biographical sketches can be found in "Women in Business," Ladies' Home Journal, Nov. 1928; Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five; and Current Biog., 1946. Brief histories of the federations founded by Phillips are Geline MacDonald Bowman, A History of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, Inc., 1919-1944 (1944), and Phyllis A. Deakin, In Pride and with Promise (1970). Information was provided by the Univ. of Ky. Libraries. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, May 22, 1955, and Independent Woman, June-July 1955. While most sources give a May 20, 1955, date, the date of death Marseilles time was May 21, 1955. Death record from U.S. Dept. of State.] J.

STANLEY

LEMONS

PINCHOT, Cornelia Elizabeth Bryce, Aug. 26, 1881-Sept. 9, 1960. Politician, suffragist. Cornelia Pinchot was born in Newport, R.I., to Lloyd Stevens and Edith (Cooper) Bryce. Her great-grandfather was iron magnate Peter Cooper, the philanthropist-patron of Cooper Institute; her grandfather, Edward Cooper, was a conservative Democrat and anti-Tammany mayor of New York City. Lloyd Bryce served variously as a congressman, novelist, editor-publisher of the North American Review, political adviser to Theodore Roosevelt, and United States minister to the Netherlands. The younger daughter and second of the Bryces' three children, Cornelia inherited her family's privileges along with its social conscience. Raised in Newport society and educated in Long Island private schools, the beautiful, red-haired Leila, as she was known, traveled extensively, won blue ribbons at hunts and horse shows, and joined other society women for balloon flights. She moved with poise from the receiving line to the picket line, campaigning for woman suffrage in the early 1900s and championing the working girl. As vice chairman of the New York City Conference on Unemployed Women, she helped stage a Venetian Pageant at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1914 to raise funds for a sewing room and a free employment exchange. Her parents' friendship with Theodore Roosevelt brought Cornelia Bryce invitations to group discussions in the library at Roosevelt's Oyster Bay estate. Roosevelt recognized her keen political mind and through participation in his circle, she caught the eye of his conservationist protégé Gifford Pinchot, sixteen years her

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senior. Pinchot and Cornelia Bryce were married on Aug. 15, 1914; they devoted their honeymoon to Pinchot's campaign as the Progressive party candidate for the United States Senate from Pennsylvania. He lost to the incumbent in this first attempt, but the Pinchots successfully made Pennsylvania their political base for the next three decades, settling down in Grey Towers in Milford, where their only child, Gifford Bryce, was born in 1915. While remaining close to her husband, a proponent of woman suffrage, Cornelia Pinchot renounced the traditional role of the well-bred political wife to work through her own channels. As secretary of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association ( 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 ) , she donated funds and lobbied to ensure the state legislature's ratification of the nineteenth amendment. She followed that successful effort by committing herself formally to the Republican party, serving on its state committee as the first woman representative from her county, and becoming treasurer of the Pennsylvania Republican Women's Committee. Concluding that the Women's Committee was not sufficiently powerful within the party structure, she then organized an independent body, the State Council of Republican Women. Cornelia Pinchot's political influence was enhanced by her husband's election as governor of Pennsylvania in 1922, a victory to which she contributed significantly by organizing support among women in the state. Throughout Gifford Pinchot's first term in office ( 1 9 2 3 - 2 7 ) , she championed women's rights, asking the state legislature to investigate the legal and economic status of women in the home and at work, and opposing repeal of Pennsylvania's direct primary, which she felt guaranteed women a voice in selecting party candidates. Like her husband, she was an ardent prohibitionist. As first lady, Cornelia Pinchot became a confident public speaker, with a reputation for being quite blunt before some audiences. She told an assembly of the Daughters of the American Revolution, for example, that she hated genealogists. Maintaining a similar frank approach throughout her life, she informed delegates to a United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources in 1949 that their meeting was "upside-down Humpty-Dumpty nonsense," since it had no policymaking authority. Cornelia Pinchot made her own bid for office in 1928, an unsuccessful attempt to unseat the Republican incumbent from Pennsylvania's Fifteenth Congressional District. Her platform stressed support for prohibition and opposition to the electric power monopoly, positions central to her husband's political efforts as well. She

tried twice more to win the congressional nomination and attempted briefly in 1934 to follow Gifford Pinchot as governor, but never gained elective office. During her husband's second term in the governor's mansion ( 1 9 3 1 - 3 5 ) , Cornelia Pinchot devoted particular attention to the problems of organized labor and of hard-pressed women and child workers. Appointed by her husband to a state committee to investigate sweatshops, she came into conflict with the president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association and with the state GOP boss. She also made personal appearances and radio addresses advocating minimum wage laws for women and children, encouraged women to unionize, and gave financial aid to summer schools training women as union organizers. In the spring of 1933, she paraded with textile strikers in the Lehigh Valley, creating the kind of "skillful propaganda" which The New Republic believed improved mill conditions. The following January, Pinchot supported striking Brooklyn laundry workers, arriving at the employees' entrance in the governor's chauffeured limousine and flamboyantly advertising their cause to the press. She gained further notice late in 1935, when she effectively ran the state of Pennsylvania for several months while her husband was hospitalized. Cornelia Pinchot remained an active and outspoken figure in the 1940s, even after her husband's death in 1946. She represented the United States at the International Women's Conference in Paris in 1945 and made headlines by calling for nationalization of all uranium deposits and for United Nations' control of atomic research. As president of the Washington chapter of the Americans United for World Organization, she appealed for international disarmament. In 1947 Pinchot was elected to the board of the Americans for Democratic Action, and in the same year undertook a four-month tour of Greece and the Balkans to study the effects of guerrilla warfare. Cornelia Bryce Pinchot spent her last years in Washington, D.C., frequently entertaining political figures at her home there. She died in Washington of a stroke in September 1960, at the age of seventy-nine, and was buried at the Pinchot estate in Milford, Pa., beside her husband. [Cornelia Pinchot's voluminous papers, numbering about 250,000 items, are held in the Manuscript Div., Library of Congress. For her views on women's economic rights see Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, "Women Who Work," Survey, April 15, 1929, pp. 138-39. Contemporary accounts of her activities include Elizabeth Frazer, "Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, Housewife and Politician," Sat. Eve. Post, Aug. 26,

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Pitts 1922; "Mrs. Pinchot Backs the 'Baby Strikers,'" Literary Digest, May 20, 1933, p. 9; and two items in New Republic, May 24, 1933, p. 30, and June 7, 1933, p. 84. A thorough review of her career during the 1920s and 1930s is provided by John W . Furlow, Jr., "Cornelia Bryce Pinchot: Feminism in the PostSuffrage Era," Pennsylvania Hist., Oct. 1976, pp. 3 2 9 - 4 6 . Her father, Lloyd Bryce, is included in Diet. Am. Biog., II; for her husband see Nelson McGeary, Gifford Pinchot, Forester-Politician ( 1 9 6 0 ) , which also contains information on Cornelia Pinchot. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times and Wash. Post, Sept. 10, 1960. Death certificate furnished by D.C. Dept. of Public Health.] BONNIE F O X

SCHWARTZ

PITTS, ZaSu, Jan. 3, 1898?-June 7, 1963. Actress. ZaSu Pitts, one of the leading comediennes of both silent and talking films, played in more than 150 movies in a career that spanned over forty-five years and encompassed much of the history of Hollywood. Yet she is perhaps best remembered and honored for two dramatic roles given her by director Erich von Stroheim, in Greed (1924) and The Wedding March (1928). Born in Parsons, Kans., ZaSu Pitts was the second daughter and one of four children of Rulandus Pitts, a native of New York, and Nellie (Shea) Pitts, of Irish ancestry. She was taken by her parents at an early age to Santa Cruz, Calif., where, after her father's death in 1908, her mother ran a boardinghouse. Pitts attended public schools, graduating from Santa Cruz High School in 1914. A year later, encouraged by her family because of a gift for mimicry which had attracted local attention, Pitts went to Hollywood to seek a career in the movies. Her mother and two brothers followed her shortly thereafter. Her first opportunity, and her first success, came in 1917 with her discovery by f r a n c l . . m a r i o n , at that time scenarist for Mary Pickford (died 1979). Her first film, The Little Princess (1917), with the popular Pickford, was directed by Marshall (Mickey) Neilan. In 1918 she appeared in How Could You, Jean? under the direction of the ill-starred William Desmond Taylor. In these early roles Pitts developed her distinctive woebegone manner. It was, she said later, patterned after a schoolteacher whom she imitated to the delight of the other pupils. A fan magazine article in 1919 dubbed Pitts "The Girl with the Ginger Snap Name," and her distinctive first name always remained part of her trademark. She insisted on its being written ZaSu, with each syllable capitalized, as she claimed it was devised in honor of two paternal aunts named Eliza and Susan. The correct pronunciation was "zay-zoo," she once said,

but everyone in Hollywood pronounced it "zazz-zoo" (to rhyme with "has zoo"), and she was never known to have objected. Beginning her career as a youthful character actress, Pitts always stressed personality rather than looks in her film work. Under a full-page portrait of her, a 1923 fan magazine caption stated that ZaSu Pitts was "getting so pretty that she's been forced to abandon the wistful ugly duckling parts that brought her before the public eye." Yet she resisted studio publicity which tried to change her image. One of the few published pieces bearing her signature (though probably ghostwritten) was titled "Youth in Character Work." It appeared in a 1924 Hollywood volume, The Truth About the Movies, By the Stars, published just as she had completed Greed, for which von Stroheim had cast her despite studio objections that she was "not sexy enough for the role." From an artistic viewpoint, Pitts's association with Erich von Stroheim was the high point of her career. Paul Rotha, in his authoritative The Film Till Now (1931), stated that the "brilliant performance of ZaSu Pitts as the hoarding wife . . . has never been equalled by any other American actress at any time." Many other critics have also rated that performance a classic, as they did her characterization of the lame princess in von Stroheim's The Wedding March. Pitts's last silent role was a dramatic one opposite Emil Jannings in The Sins of the Fathers (1928). With the arrival of talking pictures, it was expected that Pitts's high-pitched cracking voice would rule her out for serious dramatic roles, and indeed thereafter she was almost invariably typecast as a fluttery comedienne. One exception occurred when, on von Stroheim's recommendation, Lewis Milestone employed her as the mother in the World War I tragedy, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Preview audiences are reported to have laughed so at her tragic scenes that they had to be reshot with Beryl Mercer in the role. Von Stroheim himself used Pitts once more, in 1932, in his last, ill-fated, Hollywood directorial assignment, Walking Down Broadway, which was shelved and released much later in a truncated version as Hello, Sister! In this film, Pitts had a striking role in which she evidenced for her roommate, Boots Mallory, feelings "not quite motherly, not quite sisterly, but a great deal more than either." Peter Noble concluded that the sexual ambiguity of her "obsessional jealousy" toward the other girl "was so unusual that it went over the heads of the regular Fox critics and censors" (Noble, pp. 101-102). It is, at any rate, probably the first serious reference to lesbianism in a major Hollywood film.

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As a comedienne, Pitts starred in thirteen shorts with Thelma Todd at Hal Roach Studios and several feature-length comedies with Slim Summerville at Universal Pictures, in the early 1930s. She also played major comedy roles in a number of outstanding movies: The Guardsman (1931), the only film ever to star Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), probably her favorite, in which she played the western maid who marries the perfect English butler, portrayed by Charles Laughton; Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1934); and Nurse Edith Cavell (1939). Her last film, released after her death, was Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). She described her memorable type of characterization as "pathetic comedy." ZaSu Pitts was married to Hollywood boxing promoter Thomas S. Gallery on July 24, 1920; she gave birth to a daughter, Ann, in 1923. In 1926, on the death of actress Barbara LaMarr who was one of Pitts's closest friends, she and Gallery adopted LaMarr's son, Donald Michael. When the couple were separated in late 1926 (they were divorced in 1932), the two children remained with Pitts. On Oct. 8, 1933, she was secretly married in Minden, Nev., to former tennis champion and Pasadena real estate broker John Edward Woodall. In the late 1930s Pitts made personal appearances at major motion picture theaters, and during World War II she toured in several stage plays, including Her First Murder and Ramshackle Inn, in which she made a short-lived Broadway debut. In 1953 she toured in a revival of The Bat. She also did considerable work in radio and later in the new medium of television, in which she was featured on "The Gale Storm Show" and "Oh, Susanna." By the late 1950s Pitts was largely retired. She died of cancer in 1963 in Los Angeles. [Information about Pitts is in the Robinson Locke Coll., the Chamberlain and Lyman Brown Agency Coll., and the clipping file, all in the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library; in the Harvard Theatre Coll.; and in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Acad, of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, and in the library of the Am. Film Institute, both in Beverly Hills, Calif. A book of her candy recipes, Candy Hits by ZaSu Pitts, was published in 1963. Early accounts of her life and career include Jim Tully, "ZaSu Pitts," Vanity Fair, Aug. 1928, and Frank Condon, "From Eliza and Susan," Sat. Eve. Post, April 30, 1932. Other sources of information are King Vidor, A Tree Is a Tree (1952); Peter Noble, Hollywood Scapegoat: The Biography of Erich von Stroheim (1972); Frances Marion, Off with Their Heads (1972); David Thomson, A Biog. Diet, of the Cinema (1976), which includes an annotated list of her films; Leslie Halliwell, The

Filmgoer's Companion (1977). Since birth records were not kept in Kansas before 1911, there is no documentary evidence that ZaSu was actually Pitts's given name at birth. Most published sources give Pitts's birth date as Jan. 3, 1898; however, the 1900 U.S. Census lists the second daughter of Rulandus and Nellie Pitts as Yazan, born in March 1894; there is no census record of a child born in 1898. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times and N.Y. Herald Tribune, June 8, 1963; marriage and death certificates from the Calif. Dept. of Health Services.] HAROLD J .

SALEMSON

PLATH, Sylvia, Oct. 27, 1932-Feb. 11, 1963. Writer. Sylvia Plath, poet and novelist, was born in Boston, the first of two children of Aurelia (Schober) and Otto Emil Plath. Her Germanborn father, who came to America in his teens, was a noted entomologist, an authority on bees, and a professor of biology at Boston University. Her mother, born in Boston to Austrian parents, had taken an A.M. in English and German, and had been a student of her husband (twenty-one years her senior) in Middle German. Devoted to literature, she taught English in secondary school until her marriage. In 1940, when Sylvia was eight, her father died following amputation of his leg—a complication of a diabetic condition for which he had refused treatment, mistakenly believing himself to have cancer. Aurelia Plath, left to support Sylvia and her younger brother Warren, began to teach medical-secretarial courses at Boston University. In 1942 she moved the family from the seaside home in Winthrop, Mass., that Sylvia had loved to a house in Wellesley which they shared with her Schober grandparents. The trauma of her father's death, a motivating force in Plath's life and work, appears in her writing as ending not only an idyllic childhood but her wholeness. In her earlier poetry the self that survives her father has been amputated from reality; it is incomplete, false, because an essential part of her has been buried with him: "The day you died I went into the dirt" ("Electra on Azalea Path"). But in her later work, nostalgia and guilt turn to rage at having been abandoned by the "autocrat" father she "adored and despised." From an early age, Plath was a disciplined, prizewinning student and a prolific writer with strong literary ambitions (her first poem was published shortly after her father's death). Though by nature a compulsive achiever, she was concerned to appear the well-rounded American girl. She was tall, good-looking, fashion-conscious, athletic, and defensive about being brainy.

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In 1950, after graduating from Bradford High School, she entered Smith College on a scholarship endowed by the popular novelist Olive Higgins Prouty (d. 1974), who became a friend and mentor. There Plath's academic perfectionism increasingly placed a strain on her psychic resources. A month spent in New York, in the summer of 1953, as guest managing editor for Mademoiselle magazine stimulated her but also inflamed her self-doubts. Deeply depressed, she returned to Wellesley, underwent several traumatic electroshock treatments, and nearly succeeded in killing herself with sleeping pills. Hospitalized at Prouty's expense in McLean Hospital, a private institution in Belmont, Mass., she began to confront her "Electra complex," her guilt over her father's death, and her resentment at her closeness to her mother whom she had made a vicarious participant in her life, partly to recompense her for the sacrifices she had made. Plath returned to Smith in 1954. Bolder, more adventurous, she dyed her hair blonde and embarked on a series of aifairs. She graduated the following year summa cum laude, with several poetry awards and a prize for her English honors thesis on the "double" in Dostoyevsky. The topic reflected her fascination with true and false selves. After graduation in 1955 she went on a Fulbright fellowship to England to study for an English tripos at Newnham College, Cambridge. There she met the young English poet Ted (Edward James) Hughes, a recent Cambridge graduate. Of working-class origins, unlike Plath he lived without regard for social conventions. His impact on her was immediate and profound: he was a "violent Adam," "the only man in the world who is my match"; "he . . . will work with me to make me a woman poet like the world will gape at." Hughes even filled somehow that "huge, sad hole I felt in having no father." But she also described him as having been ruthless, "used to walking over women"; his best self had been hidden, but she would reform him. Plath and Hughes were married on June 16, 1956. From the outset they conceived of their union in elevated and mythic terms, as a partnership dedicated to poetry. They shared advice, criticism, and literary sources. Plath's poetry to this time had been highly literary, often selfconsciously clever, always technically skilled. She was fascinated by elaborate rhyme-schemes and metrical forms, and wrote slowly, with constant reference to her thesaurus. Hughes suggested writing exercises to help her relax her inhibitions; later he invented exercises to facilitate access to the unconscious.

He also fired her with enthusiasm for Robert Graves's The White Goddess. Plath's loss of her father and later her break with Hughes were both readily translated into Graves's myth of the cyclical union and separation of the goddess of poetic inspiration (symbolized by the moon) and a god. Love/hate relationships with several beautiful, childless women, such as her sister-in-law Olwyn Hughes ("Amnesiac"), could also be understood in Graves's terms. Other influences among her very extensive reading include Theodore Roethke, D. H. Lawrence, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Blake, and Virginia Woolf. She also read widely in the literature of mysticism and the occult. After completing her degree at Cambridge in 1957, she returned with Hughes to the United States, she to teach at Smith, he at the University of Massachusetts. Though a brilliant instructor, she came to feel that "the security and prestige of academic life [was] Death to writing." They spent the next year in Boston where Plath and the young poet ANNE SEXTON attended a poetry seminar taught by Robert Lowell. Plath was impressed by their less restrained, less public style of poetry, one which drew freely on extreme personal experience. In late 1959, just before leaving for England— where she and Hughes had decided to settleshe wrote "The Stones," which presented her 1953 breakdown as an experience of symbolic death and the rebirth of a new self. It was the first intimation of the voice she would later fully possess. By early 1960, Plath and Hughes were living in a London flat where their daughter, Frieda Rebecca, was born on April 1. Plath's first book of poems, The Colossus, was published that year in England, where it was well-reviewed. But Hughes's literary success was by this time much greater, and he had already published two books of poems. From the beginning, Plath put his career above her own, typing for him, acting as his literary agent, and in other ways promoting his work. Plath had a miscarriage in early 1961, but she was soon pregnant again; she was determined to have many children. For this, and to be able to write in peace, they needed more room. Later that year, they moved to an old manor house in the Devon countryside. Soon after, Plath received a grant to work on her novel, The Bell Jar (published in England in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas). Centering around her 1953 breakdown, this tale of coming of age in the 1950s represented, in social and personal terms, her quest for wholeness, for an authentic self. Plath sometimes referred to the book as a "potboiler," perhaps reflecting her uneasiness

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Plath with its satire of people (like Olive Prouty) whom she cared about. She hoped, nonetheless, to achieve a steady income by "breaking into the women's slicks" with stories like "I Lied for Love." Unsuccessful in this, she published short stories in literary magazines. On Jan. 17, 1962, her son, Nicholas Farrar, was born at home in Devon. For several months afterward Plath wrote little poetry, but she did complete Three Women, a verse-play set in a maternity ward. In July she discovered that Hughes was having an affair with a woman who with her husband had sublet their London flat. Plath negotiated for a separation, while hoping for a reconciliation. But in October Hughes moved to London. She asked for a divorce and he agreed; she began legal proceedings but they were not completed before her death the following year. Plath linked the breakup of her marriage to Hughes's disenchantment with domesticity and his desire to enjoy his growing fame (he soon came to be considered the foremost poet of his generation). But class differences also played a part and she felt he was paying her back for having "reformed" him. Her intensity was also a strain on Hughes, who remarked that it made the atmosphere they lived in an "intense claustrophobic heightening of colors." Her abandonment by Hughes released in Plath a rage and determination to end her long self-effacement—"I shall be a rich, active woman, not a servant-shadow as I have been"—and launched her into the explosive last poems on which her reputation rests, nearly all of them written in the last eight months of her life. They form a mythicized autobiography, a mythic system analogous to that of The White Goddess (she borrows, for example, Graves's emblematic colors) that expresses the desire to free her hidden true self by destroying both her false self and the victimizing male in relation to whom it had evolved. In "Stings," she speaks of having "a self to recover, a queen"; in "Daddy," she symbolically identifies husband and father, and ritually kills both. In a remarkably short time, while she was "almost fully occupied with children and housekeeping," Sylvia Plath "underwent a poetic development that has hardly any equal on record for suddenness and completeness" (Hughes, Poetry Book Soc. Bull). The late poems were composed, Hughes has recalled, "at great speed, as she might take dictation, where she ignores metre and rhyme for rhythm and momentum." The experience of motherhood had stimulated her creativity, put her in touch with her deepest resources, and by 1961 her painstakingly developed poetic skills had come to be effortlessly

available. Hughes's desertion focused it all. Plath spoke of her drive to write as a kind of possession; she became a channel for words, images, themes that magically and instinctually surged up whole from the unconscious. The last poems abound with luminous, precise, almost hallucinatory imagery: "The blood jet is poetry,/ There is no stopping it"; red poppies are "little bloody skirts"; her dead father is "marble-heavy, a bag full of God." In this molten state, everything she observed or experienced manifested the underlying themes in her life and poetry: the war between true and false selves, between an ecstatic apprehension of the multiplicity of the world, and her cold pure drive toward an ultimate, unchanging self. Plath's crisis was spiritual as well as psychological. While most of the poems express the desire for rebirth from a spoiled history, rebirth —at the very end—came to mean transcending the ego itself, overcoming what she called the "stigma of selfhood." A few days before her death she was, Hughes reports, in a "strange, terribly exalted mood." She told him: "I have seen God, and he keeps picking me up." But at the same time she wrote in "Mystic": "Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?" How can such a vision be integrated into a life still in bondage to the ego? She drew strength from the knowledge that she was writing her best poems—"they will make my name"—and she was deep into a new autobiographical novel, which would conclude with the promise of a new self. In December she moved with her children to a London flat, delighted that it was in a house where Yeats once lived, and had plans to consult a psychiatrist. But England's worst winter in over a century further undermined her already declining health and morale. On Feb. 5, 1963, she wrote "Edge," in which the moon, like a cold muse, calmly regards the final scene of a tragedy: a "perfected" woman whose "dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment." Six days later she ended her life by putting her head in her oven and turning on the gas. In October 1963 ten of her most powerful poems, unprecedented in their frankness and sustained incandescence, were published in Encounter magazine; they caused an immediate sensation which was amplified when Ariel, a collection of her late poems, appeared in England two years after her death. With the American editions of Ariel (1966, with an introduction by Robert Lowell) and The Bell Jar (1971), a virtual cult of Sylvia Plath developed in her own country. Plath was hailed as a "naive prophet" of women's liberation. But her significance as a poet transcends the particular moment. She is, as

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A. E. Dyson has said, "among the handful of writers by which future generations will seek to know us and give us a name." [Aurelia Schober Plath has edited Letters Home ( 1 9 7 5 ) , a selection of Plath's correspondence, with photographs. The uncut versions of these letters, together with published and unpublished poems and prose writings and memorabilia, are in the Plath MSS., Lilly Library, Indiana Univ. MSS. of her late poems, diaries and journals, and other material are in the possession of Ted Hughes. Plath's thesis, "The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky's Novels," is in the Sophia Smith Coll., Smith College. Other books by Plath include Crossing the Water ( 1 9 7 1 ) , mostly "transitional" poems, and a second collection of late poems, Winter Trees ( 1 9 7 1 ) , which also contains her play Three Women. Uncollected or previously unpublished poems appear in Pursuit ( 1 9 7 3 ) ; Crystal Gazer and Other Poems ( 1 9 7 1 ) ; Lyonnesse ( 1 9 7 1 ) ; and Fiesta Melons ( 1 9 7 1 ) , all privately printed. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams ( 1 9 7 7 ) , with an introduction by Ted Hughes, is a selection of stories, articles, and excerpts from Plath's notebooks. An Oct. 1962 interview with Plath is included in Peter Orr, ed., The Poet Speaks ( 1 9 6 6 ) . Selections from the interview and Plath's reading of some of her poems are on an Argo record, The Poet Speaks ( 1 9 6 5 ) . See also Plath's statement on poetry in London Mag., Feb. 1962. A "Biographical Note" by Lois Ames is appended to the U.S. edition of The Bell Jar. The only full-length biography, Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness ( 1 9 7 6 ) , is detailed but misogynistic and not completely reliable. Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work ( 1 9 7 7 ) , edited by Butscher, contains several valuable reminiscences. Ted Hughes has commented on Plath's development in "Sylvia Plath," Poetry Book Soc. Bull., Feb. 1965, and "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems," in Charles Newman, ed., The Art of Sylvia Plath ( 1 9 7 0 ) , a useful compilation of reminiscences and critical essays which also contains a bibliography. Nancy Hunter Steiner, A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath ( 1 9 7 3 ) , is an informative but catty memoir by a college roommate. A. Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath: A Memoir," in New American Rev., no. 12 ( 1 9 7 1 ) , contains an account of Plath's death that was disputed by Hughes; see their exchange of letters in the London Times Lit. Supp., Nov. 19 and 26, 1971. Alvarez also wrote an obituary of Plath in the London Observer, Feb. 17, 1963. A critical essay by Harriet Rosenstein, "Reconsidering Sylvia Plath," appeared in Ms., Sept. 1972; she also wrote a dissertation, "Sylvia Plath: 1 9 3 2 - 1 9 5 2 " (Brandeis Univ., 1973). See also Eileen Aird, Sylvia Plath ( 1 9 7 3 ) , and Margaret Dickie Uroff, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes ( 1 9 7 9 ) . Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath ( 1 9 7 6 ) , is a critical study with substantial biographical information. Further information was acquired from Ted Hughes and Aurelia Plath.] JUDITH

KROLL

POLLITZER, Anita Lily, Oct. 31, 1894-July 3, 1975. Suffragist, feminist. Anita Pollitzer, suffragist and lifelong equal rights advocate, was born in Charleston, S.C., the third daughter and last of four children of Clara (Guinzburg) and Gustave Morris Pollitzer, a cotton exporter and civic activist. Her paternal grandparents emigrated in the midnineteenth century from Vienna to New York where her father was born. The family later moved to Beaufort, S.C. Clara Pollitzer, born in Baltimore, Md., the daughter of a rabbi who had emigrated with his wife from Prague in 1848, graduated from Hunter College and taught German before her marriage. Anita Pollitzer spent her childhood years in Charleston with summers in Beaufort. A precocious child, she could read, write, and play the piano before she entered school. Following her graduation in 1913 from Memminger High and Normal School, a summer of study at Winthrop College, in Rock Hill, S.C., sparked her desire to major in art; in the fall she entered Teachers College, Columbia University. Shortly after receiving her B.S. degree in art and education in 1916, she became interested in the woman suffrage movement, met Alice Paul (1885-1977), and enrolled in the National Woman's party (NWP). From that time forward her life centered around the work of the NWP. Alice Paul quickly perceived that the diminutive, attractive Pollitzer, with her dark hair, deep blue eyes, and winning southern manner, could effectively serve the party as organizer and charm the craggiest of politicians. She dispatched Pollitzer to a succession of states in the final years before ratification of the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution. So began a career of travel, lobbying, speaking, and organizing. As a Silent Sentinel picketing in Washington in January 1917 to urge President Woodrow Wilson to endorse the amendment, Pollitzer was arrested and detained for a time. In August 1920, on the day before Tennessee, the thirty-sixth and last state, ratified the amendment, she dined with state legislator Harry T. Burn, persuading him to cast the deciding vote. Pollitzer gave the seconding speech at a Seneca Falls anniversary ceremony in 1923, when the NWP proposed to place before Congress a new Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). For the next four decades she never let flag her labors for this cause. She wrote letters, meticulously kept current lists of congressional supporters, contributed to the NWP publication Equal Rights, spoke on radio and television, and appeared before Senate and House com-

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Pollitzer mittees. Then in 1953, because of an added proviso that would have exempted protective legislation for women, she as ardently battled to defeat the amendment. Other women's issues commanded the attention of the N W P and so of Anita Pollitzer: the right of American women married to foreign nationals to keep their citizenship, equitable labor codes under the National Industrial Recovery Act with equal pay scales for both sexes, and a married woman's right to paid employment by the government. Following Alice Paul's lead, she also entered fully into the work of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, and supported suffrage for European women. Shortly after obtaining an A.M. degree in international law at Columbia University in 1933, she assumed the post of vice chairman in the World Woman's party, another of Paul's ventures. She went as delegate in 1 9 4 5 to the San Francisco conference of the United Nations and worked for women's equality in the United Nations charter and in other international conventions. In 1928 Pollitzer married Elie Charlier Edson, a free-lance press agent. With her husband's unqualified encouragement, she continued her N W P work. She kept her maiden name. Neither Pollitzer nor Edson earned much money, and they lived mainly on income derived from securities given her by relatives and a legacy from his mother. Pollitzer had early moved into Alice Paul's inner leadership circle, and held several major offices in the NWP. When Paul stepped down as N W P chairman in 1945, Pollitzer, her choice as successor, received 155 of 197 votes cast. A faction led by Paul's rival, Doris Stevens ( 1 8 9 2 1 9 6 3 ) , refused to acknowledge Pollitzer as party head and initiated a lawsuit "to bring about [by] legal means democratic executive control." But in 1947 a federal district judge ruled Pollitzer and her duly elected administration to be legal party heads. Pollitzer remained chairman until 1949. Consensus held that she rendered able, even brilliant, leadership, although some members deplored her subjection "to Miss Paul's views . . . passions and moods," and others believed Paul deliberately held Pollitzer back, preventing her from becoming the national leader of women she might have been. In fact, the two women complemented each other, Pollitzer acknowledging Paul's superiority as party strategist and eagerly and effectively carrying out the policies Paul designed. In 1953 Pollitzer helped prevent the N W P from yielding its autonomy in an ill-conceived fund-raising scheme. Letters on this and other party matters show her persistence as well as her incisive mind. Her faith that the E R A would be-

come part of the Constitution never wavered; her perennial optimism and sunny disposition no doubt fortified her energies, for only old age at last slowed her activities. In addition to party labors, she taught art and English, and worked as a volunteer for an antivivisection society. She also wrote a biography (never published) of Georgia O'Keeffe, a classmate in art at Teachers College. It was Pollitzer who had first shown O'Keeffe's work to photographer and art patron Alfred Stieglitz, thus beginning their very significant creative partnership. Pollitzer lived a quieter life in the 1960s, often visiting her family in Charleston, including her sisters, Mabel and Carrie Pollitzer, who had been prominent locally in the suffrage campaign. She attended few meetings at N W P headquarters in Washington, but continued to serve the party by writing letters and telephoning. In 1971, the year her husband died, she suffered a stroke from which she did not fully recover. For four years she was cared for by nurses in her apartment near Columbia University; she died in the home of one of them in Queens, N.Y. [The main sources of information about Anita Pollitzer are in her papers, in the possession of Constance Myers, which contain correspondence, lectures, articles, NWP bulletins and memoranda, and many photographs. The O'Keeffe-Pollitzer correspondence is in the Beinecke Library, Yale Univ., and the Miriam Holden-Pollitzer letters are at Princeton Univ. The NWP Papers in the Library of Congress contain considerable Pollitzer material. Some official correspondence and materials concerning the NWP lawsuit are in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Taped interviews with Mabel and Carrie Pollitzer, her nephew William Pollitzer, and her friend Laura Bragg are in the South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, S.C. Pollitzer's article on O'Keeffe, "That's Georgia," appeared in the Sat. Rev. Lit., Nov. 4, 1950, pp. 41-43. Scattered references to Pollitzer's part in the suffrage campaign, many in her own words, are found in Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of the Woman's Party (1921). Loretta Ellen Zimmerman, "Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1912-1920" (Ph.D. diss., Tulane Univ., 1964), contains references to Pollitzer's suffrage work. Her labors on behalf of the ERA are mentioned in Susan Deubel Becker, "An Intellectual History of the National Woman's Party, 1920-1941" (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve Univ., 1975), and Marjory Nelson, "Ladies in the Streets: A Sociological Analysis of the National Woman's Party, 1910-1930" (Ph.D. diss., SUNY, Buffalo, 1976). See also a biographical sketch in Equal Rights, Nov.-Dec. 1945, and Elise Pinckney, "Anita Pollitzer: She Found a Career in Her Belief of Equal Rights for Women," South Carolina Mag., March 1954. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, July 5, 1975, Charleston News and Courier, July 8, 1975, and Charleston Evening Post, July 7, 1975.]

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POOL, Judith Graham, June 1, 1919-July 13, 1975. Physiologist. Judith Pool was born in Queens, N.Y., the eldest of the two daughters and one son of Leon Wilfred and Nellie (Baron) Graham. Her mother, a native of New York, was a schoolteacher; her father, a stockbroker, was English by birth. Both parents were Jewish. After graduating from Jamaica High School, Judith Graham attended the University of Chicago, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. In 1938, during her junior year, she married Ithiel de Sola Pool, a student in political science. She received a B.S. in 1939 and stayed on at Chicago, pursuing graduate studies and working as an assistant in physiology. In 1942 the Pools moved to Geneva, N.Y., where they both held posts at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she as an instructor in physics, he as assistant professor of political science. During this time they had two sons, Jonathan Robert (b. 1942) and Jeremy David (b. 1945). Judith Pool received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1946. During the next four years Pool worked at a variety of teaching, research, and secretarial jobs. The family moved to California in 1949 when her husband received an appointment at Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. Judith Pool returned to laboratory work in 1950 as a research associate at the Stanford Research Institute. In 1953 she joined the staff at Stanford University's School of Medicine as a research fellow (and trainee) supported by a Bank of AmericaGiannini Foundation grant for hemophilia research. It was here that she began her work in blood coagulation, and she published her first paper on the topic a year later. Pool continued her work at Stanford for the remainder of her life except for one year spent in Oslo, Norway (1958-59), under a Fulbright research fellowship. Her daughter, Lorna, was born in 1964. Her second marriage, in 1972, was to Maurice Sokolow, professor of medicine and hematology at the University of California, San Francisco. Both marriages ended in divorce, the first in 1953, the second in 1975. Judith Pool's research was mainly concerned with muscle physiology and blood coagulation. Her studies of muscle were the basis for her dissertation, directed by the well-known neurophysiologist, Ralph Waldo Gerard. She determined the electrical potential of the membrane of a single isolated muscle fiber—a landmark discovery at the time. Her research in the area of blood coagulation helped to revolutionize the treatment of hemo-

philia. Working with two associates she developed cryoprecipitate, a cold-insoluble protein fraction of whole blood plasma which contains the antihemophilic factor (AHF) or factor VIII and which is used for transfusion to correct the bleeding defect in hemophilia. This procedure of cold precipitation of AHF, first published in 1964, has become standard in blood banks for making "cryo"—the name given to the "wet" antihemophilia factor concentrate used in the treatment of hemophilia—and in industry as the first step in processing blood plasma in the preparation of dry therapeutic AHF concentrates. Pool also worked on many topics related to coagulation, sometimes alone but often with various colleagues. Her extensive research on the measurement of blood coagulation factors provided material for a number of published articles. She gave special attention to the measurement of an inhibitor of AHF that develops in the blood of about 10 percent of hemophiliacs who have had repeated transfusions —a complication that makes the bleeding disorder even worse. The great value of cryoprecipitate was promptly recognized and Pool's accomplishments were widely acclaimed. She gave lectures at several institutions and congresses, including the Paul M. Aggeler Memorial Lecture in 1974, and she became a member of the national scientific advisory committees of the National Institutes of Health and the American Red Cross Blood Program. She received the Murray Thelin Award from the National Hemophilia Foundation in 1968 and the Elizabeth Blackwell Award from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1973. Her last honor, the Professional Achievement Award, came from the University of Chicago in the spring of 1975. After her death the National Hemophilia Foundation renamed its Research Fellowship Awards the Judith Graham Pool Research Fellowships. Pool was an independent investigator in coagulation from 1954 until her death—an unusual situation for a person with only one year of training in such a complex field. She remained a research fellow at Stanford until 1956, advancing to senior research associate ( 1 9 5 6 - 7 0 ) , and senior scientist ( 1 9 7 0 - 7 2 ). By this time a famous scientist, Pool was promoted to full professor in 1972, without having been in the lower professorial ranks. In her last years, she devoted much effort to making more and better opportunities in science available to women, both in her own institution and nationally. Soon after its founding, she was elected copresident of the Association of Women in Science ( 1 9 7 1 ) ; she was also the first chairwoman of the Professional

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Women of Stanford University Medical Center (organized in 1970). Judith Pool died of a brain tumor in 1975 at Stanford University Hospital. Shortly before, she recorded a farewell message to family and friends: "The last few years of my life have been, I think, very unusual in that they have amounted to an experience for me of feeling overrewarded, overrecognized, overgratified beyond what anyone could expect, so there is no possibility of feeling cheated or regretful about what I will not have had as a result of dying earlier than expected. Quite the converse; it has almost been embarrassing in the other extreme." She was fifty-six. [Biographical material, news releases, and lists of Pool's publications are located in the archives of Stanford Univ. Medical Center. The collection includes a "Memorial Resolution for Judith Pool, 1919-1975," by Marion E. Smith, and a review of her life and work by F. C. Grumet. Her most important publications include her paper on muscle physiology (written with R. W. Gerard), "Membrane Potentials and Excitation of Impaled Single Muscle Fibers," Jour. Cellular and Comparative Physiology, vol. 28, no. 99, 1946; her first paper on blood coagulation (written with T. H. Spaet), "Ethionine-Induced Depression of Plasma Antihemophilic Globulin in the Rat," Proc. of the Soc. for Experimental Biology and Medicine, Oct. 1954; her major work (written with E. J. Hershgold and A. R. Pappenhagen), "High Potency Antihaemophilic Factor Concentrate Prepared from Cryoglobulin Precipitate," Nature, July 18, 1964; and her last published paper, "Cryoprecipitate: Its Preparation and Clinical Use," in K. M. Brinkhous and H. C. Hemker, eds., Handbook of Hemophilia (1975). She also published (with J. P. Bunker), "The Case for More Women in Medicine: The Stanford Program," New England Jour. Medicine, July 1, 1971. Information on Pool's life and work can be found in Robert and Suzanne Massie, Journey (1975); K. M. Brinkhous, "Judith Graham Pool, Ph.D. (1919-1975): An Appreciation," Thrombosis and Haemostasis, April 30, 1976; and an entry in Who's Who in America, 1974-75. The Brinkhous article contains a photograph. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, July 15, 1975. Information was provided by Jeremy David Pool and by Theodore H. Spaet. Death certificate was obtained from the Calif. Dept of Health.] K. M. BRINKHOUS

PORTER, Helen Tracy Lowe. See PORTER, Helen Tracy.

LOWE-

POST, Emily Price, Oct. 27, 1872-Sept. 25, 1960. Adviser on etiquette, writer, interior decorator. Emily Price Post was born in Baltimore, the only child of Josephine (Lee) and Bruce Price,

an architect. Both her parents descended from British immigrants who arrived before the Revolution. Her maternal grandfather, Washington Lee, was a wealthy Wilkes-Barre, Pa., mine owner; her paternal grandfather, William Price, was a lawyer and judge. Bruce Price, a decisive influence on his daughter, was becoming nationally famous by the time of Emily's birth. In 1877 he moved his business to New York; his wife and daughter followed. Emily was guided by governesses and enrolled in a neighboring finishing school, Miss Graham's. Reared in a genteel, upper-class New York setting, she was taught deportment and knowledge of the polite arts. Her personal beauty and carriage were exceptional, and attracted the favorable comments of the era's most vocal social umpire, Ward McAllister. Shortly after her debut Emily Price married, in 1892, Edwin M. Post, a businessman and investor and a sportsman. As a girl she had spent many summers in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. (a wealthy community planned by Bruce Price), where her parents owned a house; after her marriage she continued to live there for periods of the year, and on Staten Island. In time Edwin Post purchased a house in Manhattan. The Posts spent a lengthy honeymoon in Europe, and she returned there frequently, sending home long, witty letters. Family friends persuaded her to show these letters to publishers, and, receiving encouragement from the editor of Ainslee's magazine, she turned them into a novel which was serialized and then published as The Flight of a Moth (1904). During these early years of marriage two sons were born, Edwin M., Jr. (1893) and Bruce Price (1895). But the marriage ended in divorce in 1905. A growing estrangement was sharpened by Edwin Post's extramarital affairs, one of which was exposed by the blackmailing editor of Town Topics, Col. William D. Mann. Faced with the need to supplement her small income and raise her sons, Mrs. Price Post, as she chose to be known after her divorce, turned to freelance writing. During the next twenty years she turned out essays, short stories, and half a dozen novels. Most ran in journals like Ainslee's and Everybody's. She concentrated upon the life of the rich, the heady atmosphere of social climbing and new wealth. Her stories featured an international set, paying special attention to their standards of love, marriage, and taste. Post knew this class well, and her readers devoured the details of great country weekends, formal balls, sailing voyages, and romantic dalliances with the nobility. A spirit of adventure also characterized her own activities. With her older son, Edwin, she

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Post traveled by automobile from New York to California in 1915, to visit the Panama-Pacific Exposition and to publicize the pleasures of transcontinental motoring in its heroic age. Publishing her tour journal first in serial and then in book form (By Motor to the Golden Gate, 1916), she complemented this venturesomeness with a continuing interest in domestic life, particularly interior decoration. Influenced by her father's architectural career, she enjoyed making architectural models and redoing the homes of friends. As a successful writer and a former debutante, Post was approached in 1921 by Richard Duffy, an editor at Funk and Wagnalls, who suggested she create a guide to American etiquette. At first reluctant, she surveyed the existing literature and found it wanting. In a furious burst of energy she worked for ten months and produced a book published in 1922 as Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home. Almost immediately Emily Post became a celebrity, identified in the public mind with authoritative rulings on standards M social behavior. The popularity of the book rested on its wit, judgment, sense of humor, and knowledgeability. It met the needs of postwar Americans who wanted to rationalize their newly complex social relationships. By codifying an immense mass of traditions and informal regulations, by burying some myths and allaying some suspicions, Post did what the first American dictionary makers had done a century earlier: defined appropriate usage with special bows to colloquial needs. Ironically, during a decade associated with the overthrow of taboos associated with marriage, courtship, dress, drinking, and party-giving, a traditionalist's guide to the perplexed became a best seller. During the next twenty years over 650,000 copies of the book were sold; it moved through a number of important revisions and eventually took on the title of Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage. Post also wrote a column which first appeared in McCall's and was later syndicated in more than 150 newspapers, and she appeared weekly on the radio. For a decade she received thousands of letters each month. Organizing a cooperative apartment house in New York City, she left Tuxedo Park and also built a summer home in Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard. There she gardened, entertained her grandchildren, and found time to work on several editions of her favorite book, The Personality of a House (1930), a guide to home decoration, and to write smaller works on child behavior, letter writing, and traveling. Her younger son, an architect, died suddenly in 1927, but her son Edwin became an adviser,

managing the Emily Post Institute, founded in 1946 to handle her small empire. In 1960, the year she died, a tenth edition of Etiquette was issued; like previous editions, it reflected large social changes by modifying once sacrosanct rules. Although cataract surgery interrupted her activities in later years, Post remained active until her death at her New York apartment. Emily Post was a peculiarly American phenomenon, mediator between a mobile, democratic society and an abstract ideal of social maturity. Aristocratic ambitions led many to accept her as a certified instructor while fear of outraging the mysterious standards of "society" gave her words weight with the middle classes. Readers were fascinated by her thoroughness, reassured by her practicality, and flattered by the fantasies Post permitted to surface; there was almost no question of behavior she refused to tackle. "You may have had a successful hunting trip and wish to send the President a brace of pheasants," she wrote in her Washington section. But she advised against presenting a gift in person because the secret service disliked small packages. Responding to restaurant-going habits, Post not only advised on seating but treated alcoves and built-in benches along the wall; her chapters on dining behavior noted the problems of left-handed children. Willing to sacrifice tradition when necessary, she often did so sadly. In the 1945 edition, Post acknowledged doubts about retaining advice on opera- and theater-going as they illustrated "an extreme formality of deportment that may never return." But she included the chapter unchanged, arguing that "the opera will lose much of its prestige if its manners grow lax." Nevertheless, she moved with the times. There is no reason, Post wrote in the 1945 edition, why a man invited to dine with a woman friend should be embarrassed to have her "take the check and pay it." "Mrs. Grundy," she concluded, "has lost nearly all of her influence during the war." Emily Post accepted her celebrity with good humor. Sympathetic with rather than condescending toward her millions of followers, she took seriously questions about table settings, bridal invitations, mourning customs, and dress codes, spicing her descriptions with fictional families like the Oldworlds, the Onceweres, the Highbrows, and the Wellborns. In the absence of a court, a peerage, and a royal family, Emily Post became the nation's lawgiver on matters of social usage, and entered the language as the final arbiter of proper behavior. [In addition to her novels and the books mentioned, Emily Post published many articles on various aspects of etiquette, such as "How to Be Happy

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Though a Parent," Collier's, July 20, 1929, pp. 17, 41; "One Servant in the House," American Home, May 1931, pp. 113-14; and "Etiquette of Smoking," Good Housekeeping, Sept. 1940, p. 37. Her other books include How to Behave Though a Debutante (1928), a collection of sketches that had been published anonymously in Vanity Fair; How to Give Buffet Suppers (1933); Time Etiquette (1935); The Secret of Keeping Friends (1938); Motor Manners: The Blue Book of Traffic Etiquette (1949); and The Emily Post Cookbook (1951). The only book about her, Truly Emily Post (1961), written by her son Edwin, is anecdotal and not always reliable, but evocative. The best biographical source is James L. Cate, "Keeping Posted," Univ. of Chicago Mag., May/June 1972, pp. 24-34. Among the many contemporary portraits see the profile, New Yorker, Aug. 16, 1930, pp. 22-25, by Helena Huntington Smith; Margaret Case Harriman, "Dear Mrs. Post," Sat. Eve. Post, May 15, 1937, pp. 18-19, 52-58; Hildegard Dolson, "Ask Mrs. Post," Reader's Digest, April 1941, pp. 7-12, an abridgement of an article in Independent Woman, April 1941; an entry in Current Biog., 1941; and Geoffrey Hellman, "The Waning Oomph of Mrs. Toplofty," New Yorker, June 18, 1955, pp. 80, 88. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Sept. 27, 1960. Various published sources list her year of birth as 1873 and the day as Oct. 3 or 30; the Oct. 27, 1872, date was supplied by Post's grandson William G. Post from a handwritten entry in a family copy of a 1905 book entitled The Post Family.] NEIL

HARRIS

POST, Marjorie Merriweather, March 15, 1 8 8 7 Sept. 12, 1973. Philanthropist, businesswoman. Marjorie Merriweather Post was the only child of Charles William Post, founder of the Postum Cereal Company, and Ella Letitia (Merriweather) Post, both descendants of early seventeenth-century English settlers. Like her parents, Marjorie Post was born in middle-class surroundings in Springfield, 111., but she grew up in Battle Creek, Mich., where her father moved in 1891 seeking treatment for a debilitating digestive disorder at the sanitarium of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Although he regained his health only after becoming a Christian Scientist, C. W. Post, then an inventor and farm implement salesman, nevertheless profited from the sanitarium's health food ideas. After experimenting with various cereal combinations, he concocted and successfully marketed Postum, Grape Nuts, and Post Toasties. To prepare his daughter to inherit his multimillion dollar business, Post supplemented her education at the Battle Creek public schools and at Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington, D.C. ( 1 9 0 1 - 0 4 ) , with a thorough training in business operations and techniques. She sat in on busi-

ness meetings, toured factories, and was quizzed about what she had learned. He even taught her to box. Father and daughter remained close even after he divorced her mother and remarried in 1904. A year later Marjorie Post married Edward Bennett Close, a lawyer from an old New York family. They had two daughters, Adelaide Brevoort (b. 1 9 0 8 ) and Eleanor Post (b. 1 9 0 9 ) . After her father committed suicide in 1914, Marjorie Post Close inherited the Postum Cereal Company. Represented on the board of directors by her husband (women were not welcome, and she only became a board member in 1 9 3 6 ) , she was consulted about major decisions. She divorced Close in 1919 and the following year married Edward Francis Hutton, a wealthy Manhattan stockbroker. T h e Huttons had one daughter, Nedenia Marjorie (b. 1 9 2 3 ) , who became the actress Dina Merrill. In 1923 E. F. Hutton became chairman of the board of the Postum Cereal Company and took an active role in Postum's rapid expansion during the 1920s. At the same time, Marjorie Post Hutton, impressed by a frozen goose served on one of her yachts, became an enthusiastic early proponent of frozen foods. For several years she tried, against her husband's advice, to persuade Postum's board to purchase the patents and food freezing equipment of Clarence Birdseye, and in 1929 she succeeded. After acquiring Birdseye's General Foods Company, Postum, already a public corporation, was renamed the General Foods Corporation and grew into the largest food industry in the United States, multiplying Marjorie Post's inherited fortune several times. Marjorie Post and E. F. Hutton (who reportedly opposed her support for Franklin D. Roosevelt and her first efforts to use her money for public charity) were divorced in 1935. T h e same year she married Joseph Edward Davies, a wealthy Washington, D.C., lawyer and later the ambassador to the Soviet Union ( 1 9 3 6 3 8 ) and to Belgium ( 1 9 3 8 - 3 9 ) . Renowned for her beauty, vitality, and charm, Marjorie Post Davies enjoyed entertaining and, during her sojourns with her third husband in Moscow and Brussels, maintained her reputation as a lavish hostess. Divorced from Davies in 1955, she was married one more time, in 1958, to Herbert Arthur May, head of the Westinghouse Corporation. They were divorced in 1964, and she resumed the name Marjorie Merriweather Post. For her entertaining, Post built various sumptuous estates filled with precious decorative art objects. Mar-A-Lago, her Hispano-Moresque winter estate in Palm Beach, Fla., was decorated with Dutch Delft, Venetian, Portuguese, and Louis X V I furnishings. Camp Topridge, a sum-

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Post mer retreat in the Adirondacks, housed a fine collection of American Indian arts and crafts. In Washington, D.C., Post's Georgian residence, Hillwood, where she catered to the political and diplomatic society of the capital, displayed her priceless collection of antiques, tapestries, jades, porcelains, china services, silver, and glassware, including many treasures which had once belonged to European monarchs. Her collection of tsarist art objects—Russian imperial portraits, F a b e r g e Easter eggs, chalices, icons, porcelains, and jewelry—is considered the finest outside the Soviet Union. Post's decorative art treasures went on public view at Hillwood after her death there of acute pericarditis at the age of eightysix. Marjorie Post prided herself on using her fortune constructively, and she contributed generously to charity and the arts. During World W a r I, she provided funds for the Red Cross to build, equip, and run a 2 , 0 0 0 - b e d hospital at Savenay, France. From 1 9 2 9 to 1935, she supported a New York City Salvation Army food kitchen, where she was known as the Lady Bountiful of Hell's Kitchen. T h e principal benefactor of Mount Vernon College (previously Mount Vernon Seminary), serving for many years on the school's board of directors, and of C. W . Post College in N e w York (later part of Long Island University), Post also helped the Boy Scouts build a service center in Washington, D . C . In addition to a large contribution toward the construction of the John F . Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, she gave over a million dollars to the National Symphony Orchestra and sponsored the orchestra's Music for Young America concerts, which offered free spring concerts for schoolchildren visiting the capital. Post's largess was acknowledged by many awards from a variety of institutions and five foreign countries. She also had numerous private charities, including gifts to former employees. Described even in advanced age as a remarkably handsome woman, Marjorie Merriweather Post worried about her diet, exercised religiously, and avoided cigarettes and alcohol. Fearful of infection from other people's germs, she at one time owned her own Pullman car. Post said she learned from her father that money should b e used to help other people, and she also attributed her organizational talents to him. C. W . Post had, she claimed, once said of her: " I f [she] were cast ashore on a desert island [she'd] organize the grains of sand." [Post's personal papers, photographs, and family portraits are located at the Hillwood Museum, Washington, D.C. Hillwood was willed to the Smithsonian Institution (but was later returned to

the Post family and became a private museum); Camp Topridge to N.Y. state; Mar-A-Lago to the U.S. government. Recollections of her childhood are included in The Reminiscences of Marjorie Merriweather Post ( 1 9 6 4 ) , in the Oral Hist. Coll., Columbia Univ. Nettie Leitch Major, "Marjorie Merriweather Post," in C. W. Post: The Hour and the Man ( 1 9 6 3 ) , and William Wright, Heiress: The Rich Life of Marjorie Merriweather Post ( 1 9 7 8 ) , are the major biographies. Post was the subject of a number of popular magazine articles, the most comprehensive being Arthur Bartlett, "Lady Bountiful," New Yorker, Feb. 4, 11, and 18, 1939; "Post Hostess with the Mostest," Time, Sept. 24, 1973; "Mumsy the Magnificent," Time, Feb. 3,1967; and "A World Unique and Magnificent," Life, Nov. 5, 1965. Post's collection of tsarist art objects is discussed in two books by Marvin C. Ross, The Art of Karl Faberge and His Contemporaries ( 1 9 6 5 ) and Russian Porcelains ( 1 9 6 8 ) . On Sept. 13, 1973, the N.Y. Times, Wash. Post, and Wash. Star News carried long obituaries. Death certificate was supplied by D.C. Dept. of Public Health.] NANCY BOURGERIE

MEO

POUND, Louise, June 30, 1 8 7 2 - J u n e 2 8 , 1958. Scholar, teacher, athlete. Louise Pound, who made pioneering contributions to American philology and folklore, was born in Lincoln, Neb. She was the middle of three children and older of two daughters of Stephen Bosworth and Laura (Biddlecombe) Pound, who had moved from New York state in 1869. Her father, a lawyer, was a district court judge and a state senator; her mother had been a teacher. Both parents were descended from seventeenth-century English colonists. Lincoln offered significant cultural opportunities, particularly for select families like the Pounds: " I t may have been mud-flats on the outside, but it was Boston within." Through courses at the University of Nebraska, Laura Pound had become proficient in German language and literature. She had also developed an interest in botany, finding prairie specimens hitherto unidentified. Because the program offered in the public schools was "too stereotyped," she decided to teach her three children at home. In 1 8 8 6 Louise Pound entered the university's preparatory Latin School by examination, and in 1 8 8 8 she enrolled as a freshman at the university. Pound received a B . L . with a diploma in music (piano) from the University of Nebraska in 1892, having been class orator and poet, associate editor of a college paper, women's state tennis champion, and university champion in men's singles and doubles, for which she earned a man's varsity letter. She began her teaching career as a fellow in English at the university

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in 1894 and received her A.M. there in 1895. Meanwhile she earned a string of bars for "century runs" (cycling one hundred miles in twelve hours) and was at various times coach, captain, and member of a winning women's basketball team. After attending summer sessions at the University of Chicago in 1897 and 1898, Pound determined to take the Ph.D. in Germany for reasons of economy and relative brevity. She succeeded in obtaining the degree from Heidelberg in far fewer than the usual seven semesters. "Winning that degree in two semesters was the hardest thing I ever did," she stated in a newspaper interview in 1945. In 1900 Pound returned to the University of Nebraska, where she was to teach for forty-five more years. Athletically, she was a ranking woman golfer (for over twenty-five years) and figure skater. "Gave up tennis in the second decade of the century," she wrote in her eighties. "Bi-focal glasses wrecked my ground strokes." She became a full professor in 1912 and had visiting professorships during summers at the University of California, Berkeley (1923), Yale University ( 1 9 2 8 ) , the University of Chicago (1929), Columbia University (1930), and Stanford University ( 1 9 3 1 ) . Her teaching load during the regular academic year was heavy, and there were no sabbaticals. She taught a wide range of subjects and pioneered in teaching American literature and language at a time when most university departments offered only English literature. Her students remembered her as a great teacher—knowledgeable, inspiring, and interested in their lives and work long after graduation. Despite the heavy teaching load, Pound accomplished an enormous amount of scholarly work, much of it innovative. A notable contribution was her demolition of the once widely held notion of the cooperative origin of ballads. Pound argued for the reasonableness of individual composition and the relative modernity of the genre. In Poetic Origins and the Ballad (1921), she pointed to evidence in the ballads of knowledge of rhyme and stanza form and demonstrated their dissimilarity to genuine products of folk improvisation. Perhaps her major contribution was her role in establishing the scholarly study of American speech and folklore. A number of her studies concerned etymology and modern changes in the English language as spoken in the United States, work which, when she began it, was not considered respectable by either English or American philologists. H. L. Mencken wrote that Pound's "early work put the study of current American English on its legs." This area of her work has been partly recorded in the journal

American Speech, of which she was a founder and senior editor (1925—33). She was also editor of the University of Nebraska Studies in Language and Criticism ( 1 9 1 7 - 4 0 ) . The middle west figures prominently in Pound's studies of folklore, from Folk-Song of Nebraska and the Central West: A Syllabus (1915), the first state collection of its kind, to her last volume, Nebraska Folklore, published posthumously in 1959. She chose to remain in Nebraska in part because of her attachment to her sister Olivia and to the family home, a three-story modified Victorian house where she had a tower-room library and study. There were usually several women students who lived at the house and provided domestic service. Her work, however, received national recognition, and in 1955 her professional career was crowned by her election, at eighty-two, as the first woman president of the Modern Language Association. The same year she was elected to the Nebraska Sports Hall of Fame, the only woman on the roster. As she wrote to a friend and former student: "First woman again.—Life has its humors." Louise Pound was a strikingly beautiful woman. Her red hair, which retained its color, was worn wrapped about her head in a braid. As a student she had founded the Order of the Golden Fleece, to which only women who were natural redheads could belong. Throughout her life Pound was an advocate of women's education and supported efforts to improve the position of women within the University of Nebraska. She was willing, too, to speak to women's groups throughout the state, and no doubt influenced mothers to send their daughters—who otherwise might not have gone—to the university. She was not only outspoken in her defense of the rights of women but also capable of dramatic demonstration: in the 1920s Pound set up a desk in a hallway outside her classroom to protest her assignment to an office irrationally distant from the site of her teaching. Among the many professional organizations to which Pound belonged, "closest to her heart" was the American Association of University Women, which she served as national vice president ( 1 9 3 7 - 4 4 ) . Louise Pound died in Lincoln at eighty-five of a heart attack. She had been, as her student B. A. Botkin recalled, "a great teacher because she was a great person." [The extensive papers of the Pound family—Louise, her mother, her brother, Roscoe (dean of the Harvard L a w School), and her sister, Olivia—include letters, articles, clippings, autobiographical and genealogical material, scrapbooks, class notebooks from the 1890s, and many reprints of scholarly arti-

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cles. These are held in the archives of the Neb. State Hist. Soc. in Lincoln. Additional items including photographs are in the archives of the Univ. of Neb., Lincoln. Selected Writings of Louise Pound (1949), a good introduction to her work, has a lengthy bibliography compiled by Mamie Meredith and Ruth Odell, as well as a list of her many professional societies, activities, and honors. Some autobiographical material was published in Louise Pound, "The Class of 1892—Fifty Years After," Neh. Alumnus, May 1942, and in Sara Mullin Baldwin and Robert Morton Baldwin, eds., Nebraskana (1932), pp. 963-64. Biographical material includes Hartley Alexander, "Louise Pound," Neb. Alumnus, Oct. 1933; "For Members Only," PMLA, April 1955; B. A. Botkin, "Pound Sterling: Letters from a 'Lady Professor,' " Prairie Schooner, March 1959; J. R. Johnson, Representative Nebraskans (1954), pp. 154-58; an affectionate tribute by Roscoe Pound, "My Sister Louise," Boston Globe, June 30, 1957; and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XLVI, 538. For H. L. Mencken's acknowledged debt to Pound see The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, Supp. I (19^2)^ p. vi. For a description of Lincoln during Pounces formative years see Bernice Slote's introduction to The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896 (1966), especially pp. 6-7. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 29, 1958; Western Folklore, July 1959, pp. 201-2; Names, March 1959, pp. 60-62; and Southern Folklore Quart., June 1959, pp. 132-33. Additional information was provided by Belle Farman, Wilbur G. Gaffney, Elizabeth Grone, Robert and Virginia Knoll, Grace Loveland, and Bernice Slote. Death certificate supplied by Neb. Dept. of Health.] E V E L Y N H.

HAIXER

POWDERMAKER, Hortense, Dec. 24, 1 8 9 6 June 15, 1970. Anthropologist. Hortense Powdermaker, an adventurous investigator whose work made an enduring contribution to anthropology in her generation, was born in Philadelphia, the second child of Minnie (Jacoby) and Louis Powdermaker, a middleclass businessman. Except for her paternal grandmother who came from England, her grandparents were German Jewish immigrants to Philadelphia. Both grandfathers were successful businessmen in that city, but Louis Powdermaker's fortunes fluctuated. Hortense Powdermaker grew up keenly aware of small social distinctions, a sensitivity which she later made good use of in her anthropological studies. The family moved to Reading, Pa., when Hortense was about five, and seven or eight years later settled in Baltimore, where she was confirmed in a Reform synagogue. There were three other children in the family: an older sister, Florence Powdermaker ( 1 8 9 4 - 1 9 6 6 ) , who became a distinguished psychiatrist, and a younger

sister and brother. Hortense felt dominated by her older sister, and throughout her life struggled with her own resulting feelings of inadequacy. She also at an early age rebelled against "the business values and the social snobbery" of her family. Powdermaker attended Western High School in Baltimore and graduated from Goucher College in 1919 with a major in history. She was somewhat detached from college social life, both because she was a day student and because, as a Jew, she was not invited to join a sorority. She developed an interest in socialism and in the labor movement and spent one spring vacation working in a men's shirt factory. After graduation Powdermaker worked in New York City for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and was sent to Cleveland and Rochester as a union organizer. She enjoyed the work but came to feel that in the union she would always be an outsider. In 1925 she went to London where she registered at the London School of Economics for a class in anthropology taught by Bronislaw Malinowski and found that "Anthropology was what I had been looking for without knowing it." She became one of Malinowski's first graduate students while he was developing his theory of functionalism and exploring the relation of psychoanalysis to anthropology. These approaches thereafter shaped her work. During her London years, Powdermaker lived most of the time in Bloomsbury and spent summers in the South Tyrol near the Malinowski villa. She received a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1928 and left the following year to do her first field work. Her first book, Life in Lesu ( 1 9 3 3 ) , was the product of her ten months in a small village in New Ireland, an island in the southwest Pacific. Associated with the Institute of Human Relations at Yale University between 1930 and 1937, she came to know Edward Sapir, whose interest in culture and personality greatly stimulated her own thinking. With Sapir's help, Powdermaker obtained support from the Social Science Research Council for what became one of the first community studies to be done in the United States by an anthropologist, and between 1932 and 1934 she spent twelve months in Indianola, Miss. She also helped psychologist John Dollard get started in Indianola and was chagrined when his research converged with hers and was published first. A more comprehensive study than Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town ( 1 9 3 7 ) , Powdermaker's After Freedom (1939) is notable for its descriptions of social distinctions within the black and white communities and for its comments on the black church. Pow-

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dermaker later published a related paper reflecting her psychoanalytic interests, "The Channeling of Negro Aggression by the Cultural Process" (Am. Jour. Sociology, May 1943). In 1938 Powdermaker was named instructor in anthropology at Queens College in New York City where she taught until her retirement, becoming professor in 1954. She set high standards for the joint department of anthropology and sociology which she founded, and she was proud of the accomplishments of her students. A popular lecturer, Powdermaker was especially successful in communicating the excitement of her profession. She taught briefly at several other universities and was lecturer in cultural anthropology at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology (1944-52), and in the department of psychiatry at the New York College of Medicine (1958). During World War II Powdermaker lectured at Yale in the Army Specialized Training Program for the southwest Pacific and wrote a short book for high school students, Probing Our Prejudices (1944). She was vice president and chairman of the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences (1944—46) and vice president (1945-46) and president (1946-47) of the American Ethnological Society. Interested in the movies ever since her field work in Mississippi, Powdermaker spent the year 1946-47 in Hollywood gathering material for the book that made her famous, Hollywood, The Dream Factory (1950). In it she analyzed the social structure of the moviemaking community and showed how it affected the content of the movies. Powdermaker was frustrated by Hollywood, critical of its values, and uncomfortable with her research, for she was not able to be a participant-observer—the anthropologist's ideal role in field work—as she had been elsewhere. But her interest in mass communications continued, and she spent a sabbatical year (1953-54) studying social change and the effects of mass media in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia). Copper Town (1962) contains good field data, but reflects her struggle to comprehend a rapidly changing situation. Powdermaker's last and best book was Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (1966), an account of her field work experiences. She had long been able to give a vivid picture of life in other cultures, as in such articles as "From the Diary of a Girl Organizer," in The Amalgamated Illustrated Almanac (1924), and "At Home on the Equator: Letters from the South Seas," in the February 1934 Atlantic Monthly. But Stranger and Friend, a long look back at her entire career, is distinguished by its perspective, by the insight into

her own person Powdermaker gained from extensive psychoanalysis, and by its intention of conveying to young anthropologists the actual experience of field work. It is a classic statement by an anthropologist of why and how one seeks to enter and understand other societies. She also wrote the article on field work for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968). Powdermaker received an honorary degree from Goucher College in 1957 and in 1965 won the Distinguished Teacher Award given by the Alumni Association of Queens College. Retiring in 1968, she moved to Berkeley, Calif., where she began a study of the youth culture and worked on lectures on women and culture. She died in Berkeley of a heart attack in 1970. Hortense Powdermaker was a short, plump woman, keenly interested in clothes and in her personal appearance. She liked to talk, she liked parties, and she was a frequent and gracious hostess and a good cook. A sensitive and intuitive person, she could wound sharply when she was despondent but could soothe and encourage in an uncannily comforting way when her own inner turmoil subsided. She was not close to her family but had many friends among students and colleagues who appreciated her ready wit, warmth, and honesty. For a number of years she shared her apartment with a foster son, Won Mo Kim. Powdermaker's strengths as a scholar were her inquiring mind, keen intuition, and an inner drive that made her work very hard. A lifelong commitment to social justice helped to shape her choice of problems for study. Although she was not a significant theorist, in her ability to sense new areas where anthropological methods might be fruitfully applied, as in her studies of the American south, of Hollywood, and of contemporary Africa, she was a pioneer. [Powdermaker directed in her will that her personal papers be destroyed. There are some letters in the Alfred L. Kroeber Papers, and in the university archives, both in the Bancroft Library, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley. A collection of photographs taken in the field are at the Lowie Museum, also at Berkeley. Her published papers also include "Vital Statistics of New Ireland as Revealed in Genealogies," Human Biology, Sept. 1931, pp. 351-75; with Joseph Semper, "Education and Occupation Among New Haven Negroes," Jour. Negro Hist., April 1938, pp. 200-15; "The Anthropological Approach to the Problem of Modifying Race Attitudes," Jour. Negro Education, Summer 1944, pp. 295-303; "An Anthropological Approach to the Problem of Obesity," Bull. N.Y. Acad, of Medicine, 1960, pp. 5-14; and two tributes to her teacher, "Commemoration of Professor Bronislaw Malinowski," Bull. Polish Inst, of Arts and Sciences in

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Price America, Jan. 1943, pp. 2 0 3 - 7 , and "Further Reflections on Lesu and Malinowski's Diary," Oceania, June 1970, pp. 3 4 4 - 4 7 . The major source of information about Powdermaker's life is Stranger and Friend, although it includes little on her teaching, other professional activities, and private life. See also Margie H. Luckett, ed., Maryland Women ( 1 9 3 1 ) , pp. 3 5 1 - 5 2 ; New Yorker, March 5, 1949, pp. 2 1 - 2 2 ; Current Biog., 1961; and Winifred G. Helmes, ed., Notable Maryland Women ( 1 9 7 7 ) , pp. 2 8 5 - 8 9 . Another useful source is an obituary by Eric R. Wolf, accompanied by a bibliography, a photograph, and a tribute by George L. Trager, in Am. Anthropologist, June 1971, pp. 7 8 3 - 8 7 . An obituary also appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 17, 1970. Gerald D. Berreman, Ernestine Friedl, Theodora KroeberQuinn, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes supplied additional information for this article. The dates of her birth and graduation from college given in most printed sources are incorrect. The 1919 graduation date was confirmed by Goucher College. Birth certificate provided by Philadelphia Dept. of Records; death certificate by Calif. Dept. of Health Services.] J O A N T. MARK

PRICE, Florence Beatrice Smith, April 9 , 1 8 8 8 June 3, 1953. Composer, instrumentalist. Florence Price, whose music was played by American orchestras during the 1930s and 1940s, was important as the first black woman symphonic composer in the United States. Born in Little Rock, Ark., she was the second daughter and third child of James H. and Florence (Gulliver) Smith. Her father, a dentist, had been born of free black parents in Delaware in 1843. He learned dentistry in Philadelphia, went to Chicago to practice, and, after the Great Fire of 1871, moved to Arkansas. Her mother, a musically trained elementary school teacher, c a m e from Indianapolis.

Florence Smith was educated in the black schools of Little Rock. She received her early musical training from her mother and began composing as a young girl, reportedly publishing her first work at age eleven. Valedictorian of her class, at fourteen she went to the New England Conservatory in Boston to study piano and organ, graduating in 1906. Smith taught at Shorter College in North Little Rock, Ark., from 1906 to 1910 and at Clark University in Atlanta until 1912, when she returned to Little Rock to marry Thomas J. Price, an attorney. After her marriage on Sept. 12, 1912, Florence Price taught music privately, remaining active professionally after the birth of her children: a son, Thomas, who died in infancy, Florence Louise (b. 1917), and Edith (b. 1921). In 1927 the family moved to Chicago where Price continued her studies at the Chicago Musical College, the American Conserva-

tory, and other area colleges and universities. She also taught piano, organ, and composition, and performed as an organist and pianist. During the 1920s Price entered several composition contests, and in 1925 and 1927 her "Memories of Dixieland" and "In the Land of Cotton" won second place in the Holstein competition sponsored by Opportunity magazine. In 1931 she took an honorable mention in the Wanamaker Prize competition, and in 1932 won four prizes in this contest, among them first place in the symphonic division for her Symphony in E Minor. (Her composition student Margaret Bonds [1913-1972], who subsequently had a very successful career as a composer, was a prizewinner in the same contest.) The Wanamaker Prize brought Price to the attention of Frederick Stock, conductor of the Chicago Symphony, who presented the Symphony in E Minor at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. It was the first performance by a major American orchestra of a symphony by a black woman. The Symphony in E Minor is in a romantic style, and uses such ethnic materials as the juba rhythm in classic forms, somewhat in the manner of Dvorak. In other symphonies, concertos, and program works for orchestra Price also drew occasionally on the spirit and rhythms of black music, including spirituals. She did not use jazz rhythms, however, nor did she quote preexistent tunes. Her work is close in spirit and style to that of the other black symphonists whose compositions were played in the early 1930s-William Grant Still, the first black male composer to have his work performed by an American orchestra, and William Dawson. The oldest of the three, Price received her professional musical education at an earlier period, and her musical tastes therefore reflect the styles of the turn of the century. By 1928 Schirmer and McKinley were publishing Price's works, particularly her teaching pieces. Her later publications, brought out by a number of publishers, included songs, piano pieces, short choral works, and piano teaching pieces. Her songs, however, remain the works by which she is best known. She joined the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1940, and her larger works became available through this organization in manuscript form. During her life Price's symphonic works were played by the orchestras of several cities, including those of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, and by the Chicago Women's Symphony, with which she played her Piano Concerto in F Minor in 1934. Her Three Negro Dances were in the repertory of the New York City

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Priest Symphonic Band and the United States Marine Band. Songs and spiritual arrangements, the best known of which are "My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord" and "Songs to a Dark Virgin," were sung by Marian Anderson and other concert singers. Price was very active in the Chicago Club of Women Organists, and her organ music, published by Lorenz, Summy and Galaxy, was played by organists in the Chicago area. Thomas Price died in 1942. During the next decade Florence Price continued to perform and compose. She wrote a second violin concerto in 1952, and on Feb. 18, 1953, the Television Pops Concert by members of the Chicago Symphony included her Suite of Negro Dances. She died of a stroke at Saint Luke's Hospital in Chicago in 1953. In 1964 the Chicago public schools honored her memory by naming a new elementary school for her. [A collection of original manuscripts and other documents is held by Elmer Robinson and Lawrence Robinson, Price's son-in-law and grandson. There is also a small collection of correspondence, published and unpublished scores, programs, photographs, and other materials, as well as correspondence from Price's daughter Florence Price Robinson to Mary Hudgins and Barbara Jackson, in Special Collections, Univ. of Ark. Library, Fayetteville. Price's works are partially listed in ASCAP Symphonic Catalogue (1959) and Ora Williams, American Black Women in the Arts and Social Sciences: A Bibliographic Survey (1973), which also lists recordings. Information about her and some assessment of her work can be found in Verna Arvey, "Outstanding Achievements of Negro Composers," Etude, March 1942; ASCAP Biog. Diet, of Composers, Authors and Publishers, 1948, 1952, 1966; Margaret Bonds, "A Reminiscence," International Library of Negro Life and History: The Negro in Music and Art (1967); Maude Cuney-Hare, Negro Musicians and Their Music (1936); Shirley Graham, "Spirituals to Symphonies," Etude, Nov. 1936; Barbara Garvey Jackson, "Florence Price, Composer," The Black Perspective in Music, Spring 1977; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (1971). Mildred Denby Green, "A Study of the Lives and Works of Five Black Women Composers" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Okla., 1975), includes also an extensive, but not complete, list of Price's works. Obituaries appeared in Etude, Aug. 1953; Musical America, July 1953; and Musical Courier, July 1953; death record supplied by 111. Dept. of Public Health. Photographs can be found in the articles by Graham and Jackson.] BARBARA GARVEY

JACKSON

PRIEST, Ivy Maude Baker, Sept. 7, 1905-June 23, 1975. Republican party worker, federal and state official. Ivy Baker Priest, who became treasurer of the

United States, was born in Kimberly, Piute County, Utah, the eldest of seven children (four boys and three girls) of Orange Decatur and Clara (Fearnley) Baker. Her father, grandson of an early Utah settler, was a miner with five years of schooling. He met his future wife, then a domestic worker, while on a Mormon mission to England. During Ivy's school years, the family lived in Bingham, Utah, a mining town twenty-eight miles southwest of Salt Lake City. After Orange Baker was injured in a mining accident, his wife opened a boardinghouse where she fed thirty miners with the help of her eldest daughter and two hired girls. Clara Baker was known as "Mrs. Republican" because of her activity in grassroots politics in Bingham. Young Ivy helped by baby-sitting for voters on election day. Ivy Baker graduated from Bingham Canyon High School, but her family's poverty prevented her from attending college or studying law, as she had planned. She worked as a ticket seller in a movie theater before an early, unsuccessful marriage ( 1 9 2 4 - 2 9 ) to Harry Howard Hicks. The couple lived in North Carolina where Harry Hicks worked as a traveling salesman. Ivy Baker Hicks rejoined her family, then in Salt Lake City, at the onslaught of the depression. She helped out her parents, who received church welfare, by working as a long distance telephone operator, and later entered department store merchandising while teaching American history in night school. On Dec. 7, 1935, she married Roy Fletcher Priest, a traveling wholesale-furniture dealer twenty-one years her senior. This marriage to a mature man, considerably shorter than she, proved eminently successful. She was happy to be a housewife in Bountiful, Utah, even as her husband encouraged her political activities. A tall, trim, and vivacious brunette, who favored decorative hats, Ivy Baker Priest was a dynamic public speaker. Her organizing ability led her up the ranks of the Republican party. She was successively president of the Utah Young Republicans ( 1 9 3 4 - 3 6 ) ; cochairman of the Young Republicans for eleven western states (1936—40); Republican committeewoman from Davis County, Utah; president of the Utah Legislative Council ( 1 9 3 7 - 3 9 ) ; and Republican national committeewoman from Utah ( 1 9 4 4 5 2 ) . She ran unsuccessfully for the Utah State Legislature in 1934 and for Congress in 1950 against the Democratic incumbent, Reva Beck Bosone, a lawyer. During the 1930s, Priest had also been a leader in efforts to enact the first minimum wage law for working women in Utah. Her four children, Patricia Ann (b. 1 9 3 6 ) , Peggy Louise (b. 1 9 3 8 ) , Nancy Ellen (b.

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Priest 1941), and Roy Baker Priest (b. 1 9 4 2 ) , were born during this period of heavy political activity. Indeed, she had been encouraged by her husband and mother to resume her political work following the death of her daughter Peggy in 1939. Priest confronted the potential conflict between work and motherhood in her autobiography, Green Grows Ivy, maintaining that "her career grew out of her desire to be a better mother and to assume the responsibilities of community life." Elsewhere she gave a religious justification for her dual role: " W e have a belief in the Mormon Church that each of us is given a separate set of talents. Our objective in life is to use these talents to the utmost, wherever they lead us." Priest's mother encouraged her emotionally and practically, even moving in to care for the children at busy times, as did a maternal aunt. Following a stroke, Roy Priest retired from his business at the age of sixty-eight, and assumed the title "home manager." Ivy Baker Priest was an early supporter of Dwight D. Eisenhower's undeclared presidential candidacy in 1952. After his nomination she was appointed assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, in charge of women's affairs. Long a proponent of increasing women's participation in politics, her successful efforts during the campaign led to her appointment as the thirtieth treasurer of the United States, the second woman to hold the position. As treasurer, she headed the banking facility of the federal government, and was responsible for all money received, for outgoing checks, and for issuing much of the nation's paper currency. Although she had no training for this work, it was an essentially political post, and she impressed the official staff with her good sense and administrative skill. She averaged ten speeches a month; she and Oveta Culp Hobby were the most visible women in the administration. Active in the American Red Cross, the Utah and National Safety Councils, the International Soroptimist Club, and the National Society for Crippled Children and Adults, Priest lent her name and skills to many good works. The recipient of several honorary degrees, she was chosen as one of the twenty outstanding women of the twentieth century by the Women's Newspaper Editors and Publishers Association. In 1959 she was named Mother-in-Law of the Year. After serving as treasurer during the eight years of Eisenhower's administration, she retired in 1961 to California. Roy Priest had died in 1959, and on June 20, 1961, she married Sidney William Stevens, a Beverly Hills real estate developer, who died in 1972. In 1966 she ran successfully for the post of

treasurer of California, her first elective office, and served under Governor Ronald Reagan for two four-year terms. The first woman to seek the post, she acquitted her charge to invest California's revenues for high return. In 1968 she placed Ronald Reagan in nomination for the United States presidency, becoming the first woman to nominate a candidate for that office. Declining to run for a third term because of poor health, Ivy Baker Priest died of cancer in June 1975 in Santa Monica, Calif. [Ivy Baker Priest's papers, still in the possession of her family, will be deposited at the University of Utah. Her lively autobiography, Green Grows Ivy (1958), is the best source on her life through her appointment as U.S. treasurer. The State of Utah Dept. of Development Services maintains a file of newspaper clippings about her. Short entries can be found in Current Biog., 1952; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., I, 252; and Who's Who in Am., 1974-1975. See also Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, Ladies of Courage (1954), pp. 247-52. Obituaries appeared in the Salt Lake City (Utah) Tribune and the N.Y. Times, on June 25, 1975. Nancy Priest Valenzuela provided helpful information.] CLAUDIA L.

BUSHMAN

PUTNAM, Bertha Haven, March 1, 1 8 7 2 - F e b . 26, 1960. Historian. Bertha Putnam, authority on medieval English legal and economic history and professor at Mount Holyoke College for twenty-nine years, was born in New York City, the eldest of the four daughters of George Haven and Rebecca Kettel (Shepard) Putnam. Both families migrated to Massachusetts from England in the seventeenth century. George Haven Putnam served in the Union army during the Civil War and later took over his father's publishing firm, which became G. P. Putnam's Sons. A Republican turned Democrat, he was active in reform movements in New York City. Rebecca Putnam had attended Antioch College, but left during her second year to nurse in a military hospital. She taught Greek and Latin at Worcester (Mass.) High School, and after her marriage she worked to introduce kindergartens into New York City schools and to improve the working conditions of salesgirls. The Putnams lived in comfortable circumstances, enjoying contacts with authors and men of affairs in the United States and England. Bertha Putnam attended Miss Audobon's School and Miss Gibbons's School in New York City; when she was ten she persuaded her mother to teach her Greek. She received an A.B. from Bryn Mawr College in 1893 and then taught Latin at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. After her mother's death in 1895, she

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Putnam returned to New York to act as hostess for her father until his second marriage in 1899 to E M I L Y J A M E S SMITH P U T N A M . Bertha Putnam taught special classes at the Brearley School for four years. She also attended graduate school at Columbia University (1895-97, 1 9 0 0 - 0 3 ) , and earned her Ph.D. in 1908. That year she was appointed instructor in history at Mount Holyoke College, advancing to assistant professor in 1912 and full professor in 1924. Bertha Putnam was above all a scholar. Her primary interest, stimulated by historian Charles M. Andrews at Bryn Mawr and by sociologist F. W. Giddings at Columbia, lay in the field of medieval English legal and economic history. Her dissertation grew out of her concern with legislation affecting the working man; it was published in 1908 as The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers during the First Decade after the Black Death, 1349-1359. In studying this early labor legislation she investigated its enforcement by special justices of laborers, and was thus led to study the justices of the peace to whom this responsibility was later given. During her research in the Public Record Office in London she identified records that had previously been misclassified and, consequently, overlooked. The justices of the peace—their powers and their practices—became the subject of her writings and the basis of her lasting reputation; subsequent work has not fundamentally altered her findings. Her frequent trips to England in connection with her research led to lasting friendships with English scholars. In her teaching Bertha Putnam was as thorough and well organized as she was in her research. Her lectures were stimulating and informative, and her high standards, enthusiasm, and delight in her subject infected her students at Mount Holyoke. With N E L L I E NEILSON, chairman of Mount Holyoke's history department, she did much to develop a distinguished department and to assist honor and graduate students as well as younger faculty members. Putnam also aided many younger scholars by providing them with opportunities for publication. Bertha Putnam was a generous and forthright person with a lively sense of humor. She was strict in her adherence to her own high standards. After the development of a heart condition about 1916 forced her to abandon the outdoor activities she had enjoyed as a girl, she adopted the strict work schedule which made possible her many accomplishments. Putnam received many honors during her

career, including fellowships from the American Association of University Women and research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies. In 1938 she was the first woman and nonlawyer to receive a research grant from Harvard Law School. Two years later the Mediaeval Academy of America awarded her its first Haskins Medal for a volume she edited, Proceedings Before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, Edward 111 to Richard III (1938), the result of thirty years of original work. In 1945 she received an honorary LL.D. from Smith College and in 1949 was elected a fellow of the Mediaeval Academy. After her retirement from Mount Holyoke in 1937, Putnam lectured for a year at Bryn Mawr College and continued her scholarly work until an attack of shingles in the late 1940s left her partly blind. She died of arteriosclerosis in South Hadley, Mass., in 1960. To Bertha Putnam the recognition of women as scholars was of supreme importance. She always insisted that this recognition be earned by hard and dedicated work. Her own success serves as a prime example of what she believed and practiced. [Putnam's published works include Early Treatises on the Practice of the Justices of the Peace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries ( 1 9 2 4 ) and The Place in Legal History of Sir William Shareshull, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, 1350-1361 ( 1 9 5 0 ) ; she was editor of Kent Keepers of the Peace, 1316-1317 ( 1 9 3 3 ) and Yorkshire Sessions of the Peace, 1361-1364 ( 1 9 3 9 ) . Her most important articles are "The Justices of Labourers in the Fourteenth Century," English Hist. Rev., vol. 21 ( 1 9 0 6 ) , and "The Transformation of the Keepers of the Peace into the Justices of the Peace 1 3 2 7 - 1 3 8 0 , " Royal Hist. Soc., Transactions, 4th ser., vol. 12 ( 1 9 2 9 ) . Margaret Hastings and Elisabeth G. Kimball, "Two Distinguished Medievalists—Nellie Neilson and Bertha Putnam," Jour. British Studies, Spring 1979, discuss Putnam as scholar and teacher. George Haven Putnam, Memories of My Youth, 1844-1865 ( 1 9 1 4 ) , and Memories of a Publisher, 1865-1915 ( 1 9 1 6 ) , contain background information on Putnam's father; Corinna Lindon Smith, Interesting People ( 1 9 6 2 ) , provides information about her mother. A biobibliography prepared by Marjorie Markoff and an entry in Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., X L I I I , 22—23, give useful details. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 27, 1960; The Times (London), March 4, 1960; Archives (Journal of the British Records Association), vol. 4 ( 1 9 6 0 ) . Death certificate provided by the Mass. Dept. of Health.]

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ELISABETH G. KIMBALL

R RAND, Marie Gertrude, Oct. 29, 1 8 8 6 - J u n e 30, 1970. Experimental psychologist. Gertrude Rand, a leading researcher in the field of physiological optics, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the third child of a large family. Her parents were Mary Catherine (Moench) and Lyman Fiske Rand, later president of a manufacturing company. After graduating from Girls High School in Brooklyn in 1904, she followed a Rand tradition by entering Cornell University, where she earned her A.B. in 1 9 0 8 with a major in experimental psychology. She went on to study psychology at Bryn Mawr College under Clarence Errol Ferree, who directed her dissertation on the sensitivity of the retina to color. After receiving her A.M. and Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr in 1911, she continued to work there with Ferree as postdoctoral fellow (1911-12), Sarah Berliner Research Fellow ( 1 9 1 2 - 1 3 ) , and associate in experimental psychology (1913— 2 7 ) . Rand married Clarence Ferree in 1918. Retaining her maiden name professionally, she collaborated productively with her husband until his death in 1942. During their years at Bryn Mawr, Rand and Ferree did experimental work on the effects of general illumination on color perception and also developed techniques for measuring the light sensitivity and color discrimination of various parts of the retina. Their efforts led eventually to the Ferree-Rand perimeter, which mapped the retina for its perceptual abilities and became an important tool for diagnosing vision problems. From 1924 to 1927 Rand served on the National Research Council's committee on industrial lighting; with her husband, she designed industrial and hospital lighting systems. In 1928 Rand moved with her husband to the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School .of Medicine. Rand taught there as an associate professor first of research ophthalmology, then of physiological optics, before becoming associate director of the Research Laboratory of Physiological Optics in Baltimore in 1935. Besides their academic work during this period, Rand and Ferree served as consultants for industries and agencies concerned with lighting technology. They developed new instruments and lamps for ophthalmologists and glare-control lighting systems for public places, notably the Johns Hopkins University Hospital and New York's Holland Tunnel, probably their most important illumination project. In 1943, following Ferree's death, Rand

moved to New York City to become a research associate at the Knapp Foundation of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Returning to her earlier work in color perception, she collaborated at Columbia with Legrand Hardy and M. Catherine Rittler in experiments on the detection and measurement of color blindness. In the early 1950s they developed the Hardy-Rand-Rittler plates for testing color vision. Unlike existing systems which simply identified individuals with abnormal color vision, the plates made it possible to identify the type and degree of defect for each subject. Thus Rand's careful, experimental work enabled ophthalmologists and psychologists to draw clearer conclusions from the tests they administered. Retiring in 1957, Gertrude Rand spent her last years in Stony Brook, Long Island, where she died at the age of eighty-three. The range of Rand's work was wide, having implications for several research specialties and for industries associated with lighting technology. She was a modest, unassuming woman who tended to underestimate the value of her work, but colleagues were quick to recognize her gifts. At ease in collaboration with men, she shared credit with them on an equal basis and earned the respect of the many doctoral and, later, medical students she guided. She advised government and military offices about optics and lighting during World War II, and later became the first woman elected a fellow of the Illuminating Engineering Society ( 1 9 5 2 ) ; the society subsequently awarded her its Gold Medal for 1963. Rand was also the first woman to win the Edgar D. Tillyer Medal of the Optical Society of America for outstanding research in vision ( 1 9 5 9 ) . In 1971, a year after Rand's death, her former student Louise Sloan became the second woman to receive the Tillyer Medal. [Some materials on Rand, including alumni information forms, are on file at the Cornell Univ. Archives. Rand contributed more than 100 articles to the literature of her field, most coauthored with her husband and other collaborators. She also coauthored a text with Ferree, Radiometric Apparatus for Use in Psychological and Physiological Optics (1917). For a biographical sketch and selected bibliography see Kenneth N. Ogle, "Gertrude Rand: Edgar D. Tillyer Medalist for 1959," Jour. Optical Society of Am., Oct. 1959, pp. 937-41; the article includes a photograph of Rand. See also Am. Men of Science, 9th ed. (1955); and Lighting News, Aug. 1963 and Nov. 1963. An obituary appeared in N.Y. Times, July 3, 1970. Information from 1917 N.Y. City Directory; birth certificate provided by N.Y. City Municipal Archives.]

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ELIZABETH

GARBER

Rankin

Rankin RANKIN, Jeannette Pickering, June 11, 1880May 18, 1973. Suffragist, congresswoman, pacifist. Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and the only member of Congress to oppose the entry of the United States into both world wars. Born on Grant Creek Ranch, six miles from Missoula in Montana Territory, she was the oldest of seven children, six girls and one boy. Her mother, Olive Pickering, of English ancestry, left her New Hampshire home in 1878 to become an elementary schoolteacher in Missoula; the next year she met and married John Rankin, a successful rancher and lumber merchant whose family had migrated from Scotland to Canada around 1800. The Rankin household represented an amalgam of western informality and upper-middleclass expectations. Thus, as a child Jeannette exhibited seemingly contradictory personality traits; she could be creative, open-minded, and cooperative while also being stubborn and highhanded with her siblings. Despite a generally permissive upbringing, the Rankin children appeared driven to succeed. Most pursued professional careers: Harriet became dean of women at the University of Montana; Mary an English instructor at the same university; Edna a lawyer and pioneer in the field of planned parenthood; and Wellington one of Montana's most famous trial lawyers. The ambitions of all the Rankin women were aided in part by the open, loosely structured nature of frontier society which provided numerous career opportunities for women. Jeannette Rankin's candidacy for national office prior to the passage of the nineteenth amendment was possible because Montana had already enfranchised its women. Rankin attended public schools in Missoula, graduating from the University of Montana in 1902 with a B.S. in biology. She did not like school and considered herself a very poor student who "only went on because it was the thing to do." Partly because of this sense of intellectual inferiority, Rankin remained a shy, retiring person throughout college. After teaching briefly in country schools following graduation, she served a short apprenticeship as a seamstress and occasionally supported herself by taking in sewing. Her father's death in 1904 and her mother's increasing withdrawal from normal household activities led Rankin to assume full responsibility for her younger siblings; she remained closer to members of her immediate family, especially her brother, than to the friends she made later in her career. Wellington Rankin became her adviser

and financial backer; she was never completely self-supporting and received regular installments from the family estate all her life. Following her father's death Rankin spent several busy but restless years at home. In 1908 she left to study at the New York School of Philanthropy, and subsequently practiced for a brief time as a social worker in Montana and Washington. Unhappy with her newly chosen profession, Rankin entered the University of Washington in 1909. While a student there she joined the successful Washington state campaign for woman suffrage in 1910. This experience marked a turning point in her life: a meeting with New Jersey journalist and former suffrage campaigner Minnie J. Reynolds convinced her that the quest for peace should be incorporated into the suffrage movement. Rankin officially launched her own political career in Montana on Feb. 2, 1911, when she urged the state legislature to grant women the right to vote. During the next twelve months she gained valuable organizational and oratorical skills by working for suffrage groups in New York, California, and Ohio. In 1913 she became a field secretary for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, spending the next two years lobbying for female suffrage in fifteen states; her half dozen campaign trips to Montana helped to win the vote for women there in 1914. By 1916 Rankin faced a serious career choice: she could continue to work for national suffrage, become a lobbyist for social legislation, or run for Congress from Montana. Choosing the last, she campaigned successfully on a progressive Republican platform calling for woman suffrage, protective legislation for children, tariff revision, prohibition, and "preparedness that will make for peace." On April 6, 1917, four days after she had been introduced in Congress as its first female member, Rankin voted against United States entry into World War I. Both C A R R I E C H A P M A N C A T T and Alice Paul ( 1 8 8 5 - 1 9 7 7 ) , leaders of the prowar and antiwar suffragists respectively, attempted to influence her decision. "I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war," she declared on the floor of the House. Fifty-six members of Congress voted with her on this memorable occasion; contrary to popular accounts, she did not cry, although some of the men did. Wellington Rankin had urged her to cast "a man's vote" for war, but she maintained that public sentiment in Montana was overwhelmingly against the war. In the 1930s, she developed a more sophisticated "revisionist" defense of her vote, asserting: "I knew we were asked to

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Rankin vote for a commercial war, that none of the idealistic hopes would be carried out, and I was aware of the falseness of much of the prowar propaganda" (Schaffer, p. 8 3 ) . Whatever her reasons, her first antiwar vote had an enormous impact on her long public career. "It was not only the most significant thing I ever did," she later said, "it was a significant thing in itself." This single act publicly identified Rankin as a pacifist for the first time, and from then until her death fifty-six years later she campaigned against United States involvement in all wars. During the remainder of her first term in Congress Rankin sponsored legislation to aid women and children, especially during wartime, and continued to work for a federal suffrage amendment. Montanans, however, became increasingly disenchanted with her pacifism as the war continued. Unable to run again for the House of Representatives in a statewide election—the legislature had divided Montana into two congressional districts—Rankin decided to become the state's first woman senator. When she lost the Republican nomination for the Senate she continued in the race as a candidate of the newly organized National party, an amorphous group of Non-Partisan League farmers, prowar socialists, antiwar progressives, and prohibitionists. From the start it was a hopeless campaign, made even more so by the fact that Catt came out in favor of Rankin's Democratic opponent, Thomas J. Walsh. Defeated in her bid for the Senate, Rankin finished her term in Congress and then accompanied J A N E ADDAMS and F L O R E N C E K E L L E Y tO Zurich in 1919 as a delegate to the Second International Congress of Women, which became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom ( W I L P F ) . When they returned to the United States, Kelley appointed Rankin field secretary of the National Consumers' League; between 1920 and 1924 Rankin lobbied on Capitol Hill for the Sheppard-Towner bill to combat infant and maternal disease and conducted educational campaigns in the Mississippi Valley favoring laws to regulate working conditions for women. During these years she also became a field secretary and board member of the W I L P F and a supporter of S. O. Levison's plan to outlaw war. In 1924 Rankin established a second home near Athens, Ga., while retaining her legal residence in Montana. She spent most of her winters in Georgia, living in several spartan cottages which she continually remodeled. She founded the Georgia Peace Society in 1928, which became the home base of her pacifist operations until its demise from lack of funds on the eve of World War II.

In 1925, after about ten months, Rankin resigned as W I L P F field secretary when it proved impossible to finance her elaborate plan for organizing western members. Moreover, like many other western suffragists, she found it difficult to work with the national leaders of the W I L P F , especially its strong-minded executive secretary, Dorothy Detzer. A similar dissatisfaction involving conflicting personalities and strategies prompted her resignation in 1929 as a lobbyist for the Women's Peace Union, an organization she had supported since 1921 and whose sole purpose was to outlaw war by passing a constitutional amendment. In 1929 Rankin began a ten-year association with the National Council for the Prevention of W a r ( N C P W ) , as a Washington lobbyist and field organizer. This affiliation ended as a result of disagreements over salary cuts and her own feeling that her organizational work was not sufficiently appreciated by other N C P W leaders, especially executive director Frederick J. Libby. She also opposed her coworkers' support of the foreign policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After leaving the N C P W , Rankin again ran for Congress from Montana as a Republican pacifist. Capitalizing on her influential family connections, on the widespread public antiwar sentiment in Montana, and on the backing of labor and women, she defeated liberal Democrat Jerry J. O'Connell. She argued in Congress against Lend-Lease, the draft, military expenditures, and repeal of the neutrality legislation of the 1930s. On Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, she cast the single vote against American entry into the Second World War. Again there were no tears; again her brother urged her to vote yes. But this time she stood alone in the House and ultimately in Montana, losing any chance for reelection in 1942. During the remainder of the 1940s Rankin ranched in Montana, redesigned yet another cottage in Georgia, cared for her ailing mother, and, most important, began to travel extensively abroad to study the pacifist methods and ideas of foreign countries. She displayed intense interest in Gandhi's work in India and visited that country seven times between 1946 and 1971. " I traveled around the world," she declared in 1972, "and stayed long enough to know how the Americans were dominating underdeveloped countries" (Berkeley Oral History Project, p. 12). Throughout the 1950s she quietly opposed all manifestations of the cold war, including United States involvement in Korea. The war in Vietnam revitalized both her spirits and her career. She had been out of the national limelight for over two decades when

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the Jeannette Rankin Brigade was organized in 1 9 6 7 . An incongruous coalition of feminists, pacifists, hippies, rock musicians, antiwar students, and assorted radicals, the brigade demonstrated against the war in Washington, D . C . , on Jan. 15, 1 9 6 8 . Shortly afterward, Rankin decided (at the age of eighty-eight) to run again for Congress to "have somebody to vote for" and to oppose a third world war if necessary. But it was not to be. Rankin had long suffered from what is known as tic douloureux, a disease that causes painful inflammation of a facial nerve. F o r years she had tried to control the condition with alcohol injections and aspirin, but with age the pain had become incapacitating. In 1968, instead of running for a third term, she underwent surgery which was only partly successful. Nonetheless, Jeannette Rankin's long career ended as it had begun, amid a flurry of travel, public appearances, and antiwar statements. She died of a heart attack in Carmel, Calif., in 1 9 7 3 . Rankin's life epitomizes the experience of a western woman among a generation of female pacifists who, like Jane Addams, believed in a global society of peace—one they conceived of in terms of "community and world housekeeping." T h e r e has probably never been such an influential generation of pacifists, and Jeannette Rankin remains one of its most memorable representatives. [The papers of Jeannette Rankin at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, provide information for limited portions of her life; few of her private letters before World War II were preserved and the records for her first term in Congress are incomplete. A major source is the oral history of Rankin, "Activist for World Peace, Women's Rights, and Democratic Government" ( 1 9 7 4 ) , at the Bancroft Library, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley. Rankin's letters to the NCPW from 1929 to 1939 are in the Swarthmore College Peace Coll. Hannah Josephson, First Ladij in Congress: Jeannette Rankin ( 1 9 7 4 ) , remains the only published biography, although a more thorough one by Norma Smith is forthcoming. Ronald Schaffer, "Jeannette Rankin: Progressive Isolationist" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., 1959), represents an older interpretation, but is based on documents that were either lost or passed into private hands in the 1960s. Other works include: John C. Board, "The Lady from Montana: Jeannette Rankin" (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Wyo., 1964); Katherine Cheek, "The Wit and Rhetoric of Jeannette Rankin" (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Ga., 1970); Ted Carlton Harris, "Jeannette Rankin: Suffragist, First Woman Elected to Congress, and Pacifist" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Ga., 1972); and Doris Buck Ward, "The Winning of Woman Suffrage in Montana" (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Mont., 1974). For published articles see: Mackey Brown, "Montana's First Woman Politician—A Recollection of Jeannette Rankin Campaigning," Mont. Business

Quart., Autumn 1971, pp. 2 3 - 2 6 ; Belle Fligelman Winestine, "Mother Was Shocked," Montana: The Mag. of Western Hist., July 1974, pp. 7 0 - 7 9 ; Ted Harris, "Jeannette Rankin in Georgia," Ga. Hist. Quart., Spring 1974, pp. 55-78; and Joan Hoff Wilson, " 'Peace Is a Woman's Job . . .': Jeannette Rankin's Foreign Policy," Montana: The Mag. of Western Hist., Jan., April 1980. Death certificate was provided by the Calif. Dept. of Public Health.] JOAN

HOFF

WILSON

R A P O P O R T , Lydia, March 8, 1 9 2 3 - S e p t . 1 9 7 1 . Social work educator.

6,

Lydia Rapoport was born in Vienna, Austria, the younger of two children of Eugenia (Margulies) and Samuel Rappoport (his spelling of the n a m e ) . Her Polish-born mother, although a trained teacher, did not engage in her profession but devoted herself to family duties. Her father, who had studied law in Vienna, worked in the grain trading business before migrating in 1 9 2 8 to the United States, where he was employed in New York City as a translator. T h e rest of the family remained in Vienna until 1 9 3 2 so that Lydia's brother could complete his gymnasium education. In New York Lydia Rapoport attended public schools and majored in sociology at Hunter College. E l e c t e d to Phi B e t a Kappa, she received her A.B. in 1 9 4 3 and immediately enrolled in the accelerated course at Smith College School for Social Work. She received her master's degree the following year, when she was only twenty-one. From Smith, Rapoport went to Chicago, where she worked first as a child guidance counselor at the Institute for Juvenile Research, then as an intake supervisor at the Child Guidance Clinic at the Bobs Roberts Hospital of the University of Chicago, and later as a supervisor at the Jewish Children's Bureau and the Michael Reese Hospital. She earned a certificate in child therapy from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and became a specialist in the diagnosis and treatment of emotionally disturbed children. In 1 9 5 2 Rapoport won a Fulbright fellowship and left Chicago to study at the London School of Economics. While there she met Richard Titmuss, one of the architects of the national health service, and D a m e Eileen Younghusband, a leading English social work scholar and educator, both of whom became her lifelong friends. Returning from England in 1954, Rapoport decided to live in California to be near her brother and his family. She became a supervisor at the California State Mental Hygiene Clinic for students of the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. A year

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Rawlings

later she joined the faculty of the school as an assistant professor, teaching social casework. Receiving tenure in 1963 and promotion to full professor in 1969, Rapoport founded the Community Mental Health Program at Berkeley, an advanced program for graduate social workers interested in developing special skills in community mental health work. An effective and inspiring teacher, she frequently gave special institutes and seminars in the fields of social work she developed as specialties: crisis theory, consultation, and supervision. In addition, she taught at the summer programs at Smith College School for Social Work and the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Lydia Rapoport's major research and writings were completed during her years on the Berkeley faculty and during a year of study with Erich Lindemann at the Harvard School of Public Health ( 1 9 5 9 - 6 0 ) . Out of her exchanges with specialists in public health came her most important contribution: a theoretical framework for what she termed crisis-oriented brief treatment, an approach she subsequently developed as a specialty within social casework. Her work drew on the central concepts of personality, stress, and learning theories, and utilized the preventive orientation of public health rather than the medical model of treatment. Lydia Rapoport also helped to formulate a theoretical basis for defining consultation and supervision as distinct social work functions. She explored the role of the social worker as a consultant, analyzed the function of the supervisor in social work practice and education, and set guidelines for the relationship between supervisor and student or supervisee. In 1963 Rapoport traveled to Israel to be visiting professor at the Baerwald School of Social Work of Hebrew University in Jerusalem for a year. There she assisted in setting up a standard undergraduate curriculum in the country's schools of social work. Although she had never closely identified with her Jewish heritage, she soon acquired a profound affection for the new country and its people. On a leave from her Berkeley post, Rapoport moved to New York in January 1971 to become the first United Nations Inter-Regional Adviser on Family Welfare and Family Planning. In July of that year she became ill and underwent emergency intestinal surgery; seven weeks later she died in New York of acute bacterial endocarditis. At the time of her death, she was about to begin a study of the roles of social workers in introducing family planning in social service programs in Israel. In a 1960 paper, "In Defense of Social Work: An Examination of Stress in the Profession,"

Rapoport wrote: "No other profession is as selfexamining and critically self-conscious as social work" (Katz, p. 4 9 ) . The major legacy of her own scholarship was a commitment to examining the theoretical basis for social casework and to defining the necessary skills for the social work practitioner and educator. [Lydia Rapoport's major writings can be found in Sanford N. Katz, ed., Creativity in Social Work: Selected Writings of Lydia Rapoport (1975), which also includes a biographical sketch and an analysis of her contribution to social work. A brief account of her career is in Ernest Greenwood, Gertrude Wilson, and Robert Apte, "Lydia Rapoport," In Memoriam (Univ. of Calif., July 1975). Obituaries appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 8, 1971; and Oakland Tribune, Sept. 8, 1971. The Lydia Rapoport Endowment Fund at Smith College School for Social Work, established by Rapoport's friends, supports the Lydia Rapoport Distinguished Visiting Professorship.] SANFORD N.

KATZ

RAWLINGS, Marjorie Kinnan, Aug. 8, 1 8 9 6 Dec. 14, 1953. Writer. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., the older child and only daughter of Arthur Frank and Ida May (Traphagen) Kinnan. Of largely Scots and Scots-Irish descent on both sides, the family traced its American heritage back to the seventeenth century. Arthur Kinnan was an attorney in the United States Patent Office who also owned a farm in Maryland. Growing up in Washington, Marjorie attended public school and developed an early interest in writing. As a young girl she played "Story Lady," entertaining the boys (but not the girls) in the neighborhood with ber imaginative tales. Early in 1913 her father died. The next year, after completing high school, she moved with her mother and younger brother to Madison, Wis., where she enrolled at the university. Active in the campus dramatic society, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year and received the A.B. in 1918. For a year after graduation Marjorie Kinnan worked as an editor and publicist for the YWCA at its national headquarters in New York City. In May 1919 she married the writer and boating enthusiast Charles A. Rawlings, and moved with him to Rochester, N.Y. During the next decade she wrote advertising copy and newspaper features, working for the Louisville Courier-Journal ( 1 9 2 0 - 2 1 ) and the Rochester Journal ( 1 9 2 2 - 2 3 ) . She also produced a syndicated verse column, "Songs of a Housewife" ( 1 9 2 5 - 2 7 ) , but attempts to publish her fiction proved unsuccessful.

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Rawlings

In 1928 Charles and Marjorie Rawlings bought a large orange grove at Cross Creek, near Hawthorne, in north central Florida, where her plan to become a professional writer was realized. In 1930 Scrihner's Magazine bought her short collection of character sketches, "Cracker Chidlings: Real Tales from the Florida Interior," as well as her more ambitious story of a farm couple facing starvation, "Jacob's Ladder." The stories attracted the attention of Maxwell Perkins, renowned editor for the Scribner publishing firm, who began to work with her. Rawlings went to live for several weeks in the Big Scrub country not far from Cross Creek, with an old woman and her moonshiner son, and projected new fictions about the rural Floridians. The year 1933 was momentous for Rawlings, as her story "Gal Young Un," published in Harper's the year before, won first prize in the O. Henry Memorial Award contest, and her first novel, South Moon Under, about the lives and lore of Florida moonshiners, appeared. (Like several of her later books, the novel became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.) Shortly after the novel's publication, the author and her husband, who did not share her commitment to life in the Florida back country, recognized at last their basic incompatibility and were divorced. Marjorie Rawlings continued to live in and about Cross Creek for the next few years, traveling briefly to Hampshire, England, to gather material for her second novel, Golden Apples (1935). Far below South Moon Under in quality, the novel was hampered by Rawlings's clumsy handling of her English protagonist and the high society he encounters. Turning back to more familiar themes, she began work on The Yearling ( 1 9 3 8 ) , inspired by Maxwell Perkins's earlier suggestion that she write "a book about a boy," an adventure tale evocative of Huckleberry Finn or Kim and set in the Florida woods. Rawlings was well suited to the task. Since adolescence, she had written yearningly in her fiction of little boys. Occasionally she might treat of a small girl, but never with the intensity she brought to an adult's fondness for a sonfigure. While working on The Yearling at a North Carolina resort, Rawlings encountered such a child, an orphan boy who strongly appealed to her and whom she featured in her stories "A Mother in Mannville" (1936) and "Mountain Prelude" (1947). The Yearling proved the high point of Rawlings's career. It enjoyed measured critical and enormous popular success. Movie rights were sold to MGM—though it was not until 1946 that an MGM motion picture version of The Yearling was finally released—and the book won

the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939. Other tributes followed, including membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and several honorary degrees. In 1941 Rawlings married Norton Sanford Baskin, an old friend of hers who operated a hotel and restaurant in St. Augustine, Fla., where the two then resided. She paid tribute to her adoptive home in Cross Creek ( 1 9 4 2 ) , a memoir of her "life in the woods" which warrants comparison to Thoreau's Walden. Although well received, Cross Creek embroiled its author in a long-drawn-out lawsuit by one of her Cross Creek neighbors, Zelma Cason, who felt libeled by its portrait of her. (Eventually, the Florida Supreme Court found in favor of the plaintiff, but the author had to pay only nominal damages.) Rawlings won a second O. Henry Memorial Award in 1945 for her story "Black Secret," which had appeared earlier that year in The New Yorker. Two years later she purchased an old farmhouse in Van Hornesville, N.Y., to serve as her summer home. Her husband remained tied to his work in Florida, and subsequently they were together for only part of each year. As she had earlier used Cross Creek, Rawlings now employed the farmlands of upstate New York as a fictional locale, combining that setting with family lore concerning her maternal grandfather Traphagen to produce The Sojourner (1953). While less popular than The Yearling and disparaged by some critics, the novel remains one of her serious achievements, a subtle repudiation of society and its vanities. Rawlings's next subject was to have been a biography of Ellen Glasgow, but ill health interrupted her research; she died of a stroke in St. Augustine, Fla., in December 1953. Her body was laid to rest in Antioch Cemetery not far from Cross Creek. At the funeral service a friend read from her memoir of that place: "Who owns Cross Creek? The red birds, I think, more than I . . ." Fierce undercurrents of emotion, attraction and repulsion, energized Rawlings's work, the inspired writings as well as the "interesting trash instead of literature" (as she once called some of her fiction). She had a longing for solitude and an aversion to city life, powerfully expressed in the character of Penny Baxter in The Yearling. More important is her pervasive sympathy for young boys in her fiction, contrasted to her generally unsentimental handling of mothers and wives. Described by Cross Creek acquaintances as a moody, cantankerous person herself, Rawlings wrote vividly of angry women who "get back" at their husbands or children, as with Ma Baxter in The Yearling or Amelia Lin-

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den in The Sojourner. From such powerful elements the author fashioned both slapdash commercial pieces and works of art, yielding a few books and several stories which have earned her a secure place in twentieth-century American literature. [There is a collection of Rawlings's papers, including manuscripts and letters, in the Library of the Univ. of Fla. at Gainesville. Other books by Rawlings include a collection of stories, When the Whippoortvill— ( 1 9 4 0 ) ; a "conversational cookbook," Cross Creek Cookery ( 1 9 4 2 ) ; a children's story, The Secret River ( 1 9 5 5 ) ; and an anthology, The Marjorie Rawlings Reader ( 1 9 5 6 ) , ed. Julia Scribner Bigham. (Bigham's introduction discusses Maxwell Perkins's work with Rawlings.) There are two published biographies, generally complementary: Gordon E . Bigelow, Frontier Eden: The Literary Career of Marjorie Rinnan Rawlings ( 1 9 6 6 ) , and Samuel I. Bellman, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1974), which includes a frontispiece photograph. Among useful essays on Rawlings are Harry Evans, "Marjorie Kirinan Rawlings," Family Circle, May 7 and 14, 1943; Gordon Bigelow, "Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Wilderness," Sewanee Rev., Spring 1965, pp. 2 9 9 - 3 1 0 ; Samuel Bellman, "Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: A Solitary Sojourner in the Florida Backwoods," Kansas Quart., Spring 1970, pp. 7 8 - 8 7 ; and Samuel I. Bellman, "Writing Literature for Young People: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' 'Secret River' of the Imagination," Costerus, vol. 9 ( 1 9 7 3 ) . Sketches of her can be found in Current Biog., 1942; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., G, 4 3 2 - 3 3 ; and Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 16, 1 9 5 3 ; death certificate furnished by Fla. Dept. of Health.] SAMUEL

IRVING

BELLMAN

REBAY, Hilla, May 31, 1890-Sept. 27, 1967. M u s e u m director, painter.

In the formation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Hilla Rebay realized her dream of creating a museum for the art to which she devoted her life. Born the Baroness Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Rebay von Ehrenwiesen in Strassburg, Alsace, she and her elder brother were raised in Germany. An artistically gifted child, she was encouraged by her parents to develop her talents. Her mother, the former Antonie von Eicken, had come from a cultivated and artistic family, which at one time had held mining interests in the Ruhr; her Bavarian father, Baron Franz Joseph Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, was a career army officer who attained the rank of general during World War I. His letters to Hilla, as she was called, reveal a serious, but gentle and supportive, father, who encouraged her in her artistic studies while worrying about her frail health and nerves. He

too was artistic, and filled several homes with handcarved furniture of professional skill. Hilla attended girls' schools in Strassburg, Freiburg, and Cologne. She took regular art classes at her schools and with tutors, showing considerable skill at portraiture. At the age of nineteen, in 1909, she was sent to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where she remained until 1910. While taking all the conventional art courses, she also became aware of the more experimental art being done outside the schools. During this Paris period, she developed an interest in theosophy, and like many another twentieth-century artist, she became a lifelong devotee of Oriental mysticism. Rebay spent most of 1911 as an advanced student in Munich. She exhibited at the Cologne Kunstverein in 1912; in 1913 she was accepted in the Munich Spring Secession exhibition and the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in Paris. From then on she signed her work Hilla v. Rebay or Hilla Rebay. A meeting with Hans Arp in Zurich in 1916 was catalytic for Rebay's future. Arp, the proponent of the theory of spontaneous generation of form, encouraged her to work in the most advanced abstract style and to believe in herself and in the validity of this art form. He introduced her to Herwarth Walden, director of the radical Berlin art gallery, Der Sturm, where Rebay exhibited in 1917 and 1919. There she saw works by many of the artists she would later collect, most notably the nonfigurative paintings of the pioneer abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky. In his work, spontaneously created color-forms based loosely or not at all on natural objects were, as he explained, the expression of the inner emotion of the artist's soul. At Der Sturm she also met Rudolf Bauer, a painter who was to play a disastrous role in her life. Her blind admiration for Bauer's painting, which was studiously derived from Kandinsky's, allowed Rebay to cast Bauer in the role of genius. So that he might work without distraction, she undertook to support him for the rest of his life. Accepting her assistance as his due, Bauer never evidenced any gratitude. At thirty-five, Hilla Rebay was not prospering in her work or in her life. She was entangled in the unhappy liaison with Bauer, and still supported by her parents. To escape she moved to Italy in 1925, finally establishing her independence. Convinced that nonobjective art was thriving in the United States she decided to emigrate, and in 1927 the vivacious and talented baroness arrived in New York. When she realized her error concerning the influence of nonobjective painting there, it became her mission to promote and encourage this art form.

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Through family connections she met Irene and Solomon R. Guggenheim, and she conveyed her enthusiasm for nonobjective painting to the nearly seventy-year-old multimillionaire and his wife. Having convinced them to begin to collect in this area, in 1929 she started to introduce the Guggenheims to artists' studios and galleries in Europe and the United States. They acquired works by Calder, Chagall, Delaunay, Gabo, Kandinsky, Klee, Marc, Moholy-Nagy, Mondrian, Pevsner, Picasso, Gleizes, Léger, and Seurat, which led to plans for a permanent public home for the collection and formed the nucleus of the future museum's holdings. When the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was incorporated in 1937, Rebay was named curator. Only twelve years after her arrival in the United States Rebay supervised, in 1939, the opening of the museum in temporary quarters at 24 East 54th Street, in New York City, where it was known as both the Museum of Nonobjective Painting and Art of Tomorrow. She became the museum's first director. Aware of the work accomplished by such American women a s I S A B E L L A S T E W A R T GARDNER a n d

GERTRUDE

who had preceded her in the formation of public art collections, Rebay felt closest to K A T H E R I N E D R E I E R , whose collection of twentieth-century art and support of artists she deeply respected. T h e two women, brought together in 1930 by Kandinsky and Mondrian, remained cordial friends until Dreier's death; Rebay felt that she was carrying on in the tradition Dreier had begun. Guggenheim's faith in Rebay's leadership of the museum was firmly underscored when, in 1942, he agreed to begin the permanent building which he and Rebay had contemplated more than a decade before. Also in 1942, Hilla Rebay was denounced as a German spy; she was deeply hurt to discover that it was Rudolf Bauer, now in the United States—with her support—and jealous of her role at the museum, who had spread the rumors leading to the accusation. Rebay was cleared of the charge, and in 1943 she invited Frank Lloyd Wright to discuss plans for the design of the proposed museum (completed in 1 9 5 9 ) . Wright and Rebay became close, if argumentative, friends; he called her "a magnificently human projectile." (She became an American citizen in 1947.) T h e supportive Solomon Guggenheim's death in 1 9 4 9 was a great blow to Rebay. Her zealous advocacy both of nonobjective painting and of Bauer had earned her as many detractors as adherents; few were neutral. In 1952 the other trustees forced Rebay to resign from the museum, which perhaps had grown beyond her. VANDERBILT WHITNEY

The museum was renamed for Solomon R. Guggenheim, and its emphasis changed from nonobjective painting to a more inclusive survey of twentieth-century art. For a decade Rebay remained active in the arts; she also established a foundation for the encouragement of nonobjective painting. But with old age and illness, she withdrew entirely. Hilla Rebay died a lonely and disappointed woman at her home in Greens Farms, Conn. But the museum created initially by her taste, vision, and energy became a public monument. [The Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive, containing a large collection of correspondence and personal papers, is maintained by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Rebay's writings include "Nonobjective Art," Southern Literary Messenger, Dec. 1942, pp. 472-75, and numerous exhibition catalogs including Wassily Kandinsky Memorial (1945) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Memorial (1947). Partly because of Rebay's own vagueness about dates, the biographical material previously published about her is inaccurate. Furthermore, her life and work have generally been treated in a superficial manner. An obituary in the N.Y. Times, Sept. 29, 1967, borders on slander. Knowledgeable articles include Dore Ashton, "Naissance d'un grand musée," XXe Siècle, Dec. 1968, pp. 137-39; Katharine Kuh, "The Vision of Hilla Rebay," N.Y. Times, May 7, 1972, sect. 2, p. 21; Lawrence Campbell, "The Museum of Non-objective Painting Revisited," ART New5, Dec. 1972, pp. 40-41; and Hans Riehter, Begegnungen von Dada his heute (1973), pp. 162-85. Joan M. Lukach is preparing a documentary biography of Hilla Rebay and her role in the creation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.] JOAN M .

R E E D , Dorothy. See Reed.

LUKACH

MENDENHALL, Dorothy

REICHARD, Gladys Amanda, July 17, 1 8 9 3 July 25, 1955. Anthropologist. Head of what was for many years the only undergraduate department of anthropology in a woman's college in the United States, Gladys Reichard was also a dedicated field worker who made a lifelong study of the culture and language of the Navaho Indians. She was born in Bangor, Pa., the younger of two daughters of Noah W. Reichard, a respected family physician, and Minerva Ann (Jordan) Reichard. Minerva Ann Reichard died when her daughters were young, and Dr. Reichard later remarried. The Reichard family was of Pennsylvania Dutch heritage and the Quaker household was intellectually oriented. After her graduation from Bangor High School in 1909, Gladys Reichard

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Reichard began teaching, first in a country school in Northampton County, Pa., and then, from 1911 to 1915, at the elementary school in Bangor. In 1915 Reichard enrolled at Swarthmore College, from which she was graduated four years later with honors, a major in classics, and the Lucretia Mott Fellowship for graduate study. Stimulated by a course in anthropology she had taken at Swarthmore, she decided she wanted to study with Franz Boas, professor of anthropology at Columbia University. In the fall of 1919 she moved to New York where Boas soon became the central intellectual influence in her life. Of all the women students and associates who gathered around Franz Boas and, in public or in private, called him "Papa Franz," Gladys Reichard was most like a daughter. Her personal and intellectual loyalty to him was nearly absolute, and in return Franz Boas took care of her, providing jobs, fellowships, grants, and publishers as they were needed. While she was in graduate school she lived for a year in the Boas home. Gladys Reichard had thought that she might study the evolution of culture and perhaps archaeology, but under Boas's tutelage she turned to linguistics. She received an A.M. in 1920, and in 1920-21 assisted Boas in his classes at Barnard College; she also taught at the Robert Louis Stevenson School in New York City. In 1925, she received her Ph.D. with a dissertation on the grammar of the Wiyot Indians in California, among whom she had done field work during 1922-23. After her year in California, Reichard had returned to Barnard in 1923 as instructor in anthropology; she taught there for the rest of her life, becoming assistant professor in 1928 and professor of anthropology in 1951. Around 1923 Gladys Reichard had begun a close relationship with Pliny Earle Goddard (1869-1928), curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, who became the other great influence in her life. He interested Reichard in the Navaho Indians, whom she visited in 1923; the following year she traveled with him for six weeks on the Navaho reservation gathering genealogies which became the basis for her Social Life of the Navaho Indians (1928). Goddard wanted to know a culture not as an abstraction but as it was experienced by individuals, and this concern, along with the meticulous recording of data and the interest in language and in art styles which she learned from Boas, came to characterize Reichard's work. She was not interested in theory nor, generally, in comparative studies. Throughout her career she was bluntly

critical of those who, in her view, moved too quickly from observation to theory. Reichard spent 1926-27 in Hamburg, Germany, on a Guggenheim fellowship, studying Melanesian design. From Europe she went to Idaho to do an analysis of Coeur d'Alene grammar for the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1938), but after Goddard's- sudden death in 1928, she turned again to her Navaho studies. Her book Melanesian Design (1933) was awarded the A. Cressy Morrison Prize in Natural Science by the New York Academy of Sciences in 1932. She edited Goddard's unpublished texts and then, from 1930 on, spent four summers living with a Navaho family near Ganado, Ariz., learning to speak the Navaho language and to weave rugs. Although several studies had been made of Navaho weaving, none had been done from the point of view of the weaver, which was Reichard's primary interest. Spider Woman (1934) is both a record of what a woman weaver thinks and does and one of the first good accounts of the field work experience. Reichard later wrote a more technical volume on weaving, Navaho Shepherd and Weaver (1936), and a fictionalized account of the daily life of a Navaho family, Dezba, Woman of the Desert (1939); she and her sister, Lilian, also took the photographs for Dezba. In the summer of 1934 Reichard ran the Hogan School at her Navaho family's compound. Sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the school made the first attempt to teach native speakers to write the Navaho language. It was a success, but the need to complete the Coeur d'Alene grammar kept her from undertaking it a second summer. Gladys Reichard had observed Navaho ceremonials as she was learning to weave, and gradually she concentrated on the study of Navaho religion. Her early lack of interest in religion was transformed as she gathered information on sand paintings and legends. In 1950 she summed up twenty years of research in her major work, Navaho Religion: A Study of Symbolism. Reichard returned to the study of language with Navaho Grammar (1951). This work was controversial, however, since she had never accepted a new system of transcription for Navaho worked out by Edward Sapir and Harry Hoijer. Her methods, which lacked both statistical and structural orientation, were outdated, but she continued her linguistic work with "A Comparison of Five Salish Languages," published after her death in the International Journal of American Linguistics ( 1 9 5 8 - 6 0 ) . A reserved person with a few deep friend-

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Reíd ships, Reichard felt most at home in the southwest. From 1940 on, she spent nearly every summer and two sabbaticals in Flagstaff, Ariz., near the Museum of Northern Arizona; she planned to retire to Flagstaff. She died there in 1955, of a stroke, one week after an earlier stroke had hospitalized and partly paralyzed her. Although in her own time Reichard was eclipsed by the greater fame of such other of Boas's students as RUTH BENEDICT and Margaret Mead ( 1 9 0 1 - 1 9 7 8 ) , the depth and quality of her ethnographic recording has gradually gained recognition. A 1977 study by Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe, is dedicated to Reichard, and the author views himself as carrying on the task she began, that of interpreting the Navaho world view to those outside it. [Gladys Reichard's papers are at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff and include book reviews, correspondence, photographs of Navaho and other Indians and of the southwest, Navaho word lists, texts, and sandpainting copies. Her letters to Franz Boas are in the Boas Papers, Am. Phil. Soc. Library, Philadelphia. Reichard's important works not cited above include Sandpaintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant ( 1 9 3 7 ) , with Franc J. Newcomb; Navajo Medicine Man: Sandpaintings and Legends of Miguelito ( 1 9 3 9 ) ; Prayer: The Compulsive Word ( 1 9 4 4 ) ; and The Story of the Navaho Hail Chant ( 1 9 4 4 ) . A memorial booklet published by Barnard College contains tributes by Ruth L. Bunzel, Frederica de Laguna, and Margaret Mead, a bibliography compiled by Nathalie F. S. Woodbury, and a photograph of Reichard. See also Barnard College Alumnae Monthly, Nov. 1950; Esther S. Goldfrank, "Gladys Amanda Reichard, 1 8 9 3 - 1 9 5 5 , " Jour, of Am. Folklore ( 1 9 5 6 ) , pp. 5 3 - 5 4 , and Plateau ( 1 9 5 5 ) , p. 48; an obituary by Marian W . Smith, Am. Anthropologist ( 1 9 5 6 ) , pp. 9 1 3 - 1 6 ; and the N.Y. Times obituary, July 26, 1955. Death record from Ariz. Dept. of Health. Katharine Bartlett, Ruth L. Bunzel, Nathalie F. S. Woodbury, Leland C. Wyman, and Duane E. Miller, mayor of Bangor, Pa., supplied additional information. Leland C. Wyman of Jamaica Plain, Mass., has letters from Reichard concerning problems in Navaho ritual. A biobibliography by Steven G. Laughlin provided assistance with research.] JOAN T. MARK

REID, Helen Miles Rogers, Nov. 23, 1882-July 27, 1970. Newspaper publisher. Helen Rogers Reid was born in Appleton, Wis., the eleventh and last child and sixth daughter of Benjamin Talbot and Sarah Louise (Johnson) Rogers. Of largely English ancestry, Helen's parents traced their American genealogy to the early eighteenth century. Her father was

a hotel operator with interests also in mining and lumbering, her mother a housewife much occupied with childrearing. The family was moderately well off by community standards, but Benjamin Rogers's death in 1885 left them in somewhat reduced though still genteel circumstances. Helen Rogers attended the First Ward public school in Appleton until she was ten, then received a scholarship to Grafton Hall, an Episcopal seminary for girls in Fond du Lac, Wis. In 1899 she enrolled in Barnard College as one of its first mid western students; to pay her way, she tutored, did clerical work, and served as assistant housekeeper in a dormitory. Concentrating in Greek and zoology, she wrote a senior thesis on "The Physiology of Minute Crustacea" and received her A.B. in 1903. Casting about for a job, Helen Rogers sought and obtained the position of social secretary to E L I S A B E T H M I L L S REID, daughter of the financier Darius Ogden Mills, and wife of Whitelaw Reid, proprietor of the New York Tribune. The Reids lived sumptuously in a Florentine fortress on Madison Avenue, with a dinner table for eighty and the wealth and social prestige to fill it with interesting people. Helen Rogers worked eight years for Elisabeth Reid, moving between the United States and London, where from 1905 until his death in 1912, Whitelaw Reid was ambassador to the Court of St. James. During these years, Rogers met the Reids' only son, Ogden Mills, just out of Yale but not intellectually inclined. In a match much favored by his mother, he and Helen Rogers were married in Wisconsin on March 14, 1911. At the outset, Helen Rogers Reid took only a passing interest in the Tribune, which her husband inherited on his father's death. In 1913 she gave birth to a son, Whitelaw, followed two years later by a daughter, Elizabeth (who died as a child, in 1924). Helen Reid's main public activity after her daughter's birth was as state treasurer for the New York suffrage campaign, raising more than a half-million dollars for the decisive 1917 effort. Her commitment to women's rights stemmed from her college years, she later told a reporter: "When I was in Barnard, working my way through, the necessity for complete independence of women was borne in upon me." In speeches through her life, she advocated that women should work and be economically independent of their husbands, and that men should take greater responsibility in the home and in raising children; she also believed women should be conscripted for some form of military service. In 1918 Helen Reid became an advertising solicitor for the anemic Tribune. The Reid family was said to have poured fifteen million dollars

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Reid into the paper between 1898 and 1918, but it had remained unprofitable, and Ogden Reid had done little but supervise in a very general way. Helen Reid helped to reduce the paper's deficit substantially, bringing to the business the shrewd managerial instincts her husband lacked. Within two months of joining the advertising department, she became its director, a post she held under various titles for the next twenty-nine years. Acting with what one associate called the "persistence of gravity," she prodded salesmen and tirelessly pursued potential advertisers, doubling the Tribune s advertising linage between 1918 and 1924. With a keen business sense she also promoted the 1924 acquisition of the New York Herald, merging it with the Tribune into the New York Herald Tribune at a cost of five million dollars to the Reids. With its expanded circulation and staff, the Herald Tribune became one of the nation's major newspapers. Over the next two decades, as vice president of the Herald Tribune, Helen Reid came to play an important role in determining policy. She was responsible for its concentration on the middle-class suburbs and for its emphasis on gardening news and allied features of special interest to suburban women. She expanded the paper's Home Institute, a widely known experimental and test kitchen, and hired Clementine Paddleford as food writer. And she saw to the appointment of women in other areas as well, including that of I R I T A V A N D O R E N as editor of Books, the Sunday literary supplement, and M A R I E M A T T I N G L Y M E L O N E Y as director of the annual Forum on Current Problems (1930) and later as editor of This Week, the paper's Sunday fiction and articles supplement. Reid also brought syndicated foreign affairs columnist D O R O T H Y T H O M P S O N to the paper. By the 1940s the Herald Tribune had more women staff members than any other daily paper in the United States. Outside the newsroom, Helen Reid became a force in civic and national life. Filling the power vacuum created by her husband, she represented the paper in Republican politics. It was she, for example, who traveled to Marion, Ohio, in 1920 after the election of Warren G. Harding to discuss cabinet appointments and to let Harding know, subtly, that the Tribune's support depended on the quality of his choices. In later years, she supported and advised the presidential campaigns of Wendell L. Willkie and Dwight D. Eisenhower. According to Clare Boothe Luce: "In those years, New York Republicanism was Helen Reid." Reid's political influence was evidenced at the dinners she gave for public opinion molders and leaders. It was her custom at these dinners to throw out a question

of the moment and go around the table for comments; some guests gave their opinions seated; others, sensing they were in the presence of "Queen Helen," rose and addressed her as if she were a public meeting. On her husband's death in 1947, Helen Reid succeeded him as president of the Herald Tribune corporation. Control of the newspaper remained within the family for the next ten years; in 1953, Reid became chairman of the board, yielding the presidency to her elder son, Whitelaw. Then two years later, at the age of seventytwo, she resigned the chairmanship but continued on the board, Whitelaw taking her place as chairman while her youngest child, Ogden (b. 1925), became president, publisher, and editor. Neither son proved adept as a newspaper owner, however, and in 1957 the family sold all but a small interest to John Hay Whitney, who operated the failing property until 1966. As the New York World Tribune, it expired finally in May 1967. A trustee of Barnard College (1914-56), Helen Reid served as chairman of the Board of Trustees there from 1947 to 1956. She spent her last years quietly on the Reid family estate in Purchase, N.Y., and at her apartment in New York City, where she died in July 1970. [Helen Reid's papers are in the Reid Family Coll., Library of Congress. There is also material on Reid, including letters on trustee matters, in the Barnard College Archives; some letters are still held by family members. Useful articles on Reid include Mona Gardner, "Queen Helen," Sat. Eve. Post, May 6 and 13, 1944; Don Wharton, "The Girl Who Made Good," Today, July 11, 1936; and Current Biog., 1952. See also Harry Baehr, Jr., The New York Tribune Since the Civil War (1936). Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, July 28, 1970, and Barnard Alumnae, Fall 1970. Information was supplied by Louise Fitzsimons and by Reid's son Whitelaw Reid.] ALDEN

RICE PEREIRA, Irene. See Rice.

WHITMAN

PEREIRA,

Irene

RICHTER, Gisela Marie Augusta, Aug. 15, 1882-Dec. 24, 1972. Classical archaeologist, museum curator. Gisela Richter was born in London, England, the third of four surviving children and second daughter of Jean Paul and Luise Marie (Schwaab) Richter. (A third daughter died in infancy.) Her father, a British subject, partly German and partly French in origin, was a noted art historian and connoisseur of Italian painting. Luise Richter, born in Broussa, Turkey,

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where her father had started a silk industry, was also an art critic and writer. Both daughters continued their parents' interest: Irma (a year older than Gisela) became a painter, while the brothers branched out, the elder becoming a lawyer and the younger an orientalist. Gisela Richter began school in Florence, Italy, where her family lived until she was ten, and continued at Maida Vale High School after the Richters moved to London in 1892. Her father trained the girls in connoisseurship of painting. When Gisela was fourteen, she and Irma attended lectures by Emanuel Loewy at the University of Rome. These lectures and frequent visits to the museums of Rome "proved a turning-point in my life," Richter later wrote. "I became enamoured of Greek and Roman art and decided to become an archaeologist." Entering Girton College, Cambridge, in 1901, she found the work "all-absorbing," especially that with her don, Katharine Jex-Blake, who taught classical languages and history. Archaeology lectures seemed "rather elementary" after Rome. In the fall of 1904, for her fourth undergraduate year, Richter went to the British School of Archaeology in Athens. The only woman at the school, she was not allowed to live there, staying instead at a pension where she became friends with several women from the American School of Classical Studies. Richter's study in Athens led to a bachelor's thesis on Attic vases, published in the British School's Annual for 1904-05. In the autumn of 1905 H A R R I E T BOYD (HAWES), the American excavator of Gournia, then in her early thirties, invited Gisela Richter to come with her to the United States. She introduced Richter to Edward Robinson, vice director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, who offered Richter a temporary job planning an exhibit of Greek vases. In June 1906, when she left for England to visit her family, Robinson promised her a permanent post beginning that autumn. Her family consented, but insisted, lest she become an exile, that she return each summer. The three months away from the museum became a permanent pattern; Richter spent much of the time visiting museums and conferring with the principal scholars in her own and related fields. She became an American citizen in 1917, but remained in close touch with an international circle of scholarly friends throughout her career. Gisela Richter was named assistant curator of classical art at the Metropolitan Museum in 1910, rising to curator in 1925. During these years a steady stream of important acquisitions made by the museum's purchasing agent, John Marshall, raised the Metropolitan's classical holdings to the level of a great collection. As

Richter exhibited and published these works, she became expert in all classes of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art except for architecture. After Marshall died in 1928, Richter became responsible for acquisitions. Vigorously and with brilliant success, she pursued Marshall's tradition of making major additions to the collection. Most important and most influential on her own scholarship was her purchase in 1932 of a nearly intact early archaic marble statue of a young man (kouros), a work initially suspected as a forgery by some authorities. The successful effort to authenticate the kouros and fix its place in the history of Greek art led to the publication of Kouroi (1942), in which Richter established a chronology based on the steady development of realism in the rendering of anatomical features. Richter's grasp of the technical problems facing Greek sculptors was enhanced by her own experiments with sculpture in marble and by the advice of her sister, Irma, who collaborated with her on Kouroi. Archaic art became Richter's special interest, and a series of exhaustive studies of various types of archaic Greek sculpture made her a leading authority in this field. Formally retired in 1948, Gisela Richter remained at the Metropolitan to finish work on museum publications before moving with her sister to Rome in 1952. Irma Richter died in 1956. Gisela Richter remained until her death in their apartment near the American Academy, whose excellent library supplied her research needs. In these Roman years she produced for the Phaidon Press a series of books, thorough, comprehensive, and beautifully illustrated. Many were reworkings of earlier books, brought up to date and often greatly enlarged. The great success of her Handbook of Greek Art (1959) compensated the press for the lavish production of the more specialized works. This Handbook, like the earlier Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks (1929), became a standard source for English-speaking students. Richter was less interested in cultural differences than in time as the principal dimension of change: the chronological frameworks she set up in her books have proved to be enduring foundations for scholarship, requiring modification but not demolition as new knowledge enters the field. In her personal life, Richter's lifelong friendship with her sister was the dominant relationship. Gisela and Irma Richter avoided rivalry and enhanced each other's achievement; the same spirit was reflected in Richter's many personal and professional associations with other women. Among those from whom Richter learned, and whose support she acknowledged, were the potter Maude Robinson, who gave

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Richter lessons in her craft, and Marjorie Milne, who lent Richter philological and epigraphical expertise as her assistant curator at the Metropolitan. Richter does not seem to have sought marriage or children of her own and seems always to have preferred to think of herself as young. Later in life, however, she enjoyed visits from children of old friends as well as from her grandnephew. She was unfailingly helpful to younger scholars throughout her mature life. Richter received a great many honorary degrees, but never paraded them. As a young scholar employed in degree-conscious America, she was practical enough to apply for degrees on the basis of her publications, receiving a Litt.D. from Trinity College, Dublin (1913), and an A.M. (1933) and later a Litt.D. from Cambridge. Her great passion, however, was always the beautiful object and the discovery of the realities surrounding it. So she could honestly express surprise, on receiving a gold medal for archaeological achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America in 1968, at being honored for doing what she most enjoyed. Gisela Richter died in her sleep in her Rome apartment in December 1972, and was buried beside her sister in Rome's Protestant Cemetery. [The most informative single source is Gisela Richter, My Memoirs, Recollections of an Archaeologist's Life ( 1 9 7 2 ) , illustrated with photographs. Richter describes her career at the Metropolitan Museum in "The Department of Greek and Roman Art: Triumphs and Tribulations," Metropolitan Museum Jour., 1970, pp. 7 3 - 9 5 . Her other major works include The Craft of Athenian Pottery ( 1 9 2 3 ) , The Portraits of the Greeks, 3 vols. ( 1 9 6 5 ) , and Korai: Archaic Greek Maidens (1968). Among her most important museum publications are Red-Figured Athenian Vases ( 1 9 3 6 ) , Handbook of the Greek Collection ( 1 9 5 3 ) , and Catalogue of Engraved Gems, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman ( 1 9 5 6 ) . Schol arly obituaries by Cornelius Vermeule, Burlington Mag., May 1973, p. 329, and Homer Thompson, Am. Phil. Soc. Year Book, 1973, pp. 144-50, derive most of their biographical material from the Memoirs. Vermeule assesses her achievement as a museum curator, Thompson as an archaeologist. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 26, 1972; Who's Who in America, 1972-73, gives her final list of her degrees, awards, academies, and books. A biobibliography by Monica Blanchard was useful in locating information on Ricliter's parents and sister.] EVELYN

B.

HARRISON

RINEHART, Mary Roberts, Aug. 12, 1876Sept. 22, 1958. Writer. Mary Roberts Rinehart, best-selling author and founder of the had-I-but-known school of crime novels, was born in Allegheny, Pa., the

older of two daughters of Cornelia (Grilleland) and Thomas Beveridge Roberts, a sewing machine salesman. In her autobiography, My Story (1948), she recalls a nominally happy childhood which contained, nonetheless, a profound fear of economic and personal loss. Her mother's fierce energy went into maintaining appearances and keeping an immaculate house, taking in boarders as a last resort when times were bad. The Robertses were Covenanters, and the God they worshipped was one of wrath. Mary Roberts's "abiding sense of sin" and her feeling that danger lurked in the midst of happiness became components of her work, especially her crime novels. When a woman doctor moved into their neighborhood, Roberts envied the bag and buggy, symbols of a status few women possessed. After she graduated from Allegheny High School at sixteen, however, her desire to go to medical school had to be postponed because of her youth and poverty. She enrolled at the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses, where she faced a new world of industrial poverty and violence. The experience left her with "a terrible and often devastating pity and compassion" for the victims of society. Roberts graduated in 1896, the year after her father's suicide, which deepened her sense of tragedy. She hoped for a measure of stability in her marriage in April 1896 to Stanley M. Rinehart, a young surgeon. Three sons, Stanley, Jr., Alan, and Frederick, were born during the next five years, before she was twenty-five, and she became, in her own words, "an almost excessively devoted" mother. She put aside early ambitions to write, but in 1903 when the family's security was threatened by stock market losses, she sat down at a rickety card table and within a year had sold forty-five stories. Her first published book, The Circular Staircase (1908), established her preeminence in the genre she unwittingly had founded—the fusion of the detective story with the humorous novel. Rinehart produced sixty more books, but, even when she employed a full-time secretary and worked in an office, she refused to define herself as "a career woman," and consistently reiterated the primacy of her family over her writing. Her work during World War I was untiring: she served as a European correspondent in 1915, toured camps in the United States as a representative of the secretary of war, and returned to Paris to report the armistice. Her imagination took fire from stories of the war and she saw it as a chance to regain her sense of adventure. Several popular novels of the time expressed her commitment to the war, although, as a wife and mother of men in the army, she also feared its

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Rinehart toll. The Amazing Interlude ( 1 9 1 7 ) and Dangerous Days ( 1 9 1 9 ) had heroines who fulfilled woman's true task—as Rinehart saw it—service. In Bab: A Sub-Deb ( 1 9 1 7 ) a teenager, "tired of being told that the defense of our Dear Country is a masculine matter," breaks up an espionage ring to show the value of women in wartime. During the postwar years the Rineharts moved to Washington, D.C., where Stanley Rinehart worked for the Veterans' Bureau. Spending summers on a Wyoming ranch, Mary Rinehart became concerned about the plight of the Blackfeet Indians and used her influence to raise money for them, even threatening an exposé in the Saturday Evening Post. In 1921 her husband resigned his post in order to manage her business affairs. Rinehart had become a late convert to the cause of woman suffrage, convinced by arguments of economic equality. She wrote many pieces for magazines about the so-called New Woman, but concluded, reluctantly but realistically, that the world had changed more than women, and that the old roles were hard to fit into a new setting. Rinehart wrote several plays, among them the very successful The Bat (1920), coauthored with Avery Hopwood, who delighted her by complimenting her criminal mind. A revival of The Bat, with ZASU PITTS, was filmed for television in 1953 after the play closed, and three movie versions were made; the last, in 1959, starred AGNES MOOREHEAD. After her husband's death in 1932 Rinehart moved to New York City. In 1937 she covered the coronation of George VI, and during World War II she served as an air raid warden. She was in the headlines in 1947 when her cook tried to kill her, and in 1948 her Bar Harbor, Maine, home was destroyed by fire. Ill health, serious accidents, several operations, and the tragic scalding death of her mother intensified her feeling that life offered no security. She finally became an Episcopalian, not so much because she believed in God but because she "was afraid He might exist and must be placated." After surgery for breast cancer, Rinehart courageously published her story, in the hope that it would help frightened women ("I Had Cancer," Ladies' Home Jour., July 1947). When she died in her sleep at her home in New York in 1958, on her desk was the manuscript on which she was working, a very personal memoir of her girlhood entitled "To My Sons." Mary Roberts Rinehart was said to have been on the best-seller lists longer and more often than any other American author. With the possible exception of the Tish stories—tales of three intrepid spinsters whose exploits, according to

her son, represented what Rinehart saw herself as doing had she not married—her work has not survived contemporary criticism. Nonetheless, the heroines of her stories are interesting women for whom murder and war are synonyms for liberation. Violence jolted the hidebound spinster and repressed maiden into action and responsibility. Her ambiance of domestic violence is itself a statement. "There's somebody dead in the linen closet," a typical beginning, followed by a heroic if somewhat muddled solution, illustrated Rinehart's belief that women got rather more done than men although they never took themselves so seriously. The happy endings in her stories were required by her conviction that optimism is central to American life, by her refusal to depress her children, and by her editors' demands. She was aware of the "fatal facility" that made her write too much, too fast—she had real trouble finding a pen that wrote quickly enough for her. "I am frankly a story teller," she said in 1917. "Someday I may be a novelist." When her sons founded their own publishing firm, Rinehart felt she "owed them a best seller" every year, and so the serious work she hoped to accomplish was left undone. But the power of her writing was such that after The Man in Lower Ten ( 1 9 0 9 ) was published, railroad passengers avoided that bunk for years, and she had fan letters from readers as diverse as Theodore Roosevelt and GERTRUDE

STEIN.

[Manuscript collections containing Rinehart correspondence and other materials are at the Univ. of Pittsburgh, the N.Y. Public Library, and Houghton Library, Harvard Univ. In addition to her many novels, collections of short stories, and plays, and her autobiography, first issued in 1931 and expanded in 1945, Rinehart published several travel books and numerous articles in magazines. Two articles which focus on her views of herself as a writer are "Writing Is Work," Sat. Eve. Post, March 11, 1939, pp. 10-11, and "The Detective Story," in George H. Doran, ed., Mary Roberts Rinehart: A Sketch of the Woman and Her Work (1925). The best account of her life and her work is Jan Cohn, "A Pittsburgh Centennial: Mary Roberts Rinehart," Carnegie Mag., Sept. 1976, pp. 300-7. See also Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., C, 486-87; Geoffrey T. Hellman, "Mary Roberts Rinehart," Life, Feb. 25, 1946, pp. 55-61; Twentieth Century Authors (1942) and its First Supplement (1955); W. J. Burke and Will D. Howe, American Authors and Books (1962), which lists her works; and Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler, Encyc. Mystery and Detection (1976), which details the stage and film versions of her plays and novels. A biography by Jan Cohn, Improbable Fiction: The Life of Mary Roberts Rinehart (1980), appeared while this article was in press. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Sept. 23, 1958; Newsweek and Time, Oct. 6, 1958; and the Sat. Eve. Post, Oct. 25, 1958. Additional

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Rippin information for this article was provided by Frederick Rinehart and William Sladen.] BARBARA

WELTER

RIPPIN, Jane Parker Deeter, May 30, 1 8 8 2 June 2, 1953. Social worker, Girl Scout executive, journalist. Jane Deeter Rippin was born in Harrisburg, Pa., the third of five children and youngest of three daughters of Sarah Emely (Mather) and Jasper Newton Deeter. Both parents descended from central Pennsylvania colonial families. The Deeter children lived in Mechanicsburg with their mother, while their father worked in the Mather family business in Harrisburg, returning home on weekends. During Jane's girlhood her mother, at the age of fifty, told her family that she would no longer be responsible for anyone but herself. A gifted singer, she hired extra household help and paid their wages from money she earned by giving private voice lessons. Although she never did routine housework again and spent a great deal more time by herself, she remained the psychic center of the household. Jasper Deeter did not believe in spending money on educating girls, and, although he sent both sons to private schools, all three daughters went to public school. Ruth, the eldest, worked in the family business but earned enough raising geese to send her sisters to college. Jane Deeter received her B.S. from Irving College in Mechanicsburg in 1902. Upon graduation she began working as assistant to the principal of Mechanicsburg High School. In 1908, with her sister's encouragement, Deeter embarked on her career in social work, becoming assistant superintendent of the Children's Village, an orphanage and foster home in Meadowbrook, Pa. Two years later she moved to Philadelphia to become a caseworker for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and became immediately involved in the problems of youths in the city. Making friends in the social work community, in 1911 Deeter organized a cooperative boardinghouse, called the Coop, with five other women. Before the first winter they allowed two men to join as auxiliary members; their task was to shovel coal for the furnace. Though membership changed over the years, the house served as a model of cooperative living. On Oct. 13, 1913, Jane Deeter married James Yardley Rippin, one of the first male members of the Coop. He was an architect, woodworker, and contractor, who always encouraged his wife in her career. The couple fashioned an egalitarian and mutually supportive marriage which

survived various fluctuations in their fortunes. Most often her salary was their main source of income. The year after her marriage, Jane Deeter Rippin received her A.M. from Irving College and was appointed chief probation officer of Philadelphia. When her father learned she was to receive $5,000 a year, he forbade her to accept the position because he did not believe any woman deserved such a high salary. Rippin took the job and her father disowned her. He never again saw her voluntarily, although she took him into her home two years later in his final illness. Rippin proved to be an innovative manager and an able politician. She had charge of the probation work of five courts: domestic relations, petty criminal for unmarried mothers, juvenile, miscreants, and women's court for sex offenders. Her staff increased from 3 to 3 6 5 persons, largely because she instituted extensive social and psychological examinations and assigned an advocate social worker for each person brought to the court. After a hard struggle with local politicians, in 1917 Rippin opened the first multipurpose municipal detention home for women offenders. Reflecting her strong belief in alternatives to traditional incarceration, the women's building served as a diagnostic and treatment center, with a court and an employment agency, as well as a dormitory-style prison. Keenly aware of women's and children's needs, Rippin installed day nurseries in courts dealing with families and fought a losing battle for a special center for women alcoholics. In the fall of 1917 Rippin was asked by the War Department's Commission on Training Camp Activities to supervise work with women and girls who gathered around military camps in the southwest. It was her responsibility to enforce the prohibition of liquor and prostitution near military bases. Organizing the surrounding communities, she succeeded in establishing voluntary centers for girls and women which provided alternatives to delinquency. In 1918 Rippin became director of the commission's section on women and girls. During her term, her staff raised more than $ 5 0 0 , 0 0 0 and worked with more than 3 8 , 0 0 0 delinquent women. She also sponsored a study of the causes of delinquency; its recommendations helped to inspire the establishment of the United Service Organization ( U S O ) in 1941. As a part of that study, Rippin examined girls' organizations in the United States and became interested in the potential of the Girl Scouts to keep adolescent girls occupied in wholesome pursuits. Appointed national director of the Girl

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Scouts, Inc., in 1919, she served until 1930, presiding over the transformation of the Girl Scouts from the highly personalized form developed by its founder, J U L I E T T E L O W , into an efficient, modern organization. Under her direction, membership grew from 50,000 to 250,000; regions and regional councils were formed; and camps and training schools (two of them designed by James Rippin) were established. Rippin actively promoted the growth of international scouting and helped in the development of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts in 1928. A very effective fund raiser, she also initiated the annual cookie sale. Perhaps most important to the ultimate success of the organization, however, Rippin established a framework in which professional staff and volunteers could cooperate. She herself led a troop as a volunteer during her entire tenure as national director. An enormously hard worker and an equally demanding boss, Rippin inspired her staff to spread the scouting movement across the country. She loved her Girl Scout work and left only because of failing health, continuing to be an active member of the National Advisory Council for the rest of her life. In 1931 Rippin became director of research for women's news for the Westchester County Publishers, a chain of more than fifty local newspapers. In her role as a journalist, she was again successful. Often addressing relevant issues affecting women, she also enthusiastically covered traditional women's affairs, especially women's clubs and garden news. Jane Deeter Rippin suffered her first serious stroke, which left her partially paralyzed and aphasic, in 1936. With singular determination, she spent months learning to recognize, pronounce, and write single words and then sentences. Over several years she regained her ability to write and speak and overcame her paralysis. Rippin continued to work for the newspapers and participate in community activities until her final stroke, March 13, 1953. She remained unconscious until her death at home in Tarrytown, N.Y., almost three months later. [The largest single body of information on Jane Deeter Rippin is housed at the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. Archives in New York City. The collection includes extensive typed notes from Rippin's personal letters and interviews conducted by Vera Watson Schmidt for a biography of Rippin which was never written. A June 20, 1976, interview with Dorris Hough by Mary Aickin Rothschild, also in the archives, contains valuable information about what it was like to work for Rippin. A list of organizations to which she belonged appears in the entry in Who Was Who in America, III ( 1 9 6 0 ) . For a concise summary of her career see the obituary in the N.Y.

Herald Tribune, June 3, 1953, which was partially written in advance by Rippin. Obituaries also appeared in the June 3, 1953, N.Y. Times and Tarrytown (N.Y.) Daily News. Additional information for this article was provided by Evelyn Koch and by Rippin's nieces, E. Jean Deeter and Martha D. Crawford. Death certificate was supplied by N.Y. State Dept. of Health.] MARY AICKIN ROTHSCHILD

ROBERTS, Lydia Jane, June 30, 1879-May 28, 1965. Nutritionist, home economics educator. Lydia Roberts, a leader in nutrition studies and a specialist in the nutrition of children, was born in Hope Township, Barry County, Mich. She was the third of four children and youngest of three daughters of Warren and Mary (MfcKibbin) Roberts. Her father, a carpenter, moved the family to Martin, Mich., a farming area, shortly after Lydia's birth, and there she attended grammar and high school. In 1899 Lydia Roberts completed the oneyear course at Mt. Pleasant Normal School (later Central Michigan University). After teaching for several years in Michigan, the urge to travel took her first to Montana, where she taught in schools in Miles City and Great Falls, and then briefly to Virginia. In 1909 Mt. Pleasant Normal School awarded her a Life Certificate, which qualified her to teach in any Michigan elementary school, rural or urban. Returning to Montana, Roberts taught third grade in Dillon and served as teacher-critic in Western Montana College until 1915 when, at the age of thirty-six, she entered the University of Chicago with advanced standing. Motivated by an interest in the relation between diet and health developed during a summer of work at a Montana children's institute, Roberts resumed her education in order to gain greater understanding of the feeding of children. That subject remained a lifelong concern and one focus of a career which recorded major accomplishments in nutrition education and research and in community nutrition. The period when she entered Chicago saw the pioneering efforts of Elmer McCollum, Thomas Osborne, Lafayette Mendel, and others in the recognition of vitamins and minerals as essential trace nutrients in foods. Roberts majored in home economics, a department of which KATHARINE BLUNT, a biochemist, had recently become chairman. Encouraged by Blunt to continue her studies in foods and nutrition after receiving her B.S. in 1917, Roberts completed her M.S. in 1919. Her master's thesis, "A Malnutrition Clinic as a University Problem in Applied Nutrition," was based on work being done at a child

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Roberts

nutrition clinic set up by Blunt in collaboration with the Rush Medical Collège. Her practical efforts at the clinic also led Roberts to develop a course in child feeding. In 1919 Lydia Roberts became assistant professor of home economics at the University of Chicago. For the next decade, a period of dramatic growth in the profession of home economics as well as in the department, she continued her studies and her practical work on nutrition of children. She made skillful use of her students as coworkers in gathering information which became the basis for the book Nutrition Work With Children (1927). A classic in its field, the book served as her dissertation for the Ph.D. in home economics which Roberts received in 1928, along with a promotion to associate professor. When Blunt left Chicago in 1929, Roberts headed a three-member committee to administer the department while a nationwide search was conducted for a replacement. Finally, in June 1930, the position was offered to Roberts; she served as chairman and full professor until her mandatory retirement in 1944. During this fourteen-year period she maintained a heavy schedule of administration, teaching, and research on the nutritional needs of children. That research contributed to knowledge of caloric, protein, vitamin, and mineral requirements; characteristically, it was geared to practical application. Roberts lived during this period with her elder sister Lillian, a secretary in one of the university offices. A friendly, outgoing person, she was an effective administrator and teacher who set high standards for herself and expected them as well in her associates and students. While meeting her responsibilities in Chicago, Roberts was also active on a number of national committees. In 1929 she served on three committees of the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, the most important being the Committee on Nutrition. Later she became a longtime member of the Council on Foods and Nutrition of the American Medical Association, and of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council. On the Food and Nutrition Board she played a leading role in setting up recommendations for the addition of selected vitamins and minerals to flour and bread as a wartime measure to insure improved nutrition. Her support helped gain acceptance of the enrichment program by the industries involved. After retirement from the University of Chicago, Roberts accepted a faculty appointment at the University of Puerto Rico. The invitation came from the university's chancellor, who

knew of her 1943 nutrition survey of the island for the United States Department of Agriculture. Roberts made Puerto Rico her new home, engaging vigorously in nutrition studies there until her death. She chaired the home economics department at the university from 1946 to 1952, and even after her second retirement continued an active program aimed at improvement of the nutrition of Puerto Rican families. With her colleague, Rosa L. Stefani, Roberts undertook a study of the food habits of the people; the results were published in 1949 as Patterns of Living in Puerto Rican Families. The culmination of her work was a nutrition improvement project undertaken in a rural community and reported in The Dona Elena Project (1963). An experimental effort to tie economic assistance to nutrition education, the project brought a new road, electric power lines, and improved sanitary facilities along with agricultural services and practical instruction in nutrition to an isolated mountain area. It became the model for a program established throughout the island. Lydia Roberts's active life came to an end in Rio Piedras when, still working at age eightyfive, she collapsed at her desk. She died of massive bleeding resulting from a ruptured abdominal aneurysm. Although she received many honors, Roberts derived her greatest satisfaction from the improvement in the nutrition of children arising out of her studies and practical projects. [Roberts's master's thesis was published in the March 1919 Jour. Home Economics. A revised edition of Nutrition Work With Children appeared in 1935; third and fourth editions, prepared by Ethel Austin Martin, were published as Roberts' Nutrition Work With Children in 19S4 and 1978. Ethel Martin has also published "The Life Works of Lydia J. Roberts," Jour. Am. Dietetic Assoc., Oct. 1966, pp. 299-302. The best biographical study is Franklin C. Bing, "Lydia Jane Roberts—A Biographical Sketch," Jour. Nutrition, Sept. 1967, pp. 1-13. Another good profile is Ethel Austin Martin, "Lydia Jane Roberts, June 30, 1879-May 28, 1965," Jour. Am. Dietetic Assoc., Aug. 1965, pp. 127-28. Death certificate supplied by Puerto Rico Dept. of Health.] AARON J .

IHDE

ROBERTS, Mary May, Jan. 30, 1877-Jan. 11, 1959. Nurse, editor. Mary May Roberts was the eldest of four children, two girls and two boys, of Henry W. and Elizabeth Scott (Elliot) Roberts, both of Scots-English ancestry. She was born in Duncan City, Mich, (later part of Cheboygan), a company town owned and operated by the sawmill firm for which her father worked. As a child,

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Roberts she attended the company school and enjoyed the company-built toboggan slides and skating pond. A serious and energetic girl, she excelled at her school work and graduated in 1895 from high school in nearby Cheboygan as valedictorian of her four-member class. Despite opposition from her father, Roberts applied to the Jewish Hospital Training School for Nurses in Cincinnati. Henry Roberts's conviction that his daughter could not "stick it out"—he handed her a return ticket as she boarded the train for school —"somehow made her instantly determined to see the thing through, no matter what," Roberts recalled (Nursing Outlook, Feb. 1959, p. 7 2 ) . Mary Roberts excelled at nursing school, despite supervision that "partook largely of the mental quality of a policeman on his beat," as she characterized it later. After graduating in 1899, she held a variety of hospital posts: clinic nurse at the Baroness Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tenn. (1899); superintendent of nurses at the Savannah Hospital in Georgia ( 1 9 0 0 - 0 3 ) ; and assistant superintendent of nurses at Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati ( 1 9 0 4 0 6 ) . She then did private duty nursing in Evanston, 111., before returning to Cincinnati in 1908 to become superintendent of nurses at the Christian R. Holmes Hospital. Remaining there until the outbreak of World War I, she played an active role in the Ohio nurses' organizations. In 1917 Roberts left her hospital post to work for the American Red Cross, recruiting nurses for military service and later serving as chief nurse and director of the Army School of Nursing unit at Camp Sherman, Ohio. Mary Roberts left the American Red Cross in 1919, at the age of forty-two, with a solid yet unexceptionable career in hospital nursing behind her. She entered Teachers College, Columbia University, to work for a college degree. These years of study brought her "a vastly increased vision and spacious-mindedness and more new found enthusiasm for nursing," Roberts later wrote. More important, Roberts's years at Teachers College brought her a new career. She attracted the favorable attention of the American Journal of Nursing's editorial board, and, after receiving a B.S. and diploma in nursing school administration in 1921, Roberts, along with Katherine De Witt, succeeded SOPHIA P A L M E R as the Journal's coeditors. In 1923 Roberts became sole editor. In justifying the appointment of an unknown Ohio nurse to this prestigious position, the board explained to its readers that "her point of view will not be that of a person who has long been in the limelight, but that of a majority of our able women." However like the average nurse Mary Roberts

may have been in some respects, she soon displayed a journalistic skill and executive ability that placed her in the limelight. During three decades of chaotic growth for the profession, as increased demand for nurses created pressure to lower educational requirements and economic uncertainty jeopardized hard-won working conditions and wages, Roberts used her position to campaign for higher professional standards. Her aggressive editorial policy exemplified what she called the "most desirable of editorial qualities —an awareness of what is about to become important." Creating an extensive network among nurses all over the country, Roberts constantly surveyed the profession, identifying its problems and advocating solutions. Under her editorship, circulation went from 20,000 to 100,000, and the Journal won widespread respect. Roberts's influence on nursing extended beyond the pages of the Journal. One of her most significant achievements was the plan she sponsored in 1932 making the National League of Nursing Education the education department of the American Nurses' Association (ANA). Another was the Nursing Information Bureau of the ANA, which she ran from 1934 to 1948 for the benefit of both nurses and the public. Roberts also represented the nursing profession on a number of projects involving the medical profession as a whole, including the influential Committee on Costs of Medical Care organized in 1927 to survey the cost and distribution of health services. In 1949 Mary Roberts retired as editor of the American Journal of Nursing, retaining the title of editor emeritus. While continuing to play an active role in the profession, she put most of her energy into the writing of nursing.history, publishing the classic American Nursing: History and Interpretation (1954) and The Army Nurse Corps—Yesterday and Today (1957). She died in New York City at age eighty-one after suffering a stroke while at work on an editorial in the Journal offices. Throughout her career Roberts received a number of awards, including the International Red Cross Florence Nightingale Medal (1949) and the Mary Adelaide Nutting Award for Leadership in Nursing (1949). She was particularly proud of the Mary M. Roberts Fellowship in Journalism established in her honor by the American Journal of Nursing in 1950. Described by her coworkers as a hard taskmaster, Roberts nonetheless won both love and respect for her warmth, openness, and sense of humor, and gained a reputation for discretion and wise counsel. For a generation of nurses, "Miss Roberts was the Journal," and in this role she became "one of the greatest teachers, the most

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Robeson indefatigable investigators, and the most potent educational influences on modern nursing" (Am. Jour. Nursing, Oct. 1950, p. 583, and May 1949, p. 2 6 6 ) . [The major manuscript source is the Am. Jour, of Nursing Co.-Mary M. Roberts Coll. in the Nursing Archive, Mugar Library, Boston Univ., which contains correspondence, manuscripts, scrapbooks, biographical materials, and photographs. Material on Roberts's early life can be found in the collection of Cheboygan history privately owned by Ellis Olson. The main source for Roberts's writings is the Am. Jour. Nursing. For her regular contributions to this and other nursing journals see Nursing Studies Index. Biographical articles include Katherine De Witt, "Mary M. Roberts," Biographic Sketches, 1937-40, published by the Nat. League of Nursing Education and available from the Mugar Library; Edith Patton Lewis, "Mary M. Roberts: Spokesman for Nursing," Am. Jour. Nursing, March 1959, pp. 3 3 6 - 4 3 ; "Mary M. Roberts Retires as Editor," Am. Jour. Nursing, May 1949, pp. 2 6 1 - 7 1 . See also "The Journal's Golden Anniversary," Am. Jour. Nursing, Oct. 1950, pp. 583-84. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 12, 1959, and Nursing Outlook, Feb. 1959, pp. 7 2 - 7 3 . ] NANCY

TOMES

ROBESON, Eslanda Cardoza Goode, Dec. 15, 1896-Dec. 13, 1965. Writer, civil rights reformer. Eslanda Robeson was born in Washington, D.C., the only daughter of Eslanda (Cardoza) and John Goode. Her father, who came from Chicago, was probably of West Indian descent; he worked as a clerk in the War Department. Her mother came from the prominent Charleston, S.C., Sephardic Jewish family of Cardozo (spelling of the name varies). Eslanda's grandfather, Francis Lewis Cardozo, was a black statesman and educator who had been secretary of state and secretary of the treasury in South Carolina during Reconstruction and principal after the Civil War of Avery Institute, one of the first schools for blacks in South Carolina. After her father's death in 1902, Eslanda moved to New York City with her mother and two brothers. She attended New York City public schools and at the age of sixteen enrolled in the household science course at the University of Illinois, remaining there for two years ( 1 9 1 2 14). In the summer of 1916 she transferred to Teachers College of Columbia University where she majored in chemistry and earned a B.S. in 1920. She then worked as a surgical technician and chemist at Presbyterian Hospital of Columbia University, probably the first black woman to hold this position. Eslanda Goode met Paul Robeson while he

was a student at Columbia University Law School; they were married in 1921 after a brief courtship. Eslanda Robeson exerted a strong influence on her husband, actively encouraging him to pursue a career in the theater. Convinced that opportunities for blacks in the legal profession were limited, he agreed. In the fall of 1925, she left her job at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and accompanied her husband to London for his much-heralded appearance there in the Provincetown Players' production of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones. Their only child, Paul Jr., was born in 1927. During most of his childhood he was cared for by his maternal grandmother, leaving Eslanda Robeson free to manage her husband's career. For several years she was responsible for their finances and for booking concert tours in the United States and Europe. Eslanda Robeson's first book, a biography entitled Paul Robeson, Negro, appeared in 1930. It offered a rather simplistic portrait of its subject, but it demonstrated her admiration for her husband and made clear her role in motivating him toward the realization of his tremendous potential as an artist. The book also reflects some of the marital strains which led the Robesons to separate from 1930 until 1933. The couple had settled in London in 1928. For the next twelve years Eslanda Robeson maintained a residence in England, finding racial discrimination less pronounced there than in the United States. In England, too, she was able to develop her growing interest in Africa. She had access there to a wealth of information about Africa through the British press and films, as well as from African students. In 1935 she enrolled at London University to take classes in anthropology, continuing to study there until 1937, and at the London School of Economics in 1938. She toured Africa for six months in 1936 with her son, gathering material for a book. During the 1930s, Eslanda Robeson also traveled through Europe and made several trips to the Soviet Union, the first in 1934. A close observer of the worsening political situation in Europe, she became an ardent antifascist. With Paul Robeson, she went to Spain during the civil war there to show her support for the Spanish Republic. After the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the Robesons returned to the United States. They settled in Connecticut and Eslanda Robeson continued her study of anthropology as a doctoral student at the Hartford Seminary. In 1945, African Journey, the book based on her earlier travels, was published. Robeson's approach to Africa was more descriptive than analytical; she detailed the living habits and the economic and cultural customs of various

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Robeson tribes, illustrating them with photographs she had taken. Reviewers praised the book as both a provocative and enlightening account of the African peoples and an important treatise on the color line. Drawing on her training as an anthropologist, Robeson was one of the first Americans to demonstrate the urgent need for reform among the colonial powers. She also emphasized the important source of pride for Afro-Americans provided by Africa's rich heritage, which had been largely ignored or misrepresented in the United States. During the 1940s, Eslanda Robeson became a popular lecturer, bringing the subjects of Africa, race relations, and colonialism to colleges, churches, and public gatherings. After the war, Eslanda Robeson's writings focused especially on the issue of colonialism. She viewed the war as a turning point for emerging nations in Asia and Africa and saw the United Nations as a potential mediator between the European powers and their colonies in the postwar struggle over liberation. In 1945 she attended the founding convention of the UN as a representative for the Council on African Affairs, a private organization chaired by Paul Robeson and concerned with colonial problems. Throughout the 1950s she covered UN activities for the New World Review (formerly called Soviet Russia Today). Robeson's hopes for a new international order soured as relations worsened between the United States and the Soviet Union, but she was confident that the remnants of colonialism could not long resist the rising tide of nationalism in Asia and Africa. During these postwar years, Eslanda Robeson also drew attention for her outspoken criticism of American foreign policy and her favorable view of the Soviet Union. She contended that the issue of communism was often raised to avoid confronting the serious economic, social, and political problems caused by generations of racism and colonialism. In 1948 she joined in establishing the Progressive party and actively campaigned for Henry A. Wallace for president; she ran as the Progressive party's candidate for secretary of state in Connecticut in 1948, and in 1950 for congresswoman-at-large from that state. These political stands led to an extended period of personal and financial hardship for both Eslanda and Paul Robeson who, unable to obtain passports, could not leave the United States from 1950 to 1958. In addition, both were subjected to congressional investigations. In July 1953 she was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Robeson refused to discuss her political beliefs, citing not only the fifth amendment to the Constitution but

also the fifteenth, which guarantees equal rights regardless of race and color. Angered, McCarthy told her she had no special rights because of her race and overruled her. In response Robeson reminded the committee that she had spent her life fighting racial discrimination. "You're white and I'm colored and this is a very white committee," she observed. She continued to challenge the committee's questioning, leading McCarthy to observe that it was only out of "special consideration" that she did not receive a citation for contempt. Eslanda Robeson's views on postwar America were elaborated in An American Argument (1949), a dialogue with PEARL BUCK. Robeson focused her criticism on the failure of the United States to be a complete democracy, especially for blacks. She was an early advocate of legislation as an important strategy for securing racial justice and equality, but believed that a strong, united black protest was necessary to initiate the process of reform. The 1954 Supreme Court decision (Brown v. Board of Education) outlawing segregation in public schools, combined with the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and the emerging leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., provided the momentum for the kind of protest movement Robeson had in mind. In 1957 she joined King's Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., to urge implementation of the Supreme Court decision. Although she lived abroad for the next five years, she followed the civil rights movement closely and wrote enthusiastically about the sitins and freedom rides and about the 1963 March on Washington. Eslanda Robeson died in New York City of cancer in 1965. The impact of her views was dulled by the political climate of the 1950s, but she provided a challenging perspective during a time of conformity, and a conscience that should have been heeded. [There is a clipping file on Eslanda Robeson at the Schomburg Coll., N.Y. Public Library. Her books provide autobiographical information; see also her articles in the New World Rev., 1 9 5 2 - 6 5 . Other biographical sources include obituary notices in the New World Rev., Jan. 1966, pp. 8—13; The Worker, Dec. 19, 1965; the N.Y. Times, Dec. 16, 1965; and the entry in Current Biog., 1945. Information also appears in studies of Paul Robeson. See Edwin Embree, 13 Against the Odds ( 1 9 4 4 ) ; Dorothy Gilliam, Paul Robeson, All-American ( 1 9 7 6 ) ; Edwin Hoyt, Paul Robeson, the American Othello ( 1 9 6 7 ) ; and Marie Seton, Paul Robeson (1958).] PATRICIA

A.

SULLIVAN

ROBINSON, Rubye Doris Smith, April 25, 1942-Oct. 7, 1967. Civil rights reformer.

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Robinson Rubye Doris Smith Robinson, a leading figure in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was, according to James Forman, "one of the few genuine revolutionaries in the black liberation movement." By the time of her death at twenty-five she had become the key figure in managing the unwieldy and unpredictable existence of SNCC, the most radical of the civil rights organizations in the 1960s. Rubye Doris Smith was born in Atlanta, the second of seven children (three girls and four boys) of Alice (Banks) and John Thomas Smith, both of whom had been born in Georgia. Alice Smith was a beautician and ran the family store; John Thomas Smith was a self-employed mover who later became a minister. The Smiths placed a high priority on education. When Rubye's older sister, Mary Ann, was sent to a church-run kindergarten, Rubye Doris, then three, insisted on going. By age four, she was in first grade, and throughout her years in public elementary school she was ahead of her age group. At thirteen she watched on television the bus boycott by blacks in Montgomery, Ala., to protest segregation; later she remembered that seeing the old people "walking, walking" led to her determination to be politically active. Rubye Doris Smith was sixteen when she finished high school and entered Spelman College in Atlanta. She was a sophomore on Feb. 1, 1960, when the Greensboro, N.C., lunch-counter sit-in occurred. The powerful impact of this demonstration led to others. Rubye Smith, with her sister, joined students from Atlanta University Center (the Atlanta Committee on Appeal for Human Rights) in a sit-in campaign against restaurants connected with government buildings. In April 1960 she traveled with other Atlanta students to Raleigh, N.C., for the founding meeting of SNCC. As the sit-in demonstrations continued across the south, arrests multiplied. In February 1961, after the arrest of students participating in a demonstration in Rock Hill, S.C., Smith traveled there with a SNCC support contingent. They were also arrested, and Rubye Smith and the others spent thirty days in jail, the first time civil rights workers arrested for sitting-in had chosen to adopt the tactic of jail-without-bail and serve their full sentence. Rubye Doris Smith's strength and determination did not develop in isolation. She came from a strong family: her grandfather, Pleas Banks, had waited alone with a gun on the front porch of his house in Barnesville, Ga., when a white man threatened to lynch his son. Alice Smith was dedicated to the development and harmony of her family and her energy and skill were often needed to abate conflict between Rubye Doris

and her father, who felt that his daughter's political decisions placed her life and future in needless jeopardy. Even as a child Rubye Doris was independent, her mother recalled: "Once she was clear, she was going to do it whether it was what you wanted or not." Her involvement in the civil rights struggle deepened in the spring of 1961 when she responded to a call for reinforcements from Freedom Riders jailed in Birmingham, Ala. The Freedom Rides, initiated by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and continued by SNCC, challenged the legality of state-mandated segregation in interstate travel throughout the south. Smith's efforts to raise money for the trip drew little support; many Atlanta blacks thought the Freedom Rides too dangerous. She went to Birmingham, and on May 20, with nine students from Nashville, left for Montgomery, where the group was attacked by a mob of angry whites. On May 24, Smith and eleven other Freedom Riders boarded a bus for Jackson, Miss. There they were arrested for trying to use the white restrooms, charged with breach of peace and refusal to obey officers, and given a twomonth suspended sentence and a $200 fine. Smith decided to go to jail rather than pay. She shared a cell in the Hinds County jail with as many as twenty-three others, and finished out her sentence—accompanied by an increasing number of Freedom Riders—in the maximum security unit of the Parchman State Penitentiary. Her role in the Rides was characteristic: an active participant, she also identified the kind of support the group needed and set about organizing people to serve that need. Upon her release, Smith joined the summer voter registration project newly organized by SNCC in McComb, Miss. She also attended a training seminar for student activists at Fisk University, where arguments arose over the response SNCC would make to black youths who had thrown rocks during local demonstrations. Smith agreed with those who found it understandable that blacks would strike back. With these incidents, SNCC began to view nonviolence as a tactic rather than a way of life, a philosophical difference between their policies and those of Martin Luther King, Jr. In fall 1961 Rubye Doris Smith returned to Spelman, while also greatly increasing the time she spent with SNCC. She took an active part in large demonstrations in Albany, Ga., in December, urging unsuccessfully that there be further demonstrations and more pressure on the city's power structure. For most of the summer of 1962 she worked with SNCC projects in Cairo, 111. The following spring she became a full-time staff member of SNCC, working as

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Robinson

administrative assistant to executive secretary James Forman. At twenty-one she was aware of a clear purpose in her life. She felt a sense of urgency: the conditions under which blacks lived had to b e changed, and she and fullycommitted black students like her had the opportunity to make a difference. Between 1 9 6 3 and 1 9 6 7 , Rubye Doris Smith functioned as the administrative and logistical center of S N C C . She presided over the Sojourner Motor Fleet, cars needed to carry the voter registration drive into rural areas, organized student recruits, met the day-to-day needs of the field staff, and responded to emergencies. Compassionate and responsive to individual needs, Smith also knew that a delicate balance had to b e maintained between civil rights workers and local community activists; her rage knew no bounds when she discovered staff members behaving irresponsibly or against instructions. T h e need to bring order to a loosely knit, highly individualized staff created the most pressure in Smith's work. During the summer of 1 9 6 4 , S N C C joined with C O R E , NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the Mississippi Summer Project, a major voter registration drive. Because of the large number of volunteers needed, most had to provide their own subsistence, making it very difficult for blacks to participate. Believing that civil rights work in the south should be led by blacks, Rubye Smith initiated a concerted drive for southern black volunteers. She was also in the forefront of those who questioned SNCC's ability to survive under the combined pressure of the influx of white volunteers and the involvement with other civil rights groups in an umbrella organization. During the fall of 1 9 6 4 a series of events underlined and enlarged Rubye Doris Smith's impact on S N C C ' s political direction. During a staff retreat called in the aftermath of Mississippi Summer to discuss SNCC's future direction, Smith carried out the daily tasks of the organization, making policy decisions as the need arose and without clear guidelines from the policymaking body. In September she went with nine other S N C C staff members to Africa, an experience which affected her profoundly and furthered her growing commitment to black nationalism. On her return, she urged S N C C to develop connections with Africa, one of the first staff members to suggest this step. Smith also played a decisive role in the conflict that arose that fall over the role of women in the movement. T h e leadership, in general, was male-dominated, although the majority of participants were women. At S N C C most of the central office staff were women but—with the

exception of Rubye Smith—they were assigned primarily to clerical tasks. She joined a sit-in at James Forman's office, organized b y other women on the staff to protest their limited role and to demand that women have access to field assignments and other positions of responsibility. But she resisted further action directed to SNCC's internal needs, fearful that it would deflect energies from the organization's central purpose, the improvement of conditions for blacks throughout the country. In November 1 9 6 4 , Rubye Smith married Clifford Robinson, a veteran who b e c a m e chief mechanic for the Sojourner Motor Fleet. Their son, Kenneth Toure—named for Sekou Toure, the president of Guinea whom Smith had met in Africa—was born the following July. Neither marriage nor motherhood lessened her intense involvement in the movement and in the summer of 1 9 6 6 Rubye Doris Smith Robinson succeeded James Forman as executive secretary of SNCC. Under chairman Stokely Carmichael, S N C C began to make the transition to black nationalism. W h e n field secretary Willie Ricks raised the cry of black power on the June 1 9 6 6 James Meredith March in Mississippi, Robinson strongly supported the new direction. Although she may have had indications of her illness by 1 9 6 6 , Robinson remained active until a few months before her death from lymphoma in Atlanta. Associates remembered her as a leader, an organizer, and a fighter. Her coworker Stanley Wise recalled: " R u b y e Doris was probably the nearest thing I ever met to a free person. I mean really free, free in the sense that be you Black or white, you could not commit a great indignity or injustice about Rubye and have it go undealt with . . . Rubye just stood up to anybody . . . That's just not the way Blacks acted in the south. As a result, she made you stand taller." [There is no manuscript collection; all of Robinson's papers remain in the possession of her family. For biographical and background information see: Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists ( 1 9 6 4 ) ; James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries ( 1 9 7 2 ) ; and August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study of the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 ( 1 9 7 3 ) . Cleveland Sellers recalls Smith's impact on him in The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC ( 1 9 7 3 ) , with Robert Terrell; an interview with her (as "Sarah") appears in Josephine Carson, Silent Voices: The Southern Negro Woman Today ( 1 9 6 9 ) . An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 10, 1967; death record provided by the Ga. Dept. of Human Resources. A biobibliography by James P. Posey assisted with research. Especially valuable were interviews with Courtland Cox, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Judy Richard-

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Rogers son, Reginald Robinson, Alice Banks Smith, Annette Jones White, and Stanley Wise.] BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

ROCHESTER, Anna. See

HUTCHINS,

Grace.

ROGERS, Edith Nourse, March 19, 1881-Sept. 10, 1960. Congresswoman. Edith Nourse Rogers, Republican congresswoman from the Fifth District in Massachusetts and the sixth woman to be elected a representative, rode the crest of the veterans' movement to serve in the House of Representatives for thirtyfive years, the longest stay of any woman elected to the Congress. She succeeded her husband, John Jacob Rogers, who had served the same district for twelve years. A member of the minority party for most of her career—the Republicans had a majority only in the Eightieth and Eighty-Third Congresses—Rogers was the first Republican woman to chair a major committee, Veterans' Affairs, and a nationally recognized proponent of veterans' legislation. Born Edith Frances Nourse in the mill and shipping town of Saco, Maine, she was the only daughter and younger of two children. Both parents—Edith Frances (Riversmith) and Franklin T. Nourse—were natives of Maine and descendants of seventeenth-century Puritan settlers in Massachusetts. Edith Nourse spent her first fourteen years in Saco. The Nourse family was fairly well-to-do and her girlhood was marked by stability; Edith was educated by a tutor and her brother attended a private academy. Her father, a Harvard graduate, was the mill agent or manager of one of the largest textile mills and a power wielder in local politics. Her mother, who left the Congregational church to join her husband at the Episcopal, engaged in volunteer work to aid the poor. The Episcopal church remained important to their daughter. In January 1895, Franklin Nourse accepted the position of mill agent for the second largest cotton textile company in Lowell, Mass., and the family moved into a larger orbit. In Lowell, Edith Nourse attended a small private girls' boarding school, Rogers Hall, graduating in 1899. Her parents then selected a finishing school, Madame Julien's in Neuilly, near Paris, and gave her travel on the Continent. Returning to Massachusetts, she participated in social, welfare, and church activities in Lowell and attended luncheon and theater parties in Boston. In the fall of 1907 the popular socialite married John Jacob Rogers, a graduate of Harvard University and its Law School. The marriage united two prosperous Yankee Republican families. John Rogers began a successful law practice

in Lowell with his brother-in-law, then turned to politics in 1911. Running as a regular Republican, he triumphed over a Progressive, a Democrat, and a Socialist to win election to Congress in 1912. In six subsequent elections he carried Lowell and, customarily, all the other cities and towns in the district. The couple's move to Washington provided the setting that changed Edith Nourse Rogers's life. She and her husband lavishly entertained the political and diplomatic community, although initially she sought not to intrude on his official role. In 1917, however, when he joined other members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on a "secret" but unofficial mission to Britain and France, she insisted on accompanying him. In England she volunteered at the YMCA hut in London; on the Continent, she accompanied her husband to battle zones as a member of a Red Cross party and visited base and field hospitals. Returning to Washington in early 1918 she joined the Red Cross as a Grey Lady and worked seven days a week at Walter Reed Hospital. This was the real turning point for her: henceforth she exchanged the role of socialite for that of patriot dedicated to aiding veterans. Her husband enlisted briefly in the field artillery while retaining his seat in Congress; she continued at Walter Reed as the soldiers' "angel of mercy," working there until 1922. After the war John Rogers held to his major interest in foreign affairs but also began to respond to pressures on Congress for aid to World War I veterans. He joined the American Legion as a charter member, and Edith Rogers joined the auxiliary. In 1922 President Warren G. Harding appointed her a dollar-a-year inspector of veterans' hospitals; Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover later renewed the appointment. With her travels throughout the country she began to be recognized as an authority on the adequacy of medical service to veterans. Edith Rogers made her first foray into the politics of the Fifth Congressional District in 1924 when she served as a Coolidge presidential elector. She became secretary of the electors, the first woman to make the official delivery of the vote. In 1924 John Jacob Rogers, at the peak of his career, fell ill with Hodgkin's disease; he died in March 1925. Ex-servicemen, along with family, businessmen, and leading Republicans in Lowell and elsewhere joined in urging Edith Nourse Rogers (she unfailingly used this name after 1925) to run for her husband's seat. At first expressing reticence, she then agreed, saying she thought her husband would wish her to carry out his policies. But she would not cam-

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Rogers paign, she said, as that would not be dignified. Rogers saw her candidacy as an extension of her profession, transferring her work for veterans to the congressional arena. Concern over electing a woman was neutralized in press coverage by arguing that "the office seeks the woman" and by stating that Edith Nourse Rogers was not a suffragist. It was never revealed that both she and her husband had earlier been ardent advocates of suffrage. Rogers won the June primary by 84 percent against two opponents in an exceedingly low turnout, and went on to win the special June 30 election by 72 percent, the first of her eighteen election successes. Like her husband, she eventually captured the entire district, and withstood threats from State House Democrats in Boston who sought to "carve up" this Republican area as the Commonwealth gained Democratic strength while losing three congressional seats in reapportionment. At first she eliminated opposition in her own party and from the early 1940s on had no primary contests. In Democratic landslides during the New Deal, split-ticket voting gave her victories with more than 60 percent of the votes. Also from 1942 on, she carried every city and town, gaining 72 to 100 percent of the total vote. In three campaigns she had no Democratic opponent. Rogers became a tenacious legislator. Her first committee assignments included World War Veterans' Legislation. Subsequently she also had sixteen years on the Civil Service Committee and fourteen on Foreign Affairs. When reorganization in the Eightieth Congress restricted each member to one major committee (1947), she stayed on Veterans' Affairs as the ranking member. Backing for her from veterans' organizations compelled the Republicans to recognize her seniority and give her the committee chairmanship. The "welfare of veterans" was, according to Rogers, her "greatest interest in life." Veterans' legislation was not an issue—everyone was for it. Yet the two major organizations, the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, with their auxiliaries, furnished formidable pressures for greater and greater benefits and climbed in membership from 885,000 in the mid-1920s to more than 5,000,000 in the mid-1950s. Rogers carried many of their bills and fought their skirmishes on the floor. When she was chairman, 77 to 80 percent of her bills dealt with veterans, though few of these were ever enacted. During her career she introduced 1,242 bills and slightly over half, 629, dealt with veterans' and armed services' matters. Notably, she was the author of the bill to establish the Women's Army Corps and was one of the major drafters of the G.I.

Bill of Rights. She also sponsored the Korean Veterans Benefits bill and a permanent Nurse Corps in the Veterans Administration, and easily won legislation to support the development of prosthetic appliances and appropriations for automobiles for amputees. In foreign policy, another major interest, Rogers was sometimes ahead of public opinion but often merely reflected it. In 1933 she was one of the first to speak in the House against Hitler's treatment of the Jews. Before World War II she favored the fortification of Guam. Later, she supported both the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1954, however, she opposed a proposal by then Vice President Richard Nixon to send troops to Indochina, contending that this was not the arena in which to strike at communism. Rogers's relationship with her constituency was intensely personal. She openly courted Democrats; one of her last appointments was of a Democrat to a postmastership. Campaigning the year round, she maintained a well-staffed district office, providing services paid for out of her income from inheritances. Rogers diligently aided the textile and leather industries in her district, opposing foreign competition, attacking wage differentials between north and south, and authorizing expansion of State Department trade groups. She also continually sought and obtained funds for improvement and flood control for the Merrimack River Basin. Unflagging in her efforts to get defense contracts for her district, after World War II she tried for an atomic energy plant and for contracts to do nuclear research. Rogers is credited with having brought to Massachusetts more than a billion dollars of civil and military manufacturing contracts. A "tearing beauty" in her youth, in old age a "mother figure," Rogers has been described as vivacious, charming, and hard-working, a woman who decorated herself daily with an orchid or gardenia. At times, however, she could be a "hair shirt," capable of conducting her own filibuster to force the Republican leadership to action. In the House, she generally voted with the Republican majority. Her party unity score varied (in the early 1950s from 60 to 92 percent), but it was generally above 80 percent. After 1954, however, her attendance in the House became less frequent and by 1960 her unity vote had dropped to a low of 33 percent. Rogers had occupied more floor time and filled more space in the Congressional Record as the years wore on. In the twenties she was concerned primarily with private and New England measures and with some national interest measures, in the thirties, forties, and early

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Rogers

fifties with veterans' legislation, defense, and foreign affairs. In the late 1950s she focused again on private, New England, and national interest bills, giving less attention to substantive questions and more to procedural and courtesy matters. At times Rogers was enlightened in her ideas about women, yet she also supported stereotypical views. Immediately upon her election she said that she hoped everybody would "forget as soon as possible" that she was a woman. Asked in 1928 about women and politics she responded that the home and children should come first, noting that if she had children she would not be able to handle her political obligations. In Congress she fought child labor, and worked for a forty-eight-hour week for women and for equal pay for equal work. While praising "gracious charm and simplicity" as feminine virtues, in speeches she extolled the professional and political accomplishments of achieving women of the past and spoke optimistically about the position of women in her day. Rogers's many honors came primarily as a result of her accomplishments for veterans. She received medals, awards, citations, certificates of merit, and honorary life memberships. In 1950 the American Legion gave her the Distinguished Service Medal, and almost every veterans' organization as well as a number of foreign governments followed with some kind of recognition. A half dozen colleges and universities awarded her honorary degrees and a public school in Lowell, the parade grounds at Fort Devens in Ayer, Mass., the WAC museum in Alabama, and the Bedford (Mass.) Veterans Hospital were given her name. She did not remarry. Scandal threatened her in 1949 at the age of sixty-seven when she was named in a contested divorce and maintenance suit brought by the wife of one of her longtime staff members, naval Captain Harold A. Latta Lawrence. Several months later, however, the district court judge ordered all reference to Rogers removed from the record. Lawrence continued to manage her campaigns, became coexecutor of her estate, and inherited her house in Saco. The Congressional Record furnishes some evidence of a slowing of Rogers's mental and physical powers for several years before her death. She seems to have become embittered with the House Republican leadership and apparently developed a sense of persecution, but neither the press nor her office staff acknowledged the effects of her advancing age. In her nineteenth election campaign and in her eightieth year, she appeared politically invincible. But seriously failing health led to hospitalization

in Boston (under the assumed name of Edith White to avoid jeopardizing her c a m p a i g n ) . Suffering a heart attack, she died in Boston three days before the primary election. T h e almost fifty-year political hegemony of the Rogerses was concluded. Her legacy remains. [The Rogers Papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, contain records from the files of her years in office: letters, voting records, speeches, news releases, campaign materials, scrapbooks, news clippings, citations and awards, photographs, and memorial addresses delivered in Congress in 1961. A handwritten, undated genealogy of the Nourse (or Nurse) family and Mabel Hill's typewritten romantic but unreliable biography of Rogers and her husband through the 1920s were in the collection of the late Captain Harold A. Latta Lawrence, Saco. The evaluation of Edith Nourse Rogers's congressional career is derived from an analysis of the Congressional Record, 63d Cong., 1913, through the 87th Cong., 1961, and reports of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, 79th through 86th Cong. Her voting record in Congress covering party unity is included in the Congressional Quart. Almanac, vol. I ( 1 9 4 5 ) , and subsequent volumes. The files of the Boston Globe and Boston Herald-American and microfilm of the Lowell Sun and the Lowell Courier-Citizen, the N.Y. Times, and the Wash. Post also provided material on her career. General accounts of Edith Nourse and John Jacob Rogers appear in Congressional Directory for the 63d Cong., 1913, through the 86th Cong., 2d sess., 1960; Biog. Directory of the Am. Congress, 1774-1961 ( 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. 1536, 1537; Current Biog., 1942; and Hope Chamberlain, A Minority of Members: Women in the U.S. Congress ( 1 9 7 3 ) . For background on Saco and the Nourses see Roy P. Fairfield, Sands, Spindles and Steeples: A History of Saco, Maine ( 1 9 5 6 ) . The best recent history of Lowell is Arthur L. Eno, Jr., ed., Cotton Was King: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts ( 1 9 7 6 ) . Verification of vital statistics for Rogers, her husband, and other members of her family come from the baptismal records of the Trinity Episcopal Church, Saco; city offices in Lowell, Boston, and Washington, D.C.; secretaries' reports of the classes of 1870 and 1904, Harvard College; and the 1880 U.S. Census. Obituaries of Edith Nourse Rogers appeared in both the N.Y. Times and the Wash. Post, Sept. 11, 1960. Information was provided by James Thomas Dorris and John Cronin of the Boston Herald-American; Thomas Winship and Robert Healy of the Boston Globe; Edward Harley, Special Collections, Lowell City Library; Janet Fenderson; John McCormack; Henry Cabot Lodge; Bradford Morse; Helen Nesmith, whose scrapbook adds color to her friend's career; Rogers's niece by marriage, Betty Flather; Roy Slack; and Judith Sessions and Patricia Donegan of the Mount Vernon College Library. Mary Clayton Crozier conducted the research in Boston, Cambridge, Saco-Biddeford, and Lowell, and Daniel Danik researched the Congressional Record, newspapers, and Massachusetts election statistics.]

589

VICTORIA

SCHUCK

Rogers

Rogers R O G E R S , Mother Mary Joseph (Mary Josephine), Oct. 27, 1 8 8 2 - O c t . 9, 1955. Founder, religious order. Mary Josephine Rogers, who founded the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, was born in Roxbury, Mass., the fourth of eight children and first of three daughters of Abraham and Mary Josephine (Plummer) Rogers. Her father's parents had emigrated from Ireland in the 1820s; her mother was of English and Irish descent. Both parents were born in Massachusetts. Mary Josephine Rogers attended public school in Jamaica Plain, Mass., and graduated from West Roxbury High School. She went on to Smith College, where she completed her A.B. in June 1905. She later remarked that if she had not attended Smith, she would not have founded a missionary congregation. During her college years she became aware of the enthusiastic Protestant mission study groups on campus, and when she returned in 1906 as an assistant in zoology, she was asked to promote some kind of religious organization for Catholic undergraduates. Because she felt unprepared to lead a Bible study group, as was first suggested, Rogers formed a mission study class, destined eventually to become the Smith Newman Club. Seeking guidance for her work as faculty adviser, she consulted Rev. James Anthony Walsh, director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, in Boston; in him she found a lifelong coworker and friend. She began immediately to assist Walsh in his promotion of mission activity and by 1908 was willing to resign her position at Smith and return to Boston so that she could give more time to their work. She enrolled that year in Boston Normal School, received a teacher's diploma in 1909, and taught in Boston for the next three years, while helping Walsh with the editing of his mission magazine, Field Afar. In 1912 Walsh opened Maryknoll, a seminary near Ossining, N.Y., to prepare American priests for service in mission areas. Moving to Maryknoll in September 1912, Rogers soon became the recognized leader of a group of women who had come there to assist Walsh in his new endeavor. Gradually other women joined them and the desire to become a religious community developed. After a difficult search for a community that could spare sisters to provide the required ascetical training for the new group, members of the Sisters Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary came to Maryknoll from Scranton, Pa., in June 1914 to begin this work. By 1916, however, Walsh, Rogers, and the other sisters concluded that the simpler,

more flexible Rule of St. Dominic would be more compatible with missionary life. Maryknoll's petitions to Rome for canonical status as an official religious congregation began in July 1916. In April 1917 a Dominican sister from Sinsinawa, Wis., came to teach the Maryknoll sisters Dominican spirituality. Their first and second requests to Rome for official recognition were refused because the sisters lacked the necessary financial independence and autonomy of government. Finally, on Feb. 14, 1920, the decree erecting a new religious institute, the Foreign Mission Sisters of St. Dominic, arrived and the sisters' official period of novitiate began. In 1921 the first group of twenty-one made their vows, and during that year six sisters went to China. Since 1920 Maryknoll women had been at work among the Japanese in California and in Seattle. The first general chapter of the new order met in 1925, and elected Mary Josephine Rogers, now Mother Mary Joseph, as superior general. T h e close cooperation between the priests and the sisters of Maryknoll continued. Walsh's advice still influenced the sisters, but Mother Mary Joseph's views also influenced the priests, so a fraternal rather than a paternal relationship developed. On a visit to the Far East, Mother Mary Joseph discovered that the priests' health suffered from bad nutrition, the result in part of their ignorance about buying and preparing food; she subsequently designed a course on the subject for the seminarians. She also prepared a manual of courtesy for the priests and seminarians, concerned that, without domestic pressure from women, the men might develop careless manners that could offend the Chinese. As a religious superior, Mother Mary Joseph insisted that the best service of God and man required the best possible use of human talents and energies within a framework of religious devotion. The sacrificial element, always essential to religious consecration, would, she felt, come naturally from the difficult work that the sisters had chosen rather than from a proliferation of penitential exercises. She never "tried" sisters who were in training to evaluate their spiritual progress, believing that their responses to the challenges of their lives would provide proof enough. Emphasizing the value of prayer and meditation, Mother Mary Joseph insisted that every Maryknoll sister should be a contemplative in action. In 1933, without any precedent for such an arrangement among active communities of religious women, she established a contemplative branch, a cloistered Maryknoll to support the work of the congregation through constant prayer.

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As the leader of a mission order, Mother Mary Joseph emphasized the duty of service and the necessity of professional preparation. While deeply concerned with the worship of God, and with the preservation of the faith, she saw service of God especially in the service of human beings, an unusual point of view in the preVatican II era. Under Mother Rogers's leadership, Maryknoll sisters worked to enable indigenous women in developing areas to serve their own people. To this end, ten independent religious sisterhoods were founded with Maryknoll help. Although five of these had to be disbanded when the Communist regime took over in China, the remainder were still active in the 1970s. Women from mission areas who wished to join Maryknoll were also welcomed into the order, as were members of the Chinese congregations who succeeded in escaping from mainland China. Mother Mary Joseph also insisted that all Maryknoll sisters, from the United States and abroad, be fully qualified for their work. In an era when many sisters taught or provided other services without professional preparation, Maryknoll sisters did not. Although the congregation did not devote itself to any one specific form of service, most sisters taught, nursed, or engaged in some form of social service. A sister's profession was determined by the needs of the people in her area and by her own aptitudes, previous training, and tastes. At first most Maryknoll sisters went to the Orient, but over the years the order increasingly diversified its mission areas, going to Africa, Micronesia, the Middle East, and eight Latin American countries. The life and work of Mother Mary Joseph Rogers resulted in the service of more than 1,100 American women in developing areas, and more than 3 0 0 working with cultural minorities in the United States. In addition, more than 170 women had come to the congregation from mission areas. Mother Mary Joseph was reelected as superior general at every chapter, until, in 1947, she declined reelection because she knew that the dispensation from Rome necessary for the continuance of the same leadership after so long a time would not be granted. Those who knew her best remark that Mother Mary Joseph was not "perfect" in the rigid tradition, so much as she was "great" in the possession of a rare breadth of vision, warmth of heart, and a faith strong in its response to God and to the challenge of events. A large woman, with striking eyes, she had an intense interest in contemporary affairs, a magnetic personality, and a keen sense of humor. As a spiritual leader, her central emphasis was on loving human relationships as

both a means and a consequence of the establishment of a deep relationship with God. Until her death from peritonitis at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City, Mother Mary Joseph remained a vital and constructive influence in the congregation she founded. [Nearly all the important original sources, including extensive diaries, are available in the Archives of the Maryknoll Sisters' Motherhouse, Maryknoll, N.Y. Sister Jeanne Marie Lyons, Maryknoll's First Lady (1964), is a popularly written but thoroughly researched biography. Sister Camilla Kennedy is preparing a doctoral dissertation on the spirituality of Mother Mary Joseph for the St. Louis Univ. Dept. of Theology. See also Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. Interviews with Mother Mary Coleman, former superior general of the Maryknoll Sisters, with Sister Jeanne Marie Lyons, and with Mother Mary Joseph's niece, Elizabeth Novak Schmick, supplemented documentary sources, as did material from Sister Barbara Hendricks, president of the order. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 10, 1955. Photographs are available at the Maryknoll Motherhouse.] JOAN

BLAND,

S.N.D.

ROHDE, Ruth Bryan Owen, Oct. 2, 1 8 8 5 - J u l y 2 6 , 1 9 5 4 . Congresswoman, diplomat, lecturer. Ruth Bryan was born in Jacksonville, 111., eldest of three children (two daughters and a son) of Mary Elizabeth (Baird) and William Jennings Bryan. Her father's forebears, Irish and English, had been long settled in Virginia before migrating to the Illinois frontier, where her grandfather, Silas L. Bryan, was a circuit judge and legislator. On the maternal side, Scottish and English forebears left colonial New England for upper New York state and later for Illinois. Mary Baird Bryan was a remarkable woman who left a strong imprint on her daughter's character. College-educated, she studied law after her marriage and was admitted to the Nebraska bar in 1888. Far abler than her husband in intellect and judgment, she enabled him to make the most of his political talents. Their eldest daughter's attributes reflect a union of her parents' qualities. From her father came an extraordinary power of expression, facility in personal relations, courage, and a handsome presence; from her mother, a constructive intelligence, ambition, and ceaseless drive. When Ruth was two, her parents left Jacksonville for Lincoln, Neb. She was five when Bryan was elected to the first of two terms in Congress. She often accompanied her mother to the House gallery, and occasionally sat beside her father on the House floor, listening with "awed delight" to his brilliant performance in the tariff debates. After the historic "cross of gold" speech

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Rohde stampeded the Democratic National Convention into nominating Bryan for the presidency in 1896, the candidate's tightly knit family participated in his precedent-setting campaign of nationwide travel. Appealing directly to the voters, Bryan was accompanied by his wife, who also handled the correspondence, and frequently by his children as well; eleven-year-old Ruth acknowledged the letters from admirers who had named children for her father. Much later, she served as her father's secretary and campaign manager on his third and last try for the presidency in 1908. From childhood, therefore, Ruth Bryan had an insider's view of politics, acquiring both political knowledge and the capacity to absorb defeat as well as victory with composure and grace. After intermittent education in the Lincoln public schools, she entered Monticello Female Academy (later Monticello College) in Godfrey, 111., in 1899. Two years later she enrolled at the University of Nebraska, but cut her academic career short by marrying an artist, William Homer Leavitt, on Oct. 3, 1903. Two children were born, Ruth in 1904 and John Baird in 1905, before the marriage ended in divorce in 1909. While studying voice in Germany in 1909, she met Reginald Altham Owen, officer in the Royal (British) Engineers, whom she married on May 3, 1910. The couple was stationed in Jamaica until Major Owen was recalled to England in 1913. Her second son, Reginald, was born there the same year. While Major Owen saw continuous service in the Egypt-Palestine campaigns, sustaining injuries that made him a chronic invalid, his wife served for fifteen months as secretary-treasurer of the American Woman's War Relief Fund in London, along with LOU HENRY HOOVER. In 1915 she and her two-year-old son went to Cairo, where she served for three years as an operating room nurse in a voluntary unit attached to a military hospital. At the war's end, she returned to the United States with her husband and son, and joined her parents in Coconut Grove, Fla. There Ruth Owen's fourth child, Helen Rudd, was born in 1920. At the age of thirty-five, with a husband and children to support, Ruth Owen turned to the lyceum and Chautauqua platforms as her father had done. Having inherited his oratorical gifts as well as his prestige, she enjoyed considerable success. She also participated actively in civic, cultural, and patriotic organizations in fastgrowing Miami. The newly established University of Miami named her vice chairman of the board of regents in 1925 and she later taught public speaking there ( 1 9 2 7 - 2 8 ) . Her textbook, The Elements of Public Speaking (1931), based

in part on personal experiences, is of more than passing interest. In 1926 she was drawn into politics, entering the Democratic primary in Florida's Fourth Congressional District, which comprised the coastal counties from Jacksonville to Key West. She faced formidable obstacles. In Florida, which had voted against the nineteenth amendment, prejudice against women was clamorous, and the Democratic organization opposed her candidacy. She lost, but by less than 800 votes. After Major Owen's death in December 1927, she ran again for Congress the following year, aided and encouraged by her mother. Adopting her father's campaign tactics, she traveled over her large district in an attention-getting green Ford, talking to voters and soliciting the aid of editors in every community. She won the election to the Seventy-first Congress by a wide margin to become the first congresswoman from the south. Her defeated opponent challenged her election on the grounds that her citizenship status was obscure. Under a 1907 law, she had forfeited citizenship in 1910 by marrying an alien, and had not regained it under the Cable Act until 1925. The question at issue was: whether on election day she had been a citizen for seven years as required by the Constitution. The Elections Committee of the House of Representatives, charged with the power to determine the eligibility of its members, met in December 1928 to decide the question. Acting as her own counsel, and arguing on feminist grounds, Owen brilliantly defended her eligibility and condemned both the original law and the procedural flaws in the Cable Act that had made her repatriation difficult. The dramatic impact of the well-publicized "trial" focused attention on the Cable Act, which had been enacted in 1922 in response to strong feminist demands for "independent citizenship." The ensuing corrective amendments stand as Owen's greatest legislative achievement. Although less ardent a feminist than her mother, Owen became the first congresswoman after J E A N N E T T E RANKIN to concentrate on feminist issues. She introduced and vigorously supported legislation to create a cabinet-level Department of Home and Child, and fought for appropriations to send delegates to international conferences on health and child welfare. Mindful of her constituents, she secured a law to protect citrus growers, and initiated legislation to set aside the Everglades Swamp as a national park. Despite her father's lifelong antitariff position, Owen, prudently responding to her district's protectionist views, voted for the SmootHawley Tariff (1929).

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Owen's political and religious views departed from those of her parents, but the supportive family ties were never broken. The prestige of the family name lingered on to color her congressional career. A place was created for her on the Foreign Affairs Committee, making her the first woman to serve on a major congressional committee. Reelected in 1930, when she ran for a third term two years later she fell victim to antiprohibition sentiment. Although she had proposed a referendum on the issue, she was unable to counter her opponent's attacks on her as the daughter of the great "dry crusader." Abiding by the wishes of her district, she voted for repeal of the eighteenth amendment in the lame duck session of the Seventy-second Congress. In April 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Owen envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Denmark, making her the first American woman to hold a major diplomatic post. Her ministerial tasks were to improve trade relations, damaged by the impact of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and to create a fresh image of the United States. Both tasks were well suited to her talents. Taking with her three of her children and three grandchildren, she attracted favorable press attention as representing the fulfillment of family life. She learned Danish, entertained graciously, and traveled extensively, recording an official trip to Greenland in Leaves From a Greenland Diary (1935). Returning to the United States on home leave, on July 11, 1936, she married Borge Rohde, Captain of the King's Guard and Gentleman in Waiting at the Court of King Christian X, at the Hyde Park home of Franklin and E L E A N O R ROOSEVELT. It was her stated intention to retain her American citizenship and return to Denmark as minister, but marriage to a Dane automatically made her a Danish citizen. Unwittingly possessed of dual citizenship, she could no longer serve in her ministerial capacity, and she resigned her post. The Rohdes lived thereafter in the United States. Ruth Rohde returned to the lecture platform, served on numerous boards and commissions, and wrote several books, including Look Forward, Warrior (1942), a forcefully written proposal for international cooperation. President Roosevelt named her special assistant to the State Department to aid in drafting the United Nations Charter, and in 1949 President Harry S Truman appointed her an alternate delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. From 1948 onward she chaired the executive committee of the Speakers' Research Committee of the United Nations. The recipient of many awards and several

honorary degrees, Ruth Rohde traveled to Denmark in 1954 to acknowledge the Order of Merit conferred on her by King Frederick IX for her contribution to Danish-American friendship. She died in Copenhagen of a heart attack, and her ashes were buried there. To the end of her life Ruth Rohde remained a majestically handsome woman, famous as a hostess who combined political acumen with personal grace, and for her ceaseless activity in civic and international causes. Her career conveyed a message on the political status of women in a transitional period. She served admirably as a vivid and courageous trailbreaker to whom overcoming obstacles—often of her own making —appeared effortless. For the same reason she could not well serve as a model. [Ruth Bryan Owen Rohde also wrote travel books and retellings of Scandinavian folk tales, including Denmark Caravan (1936), The Castle in the Silver Wood and Other Scandinavian Fairy Tales (1939), Picture Tales from Scandinavia (1939), and Caribbean Caravel (1949). The principal source for the social and political background of her early life is the candid memoir of her parents, Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan: By Himself and His Wife Mary Baird Bryan (1925). See also Paolo Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, I, Political Evangelist, 1860-1908 (1964); Current Biog., 1944; and Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. For Rohde's congressional career see Biog. Directory of the Am. Congress (1961), Congressional Record, 71st and 72nd Congresses, and Hope Chamberlin, A Minority of Members: Women in the U.S. Congress (1973). On the contested election case see Committee Print, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Elections, no. 1, Jan. 17, 1930: "Arguments and Hearings in the Contested Election Case of William C. Lawson v. Ruth Bryan Owen" (1930). For background on the Cable Act and a discussion of her case see J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (1973), pp. 63-69, 235-37. The Woman's Journal has good coverage of the Cable Act and its consequences in 1922-23; see The Woman Citizen for commentary on the 192829 hearing. Among the many press articles about Rohde, the most useful are C. Lowe, "Our First Woman Diplomat," Pictorial Rev., Feb. 1934; "Ruth Bryan Owen: First Woman Diplomat," Christian Century, April 26, 1933; "Mr. Roosevelt's New Deal for Women," Literary Digest, April 15, 1933; "Lady Lame Duck's Farewell," Literary Digest, Feb. 25, 1933. A biobibliography prepared by Libby Atwood proved useful in research for this article. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, July 27, 1954, and Newsweek, Aug. 9, 1954.] LOUISE M . YOUNG

ROMBAUER, Irma Louise von Starkloff, Oct. 30, 1877-Oct. 14, 1962. Food writer.

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Rombauer cookbook in the mid-twentieth century was born Irma von Starkloff in St. Louis, Mo. She was the younger of two daughters of Hugo Maximilian and Clara (Kuhlman) von Starkloff; her father also had two sons by an earlier marriage. Hugo von Starkloff, a physician and surgeon, was descended from a very old Stuttgart family; he had come to the United States in the 1850s. Her mother also emigrated from Germany to St. Louis and in 1873 helped SUSAN B L O W to start the first public school kindergarten in the United States. When Irma was twelve her father was appointed United States consul in Bremen, Germany. She was educated at boarding schools in Switzerland, and learned to speak German and French fluently, an asset that in later life enabled her to do food research in three languages. After years of schooling and traveling through Europe, she returned to St. Louis in 1894 and for a time attended the school of fine arts at Washington University. She had become, in every sense, the young lady of the period. She danced well, knew music, did stitchery, and was versed in various other arts—not, however, the art of cookery. On Oct. 14, 1899, Irma von Starkloff married a young lawyer named Edgar Roderick Rombauer. She knew absolutely nothing about domestic duties, so her husband, an avid camper and enthusiastic camp cook, coached her in the kitchen. Like other celebrities in the food world, she learned to cook through necessity rather than through choice. But her interest grew, and as the family became more successful and she found herself entertaining more often, she acquired greater confidence in cooking and learned to shop for the best the markets could offer. In a few years she had established a reputation as a delightful hostess who had a way with food. Her husband, who was active in politics as a reformer and served briefly as speaker of the St. Louis House of Delegates and for many years as president of the city's Urban League, died in February 1930. By this time Rombauer's daughter, Marion (1903-1976), and son, Edgar (b. 1907), were married and had set up their own households. They asked her to write a little cookbook of the recipes they had grown up with. This she did, drawing on an earlier compilation gathered for a Unitarian church-sponsored cooking course she had given in the 1920s, and adding bits of her sage advice and a good measure of her wit. The book of 500 recipes, privately printed and published in 1931, was called Joy of Cooking. It sold some 3,000 copies. Rombauer then rewrote and enlarged it, changing the format of her recipes to the step-by-step

method that became her permanent style, and began to look for a publisher. By chance Irma Rombauer met the president of the Bobbs-Merrill publishing firm, who agreed to look over her book. This proved a momentous step for both publisher and author. The first Bobbs-Merrill edition of The Joy of Cooking was published in 1936. It did not become a best seller at once, although it sold well initially and continued to sell. In 1943 Rombauer revised the book, incorporating in it Streamlined Cooking, which she had published in 1939. Suddenly it caught on, and the rest is history. The Joy of Cooking set sales records that only F A N N I E F A R M E R ' S Boston Cooking-School Cook Book had broken in previous years. It also was one of the first cookbooks to offer a money-back guarantee. During the next thirty years The Joy of Cooking received many encomiums and became a part of almost every American home. It has also had a few dissenters, as does any classic volume: there are those who claim they cannot follow Fannie Farmer or Julia Child. The book went through a third revision, published in 1952, with Marion Rombauer Becker named for the first time as coauthor. In later years Rombauer turned over much of the responsibility for the book to her daughter, who had assisted with the work from the beginning. She herself was always ready to answer queries, however, and she replied to fan letters in longhand. She also continued to travel and remained active in a variety of civic and cultural organizations. She was a woman of versatile interests and always stimulating company, possessed of both a charming sense of humor and a modest but knowing approach to living. Rombauer's other two books, Streamlined Cooking and Cook Book for Boys and Girls (1946), were eclipsed by the overwhelming popularity of The Joy of Cooking, which set a standard for cookbooks in an age when there was great dissension among food writers. Even the most devoted followers of European or Oriental cooking are apt to have a copy on their shelves to use for its information if not for its recipes. (Rombauer herself was a fan of Chinese cooking and discussed the possibility of applying Chinese techniques to everyday practices in American kitchens, an idea that later came into fashion.) The book covers a tremendous amount of ground, and can usually be depended on to yield a recipe for practically anything in the contemporary kitchen. Its influence has been vast, and if it has not created a distinctive style of cooking or set a trend, it never touched any cook it did not enrich. Irma Rombauer died in St. Louis in 1962 of

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an acute heart attack, having suffered a stroke eight years earlier. Revisions of The Joy of Cooking continued under the supervision of her daughter. Marion Becker carried on the work with dedication, although she did prepare one edition that broke away from many of the principles her mother had established; it included far too many French and Italian recipes, and robbed the book of some of the delicious Rombauer humor and personality. Irma Rombauer is one of the great women of American cookery and deserves to be known in her original state of joy. [Further editions of The Joy of Cooking appeared under Marion Rombauer Becker's direction in 1963 and 1975. Her son, Ethan Becker, is preparing a new edition. The fullest account of Rombauer's life is contained in Little Acorn: The Story Behind the Joy of Cooking, 1931-1966 ( 1 9 6 6 ) , which is available from the Bobbs-Merrill Co. Other sources of information about Rombauer and her book include Harry B. Wilson, "St. Louis Queen of Cookbooks," Coronet, Oct. 1950; Jane Nickerson, "They Wanted to Cook Like Mother," N.Y. Times Book Rev., Aug. 12, 1951; an entry in Current Biog., 1953; and obituaries in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 17, 1962, and Time, Oct. 26, 1962; death record from Mo. Dept. of Health. Assistance in the research for this article was provided by a biobibliography prepared by Kathleen McDonough.] JAMES

BEARD

ROOSEVELT, Anna Eleanor, Oct. 11, 1884Nov. 7, 1962. Social reformer. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City, the first child of Elliott and Anna (Hall) Roosevelt. Descended on both sides from distinguished colonial families active in commerce, banking, and politics, Eleanor seemed destined to enjoy all the benefits of class and privilege. By the time she was ten, both her parents had died, as had a younger brother, leaving Eleanor and her second brother, Hall, as the only survivors. From that point forward, Eleanor Roosevelt's life was characterized by paradox. A woman of remarkable self-control, she yet reached out to touch the world in profoundly emotional ways. Although committed to the traditional idea of women as primarily responsible to husband and family, she personified the strength of the independent woman. Both by fate and by will, she became the most important public woman of the twentieth century. Eleanor Roosevelt remembered herself as "a solemn child, without beauty. I seemed like a little old woman entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth." She experienced emotional rejection early: her mother

called her "granny" and, at least in Eleanor's memory, warmly embraced her son while being only "kindly and indifferent" to her little girl. From most of her family young Eleanor received the message that she was "very plain," almost ugly, and certainly "old-fashioned." When her parents died, she went to live with her maternal grandmother, who was equally without warmth. As a cousin later remarked: "It was the grimmest childhood I had ever known. Who did she have? Nobody." In fact, she had one person—her father. "He was the one great love of my life as a child," she later wrote, "and . . . like many children, I have lived a dream life with him." Described by his friends as "charming, impetuous . . . generous, [and] friendly," Elliott Roosevelt developed with Eleanor an intimacy that seemed almost magical. "As soon as I could talk," she recalled, "I went into his dressing room every morning and chattered to him . . . I even danced with him." She dreamed of the time when she and her father "would have a life of our own together." But Elliott Roosevelt's capacity for ebullient play and love also contained the seeds of selfdestruction. He was never able to provide stability for himself and his family, and his emotional imbalance caused his banishment from the household. He nourished the relationship with Eleanor through letters to "father's own little Nell," writing of "the wonderful long rides" that he wanted them to enjoy together. But when his long-awaited visits occurred, they often ended in disaster, as when he left Eleanor with the doorman at his club, promising to return but going off on a drunken spree. The pain of betrayal was exceeded only by a depth of love for the man who she believed to be "the only person who really cared." The emotional void caused by her father's death persisted until, at the age of fifteen, she enrolled at Allenswood, a girls' school outside of London presided over by Marie Souvestre. The daughter of the French philosopher and radical Emil Souvestre, she passionately embraced unpopular causes, staunchly defending Dreyfus in France and the cause of the Boers in South Africa. Souvestre provided for Eleanor a deeply needed emotional bond, confiding in her as they toured the continent together, and expressing the affection that made it possible for the younger woman to flower. Roosevelt remembered the years at Allenswood as "the happiest years" of her life: "Whatever I have become since had its seeds in those three years of contact with a liberal mind and strong personality." Souvestre's imprint was not lost when Eleanor Roosevelt returned to New York City at seventeen

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Roosevelt to come out in society. In the rush of parties and dances, she kept her eye 011 the more serious world of ideas and social service. She plunged into settlement house work and at eighteen joined the National Consumers' League, headed by F L O R E N C E K E L L E Y . The League was committed to securing health and safety for workers, especially women, and as Roosevelt visited factories and sweatshops, she developed a lifelong commitment to helping the poor. She also joined the Junior League and taught calisthenics and dancing at the Rivington Street Settlement House. Much of Eleanor Roosevelt's subsequent political activism can be traced to this early involvement in social reform. At the same time, Eleanor Roosevelt was secretly planning to marry her cousin Franklin Roosevelt. Like Elliott Roosevelt, his godfather, Franklin was spontaneous, warm, and gregarious. But Franklin Roosevelt also possessed good sense and singleness of purpose. Eleanor Roosevelt saw in him the spark of life that she remembered from her father; he, in turn, saw in her the discipline that would curb his own instincts toward excess. After their marriage on March 17, 1905, the young Roosevelts settled in New York City while Franklin finished his law studies at Columbia University. For the next fifteen years Eleanor Roosevelt's public activities gave way to other concerns. Sara Roosevelt, Franklin's mother, objected to her work at the settlement house because she might bring home diseases. The Roosevelts' first child, Anna, was born within a year ( 1 9 0 6 ) , James the next year, and two years later Franklin. Eleanor Roosevelt cherished her children, but it was not a happy time. Her motherin-law dominated the household, and she came to feel that "Franklin's children were more my mother-in-law's children than they were mine." But she did not rebel. She feared hurting her husband and losing his affection, and she experienced a profound sense of inadequacy about her abilities as a wife and mother that continued throughout her life. The death of her third child, seven months after his birth, only reinforced her pain and unhappiness. Three additional children were born in the next six y e a r s Elliott in 1910, Franklin Jr. in 1914, and John in 1916. But motherhood could not be fulfilling in a household ruled by a mother-in-law who told the children they were hers: "Your mother only bore you." Between 1910 and the beginning of World War I, Eleanor Roosevelt's activities revolved increasingly around her husband's growing political career. Elected as the Democratic assemblyman from Dutchess County, N.Y., in 1910, Franklin Roosevelt rapidly became a

leader of insurgent anti-Tammany forces in Albany and Eleanor Roosevelt found herself organizing frequent social-political gatherings. In 1913 he was appointed assistant secretary of the navy and she became expert at hosting multiple social events while managing a large household and moving everyone to Campobello in New Brunswick during the summer, then to Hyde Park, and back to Washington. The entry of the United States into World War I in 1917 provided Eleanor Roosevelt, as her biographer Joseph Lash has noted, with "a reason acceptable to her conscience to free herself of the social duties that she hated, to concentrate less on her household, and plunge into work that fitted her aptitude." She rose at 5:00 A.M. to coordinate activities at Washington's Union Station canteen for soldiers on their way to training camps, took charge of Red Cross activities, supervised the knitting rooms at the navy department, and spoke at patriotic rallies. Her interest in social welfare led to her drive to improve conditions at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill, while her sensitivity to suffering came forth in the visits she paid to wounded soldiers. "[My son] always loved to see you come in," one mother wrote. "You always brought a ray of sunshine." After Franklin Roosevelt's unsuccessful campaign for the vice presidency in 1920, the Roosevelts returned to New York where Eleanor became active in the League of Women Voters. At the time of her marriage, she had opposed suffrage, thinking it inconsistent with women's proper role; now she coordinated the League's legislative program, drafted laws providing equal representation for men and women, and worked with Esther L a p e and Elizabeth Read on the League's lobbying activities. In 1922 she joined the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL)—then viewed as "left-leaning"—and found there friends as well as political allies. In addition to working for maximum hour and minimum wage laws for women, she helped raise funds for W T U L headquarters in New York City and developed warm ties to its leaders, including R O S E S C H N E I D E R M A N and M A U D S W A R T Z , both immigrants. When her husband was paralyzed by polio in 1921, Eleanor Roosevelt's public life expanded still further as she became his personal representative in the political arena. With the aid of Louis Howe, Franklin Roosevelt's political mentor who had become her own close friend, she first mobilized Dutchess County women, then moved on to the state Democratic party, organizing all but five counties by 1924. "Organization," she noted, "is something to which [the men] are always ready to take off their

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hats." No one did the job better. Leading a delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1924, she fought for equal pay legislation, the child labor amendment, and other planks endorsed by women reformers. By 1928, Eleanor Roosevelt had become a political leader in her own right. Once just a political wife, she gradually extended that role into a vehicle for asserting her own personality and goals. She headed up the national women's campaign for the Democratic party in 1928, making sure that the party appealed to independent voters, to minorities, and .to women. After Franklin Roosevelt's election as governor of New York, she was instrumental in securing FRANCES PERKINS'S appointment as the state's industrial commissioner. She dictated as many as a hundred letters a day, spoke to countless groups, and acted as an advocate of social reform and women's issues. Eleanor Roosevelt's talent for combining partisan political activity with devotion to social welfare causes made her the center of an ever-growing female reform network. Her associates included Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, former suffragists and Democratic party loyalists; M A R Y DEWSON, who was president of the New York Consumers' League from 1925 to 1931; and M A R Y DREIER of the WTUL. She walked on picket lines with Rose Schneiderman, edited the Women's Democratic News, and advised the League of Women Voters on political tactics. Not only did her political sophistication grow, but she also learned to uphold her beliefs even if she caused "disagreement or unpleasant feelings." By standing up for women in politics, she provided a model for others to follow. During the 1932 campaign which led to her husband's election to the presidency, Eleanor Roosevelt coordinated the activities of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, working with Mary Dewson to mobilize thousands of women precinct workers. After the election, Dewson took over direction of the Women's Division. She corresponded daily with Eleanor Roosevelt both about appointing women to office and about securing action on issues that would appeal to minorities, women, and such professional groups as educators and social workers. Together they brought to Washington an unprecedented number of dynamic women activists, including E L L E N WOODWARD, Hilda Worthington Smith, and Florence Kerr, MARY ANDERSON, director of the Women's Bureau, recalled that women government officials had formerly dined together in a small university club. "Now," she said, "there are so many of them that we need a hall." Eleanor Roosevelt also provided a national

forum for transmitting the views and concerns of these women. At regular press conferences for women reporters, she introduced M A R Y MCLEOD B E T H U N E and other women leaders to talk about their work with the administration. These sessions provided new status and prestige for the female press corps; they also underlined the importance to Eleanor Roosevelt of women's issues and created a community of women reporters and government workers. Eleanor Roosevelt's own political role was best seen in the 1936 reelection drive when she used the educational approach developed by the Women's Division in 1932 as a primary campaign weapon. More than 60,000 women precinct workers canvassed the electorate and for the first time women received equal representation on the Democratic platform committee, an event described by the New York Times as "the biggest coup for women in years." Eleanor Roosevelt's fear that there would be no active role available to her as first lady had been unfounded. She toured the country repeatedly, surveying conditions in the coal mines, visiting relief projects, and speaking out for the human rights of the disadvantaged. Through her syndicated newspaper column "My Day," which first appeared in January 1936, and through radio programs and lectures, she reached millions and communicated to the country her deep compassion for those who suffered. At the White House, in turn, she acted as advocate of the poor and disenfranchised. "No one who ever saw Eleanor Roosevelt sit down facing her husband, and holding his eyes firmly, say to him 'Franklin, I think you should . . . or, Franklin surely you will not' . . . will ever forget the experience," Rexford Tugwell wrote. She had become, as columnist Raymond Clapper noted, a "Cabinet Minister without portfolio— the most influential woman of our times." But if Eleanor Roosevelt had achieved an unparalleled measure of political influence, it was in place of, rather than because of, an intimate personal relationship with her husband. Probably at no time after their first few years together did Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt achieve the degree of intimacy that she once described as caring so much that a look and the sound of a voice would tell all. Not only did Sara Roosevelt remain a dominant presence, but Franklin had embarked on his own interests and enthusiasms, often different from those of his wife. The dissimilarities in their temperaments became a permanent barrier. While he loved to party, she held back, telling her daughter Anna in a letter from Warm Springs, Ga., in 1934, that she "always felt like a spoil-sport and policeman here."

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Roosevelt During his years as assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt had often indulged his fun-loving instinct, causing a lasting breach in the marriage. When his wife was away, his frequent companion had been Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's social secretary. Over time, their relationship became intimate. Eleanor Roosevelt learned of the affair in 1918 and offered to divorce him. Although Franklin refused her offer, and Sara Roosevelt engineered an agreement for them to stay together if her son stopped seeing Lucy Mercer, Eleanor Roosevelt's marriage would never again achieve the magical possibility of being "for life, for death." Some observers have connected Eleanor Roosevelt's reemergence as a public figure with her profound anger at her husband's betrayal. Yet her activism predated her discovery of the Mercer affair, going back to World W a r I and ultimately to the settlement house years. The Lucy Mercer affair, like Franklin's polio, reinforced her move toward public self-assertion, but did not in itself cause a transformation. What it did cause was a gradual reallocation of emotional energy away from her husband. Throughout the 1920s a warmth of tone and feeling continued in her letters to and about him. Yet gradually their lives became more separate. She might be jealous of his secretary, Missy LeHand, or even of her daughter Anna, for the ease with which they supplied Franklin Roosevelt with fun and enjoyment. But part of her also accepted the idea that others must provide what she could not give. In a poignant piece entitled "On Being Forty-five," written for Vogue in 1930, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that by middleage a woman must recognize that the romantic dreams of youth are over. T h e forty-five-yearold woman "must keep an open and speculative mind . . . [to] be ready to go out and try new adventures, create new work for others as well as herself, and strike deep roots in some community where her presence will make a difference to the lives of others." Taking her own advice, Eleanor Roosevelt transferred her emotional attachments to others. In 1926 she had moved with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman into Val-Kill, a newly constructed cottage at Hyde Park. The event accurately symbolized her growing detachment from Franklin and his mother. Although she returned to "the big house" at Hyde Park when her husband was present, it was always with a sense of resentment and regret. She and Dickerman purchased Todhunter, a private school in New York City where Eleanor Roosevelt taught three days a week even after Franklin was elected governor of New York. The three women also jointly managed a furniture crafts factory

at Val-Kill. After 1920, she and Louis Howe developed profound bonds of affection and support, each carrying the other loyally through crises with Franklin and the vicissitudes of party politics. Harry Hopkins, director of the WPA, also became an intimate. But her most carefree relationship was probably that with Earl Miller, a former state trooper and subsequently a bodyguard for the Roosevelt family who became a close companion. Miller encouraged her to drive her own car, take up horseback riding again, and develop confidence in her personality. With these and others, Eleanor Roosevelt developed a rich emotional life. Although she frequently appeared cold and distant, she passionately cared for her children and friends. Writing to her daughter Anna on Christmas Eve in 1935, she noted: "It was hard to decorate the tree or get things distributed without you . . . and if anyone says much I shall weep." She expressed similar affection in daily letters to LORENA HICKOK, the former journalist and assistant to Harry Hopkins, who moved to Hyde Park after a falling-out occurred between Eleanor Roosevelt and Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook in the late 1930s. Most surprising of all, perhaps, she poured out her feelings to distant correspondents, answering the many pleas for help which came to her with either a sensitive letter, an admonition to a federal agency to take action, or even a personal check. The poor wrote to her because they knew she cared, and in caring, she found an outlet for her powerful emotional needs. The same compassion was manifested in Eleanor Roosevelt's advocacy of the oppressed. Hearing about the struggle of Appalachian farmers to reclaim their land, she became a champion of the Arthurdale ( W . V a . ) Resettlement Administration project and devoted her lecture fees as well as her influence to help the community. She invited to the White House representatives of poor southern textile workers and northern garment workers, seating them next to the president at dinner so that he might hear of their plight. She and Franklin Roosevelt had worked out a tacit understanding which permitted her to bring the cause of the oppressed to his attention, and allowed him, in turn, to use her activism as a means of building alliances with groups to his left. Although the president frequently refused to act as she wished, the dispossessed at least had an advocate. Largely because of Eleanor Roosevelt, the issue of civil rights for black Americans received a hearing at the White House. Although like most white Americans she had grown up in an environment suffused with racism and nativism,

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she was one of the few voices in the administration insisting that racial discrimination had no place in American life. As always, she led by example. At a 1939 Birmingham meeting inaugurating the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, she placed her chair so that it straddled the black and white sides of the aisle, thereby confounding local authorities who insisted on segregation. She resigned in the same year from the Daughters of the American Revolution after they denied the black artist Marian Anderson permission to perform at Constitution Hall. Instead, and in part through Eleanor Roosevelt's intervention, Anderson sang to 7 5 , 0 0 0 people from the Lincoln Memorial. Eleanor Roosevelt also acted as behind-thescenes lobbyist for civil rights legislation. With alacrity she accepted the suggestion of Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, that she act as an intermediary with the president in the association's attempt to secure legislation defining lynching as a federal crime. She also agreed to be a patron of an NAACP-sponsored exhibit in New York City of paintings and drawings dealing with lynching, and attended the showing. Although she lost out in her campaign for the president's strong endorsement of an antilynching bill, she had communicated to him her anger that "one could get nothing done." Continuing to speak forthrightly for the cause of civil rights, she addressed the NAACP's annual meeting in June 1939 and joined the biracial protest organization a few weeks later. As the threat of war increased, Eleanor Roosevelt joined her Negro friends in arguing vigorously for administration action to eliminate discrimination in the armed services and in defense employment. Although civil rights forces were not satisfied with the administration's response, the positive changes that did occur were due in large part to their alliance with Eleanor Roosevelt. She brought the same fervor to her identification with young people. Fearing that a whole generation might be lost to democracy because of the depression, she reached out to make contact with them. Despite warnings from White House aides, between 1936 and 1940 Eleanor Roosevelt became deeply involved in the activities of the American Student Union and the American Youth Congress, groups committed to a democratic socialist program of massively expanded social welfare programs. She advanced their point of view in White House circles, and invited them to meet the president. Although she was later betrayed by some of her young allies who followed the Communist party line and denounced the European war as imperialistic after the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact

of 1939, she continued to believe in the importance of remaining open to dissent. " I have never said anywhere that I would rather see voung people sympathetic with communism," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote. "But I have said I would rather see the young people actively at work, even if I considered they were doing things that were a mistake." With the onset of World War II, Roosevelt persisted in her efforts for the disadvantaged. She insisted that administration officials consult women activists and incorporate roles for women as a major part of their planning for wartime operations, and she intervened repeatedly with war production agencies as well as the military to advocate fairer treatment for black Americans. When it seemed that many New Deal social welfare programs would be threatened by war, Eleanor Roosevelt became their defender. Increasingly she devoted herself to the dream of international cooperation, aware more than most of the revolution rising in Africa and Asia, and of the dangers posed by the threat of postwar conflict. But her energies in the war were directed primarily to human needs. When Jewish refugees seeking a haven from Nazi persecution received less than an enthusiastic response from the State Department, Eleanor Roosevelt served as their advocate. Families separated by war always found an ally when they sought her help, and wounded veterans in army hospitals far from home received from her visits the cherished message that someone cared. As the war proceeded, the worlds of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt became still more separate. They were frequently adversaries and the president was less able to tolerate her advocacy of unpopular causes. In search of release from the unbearable pressures of the war, he had come to rely on the gaiety and laughter of his daughter Anna, and other women companions, including Lucy Mercer Rutherford, who, unknown to Eleanor, was with Franklin Roosevelt in Warm Springs when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in April 1945. With great discipline and dignity, Eleanor Roosevelt bore both the pain of Franklin's death and the circumstances surrounding it. Her first concern was with carrying forward the policies in which they had both believed despite their disagreements. Writing later about their relationship, she commented: "He might have been happier with a wife who had been completely uncritical. That I was never able to be and he had to find it in some other people. Nevertheless, I think that I sometimes acted as a spur . . . I was one of those who served his purposes." What she did not say was that Frank-

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Roosevelt lin Roosevelt had served her purposes as well. Though they never retrieved their early intimacy, they had created an unparalleled partnership to respond to the needs of a nation in crisis. Not long after her husband's death, Eleanor Roosevelt told a reporter: "The story is over." But no one who cared so much for so many causes, and was so effective a leader, could long remain on the sidelines. Over the next decade and a half, she continued to be the most effective woman in American politics. In long letters to President Harry S Truman, she implored the administration to push forward with civil rights, maintain the Fair Employment Practices Commission, develop a foreign policy able to cope with the needs of other nations, and work toward a world system where atom bombs would cease to be a negotiating chip in international relations. Appropriately, President Truman nominated Eleanor Roosevelt as a United States delegate to the United Nations. There she argued, debated, and lobbied for the creation of a document on human rights that would embody standards which civilized humankind would accept as sacred and inalienable. Finally on Dec. 10, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fundamentally shaped by her, passed the General Assembly. Delegates rose in a standing ovation to the woman who more than anyone else had come to symbolize the cause of human rights. Even those in the United States who had most opposed her applauded: " I want to say that I take back everything I ever said about her," Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg commented, "and believe me, it's been plenty." At times during the New Deal a figure of scorn among some conservatives, Eleanor Roosevelt was fast becoming a national heroine. The cause of world peace and the desire to help the victims of war quickly became central to Roosevelt's efforts. In moving speeches that vividly portrayed the suffering wrought by war, she sought to educate the United States to its postwar responsibilities. She had traveled through England noting the names of all the young men who had died during the war, she told an audience. "There is a feeling that spreads over the land," she said, "the feel of civilization that of itself might have a hard time coming back." If the United States wished to avoid such a world, it must help those who had suffered, and avoid isolationism. Although Eleanor Roosevelt disagreed profoundly with some of the military aspects of United States foreign policy, she supported the broad outlines of its response to the Soviet Union

in the developing cold war. In debates at the U N she learned quickly that Soviet delegates could be hypocritical, and on more than one occasion she responded to their charges of injustice in America by proposing that each country submit to investigation of its social conditions—a suggestion the Soviets refused. She refused in 1947 to support the newly formed Progressive party with its platform of accommodation toward the Soviet Union, and instead spearheaded the drive to build Americans for Democratic Action, a group which espoused social reforms at home and support of Truman's foreign policy. Throughout the 1950s Eleanor Roosevelt remained a singular public figure, able to galvanize the attention of millions by her statements. She became one of the staunchest advocates of Israel, argued vigorously for civil rights, and spoke forcefully against the witch hunts of McCarthyism. When Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953 she resigned her U N post, but she continued to work tirelessly through the American Association for the United Nations to mobilize public support for international cooperation. She also gave unstintingly of her time to the election campaigns in 1952 and 1956 of her dear friend Adlai Stevenson, who brought to politics a wit and sophistication that she admired. The private sphere, however, remained most precious. "The people I love," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote her friend and physician David Gurewitsch, "mean more to me than all the public things. I only do the public things because there are a few close people whom I love dearly and who matter to me above everything else." The Roosevelt children remained as much a trial as a comfort. After Franklin Roosevelt's death, she lived at Val-Kill with her secretary, Malvina Thompson ( 1 8 9 3 - 1 9 5 3 ) , and her son Elliott and his family. More often than not, family gatherings degenerated into bitter arguments. But her grandchildren brought joy as did friends, old and new. As she entered her seventies, Eleanor Roosevelt had become the first lady of the world. Traveling to India, Japan, and the Soviet Union, she spoke for the best that was in America. Although she did not initially approve of John F. Kennedy and would have much preferred to see Adlai Stevenson nominated again in 1960, she lived to see the spirit of impatience and reform return to Washington. In 1962 she sponsored hearings in Washington, D.C., where young civil rights workers testified about the judicial and police harassment of black protesters in the south. It was fitting that Eleanor Roosevelt's last

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Roosevelt major official position was to chair President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of W o m e n , to which she was appointed in D e c e m b e r 1961. More than anyone else of her generation she had exemplified the political independence and personal autonomy that were abiding themes of the women's movement. Eleanor Roosevelt had not been a militant feminist and, like most social reformers, she had opposed the E q u a l Rights Amendment ( E R A ) until the mid-1940s, believing that it would jeopardize protective labor legislation for women. During the depression she accepted the popular view that, at least temporarily, some married women should leave the labor force to improve the chances of the unemployed. On occasion, she also adopted maleoriented definitions of fulfillment. "You are successful," she wrote in a 1 9 3 1 article, "when your husband feels that he has been a success and that life has been worthwhile." But on the issue of women's equality as in so many other areas, Roosevelt most often affirmed the inalienable right of the human spirit to grow and seek fulfillment. Brought up amidst antiSemitic and anti-Negro attitudes, she had transcended her past to become one of the strongest champions of minority rights. Once opposed to suffrage, she had grown to exemplify women's aspirations for a full life in politics. Eleanor Roosevelt participated in the activities of the Women's Commission until August 1 9 6 2 , testifying on behalf of equal pay laws at a congressional hearing in April of that year. She died at her home in New York City in November from a rare form of tuberculosis. Twenty years earlier she had written: "You can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. T h e influence you exert is through your own life and what you've become yourself." Despite disappointment and tragedy, Eleanor Roosevelt had followed her own advice. " W h a t other single human being," Adlai Stevenson asked at her memorial service, "has touched and transformed the existence of so many? . . . She walked in the slums . . . of the world, not on a tour of inspection . . . but as one who could not feel contentment when others were hungry." Because of her life, millions of others may have experienced a new sense of possibility. She would have wished for nothing more. [The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y., represent the most comprehensive collection of material available. Of particular interest are her correspondence with Walter White of the NAACP, material about her family, especially her father, and drafts of articles and lectures. Other relevant collections at Hyde Park are the papers of Mary Dewson, Hilda Worthington Smith, and Lorena Hickok; the papers

of the Women's Div. of the Democratic Nat. Committee; and those of Anna Roosevelt Halsted. Several manuscript collections at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, bear directly on Eleanor Roosevelt's life: see especially the papers of Mary Anderson, Mary Dewson, Mary Dreier, and Ellen Woodward. Of Eleanor Roosevelt's own writings the most valuable are This I Remember ( 1 9 4 9 ) ; This Is My Story ( 1 9 3 7 ) ; Autobiography ( 1 9 6 1 ) ; and It's Up To the Women ( 1 9 3 3 ) . She also wrote a monthly column, "If You Ask Me," for the Ladies' Home Jour, from lune 1941 to spring 1949 and in McCall's after 1949. The best place to begin reading about her is Joseph Lash's excellent two-volume biography, Eleanor and Franklin (1971) and Eleanor: The Years Alone ( 1 9 7 2 ) . Other books that cast light upon the Roosevelt family include James Roosevelt, My Parents: A Differing View ( 1 9 7 6 ) , and Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story ( 1 9 7 3 ) , both of which offer personal views by the Roosevelt children. Another useful biography is Tamara Hareven, Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience (1968).] WILLIAM

R O S E N B E R G , Ethel 1 9 1 5 - J u n e 19, 1953.

Greenglass,

II.

CHAFE

Sept.

28,

Ethel Rosenberg was born on the Lower ' ' 4st Side of New York City, the only daughter of Barnet and Tessie ( F e l t ) Greenglass. Her mother was born in Austria; her father, born in Russia, had a home repair shop for sewing machines in the basement of their Sheriff Street tenement. Ethel had an older half brother, Samuel, and two younger brothers, Bernard and David. She died in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison at the age of thirty-seven, the day after her fourteenth wedding anniversary, accused of conspiracy to commit espionage and condemned by the testimony of David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth. Growing up, E t h e l Greenglass was ambitious to break away from her neighborhood; she dreamed of success as an actress and singer. She attended the local public schools before entering nearby Seward Park High School where, hoping to go to college, she took the general rather than clerical course. An excellent student, she was allowed to skip a year and graduated in 1931. From junior high school on, she sang and acted in school plays, despite her mother's bluntly voiced disapproval. Ethel Greenglass graduated into the depression, however; she enrolled in a six-month stenographic course and took a job, in the summer of 1931, with the National New York Shipping and Packing Company. But she did not entirely abandon ' c r ambitions. She joined the Clark House Players, an

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Rosenberg amateur theatrical group, and played several leading roles in her three years with them, including one as the sister of a man awaiting execution. Seeking ways to eke out her seven-dollar weekly salary, Ethel Greenglass also entered the amateur night competitions that were a feature of depression-era entertainment, singing on the Major Bowes circuit in theaters in New York and New Jersey. She continued to live at home, giving most of her salary to her mother, but managing to save enough to take singing lessons. Her greatest success was her acceptance as the youngest member of a professional choir, the Schola Cantorum. As the depression deepened, Ethel Greenglass became increasingly involved in political action. She helped organize the union at the National Company and in August 1935 was on the strike committee and an active participant in what became a major city-wide strike for better wages and for recognition of the Ladies Apparel Shipping Clerks Union. Ethel Greenglass and other strike leaders were fired; in September she brought a complaint to the newly formed National Labor Relations Board which ruled five months later that she should be reinstated. By then, however, she was working as a stenographer for the Bell Textile Company. In 1936, singing at a fund-raising rally for the International Seamen's Union, she met Julius Rosenberg, almost three years her junior and then an engineering student at the City College of New York. Like Ethel Greenglass, he had graduated young from Seward Park High School; he lived with his family, Jewish immigrants from Poland, less than a block from the Greenglasses. Rosenberg had been an outstanding student of Hebrew, and intensely religious. His idealism redirected by the case of Tom Mooney, the unjustly imprisoned California labor leader, he joined the Communist party sometime in the 1930s. By 1936 he was thinking of leaving college to devote his time to political action, but Ethel Greenglass urged him not to give up his chance for an education. They married on June 18, 1939; Ethel Rosenberg later recalled "the turbulence and struggle, the joy and beauty of the early years . . . Together we hunted down the answers to all the seemingly insoluble riddles which a complex and callous society presented" (Death House Letters, p. 39). She continued to work at Bell Textile, and became a member of the women's auxiliary of her husband's union, the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT); with the other women she helped to raise funds for children orphaned by the civil war in Spain. For some months in 1940 Ethel Rosenberg worked as a clerk-typist for

the United States Bureau of the Census. In the fall of 1941 Julius Rosenberg received an appointment as a junior engineer with the United States Signal Corps, a job he held—with promotions—until 1945. With this new position, Ethel Rosenberg's life also changed. She turned to volunteer activity, continuing to work with the FAECT auxiliary. Welcoming United States entry into World War II as a continuation of the left's fight against fascism, she joined the Lower East Side Defense Council, a volunteer civil defense organization. The Rosenbergs moved into Knickerbocker Village, a new low-cost housing project which remained their home for the rest of their lives together. Neighbors later told F B I agents that they stayed very much to themselves, and were very close: they "adore[d] each other," one observed. Ethel Rosenberg, another said, was "always poorly dressed"; she seemed to have "even less money" than other project residents. With the birth of their first child, Michael, in 1943, Ethel Rosenberg's outside activities gradually ceased. She was ill for some months in 1944 and 1945, suffering from symptoms she attributed to a spinal curvature that had troubled her since childhood. By the time Robert was born, in 1947, the energies she had once given to acting and singing and to political work were turned almost entirely to home and family; there was little encouragement from the organized political movements on the left for women to take a public role. She took a course in child psychology at the New School for Social Research, learned to play the guitar, and attended a course on music for children at the Bank Street School. Michael was high strung and difficult. Ethel Rosenberg feared that her anxieties and her permissiveness were at fault, and sought help for him in 1947 from a social worker at the Jewish Board of Guardians. This concern, as well as mounting pressure on the family because of their political activities and the continuing disapproval and rejection that had marked her relationship with her family, led her to seek psychiatric help for herself in 1949. Julius Rosenberg had been fired from the Signal Corps in 1945 on political grounds; he had been laid off later that year from a job with Emerson Radio. With David Greenglass, he attempted to start his own business, a machine shop. It was never successful, and they both lost money. In 1950 Harry Gold, a Philadelphia chemist who claimed to be the United States contact for confessed British spy Klaus Fuchs, identified David Greenglass as his source of information in passing atomic secrets. Greenglass claimed that his brother-in-law had recruited him for espion-

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age work. Julius Rosenberg was arrested in July 1950 and imprisoned. After his arrest, Ethel Rosenberg had to conclude the business of the failed machine shop, care for her home, and try to quiet her children's anxieties. A woman with few friends, she was isolated, avoided by acquaintances and neighbors fearful of guilt by association; her only support came from her husband's family. On Aug. 2, 1950, she was called to appear before a Grand Jury. After her second appearance, nine days later, she too was arrested. Her bail was set at $100,000, and she was sent to the Women's House of Detention in New York City. She remained there for eight months, with no specific charges brought to support her arrest as part of a "conspiracy to commit espionage." In July, James Mclnerney, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, had said there was not enough evidence to proceed against Ethel Rosenberg, although noting her potential usefulness as a lever against her husband (JR Headqtrs. file, vol. 3, no. 188). Not until February 1951 were any charges made; they came only from Ruth Greenglass, who, according to a summary report in the FBI files (the original interview has not appeared), claimed that Ethel Rosenberg had typed the information allegedly brought to her husband by David Greenglass (JR Headqtrs. file, vol. 18, no. 922). No such typed notes were ever produced as evidence in the trial, nor had there been any mention in David Greenglass's prior testimony of his sister's involvement. Ruth Greenglass admitted to complicity in the crime for which her husband was later convicted, but she was never indicted. Knowing the weakness of their case against Ethel Rosenberg, the government yet persisted, hoping to force Julius Rosenberg to a confession. They hoped, too, to make an example of her. At a meeting of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy on Feb. 8, 1951, United States Attorney Myles Lane acknowledged: "The case is not too strong against Mrs. Rosenberg. But for the purpose of acting as a deterrent, I think it is very important that she is convicted, too, and given a stiff sentence." She and Julius Rosenberg were brought to trial in March; they were convicted of conspiracy. In April FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover recommended a thirty-year sentence for Ethel Rosenberg, because she was "the mother of two small children" and "would, in a sense, be presumed to be acting under the influence of her husband" (JR Headqtrs. file, vol. 19, no. 944). Assistant United States Attorney Roy Cohn favored the death penalty, but noted: "If Mrs. Rosenberg were sentenced to a prison term there was a possibility she would talk" (J. Edgar

Hoover to D. M. Ladd, April 3, 1951, Kaufman Papers). But trial judge Irving Kaufman had already determined on the death sentence for both the Rosenbergs (memo, A. H. Belmont to D. M. Ladd, March 16, 1951, JR Headqtrs. file, vol. 17, no. 894), and his decision remained. The Rosenbergs continued to protest their innocence, as they did until the end of their lives. Ethel Rosenberg was held for two years in virtual solitary confinement at Sing Sing prison, the sole woman prisoner, her only companions the matrons assigned to guard her. She was allowed a weekly visit with her husband, with a wire mesh screen between them. After a year's absence, she began to see her children at infrequent intervals. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had to communicate mainly by letters; many of these were released for publication in an attempt to raise money for the support of their sons. Despite the sometimes self-conscious prose that marks what were at once private and public communications, Ethel Rosenberg's letters provide a passionate and articulate record of her torment over the loss of husband and children and her anxiety over her children's future. Her pride and anger are clear too (as they are in other documents of the Sing Sing years). She was subjected to great pressure from the government, from her mother and her brothers, and from press and public images of her as an unnatural mother and a domineering wife. (President Dwight D. Eisenhower justified his refusal to grant her clemency by claiming: "It is the woman who is the strong and recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one.") But she refused to accede to those pressures in order to save her life or provide her children with a mother. The letters also reveal Ethel Rosenberg's passion to write. They provided an outlet long denied her to express herself to a listening public; at the beginning, she saw her imprisonment as an opportunity to serve as a symbol of those who were being victimized by anticommunist hysteria. Her hold on her emotional equilibrium was sometimes precarious, and she suffered periods of breakdown. Her psychiatrist was allowed to visit her and, at the end, she expressed her deep gratitude to him, wanting him to share her "triumph—For I have no fear and no regrets—only that the release from the trap was not completely effectuated and the qualities I possessed could not expand to their fullest capacities" (We Are Your Sons, pp. 265-66). A series of legal appeals kept Julius and Ethel Rosenberg alive for two years after a sentence of death was passed. The courts refused to consider new evidence which was presented by

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defense lawyers, however, and the government refused to accede to the pleas for clemency which poured in from countries around the world. Ethel Rosenberg wrote on June 16, 1953, asking President Eisenhower as an "affectionate grandfather . . . sensitive artist . . . [and] devoutly religious man" (We Are Your Sons, pp. 2 5 2 - 5 5 ) to grant them their lives. He refused; she died three days later, telling her sons in her last letter to them: "Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience." [The files released by the F B I in connection with the Freedom of Information Act snit brought by the Rosenbergs' sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, are at the office of the Fund for Open Information and Accountability, Inc. ( F O I A ) in N.Y. City; they can be seen by appointment. Quotations from F B I files ( J R Headqtrs. file) are from material in the FOIA archive. F B I documents relating to Judge Kaufman's handling of the case were published in 1976 by the Nat. Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case as The Kaufman Papers. Unpublished letters are in the possession of the family. The trial transcript is on file at Fed. District Court for Southern N.Y. at Foley Square, U.S. v. Rosenbergs, Sobeli, Yakovley, and Greenglass (Cr. No. 1 3 4 - 2 4 5 ) . In 1952 the trial transcript was sold in book form by the Nat. Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case; a microfilm of the transcript was published by the Fund for the Republic ( 1 9 5 4 ) . Selected letters were published as Death House Letters (1953); others appear in a book on the case by Robert and Michael Meeropol, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg ( 1 9 7 5 ) . An important early book, Virginia Gardner, The Rosenberg Story (19.54), gives biographical information on Ethel Rosenberg, as does an excellent article by Ellie Meeropol and Beth Schneider, "The Ethel Rosenberg Story," Off Our Backs, Sept.-Oct. 1975. The most thoroughly researched discussion of the case, which includes evidence of the Rosenbergs' innocence not introduced at the trial, is Walter and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (1973). Other books in support of the Rosenbergs are William A. Reuben, The Atom Spy Hoax ( 1 9 5 4 ) , an expanded version of his series of articles in the National Guardian, 1951-5.3; John Wexley, The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1955); Malcolm D. Sharp, Was Justice Done? with an introduction by Harold C. Urey ( 1 9 5 6 ) ; Alvan Goldstein, The Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ( 1 9 7 5 ) ; and a book by the Rosenbergs' codefendant, Morton Sobell, On Doing Time ( 1 9 7 4 ) . Upholding their conviction are Louis Nizer, The Implosion Conspiracy ( 1 9 7 3 ) , and Jonathan Root, The Betrayers ( 1 9 6 6 ) . See also the article on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five; Sol Stern and Ronald Radosh, "The Hidden Rosenberg Case," New Republic, June 2.3, 1979, which argues for Ethel Rosenberg's innocence of the charges against her; and Jon Steinberg, "The

Rosenbergs Framed Again," Seven 1979.]

Days, July 20,

CAROL HURD GREEN

ROSENTHAL, Ida Cohen, Jan. 9, 1886-March 28, 1973. Manufacturing executive. Ida Rosenthal was born in Rakov, near Minsk, Russia, the eldest of the four girls and three boys of Abraham and Sarah (Shapiro) Kaganovich. (The surname was changed to Cohen when the family came to the United States.) Her father was a Hebrew scholar and her mother kept a small general store to help support the family. At the age of sixteen Ida went to Warsaw, where she worked as a dressmaker, taking lessons in Russian and mathematics in her spare time. She left for the United States around 1904, following her sister Ethel and William Rosenthal, a young man who had left Russia to escape the tsarist draft. Her parents emigrated in 1909, and her father and three of her brothers organized A. Cohen & Sons of New York City, wholesalers of silverware, clocks, and cut glass. An accomplished seamstress, Ida Cohen settled in Hoboken, N.J., and supported herself as a dressmaker. On June 10, 1906, she married William Rosenthal and together they continued in the dressmaking business. They had a son, Lewis ( 1 9 0 7 - 1 9 3 0 ) , and a daughter, Beatrice, born in 1916. When they moved their dressmaking shop from Hoboken to New York's Washington Heights in 1918, they had some fifteen to twenty employees. In the early 1920s Enid Bissett, a friend of Ida Rosenthal, persuaded her to become a partner in a dress shop on fashionable Fifty-Seventh Street. The women, dissatisfied with the fit of their garments on the boyish figures that were then stylish, pioneered in designing the modern brassiere. To replace the plain strip of cloth with hooks at the back that was the brassiere of the day, Rosenthal and Bissett designed a garment, to be given away with their dresses, which had a few tucks that formed "cups" for the breasts. Since their customers returned to buy the giveaways, they went into the business of manufacturing them. Together with William Rosenthal they incorporated the Maiden Form Brassiere Company in 1923, with an initial investment of $4,500. (The name was changed to Maidenform, Inc. in 1960, to conform with the trade name of the company's product.) The Rosenthals held two-thirds of the common stock, Enid Bissett one-third. When poor health forced Bissett's retirement in the 1940s, the Rosenthals remained the principal managers. William Rosenthal, president of the company, was in charge of design, and, in the early years, of production as well. He created

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standard brassiere sizes which were the precursors of the A, B, C, and D cup sizes. Ida Rosenthal, treasurer of the company, managed sales and finances. Under five feet in height, brown-eyed and vivacious, Ida Rosenthal was a dominant force in the business. A reporter later remarked that while others in the organization might "know design, or production, or standards . . . Mrs. R. knows everything" ( F o r t u n e , p. 1 3 0 ) . The business was a success from the beginning. Sales increased each year in the 1920s. In 1924 the factory, having outgrown the New York premises, was moved to Bayonne, N.J. Maiden Form's growth in the 1930s owed much to the change in women's fashions: the boyish look was replaced by the softly curved female figure. But the success of the firm also rested upon careful management, innovative design, mass production, the introduction of a modified piecework system as an incentive to labor, and an aggressive sales organization. By 1938 Maiden Form had annual gross earnings of more than $4,500,000, a figure that would reach $ 4 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 by 1964. During World W a r I I Maiden Form was given priority in obtaining materials, Ida Rosenthal later claimed, because women workers who wore an "uplift" brassiere were less fatigued than those who did not. In the late 1940s, at the suggestion of Mary Filius, a copywriter for a New York advertising agency, the Rosenthals launched a highly successful twenty-year advertising campaign that featured young women dreaming of themselves in a variety of situations, dressed, above the waist, only in their Maidenform bras: " I dreamed I went shopping in my Maidenform bra," exclaimed the first of many models. At midcentury Maiden Form had 9,000 retail outlets, and its volume of sales was increasing by almost $1,000,000 yearly. Upon the death of her husband in 1958 Ida Rosenthal became president of the company, and in 1959 chairman of the board. She also moved from their eighteen-room house on Long Island to a small Manhattan apartment, where she lived for the rest of her life. In the 1960s Rosenthal spent much of her time traveling to keep in touch with Maidenform's worldwide interests in more than one hundred countries. She explained: "Quality we give them. Delivery we give them. I add personality" (Time, p. 9 2 ) . With some 4 , 0 0 0 employees, the company had offices, plants, and warehouses in five states, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, England, and Canada. Maidenform expanded into sportswear in 1961. Two years later Ida Rosenthal went to the Soviet Union as a member of an industrial study exchange team, returning

home enthusiastic about future markets there. At the age of eighty, she was still making at least two business trips a year to Europe and elsewhere. Ida Rosenthal also had many philanthropic interests. She and her husband founded Camp Lewis, a Boy Scout camp in Sussex County, N.J., established the Judaica and Hebraica Library at New York University, and contributed significantly to setting up the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. A director of the Bronx Lebanon Medical Center and of the Bayonne Industrial YMCA, she was in addition active for many years in the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Over the years several family members worked for Maidenform, including Ida Rosenthal's daughter, Beatrice Coleman, who eventually took over the business. Ida Rosenthal died of pneumonia in New York City in 1973 at the age of eighty-seven, after several years' illness. [The few published sources on Ida Rosenthal are often contradictory as to basic facts. For biographical information see Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., LVII, 339-40. Discussions of the development of Maidenform include "Maidenform's Mrs. R.," Fortune, July 1950, pp. 75-76ff.; "Ida Rosenthal," Time, Oct. 24, 1960, p. 92; and Caroline Bird, Enterprising Women (1976). Additional information came from the N.Y. Times, Dec. 9, 1965, and from scattered items in Fortune, Newsweek, and the N.Y. Times. The biographical sketch of William Rosenthal in Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XLVIII, 41-42, and his obituary in the N.Y. Times, April 14, 1958, were helpful. Ida Rosenthal's obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, March 30, 1973. Assistance was provided by Beatrice Coleman and by Hyman J. Cohen, Ida Rosenthal's brother.] I R E N E D.

NEU

R O S E N T H A L , Jean, March 16, 1 9 1 2 - M a y 1, 1969. Lighting designer. The start of Jean Rosenthal's career coincided with the beginnings of her profession. A pioneer in lighting design, she believed that "the most successful and brilliant work a lighting designer does is usually the least noticeable." Rosenthal considered hers a subservient art, a high craft serving the creative purposes of other artists. Nevertheless, she insisted that lighting affects "how you see what you see, how you feel about it, and how you hear what you are hearing." She was born Eugenie Rosenthal in New York City, the only daughter and second of three children of Pauline (Scharfman) and Morris Rosenthal. Her parents, both the children of Jewish tailors, had emigrated from Rumania in the 1880s. Both were doctors of medicine, and

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Rosenthal Pauline Rosenthal had an additional degree in psychiatry. Jean and her brothers attended in succession the Ethical Culture School in the Bronx, William Fincke's experimental Manumit School in Pawling, N.Y., and the Friends Seminary in Manhattan, from which she graduated in 1928. Rosenthal recalled that her parents encouraged her to take advantage of all that the city offered: she regularly attended the theater, opera, and symphony; she read the critics and columnists of the day; and she was infected by the excitement of innovations in music, dance, and painting. To complete her schooling, Rosenthal did not go on to college, but enrolled in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre ( 1 9 2 9 30), although she had no idea what she wanted to do. Finding that she wanted neither to act nor to dance, Rosenthal became technical assistant to faculty member Martha Graham and discovered that she had what she called "a useful way of seeing things." She applied to George Pierce Baker, then teaching drama at Yale University, and after a five-minute interview he enrolled her in the drama program. There, from the lighting instructor Stanley McCandless, whom she called "the granddaddy of us all," she learned a "specific and orderly attitude" which demanded that "there must be a technique and a method for organizing" ideas in theater lighting. Leaving Yale in 1933, Rosenthal was employed by the Federal Theatre Project as a technician in charge of wagon theaters in the New York City parks. The experience provided her with a thorough education in production and led to a job in another Federal Theatre group with producer John Houseman. Rosenthal followed Houseman when he took a leave of absence in 1936 to produce Hamlet, with Leslie Howard, and took over when the man who was to install the lighting fell ill. When, along with Houseman, Orson Welles, and the rest of the group, she was fired from the Federal Theatre Project, she became Welles's technician in charge of lighting for the Mercury Theatre. Within a year she was directing the production staff. Word soon spread in the profession that the stunning and original lighting for Welles's modern Julius Caesar (1937) had been created by the small, darkhaired woman with the huge blue eyes named Jean Rosenthal. In 1940, in order to ensure a steady income for herself, Rosenthal founded the Theatre Production Service, which supplied equipment and design for college and community theaters. Her "professional home was always 'on Broadway,' " although her earliest and continuing association was with what she termed lyric

rather than commercial theater. In addition to her work for the Mercury, Rosenthal designed the lighting for Martha Graham's dance company—to which she always gave first priority; the New York City Ballet and its predecessor, the Ballet Society; Gian Carlo Menotti's operas; and the opera season at New York's City Center. Her influence on lighting for the dance was worldwide. Instead of fixed light for visibility and a minimum change of color, which resulted in a two-dimensionally lit stage, she used side light to edge the bodies of dancers, giving them the quality of sculpture moving in space. She also introduced pale palettes of light which enhanced the beauty of the form, light cues which anticipated the movement of the dancers, and subtle transitions which helped the dancers appear effortless. Just as Martha Graham expanded dance tradition to create new forms, so Jean Rosenthal's lighting helped to transform the appearance of dance performances, including that of traditional European ballets. As her reputation grew, Rosenthal was offered her choice of productions in the commercial theater. She made memorable contributions to such hits as Becket (1960) and the 1964 production of Hamlet with Richard Burton. Rosenthal worked with Mike Nichols on The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite ( 1 9 6 8 ) , and Luv (1969), and with other directors. The formidable list of productions in which "lighting by Jean Rosenthal" was a mark of excellence also included the musicals West Side Story (1957), Hello, Dolly! (1964), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), and Cabaret (1966). Outside New York, Rosenthal lit Shakespeare in Connecticut and opera in Dallas and Chicago. She also designed the lighting for buildings across the country, including the Pan American terminal at the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York and theaters in Canada and Australia as well as the United States. Of these she considered the Los Angeles Music Center to be the most successful and practical. Rosenthal was a master of lighting techniques, but her most important contribution, widely adopted by her successors, was an attitude. She thought about each production as a whole, eschewing obtrusive effects, lighting the air in which actors moved rather than the scenery, underlining the dramatic mood of the moment. John Houseman credited her in large part with "bringing organization and order into the lighting of shows," and her system of writing cues so that the results could be repeated uniformly was copied throughout the profession. During what time she had for it, her private life was happy, shared with a few cherished

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friends and enriched by a close relationship with her family. Marion Kinsella, an artist and her lighting assistant, shared Rosenthal's New York apartment and her house on Martha's Vineyard for many years. For recreation Rosenthal loved walking on country roads or the beach, and trips to Europe. Gourmet cooking was her hobby. Jean Rosenthal died of cancer in New York in 1969. During the terminal days of her illness, she was taken in a wheelchair to the theater to carry out the last assignment she was able to fulfill, the lighting for a new dance created by Martha Graham. Many of her major contributions exist only in faulty memories and dusty work sheets, but before she died she began a collaboration on a book tracing her career and her ideas about lighting design. In The Magic of Light ( 1 9 7 2 ) she wrote: "Lighting design, the imposing of quality on the scarcely visible air through which objects and people are seen, begins with thinking about it." [The Jean Rosenthal Papers at the Wis. Center for Theater Research consist of lighting notes for a number of productions, 1949-61. There are some lighting plots and memorabilia in the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library. All quotations in the article are from Jean Rosenthal and Lael Wertenbaker, The Magic of Light (1972). The research material and transcripts of the tapes Rosenthal made for the book are in the Lael Wertenbaker Coll., Mugar Library, Boston Univ. The fullest biographical account is Winthrop Sargeant, "Please, Darling, Bring Three to Seven," New Yorker, Feb. 4, 1956, pp. 33-59. Her career is chronicled in "Personality of the Month: Jean Rosenthal," Dance Mag., Oct. 1959. John Houseman, Run-Through (1972) tells of his association with Rosenthal, including an account of her work on The Cradle Will Rock. The Biog. Encyc. and Who's Who of the Am. Theatre (1966) gives a nearly complete list of her credits. Her obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, May 2, 1969. Additional information was supplied by her brother Leon Rosenthal.] LAEL

WERTENBAKER

R U B I N S T E I N , Helena, Dec. 25, 1870-April 1, 1965. Entrepreneur, philanthropist. From a legendary twelve pots of face cream, Helena Rubinstein created a multimillion dollar cosmetics industry; at one time she employed 30,000 people all over the world. Born in Cracow, Poland, she was the eldest of eight daughters (a brother died in infancy) of Augusta (Silberfeld) and Horace Rubinstein, an egg merchant. She attended the University of Cracow, studied medicine briefly in Switzerland, and around 1902 immigrated alone to Australia, where an uncle lived. Rubinstein brought with her twelve pots of

her mother's face cream, developed by chemist Jacob Lykusky. Australian acquaintances, impressed by her fair complexion, begged her so frequently for the cream that she obtained a loan and opened a modest shop in Melbourne. Besides selling her "Creme Valaze," she instructed women individually on the art of proper skin care, an innovation at that time. Her shop prospered because of the praise of well-known clients, and Rubinstein never forgot the value of publicity and personal endorsement. Phenomenally energetic, she worked eighteen hours a day, setting a pattern for life. She loved her work with a passion not often directed to other areas of her life, and came to believe that she was "confident and relaxed only in business" (My Life for Beauty, p. 3 9 ) . By 1908 her sister Ceska had joined her in Australia to take over management of the business. Helena Rubinstein sailed for London with $100,000 in capital to begin what would become an international organization. To broaden her knowledge of cosmetics, she studied briefly in Paris with a dermatologist, and then in Vienna under Emmie Litz, who returned with her to the fashionable salon she had established in a London mansion. Impressed by the vivid decors of Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois for the Ballet Russe, Rubinstein adopted their electric color combinations when decorating her salons. In 1908 Rubinstein married American journalist Edward Titus; they had two sons, Roy (b. 1909) and Horace (b. 1912). The family moved to Paris where Rubinstein opened another salon, but with the coming of World War I, they fled to the United States ( 1 9 1 5 ) . They bought a home in Greenwich, Conn., and lodged the two children in boarding schools; Rubinstein then opened a new salon in New York City. By 1917 she had salons in San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia, and department stores clamored for her preparations. With the postwar eagerness to try new things, her business expanded. Movie and theater stars helped launch new beauty trends, and Madame, as she was known, created the vamp look for T H E D A B A H A . In 1918 Rubinstein and her husband returned to her business in Paris. Edward Titus founded Black Mannequin Press, which published D. H. Lawrence and other modern writers; Rubinstein entered the world of art, beginning to amass what became tremendous collections of paintings, sculpture, and jewelry. Their apartment became a center for artists seeking commissions, among them Braque, Modigliani, Chagall, and Dufy. The sculptor Jacob Epstein introduced her to African sculpture, a lifelong interest. Rubinstein bought art and jewelry indiscriminately and in vast quan-

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tities, explaining, "I'm a business woman, I'm vised to buying in bulk" (James, p. 4 1 ) . In 1942 Salvador Dali painted her chained by ropes of emeralds to a high rock, enslaved by her possessions, an interpretation that Madame vigorously disputed. She was, in fact, surprisingly casual with her treasures, and once kept a million dollars' worth of jewelry (some once owned by Catherine of Russia) in a cardboard dress box beneath her bed. Not a classic beauty, Rubinstein was small (four feet ten) and elegant. She wore her black hair in a severe chignon; dressed in high fashion, she loved masses of jewelry and crimson lipstick and nail polish. Her manners were often earthy, and her behavior paradoxical; although capable of great acts of generosity, she carried her lunch in a brown paper bag and practiced strange and irrational economies in her household. Rubinstein's marriage faltered in the late twenties and she was divorced in 1937 or 1938. She blamed the breakdown on her devotion to business: " I realize what a failure I must have been at that time as a wife, even as a mother" (My Life for Beauty, p. 7 2 ) . In an attempt to slow down she sold her American business to a Wall Street firm, Lehman Bros., only to buy it back a year later after the Wall Street crash, for a fraction of its cost. Although Rubinstein never followed prescribed beauty routines herself, because "it takes time and time is one thing I haven't got" (James, p. 3 8 ) , she was brilliant and innovative in developing a business based on these routines. She instituted a program to train salesgirls to teach women skin care, devised a diet plan for beauty modeled on her personal experience at a Swiss health spa, and inaugurated a "Day of Beauty" at her salons, in which clients underwent a full eight hours of reconditioning. Rubinstein also developed medicated skin creams and waterproof mascara, but her emphasis on the medicinal value of her preparations led her into conflict with the Food and Drug Administration. She loved innovative promotional techniques, excelling in the use of colorful stunts, decorative motifs, and imaginative packaging. Rubinstein's feud with E L I Z A B E T H ARDEN, who also maintained a salon on Fifth Avenue, was legendary; it took a baroque turn in 1938 when Arden hired away Rubinstein's general manager and eleven members of his staff, and Madame retaliated by hiring Arden's ex-husband, Thomas J. Lewis. Once described as a "matriarch . . . both mother and ruler of the tribe" (James, p. 4 3 ) , Rubinstein took many members of her family into the business, including several sisters, a nephew, a niece, and her son Roy. In 1938 she

married Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, a Russian prince twenty years her junior, and established a male cosmetics line bearing his name. Gourielli died in 1956; her son Horace died two years later. Rubinstein was active in philanthropic causes and was particularly generous to Israel. She founded the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv where her exquisite collection of miniature rooms is housed. T h e Helena Rubinstein Foundation, created in 1953, gave funds to organizations concerned with health, medical research, and rehabilitation, supported the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, and provided scholarships for Israelis. In 1959 Helena Rubinstein officially represented the United States cosmetics industry at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. She never retired: in her last years, when her health began to fail, she often conducted business meetings from her lucite bed, its headboard and footboard illuminated with fluorescent lighting. She died in New York City in April 1965, at ninety-four. [Rubinstein's autobiography, My Life for Beauty (1964) is informative. Patrick O'Higgins, Madame (1971) emphasizes the last ten years of her life when he was her personal assistant; it is entertaining, but gossip-strewn and often unreliable. Maxine Fabe, Beauty Millionaire (1972), is a children's book. For further biographical information see T. F. James, "Princess of the Beauty Business," Cosmopolitan, June 1959; Jo Swerling, "Beauty in Jars and Vials," New Yorker, June 30, 1928; and Current Biog., 1943. Other sources include "We Can't All Be Beautiful," American Mag., June 1936; "Helena Rubinstein in Her Paris Home," House and Garden, Jan. 1938; H. Bauer, "Beauty Tycoon," Collier's, Dec. 4, 1948; "Beauty's Handmaiden," Jan. 26,1953, and "Beauty Merchant," April 9, 1965, both in Time; "Madame," Newsweek, April 12, 1965; and two articles in Life, "Madame Rubinstein, the Little Lady from Krakow," July 21, 1941, and "A Tiny, Tireless Tycoon of Beauty," May 15, 1964. Articles on Rubinstein's art collection include G. O'Donnell, Feb., April, and July 1957, and S. A. Parvin, "Miniature Rooms of Helena Rubinstein," May and July 1965, all in Hobbies; and "Imaginary U.S.A.," Look, Oct. 20, 1953. Although Rubinstein's birth date is sometimes given as 1882, she confirms the 1870 date in her autobiography. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, April 2, 1965.] ALMA L. KENNEY

RUDKIN, Margaret Fogarty, Sept. 14, 1 8 9 7 June 1, 1967. Businesswoman. Margaret Rudkin, who at forty started the Pepperidge Farm bakeries with a few loaves of home-baked whole wheat bread, was born in

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New York City, the oldest of the five children of Joseph I. and Margaret (Healy) Fogarty. While she later claimed that her mother "never even boiled an egg," Margaret learned something about good food and its preparation as a girl from her Irish grandmother, with whom the family lived in a narrow, four-story brownstone house in the Tudor City area of Manhattan. Her grandmother died when Margaret was twelve and the family moved to Flushing, Long Island, where she attended public schools, graduating as valedictorian of her high school class. She then went to work as a bookkeeper for a small local bank, the first woman hired there, and prepared herself for a business career. In 1919 Margaret Fogarty moved to the firm of McClure, Jones & Co., member of the New York Stock Exchange. There she dealt directly with customers and met Henry Albert Rudkin, a polo-playing partner in the firm; twelve years her senior, he shared her New York origins and Irish descent. The two were married on April 8, 1923, and had three sons: Henry Jr. (b. 1924), William (b. 1926), and Mark (b. 1929). Prospering on Wall Street, the Rudkins purchased 125 acres near Fairfield, Conn., built a Tudor mansion there, and christened their estate after an old pepperidge tree which stood on the grounds. In its early days, Pepperidge Farm boasted a garage for five automobiles and stables for twelve horses. The Rudkins' devotion to hunts and horse shows was curtailed by the depression, however, and by a serious polo accident that forced Henry Rudkin to be away from work for six months. Margaret Rudkin sold the horses and all but one automobile, dismissed her fulltime servants, and sought new ways to raise money on the farm, starting with homegrown apples and turkeys. Margaret Rudkin began baking bread at Pepperidge Farm in 1937. According to one popular account, she made her first loaf as part of a special diet for her youngest son's asthma, following a doctor's suggestion that chemical additives in commercially baked bread might be aggravating his condition. (In her official account of Pepperidge Farm, written in 1962, Rudkin notes simply that the bakery grew out of her "interest in proper food for children.") Relying only on cookbooks, she set out to make stone-ground whole wheat bread: her initial effort was "as hard as rock and about one-inch high." Eventually Rudkin arrived at a formula that pleased both family and friends, and in the summer of 1937 she went into business. In August she sold her first batch of loaves wholesale to her own grocer in Fairfield. Because her recipe relied on fresh, relatively

expensive ingredients, like butter and whole milk, Rudkin's bread initially sold at more than twice the price of its mass-produced competitors. Yet demand grew quickly, enabling her to hire several more workers that fall and move the baking from the kitchen to a corner of the garage. There she began to make white bread of unbleached flour, testing the product on the manager of Charles & Co., a famous specialty food store in New York City; she came away with an order for twenty-four loaves a day, delivered personally for the first few weeks to Grand Central Station by Henry Rudkin on his way to Wall Street. The early success of Rudkin's bakery was closely tied to publicity. Her bread received its first important notice on Nov. 20, 1937, with an article in the New York Journal and American, "Society Woman Turns Baker to Supply Elite With Healthful Bread." Enthusiastic articles followed in the New York press from the Herald Tribune's Emma Bugbee and the World Telegram's Helen Worden, who described the bread's creator as "slim and sophisticated, with gorgeous red hair, green eyes and a milk-white skin." The single most important boost for Pepperidge Farm, though, was J. D. Ratcliff's article, "Bread, de Luxe," which appeared in the December 1939 issue of Reader's Digest and yielded Rudkin orders from all over the United States, Canada, and several foreign countries. On the strength of an expanding reputation, she borrowed $15,000 in 1940 to move the bakery from Pepperidge Farm proper to a former auto salesroom and hospital in Norwalk, Conn. Weekly volume exceeded 50,000 loaves there the first year, with white bread the major item, although the company continued to produce whole wheat bread and add to its roster of baked goods. Over the next two decades, Pepperidge Farm grew to become a major national firm. Henry Rudkin gradually gave up his Wall Street activities to handle finances and marketing as chairman of the company, while Margaret Rudkin served as president, overseeing the bakery's daily operations. In 1947 production shifted to a new $625,000 plant in Norwalk, and plants were later opened in Pennsylvania (1949) and Illinois (1953). Pepperidge Farm began advertising nationally in the 1950s, with Margaret Rudkin appearing in television commercials. She also played a part in two important acquisitions during the decade, purchasing a frozen pastry line from a firm in New Hampshire and cookie recipes from the Delacre company of Belgium. In 1960 the Rudkins sold their business to the Campbell Soup Company. Pepperidge Farm

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Rudkin had then reached profits of $1,300,000 on annual sales of $32,000,000, assets the Rudkins exchanged for Campbell stock worth about $28,000,000. Under the agreement, Margaret Rudkin became a director of Campbell Soup while continuing to run Pepperidge Farm. In 1962 she yielded the presidency to her son William and succeeded her husband as chairman, a post she held until September 1966, five months after her husband's death. Ill with breast cancer, for which she had first undergone surgery in 1956, Margaret Rudkin died in June 1967 at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. Margaret Rudkin brought to Pepperidge Farm both her commercial flair and a consuming interest in the product. While servants helped her at times with the housework, she frequently did her own cooking and her fondness for food led her to collect ancient cookbooks. In 1957 the company's 1,000 employees (who were paid somewhat more than similar workers elsewhere) contributed a dollar each and celebrated the bakery's twentieth anniversary by buying her a copy of the fifteenth-century classic De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine. She drew on this later in writing The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook (1963), which became a best seller. In the months before her death, Rudkin donated her cookbook collection to the Pequot Library in Southport and made generous gifts as well to the YaleNew Haven Hospital and other institutions. The Rudkin tradition of quiet generosity extended to individuals as well, notably Benjamin Sonnenberg, the publicity man who suggested the 1939 Reader's Digest article. In addition to employing him on the usual fee basis, Margaret and Henry Rudkin gave him a 5 percent interest in the business. By 1960, this was worth more than $1,000,000. [The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook (1963, 1970) includes an autobiographical account. Rudkin also describes the origins and growth of her bakery in the 25th anniversary issue of The Conveyor, published by Pepperidge Farm in 1962. See also the March 1973 issue of The Conveyor, which traces the history of the company over thirty-five years. Other accounts of Rudkin's life and career include: "Rudkin of Pepperidge," Time, July 14, 1947; John Bainbridge, "Striking a Blow for Grandma," New Yorker, May 22, 1948; W. B. Hartley, "The Story of Pepperidge Bread," Coronet, Aug. 1953; Current Biog., 1959; "Champion of the Old Fashioned," Time, March 21, 1960; "Pepperidge Farm Sold to Campbell Soup," N.Y. Times, Nov. 18, 1960; and "Mrs. Rudkin Revisited," New Yorker, Nov. 16, 1963. An obituary appeared in N.Y. Times, June 2, 1967; death certificate furnished by Conn. Dept. of Health.] TOM

MAHONEY

RUSSELL, Jane Anne, Feb. 9, 1911-March 12, 1967. Biochemist, endocrinologist. Jane Anne Russell was born in Los Angeles County in what is now Watts, Calif., the youngest of five children (three girls and two boys) of Josiah Howard and Mary Ann (Phillips) Russell. Her parents, both of English descent, were poor; they had moved to California at the turn of the century, probably from Maryland. Josiah Russell worked at ranching, served as deputy sheriff, and built a homestead near Los Angeles. An outstanding student, especially proficient in mathematics, Jane Russell went for two years to Polytechnic High School in Long Beach; she graduated in 1928, second in her class. She entered the University of California at Berkeley at seventeen and graduated first in her class four years later. For her outstanding achievement she received the Kraft Prize, a Phi Beta Kappa key, a Stewart Scholarship, and the University Gold Medal. Entering the graduate school at Berkeley, Russell at first supported herself by working as a technician for the chairman of the biochemistry department, Edward S. Sundstroem. In 1934, however, she received the California Fellowship in Biochemistry, and the Rosenberg Fellowship the following year. She was also accepted as a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute of Experimental Biology under Herbert M. Evans, who was directing massive research programs on vitamins and hormones. Under the supervision of Leslie L. Bennett, Russell was assigned to investigate the role of pituitary hormones in carbohydrate metabolism. By the time she received her doctorate in 1937 she had already published six papers on the subject, with several more in press. Particularly influential was an article in Physiological Reviews on the relation of the anterior pituitary to carbohydrate metabolism ( 1 9 3 8 ) . Her interest in carbohydrates led her to collaborate with Carl and g e h t y cori at Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. After receiving her degree, Russell stayed at the Institute for another year supported by a Porter Fellowship from the American Physiological Society. In 1938 she moved to Yale University as a National Research Council Fellow. Already a recognized world authority in her field, she had demonstrated that during periods of carbohydrate deprivation some unknown pituitary factor (later shown to be growth hormone) was necessary to maintain adequate levels of tissue carbohydrate, including blood glucose. Russell's pioneering contributions demonstrated the existence of checks and balances

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which govern carbohydrate metabolism, and laid a foundation for future studies on the mechanisms of body growth, maintenance, and breakdown. J a n e Russell had an extraordinarily lucid and disciplined mind, in part a result of her early mathematical training. Her particular genius lay in devising relatively simple experiments capable of yielding decisive answers to important questions. At Yale, in the department of physiological chemistry under C. N. H. Long, she continued her studies on the hormonal regulation of carbohydrate metabolism for the next twelve years. Her most important contribution was to show that the carbohydrate regulating activity of pituitary extracts was contained in the growth hormone discovered by H. M. Evans and prepared in crystalline form by Alfred Ellis Wilhelmi, a close collaborator whom she married on Aug. 2 6 , 1940. Russell worked first with the aid of two fellowships, and then from 1 9 4 1 to 1 9 5 0 as an instructor. Her lack of formal recognition by Yale became a much-cited example of academic discrimination against women, especially after Russell had received the prestigious Ciba Award in 1 9 4 6 for hormonal studies as well as other distinctions usually reserved for full professors. Starting in 1 9 4 9 she participated in the peerreview system of research grant applications to the National Institutes of Health ( N I H ) and in 1 9 5 0 she served as vice president of the Endocrine Society. Russell and Wilhelmi moved to Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., in 1950, he as professor and chairman of the department of biochemistry and she as assistant professor. Thus started a decade of great activity for Russell. In the laboratory, she extended her studies on the metabolic effects of growth hormone to nitrogen metabolism; her results led her to theorize that this hormone was needed not only for growth in the young, but also for preventing the breakdown of essential structural proteins— a concept shown to b e correct by later studies. An outstanding teacher as well as researcher, she developed a remarkable clarity of style as a lecturer and took great pride in her students. Russell wielded substantial influence in science-policy organizations and received much public recognition. She served on the N I H study section on metabolism and endocrinology ( 1 9 5 0 - 5 4 ) and on the National Research Council Committee for the Evaluation of PostDoctoral Fellowships ( 1 9 5 5 - 5 8 ) , and was a member of the National Science Board—a major honor. In 1 9 6 1 she shared the Upjohn Award of the Endocrine Society with Alfred Wilhelmi, and that year was also designated W o m a n of

the Year in Professions in Atlanta. In 1 9 5 8 she was elected to the editorial board of the American Physiological Society, and became section editor for metabolism and endocrinology in 1962. Despite her more than seventy publications and numerous other accomplishments, formal academic recognition was slow in coming. Though promoted to associate professor in 1 9 5 3 —already a belated move—promotion to full professor eluded her for another twelve years; when it finally came in 1965, she was fatally ill. She died of mammary cancer in Atlanta in 1967, after five years of painful illness. Jane Russell greatly valued her marriage and her home; she was close to her family and cared for her aged mother. Skilled in gardening and sewing, she was a virtuoso knitter, whose sweaters were almost as famous as her laboratory work. She possessed extensive knowledge about California, and retained a lifelong love for her native state. [The Archives at Emory Univ. contain a file of clippings, a curriculum vitae, and a list of publications. Some letters from Russell to Herbert M. Evans are in the Manuscript Div., Bancroft Library, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley. Information about Russell's life can be found in C. N. H. Long, "In Memoriam: Jane A. Russell," Endocrinology, Oct. 1967; J. R. K. Preedy, "Jane Russell Wilhelmi ( 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 6 7 ) , " Memorial Oration, Durham Chapel, Emory Univ., March 15, 1967; Jay Tepperman, "Remembering Jane," read on the occasion of the first Jane Russell Wilhelmi Memorial Lecture, Emory Univ., March 19, 1976; and an entry in Who Was Who in America, IV ( 1 9 6 8 ) . Alfred E. Wilhelmi provided useful information.] I. D.

RYAN, Anne, July 20, 1889-April 18, Artist.

RAACKE

1954.

Anne Ryan was born in Hoboken, N.J., the oldest of four children and only daughter of John and Elizabeth (Soran) Ryan. Her father, a prosperous Irish Catholic banker who wrote poetry in his spare time, died in 1902. Her mother had committed suicide a year earlier; the children were brought up by their grandmother. Also in 1904, when she was fourteen, Anne Ryan enrolled at the Academy of St. Elizabeth's Convent, in Convent Station, N.J. She completed preparatory school there and continued into St. Elizabeth's College. In 1911, she left college to marry a young law student, William J. McFadden. Twin children, William and Elizabeth, were born the next year; a third child, Thomas, was born in 1919. After some years of strain, caused

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in part by her desire to live in a world beyond the domestic circle, the McFaddens were legally separated in 1923. Ryan (who resumed her maiden name) wrote poems, worked on a novel, and spent time with artists in New York City's Greenwich Village; she published a volume of poetry, Lost Hills, in 1925. Leaving her children in school in the United States, Ryan went in 1931 to Majorca, her first and only visit to Europe. She chose Majorca not only because it was beautiful and unspoiled but also because it was an inexpensive place to live. In her two years abroad, she wrote poems, stories, and articles, some of which appeared in The Literary Digest and Commonweal, and worked on a full-length study—never published —of Fra Junipero Serra. Her twins joined her for the summer of 1932 and with them she traveled to Paris, where for the first time she saw a wide variety of contemporary painting. Forced by the economic pressure of the depression to leave Spain in 1933, Ryan returned to the United States and lived with her younger son in Greenwich Village. She continued to write, and for a time supported herself by running a restaurant. Increasingly she became interested in painting, as she came to know the work of the many gifted young artists who lived in the Village during the days of the Federal Arts Project and the American Abstract Artists group. Almost fifty, she began to paint in response to the excitement around her. Her efforts were encouraged by her friends Hans Hofmann and Tony Smith. In 1941 Ryan joined Atelier XVII, the printmaking workshop which the British surrealist Stanley William Hayter had moved to New York from Paris at the outbreak of World War II. There she encountered the work of sophisticated European artists, and was much influenced by the biomorphic linear abstraction which characterized Hayter's own work at the time. She produced a number of woodblock prints and engravings during this period. The chief turning point in Ryan's artistic development was her exposure in 1948 to the collages of the German master Kurt Schwitters shown at the Rose Fried Gallery shortly after his death early in 1948. Ryan was enormously excited by Schwitters's use of materials, by the way material fragments could be transposed into abstract form, and by the power that could be communicated on such a small scale. Immediately she began to collect materials and to experiment with the medium. Ryan's first works reflected the Schwitters influence most directly, in that she used bits of such everyday things as postage stamps and tickets—fragments of printed and pictorial mat-

ter—to make her compositions. Gradually, however, she developed a repertory of materials which became distinctly individual: very fine papers—including the handmade papers of Douglas Howell—and a range of textiles, printed or plain but always with a distinctive weave and texture. With these she worked for the next six years until her death, producing a large body of abstract compositions. Many of her works were very small, in contrast to the big, overall painting most characteristic of the milieu in which she worked, but they possessed an individual voice and authority. Ryan's discovery of her own materials, and of the aptness of collage to her sense of a mystical perfection lying beyond consciousness, lent a new, personal dimension to the medium. Her work, Hilton Kramer noted, had "the air of a private communication, of something confided with affection and delicacy" (IV.Y. Times, Feb. 3, 1968, p. 25). During the 1940s and early 1950s, Ryan participated in exhibitions in New York and elsewhere, including the Whitney Annual (1951, 1953), the Brooklyn Museum Print Annual (1947-53), and the 1951 exhibition of "Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America" at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1950 she joined the gallery of Betty Parsons, noted as one of the early supporters of avant-garde art. During this period Anne Ryan also continued to write, and in the fifties several stories were published: "Fear" in Botteghe Oscure, 10 (1952); "She Was Divorced" in Folder (1954); "Liedrica" in Paris Review, 5 (1954); and "The Darkest Leaf," published posthumously in Botteghe Oscure, 22 (1958). Her stories comment on the conflict between the sacred and the mundane; they possess, in Donald Windham's words, "the fault, or virtue, of viewing contemporary events as though they are timeless." In a 1942 journal Ryan, looking back on the stories she once wrote, had noted: "I have had the best agent in New York and yet she has never been able to place a single line anywhere. I still believe" (quoted in Windham, p. 271). It is as a visual artist, however, most particularly in the medium of collage, that Anne Ryan made her chief contribution and it is her collages that earn her a place in the history of American art. Looking back on her work the poet John Ashbery saw it as part of "the way of American art"; comparing her compositions to the work of Charles Ives, John Cage, and MARIANNE MOORE, he noted that Ryan's art also goes "beyond 'mysteries of construction'. . . into mysteries of being which, it turns out, have their own laws of construction" (Ashbery, p. 74). In her last years Anne Ryan shared a house

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Saarinen in Greenwich Village with her daughter. She suffered a stroke in the spring of 1954 and died in April at her son's home in Morristown, N.J. [Ryan's papers at the Archives of Am. Art, Washington, D.C., include correspondence, notebooks, MSS., documents, and an unpublished memoir by her daughter, Elizabeth McFadden. The catalog of the exhibition Anne Ryan Collages, Brooklyn Museum, March 13-April 21, 1974, contains an introduction

by Sarah Faunce, a chronology, a list of exhibitions, and a bibliography. Donald Windham, "A Note on Anne Ryan," Botteghe Oscure, 22 (1958), has biographical information as well as commentary on her writing. See also John Ashbery, "A Place for Everything," ART News, March 1970, and a review of the 1974 exhibition by Peter Frank in Art in America, Sept. 1974. Elizabeth McFadden provided helpful information.] SARAH C.

FAUNCE

S SAARINEN, Aline Milton Bernstein, March 25, 1914-JuIy 13, 1972. Art critic, television commentator. Aline Saarinen was born in New York City, the only daughter and the middle of three children of Allen Milton and Irma (Lewyn) Bernstein, both amateur painters. Her father, a native of New York City, headed an investment and industrial counseling firm. Bernstein's parents encouraged her to pursue artistic and cultural interests. In the twenty-fifth anniversary report of his Harvard class, her father described his family as "high-brow"; he also noted that Aline's ambition at fourteen was to be the Jane Austen of her day. She later remembered her girlhood goal as wanting to be "intelluptuous." On her first trip to Europe, when she was nine, her older brother, Charles, introduced her to the splendors of French chateaus and Gothic cathedrals; it was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to art and architecture. Bernstein attended the Fieldston School in New York City, graduated in 1931, and went on to Vassar College where the art courses she took with John McAndrew and Agnes Rindge were influential in her choice of a career. She was also active in campus journalism. An excellent student, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, awarded a Vassar College Fellowship, and graduated with an A.B. in 1935. Almost immediately after graduation, on June 17, 1935, Aline Bernstein married Joseph H. Louchheim, a public welfare administrator; they had two sons, Donald (b. 1937) and Harry (b. 1 9 3 9 ) . She enrolled in the fall of 1935 at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and graduated in 1941 with an A.M. in the history of architecture. During World War II she put aside a career in art to serve as executive secretary of the Allegheny County Rationing

Board in Pittsburgh and to work as a Red Cross nurse's aide in Washington, D.C., while her husband served in the navy. In February 1944, having returned with her family to New York City, Aline Louchheim joined the staff of Art Neivs magazine; from 1946 to 1948 she was its managing editor. She later claimed she had been given the job because she could spell the name of the fifteenth-century artist "Pollaiuolo." Her solid preparation in art and journalism and her tremendous drive and energy were the more likely causes, however. In 1946 the magazine sponsored a book, 5000 Years of Art: A Pictorial History, with commentary by Aline Louchheim. It was warmly praised in the New York Times (March 23, 1947) as a reflection of her personal experience rather than a catalog of art. In December 1947, she became associate art editor and art critic for the Times. During the next several years, she wrote on such topics as abstract art, the role of museums, and advertising in relation to art collecting for the Times, Atlantic Monthly, House Beautiful, and other publications. For her discussions of works of art as interpretations of the period in which they were made, she received significant accolades, including the International Award for Best Foreign Criticism at the Venice Biennale ( 1 9 5 1 ) and the American Federation of Arts Award for best newspaper criticism ( 1 9 5 3 ) . Aline and Joseph Louchheim were divorced in 1951. Two years later she interviewed the noted Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, then at the beginning of an extraordinary period during which he designed such buildings as the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich. ( 1 9 4 8 - 1 9 5 6 ) , and the Dulles International Terminal outside Washington, D.C. (1958-1962). In an admiring article, Louchheim praised him for "giving form or visual order to the industrial civilization to which he belongs . . . His buildings [have] become an expression

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Saarinen of our way of life." They were attracted to one another personally and, after Saarinen divorced his wife, they married in 1954. She moved to Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where his architectural firm had its headquarters, changed her by-line at the Times to Aline B. Saarinen, and became associate art critic, a status she retained until 1959. In December 1954, they had a son, Eames, named for the designer Charles Eames. The years with Eero Saarinen were productive for both. His office underwent tremendous expansion and he was busy designing the best buildings of his career. From 1954 to 1963 Aline Saarinen did public relations for his firm. With the aid of a Guggenheim fellowship awarded in 1957, she wrote The Proud Possessors ( 1 9 5 8 ) , a biographical study of major American art collectors whom she interpreted as paradigms of taste for their respective periods. It became a best seller and launched Aline Saarinen as a public personality. Eero Saarinen died unexpectedly in September 1961, leaving ten major buildings under construction. Aline Saarinen moved with the firm to New Haven, Conn., a change planned before his death, and became in a sense the public guardian of her husband's reputation. In 1962 she published Eero Saarinen on His Work. Aline Saarinen's third career began when she was almost fifty. She came into television, she later noted, by the "backdoor of art," having been asked in 1962 to appear on television to discuss Rembrandt's "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer" which the Metropolitan Museum of Art had recently purchased at an exorbitant price. Her informal and engaging manner, and her ability to be "highbrow without being highblown," led to more interviews and eventually to a career as a television art critic. Her association with Eero Saarinen no doubt contributed to her aura, but, as she stated, her success was due " 2 5 % to Eero and 7 5 % to me." In the fall of 1963 she became the art and architecture editor for the new "Sunday" show on the National Broadcasting Company ( N B C ) network and art critic for the daily "Today" show. With her usual verve she discussed topics from city planning to postage stamp design, and made such flamboyant gestures as listing the six worst manmade objects. She also won wide acclaim for her numerous specials and documentaries such as "The Art of Collecting" (NBC, Jan. 19, 1 9 6 4 ) . In October 1964 Saarinen became the third woman correspondent for NBC News, following Pauline Fredericks and Nancy Dickerson. Outspoken and authoritative, she turned her skill for trenchant observation to diverse topics, ranging from presidential inaugurations to economic

discrimination against women. As the moderator of "For Women Only," a panel show with questions from the audience, Saarinen dealt with such timely issues as abortion and birth control. In 1971, she was named chief of NBC's Paris News Bureau. The first woman ever to head an overseas television news bureau, she held the position until her death. She thrived on the intensity and total involvement her career demanded, once commenting that the "pace is dreadful. You almost have to be a widow to do it." Saarinen received many honors, including two honorary degrees. She was the only woman member of the Fine Arts Commission in Washington, D.C. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson offered her the post of ambassador to Finland, but she declined. Aline Saarinen died of a brain tumor in New York City in July 1972. In a 1966 lecture at Vassar she had commented that while "everyone is exposed to the raw material of experience, not everyone contends with it, not everyone imposes his style upon it." Saarinen not only created her own style but in so doing also played an important role as a translator of art and culture for the American public. [Aline Saarinen's papers are at the Archives of Am. Art, Washington, D.C. They have not been microfilmed and are restricted for an unspecified period. For biographical information see Current Biog., 1956, pp. 534-35; Joan Walker, "Women and the News," Cue, Aug. 14, 1965; "Art Expert or TV Personality?" an interview with Saarinen in the N.Y. Post, April 25, 1970; and articles in Time, July 2, 1956, and Nov. 3, 1967, and Newsweek, June 21, 1965. Eero Saarinen's obituary was in the N.Y. Times, Sept. 6, 1961; see also Allen Temku, Eero Saarinen (1962) and Rupert Spade, Eero Saarinen (1971). Obituaries of Aline Saarinen appeared in the Wash. Post and the N.Y. Times, both July 15, 1972. Memorial articles appeared in the N.Y. Times, July 23 (by John Canaday), Sept. 13, and Sept. 15, 1972.] MARGARET

SUPPLEE

SMITH

SABIN, Florence Rena, Nov. 9, 1 8 7 1 - O c t . 3, 1953. Physician, medical researcher. Florence Sabin was born in Central City, Colo., the second of two daughters of Serena (Miner) and George K. Sabin, who had both migrated from New England to the Colorado mining country. Two younger brothers died in infancy. Florence spent her early childhood in mining communities where her father worked as an engineer. Following her mother's death shortly after childbirth on Florence's seventh birthday, she and her sister, Mary, lived with

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relatives in Chicago and then Vermont. In 1889 she followed her sister to Smith College. There she became aware of the issues of women's rights for which she would quietly battle for the remainder of her life; there too she became interested in the burgeoning biological sciences. By the time she graduated with a B.S. in 1893 Florence Sabin had decided to study medicine, an early but unfulfilled interest of her father's. Needing first to earn enough to pay for her medical education, she taught mathematics in a Denver school for two years, then taught in Smith College's zoology department for a year. In 1896 she was part of the fourth class admitted to the Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she experienced the best medical education then available in the United States. When Sabin began her study of medicine, anatomy had just recently begun to emerge from its long descriptive phase to become an experimental science through studies in embryology and histology, subjects which would occupy her early career. Sabin was a fine all-around medical student, winning one of the four highly prized internships in internal medicine with William Osier at Johns Hopkins Hospital upon graduation. But it was Franklin P. Mall, professor of anatomy, who proved to be the strongest and most lasting influence upon her subsequent work. Mall's hallmark in teaching, as it would be Sabin's later as well, was to stimulate students to learn on their own, never to be so precise as to rob them of the joys of discovery. While she was still a student, Sabin undertook a project under Mall's guidance leading to the construction of a three-dimensional model of the mid- and lower brain. Adapted for publication in 1901, An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain was quickly adopted as a popular text. After completing her internship in 1901, Sabin chose to continue her work in anatomical and histological research. For a year she was supported by a fellowship from a group of Baltimore women who aided women's education. Then in 1902 she became an assistant in the department of anatomy, the first woman on the Hopkins medical faculty. (Her male colleagues at this time still referred to her as Miss rather than Dr. Sabin.) When she rose to the rank of full professor in 1917, she was again the first woman at the university to achieve that rank. During her early Hopkins years, Sabin concentrated her research mainly upon the origins of blood cells and the lymphatics, small vessels that transport lymph fluid. Probably her most significant scientific contribution was the demonstration that the lymphatics arise in the embryo by a series of small buds directly from the veins. By skillful injection of lymph channels with

colored solutions, and by the use of small pig embryos rather than the larger ones commonly used for such studies, she provided the histological evidence that controverted the older theory that the lymphatics arose from tissue spaces and then grew toward the veins. This work led to a number of widely cited papers and a chapter in the influential Manual of Human Embryology (1910-12) edited by Mall and Franz Keibel. On numerous summer trips to German laboratories Sabin brought back fresh ideas and new techniques. One for which she is usually given much credit is supra vital staining, the use of a nontoxic stain to study cells while still alive so that their vital processes may be observed. Though she used and helped popularize this important technique in her studies of the developing blood cells, one of her students, Herbert M. Evans, deserves the credit for its refinement and introduction in the United States. Sabin's twenty-five-year teaching career in the Hopkins anatomy department was a busy and satisfying period of her life. Soon after her appointment as an instructor in 1902, she began to help Ross Harrison teach the histology course; when he left for Yale in 1907 she took over the course. After Mall's death in 1917, Lewis Weed, who had been one of Sabin's students, succeeded to the chairmanship of the department. With disappointment but not apparent rancor, she continued to teach at Hopkins until 1925. A student in 1909 described her lectures as "very rapidly spoken" because "she was so enthusiastic in trying to correlate the scientific and medical aspect of anatomy," and also reported that Sabin would "tear up her notes after each lecture so that she would have to work it over the next year." She had many devoted students, a number of whom she influenced to follow scientific careers. Several became leaders in anatomy, immunology, and hematology. She won the respect and affection of medical students unaccustomed to women professors by her personal dignity, her generosity, and her contagious enthusiasm for medical science, all traits which made her a superb teacher. Indeed, important as her scientific research at Hopkins was, her teaching, and later her public service in Colorado, probably led to more lasting contributions. She shared with Mall a belief in the intimate connection between research and teaching: "Research lifts teaching to a high plane. No one can be a great educator unless he himself is an investigator." As she explained in her presidential address to the American Association of Anatomists, which elected her its first woman president in 1924: "All the class can be taught in the spirit of research, which

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Sabin means that it is more important for the student to be able to find out something for himself than to memorize what someone else has said." In 1925 Florence Sabin became the first woman elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the first of her sex to receive a full membership at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. At the Institute, where she worked for thirteen years in the second phase of her career, she headed a section that studied the cellular aspects of immunity. Her work was an extension of her earlier study of the development of blood cells in the embryo and in adult bone marrow, in which she recognized the prominence of the mononuclear blood cells. With coworkers at the Institute she elucidated the role of the monocytes in antigenantibody reactions and the role of the various fatty acids of the tubercle bacillus in the production of the typical cellular reactions to that bacterium. Her ties to Baltimore remained close, and she worked on the biography of her mentor, which was well received when it was published in 1934 as Franklin Paine Mall: The Story of a Mind. Sabin's study of Mall was partly autobiographical in that many of the attitudes toward research, medical education, and techniques of teaching she ascribed to Mall were also ones to which she adhered. Sabin retired to her native state in 1938 to live with her sister, Mary, with whom she had been close despite so many years of geographical separation. She remained active on a number of national advisory boards and carried on an extensive correspondence with her many former students and colleagues. In 1944 she began the third, and perhaps most remarkable, phase of her career when she was asked by Colorado Governor John Vivian to serve on his Post-War Planning Committee and assist in assessing tL state's health needs. Colorado had long considered itself a haven for those who sought to improve their health; it thus came as a shock when Sabin and the subcommittee on public health that she chaired publicized the facts p1 out an inefficient, politically controlled board or health hampered by insufficient funds, poorly trained staff, and inadequate laws. This persistent and dynamic woman in her middle seventies became known throughout her state as the "little doctor," and was seen as a pote" 1 political force. In her crusade for basic public health reforms in Colorado she used her long years of experience and her scientific skills very effectively. She gathered pertinent facts, traveled, spoke, and wrote extensively. With 1 ' riple but overwhelming evidence, she persuaded colleagues on committees, legislators,

and state officials to support a reorganized and better financed public health program. She worked tirelessly for successful passage of a series of health laws drafted by her committee and known as the Sabin program. In 1947 Mayor James Quigg Newton of Denver persuaded her to accept appointment as chairman of the Interim Board of Health and Hospitals of Denver, a post she held until 1951. In her Sippy Memorial Address to the western branch of the American Public Health Association, of which she had been president in 1948, she demonstrated that at the age of eighty-one she was still actively concerned and informed about environmental health issues. Florence Sabin died in Denver in 1953 of a heart attack just short of her eighty-second birthday. Among the many honors she had received as a scientist, as a woman, and as a civic reformer were numerous honorary degrees and buildings named for her at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and at Smith College. One of the two Coloradans represented by statues in the United States Capitol, she was one of the foremost women medical scientists of her era. [The Florence Rena Sabin Papers at the Am. Phil. Soc. Library in Philadelphia contain a bibliography, biographical material, and extensive correspondence. The Florence Rena Sabin Coll. in the Sophia Smith Coll., Smith College, includes biographical and genealogical information, scientific studies, lecture notes, notebooks, memorabilia, and photographs, as well as correspondence; many letters to her sister, Mary, and to Ella Strong Dennison shed light on her personal concerns as well as her scientific career. Her numerous scientific papers appeared for the most part in Contributions to Embryology ( a publication of the Carnegie Institution, Washington, D . C . ) , Science, and publications of the institutions where she worked. The most complete book about Sabin, which includes a bibliography, is Elinor Bluemel, Florence Sabin: Colorado Woman of the Century ( 1 9 5 9 ) . Mary K. Phelan, Probing the Unknown ( 1 9 6 9 ) , is for younger readers. The best treatment of Sabin's scientific contributions is Philip D. McMaster and Michael Heidelberger, "Florence Rena Sabin," Biog. Memoirs Nat. Acad, of Sciences, 34 ( 1 9 6 0 ) , 271-319, which also contains a bibliography. See also Vincent T. Andriole, "Florence Rena Sabin—Teacher, Scientist, Citizen," Jour. Hist. Medicine and Allied Sciences, July 1959, pp. 3 2 0 - 5 0 ; George W. Corner, A History of the Rockefeller Institute, 1901-1953 ( 1 9 6 4 ) , pp. 2 3 8 - 3 9 ; Lawrence S. Kubie, "Florence Rena Sabin, 1 8 7 1 - 1 9 5 3 , " Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Spring 1961, pp. 3 0 6 - 1 5 ; John H. Talbott, A Biographical History of Medicine ( 1 9 7 0 ) , pp. 1181-83; Edna Yost, American Women of Science ( 1 9 4 3 ) , pp. 6 2 - 7 9 ; and the entries in Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five, and Diet. Scientific Biog., vol. 12 ( 1 9 7 5 ) . An obituary ap-

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Sabin peared in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 4, 1953. Death certificate supplied by Colo. Dept. of Public Health.] GERT H. BRIEGER

SABIN, Pauline Morton, April 23, 1887-Dec. 27, 1955. Prohibition repeal leader, Republican party official, interior decorator. Pauline Morton Sabin, a leader of the movement to repeal the eighteenth amendment, was the younger of two daughters of Paul and Charlotte (Goodridge) Morton. She was raised in a political family: her grandfather, J. Sterling Morton, was United States secretary of agriculture ( 1 8 9 3 - 9 7 ) , as well as senator and governor of Nebraska; her father, a railroad executive and later president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, served as secretary of the navy from 1904 to 1905. In addition, her uncle founded Morton Salt, and she inherited several million dollars from the company fortune. Born in Chicago, Pauline Morton attended private schools there and in Washington, D.C.; she also traveled abroad and developed a lasting interest in the fine and decorative arts. On Feb. 2, 1907, she married James Hopkins Smith, Jr., a wealthy New York yachting and sports enthusiast. They had two sons, Paul Morton ( 1 9 0 8 - 1 9 5 6 ) and James Hopkins (b. 1 9 0 9 ) , who became assistant secretary of the navy for air (1952—56). At the beginning of World War I, after her husband left to serve in the French ambulance corps, Pauline Smith obtained a divorce and began an interior decorating business. She gave up the business when, on Dec. 28, 1916, she married recently divorced Charles H. Sabin, president of Guaranty Trust Company of New York. Pauline and Charles Sabin maintained an estate at Southampton, Long Island, as well as a house in New York City, and were active in New York's social elite. Soon after remarrying, she renewed her interest in politics, sharing her father's allegiance to the Republican party despite her husband's active support for the Democrats. In 1919 Pauline Sabin was elected to the Suffolk County Republican Committee and the following year joined the party's state executive committee. She helped establish the New York-based Women's National Republican Club, serving as its president from 1921 to 1926. When women were added to the Republican National Committee, as advisers in 1923 and full members a year later, Sabin became New York's first woman representative. She was a delegate to the Republican National Conventions of 1924 and 1928, cochaired Sen. James Wadsworth's unsuccessful 1926 reelection campaign, and directed

women's activities for the Coolidge and Hoover presidential campaigns in the east. A skillful organizer and fund raiser, she favored a business-minded and isolationist government. She also consistently encouraged women to participate more actively in politics. Pauline Sabin first began to criticize national prohibition in 1926 in defending Wadsworth's opposition to the eighteenth amendment. Earlier she had favored the law. In June 1928 she wrote in The Outlook that prohibition was diverting and corrupting public officials; rather than protecting children from temptation, the widely violated law was causing them to grow up "with a total lack of respect for the Constitution and for the law." Elsewhere, she expressed concern over growing federal government power as represented by the liquor ban and the steps taken to enforce it. In March 1929 she resigned from the Republican National Committee and a month later denounced the Hoover administration for supporting prohibition. She enlisted a group of other socially prominent, upper-class women and on May 28 in Chicago announced formation of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform ( W O N P R ) . The W O N P R cooperated closely with the all-male Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, in which Charles Sabin had been active since the early 1920s, but remained independent of that older society and eventually grew much larger than its counterpart. By its first national convention in April 1930, the W O N P R had 100,000 members, and by 1933 it claimed 1,500,000, making it over three times the size of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Small, slender, and attractive, Pauline Sabin was the WONPR's national chairman, driving force, and most visible representative—writing, speaking, appearing on the cover of Time, testifying before congressional committees, lobbying both parties, and building support for repeal. The membership, publicity, and grassroots campaigning of the W O N P R destroyed the myth that all women favored prohibition and encouraged the political revolt against the liquor ban. Sabin's group became the first antiprohibition organization to endorse the 1932 Democratic repeal platform and ticket. When the repeal amendment was ratified in December 1933, the W O N P R disbanded. Pauline Sabin cochaired Fiorello La Guardia's 1933 New York mayoral campaign. After repeal, however, her political involvement waned, although she served on the American Liberty League's executive committee and campaigned for Alfred M. Landon in 1936. She was widowed Oct. 10, 1933, and on May 8, 1936, married a

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Sage widower, Dwight F. Davis, former secretary of war ( 1 9 2 5 - 2 9 ) , governor general of the Philippines ( 1 9 2 9 - 3 2 ), and donor of the international tennis trophy, the Davis Cup. In May 1940, Pauline Davis was named director of volunteer special services of the American Red Cross. Under her wartime leadership, the number of Red Cross volunteers working in blood banks and canteens, making bandages and garments, serving as nurse's aides, and assisting families of servicemen grew from 53,000 to over 4,000,000. She resigned in December 1943, after a dispute over policy issues. After 1943 Pauline Davis remained active in Washington society, serving as a consultant on White House redecoration during the Truman administration. She also cared for her elder son's three children. For three years before her death she suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; she died of bronchopneumonia in Washington in 1955. [Although no collection of Pauline Morton Sabin papers survives, much information regarding her activities can be found in the WONPR files of the Pierre S. du Pont Papers at Eleutherian Mills Hist. Library and in the archives of the American Red Cross. The principal published sources of information on her antiprohibition activities are Grace C. Root, Women and Repeal: The Story of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (1934), and David E. Kyvig, "Women Against Prohibition," Am. Quart., Fall 1976. The Time cover story of July 18, 1932, is the most useful of numerous contemporary magazine or newspaper accounts. For her resignation from the Red Cross, see Foster Rhea Dulles, The American Red Cross: A History ( 1950 ). See also Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times and Wash. Post, Dec. 28, 1955. Her son, James Hopkins Smith III, also provided useful information. Death record from D.C. Health Dept.] DAVID

E.

KYVIG

SAGE, Kay Linn, June 25, 1898-Jan. 8, 1963. Painter. Kay Sage, painter and poet, was born in Albany, N.Y., where her great-grandfather had been a lumberman and a benefactor of Cornell University. Her father, Henry Manning Sage, who attended Yale, became president of the family business, the Sage Land Improvement Company; he was also a Cornell trustee and a New York state senator. Her mother, Anne Wheeler (Ward) Sage, was unconventional and restless and never quite adjusted to the conservative and socially prominent Sage family. To escape, Anne Sage traveled regularly to

France, always taking Kay, the younger and her favorite of her two daughters. In "China Eggs," an unpublished autobiography written in 1955, Kay Sage recalled her childhood love of Paris, where she rode donkeys, pushed hoops, and went on the merry-go-rounds in the Tuileries. Her parents divorced before she was ten and from then on her life was split between Italy, where her mother rented the same villa in Rapallo every year, and the United States, where her father (and, usually, her sister) lived and where Kay sometimes went to school. Kay Sage's education was haphazard, as her mother did not hesitate to take her out of school to travel. Between January 1911 and March 1914 she was a student at the fashionable Brearley School in New York City, although for some months in 1913 she was in Europe. She became fluent in French and Italian, as well as English, although a later poem comically notes that while she can "write in all of these . . . at best, they are translations, / I think in Chinese" (from The More I Wonder). Sage felt particularly at home on ships, suspended between continents, or floating down the Nile, but Italy soon became her country, as Paris had earlier been her city. In 1914, with the beginning of World War I, Sage came back to the United States. She went to the Foxcroft School in Virginia for a year, then to the Corcoran Art School in Washington, D.C., where she seldom attended classes. She had drawn and painted all her life, but had little use for instruction. When the war ended, Kay Sage returned to Italy. Moving to Rome in order to study art seriously, she took life study courses at the Scuolo Libera delle Belli Arti and other academies, always staying away when the professor came to criticize. In Rome she met Onorato Carlandi, an artist who had a deep influence on her, teaching her "to think as I hadn't thought to think before." The only woman admitted to his group of artists who went once a week to paint in the Roman Campagna, she later remembered these as "the happiest days of my life." It was during these years that the surrealists were transforming the art world in Paris. Sage, in Rome, married an Italian prince, Ranieri di San Faustino, in 1925. The marriage ended in divorce in 1935 and there seems little to be said about Sage's painting during those ten years. She had her first solo show in 1936, in Milan; the following year she moved to Paris. Most of her work in the late 1930s, in contrast to her early landscapes and portraits, was abstract. André Breton, leader of the surrealist group in

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Sage Paris, saw Kay Sage's paintings at the Salon des Surindependants; he identified them as the work of a man because of their strength. Through acquaintance with Breton and other surrealists, Kay Sage met the painter Yves Tanguy; they were immediately attracted to each other. In 1939, however, with the outbreak of World War II, Sage returned to the United States. There she immediately set out to help those who were left in Paris. With the help of Yvon Delbos, French minister of education, she organized a series of one-man shows for artists working in Paris; Yves Tanguy inaugurated the series. Sage and Tanguy were married on Aug. 17, 1940, and shortly after moved to Woodbury, Conn. That year she had her first solo exhibition in the United States, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City. Sage and Tanguy lived in an old farmhouse, where each had a studio, and where they frequently entertained such friends as the artists Hans Richter, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp; gallery owner Julien Levy, in whose gallery Sage had a 1944 show; and curator James Thrall Soby. Yves Tanguy died suddenly in 1955 and Kay Sage became more and more reclusive. She continued to paint and to write poetry in both French and English until 1958, when her eyesight began to fail. After a double cataract operation, she never regained complete vision; she stopped painting. In 1959, she took an overdose of barbiturates but recovered. Catherine Viviano, her dealer for fourteen years, organized, at her own expense, a retrospective exhibition of Sage's work in order to give her the will to live and continue painting. Sage began a series of collages and objects made of tinfoil, doorknobs, eyeglass lenses, and other such materials and completed a book of poems, Mordicus (1962), printed and illustrated by Jean Dubuffet. She also worked on cataloguing the work of Yves Tanguy, but her reconciliation with life was superficial. On Jan. 8, 1963, at her home in Connecticut, she shot herself through the heart and died. In a characteristically meticulous will, Sage asked that her work be distributed by three close friends: James Thrall Soby, John Monagan, and Catherine Viviano. Through their efforts, major museums and colleges throughout the United States own her paintings, as well as the works of art she had collected and cherished. She bequeathed to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City nearly one hundred works of art from her extensive collection. In addition, she left to the Museum the largest legacy of unrestricted purchase funds it had yet received. Kay Sage never talked about her paintings,

believing they could "speak for themselves." The paintings speak of infinity, space, and obstacles. In Sage's paintings, as in Tanguy's, the landscapes appear to come from another planet, but in her work there are constructions, scaffoldings, rigging, and towers, familiar objects from our modern world presented in a dreamlike fashion. These objects are carefully structured and harmonious, but some of them have collapsed, as if pushed by an adverse force that has disappeared after destroying their delicate balance. The colors in her paintings are at once subtle and glowing, reminiscent of the sulphurous light before a thunderstorm. Occasionally, bright mysterious objects dot the landscapes, providing a respite along an endless journey. The figures in the landscapes are human, but veiled, walking blindly to their destiny. The paths they follow look mysterious, tantalizing, and sometimes treacherous, leading to vast surfaces on the sea or on the desert. In 1955 she wrote: "I walk very quickly over a thin layer of ice. Below, the lake is deep. I am alone. There is nothing, even on the horizon. If I stop, even for a second, the ice breaks, and down I go . . . There is no other side." [Sage's papers in the Archives of Am. Art, Washington, D.C., include correspondence, photographs of her work, and "China Eggs," the most complete record available of her life. Sage's other published works are Piove in Giardino (1937), as Kay di San Faustino; Demain, Monsieur Silber (1957); The More I Wonder ( 1957 ) ; Faut dire c'qui est ( 1959 ) ; and Yves Tanguy, A Summary of His Work ( 1963 ). For biographical information see Régine Tessier Krieger's introduction to Kay Sage, 1898-1963, catalog of an exhibition at the Hubert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell Univ., which contains a chronology and partial bibliography; A Tribute to Kay Sage (1965), catalog of an exhibition at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Conn., with an introduction by Talcott Clapp; and the catalog of the Catherine Viviano Gallery, Kay Sage Retrospective, 1937-1958 (1960), with an essay by James Thrall Soby. See also Paul Cummings, Diet. Contemporary Am. Artists (1977); Linda Nochlin and Ann S. Harris, Women Artists ( 1977 ). Discussions of her work include Ralph M. Pearson, The Modern Renaissance in American Art (1954, 1968), pp. 284-86; James Thrall Soby, "Double Solitaire: Retrospective Exhibition at Wadsworth Atheneum," Sat. Rev., Sept. 4, 1954, pp. 29-30, on a Sage-Tanguy exhibition; Julien Levy, "Tanguy, Connecticut, Sage," ART News, Sept. 1954, pp. 24-27; a brief review by Margaret Breuning, "A Kay Sage Retrospective," Arts, May 1960; and two articles in Time, "Serene Surrealist," March 13, 1950, p. 49, and "Séance in Connecticut," Aug. 30, 1954, p. 58. A biobibliography by Christie D. Stephenson lists further reviews of Sage exhibitions.]

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St. Denis

ST. DENIS, Ruth, Jan. 20, 1879-July 21, 1968. Dancer. Ruth St. Denis was born Ruth Dennis, in New Jersey, the eldest child of Thomas Laban and Ruth Emma (Hull) Dennis, both born in England. Her father's family had migrated to Boonton, N.J., where Thomas Dennis later enlisted in the New Jersey Cavalry in the Civil War. The Hulls came in the 1840s to Canandaigua, N.Y., in the heart of the "burned-over district" of religious revivalism, where Emma Hull became a staunch Methodist. In 1872 Hull graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School, but a nervous breakdown prevented her practice of medicine, and she drifted to the Eagleswood colony of artists and intellectuals near Perth Amboy, N.J. There she met Thomas Dennis. He divorced his first wife in 1878 and entered a common-law marriage with Emma Hull, who was pregnant. Their hasty exchange of vows in an artist's studio haunted their daughter, who as Ruth St. Denis became extraordinarily sensitive to social proprieties, as well as fearful of pregnancy. In 1884 the Dennises moved to a farm near Somerville, N.J., joined by Thomas Dennis's adolescent son by his first marriage; their own son, Brother, was born in 1885. The family took in paying boarders, for Thomas Dennis, a machinist and amateur inventor, drank heavily and was unemployed. Ruthie Dennis escaped family quarrels by playacting and practicing Delsarte poses before the family boarders. Extroverted and athletic, she once answered the taunts of a schoolmate at the local one-room Adamsville school by bashing his head with a rusty coal shovel. She studied dancing in Somerville until anxious relatives financed a term at Dwight Moody's Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts during the fall of 1893. There she argued with the famed evangelist over the merits of the theater and fled home in time to star in her mother's amateur production of "The Old Homestead." Emma Dennis took her protégée on to New York for an audition with Karl Marwig, "master of dance" for the producer Augustin Daly, and during the week of Jan. 29, 1894, "Ruth," as she was billed, made her debut as a skirt dancer at Worth's Museum. For a decade thereafter she appeared in roof garden concerts and variety revues, helping to support both parents, who were then separated. During 1896-97 she attended the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., excelling in French, but forsook further schooling for acting-dancing roles on the legitimate stage. While touring with David Belasco's Madame

DuBarry in 1904, she spotted the advertisement for Egyptian Deities cigarettes which provided the catalyst for the Oriental style of her solo dance career. Her interest in Orientalia and mysticism had grown after her discovery of Christian Science; under the influence of the actor Edmund Russell she explored ancient religions, appearing with Russell in the Sanskrit drama Sakuntala in 1905. These influences led to the creation of "Radha," an Oriental dance-drama which launched her fame. She unveiled "Radha" in a "smokers' concert" (attended primarily by men) at the New York Theatre on Jan. 28, 1906, and first used her stage name, Ruth St. Denis, at a performance in March of that year. "Radha" proved a blueprint for later St. Denis dances, with its virginal female deity, its Manichean theme, and its iconographic movements. St. Denis toured Europe during 1906-09 and returned home with the cachet of international success to tour America as a solo dancer. Her mother remained her most rigorous critic and barred the door to St. Denis suitors. In 1914, however, Emma Dennis's mental condition deteriorated and she soon entered a sanitarium, beginning a period for St. Denis of several years of responsibility for the care of both parents. St. Denis found new inspiration and guidance from the divinity student-turned-dancer Ted Shawn, who had come to her New York studio in 1914 hoping to become her student. They were married on Aug. 13, 1914. Moving to Los Angeles in 1915 they founded Denishawn, the company and school which became the seedbed of American modern dance, counting among its students Martha Graham, DORIS H U M P H R E Y , and Charles Weidman. Ted Shawn was the organizational genius behind the school, while "Miss Ruth" contributed lofty philosophical monologues and solo dance demonstrations, ever the grand lady on and off stage. Essentially a soloist, St. Denis felt trapped in the lavish Denishawn productions and in 1919 broke away briefly with her own company of Ruth St. Denis Concert Dancers to perform "music visualizations," the translation of musical compositions into movement. Economic necessity forced her back into Denishawn, an instance of the recurring tension in her career between experimentation and popular art. She once wrote bitterly that "the 'caviar to the many' is tragedy for the artist . . . and paradoxically my whole art life has been a slow tragedy." Unlike her contemporary, ISADORA DUNCAN, who revolutionized movement, St. Denis was destined to be a dance popularizer, and throughout the 1920s she brought dance to small-town

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America as the central icon in Denishawn productions. In 1 9 2 5 - 2 6 the company toured the Orient and brought its repertoire home for touring, including the exquisite St. Denis solo, "White Jade." A new Denishawn house was built in New York, but with the depression, both Denishawn and its founders' marriage dissolved. Separated in 1931 but never divorced, Shawn and St. Denis argued over extramarital affairs, professional jealousy, her fear of pregnancy, and his preference for males. Shawn left to form his own company of male dancers while St. Denis embarked on a bitter decade of meager earnings and professional eclipse. Outmoded in the context of the emerging modern dance, St. Denis formed the Society of Spiritual Arts, intended to further dance as a form of worship, gave private concerts, wrote poetry, and performed in churches until the end of the decade when she began that transformation into myth which resurrected her career. With her designation as dance director of Adelphi College in New York in 1938, the publication of her autobiography in 1939, and her triumphant revival of "Radha" at Shawn's Jacob's Pillow in 1941, St. Denis earned the title of "First Lady of American Dance." In 1940 she founded the School of Natya in New York with the dancer La Meri, and in late 1942 moved to Hollywood, where her brother provided a studio-home. From this base she performed in concerts and plays for two more decades. Her keen intellect and earthy wit were undiminished, and she never lost the ability to project her personal magnetism on stage. The culmination of the mythmaking process came in 1964 with her Golden Wedding celebration concert with Shawn, with whom St. Denis had maintained a long-distance friendship. On July 21, 1968, St. Denis died in Hollywood of a stroke. Her ashes were buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery, where her grave marker bears the lines of a St. Denis poem: "The Gods have meant/That I should dance,/And by the Gods/ I will!" [A vast collection of Ruth St. Denis's diaries, letters, musical scores, photographs, and personal documents is housed in the Special Collections of the Univ. Research Library, the Univ. of Calif, at Los Angeles, with an additional collection particularly rich in correspondence, iconography, and film housed in the Dance Coll. of the N.Y. Public Library. St. Denis's own published writings include her impressionistic autobiography, An Unfinished Life (1939), and a volume of poetry, Lotus Light (1932). She also wrote extensively in popular journals and in The Denishawn Mag. (1924-25). Ted Shawn paid tribute to her early career in the lavish Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer and Prophet (1920) and added valuable information in his own memoir,

One Thousand and One-Night Stands (1960). St. Denis's friend Walter Terry has written the only biography, the affectionate Miss Ruth: The 'More Living Life' of Ruth St. Denis (1969); see also Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced (1979). Christena L. Schlundt's contributions include a chronology and index of dances (1906-32), The Professional Appearances of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn (1962); a dissertation, "The Role of Ruth St. Denis in the History of American Dance" (Univ. of Calif, at Claremont, 1958); "Into the Mystic With Miss Ruth," Dance Perspectives (1971); and "An Account of Ruth St. Denis in Europe, 1906-1909," Am. Assoc. for Health, Physical Education, Recreation Research Quart., 1960. Dance history surveys with sections on St. Denis include Charles and Caroline Caffin, Dancing and Dancers of Today (1912); Troy and Margaret Kinney, The Dance (1914); Margaret Lloyd, The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (1949); Paul Magriel, ed., Chronicles of the American Dance (1948); Lillian Moore, Artists of the Dance (1938); Don McDonagh, The Complete Guide to Modern Dance (1976). Walter Terry, "The Legacy of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis," Dance Perspectives (1960) is a useful analysis. The year of St. Denis's birth has been variously given as 1877, 1878, 1879, and 1880; no birth certificate exists. The Jan. 20, 1879, date is based on several sources: the date on her tombstone and on her death certificate; the U.S. Census (1880) for Perth Amboy, N.J.; an affidavit in the Thomas L. Dennis file, Bureau of Pensions, in the U.S. Navy Archives, Washington, D.C. A death certificate was provided by Calif. Dept. of Public Health.] SUZANNE

SHELTON

SANDOZ, Mari, May 11, 1896-March 10, 1966. Writer. Mari Sandoz, biographer, historian, teacher, and writer of fiction, was the oldest of the three daughters and three sons of Jules Ami Sandoz and his fourth wife, Marie Elizabeth ( F e h r ) , both German-Swiss immigrants. Her father, a medical student at the University of Zurich, emigrated from Neuchátel in 1881 and homesteaded in northwestern Nebraska in 1884. Her mother came from Schaffhausen. Born Marie Susette at Jules Sandoz's first homestead beside the Niobrara River in Sheridan County, her earliest education sprang from the demands of an isolated frontier household. She learned to trap, hunt, skin, bake, and care for the younger children. What another child might have gleaned from books, she learned from the region's storytellers—trappers, cattlemen, Indians—who gathered round the family's wood stove. Her father's wide-ranging intellectual interests—he was a well-known horticulturist, as well as a locator for settlers and an avid participant in local politics—stimulated her

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Sandoz natural curiosity and conveyed a sympathy for the world's disinherited. Her mother's harsh and difficult life, and her courage, created in her daughter both admiration and pity. At nine, speaking Swiss-German and a few words of English, Marie Sandoz began school, walking six miles a day. She quickly learned to read and was soon devouring novels and magazines despite her father's objections to fiction. Hawthorne, Conrad, and Hardy were favorite authors. After only four and a half years of schooling, and despite absences when snowblinded at twelve and during a bad case of jaundice, Sandoz passed the rural teachers' examination at age sixteen. For the next seven years she taught in schools in Sheridan and Cheyenne (Neb.) counties. In May 1914 she married Wray Macumber, a homesteader from Iowa; they were divorced in August 1919. Sandoz did not speak publicly about her marriage, although she signed her early stories Marie Macumber. In the summer session of 1922 Sandoz enrolled as an "adult special" at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, beginning a ten-year period of intermittent study concentrated on English and writing. She supported herself through a variety of jobs, working in a drug laboratory, as an assistant in the university's English department, and as a proofreader. She had decided to become a writer almost as soon as she learned to write, and at ten had published a story in the Omaha Daily News. The first issue of Prairie Schooner (1927) opened with her story, "The Vine." Her father had once told her that he considered "artists and writers the maggots of society." But his dying wish, in 1928, that she write "of his struggles as a locator, a builder of communities, a bringer of fruit to the Panhandle," gave her a subject rich and complex enough for her developing art. Living frugally but joyfully, despite her disappointment at the rejection of many stories, Sandoz devoted herself to the biography of Old Jules. In it, she recreated not only the struggles of her family but also the story of Nebraska as it moved from pioneer days into the twentieth century. At the height of the depression in 1933, when the judges of the Atlantic nonfiction contest (conducted by the Atlantic Monthly magazine) rejected the manuscript of Old Jules, Mari Sandoz decided to give up; she burned more than seventy-five stories and returned, despondent, to her family's sandhills homestead. Her spirit soon revived. When she went back to Lincoln in 1934, to a research job at the Nebraska State Historical Society, she resubmitted Old Jules to the Atlantic judges. In 1935 it won their $5,000 prize for the most interesting

and distinctive work of nonfiction and was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. These events marked a turning point in Sander's career. Old Jules (1935) became the first of the Trans-Missouri series which examines the long history of human occupation in the region between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. The series includes Crazy Horse (1942), a biography of a chief of the Oglala Sioux; Cheyenne Autumn ( 1 9 5 2 ) ; and three books about the men who used the land's resources, The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Cattlemen (1958), and The Beaver Men (1964). These volumes are distinguished by the breadth of Sandoz's vision of this immense territory, the accuracy of her research, and the beauty of her prose. To convey her sense of "the hardship, the violence and gaiety" of life on the high plains, as well as her feeling for the "deep, complex, and patterned interrelationships" of American Indian cultures she developed a style characterized by figures of speech drawn from nature, regional idioms, and rhythmical use of language. In Crazy Horse she fulfilled her purpose of expressing the Indian's "relationship to the earth and the sky and all that is in between." Cheyenne Autumn narrates the epic flight of a band of northern Cheyenne to their homeland on the Yellowstone River. Together they reveal Mari Sandoz's understanding of her Plains Indian neighbors. Sandoz's novels and short fiction reflect the concern for social justice evidenced in the TransMissouri series as well as her interest in fundamental human conflict and the relation of people to the land. Slogum House (1937), a novel about Nebraska in pioneering times, explores the psychology of a domineering "will-to-power individual" who turned "every honest, good, and beautiful thing about her to her end." Sandoz viewed her next book, Capital City ( 1 9 3 9 ) , as "a microscopic study of a unit of modern democratic society selling itself into fascism" (Meredith, p. 385). Though neither novel was as well received as her historical works, they are serious experiments in allegorical fiction. Like her later novels-The Tom-Walker (1947), Miss Morissa: Doctor of the Gold Trail ( 1 9 5 5 ) , and Son of the Gamblin' Man (I960)—they are eminently readable. Vitality, good humor, generosity, a "rapport with persons of all ages and backgrounds," and a capacity for intense activity typified Sandoz throughout her career (Switzer, p. 113). For many summers she taught creative writing: at the University of Colorado (1941) and at Indiana University ( 1 9 4 6 ) , and for several years at the summer Writers' Institute at the

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Sandoz University of Wisconsin ( 1 9 4 7 - 5 3 ; 1 9 5 5 - 5 6 ) . She won appropriate honors: among them an honorary degree from the University of Nebraska ( 1 9 5 0 ) and an award from The Westerners, Chicago Corral, for her preservation of the cultural history of the west ( 1 9 5 5 ) . After 1943 she lived simply and alone in New York City's Greenwich Village, continuing her habit of working long hours on research and writing. The move enabled her to be near her publishers and to use eastern research libraries. She had a mastectomy in 1954 and another ten years later. During this period, in addition to the three late novels, she published two short novels for young readers, The Horsecatcher ( 1 9 5 6 ) and The Story Catcher ( 1 9 6 3 ) , as well as These Were the Sioux ( 1 9 6 1 ) , a perceptive account of custom and belief which also contains many fine chapters on Sioux women, and Love Song to the Plains ( 1 9 6 1 ) . During the last year and a half of her life she finished The Battle of the Little Big Horn ( 1 9 7 8 ) and The Christmas of Phonograph Records: A Recollection ( 1 9 6 6 ) . Mari Sandoz died of cancer in March 1966, in St. Luke's Hospital, New York City. She was buried, according to her wishes, in the sandhills of Nebraska. [The principal manuscript sources are in the Mari Sandoz Coll. at the Univ. of Nebraska in Lincoln. Materials there include her research files, a vast accumulation of notes and interviews, MSS., correspondence, maps, and her extensive cross index for the research material. Other MSS. and many photographs are held by the Mari Sandoz Corporation, Gordon, Neb. Many of her short writings were collected in Hostiles and Friendlies (1959), which has a biographical introduction to each selection, and Sandhills Sundays and Other Recollections (1970), which also contains a Sandoz chronology and a checklist of her writings. Making of an Author: From the Mementoes of Mari Sandoz (1972), a booklet by her sister, Caroline Sandoz Pifer, includes letters, stories, articles, and many early photographs. Helen Arlene Winter StaufFer, "Mari Sandoz: A Study of the Artist as Biographer" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Neb., 1974), analyzes the three biographies of the TransMissouri series. Two essays based on personal acquaintance are Dorothy Nott Switzer, "Mari Sandoz's Lincoln Years: A Personal Recollection," Prairie Schooner, Summer 1971, and Mamie J. Meredith, "Mari Sandoz," in Virginia Faulkner, ed., Roundup: A Nebraska Reader (1957), pp. 382-86. See also La Verne Harrell Clark, "The Indian Writings of Mari Sandoz: 'A Lone One Left from the Old Times,'" American Indian Quart., Autumn 1974 and Winter 1974-75; and Scott L. Greenwell, "The Literary Apprenticeship of Mari Sandoz," Nebraska Hist., Summer 1976, and "Fascists in Fiction: Two Early Novels of Mari Sandoz," Western American Lit., Summer 1977. Dates of her marriage and divorce were obtained from the Sheridan Cty. Court

and the District Court, Sheridan Cty., Neb. Contemporary Authors and Twentieth Century Authors give Sandoz's birth year incorrectly as 1901, as does her obituary in the N.Y. Times, March 11, 1966; 1896 is confirmed by all other sources. Caroline Sandoz Pifer provided information about her sister and the family in an interview with Sheryll Patterson-Black.] GAIL

BAKER

SANGER, Margaret, Sept. 14, 1 8 7 9 - S e p t . 6, 1966. Birth control reformer. Margaret Sanger, leader of the American birth control movement, was born Margaret Louise Higgins in Corning, N.Y., the sixth of eleven children and third of four daughters of Anne (Purcell) and Michael Hennessey Higgins, owner and operator of a stone monument shop. Anne Higgins maintained the Roman Catholic faith of her Irish ancestors, but Michael Higgins, who ran away from a Canadian farm as a teenager to fight with the Union army, was an outspoken champion of the ideas of the atheist Robert Ingersoll and of the single-tax advocate Henry George. The two eldest Higgins daughters sacrificed their ambitions to family need and worked to supplement a family income that always seemed inadequate to Margaret Higgins. She associated both her mother's tubercular cough and the family's financial insecurity with her parents' high fertility. Anne Higgins died when she was forty-nine, prematurely aged, in her third daughter's view, by the endless drudgery of raising eleven children on the income provided by a man who was usually too busy arguing great social issues to attend to business. Michael Higgins lived past eighty. The contrast between her parents' fates was one source of Margaret Sanger's ambition to win reproductive autonomy for women. Despite her determination to escape the family martyrdom of her mother and her sisters, Margaret Higgins loved her father as "a philosopher, a rebel, and an artist." He encouraged independence in his children and treated her as an intellectual ally with whom he discussed the free silver issue as well as woman suffrage and dress reform. Yet Michael Higgins, a physically imposing man, also expected from his children the deference due a Victorian patriarch. While Margaret Higgins shared her father's ideal of self-reliance, she longed for the security and status precluded by his controversial opinions and indifference to business, and her childhood was shaped by rebellion against authority. After an eighth grade teacher mocked a new pair of elegant gloves, a gift from her eldest sister, she refused to continue school in Corn-

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ing. Her two older sisters then paid her tuition at Claverack College, a private coeducational preparatory school in the Catskills. Although she had to work in the kitchen for room and board, Higgins loved the genteel Claverack and "never wanted to return home." After three happy years at Claverack, Higgins took a job teaching first grade to immigrant children in Little Falls, N.J., but discovered that she was "not suited by temperament" for the task. Obeying her father's summons, she returned to Corning, where her mother was dying of tuberculosis. Michael Higgins expected her to manage his household with the stoic resourcefulness of a traditional wife, but she resented the burden, particularly after he locked her out of the house one night for returning past his ten o'clock curfew. She escaped Corning a second time by entering the new nursing school of White Plains (N.Y.) Hospital. The arduous duties of a nurse probationer were interrupted by a series of operations for tubercular glands, a condition that Higgins believed she had contracted while nursing her mother. In 1902 she was completing two years of practical nursing and had just been accepted into a three-year degree program when she married William Sanger, an architect who hoped to establish himself as an artist. Reluctant to marry because she felt that she was wasting both her sisters' sacrifices for her education and her own ambition, she explained to one sister: "He made me marry him, now or never he said." Pregnant within six months, Margaret Sanger spent most of her confinement at an Adirondack sanatorium. She delivered a son, Stuart, with great difficulty in 1903, and was sent back to the sanatorium by her doctor, who feared that she would be an invalid for life. Developing a revulsion against the treatment, however, she decided to attempt a normal life no matter what the consequences and the following year returned to her family in New York City on her own initiative. Her health improved, and the Sangers built a home in suburban Westchester County; a second son, Grant, was born in 1908 and a daughter, Margaret (Peggy), in 1910. About this time Margaret Sanger became conscious of an increasing dissatisfaction with her life as a housewife. She had been drawn to William Sanger by the qualities of idealism and enthusiasm that he shared with her father. But, after eight years of marriage, the chance that he would become a serious artist seemed increasingly remote. The Sangers sought to thwart a growing estrangement through joint participation in radical politics, and they left their Hastings-onHudson home for a Manhattan apartment. Margaret Sanger began working as a home

nurse on the Lower East Side "in order to earn my share" and enlisted in the radical labor movement as an activist in the International Workers of the World (IWW) effort to organize textile workers in the northeast. Sanger made important contributions to the IWW strike efforts of 1912-13 in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. Together with E L I Z A B E T H G U R L E Y F L Y N N she organized the evacuation of strikers' children from Lawrence, Mass., a tactic that aroused national sympathy for the workers and was a key factor in the success of the strike. IWW leader William (Big Bill) Haywood found Sanger especially useful because she did not fit stereotypes usually associated with radicals. She was a petite mother of three, native born, and a trained nurse. But Sanger gradually lost the reticence expected of a lady as she learned from E M M A GOLDMAN and other radical women that issues of economic justice might be joined with feminist demands for recognition of the right of women to control their bodies. Responding to an urgent demand among women of all classes for information about venereal disease, birth control, and sex education, Sanger, as a nurse and mother, easily established herself among radicals as a speaker and writer on sexual reform. She gradually became convinced that women needed a distinctive voice representing them as an interest group in the struggle for social justice, and she adopted the position that sexual reform was the paramount issue for women, a cause that had to precede the struggle for higher wages and control of the work place. Sanger's alienation from radical colleagues resulted in part from conflicts with William Sanger. He bitterly opposed the intimate friendships that had developed between his wife and a number of their friends. The discovery of her own capacity for sexual expression provided Margaret Sanger with a deep sense of personal power. Convinced that the sexual liberation of women would unleash great reservoirs of energy that had formerly been repressed or misdirected, she rejected her husband's demand that she be faithful to him, but her decision was painful. During this period she became acutely conscious of the condescension toward women of many male radicals, who expected women to subordinate their particular concerns to the class struggle. Sanger's emerging feminist consciousness was also spurred by repression of her publications. Beginning in November 1912, she published a series of articles about female sexuality in the socialist weekly The Call. An article about syphilis for the Feb. 9, 1913, issue was declared unmailable by the United States Post Office

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Sanger under the Comstock Act of 1873, whose sweeping provisions also banned information on contraception and abortion. Venereal disease exacted a terrible toll from women denied knowledge of their bodies, but the numerous deaths from abortions among Sanger's patients in the tenements of the Lower East Side provided an even more horrifying symbol of female degradation. Sanger claimed that, of all her experiences as a midwife and visiting nurse, the death of one of her clients from a self-induced abortion was the traumatic event that led her to focus all her energy on the single cause of reproductive autonomy for women. In the story of Sadie Sachs, a truck driver's wife who was scornfully refused contraceptive advice by a doctor and instructed instead to have her husband sleep on the roof, Sanger found a compelling myth. She used it to convey her outrage at the suppression of knowledge that women needed, whether their primary concern was the support of their families or the desire for greater personal freedom. Sanger's feeling of having been trapped by marriage, as well as her resentment of her mother's premature death, made the suffering of tenement mothers her own. There seemed to be no justice for these women, whose "weary misshapen bodies . . . were destined to be thrown on the scrap heap before they were thirty-five." Thus in 1914 Sanger, then living apart from her husband, set out to remove the stigma of obscenity from contraception and to establish a nationwide system of advice centers where women could obtain reliable birth control information. Her first task was an investigation of birth control methods with the goal of discovering a safe, effective, female-controlled contraceptive. Native-born Americans had dramatically lowered their birth rates in the nineteenth century through sexual restraint within marriage, induced abortion, and contraception, but they paid a high cost in the form of sexual frustration, infection, and guilt. American moral leaders almost unanimously condemned these practices on religious and nativist grounds, claiming that the native-born women's revolt against their "natural" role would lead to "race suicide." These fears provided one motive for the late nineteenth-century suppression of contraceptive information, particularly through the Comstock Act. Although numerous contraceptive devices, including spermicidal douches, "womb veils" (diaphragms), a "safe period," and condoms, were described in nineteenth-century marriage manuals, physicians did not conduct contraceptive research. After surveying the medical literature and finding that no female methods had

been clinically tested, Sanger traveled to Europe in search of better birth control technology. She returned in early 1914 determined to spread the good news that sex could be separated from procreation, although women would have to discover through individual experimentation which method was best. Sanger hoped to mobilize a mass demand for legalization of birth control through publication, beginning in March 1914, of her militantly feminist journal, The Woman Rebel, which the post office declared unmailable even though it gave no specific contraceptive advice. She continued to publish the journal and, after being indicted for violation of the postal code, departed for Europe in October 1914. Left behind were her instructions for mass distribution of her how-todo-it pamphlet Family Limitation, which provided the most detailed and informed discussion of contraceptive technique then available in English. Critics pointed to questionable recommendations such as the use of laxatives to induce menstruation, but she had shown that women did not have to accept the void left by medical reluctance to provide contraceptive information. During a year of exile in Europe, Sanger became an intimate friend of Havelock Ellis, author of Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Under his influence she began to develop a more cautious propaganda that exploited the rhetoric of social science and sought to win social elites to the cause. Ellis's permissive view of sexuality provided Sanger with a model of human nature more congenial to feminism than that of his great rival Freud. In the Netherlands Sanger found contraceptive advice centers staffed by midwives and was allowed to attend classes in the fitting of the spring-loaded vaginal diaphragm, a device that had been popularized by that country's first female physician, Aletta Jacobs. While she was away, William Sanger had been entrapped by an agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for handing out a copy of Family Limitation. This event and the pneumonia death of the Sangers' daughter in 1915 aroused great public sympathy for her. Probably as a result, within six months of her return to the United States in October 1915, the government dropped its earlier charges against her. Deeply distressed by her daughter's death, Sanger more than ever sought personal redemption through her cause and began a nationwide tour that convinced her the time had come to open a birth control advice center in the United States. Staffed by Sanger and her younger sister, Ethel Byrne, the Brownsville clinic opened in October 1916 and provided 488 Brooklyn

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Sanger mothers with contraceptive advice during the ten days before it was closed by the police. The trial and imprisonment of the "birth control sisters" helped make Sanger a national figure, and, in appealing her case, she won a clarification of the New York law that forbade distribution of birth control information. Judge Frederick Crane ruled that the 1873 statute under which Sanger had been arrested was reasonable because it allowed doctors to prescribe condoms for venereal disease. In rejecting Sanger's claim that the law was unconstitutional because it forced women to risk death in pregnancy against their will, Crane established the right of doctors to provide women with contraceptive advice for "the cure and prevention of disease," thus widening the venereal disease clause to include women. Sanger interpreted the Crane decision as a mandate for doctor-staffed birth control clinics. Although she continued to send revised editions of Family Limitation to those who asked for help, she adopted the strategy of lobbying for "doctors only" bills that removed legal prohibitions on medical advice. This pragmatic concession to the self-conscious professionalism of doctors was bitterly opposed by M A R Y W A R E D E N N E T T , Sanger's chief rival for leadership of the movement in the early 1920s. Sanger's attempt to cultivate support among doctors was part of her shift of strategy as a reformer. Gradually she broke her ties with old comrades, played down her radical past, stressed eugenic arguments for birth control, and found financial angels among socialites and philanthropists. Such support allowed her in 1921 to organize the American Birth Control League, the national lobbying organization which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (1942). Having divorced William Sanger in 1920, she completed her social transition in 1922 by marrying millionaire J. Noah Slee, the manufacturer of Three-in-One Oil. Slee kept his promises to respect her autonomy and to fund her cause, and, although Sanger continued to enjoy intimate friendships with other men, their marriage lasted until Slee's death in 1943. By 1923 Sanger had developed the network of support that allowed her to open, and to keep open, the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York City. The first doctor-staffed birth control clinic in the United States, it was one of Sanger's most important achievements. Under the medical direction of Hannah Stone (1893-1941), a careful clinical record was established demonstrating the safety and effectiveness of contraceptive practice. Irresponsible claims by medical men that diaphragms caused

cancer and madness, and did not work anyway, were refuted. The Bureau also served as a teaching facility where hundreds of physicians received instruction in contraceptive technique at a time when it was not a part of the medical school curriculum. Perhaps the Bureau's most important role was as a model for the nationwide network of over 300 birth control clinics established by Sanger and her supporters by 1938. Staffed mainly by women doctors and supported by the efforts of women volunteers, these clinics provided access to reliable contraceptive advice and were responsible for important improvements in the effectiveness of contraceptive practice. In order to keep her clinics open, Sanger tirelessly raised money to make up budget deficits. Until she could convince an old friend, Herbert Simonds, to found the Holland Rantos Company in 1925 (with funds provided by Slee), she smuggled European-manufactured diaphragms into the United States. She also fought a series of court battles to establish the legality of the birth control clinic, and in 1936 realized her goal of reversing the Comstock Act's classification of birth control as obscenity. In United States v. One Package, a case initiated by Sanger's national Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, a federal court ruled that new clinical data forced reinterpretation of the 1873 law to permit the mailing of contraceptive materials intended for physicians. The decision made possible the 1937 resolution of the American Medical Association recognizing contraception as a legitimate medical service that should be taught in medical schools. After the One Package case, Sanger played a less important role in the American birth control movement and moved from New York to Tucson, Ariz., where she and Slee had built a home for their retirement. Her occasional suggestion that women stop having children until their demands for reproductive autonomy were met and her desire to ease restrictions on medical abortions seemed out of step during a period when the birth rate hovered around the replacement level; instead, prominent social scientists argued that depopulation was a cause of the depression and fretted over the disparity between birth rates in the western democracies and those in Nazi Germany. By the late 1930s Sanger's brand of feminism was deemed counterproductive by new leaders who hoped to gain acceptance of their cause from supporters of voluntary health organizations. They replaced "birth control" with "family planning" in an effort to broaden the appeal of the movement and sought to restrict contraceptive advice to those whose health would be threatened by preg-

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nancy. This trend distressed Sanger, who believed in helping as many women as possible. After World War II and the discovery of the so-called population explosion, Sanger's vision began to command new respect, and in 1952 she played a creative role in the founding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which she served as first president. Despite her role in promoting the diaphragm, she had never been satisfied with it and raised large sums throughout her career for research on promising leads ranging from spermatoxins to foam powders. In 1952 she helped to realize her dream of a female-controlled physiological contraceptive when she brought the work of the biologist Gregory Pincus to the attention of KATHARINE DEXTER MCCORMICK, w h o

subsidized

the development of the birth control pill first marketed in 1960. When Margaret Sanger died of congestive heart failure in 1966 after a four-year stay in a Tucson nursing home, her goal of reproductive autonomy for all women remained unattained, but she had done more than any other individual to give women control over their bodies. [Over 500 boxes of personal and organizational papers are divided among the Library of Congress, the Sophia Smith Coll. at Smith College, and the Am. Birth Control League Papers at Houghton Library, Harvard Univ. The Sophia Smith Coll. also has a microfilm of the Sanger papers in the Library of Congress, as well as the papers of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Sanger left two autobiographies, My Fight for Birth Control ( 1 9 3 1 ) and Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938). Her other major books are Woman and the New Race ( 1 9 2 0 ) , The Pivot of Civilization ( 1 9 2 2 ) , Happiness in Marriage ( 1 9 2 6 ) , and Motherhood in Bondage ( 1 9 2 8 ) . She published three important journals: Woman Rebel ( 1 9 1 4 ) , Birth Control Review ( 1 9 1 7 - 4 0 ) , and Human Fertility ( 1 9 4 0 - 4 8 ) . Major studies of her career are Harold Hersey, Margaret Sanger: The Biography of the Birth Control Pioneer ( 1 9 3 8 ) ; Lawrence Lader, The Margaret Sanger Story and the Fight for Birth Control ( 1 9 5 5 ) ; David Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger ( 1 9 7 0 ) ; Emily Taft Douglas, Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the Future ( 1 9 7 0 ) ; and Madeline Gray, Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control (1979). In addition, several historians have given extended attention to Sanger's career in broader studies: Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America ( 1 9 7 6 ) ; Sheila Rothman, Woman's Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present ( 1 9 7 8 ) ; and James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 ( 1 9 7 8 ) , which contains an annotated bibliography. The source of Sanger's birth date is the family Bible in the Sophia

Smith Coll.; Gray, p. 13, explains how discrepancies in the date were resolved. Death certificate supplied by Ariz. Dept. of Health.] JAMES

REED

SAVAGE, Augusta Christine, Feb. 29, 1 8 9 2 March 26, 1962. Sculptor. Augusta Savage was born in Green Cove Springs, Fla., the seventh of fourteen children of Rev. Edward and Cornelia (Murphy) Fells. She was the third child and second daughter of the nine children (five girls and four boys) who lived to maturity. Edward Fells, who earned his living as a house painter, was a deeply religious man who assisted local Methodist ministers in conducting church services. Augusta Fells attended public schools in Green Cove Springs and studied briefly at the state normal school in Tallahassee (later Florida A & M University). From an early age, she had shown an interest in modeling the local red clay into figures. Edward Fells, thinking Augusta's models were the "graven images" prohibited in the Bible, punished her whenever he found her creations, but she persisted and he came eventually to accept her modeling. Augusta Fells married John T. Moore in 1907; her only child, Irene Connie Moore, was born the following year. John Moore died when Irene was a small child and in 1915 Augusta Moore moved to West Palm Beach, Fla. Some time in the mid-1910s, she married James Savage, a laborer and carpenter; they were divorced in the early 1920s. She remained close to her daughter; they shared a home for much of Augusta Savage's life and Irene Moore provided emotional and financial support for her mother's art. At a Palm Beach county fair Savage's clay models won a special prize of $25; additional donations from the public brought her fair earnings to $175. Advised to go to New York City to develop her talent, she eventually arrived there in 1920 with $4.60, found a job as an apartment caretaker, and set out to learn to be a sculptor. Solon Borglum, a prominent New York sculptor, directed her to Cooper Union, which had a four-year tuition-free art program. Beginning there in October 1921, she continued to take courses at the school until 1924, doing much of her study with the sculptor George Brewster. She lost her job soon after starting at Cooper Union, but the school's directors granted her a scholarship for her living expenses. In early 1923, Augusta Savage applied for admission to a summer school to be held under the patronage of the French government at the

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Palace of Fontainebleau. "Without thinking it necessary to mention my race," she made a preliminary deposit and was preparing to have two recommendations sent to the selection committee for American students when she was informed that they had decided not to approve her application. Subsequently, Ernest Peixotto, chairman of painting and sculpture for the committee, admitted that Savage had been rejected because she was not white. Hurt and disappointed, she decided to make the story public to prevent "other and better colored students" from being kept out of the school. Savage's black and white supporters appealed to the committee to reverse its decision and to President Warren G. Harding and the French government to intervene. Although these efforts were unsuccessful, committee member sculptor Hermon MacNeil invited Savage to study with him that summer. It would be six years before Savage secured the European training that would help her transcend the academicism she had learned at Cooper Union. Yet, the Fontainebleau incident was a significant influence on her career, making her a well-known black artist and a heroine to many. To some influential white artists and gallery owners, however, she appeared a troublemaker who should be avoided. At the same time, Savage was becoming known independently as a portrait sculptor. In late 1922 she had completed a bust of W. E. B. Du Bois and was working on one of Marcus Garvey. In later years, she also did busts of Frederick Douglass, Eugene Kinckle Jones, W. C. Handy, James Weldon Johnson, Edwin Bowes, Walter Gray Crump, and Theodore Upshure. Several other disappointments followed for Savage. In October 1923 she married Robert L. Poston, a journalist and an associate of Marcus Garvey; Poston died the following March. Awarded a scholarship in 1925 to cover tuition and working materials at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Savage was unable to go because she lacked the funds to pay for her travel and living expenses. She worked in laundries to collect the needed money but spent most of her earnings helping her parents and other family members. In 1929, Savage won the first of two successive Julius Rosenwald fellowships, awarded for "Gamin," an appealing portrait of a young Harlem boy and one of the best executed of her character studies. Seeking to learn the most advanced techniques in portrait sculpture, she went to Paris where she studied with Felix Beauneteaux at the Grand Chaumière and later with Charles Despiau. Savage's work was exhibited at several galleries in Europe, winning

citations at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon Printemps at the Grande-Palais in Paris and a medallion at the French government's Colonial Exposition. By early 1932, Savage had returned to New York City. She turned again to sculptured portraits, and also established a school, the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, where she later provided studio space for artists involved in the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (FAP). Exhibitions by Savage's students attracted favorable publicity during the 1930s. Savage herself was asked to exhibit her sculpture before wider and larger audiences in the 1930s and early 1940s. By 1936, Savage had become an assistant supervisor of the FAP for New York City and in December 1937 she was named the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center. Responsible for increasing the number of blacks employed by the FAP, Savage was also influential as a teacher. Several of her students, including William Artis, Norman Lewis, and Jacob Lawrence, went on to become nationally recognized artists. During these years Savage received several honors. In 1934 she became the first black elected a member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and she was one of four women and the only black woman commissioned to produce a piece of sculpture for the New York World's Fair of 1939-40. Her statue, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," featured a sixteen-foot-tall harp with strings leading from a frieze of singing black youth; a kneeling figure in front offered the gift of black music to the world. Praised by Alain Locke as "a magnificently dramatic idea," it received wide publicity. Savage had taken a leave of absence from the Harlem Community Art Center to do the World's Fair sculpture. When she sought to return, she was disappointed to find that she had been replaced. She next became president of a corporation that in June 1939 opened the Salon of Contemporary Negro Art, the first gallery in the United States devoted to the exhibition and sale of works of black artists. Although it served a great need, the gallery went out of existence a few years after its founding because of lack of funds. Subsequently, Savage withdrew from active promotion of art and art education in New York City and her own work declined in volume and significance. About 1945, Savage moved to rural Saugerties, N.Y., hoping to find new ideas for her work. There she raised and sold chickens and eggs, did some portrait sculptures of tourists, and on occasion taught children in nearby summer camps. She remained in Saugerties until a few

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months before her death in Bronx, N.Y., of cancer in 1962. Despite the barriers created throughout her life by racism and poverty, Augusta Savage produced a substantial number of works of high artistic quality. Critics have argued that her best work was her bronze and plaster portrait sculpture, although she also showed ability in several other mediums. Her portraits of Du Bois and Marcus Garvey capture the dignity and strength of those militant black leaders, while her narrative skills are displayed in the wood-carving "Envy," where a symbolic distortion and twisting of the human figure dramatize the negative impact of that emotion. "Green Apples" uses contortion for different purposes, showing a beautifully modeled nude youngster whose body is doubled over with pain from eating green apples. Savage herself was modest about her achievements: " I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work" (Poston, p. 6 7 ) . Her own suffering and struggles as an artist led her to sacrifice time she might have spent in producing her own work to teach others how to develop their talent, even when they could not pay. Augusta Savage left as her legacy not only significant works of art but also significant artists to achieve the recognition often denied to her. [There is no manuscript collection. The Schomburg Coll., N.Y. Public Library, and Savage's daughter, Irene Moore Allen, have clippings, artwork, and other memorabilia. A list of works and exhibitions and a bibliography appear in Theresa Dickason Cederholm, Afro-American Artists: A Bio-bibliography and Directory (1973), pp. 247-48. Savage published "Augusta Savage: An Autobiography," Crisis, Aug. 1929, p. 269. Various newspaper and magazine interviews rely on quotations and information supplied by Savage. The most valuable of these are: Eric Walrond, "Florida Girl Shows Amazing Gift for Sculpture," an undated clipping in the Schomburg Coll., which includes a poem by Savage and one written about her; "Young Sculptress Defies Adversity That Dogged Her Steps, Now Studies in Paris," Norfolk Journal and Guide, Oct. 19, 1929, also in the Schomburg Coll.; T. R. Poston (her brother-in-law), "Augusta Savage," Metropolitan Mag., Jan. 1935; and Harmon Foundation, Negro Artists: An Illustrated Review of Their Achievements (1935). See also Current Biog., 1941. The most useful critical evaluations are Elton Clay Fax, "Augusta Savage: An Appraisal," AMSAC (Am. Soc. for African Culture) Newsletter, 1962, and the chapter on Savage in Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, Six Black Masters of American Art (1972). See also Alain Locke, ed., The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of

the Negro Theme in Art (1940), and James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (1943, 1969). Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, March 27, 1962, and the N.Y. Amsterdam News, March 31, 1962. Savage's birth date generally appears as 1900; the 1892 date is confirmed by the 1900 U.S. Census and by a death certificate, provided by the N.Y. City Dept. of Health. Irene Allen provided useful information; a biobibliography by Frances Pollard Fugate further assisted with research.] DE W I T T

s . DYKES,

JR.

SAWYER, Ruth, Aug. 5, 1880-June 3, 1970. Children's author, storyteller. Ruth Sawyer, who made major contributions to the art of storytelling, was born in Boston's Back Bay, the only girl in a family with four older sons, all born four or five years apart. Her father, Francis Milton Sawyer, was a successful importer, a descendant of an old New England family who had been Tory sympathizers. Her mother was Ethalinda J. (Smith) Sawyer, of Lexington, Mass., also descended from an old New England family, but on the revolutionary side. A well-to-do family, the Sawyers moved to New York in 1881 and established themselves on the Upper East Side. Ruth Sawyer received loving but strict care from her parents and found it difficult growing up as the youngest and a girl in a household of adults and older brothers. But she had her beloved Irish nurse, Johanna, who captivated Ruth with tales from Donegal. Until she was seven Ruth Sawyer had a French governess; she later spent three years at Miss Brackett's, the New York school run by A N N A B B A C K E T T , which she described in Roller Skates. Francis Sawyer died in 1894, when Ruth was fourteen; because of uncertain finances the family spent a year in its summer home near Camden, Maine, later the basis for her book, The Year of Jubilo. When they returned to New York, she studied for a year at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn (189.5-96). In 1900, after graduation from Garland, a kindergarten training school in Boston, Ruth Sawyer helped to organize kindergartens for the many children in Cuba orphaned by the Spanish-American War. In recognition of this service, she received a scholarship to Teachers College, Columbia University, where she studied folklore and received a B.S. in education ( 1 9 0 4 ) . While at Columbia she became a volunteer storyteller and also had the significant experience of hearing British storyteller Marie Shedlock tell stories of Hans Christian Andersen. Also important for her own storytelling was the invi-

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Sawyer tation of the New York Public Lecture Bureau to offer folk tales in story hours for foreign-born groups; for two years she told stories in such varied settings as the Bowery, the Seamen's Mission, and a boys' reformatory at Fordham. Her first storytelling at the New York Public Library occurred in 1910 and initiated a long friendship with ANNE CAHROLL MOORE, the library's supervisor of work with children. In 1905 and again in 1907, Sawyer went to Ireland to do feature articles on commission for the New York Sun. There she associated with the great traditional storytellers, including Padraic Colum and James Stephens. Riding a little Irish pony through Donegal, she met rural folk and heard the old seanachies. In Dublin, at the studio of the poet and painter AE (George Russell), she contributed "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Tar Baby" to storytelling sessions and was lovingly called "the sister of Tom Sawyer." In 1911 Ruth Sawyer married Albert C. Durand, whom she had met in New York while they were finishing their studies-she at Columbia, he at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Infirmary. The couple moved to Ithaca, N.Y., where Dr. Durand had set up a practice in ophthalmology. There they had two children: David (b. 1912) and Margaret (b. 1916). While the children were growing up, Ruth Sawyer (the name she used professionally) continued to tell stories and began to write in earnest —both novels and children's stories. The first two novels were The Primrose Ring (1915) and Seven Miles to Arden (1917), the latter appearing serially in the Ladies' Home Journal. More important and enduring, however, were her contributions to children's literature. Her early books for children included This Way to Christmas (1916), Child's Yearbook (1917), and The Tale of the Enchanted Bunnies (1923). In 1931 Ruth Sawyer's interest in children's literature took a new turn when she went to Spain for a year of collecting stories—an adventure motivated by an earlier fascination with Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra and Conquest of Granada. The result of this travel was Toño Antonio (1934), published by Viking Press; it was then that Ruth Sawyer became a close friend of Viking's children's book editor MAY MASSEE. Subsequent results of the Spanish adventure were Picture Tales from Spain (1936) and a book on travel, My Spain (1962). By 1935 her reputation as a storyteller brought Ruth Sawyer an invitation from the United States Department of Justice to tell stories at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, W. Va. Between 1935 and 1945 she spent a month each year at Alderson.

It was in 1936 that Sawyer first achieved wide recognition, for her autobiographical story Roller Skates, the story of a spirited little girl discovering New York City on her own at the turn of the century when her parents were abroad. The book, which introduced new urban subject matter into literature for children, won the John Newbery Medal (given annually by the American Library Association for the most distinguished book for children) in 1937; its sequel, The Year of Jubilo, also autobiographical, appeared in 1940. Many other stories followed, among them Old Con and Patrick (1940); The Long Christmas, (1941); The Little Red Horse (1950); Journey Cake, Ho! (1953), illustrated by her son-in-law, Robert McCloskey; The Enchanted Schoolhouse (1956); Dietrich of Berne and the Dwarf King Laurin (1963), with Emmy Molles; and Daddies, the Story of a Plain Hound-Dog (1964). In The Way of the Storyteller (1942; rev. ed. 1962) Ruth Sawyer explained her conception of storytelling as a creative art. The book, which also includes eleven tales retold for storytellers, became a standard guide for practitioners and teachers. During six decades of giving the children's book world an original and creative outpouring, Sawyer received several honors. In 1958 the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., established the Ruth Sawyer Collection of rare books in the field of children's literature. In 1965 she received both the Regina Medal of the Catholic Library Association and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal (American Library Association) for a "substantial and lasting contribution to children's literature." In the same year a storytelling festival was held in her honor in Provincetown, Mass. After Albert Durand's retirement in 1946, the Durands moved to Hancock, Maine. Later they moved to Florida—and then to Boston, where Ruth Sawyer spent one winter telling stories at the Boston Public Library. Finally, they moved to the Hancock House Nursing Home in Lexington, Mass., where Dr. Durand died in 1967; Ruth Sawyer died there three years later of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage, two months before her ninetieth birthday. [In addition to the collection at St. Catherine's College, there is material pertaining to Sawyer in the May Massee Coll., Emporia (Kans.) State Univ. The major source of information is Virginia Haviland, Ruth Sawyer (1965), which incorporates material from the author's interviews with Sawyer. See also Ruth Sawyer's "Acceptance Paper" and a biographical note by Jacqueline Overton in New-

bery Medal Papers (1955); and Junior Book of

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(1951). An obituary appeared in Horn

Schneiderm an

Schneiderman Book Mag., Aug. 1970; death record provided by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] VIRGINIA HAVILAND

SCHNEIDERMAN, Rose, April 6, 1882-Aug. 11, 1972. Labor organizer, social reformer. Rose Schneiderman was born Rachel Schneiderman in Saven, a small village in Russian Poland, the first of Adolph Samuel and Deborah (Rothman) Schneiderman's four children (two girls and two boys). Growing up in an impoverished but close-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Rose spent her early childhood in Saven and in Khelm, an industrial city, where her father worked as a tailor and her mother, a skilled seamstress, made custom uniforms for Russian army officers. She remembered her father as gentle, easygoing, and intellectual, her mother as assertive and outspoken. Deborah Schneiderman also believed in female education and insisted that her daughter attend school. At four, Rose began attending a traditional Hebrew school, or cheder—highly unusual for a girl—and at six, she began Russian public school. Later, in the United States, despite frequent interruptions in her education, she completed the ninth grade. The Schneidermans migrated to the United States in 1890 and settled on New York's Lower East Side. In the winter of 1892, Samuel Schneiderman became ill with meningitis and died within a few days, leaving his wife pregnant with her fourth child. For several years the family depended upon charity to supplement what Deborah Schneiderman could earn by taking in boarders and home sewing. Despite their mother's resourcefulness, Rose and her brothers spent over a year in Jewish orphanages. When she returned home, Rose took on the tasks of housework and child care while her mother was at work. At thirteen Rose began work, spending three years as a department store cash girl and sales clerk—jobs that paid just over $2.00 for a work week that often stretched to seventy hours. Despite her mother's objection that industrial work was not genteel, in 1898 she took a better paying job in a cap factory. Initially she knew nothing of trade unionism, but her outlook changed after a stay with a socialist family in Montreal. In 1903 Rose Schneiderman launched her union career. With two other women, she organized her shop into the first female local of the Jewish Socialist United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union. Schneiderman emerged as an effective leader, and her local soon grew to a membership of several hundred. She served as

its secretary and as one of the union's delegates to the New York Central Labor Union. During the capmakers' successful thirteen-week strike in 1905 against employers' attempts to institute an open shop policy, she walked picket lines and led strike meetings. Although she remained a member of the union throughout her life, after 1907 Schneiderman increasingly devoted herself to the Women's Trade Union League ( W T U L ) , which she considered "the most important influence in my life." A coalition of workers and middle- and upper-class reformers, the W T U L was dedicated to unionizing working women and to lobbying for protective legislation. MARGARET DREIER ROBINS, then president of the New York branch, persuaded Schneiderman to join in 1905, despite her initial doubts that an organization with so many wealthy women could understand the needs of working women or accomplish much for them. Schneiderman became a vice president of the New York W T U L the following year. A stipend provided by IRENE LEWISOHN enabled her to quit factory work, devote herself to the league as its East Side organizer, and continue her education briefly at the Rand School of Social Science, a socialist night school dedicated to workers' education. In 1910 she accepted a position as the New York league's full-time organizer. Remaining active in the New York organization, the strongest branch of the WTUL, for thirty-five years, she and MARY DREIER became its most important leaders. Under league auspices, Schneiderman played a key role in the successful organizing drives of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union ( I L G W U ) from 1909 through 1914. By conducting strikes in virtually every branch of the women's clothing industry, the ILGWU brought several hundred thousand workers, a majority of them women, into the union, and transformed itself into a powerful organization. Schneiderman was instrumental in organizing and raising funds for ILGWU Local 25 (shirtwaistmakers), sat on that union's executive board, and was one of the leaders of the shirtwaistmakers' strike, the "Uprising of the Twenty Thousand." She also organized ILGWU Local 62 (white goods workers), served briefly as that union's president, and helped lead its 1913 strike. For Schneiderman, the early years of trade union work were exhilarating and fulfilling. The shy, lonely young woman developed into a militant organizer and dynamic speaker, well known for her strong views and a fiery temperament that matched her flaming red hair. Although less than five feet tall, she could rivet audiences' attention on street corners, in union halls, and at

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mass rallies. In the aftermath of the 1911 Triangle factory fire, in which 146 shirtwaistmakers died, it was Schneiderman's impassioned speech at the Metropolitan Opera House that best expressed the workers' outrage at the horrors of the sweatshop system. "I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies," she told the audience, "if I came here to talk good fellowship. . . . Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred" (All for One, pp. 1 0 0 - 1 ) . Schneiderman found it difficult to reconcile her commitment to the labor movement with her desire to improve conditions for women workers. Although often at odds with other W T U L leaders about what she considered their lack of commitment to immigrant women, in the end she found it easier to collaborate with members of the league than with male colleagues in the labor movement. As a national organizer for the ILGWU in 1915 and 1916-one of the few women organizers in a union with a largely female membership—she felt isolated and frustrated by the union officers' lack of confidence. She especially resented an effort by male organizers to lead a strike that she had planned, and returned to the W T U L in 1917. By this time Schneiderman had also developed an interest in broader political and educational movements. Viewing the ballot as a means of attaining protective legislation for working women, she became a committed suffragist, working as a National American Woman Suffrage Association speaker and organizer in the Ohio referendum campaign in 1913, and active as well in the 1915 and 1917 New York state campaigns. She helped to form the shortlived New York State Labor party in 1919 and ran as the party's candidate for United States senator the following year. She traveled to Europe in 1919 with MARY ANDERSON as part of the W T U L delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, and helped organize the International Congress of Working Women at that time. An ardent believer in education as a means of advancement, she was among the organizers of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers which opened in 1921. The W T U L remained her major interest. In 1918 Schneiderman was elected president of the New York league, a position she held until 1949. She became president of the National W T U L as well in 1926, but that body had already lost much of its dynamism. An effective administrator and fund raiser, as head of the New York league Schneiderman concentrated less on organizing than on promoting workers' education and on lobbying for protective legislation. She succeeded in raising funds to purchase a club-

house, which became an educational as well as social center for working women. Increasingly, Schneiderman devoted her energies to lobbying in Albany for minimum wage and eight-hour-day laws for women workers. Like other advocates of protective legislation, she vigorously opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, and, as national league president, concentrated in the late 1920s on opposing the efforts of the National Woman's party to secure its ratification. Her league activities brought Schneiderman in touch with prominent politicians and reformers, most notably Franklin and ELEANOR ROOSEVELT. Their long friendship began when Eleanor Roosevelt joined the New York W T U L in 1922. Schneiderman became a frequent guest at the Roosevelts' homes in New York City and Hyde Park and, after 1929, at the governor's mansion in Albany. During these visits, she and WTUL) leader MAUD SWARTZ often talked about the labor movement and helped to shape the Roosevelts' views on labor relations. Close associates, including FRANCES PERKINS, believed that as a result of these conversations, Franklin Roosevelt saw the trade union movement "in a new light." For her part, Schneiderman was proud of her friendship with the Roosevelts and the opportunity it gave her to experience a way of life so far removed from her own origins. As president, Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 appointed Schneiderman to the labor advisory board of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The task assigned to the board was to insure that the wages and hours provisions of the codes drawn up by various industries were fair to workers. As the only woman member, Schneiderman concentrated on codes for industries that employed large numbers of women. She later called her two years with NRA "the most exhilarating and inspiring of my life." In 1935, after the act that had established the NRA was declared unconstitutional, Rose Schneiderman returned to the Bronx, where she shared an apartment with her mother. She also returned to the W T U L which resumed its organizing efforts. Under her leadership, the league successfully organized New York women laundry workers (who through Schneiderman's negotiations were also able to affiliate with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America) and the city's hotel workers. The two protective measures for which she worked hardest, the eight-hour day and a minimum wage, were enacted into New York law during the 1930s, due in part to her coordination of W T U L lobbying efforts. In addition to her league work, from 1937 to 1943 Schneiderman also held the post of secretary of the New York State Department of Labor. Always an activist, she found this

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largely administrative position frustrating, and resigned because "there was not enough for me to do." Schneiderman was still president of the National WTUL when it disbanded in 1950. The year before she had retired as president of the New York league, but remained an active member until it too closed its doors in 1955. Thereafter she retired from public life and lived quietly in Manhattan, where she had moved following her mother's death in 1939. In her autobiography, written in her eighties, she expressed satisfaction at the progress American workers had made since her days as a capmaker. She spent the last five years in the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged in New York, where she died at the age of ninety. The dominant theme in Rose Schneiderman's career was her commitment to the labor movement. As a feminist unionist, her special contribution to that movement had been to work for the advancement of women in the workplace and in the unions, efforts that often brought her into conflict with male union leaders. As her own circumstances changed, she came to have more in common with the reformers than with the working women she sought to help, but her commitment to their cause never faltered. [Rose Schneiderman's papers, consisting primarily of correspondence, NYWTUL materials, and memorabilia, are located at the Tamiment Library, N.Y. Univ. Other useful material on her career is contained in the papers of the NYWTUL, located in the N.Y. State Labor Library, Dept. of Labor, N.Y. City, and the Nat. WTUL Papers, Library of Congress. The most helpful published work is Schneiderman's autobiography, All for One (1967). She was an occasional contributor to the Nat. WTUL's journal, Life and Labor; see especially "The White Goods Workers of New York," May 1913. See also her early article, "A Cap-Maker's Story," Independent, April 27, 1905. For information on the NYWTUL see Nancy Schrom Dye, "The Women's Trade Union League of New York, 1903-1920" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wis., 1974); "Creating a Feminist Alliance: Sisterhood and Class Conflict in the New York Women's Trade Union League," Feminist Studies, 2 (1975); and "Feminism or Unionism? The New York Women's Trade Union League and the Labor Movement," Feminist Studies, 3 (1975). See also Robin Miller Jacoby, "The Women's Trade Union League and American Feminism," Feminist Studies, 3 (1975), and "The British and American Women's Trade Union Leagues: A Case Study of Feminism and Class" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1976). For information on Schneiderman's relationship with the Roosevelts see Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (1946), and Joseph Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (1971). Schneiderman's reform interests are emphasized by Gary Edward Endelman, "Solidarity Forever: Rose Schneiderman and the Women's

Trade Union League" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Del., 1978). See also Current Biog., 1946, Biog. Diet. Am. Labor Leaders (1974), Who's Who in Labor (1946), and the obituary in the N.Y. Times, Aug. 12, 1972. Some sources list Schneiderman's birth date as April 6, 1884, but All for One and the death certificate provided by the N.Y. City Dept. of Health give it as April 6, 1882.] NANCY

SCHROM

DYE

SCOTT, Ann London, July 29, 1929-Feb. 17, 1975. Feminist, poet. Ann London Scott was born Claire Ann in Seattle, Wash., to Daniel Edwin and Claire (Chester) London, both of British ancestry. In 1935 the family moved to San Francisco, when Daniel London received an offer to become manager of the St. Francis, a luxury hotel, where Ann and her younger sister, Mimi, had memorable escapades. Ann London was a voracious reader and an excellent student, especially during her high school years at the intellectually competitive Dominican Convent School in San Rafael, Calif. In 1947 she entered Stanford University, but found it difficult to combine the serious study required of a scholarship student with the social life of a San Francisco debutante. When her fellowship was not renewed, she transferred in 1949 to the University of Washington. There a longtime interest in poetry drew her away from sorority life. Gravitating toward new friends in the arts, she married on Nov. 23, 1951, Paul de Witt Tufts, a young musician from a Washington farm family; the marriage was considered inappropriate by her family and did not survive their student years. After graduation in 1954, she returned to San Francisco, briefly renewing old associations and experimenting with various jobs. She was most attracted to the San Francisco of beat writer Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore. A second marriage followed in October 1956, to an impecunious Jewish poet, Gerd Stern. A son, Jared London, was born in 1957. The marriage caused further estrangement from her parents, who objected to her bohemian lifestyle; it ended in 1961. Determined to create a new life for herself and her son, Ann London, now thirty-two, returned that fall to the University of Washington to work toward a doctorate in literature. Her parents encouraged her, providing supplemental financial support and a summer home for their grandson. By the time she left Seattle four years later, she had begun a dissertation on Shakespeare's use of language, published her poetry in such journals as Sage, Choice, and

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Poetry Northwest, and found a promising teaching position at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Students responded to her wit and warmth, and colleagues respected her intelligence. Although she received her Ph.D. in 1968, delay in completing her dissertation cost her a tenured position in the English department. She remained on the staff until 1972, when she moved to Baltimore. In 1969 personal and professional developments coincided to change the direction of her life. She married Thomas Jefferson Scott, a gentle and sensitive artist; the marriage brought her happiness and greater self-confidence. She responded angrily to the fact that male colleagues whom she regarded as her intellectual inferiors had received tenure. Supported by her husband and the local chapter (which she had founded) of the National Organization for Women ( N O W ) , Ann Scott embarked on a study of sex discrimination at SUNY, Buffalo— an action that rapidly propelled her into a new career as a feminist and activist dedicated to social change. Elected in 1970 to the Board of Directors of the national NOW, Scott became convinced that changes in legislation affecting education, employment, and reproductive choice were essential if the cultural changes advocated by feminists were to have meaning. As NOW's Federal Contract Compliance Officer, she sought to ensure equal employment opportunities for women not only in universities but also in industry and broadcasting. With fellow N O W leader Lucy Komisar she lobbied members of Congress and national organizations to pressure the Department of Labor to change affirmative action guidelines to include women in regulations governing hiring and promotions for firms holding federal contracts. They applied similar pressure to the Federal Communications Commission, enlisting other organizations in support of a petition filed by a public interest law firm to include women in affirmative action guidelines applying to all local stations holding an F C C license. As NOW's vice president for legislation, Scott worked to secure passage of both the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act Amendment and the Equal Rights Amendment. She possessed remarkable powers of persuasion, an ability to broaden alliances, and a political sophistication that won her the admiration of legislators and fellow lobbyists. Creator of a national N O W lobbying network, Scott was also a member of the national board of Common Cause and of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. She regarded the efforts of all these organizations as part of a larger struggle for economic and social justice. In 1974 she be-

came associate director of the American Association for Higher Education. Scott died of cancer in Baltimore in 1975, after valiantly struggling with the disease for over a year. Helping to write her own obituary, she expressed a wish to be remembered as a poet and a feminist. Her enduring contribution was to the women's movement, to which she brought not only her much needed political skills but also the example of her hard-won control over her own life. [Material on Scott's feminist activities is in the possession of Lucy Komisar and in the NOW Legal Defense Fund Files. A collection of unpublished poems by Scott is in the possession of Jerome Mazzaro, SUNY, Buffalo. Scott's sex discrimination study was published as "The Half-Eaten Apple: A Look at Sex Discrimination in the University," The Reporter, SUNY, Buffalo (May 14, 1970). Scott's feminist activities are described in the NOW newsletter, Jan.-Feb. 1975, and in the obituary by Lucy Komisar, Ms., June 1975. An obituary also appeared in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 19, 1975. Komisar, Mazzaro, Thomas Scott, Claire London, and Anita Gardner provided valuable information. Birth certificate obtained from Washington State Board of Health; death certificate from Md. Dept. of Health.] JANE

DE HART

MATHEWS

SCUDDER, Ida Sophia, Dec. 9, 1 8 7 0 - M a y 24, 1960. Physician, missionary. Ida Scudder, founder of the Christian Medical College and Hospital, Vellore, South India, was born in Ranipet, Madras Presidency, India, the sixth and youngest child and only daughter of Sophia ( W e l d ) Scudder and John Scudder II. Her father, born in Ceylon, was the youngest of seven sons and two daughters who followed the first American medical missionary, John Scudder, into the Indian mission field. Her Vermontborn mother, although initially adjudged by the Reformed Church mission board as too frail to accompany her husband, survived sixty-four years in India, the last twenty-five as her daughter's unofficial hostess, assistant, and adviser. Ida's early days in the mission bungalow in Vellore included traumatic experiences during a devastating famine and cholera epidemic. In 1878 the family returned to live for four years on a farm near Creston, Neb. When her father resumed his duties in India in 1882, followed a year later by her mother, the thirteen-year-old Ida was left in Chicago under the strict tutelage of an uncle, Rev. Henry Martyn Scudder, and his wife. The feelings of loneliness and parental abandonment common to missionary children sent home for a safe education were exacerbated in 1887 when her uncle joined the Japan mission, after placing Ida in Dwight Moody's

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Scudder Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts. There the popular and mischievous blonde became a student leader, but confessed feelings of rejection and loneliness to her diary. Despite her parents' expectations and the powerful model of Scudder missionary servicefour generations of the family eventually contributed 1,100 years of missionary service in India—Ida determined to share her classmates' conventional middle-class life. Still hostile to a missionary career, she left Northfield without graduating in 1890 because her mother was ill and her parents needed her help in their isolated new post in Tindivanam. There her determination to return to the United States broke down when in a single dramatic night she was summoned to help deliver three women in childbirth, all of whom died. She had protested her lack of training and urged her father's more experienced services, but the husbands refused to allow a man to attend their wives. In 1895 Ida Scudder matriculated in the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, transferring in her final year to Cornell Medical College for the superior clinical training available there. She received her M.D. in 1899. Involved in preparations for her return to India and in fund raising for a hospital there, Scudder was distracted by insistent marriage proposals from a Philadelphia medical student. Rejecting these, as she had earlier proposals, she later commented that " 'I never could have carried on my work in the hospital and school if I had had the responsibility of bringing up a family of my own'" (Jeffery, pp. 1 8 5 - 8 6 ) . Her students and the thousands of children she delivered and sometimes informally adopted substituted for a family. Scudder also nurtured several close and long friendships, beginning with her Northfield classmate, Annie Hancock, who accompanied her to India in 1900 and was active as an evangelistic worker in Vellore until her death in 1924. An even closer companion was Gertrude Dodd, twelve years her senior, who joined her in India as an unofficial self-supporting Reformed Church missionary in 1916. Dodd gave generously from her inheritance to support students at the medical college founded by Scudder and to meet emergency needs; she also served as college bursar and registrar. The two women signed their cables "Scuddodd," and lived and traveled together until Dodd's death in Florida in 1944. When her father died of cancer within five months of her arrival in Vellore in 1900, Scudder was deprived of the experienced guidance she had planned to substitute for an internship. She found herself mistrusted by his former pa-

tients because of her age and sex, and restricted to a tiny missionary bungalow room with only the assistance of her mother and the cook's wife acting as nurse. Nonetheless, she treated thousands of cases while also supervising construction of the small Mary Taber Schell Hospital, which opened in 1902. To her heavy case load she added weekly tours of the countryside, which developed eventually into a system of itinerant roadside clinics. Through these clinics, medical teams provided treatment and rudimentary public health education to a vast rural population. As the hospital's only surgeon for twenty-two of the years before the appointment of a second surgeon in 1932, Scudder became convinced that the medical needs of India's women could not be met by government or mission facilities. In 1909 the training program for Schell Hospital nurses was expanded into a full-fledged nursing school. Overcoming great obstacles, promoting interdenominational support, and negotiating subsidies from the Madras government, she next opened the Union Mission Medical School for Women in 1918. Combining the roles of surgeon, instructor, and administrator, and with the help of supporting groups outside India, she not only weathered the depression but significantly expanded facilities. In 1938, however, new government regulations requiring university affiliation for the granting of medical degrees seemed to doom the medical school. The septuagenarian Scudder returned to the United States in 1941 and attempted to raise funds under difficult wartime conditions. She traveled for four years, although dispirited by the death of Gertrude Dodd and by the alienation of supporters such as LUCY PEABODY, who accused her of disloyalty to the cause of women's education when she concluded that the only way to save the college (renamed the Christian Medical College in the 1940s) was to make it coeducational. She persisted, and permanent affiliation with the University of Madras was announced in 1950, the fiftieth anniversary of her service in India. Finally, the founder could retire to her bungalow near Kodaikanal, in the Palani Hills, where she remained active, even playing tennis into her eighties. She died at her home in her ninetieth year. Ida Scudder received important assistance from a loyal staff and thousands of American and British supporters. Yet, from the premature opening of the medical school during wartime and a cholera epidemic, to the controversial decision not to close the school in 1938, it was her tenacious dedication to her dream, her remarkable vitality and gift for personal relations combined with simple faith, that made the

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difference between a routine missionary career and her extraordinary contribution. In the 1970s the Christian Medical College and Hospital in Vellore, by then an Indianized institution, had over 2,000 staff members. [The Scudder papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, contain family and personal correspondence, Dorothy Wilson's MSS. for her biography, diaries and notebooks, printed material on the hospital and medical college, and many photographs. There are also a few letters at the Ida Scudder Auditorium Museum at the Christian Medical College in Vellore. Other MS. material has apparently been destroyed. Her missionary reports and correspondence with her denominational board have not been located in the Reformed Church Archives, New Brunswick, N.J., nor in the N.Y. offices of either the Foreign Mission Board or the Vellore Christian Med. Board. Except for promotional brochures and brief articles in denominational periodicals such as "Glimpses of My Life," Church Herald (Sept. 3, 1954), Scudder published only such professional accounts as "Methods of Training Indian Medicals," Baptist Missionary Rev. (Dec. 1919), and reports on her innovative surgical techniques in Proc. of the First All-India Obst. ir Gynaec. Congress (Madras, 1936). The most recent biography is Dorothy C. Wilson, Dr. Ida: The Story of Dr. Ida Scudder of Vellore (1959; rev. ed. 1964); it is not annotated, but is based on interviews and research in papers surviving in Vellore in 1957. Also popular and undocumented, but somewhat more detailed for the early years and for her medical work, is M. Pauline Jeffery, Dr. Ida: India, The Life Story of Ida S. Scudder (1938; rev. ed. 1950). Short hagiographic summaries are Sheila Smith, Doctor Ida (1950), and Carolyn Scott, The Doctor Who Never Gave Up (1970). Dorothy Jealous Scudder, "A Thousand Years in Thy Sight, the Story of the Scudders of India" (1970), a MS. in the Reformed Church Archives, includes three chapters on Ida Scudder. See also D. C. Wilson, Twelve Who Cared (1977); Stephen Neill and others, eds., Concise Diet, of the Christian World Mission (1971); Sherwood Eddy, Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade (1945), pp. 128-39; and Sally Knapp, Women Doctors Today (1947), pp. 65-78. An obituary in the N.Y. Times, May 25, 1960, has several discrepancies in chronology.] VALENTIN

RABE

SCUDDER, Vida, Dec. 15, 1861-Oct. 9, 1954. Social reformer, scholar. Vida Scudder was born Julia Davida in Madura, India, the only child of David Coit Scudder, a Congregationalist missionary, and Harriet Louisa (Dutton) Scudder. In 1862 David Scudder drowned and Harriet Scudder returned with her infant daughter to the Dutton home in Auburndale, Mass. Both Scudders and Duttons were old New England families; Vida,

a delicate, sensitive child, grew up surrounded by doting grandparents, distinguished aunts and uncles, and a devoted mother. Vida Scudder spent much of her childhood in Europe where she absorbed, as much from her mother as from their travels, the devotion to beauty and tradition which marked her life. She also attended private schools in Boston, and in the religious excitement of the 1870s she and her mother were confirmed by Phillips Brooks in the Episcopal church. In 1878 Vida joined the first class of Girls' Latin School in Boston and in 1880 entered Smith College, her first ordinary association with her peers and her first and only separation from her mother until Harriet Scudder's death in 1920. Scudder learned the value of true feminine friendship during her college years; throughout her life her deeper friendships were with women. During a postgraduate term at Oxford University in 1884 Scudder attended the last lectures of John Ruskin and became aware of the "plethora of privilege" in her life. She came away filled with a social radicalism for which there was no outlet in the Boston to which she returned in 1885. Brooding, groping, bored, she accepted a position in the English department at Wellesley College in 1887, choosing Wellesley over Smith so she could remain with her mother. From the outset her teaching was animated by both a great love of letters and a growing social concern, a combination also seen in two of her earliest books, The Life of the Spirit in Modern English Poets (1895) and Social Ideals in English Letters (1898). Teaching gave her self-confidence, but her worry about "privilege unshared" persisted. This concern led her in 1887 to initiate plans for a college settlement, the beginning of what became the College Settlements Association. In 1889 the first settlement opened on Rivington Street in New York City. Scudder, as secretary of the electoral board of the association, promoted its work on college campuses, and in 1893 took a year's leave of absence from Wellesley to join H E L E N A D U D L E Y in the official opening of Denison House in Boston's South End. For the next twenty years she was the prime mover at Denison House, supplying "the ideas" while Helena Dudley, the headworker, provided "the human warmth and contacts." In 1889 Scudder became a member of William D. P. Bliss's Society of Christian Socialists, a charter member of the Brotherhood of the Carpenter, and an active worker in the Christian Social Union. But settlement work and friendships with the women in settlement neighborhoods turned her attention to the practical

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side of the labor question. Denison House became a meeting place for several labor groups. Vida Scudder and Helena Dudley were elected delegates to the Boston Central Labor Union. The mental and spiritual strain of conflicting interests brought on a breakdown in 1901. Her mother was puzzled if not disappointed by her radicalism and Scudder was often in conflict with the Wellesley College administration over her socialist activities. Her outspoken opposition to a Rockefeller gift had led to direct disagreement with the Wellesley trustees in 1900. Moreover, she constantly reproached herself for the many personal compromises she felt obliged to make in following such diverse careers. After two years of enforced idleness, traveling in Europe (1901-02), Vida Scudder returned to Boston filled with enthusiasm and new ideas. She formed an Italian Circle at Denison House for new immigrants and took an active part in organizing the Women's Trade Union League. Realizing that the moral and intellectual disunion in society demanded more radical solutions, she also began to participate more actively in church and socialist groups. In 1911 Scudder was a founding member of the Episcopal Church Socialist League, designed to encourage the application of Christian principles to industrial and social relations. Believing that Christians committed to socialism should also make their views heard outside the church, she joined the Socialist party in 1911. In Socialism and Character (1912) she tried to reconcile the apparent differences between Christianity and socialism. Through her socialist connections Scudder was asked to speak in Lawrence, Mass., during the 1912 textile strike. Her speech and that of Wellesley colleague Ellen Hayes led to demands for their resignation, and Vida Scudder was asked to suspend for that year the course for which she had become famous, "Social Ideals in English Literature." Realizing that her radicalism also hindered the work at Denison House, she resigned from most of her activity there and in 1912 moved with her mother to Wellesley. In 1919 Florence Converse (1871-1967) and her mother joined the Scudder household. Poet, novelist, and assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1908-30), Converse had been Scudder's student at Wellesley. She had become Scudder's most intimate friend, her comrade in radical causes and companion in the deepest spiritual experiences. Until Scudder's death they shared "both jokes and prayers." When the United States entered the war in 1917, Vida Scudder supported Wilson's decision, causing a painful break with many pacifist friends, whose right to dissent she nonetheless

supported strongly. In 1919, anxious to keep alive the spark of radicalism in the Episcopal church, Scudder organized the Church League for Industrial Democracy, bringing together both liberal and radical church members committed to the cause of social justice. She was also active in reorganizing the Intercollegiate Socialist League into the League for Industrial Democracy and here formed a lasting friendship with Norman Thomas. In the postwar years Scudder moved toward pacifism. In 1923 she joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation and that summer gave a series of lectures at a meeting of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Podebrady near Prague. She looked hopefully at the Russian revolution but soon realized that any revolution which did not proceed "from a Christian conception of man" could not provide a solution to social ills. Often called a communist, she actually anticipated the later ChristianMarxist dialogue. By the mid-1930s Scudder had become and remained an absolute pacifist. In 1928 Scudder retired from Wellesley and a new phase in her career began. Years of research on the early history of the Franciscans resulted in her major work, The Franciscan Adventure (1931), and established her as a leading Franciscan scholar. In 1930 she became the first dean of the Summer School of Christian Ethics held at Wellesley and in 1931 she lectured weekly at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her greatest contribution to the growth of Christian social thought in America came, however, through her writing. The author of sixteen books, on literary, religious, and political subjects, she continued to explore every new path that might lead to social redemption. Her autobiography, On Journey, published in 1937, provides a perceptive review of seventy-five years of social history and of her own religious ideals. More than most of her companions in social movements, Vida Scudder was able to harmonize the demands of an active career with an intense spiritual life. The Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, a group of Episcopal women to which she had belonged since 1889, provided consistent strength and support. Through the society she organized institutes on such topics as Franciscan studies, the church's responsibility toward racial groups, and penal reform. In 1945, almost eighty-five, she addressed the annual Conference on Christian Social Thinking at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass., on "Anglican Thought on Property." Although age curtailed her activity in the next decade, her interest never waned. In 1952 she

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Sears published My Quest for Reality, a sequel to her autobiography. She died suddenly in 1954 of asphyxiation, caused by choking on a piece of food, in her home in Wellesley. [Most of the Vida Scudder MSS. have been lost. Of those remaining, the most valuable collections are in the Wellesley College Archives, the archives of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, Adelynrood, So. Byfield, Mass., and the Smith College Library. Smith also has six handwritten journals, a draft of On Journey. See also the records of the College Settlements Assoc. in the Smith College Library and the Denison House records in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Among her other books are The Witness of Denial (1895); Introduction to the Study of English Literature (1901); A Listener in Babel: Being a Series of Imaginary Conversations (1903); Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters (1905); The Disciple of a Saint (1907); Le Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory and Its Sources (1917); The Church and the Hour: Reflections of a Socialist Churchwoman (1917); The Social Teachings of the Christian Year (1921); Brother John: A Tale of the First Franciscans (1927); Father Huntington (1940). She also prepared editions of a variety of English literary and historical works, and several volumes of religious interest as well. The most complete bibliography of her work is in Sister Catherine Theresa Corcoran, S.C., "Vida Dutton Scudder: The Progressive Years" (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown Univ., 1973). Secondary material is scarce but see Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in an Urban Age (1954); Theresa Corcoran, S.C., "Vida Dutton Scudder: Impact of World War I on the Radical Woman Professor," Anglican Theological Rev., Spring 1975; and Peter J. Frederick, "The Professor as Social Activist," New England Quart., Sept. 1970. There are references to Scudder in Florence Converse, Wellesley College: A Chronicle of the Years, 18751938 (1939); Alice Payne Hackett, Wellesley, Part of the American Story (1949); Dorothy Burgess, Dream and Deed: The Story of Katharine Lee Bates (1952); Mercedes Randall, Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch (1964). See also Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. A copy of On Journey to which many snapshots of Vida Scudder have been added is in the Wellesley College Archives. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 11, 1954; death record from the Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] THERESA

CORCORAN,

S.C.

SEARS, Eleonora Randolph, Sept. 28, 1 8 8 1 March 26, 1968. Sportswoman. A popular Boston socialite in her day, Eleonora Sears devoted her enthusiastic energies to sports, pursuing her activities with determination and dedication. She was beautiful, outspoken, and independent, and delighted in doing the unusual. The first national women's squash

champion, Sears was dubbed "pioneer in women's sports" by the New York Times. Horses were her most enduring passion; she owned and bred them, was an expert rider and jumper, and was the first woman to play polo. She also participated in tennis, sailing, golf, swimming, trapshooting, and walking, and even tried football, baseball, and ice hockey. Eleonora Randolph Sears was born on Boston's fashionable Beacon Hill, the younger of two children and only daughter of Frederick Richard and Eleonora Randolph (Coolidge) Sears. Both parents descended from early English settlers of Massachusetts, and her mother was the great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson. Her father's family had a successful business in real estate and shipping. Raised in an atmosphere of luxury, she was educated by private tutors both at home and in Paris where she and her family accompanied her grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, who served as minister to France ( 1 8 9 2 - 9 3 ) . One of the earliest interests in Eleonora Sears's varied sporting career was tennis. Niece of the first national tennis champion, Richard Dudley Sears, she was by 1903 acclaimed as the tennis queen of Newport, R.I., for her victories in club tournaments. Her aggressive style of play and overwhelming desire to win were always exciting to spectators. She was four times National Women's Doubles champion—twice with HAZEL HOTCHKISS ( w i G H T M A N ) , in 1911 and 1915, and twice with Molla Bjurstedt (Mallory), in 1916 and 1917—and won the National Mixed Doubles championship with Willis Davis in 1916. She also contributed to the revolution in women's tennis dress by rolling up her shirt sleeves to play. One of Eleonora Sears's most daring escapades, publicized nationwide, occurred in 1912 at a practice session for a men's polo team in Burlingame, Calif. Riding onto the field astride her horse, rather than sidesaddle as convention dictated to women, and wearing jodhpurs, she requested permission to be on the team. The request was denied, and she so startled the spectators by her audacity and appearance that the Burlingame Mothers' Club issued a resolution asking Eleonora Sears to "restrict herself to the normal feminine attire in the future." She completely ignored the resolution and took to wearing trousers even when she was not riding. Although her breakthroughs into previously all-male sports opened doors for other women, Eleonora Sears never saw herself as a leader of a feminist crusade. Her motive was only to be able to participate in the sports she loved, and her position as an affluent Boston society woman gave her the license to do the unconventional.

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Sears She played on the squash courts of the Harvard Club when women were officially forbidden to enter the building. There were hardly any women squash players in 1918 when she took up the game, but ten years later enough interest had developed so that the first women's national championships were held. Not surprisingly, Eleonora Sears was the winner, and she continued in tournament play until the age of seventy. Often referred to as the "Mother of Squash," she was at one time president of the United States Women's Squash Racquets Association and captain of its international team. Some of Sears's most publicized achievements were her long-distance walks. She acquired the habit of taking long walks from her father, and she frequently walked from the Sears's Beacon Street home to their summer house in Prides Crossing, Mass., a distance of twenty miles. In her early thirties she covered the 108 miles between Burlingame and Del Monte, Calif., in nineteen hours and fifty minutes. Sometimes accompanied by Harvard athletes, she often walked the forty-seven miles from Boston to Providence, R.I. In 1926 she recorded her best time between the two cities: nine hours and fifty-three minutes. Dressed in her usual hiking costume of a short coat and skirt, socks rolled down to her heavy hiking boots, and a felt hat, she was always followed by her chauffeur-driven car. Eleonora Sears's sporting achievements were extensively reported in the newspapers, but few knew about her investments in the sporting world. For years she provided the financial support for the United States Equestrian Team, and team members frequently competed in the Olympics on horses she lent them. Her money also helped to keep the National Horse Show an annual event. As a longtime member of the Boston Skating Club, Sears contributed generously to the rebuilding program after a fatal plane crash in France in 1961 practically eliminated the American skating team. Her efforts to save the Boston Mounted Police were legendary in the Boston area. When an economy move threatened in 1957 to eliminate the horses from the ranks of police work, Sears not only came forth with the necessary money but donated some of her horses to the department. Eleonora Sears spent the last five years of her life in Palm Beach, Fla. She remained relatively healthy and vigorous until 1968, when she died of leukemia in a West Palm Beach hospital. An avid sportswoman, a leader in society, a controversial figure because of her independent ways, she had "blazed a pathway for women which never had been taken before" (Menke, p. 1065).

[The major sources of material on Eleonora Sears are newspaper clippings and magazine articles. Short sketches of her accomplishments are included in John Durant and Otto Bettman, Pictorial History of American Sports ( 1 9 5 4 ) ; Phyllis Hollander, One Hundred Greatest Women in Sports ( 1 9 7 6 ) ; and Frank Menke, The Encyclopedia of Sport ( 1 9 6 9 ) . Colorful accounts of her character are in Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians ( 1 9 4 7 ) , and "Bostonian Unique—Miss Sears," Vogue, Feb. 15, 1963, pp. 80-83. Agnes Rogers, Women Are Here to Stay ( 1 9 4 9 ) , pp. 58-59, contains several photographs. The fullest biographical account is the obituary in the N.Y. Times, March 27, 1968; a biography by the author is in preparation. Obituaries also appeared in the Boston Globe, March 27, 1968; Time, April 5, 1968; and Newsweek, April 8, 1968. Death certificate was supplied by the Fla. Dept. of Health and Rehabilitative Services.] JOANNA DAVENPORT

SEEGER, Ruth Crawford. Ruth.

See

CRAWFORD-

SEEGER,

SETON, Grace Gallatin, Jan. 28, 1872-March 19, 1959. Suffragist, feminist, explorer, writer. Grace Gallatin Seton described herself as "one of those people who were born believing in suffrage." Fighting for women's rights throughout her life, she set up the Biblioteca Femina, a collection of books by women. She also traveled to areas previously seen by few western women, and wrote about the common struggle for equality of women from widely varying cultures. Her father, Albert Gallatin, who arrived penniless in Sacramento, Calif., from New York state in the early 1860s, eventually became president of the largest hardware, iron, and steel house on the west coast. He married Clemenzie Rhodes of Hudson, Mich., the daughter of a Methodist preacher and circuit rider whose family had emigrated from England in the seventeenth century. Grace was the youngest of their two daughters and one son. In 1881 Grace Gallatin's parents were divorced. Her mother, taking only Grace with her, first returned to her family and then remarried and moved to New York City. Grace had little contact with her siblings and her father, who soon remarried, although she became close to her sister much later in life. She attended the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, graduating in 1892. Later she studied commercial and hand bookmaking and printing. During a trip to Europe in 1894 Grace Gallatin met Ernest Thompson Seton, a naturalist and writer. They were married in New York City in 1896. Because Grace Seton preferred society and city life and Ernest Seton preferred the country, they compromised by spending winters

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Seton in an apartment in New York City and summers at a series of country estates. From about 1912 until 1914 they lived in England. In the early years of their marriage, Grace Seton assisted her husband with the design, organization, and editing of his books. Eager to share her husband's interests, Grace Seton also joined him on his camping trips. He wrote that "she was a dead shot with the rifle . . . and met all kinds of danger with unflinching nerve." In her first book, A Woman Tenderfoot (1900), she described her trip on horseback through the Rockies, suggesting designs for camping clothes that gave women freedom and looked "equally well on and off the horse." Her enthusiasm for outdoor life later led her to help organize the Camp Fire Girls ( 1 9 1 2 ) . After an earlier miscarriage, in 1904 Grace Seton gave birth to her only child, a daughter christened Ann and nicknamed Anya, who became a well-known writer. Anya was brought up mainly by governesses. Uninterested in being a homemaker and unable to cook or sew, Seton always had servants. Frequently away from home, during World War I she organized and directed a woman's motor unit in France which brought food and aid to the soldiers directly behind the trenches. She was decorated by the French government for her service. Active in the suffrage campaign from the age of seventeen, Seton served as vice president and later president of the Connecticut Woman's Suffrage Association ( 1 9 1 0 - 2 0 ) . After World War I, she focused her concern on women writers. As president of the National League of American Pen Women ( 1 9 2 6 - 2 8 and 1 9 3 0 - 3 2 ) , she doubled the number of branches of the organization. Her most important accomplishment was the establishment of the Biblioteca Femina, a collection of 2,000 volumes and 100 pamphlets, many of them not found in libraries, by women from thirty-seven countries on five continents. The Biblioteca, which helped gain recognition for women writers, originated during Seton's tenure as chairman of letters of the National Council of Women ( 1 9 3 3 - 3 8 ) , when she organized and presided over a conclave of women writers during the 1933 International Congress of Women in Chicago. It was later donated to the Northwestern University Library. A committed activist, Grace Seton belonged to and held office in a large number of organizations. She claimed that her entry in Who's Who in America was longer than that of any other woman writer. As a member of the Republican party, she campaigned for Herbert Hoover and Thomas E. Dewey and fought for equal status for women in the Republican National Committee. In addition, she belonged to various social

clubs, and articles about her often appeared on society pages. During the 1920s and 1930s, in addition to trips to Europe, Seton visited Japan, China, Egypt, India, South America, and Indochina. Unwilling to confine herself to the typical tourist sites, she sought places where "all normalcy and security is gone." Thus she rode a donkey on a caravan through the Libyan desert and an elephant on a safari through the jungles of Vietnam, organized a tiger hunt in India, and went to see a military uprising in China "first-hand." Besides lecturing and publishing numerous articles, Seton wrote a series of five books about her travels. These first-person narratives include extensive discussions of each country's history, customs, social structure, and political system, as well as analysis of the status of women. She sought out the Moi tribes in Vietnam, the subject of her last book, Poison Arrows ( 1 9 3 8 ) , as an example of a matriarchal culture. Generally apolitical in her writing, Seton for instance praised both the British rulers and the antiBritish nationalist leaders in A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt ( 1 9 2 3 ) . After World War I, Grace Seton and her husband, both strong-willed and competitive, followed independent careers that rarely overlapped. By the late 1920s they had separated, and they were divorced in 1935. A beautiful woman, even in her later years, she had many male friends and suitors as well as a wide circle of women friends. An early interest in mysticism and eastern religions strengthened as Seton became older. In the 1940s she was a follower of Yogananda, traveling to his ashrams in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Many of her poems, collected in The Singing Traveler (1947), express eastern beliefs. From middle age Seton suffered from arthritis, wearing an Indian bracelet to guard her from its effects and spending her winters in warm climates. Her daughter lived with her from 1930 until her death of a heart attack in Palm Beach, F l a , in 1959. [The Sophia Smith Coll. at Smith College has some of Seton's correspondence, a clipping file, notes on her travels, MSS., and pamphlets. In the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College are letters on her work with various women's organizations. Her other books include Nimrod's Wife (1907), Chinese Lanterns (1924), Yes, Lady Saheb (1925), and Magic Waters (1933). Biographical information can be found in Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XLVII, 80-81; Women of Achievement (1940), p. 38; John J. A'Becket, "Mr. and Mrs. Seton-Thompson at Home," Harper's Bazaar, Feb. 3, 1900; Helen Buckler, Mary F. Fiedler, and Martha F. Allen, Wo-He-Lo: The Story of Camp Fire Girls, 1910-1960 (1961); and Ernest Thompson Seton, Trail of an Artist-Naturalist

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Sewell (1940), pp. 343-50. For material on her father see Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXXVII, 407-8, and Betty Foot Henderson, "Families in the Mansion," Golden Notes, May 1973, pp. 2-4. James J. Hogaboam, The Bean Creek Valley (1876), has some information about the Rhodes family. Seton's obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, March 20, 1959. Additional invaluable information was provided by Seton's daughter, Anya Seton Chase, and her granddaughter, Clemency Chase Coggins. Death certificate from Fla. Dept. of Health and Rehabilitative Services.] JOAN

FEINBERG

S E W E L L , Edna Belle Scott, Aug. 1, 1 8 8 1 Oct. 22, 1967. Farm women's leader. Edna Sewell, first director of the Associated Women of the American Farm Bureau Federation ( A F B F ) , was born on a farm near the small town of Ambia, Benton County, Ind., the oldest of the three daughters and two sons of Clinton and Emma (Albaugh) Scott, both of Irish ancestry. Her father was a farmer and, for a time, a pharmacist; her mother, a homemaker. Edna Scott attended a one-room district school in the rural area where her father farmed, and graduated from the high school in Oxford, the Benton County seat. Although she did not go to college, she continued to read and study throughout her adult life. Girls married early in the community where Edna Scott lived. On Dec. 29, 1897, she married Charles W. Sewell, who was already well established as one of the county's better farmers. He took his bride to live in the oldest farmhouse in the county, and in that primitive dwelling she mastered the skills of a farm wife—baking, sewing, cleaning, canning, maintaining a sizable vegetable garden—and gave birth to her two children: Greta Geneive in 1900, and Gerald Scott in 1903 (d. 1 9 4 5 ) . In 1906 the Sewell family moved to the small town of Otterbein, Ind., to a more up-to-date farm dwelling that was close to both church and school. Edna Sewell became organist and Sunday school superintendent at the Methodist church, and joined other social organizations such as the local chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star. Her career as a leader of American farm women began in 1908, when she was asked to address a meeting of the Benton County Farmers' Institute. Her paper, entitled "The Woman in the Home and Community," attracted the attention of Professor William C. Latta of Purdue University, who invited her to give similar speeches in other counties; by 1913 she was listed as a regular speaker on the Farmers' Institute roster. These county institutes, the earliest form of systematic agricultural extension in the

United States, were organized by and for farmers but were intended to promote the well-being of the entire community. In her own town Sewell organized in 1913 a farmers' social club, which later helped construct the area's first cooperative grain elevator and became the nucleus for a local chapter of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Edna Sewell gradually became known throughout the state for her efforts to help farm women improve their lives. Purdue University offered her a unique opportunity in 1916 when, in connection with its home economics department, she organized and helped direct the first three home improvement tours ever conducted in the United States. These tours demonstrated to farm wives new and efficient ways of caring for their families and homes. Sewell also served for one year at Purdue as assistant leader of Home Demonstration agents, and in 1920 helped establish a short course in home economics to be taught in connection with the Indiana State Fair. Sewell gained nationwide recognition through her association with the A F B F , an independent organization of farmers founded in 1920 to develop agriculture and to protect the interests of farmers across the nation. At the organization's second annual meeting she stepped in at the last moment as a replacement speaker and gave an extremely effective and widely publicized talk. "There isn't a man here this evening," she maintained, "no matter how good a farmer or how capable a manager he may be, who is capable enough to manage and direct all the affairs of his farm and homestead unless he has in close partnership with him an up-to-date woman to help him." Her speech prompted the federation to pass a resolution recognizing that the strength of the farm home was essential to the stability of American agriculture, and that the admission of women as members could significantly extend the organization's influence. "We welcome to our councils the farm women of our nation," the resolution declared. In 1921 Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace invited Edna Sewell to come to Washington as one of Indiana's seven delegates to President Harding's National Agricultural Conference. She became a second vice president, head of the women's department, and a member of the board of the Indiana Farm Bureau—a position she held for nine years. In 1927 the A F B F established under Edna Sewell's directorship a Home and Community Department, which in 1934 became the Associated Women of the A F B F . She remained its head until her retirement, directing public relations work, supervising the federation's congressional lobby-

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Sexton ing activities, promoting the development of education and health-care systems, working for war relief abroad, and speaking at meetings and conferences throughout the country. She helped organize chapters in North Carolina and Tennessee, and in 1947 and 1950 traveled to Europe as the federation's delegate to the triennial conferences of Associated Country Women of the World. In addition to her work for the federation, Sewell was a consultant on rural health to the American Medical Association, which awarded her a citation for distinguished service in that field. Sewell officially retired in 1950, but continued to make public appearances and to serve on a number of committees. She was honored many times for her accomplishments, receiving distinguished service awards from such institutions as the University of Wisconsin (1933), and the A F B F ( 1 9 5 0 ) . Charles Sewell had continued to farm until his death in 1933. Hiring a family to run the farm, Edna Sewell remained there, continuing to be active in federation affairs until her death in 1967 of kidney failure at a nursing home in Lafayette, Ind. [The best source for information about the life and career of Edna Belle Scott Sewell is an autobiography written when she was seventy-three years old; the manuscript is in the possession of family members. An essay of hers, entitled "My Country 'Tis of Thee," appeared in the Progressive Farmer in 1951. Considerable information about her life can be found in press releases and other materials from the files of the AFBF, Cornell Univ. Libraries, Dept. of Manuscripts. For an account of the Associated Women and of Sewell's role in the organization see Orville M. Kile, The Farm Bureau Through Three Decades (1948). "Where Are They Now?" The Hoosier Farmer, Oct. 1964, contains information about the later part of her life. The Indianapolis News, April 21, 1956, and the Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier, March 22, 1958, printed articles citing her honors and accomplishments. Obituaries appeared in the Indianapolis Star, Oct. 24, 1967, and the Lafayette Journal and Courier, Oct. 23, 1967. A death record was provided by the Ind. Board of Health.] REBECCA

A.

SHEPHERD

SEXTON, Anne Gray Harvey, Nov. 9, 1 9 2 8 Oct. 4, 1974. Poet. Anne Sexton began writing seriously at the age of twenty-eight. From that time until she died, she made her poetry a critical battleground for sanity, identity, and fame; the poet's business of ordering experience through language became her means of holding on to life. Daily life was often very difficult for Anne Sexton; from 1954 on, she had frequent break-

downs, spent considerable time in mental institutions, and attempted suicide several times. But she did not want to be known as "the madsuicide poet," and her poetry is often obsessed instead with the will to live. Her books, especially the early ones, are filled with poems about love, life, family, her children; even the poems which clearly court death are full of the strain of the struggle. She once wrote, "Poetry saved my life"—she had begun writing poetry as mental therapy— but her motivation was not only therapeutic. Few poets were so openly demanding of praise and admiration, so immensely concerned to be taken seriously, to be thought more important than popular. She worried that her public image misrepresented her private self; as she wrote to Erica Jong, after meeting her at a reading: "That isn't the real me, the woman of the poems, the woman of the kitchen, the woman of the private (but published) hungers. Perhaps you knew that? Perhaps I didn't seem like a goddamn show-off after all" (Self-Portrait, pp. 4 1 3 1 4 ) . On stage—as she always was in p u b l i c Anne Sexton was glamorous, self-confident, full of style and posture. Behind the scenes, however (as is especially evident in her published letters) she was obsessively lacking in self-confidence, starving for praise and approval, frightened both of life and of death. In March 1956, Anne Sexton was for the second time admitted to a mental hospital. In November she tried to kill herself. Until that time, her life seems to have been at once suburbanly regular and eccentrically disturbing. Unlike other successful women poets of her generation, she was neither academic, intellectual, nor urban. Born in Newton, Mass., she was the third of three daughters of Mary Gray (Staples) and Ralph Churchill Harvey. Her father was a successful wool merchant, owner of his own company; Mary Harvey had attended Wellesley College and had literary interests. Sexton always maintained that her mother was her sternest critic. Although many of her adult letters to her family were filled with love and intimacy, there were times when she felt she was essentially unwanted, "the mistake/ that Mother used to keep Father/ from his divorce" ("Those Times," Live or Die). The Harveys lived in suburban Wellesley, Mass., where Anne attended public schools. Graduating in 1947 from Rogers Hall, a preparatory school for girls in Lowell, Mass., she very briefly attended Garland Junior College in Boston, before eloping on Aug. 16, 1948, with Alfred "Kayo" Muller Sexton II. He was the son of an affluent, conservative family who were not at all pleased with the impetuous marriage nor

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Sexton with their son's withdrawal from college to support his wife. After Kayo's naval service, the Sextons settled in the suburbs of Boston and Kayo went into the Harvey family business. "All I wanted," Sexton remarked in 1968, "was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children . . . I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me." But this life worried her. "You can't build little picket fences to keep the nightmares out" (Kevles, p. 160). The pressures of isolation and of society's expectations were troubling: "A woman who writes feels too much/ . . . As if cycles and children and islands/ weren't enough, as if mourners and gossips/ and vegetables were never enough" ("The Black Art," All My Pretty Ones). In addition, Sexton did not look the part of the contented suburban matron. She was strikingly handsome; a tough-looking, undeniably sexy woman who in her late twenties had worked as a model for the Hart Agency in Boston. Yet her poems suggest that she was constantly uneasy about her sexual identity. Addressing her daughter, she wrote: "I, who was never sure/ about being a girl, needed another/ life, another image to remind me" ("The Double Image," To Bedlam and Part Way Back). On July 21, 1953, Anne Sexton gave birth to her first child, Linda Gray. Joyce Ladd was born on Aug. 5, 1955. Although she was intensely devoted to her children, it is clear that Sexton found motherhood extremely difficult and demanding. Seven months after Joyce's birth she suffered a severe breakdown and was admitted to a mental hospital; some months later, after her suicide attempt, her children were sent to live with their grandparents. Joyce spent hefirst three years with her father's parents. Anne Sexton convalesced at her parents' home and saw her children only occasionally. As she recovered, her mother became ill. In "The Double Image," she explored her guilt about abandoning her child (the poem is addressed to Joyce) and feeling, irrationally, responsible for her mother's cancer. "She turned from me, as if death were catching . . . as if my dying had eaten inside of her./ That August you were two, but I timed my days with doubt." Later, she began to see Joyce more regularly and finally reestablished her maternal claims; she cared for her mother, who had come to live with the Sextons, for most of 1957 and 1958. The year 1959 was one of intense depression as well as brave self-examination. On March 10 Mary Harvey died of cancer; three months later Ralph Harvey died of a stroke. And in October,

Anne Sexton underwent major surgery. The poems in her first book, To Bedlam, and Part Way Back (1960), reflect the depression, but mostly the bravery. Earlier, she had quite systematically and consciously learned about writing poetry. In 1957, she enrolled in John Holmes's poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education; in 1958 she worked at Antioch with W. D. Snodgrass—who was to become a lifelong friend— and in the same year, she was accepted into Robert Lowell's writing seminar at Boston University. There she met and became friends with SYLVIA P L A T H , George Starbuck, and Maxine Kumin—her closest and most treasured friend from that time on. Lowell was a testing and a tasking teacher and his influence was significant and permanent. He encouraged Sexton and wrote, for the cover of her first book: "Her poems stick in my mind. I don't see how they can fail to make the great stir they deserve." The poems received the attention Lowell anticipated, and Sexton's career as a poet began. In 1961, she taught poetry at Harvard and was a scholar in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. All My Pretty Ones (1963) was nominated for a National Book Award; Live or Die (1966) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. She received an honorary Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard (1968) and a Guggenheim fellowship (1969). In the spring of 1972 she held the Crashaw Chair in Literature at Colgate University. Later that year Anne Sexton became a full professor at Boston University, where she had been a very successful teacher since 1969. After 1968, however, her poetry was turned out at an increasingly rapid and distressingly uncontrollable rate: Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), The Death Notebooks (1974). The Awful Rowing Towards God (1975) and 45 Mercy Street (1976) were published posthumously. With the possible exception of Transformations, grotesquely but marvelously retold fairy tales, the late poetry is strangely, dangerously possessed by an undisciplined longing for dark belief. Although she talks about hope for mercy, the poems mainly settle on despair. Books appeared and honors were conferred at an astonishing rate, but that was apparently not enough to support an increasingly desperate, unhappy, and unstable personal life. In 1973 she was twice hospitalized and the same year requested and was granted a divorce. In October 1974, Anne Sexton committed suicide at her home in Weston, Mass. Her last poems had become increasingly undisciplined and she was herself extremely dis-

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satisfied with much that she wrote. But Anne Sexton's poetry at its best reflects the woman who insisted on life, not death, who wrote, "I say Live, Live because of the sun,/ the dream, the excitable gift" ("Live," Live or Die), And that is the poetry that will survive. [In addition to the books cited, a collection, Selected Poems, was published in England in 1964. A selection of her letters, Anne Sexton: A SelfPortrait in Letters, ed. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, appeared in 1977. There is no full-length biography. J. D. McClatchy, ed., Anne Sexton: The Poet and Her Critics (1978), a collection of critical essays, contains a chronology and a full though not complete bibliography of primary and secondary sources. See also Barbara Kevles, "The Art of Poetry xv: Anne Sexton," Paris Rev., no. 52 (1971), an interview. Her obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 6, 1974; death record provided by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] JANE

MCCABE

SHAMBAUGH, Jessie Field, June 26, 1 8 8 1 Jan. 15, 1971. Rural educator. Jessie Field Shambaugh, "Mother of 4-H," was born Celestia Josephine, the fifth of eight children and third of five daughters of Solomon Elijah and Celestia Josephine (Eastman) Field. Her parents, both former educators, moved west from Illinois in 1869, and were sodbusters in Shenandoah, Page County, Iowa, where Jessie was born. As a small child, Jessie Field accompanied her father to Farm Institute meetings where the dynamic "Uncle" Henry C. Wallace, editor of Wallace's Farmer, inspired her with the ideals of farm life. She attended Fairview, a country school, in Grant Township. Although rheumatic fever when she was thirteen interrupted her education for a year, she graduated from Shenandoah High School in 1899. While attending Western Normal College in Shenandoah, Field began her career as an educator: she was asked to teach the spring term of 1901 at the Goldenrod School in Page County. To foster a feeling of pride and self-worth in her students, and to teach them improved farming techniques and home management, she formed at the school her first Boys Corn Club and Girls Home Club, the forerunners of 4-H clubs. After receiving her A.B. from Tabor College, in Fremont County, Iowa, in 1903, Field taught in Antigo, Wis. ( 1 9 0 3 - 0 4 ) , and Shenandoah ( 1 9 0 4 - 0 5 ) , and then became principal of the Jefferson School in Helena, Mont. ( 1 9 0 5 - 0 6 ) . At a time when few young women attained such positions, she was elected superintendent of schools in Page County in the fall of 1906. As superintendent, Field was innovative in

her emphasis on the practical value of education. Her goal was to make the schools more vital and useful to farm youth. In 1909 she published Farm Arithmetic, a book of problems applicable to rural living which was widely used in Iowa schools. To educate youth about scientific and improved farming techniques, she called on the colleges and Farm Institutes to offer their assistance. Believing that friendly competition was a useful teaching device, Field began in 1906 to establish a Boys Corn Club and a Girls Home Club in each of the 130 schools in Page County. With the assistance of Perry G. Holden, a professor in the extension department of the Iowa State College of Agriculture, she taught improved farming techniques. Club activities, conducted after school, included seed corn, milk, and livestock judging, and competition in home crafts and road dragging (grading of dirt roads with teams of horses pulling logs). In 1908, under Field's leadership, the Page County Boys Agricultural Club was organized. Field's students won many honors, including first prize at the International Corn Show in Omaha ( 1 9 0 9 ) . In 1912, Field won first place as the Adult Corn Judge at the Iowa State Agricultural College. While Field was superintendent, her schools served as models for exemplary rural education and attracted national attention. In 1909, under the sponsorship of the Southern Board of Education of Nashville, Tenn., fifteen superintendents from southern states visited the Page County schools; they reported that Field was "a genius" and "a prophet in her own country." Educational journals commended the schools' innovative teaching methods and their farm youth clubs. To encourage student participation in rural organizations, Field designed a three-leaf clover pin, to represent technological, agricultural, and domestic science. First distributed as an award in 1910, the letter "H" was placed on each leaf, symbolizing "Head," "Hands," and "Heart" with a kernel of corn and the word "Page" in the center. A fourth " H " was later added, representing "Home" and then "Health." The idea of the farm clubs, symbolized by the pin, was the beginning of 4-H, which evolved over the years into a national organization sponsored by the Department of Agriculture. In 1910 Jessie Field organized the first Page County Boys Farm Camp, where seminars on new farming techniques were held. A girls' camp was added in 1911. Growing in popularity, these camps were later sponsored by 4-H. In The Corn Lady: The Story of a Country Teacher's Life, published in 1911, Field described her work in the rural schools and as an organizer of farm youth groups.

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Resigning from her superintendency, Field moved to New York City in May 1912 to become the National YWCA secretary for small town and country work. Upset that "the city continues each year to claim an immense number of the best country people" ("The Country Girl"), Field felt that the YWCA could counter this movement by improving the domestic, social, and religious lives of women living on farms and in small towns. During her years in New York, Field also published with Scott Nearing Community Civics (1916), a textbook for rural adolescents. In 1917, at thirty-five, Jessie Field returned to Iowa to marry Ira William Shambaugh, twenty years her senior, who owned a grain mill. After the stillbirth of a son in 1919, they adopted a son, William H., the following year. After she recovered from pernicious anemia, Jessie Shambaugh gave birth to their daughter, Phyllis Ruth, in 1922; she later had two miscarriages. Shambaugh published A Real Country Teacher: The Story of Her Work in 1922; it includes the letters previously published in The Corn Lady, adding an update, "Fifteen Years Later," and a supplement devoted to farm arithmetic problems. As a wife and mother, she continued to advise 4-H groups and to perform welfare work, becoming a charter member of the Page County Social Welfare Board. In 1971 after a hip fracture, Jessie Shambaugh died in Clarinda, Iowa, of pneumonia at the age of eighty-nine. [The Nat. Board, YWCA, N.Y. City, has Shambaugh's booklet College Women and Country Leadership ( 1 9 1 5 ) and a 1913 speech, "The Country Girl." Other articles by Shambaugh, all in the Jour. Education, are "Educating the Country Boy and Girl," May 5, 1910; "The Best Teachers for the Country," Nov. 17, 1910; and "Polly Stanton's Eight Week Club," Dec. 24, 1914. For information on her work see "The Best Rural Schools in America," Page County History, Iowa ( 1 9 4 2 ) , pp. 4 2 - 4 8 ; A. E. Winship, "Ideal Rural School Work," Jour. Education, June 24, 1909, pp. 6 8 8 - 9 0 ; Franklin M. Beck, The 4-H Story: A History of 4-H Club Work ( 1 9 5 1 ) ; and Faye Whitmore and Manila Cheshire, The Very Beginnings ( 1 9 6 3 ) , an account by friends of Shambaugh who were 3-H and 4-H members. Obituaries appeared in Des Moines Register and Tribune, Jan. 16, 1971; Council Bluffs Nonpareil, Jan. 17, 1971; and N.Y. Times, Jan. 18, 1971. Additional information was provided by Shambaugh's daughter, Ruth Shambaugh Watkins, and by Faye Whitmore and Manila Cheshire. Death record was provided by the registrar of Page Cty., Iowa.] JANICE NAHRA FRIEDEL

SHAVER, Dorothy, July 29, 1897-June 28, 1959. Business executive.

Dorothy Shaver, whose enthusiastic promotion of American designers helped bring American fashion to international attention, was born in the small Arkansas town of Center Point. She was the eldest of three daughters (the youngest died in childhood) and the third of five children born to James D. and Sallie (Borden) Shaver. She was descended from seventeenth-century English, Welsh, and German migrants. Dorothy's father was a lawyer and chancery court judge; his father was Robert Glenn ("Fighting Bob") Shaver, a Confederate general. Sallie Shaver was the daughter of Benjamin Borden, an editor of the Arkansas Gazette. Soon after Dorothy's birth, her family moved twenty miles north to Mena, a larger community. She grew up there, sang in the Episcopal church choir, graduated from high school with honors, and at eighteen was ready to marry a law student of whom her father disapproved. Judge Shaver cooled the romance by sending her to the University of Arkansas. After two years there, she moved on to the University of Chicago for a year, majoring in English. Her younger sister, Elsie, was also in Chicago, studying art. Encouraged by having earned $600 for illustrating a Marshall Field catalog, Elsie Shaver decided in 1920 to seek her fortune in New York. When she booked her train passage, Dorothy decided to go along "for the ride." In New York, Elsie sold some advertising art, continued her studies, and for her amusement made some impish dolls of rags and raffia. Dorothy Shaver, who had read that the Kewpie dolls of ROSE O ' N E I L L were earning her a fortune, had Elsie make up a family of her dolls and undertook to sell them. Her opportunity, and the beginning of her career, came through Samuel Wallace Reyburn, a distant cousin through the Bordens, who had come from Arkansas to New York in 1914 to be treasurer of Lord & Taylor, the famous Fifth Avenue specialty store. By 1920 he had become president of both Lord & Taylor and of the Associated Dry Goods Corporation, which owned it. Shown Elsie's dolls during a Sunday call, Reyburn gave the sisters advice on production and distribution. The dolls, called "The Little Shavers," were sold through Lord & Taylor and other outlets, earning the sisters a sizable income for four years. By 1924 Elsie had lost interest in the dolls and Dorothy Shaver began her career with Lord & Taylor. She worked first in the comparison shopping bureau, checking prices in rival stores, and two months later was made its director. In 1925 she became director of interior decoration and fashion. At her suggestion, the store estab-

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lished a bureau of fashion advisers, formed to improve the quality of the store's merchandise by working directly with designers and producers. This innovation soon became a standard component of retail stores. Elected to the store's board of directors in 1927, the following year she imported from France a $100,000 collection of modern art and decorative objects, including some Picassos, Braques, and Utrillos, which earned the store fame and profits. In 1931, she was made vice president in charge of advertising, publicity, and the bureau of fashion. From this time on Shaver focused on American designers and American fashion. Paris still dominated fashion, but through her emphasis on American designers as best qualified to meet the fashion needs of American women, and through her constant promotion of this idea at Lord & Taylor, Shaver contributed substantially to making New York the center of the fashion world. Among the many American designers whom she brought to public attention were C L A I R E M C C A R D E L L , Lilly Dache, Anne Fogarty, William Pahlmann, Rose Marie Reid, and Pauline Trigere. Shaver was also largely responsible for the creation of the annual Lord & Taylor American Design Awards, begun in 1938. Between 1931 and 1945, when she became president of the store, Shaver's innovations were many, distinctive, and profitable. Unusual window displays (including the Christmas bell windows, in which no merchandise was displayed but music was piped to the outside from gold bells), the store's characteristic seasonal awnings, and the bright reds and greens used throughout the interior drew crowds, as did the creation of the first fashion department exclusively devoted to teenagers. It all helped. Though Associated Dry Goods paid no dividends between 1931 and 1943, Lord & Taylor paid dividends in every depression year except 1933. Shaver was also largely responsible for launching Lord & Taylor's branch store program, which began with the Manhasset, Long Island, branch in 1941. During World War II, she served as consultant to the quartermaster general on merchandise and women's uniforms and was also active in the Red Cross and American Women's Volunteer Services. In 1945, Shaver was elected president of Lord & Taylor at a salary of $110,000, the largest on record for any woman in the country, a fact that was widely publicized (though Life magazine noted that this was only a quarter of the salary paid to a man in a similar position). Shaver's promotion brought her some matrimonial offers and a flood of pleas for help from individuals

and organizations. She continued, however, to live with her sister in a New York apartment and a summer home at Tannersville, N.Y. She weighed the pleas and expanded her civic and charitable activities; she also broadened the Lord & Taylor Awards to honor distinguished service in medicine, the arts, housing, education, and international relations. Shaver's efforts continued to be reflected in expanding profits. Lord & Taylor's sales, which were $30 million a year when Shaver became president, reached $50 million six years later and soared to $100 million in 1959, when Associated Dry Goods paid record dividends. Shaver had been made a director of the holding company in 1946. In 1946 and 1947, Associated Press editors voted Dorothy Shaver the outstanding woman in business. The American Woman's Association gave her its 1950 award for feminist achievement and in 1953, she received the first award of the Society of New York Dress Designers for "outstanding support of American design." Shaver was also a trustee of the Parsons School of Design and a fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was instrumental in the formation of the museum's Costume Institute. In 1959, Shaver suffered a mild stroke in New York and apparently recovered only to be felled by a second at her summer home. She died of a stroke at the Columbia Memorial Hospital at Hudson, N.Y. Shaver's American Design Awards were discontinued, but in 1976, as part of the store's 150th anniversary celebration, one was revived: an annual Dorothy Shaver Rose Award for "an outstanding individual whose creative mind has brought new beauty and deeper understanding to our lives." [Dorothy Shaver's papers, principally texts of her speeches, were given by her sister to the Smithsonian Institution. Biographical sketches of Shaver appear in Current Biog., 1946, and the Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., H, 134-35, with portrait. Biographical articles include S. J. Woolf, "Miss Shaver Pictures the Store of Tomorrow," N.Y. Times, Jan. 5, 1947; Jeanne Perkins, "No. 1 Career Woman," Life, May 12, 1947; and a chapter in Isabella Taves, Successful Women and How They Attained Success (1943). Lord & Taylor's public relations operation under Dorothy Shaver was described by Tom Mahoney and Rita Hession in Public Relations for Retailers (1949). Shaver's obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 29, 1959; death record from N.Y. State Dept. of Health.] TOM MAHONEY

SHERWIN, Belle, March 25, 1868-July 9, 1955. Suffragist, civic leader.

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Sherwin Belle Sherwin was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the oldest of the four daughters and one son of Henry Alden and Mary Frances (Smith) Sherwin; two of her siblings died in childhood. Both parents were of colonial English ancestry. Her maternal grandfather left New York for Ohio's Western Reserve in 1836. Her father, born in Vermont, migrated to Cleveland about 1860. From modest beginnings in wholesale trade he prospered and, as founder of the paint manufacturing Sherwin-Williams Company, became one of Cleveland's leading industrialists and influential citizens. His oldest daughter inherited his intellectual acuity and executive gifts as well as his devotion to the work ethic. Growing up in an atmosphere of increasing affluence tempered by moral zeal, she early showed signs of charting her own course. Following primary education in Cleveland's public schools, Belle Sherwin attended St. Margaret's School in Waterbury, Conn. In 1886 she entered Wellesley College, attracted by its stated purpose "to educate learned and useful teachers," and by its dynamic president, A L I C E F R E E M A N ( P A L M E R ) , and the faculty of women scholars she had recruited. Among the faculty members who encouraged interest in social reform and served as role models, K A T H A R I N E COMAN, professor of history and economics, was a particularly strong influence on Sherwin. Receiving a B.S. in 1890, Sherwin maintained a lifelong association with Wellesley. Elected a trustee in 1918, she served until 1943 and remained as trustee emerita until 1952. For thirty years she chaired the Building and Grounds Committee, contributing with good judgment and generous gifts to the development of the Wellesley campus. After graduating from college, Sherwin taught history briefly at St. Margaret's School before pursuing graduate study in history at Oxford University ( 1 8 9 4 - 9 5 ) . She made a further trial of teaching history at Miss Hersey's School for Girls in Boston, but the constraints imposed on teachers in private schools, combined with her reluctance, since she was financially independent, to limit her choices too narrowly, prompted her return to Cleveland in 1899. She ventured first into social work at Alta House, organizing English classes for Italian immigrants. In 1900 she organized the Cleveland Consumers' League and for several years directed its investigative activities. She became a board member of the newly established Visiting Nurses' Association (VNA) in 1902 and served as chairman of the committee on recruitment and training. Within the next decade, she integrated the VNA into the Cleveland Welfare Federation, upgraded visiting nurse training,

and established a secure place for the visiting nurse in Cleveland's public health system. Sherwin's reputation as an administrator made her a natural choice to head the war work of Cleveland women in 1917 and to move on rapidly to chairmanship of the Woman's Committee of the Ohio branch of the United States Council of National Defense. She coordinated the activities of sixty women's organizations in carrying out programs of food conservation and production, industrial recruitment, and social welfare. This experience strengthened and disciplined her native talent for what she later defined as "the art of getting things done." Belle Sherwin's involvement in the suffrage movement began in 1910 when she joined the College Equal Suffrage League during MAUD WOOD PARK'S organizing visit to Cleveland. Her welfare activities remained primary, however, until 1916, when a group of wealthy Cleveland women organized a militant branch of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage which rapidly polarized Cleveland women. In order to provide those antagonized by the extremists on both sides with a forum for rational debate, Sherwin organized the Women's City Club. When her war service ended in 1919, she became president of the Cleveland Suffrage Association and a supporter of CARRIE C H A P M A N CATT'S plan to perpetuate the suffrage coalition until women had mastered the use of the ballot. In 1920 the National American Woman Suffrage Association reconstituted itself as the National League of Women Voters; the following year, at the first League convention after ratification of the suffrage amendment, Belle Sherwin was elected vice president and chairman of the department charged with training women for their civic duties. From an office in her Cleveland home soon emanated a stream of programs for citizenship classes, instructions on state electoral requirements and on voting, and analyses of political processes. But the poor showing of women in the 1920 and 1922 elections demonstrated that crash programs in civics would not motivate political participation. Sherwin concluded that the lessons had to be learned "from the alphabet upward, and the experience of centuries encapsulated." The necessary psychological reorientation called for the development of innovative methods of political education, a task Sherwin undertook upon her election in 1924 as the League's second president, succeeding Maud Wood Park. When Sherwin took over, the organization was united in its desire to win a share in governing the country but divided as to methods. Each of its semiautonomous standing committees, which represented the different segments of the

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suffrage coalition, had its own program and specialists. Sherwin saw the possibility of fusing aims and methods. Establishing a residence in Washington, D.C., she made the national headquarters there the functioning center of authority and communications by drawing in previously dispersed activities and systematizing procedures. Since the "art of getting things done" interested her more than specific programs, she directed her conciliatory skills toward achieving consensus on program and policy among the conflicting factions. The ten years of Sherwin's presidency established the character of the League of Women Voters as a nonpartisan, goal-oriented organization, politically accountable for its policies, and respected for the accuracy and objectivity of the educational materials prepared by its research staff. The institutional structure, educational techniques, and administrative procedures established during this period were largely attributable to her leadership. Under Sherwin, "study before action" became the operative principle of the League. The research and discussion which preceded the formulation of legislative goals and political action to achieve those goals became the means of the members' political education. This decisionmaking process characterized the League's work long after her departure and has largely accounted for its legislative achievements. Sherwin likened the League to "a university without walls . . . whose members enter to learn and remain to shape the curriculum," in the meantime acquiring habits of independent political judgment and disciplined action. Sherwin's greatest gift as an organizer and administrator was the ability to detect and develop talent. Those who worked most closely with her admired her as a great teacher whose intellectual credentials were evidenced in all of her work. She was a skillful politician, holding together the disparate elements in the organization by a mixture of conciliation and persuasion. Although generous and just, she was a severe taskmaster and impatient with trivialities. She possessed both dignity and style, and wore easily the mantle of authority; none doubted that her quiet self-assurance masked a resolute and forceful character. In 1934 Sherwin was succeeded as president of the League by M A R G U E R I T E W E L L S . That year President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to the Consumers' Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration; she was also appointed to the Federal Advisory Committee of the United States Employment Service. Despite long absence, Sherwin never ceased identifying herself as a citizen of Cleveland. In

1942 she sold her Georgetown home and returned to her native city. Still intellectually vigorous and active, she divided her time during the next decade between Winden, the family estate at Kirtland, and a townhouse she designed. Her final years were shadowed by ill health. She died of bronchopneumonia at her Cleveland home at the age of eighty-seven. [The League of Women Voters of the U.S. Records in the Manuscript Div., Library of Congress, contain official minutes, letters to state presidents, and speeches during her presidency, as well as correspondence with League officers and others. A small collection of materials is in the Belle Sherwin Papers at the Schlesinger Library, RadclifFe College. Articles about Sherwin's work appeared in the League's Woman Citizen, 1919-23 and 1926-27, and Woman's Journal, 1928-31. The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Cleveland Press gave generous coverage of her career from 1917 to her retirement. Other printed sources include Virginia Abbott, The History of Woman Suffrage and the League of Women Voters in Cuyahoga County, 1911-1945 (1949); Irene M. Bowker, Public Health Nursing in Cleveland, 18951928 (1930); Avis D. Carlson, "Trail-Blazers in Citizenship," Survey Graphic, Sept. 1945, a brief history of the League; Florence Converse, Wellesley College: A Chronicle of the Years 1875-1938 (1939); Jean Glasscock, ed., Wellesley College, 1875-1975: A Century of Women (1975); J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (1973), which contains a useful bibliography; and How Ohio Mobilized Her Resources for the War: A History of the Activities of the Ohio Branch, Council of National Defense, 1917-1919 (1919). For family background see the autobiography of her nephew, Orville Prescott, The FiveDollar Goldpiece (1956). Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 10, 1955. Sherwin's niece, Sarah Prescott Michel, furnished a genealogy of the Smith-Sherwin families and valuable personal reminiscences. Additional information about the League years was provided by Julia H. Carson, Beatrice Pitney Lamb, and Marguerite Owen. Death certificate supplied by Ohio Dept. of Health.] LOUISE M.

YOUNG

SHERWOOD-HALL, Rosetta. See HALL, Rosetta Sherwood. SIMKHOVITCH, Mary Kingsbury, Sept. 8, 1867-Nov. 15, 1951. Settlement worker, housing reformer. Mary Simkhovitch, founder of Greenwich House, was born in Chestnut Hill, Mass., the older of two children and only daughter of Laura (Holmes) and Isaac Franklin Kingsbury. Both parents came from old New England families; the Kingsburys' considerable wealth rested on

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Simkhovitch large real estate holdings in the Boston area. Her paternal grandmother had been a student of MARY LYON at the Ipswich Female Seminary; her maternal grandfather, Cornelius Holmes, an ardent abolitionist. Laura Holmes Kingsbury enjoyed advanced educational opportunities for a young woman of her time, attending normal school; she taught before her marriage. Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch described her mother as "primarily an intellectual person. Domestic duties worried rather than interested her." Her father, having served in the Union army, returned to assume a political career, first in the Custom House, then in the Massachusetts state legislature, and finally as town clerk of Newton. Mary Kingsbury graduated from Newton High School in 1886. She decided against attending a women's college and instead chose to commute to Boston University, a school she later described as "more like a midwestern college" than the "restrained and narrow" eastern women's schools. In 1890 she received her A.B. and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While at Boston University Kingsbury met the Rev. W. D. P. Bliss and HELENA STUART DUDLEY, both of whom exerted a strong influence upon her. Bliss, a Fabian socialist, editor of The Encyclopedia of Social Reform, and pastor of the Episcopal Church of the Carpenter, attracted a broad spectrum of workers, labor leaders, bourgeois reformers, and academics to his church. Dudley, head of Denison House, a settlement house in Boston's South End, was part of a reform circle of women academics and scholars that included VIDA SCUDDER. Like the Church of the Carpenter, Denison House provided an open forum for the discussion of social theory and the exploration of social problems. During her college years Kingsbury first encountered slum life as leader of a teenage girls' club at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church; this experience marked the beginning of her interest in housing reform. It was here as well that she learned one of the basic principles that would characterize her settlement house philosophy: "Before any help can be given the situation must be felt, realized and understood at first hand . . . Only that which is lived can be understood and translated to others." For two years following her college graduation, Kingsbury taught high school Latin in Somerville, Mass. In 1892 she began graduate study in economic history and sociology at Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College). She continued her contacts with Boston's black neighborhoods as well, serving on St. Augustine's casework committee. In 1893 Kingsbury received a scholarship from the Women's Educational and Industrial Union to continue her

studies in Berlin. Accompanied by her mother she spent a year studying history and sociology at the University of Berlin. There she renewed her friendship with E M I L Y GREENE BALCH, with whom she took classes and toured Italy and southern Germany. At the year's end, Balch and Kingsbury attended the last major International Socialist Trade Union Congress in London. Returning to the United States, Mary Kingsbury continued her graduate studies at Columbia University with James Harvey Robinson, E. R. A. Seligman, and Franklin Giddings. There her long-developing concern with the problems of the city and industrialization took a more decisive direction. Concluding that "sociology and economics and history could surely turn out to have a reality and a validity for one if one could gain a wider personal experience," she left Columbia in 1897 to become the head resident of the College Settlement House. Located on Rivington Street in New York's Lower East Side, the College Settlement House had been founded in 1889 by graduates of the women's colleges. Ensconced on the Lower East Side, Kingsbury commenced Yiddish lessons and became exposed to the full excitement of American social criticism as it developed among members of New York's Jewish working class. There too she met the city's leading social reformers and settlement house leaders. Working with tenants' groups, she became involved in housing reform and assisted the Outdoor Recreation League, founded at the College Settlement House. In 1899 Mary Kingsbury married Russianborn Vladimir Simkhovitch, whom she had met in Berlin. A professor of economic history at Columbia University, he shared her interest in social reform. Their two children, Stephen (b. 1902) and Helena (b. 1904), were brought up with the help of a governess largely on the Simkhovitch farm in Whitehouse, N.J., where their parents visited them on weekends. The family spent summers in Maine. Between 1898 and 1901 Mary Simkhovitch served as chief resident of the Friendly Aid House on East Thirty-third Street. She found that the values and goals of this Unitarian church-supported settlement, which emphasized religious and moral uplift (the outmoded approach of the city mission movement) contrasted sharply with those of the all-female, nonsectarian College Settlement. The women alumnae at the College Settlement had emphasized cooperation with neighborhood residents and a willingness to experiment with a variety of novel, often radical, economic and social theories. The trustees of Friendly Aid House also attempted to restrict her political activities. In

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Simkhovitch 1901 Simkhovitch organized the Association of Neighborhood Workers upon the principles she felt should guide the settlement house movement. T h e following year she led an exodus from the Friendly Aid House and organized Greenwich House on Jones Street; it later moved to Barrow Street. Under her leadership Greenwich House assumed a prominent position in the settlement and social reform movements. Under its auspices or with its financial encouragement, a number of seminal economic and community studies were undertaken on the problems of dilapidated housing, unemployment, racism, and the assimilation of immigrant groups. Underlying Mary Simkhovitch's directorship of Greenwich House was her belief that settlements should function as catalysts in the creation of community cohesion and indigenous leadership. " I f social improvements are to be undertaken by one class on behalf of another," she said, "no permanent changes are likely to b e effected." Another guiding principle was that settlements should connect the neighborhood to broader social reform movements. By the 1920s Simkhovitch had developed two rather distinct areas of interest, reflecting her philosophical commitments. She became deeply involved in the cultural life within the neighborhood, and, in the larger world beyond Greenwich Village, she maintained close ties with the liberal and urban wing of the Progressive movement. She worked within Greenwich House to support neighborhood theater, to establish a settlement music school, to turn local schools into neighborhood centers, and to encourage local residents to assume leadership roles. Maintaining her interest in neighborhood parks and recreational facilities, begun while she was a resident at the College Settlement, in 1911 she was appointed a member of the Mayor's Public Recreation Commission, and in 1 9 2 5 she chaired the New York City Recreation Committee. Between .1898 and 1917 Simkhovitch served on the executive board of the National Consumers' League, working closely with FLORENCE KELLEY. She also taught at Barnard College ( 1 9 0 7 - 1 0 ) and at Teachers College, Columbia University (1910—13). Her political activity included speaking widely for Theodore Roosevelt during the 1912 presidential campaign as well as canvassing for woman suffrage. However, Simkhovitch broke with many of the women in the settlement movement when she supported the First World War. Her major reform interest centered on improving public housing. In 1907 she helped found the Committee on the Congestion of Population and served as its chairman. "Our idea

was to show that overcrowding was responsible for many of the city's ills," she later explained. With her lifelong commitment to housing reform, Simkhovitch illustrates the continuum between Progressive and New Deal reform. From 1931 to 1943 she served as president of the Public Housing Conference, whose purpose was to mobilize support for a major, permanent federal housing program. Following Franklin D. Roosevelt's election as president, Simkhovitch was instrumental in gaining inclusion in the National Industrial Recovery Act of a provision for the first federally financed low-income public housing. In 1934 Mayor Fiorello L a Guardia appointed her vice chairman of the New York City Housing Authority; three years later she helped to draft the public housing bill that finally passed as the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act. While enthusiastically advocating pioneering efforts in large-scale public housing, Simkhovitch never lost sight of the importance of restoration of old buildings and the reconstruction of small-scale traditional neighborhoods. "Many of my city planner friends," she wrote in 1938, "think it foolish to engage in housing unless it is on an impressive scale. I suppose a woman looks at it differently . . . My life at Greenwich House has taught me not to despise small things." Her ideal remained the organic community combining business, housing, recreation, and educational and cultural institutions. In 1946 Mary Simkhovitch retired as director of Greenwich House, though she continued to serve as vice chairman of the New York City Housing Authority. She died at Greenwich House in 1951. [The Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, contain biographical and genealogical material, speeches, articles, correspondence, and files of Greenwich House, the Greenwich Village Assoc., and the N.Y. City Housing Authority. Simkhovitch's Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House (1938) is an account of her life and of the settlement. Her other major writings are Standards and Tests of Efficiency in Settlement Work (1911), Votes in the Tenements (1914), The City Workers World in America (1917), The Settlement Primer (1926), The Church and Public Housing (1934), The Red Festival (1934), Group Life (1940), Quicksand: The Way of Life in the Slums (1942), and Here Is God's Plenty: Reflections on American Social Advance (1949). Biographical sketches appear in Current Biog., 1943; Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five; and Encyc. Social Work (1971). Allen F. Davis, Spearheads of Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (1967), places Simkhovitch's work in a larger perspective. Her role in the development and passage of federal housing legislation is discussed in Timothy L. McDonnell, The Wagner

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Slye Housing Act: A Case Study of the Legislative Process (1957). An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Nov. 16, 1951. A biobibliography by Russell Merritt greatly assisted in the research for this article. Birth order information from 1880 U.S. Census.] CARROLL

SMITH-ROSENBERG

SLYE, Maud Caroline, Feb. 8, 1869-Sept. 17, 1954. Pathologist. Maud Slye was born in Minneapolis, the second of three children and younger daughter of Florence Alden (Wheeler) and James Alvin Slye. She came from an educated but relatively poor family whose ancestors can be traced back to colonial times. James Slye was a lawyer and author. Florence Slye, who had an interest in poetry, hoped that her daughter would become an artist or a writer, but Maud Slye's love of nature led her toward a career in biology. The family moved to Iowa where Maud attended public schools, first in Des Moines and then in Marshalltown. After graduating from Marshalltown High School in 1886, she worked as a stenographer in St. Paul, Minn., where the family moved following her father's death. She matriculated at the University of Chicago in September 1895, reputedly entering the university with forty dollars in her possession. For three years she carried a full academic load and worked her way through school as a secretary to president William Rainey Harper; the strain led to a nervous breakdown. She recuperated while visiting relatives in Woods Hole, Mass., and then completed her undergraduate studies at Brown University, where she received an A.B. in 1899. Maud Slye next served as professor of psychology and pedagogy at Rhode Island State Normal School until 1905. Professor Charles Otis Whitman, whom she had met earlier at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, invited her in 1908 to join him as a graduate assistant in the biology department of the University of Chicago at a small stipend. Her first research after returning to Chicago involved a study of so-called "waltzing mice," which apparently suffered from a nervous disorder. Her attention soon turned, however, from the inheritance of nervous disorders to the inheritance of cancer. Several investigators had suggested that heredity might play an important role in cancer, but there was little evidence at the time for this view. Slye began carrying out breeding experiments with mice to investigate this subject, drawing upon her own meager funds to support her work. There were days when she ate very little so that she might have money to feed her mice.

In 1911 Maud Slye joined the staff of the newly established Sprague Memorial Institute at the University of Chicago, which provided her with more adequate facilities and funds for her research. The Institute's director, pathologist H. Gideon Wells, encouraged her in her work and agreed to confirm her microscopic analyses of tissue samples. In 1913 she was ready to present her first paper on her cancer research. On the basis of breeding experiments involving 5,000 mice, 298 of whom had spontaneously developed cancers, she concluded that the susceptibility to cancer was inherited and that contagion was not a factor in its transmission. Slye devoted the rest of her career to further pursuit of this line of research. In 1919 she became director of the Cancer Laboratory at the University of Chicago, and in 1922 she was promoted from instructor to assistant professor of pathology. Four years later she became associate professor of pathology, a position that she held until her retirement in 1944. A tireless worker, she raised and kept pedigrees on over 150,000 mice during her career. In the early years, Slye took care of the mice by herself, performing the autopsies, and preparing and examining the tissue slides. Later, Harriet Holmes, a trained pathologist, offered to serve as a laboratory assistant at no salary. She prepared tissue samples for microscopic analysis and coauthored several papers on cancer. Maud Slye's laboratory was described as a "mouse Utopia." She kept it scrupulously clean and took excellent care of the animals to ensure that the susceptibility to cancer in certain mice would not be masked by their dying young from other diseases. In addition, she apparently developed a real affection and concern for her laboratory animals. For many years she refused to take a vacation for fear of leaving her laboratory in the care of anyone else. At first Slye postulated that susceptibility to cancer was due to the presence of a single Mendelian recessive character. She recognized, however, that a mouse susceptible to cancer would not necessarily develop the disease unless exposed to an irritant that stimulated the growth of a cancerous tumor. The question of the nature and cause of cancer was controversial, and her views were subjected to various criticisms. By 1936, sufficient evidence had come to light that more than one gene was involved in cancer to force her to modify her position. Her revised theory held that two genetic factors were involved, one determining the type of cancer (carcinoma, sarcoma, leukemia), the other the location of the tumor. Even this view was later shown to be an oversimplification of the genetics of cancer. Although her theory has not withstood

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Slye the test of further research, her extensive and meticulous studies helped to establish clearly the role that heredity plays in determining susceptibility to cancer. Her contributions were recognized by various honors, including gold medals from the American Medical Association (1914) and the American Radiological Society (1922), the Ricketts Prize of the University of Chicago (1915), and an honorary D.Sc. from Brown University (1937). Slye believed that cancer (and other diseases) could be bred out of the human species as she had bred the disease out of certain strains of mice. She repeatedly called for the establishment of a central record bureau for human cancer statistics in the hope of determining the heredity and external factors involved in cancer so that these could be avoided as far as possible. As a woman in science, she was sometimes called upon to combat stereotypical views of women. When asked whether she was ever afraid of mice, she responded that she did not believe that women in general feared mice any more than men did. In another incident, she had to deny a malicious rumor that she had refused to show her research results to certain scientists visiting her laboratory and had broken down and cried when pressed to do so. Outside of her research, her chief interests were poetry, music, gardening, sailing, and her two dogs. Slye, who lived with her sister, published two volumes of poetry, Songs and Solaces (1934) and 1 in the Wind (1936). One of her poems describes her choice of a career in science over marriage and motherhood: 'Twas not for me to go the happy road Of flower-decked bride, and mother whose rich arms Clasped all her babies . . . My feet were set upon the service path, Whose glory of the day is toil, Whose peace at night is the peace of dreams That reach beyond the stars! (Jaffe, Outposts, pp. 159-60).

On August 16, 1954, Maud Slye was hospitalized with a heart attack. She suffered a second, fatal attack in Billings Hospital, Chicago, a month later. [The Joseph Regenstein Library, Univ. of Chicago, has a collection of Maud Slye Papers that consists almost exclusively of reports and records of her cancer research, but also includes three folders of correspondence. Materials on Slye, including a curriculum vitae, are available from the Office of Public Information, Univ. of Chicago. Most of Slye's important papers can be found in the Jour. Cancer Research. See also her lectures on "Heredity in Relation to Cancer," in Our Present Knowledge of Heredity ( 1 9 2 5 ) , pp. 101-56, and on "Genetics of Cancer and Its Localization," in Henry B. Ward, ed., Some

Fundamental Aspects of the Cancer Problem ( 1 9 3 7 ) , pp. 3 - 1 6 . The only book-length biography of Maud Slye is a popular, undocumented work by J. J. McCoy entitled The Cancer Lady: Maud Slye and Her Heredity Studies ( 1 9 7 7 ) . Useful biographical sketches are included in Current Biog., 1940, pp. 743-45, and in Bernard Jaffe, Outposts of Science ( 1 9 3 5 ) , pp. 129-60; an abbreviated version of the latter article was published in Ray Compton and Charles Nettles, eds., Conquests of Science ( 1 9 3 9 ) , pp. 2 5 5 - 6 8 . On her work see also John A. Menaugh, "Rearing Mice to Save Men," Minneapolis Sunday Jour., Feb. 5, 1933. There are obituaries in the N.Y. Times and Chicago Tribune, Sept. 18, 1954. A biobibliography prepared by Nancy Korpal assisted in the research for this article. Published sources give Maud Slye's birth date as Feb. 8, 1879. The 1869 date comes from the 1880 U.S. Census. The superintendent of Marshalltown schools has confirmed the 1886 graduation date, and has also found an 1880 record which lists Slye as eleven years old. Information from St. Paul City Directory, 1889-98.] JOHN

PARASCANDOLA

SMITH, Lillian, Dec. 12, 1897-Sept. 28, 1966. Writer, civil rights reformer. Lillian Smith expressed the central theme of her life and work when she wrote: "Future generations will think of our times as the age of wholeness, when the walls began to fall; when the fragments began to be related to each other." In the writings for which she is best known and in her less recognized roles as director of a girls' camp and editor of a little magazine, Smith probed and challenged the racist, sexist, and economically exploitative walls that fragmented her place and time. Born in Jasper, Fla., Lillian Eugenia Smith was the seventh of ten children, the third of four daughters of Calvin Warren and Annie Hester (Simpson) Smith. Her adult writings record experiences of belonging to a loving and financially comfortable family. But they also depict traumatic episodes of growing up in the racially segregated and economically stratified south. Smith's parents subjected their children to periodic religious revivals and severe sexual taboos which shattered Lillian's sense of wellbeing. They also encouraged her to love her black nurse and black playmates and then taught her to denigrate them, raising questions about the relations between white and black that were too painful to ask but too enduring to be forgotten. To these uncertainties were added the death of her older brother Dewitt from typhoid in 1911, and a reversal in family fortunes. Her father lost the family business in 1915 and the Smiths moved permanently to their summer cottage in Clayton, Ga. Lillian Smith, an aspiring

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Smith musician, attended Piedmont College in Demorest, Ga., for a year (1915-16), then left school to help her parents. She twice began studies at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Md., in 1917 and again in 1919. In the intervening year she served as principal of a rural Georgia school, assisted by her youngest sister, Esther, the family member closest to her in sympathies and values. Some time after her return to Baltimore, Smith fell in love with a fellow musician. But neither then nor later did marriage seem to be a serious possibility. Usually silent on this subject, Smith once confided: "All my life I have felt burdened by having to make promises that extend too far into the future . . . it is why I never married. My family did not believe in divorce . . . and I could not commit myself wholly and irrevocably." In the fall of 1922 Lillian Smith accepted the position of music director at Virginia School, an American Methodist institution in Huchow, China. There western imperialism and indigenous politics quickened her awareness of the destructiveness of divisions based upon race and class. In 1925 her parents fell ill and she had to return to Clayton to manage their major source of income, Laurel Falls Girls Camp. Thus diverted from a career in music, Smith returned to the south where she would spend most of her life, establish a vocation as a writer, and enjoy with fellow southerner Paula Snelling a rich lifelong partnership. Smith and Snelling first worked together at Laurel Falls, where Snelling, a counselor, supported Smith in transforming the traditional camp into a unique and nationally renowned undertaking. To encourage the campers to confront the emotional, biological, and social forces in their lives, Smith introduced programs in the arts, staffed by experts, including (in drama) her sister Esther. Family reliance on Lillian Smith's abilities and loyalty continued to influence the direction of her life. For two winters, 1925-26 and 192627, she was executive secretary to her recently widowed brother, Austin, and companion to his preschool daughter. The death of her father in 1930 left Smith responsible for her invalid mother (who died in 1938). Her frequent involvement in the personal crises of her relatives led Smith to reflect that "one wants to [help], one wouldn't do anything else, but one's own dreams, one's own life just sort of dwindles away." Some of this sense of life dwindling away led Smith, in concert with Paula Snelling, to found a little magazine. First published in 1936, it was called Fseudopodia, later renamed The North

Georgia Review, and finally, South Today. The first white southern journal to publish the work of black scholars and artists, South Today also gave space and encouragement to aspiring women writers and examined such sensitive topics as lynching. The magazine grew from a small literary undertaking to a substantial journal of interdisciplinary thought, achieving near the end of its existence in 1945 a circulation of 10,000. While working on South Today, Smith was writing books and pursuing wide-ranging studies of Freudian psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and literature, entirely self-directed. She also traveled, living in Brazil for several months in 1938 and going twice to India, first in 1946 and with Snelling in 1955. In 1944 Lillian Smith's first novel was published. Strange Fruit is a story of interracial love and of the later pathological effects of sexual and racial conditioning in childhood. The book was banned in Massachusetts for "obscenity." The literary historian Bernard DeVoto and a local bookseller challenged the ban; a trial ensued, ending in victory for the censors. A wider ban, by the United States Post Office, was quickly lifted at the intervention of ELEANOR ROOSEVELT. The novel was later adapted for the stage by Lillian and Esther Smith and played in Canada and on Broadway. Smith's second book, Killers of the Dream, (1949), unequivocally denounced segregation and questioned the moral and psychological health of Smith's racist countrymen, some of whom reacted with hostility. She began to feel that, as a result, her work was being "smothered." Although she received a succession of honors and was from the time of Strange Fruit always in demand as a lecturer and magazine contributor, the sales, reviews, and promotion of her later work never matched those of her first two books. The 1950s brought further hardship. The Journey, a book on "the meaning of ordeal, its creative and destructive effects," was completed in 1953, shortly after Smith underwent surgery for breast cancer. In Now Is the Time (1955) Smith appealed for southern support of the 1954 Supreme Court decision on desegregation; it was the most poorly promoted of any of her books. Also in 1955 came the shock of a major fire. Set by young whites, it destroyed several manuscripts and notes for books, including two autobiographical novellas and an estimated 13,000 letters and private papers. An earlier accidental fire in 1944 had consumed important files, and yet another episode of arson by unknown intruders occurred in 1958. While still reeling from the losses of the 1955

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Smith blaze, Smith began the novel One Hour. A complex story about intelligent people succumbing to mindless hysteria, the work—published in 1959—held clear implications for the McCarthy era in which it was written. A family reminiscence, Memory of a Large Christmas, was published in 1962. Lillian Smith's final book, Our Faces, Our Words (1964), focused on the nonviolent civil rights movement, reflecting Smith's close identification with the black struggle for equality and justice. Black leaders valued her work; she was a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee cited her as one of the three major influences in his life. In addition, she was honored by leading black universities (Howard, Atlanta, and Fisk) and was for many years a member of the executive board of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). When CORE disavowed nonviolence Smith resigned, interpreting the emerging language of black power as yet another source of fragmentation. At the time of her resignation Lillian Smith was gravely ill with cancer. She continued to write, working on a collection of essays and a book for and about contemporary youth. Also left unfinished was a manuscript for a novel, tentatively titled "Julia." This, along with the autobiography which Smith had hoped to write, would, in the judgment of Paula Snelling, "have been her major, deeply felt and pondered works on the seductive subject of gender." Smith died at Emory University Hospital in September 1966. Her body is buried on Old Screamer, the Georgia mountain where Laurel Falls Camp was located and where much of her writing had been done. [Most of Lillian Smith's papers are at the Univ. of Ga. at Athens; the collection includes personal and business correspondence, fan mail, Camp Laurel papers, and some MSS. Papers relating to South Today, deposited before the 1 9 5 5 fire and representing the bulk of manuscript sources on the magazine, may be found at the Univ. of Fla. in Gainesville. The Julius Rosenwald Fund Papers at Dillard Univ., New Orleans, also include Smith papers. An original, complete collection of South Today is at the Univ. of Ga. A major collection of Smith's writings appeared posthumously in 1978. The Winner Names the Age, ed. Michelle Cliff, is introduced by Paula Snelling's reminiscence, "In Re Lillian Smith." A brief biography, Lillian Smith, by Louise Blackwell and Frances Clay, was published in 1971. The most substantive article-length studies on Smith are Morton Sosna, "Lillian Smith: The Southern Liberal as Evangelist," In Search of the Silent South ( 1 9 7 7 ) ; Margaret Sullivan, "Lillian Smith: The Public Image and the Personal Vision," Mad River Rev., Summer/Fall 1967; Redding Sugg, Jr., "Lillian

Smith and the Condition of Women," South Atlantic Quart., Spring 1972; Jo Ann Robinson, "Lillian Smith: Reflections on Race and Sex," Southern Exposure, Winter 1977. See also Margaret Sullivan, A Bibliography of Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling with an Index to South Today ( 1 9 7 1 ) . An anthology of pieces selected from South Today was published by Helen White and Redding Sugg, Jr., as From the Mountain ( 1 9 7 2 ) . Obituaries which best capture the fullness of Smith's life are George P. Brockway in Sat. Rev., Oct. 22, 1966, and Margaret Long in The New South, Fall 1966. Esther Smith shared information from the family Bible and other family materials. Paula Snelling allowed the writer to examine materials on Laurel Falls Camp that survived the fire of 1944 and a five-page "Lillian Smith Chronology," which the subject wrote shortly before her death, outlining the major phases of her life.] J O ANN ROBINSON

SMITH, Rubye Doris. See Doris Smith.

ROBINSON,

Rubye

SOMERVILLE, Nellie Nugent, Sept. 25, 1863July 28, 1952. Suffragist, state legislator. Nellie Nugent Somerville, only surviving child of William Lewis and Eleanor Fulkerson (Smith) Nugent, was of English, Welsh, and Irish descent. Nellie (baptized, but never called, Eleanor) was born on her grandmother's plantation near Greenville, Miss. Her father was in the Confederate army at the time; federal soldiers had shot her grandfather and burned the family home in Greenville shortly before her birth. Her young mother survived barely two years, and though Nugent remarried, he was widowed again in a few months. Until his marriage to Aimee Webb in 1870, the care of his daughter fell largely to her devout and strongwilled grandmother, S. Myra Smith. In 1872 Nugent moved his family to Jackson, the state capital, where he quickly rose to leadership in the bar and in time became one of the wealthiest men in Mississippi. By the time Nellie was twelve, five other children had been born, and she was sent to Whitworth College, a boarding school in Brookhaven, Miss., characterized by very plain living. After two years its president confessed that this bright child had exhausted his school's resources, and she went on to Martha Washington College in Abingdon, Va. She received her A.B. in 1880, finishing with a nearly perfect record. Despite these formal educational experiences, she acquired most of her considerable learning in political theory, theology, history, and public affairs on her own. After graduation her father suggested that she read law in his office, but she preferred the in-

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Somerville

dependence of living with her grandmother in Greenville, and earning her keep by tutoring the children of a local banker. In 1885 Nellie Nugent married Robert Somerville, a civil engineer from Virginia whose family's wealth had been destroyed by the war. A mild man of great integrity, Somerville always viewed Mississippi as something of a frontier of civilization. Four children were born in nine years: Robert Nugent in 1886, Abram Douglas in 1889, Eleanor in 1891, and Lucy Robinson in 1895. All but Eleanor were to become distinguished lawyers. Nellie Somerville was close to all her children, and remained friend and adviser to them as long as she lived. Nellie Somerville was an exotic plant among women in the postreconstruction south. An iconoclast, she was a voracious reader, an independent thinker, an organizer, a public speaker of unusual power, and a tough-minded politician. When she was thirty-three, she organized and became president of a Methodist association for home missionary work. From this beginning she moved rapidly into a series of major reform efforts. Stimulus from a larger world came in the early 1890s in the form of encounters, first with CARRIE

CHAPMAN

CATT

who,

though

Only

four years her senior, was already a national leader in the suffrage movement, and then with F R A N C E S W I L L A R D , president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union ( W C T U ) , whom Somerville later called "the greatest woman I ever knew." Somerville took up both their challenges, becoming corresponding secretary of the Mississippi WCTU in 1894 and organizing and chairing the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association in 1897. Mississippi was probably the most unpromising state in the country for a suffrage organizer, but with intelligence, energy, and organizational skill, she managed to tap a good deal of latent feminism, among men as well as women. She kept her followers hard at work, and focused their labors on problems she thought women ought to address: public health, occupational safety, and protective legislation, as well as on the campaign for the vote. In her frequent speeches and newspaper articles, she did not hesitate to attack the double standard. She poured scorn on the prevailing cant about the sanctity and moral influence of motherhood, pointing out that if men did not respect women (and clearly she thought they did not) children would not either, and arguing that "if woman's influence is so stupendous her opinions should have some weight." A devout Methodist, she taught a Sunday School class at a level appropriate for a divinity school. National leaders recognized her as a source of strength in the

always fragile southern suffrage movement, and by 1915 she was a vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Both suffrage and temperance work took women to political gatherings—to county and state party conventions and to various legislative bodies. Gradually a few, among them Nellie Somerville, began to take part in the political groups that they had first encountered as lobbyists. Somerville soon displayed a gift for politics. By the mid-1910s she was the recognized leader of one faction in her county Democratic party, which, in a one-party state like Mississippi, functioned in the way a political party did elsewhere. In 1923 she became the first woman to be elected to the Mississippi legislature, where she served until 1927. She also played an important role as a delegate to the 1925 Democratic National Convention. In the legislature she studied issues and men with equal care. "She knew each political figure," wrote one observer, "his interests, his record, his motivation, his family, his friends, his supporters, and his probable future actions." Such close attention to detail made her an unusually effective legislator. Working for a wide variety of social welfare laws, she brought about a major reorganization of the state mental hospital, and also chaired the committee on eleemosynary institutions, which gained stature under her leadership. Her record was such that the newspapers considered it a matter for comment when a bill she supported failed to pass. The evolution of this able radical (suffrage and many other causes Somerville supported were considered radical in the forty years after 1890) into an equally able conservative, who spoke against pacifism, opposed the federal child labor amendment, and supported the poll tax, parallels that of other southern reformers. A product of her culture, she found many developments of the 1930s and 1940s antithetical. Not only had the major issues changed, but, when the New Deal made the national government an ever more powerful force in individuals' lives, Somerville, along with many Mississippians, drew back. By 1948, at the age of eightyfive, she was an active States' Rights Democrat. Some considered her stern, argumentative, and hard to get along with. She did not suffer fools gladly, and her mind worked rather faster than some people found comfortable. On close acquaintance, however, she was more interesting than intimidating. One clue to her character was the fact that though she had been born with a deformed right hand, she managed so well that many of her coworkers and associates were hardly aware of it. It is recorded that, playing croquet with one hand, she usually won. In

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Spofford

business too, Somerville managed her affairs with consummate skill. After her husband's death in 1925, she began to invest in real estate, and over the nearly three decades of her remaining life she transformed a small inheritance into a substantial property. Her banker thought he had never met so gifted an investor. In a pattern common among southern women leaders, Nellie Nugent Somerville's distinguished family background and her appearance as a perfect lady permitted her to overcome the hostility often directed against women who entered the public sphere. She was the equal in native ability of such better-known feminist leaders as Carrie Chapman Catt, and given a slightly different setting and cultural context, she would have been a national leader. As it was, she was a major liberalizing force in Mississippi for forty years, setting an example of the "new woman" for thousands of Mississippi women. She outlived most of her friends and suffrage comrades, and was still busily reading, writing, and conducting her business affairs when she died of cancer in Ruleville, Miss., at eightyeight. [The basic material for the life of Nellie Nugent Somerville is in the Somerville-Howorth Coll. in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. The collection includes the diary of S. Myra Smith, Somerville's grandmother. Other materials are still in family hands. The Archives of the Oral History Program of the Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, contain a transcript of an interview with Lucy Somerville Howorth, who has also generously supplied additional information. A master's thesis, "Nellie Nugent Somerville" (Delta State Univ., 1974) by Mary Louise Meredith covers Somerville's public career. William M. Cash and Lucy Somerville Howorth, eds., My Dear Nellie: The Civil War Letters of William L. Nugent to Eleanor Smith Nugent (1977) also contains useful material. There is a brief biographical sketch and information about the Mississippi suffrage movement in Accomplishments of Mississippi Women, a pamphlet published by the Miss. Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, 1978. Death record provided by Miss. Public Health Service.] A N N E FIROR SCOTT

SPOFFORD, Grace Harriet, Sept. 21, 1887June 5, 1974. Music educator and administrator. Grace Spofford was born in Haverhill, Mass., the only child of Sarah G. (Hastings) and Harry Hall Spofford, a salesman of men's clothing. Both parents came from families that had been in New England for generations and both were active in the Universalist church and in the civic life of Haverhill. Grace showed an early

interest in music, picking out notes on the piano when she was three and beginning lessons at seven. In nurturing this talent, her parents were advised by Sarah Spofford's sister, Harriet M. Newman, a trained contralto who performed for many years in Lowell and Haverhill. Grace Spofford went to the Burnham Grammar and Haverhill High Schools and in 1905 entered Mount Holyoke College, where she studied piano with William Churchill Hammond. After a year she transferred to Smith College in order to receive academic credit for piano study (and to escape the domestic work required of Mount Holyoke students). There she studied with Edwin Bruce Story and graduated in 1909. She then studied piano with Richard B. Piatt in Boston until she went to Tiffin, Ohio, as instructor in piano at Heidelberg College. While teaching at Heidelberg (191012) she also "gave countless recitals in little towns where no recital had ever been given." In 1912 she entered the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, graduating in piano in 1913 and in organ in 1916. She remained at the Peabody until 1924, teaching piano until 1918, and serving as executive secretary of the conservatory from 1917 to 1924. She also wrote music criticism for the Baltimore Evening Sun (1923-24). "I over practised in my student years," she later wrote, "which resulted in a weeping sinew that put an end to any concert career. I was rather 'bossy' anyway, and loved administrative work." In 1916 she and her lifelong friend Elizabeth Coulson (1872-1941) published "A Guide for Beginners in Piano Playing" (volume four of the Boston Music Company's Golden Key Series). In 1924 Spofford moved to Philadelphia to become the first dean of the new Curtis Institute of Music, established by M A R Y L O U I S E CURTÍS BOK ( Z I M B A L I S T ) . She remained there until 1931, when the director, Josef Hofmann, asked for her resignation following administrative differences. Moving to New York, she became executive secretary for OLGA S A M A R O F F ' S Layman's Music Courses; she was also the manager for the Curtis String Quartet and other musicians, and worked in the new field of radio music education. From 1934 to 1938 she was associate director of the New York College of Music and from 1936 to 1959 she lectured on music at the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. Spofford's most important appointment began in 1935 when she became director of the Music School of the Henry Street Settlement, founded by L I L L I A N W A L D . She remained there until 1954. During her years at Henry Street the Music School (established in 1927) became an

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Spofford important cultural resource for the neighborhood and also came to serve as a model for later schools of its kind. Essentially a conservatory, the school offered individual instruction by highly qualified teachers at little or no cost. There were as many as 500 students, not all of them young. Emphasis was placed on learning music, rather than on competition, and performers' names did not always appear on the programs for student concerts. In addition, the school provided instructors and advice for any group in the settlement that wished to add music to its programs, and offered frequent concerts and performances open to all. In 1936 Aaron Copland wrote a play-opera, The Second Hurricane, specifically for performance by Henry Street students; the production was directed by Orson Welles. Copland also taught at Henry Street, and such other noted figures as the conductor John Barbirolli and Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad visited and assisted the school. Spofford encouraged the founding of other such music schools. Her "highest hope for American music [was] a shifting of emphasis from over-professionalism to personal participation in music shared as a common experience of life" (Etude, July 1939). After her retirement, Grace Spofford became involved in international music relations and represented the United States at more than twenty international music and music education conferences in Europe and the Middle East. Between 1954 and 1963 she was three times elected chairman of music of the International Council of Women, and for ten years served in the same capacity for the National Council of Women of the United States. During her tenure, the National Council sponsored the recording of orchestral works by five women composers: M A B E L DANIELS, Miriam Gideon, Mary Howe, Julia Perry, and Louise Talma. In 1964 and again in 1966 she was a delegate to the International Music Council, the music wing of UNESCO. Spofford's long career in the cause of music earned her many honors, including a 1968 award from the National Federation of Music Clubs for distinguished service to music in the field of human rights. In an autobiographical sketch written in 1969, when she was eightytwo, Grace Spofford listed herself as still active in the National Council on Arts and Government, the People-to-People Music Committee, the National Music Council Committee on Music in UNESCO, and many other organizations. She also cited her activities with the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City and with the International Association for Liberal Christianity and Religious Freedom.

This tireless woman who lived her life for others, for the young, for music, and who traveled gladly, kept a diary throughout her long life. In the final volume, on Friday, May 31, 1974, she noted, "No therapy. Wrote letters. I am coming to my better self." Grace Spofford's better self in fact had guided her through all her eighty-six years. The initiative and self-reliance which had led her to seek and obtain the Curtis Institute post kept her in touch with the professional world of music throughout her retirement and final bout with a broken hip, hospital, nursing home, and advanced age. She died of a heart attack on June 5, 1974, in New York City; the evening before she had commented on the music at a program at the nursing home—her final contribution to the art. [The Sophia Smith Coll. at Smith College houses a large collection of Spofford's papers. In addition to correspondence that includes the 1969 autobiographical sketch, there are diaries, a box of photographs including the subject at all stages of her life, birth certificate, clippings, and scrapbooks. The Genealogy Dept. of the Haverhill Public Library also has clippings on Spofford and her family. There is some biographical information and a photograph in the article on recipients of the Elizabeth Mathias Award in The Triangle of Mu Phi Epsilon, Fall 1970. See also Who's Who Am. Women, 1974-75. The best description of the Henry Street Music School is Myles H. Fellowes, "The 'Musical Lighthouse' of New York's East Side," Etude, July 1939. Articles also appeared in Musical America, May 1952; Newsweek, June 2, 1952; and the Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 1952. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 7, 1974. Dorothy Barko recounted the circumstances of Grace Spofford's last days.] VERNON GOTWALS

STANLEY, Louise, June 8, 1883-July 15, 1954. Home economist, federal official. Louise Stanley, the first woman to direct a bureau in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), was born in Nashville, Tenn., to Gustavus and Eliza (Winston) Stanley. Her parents died before she was four years old so she and her younger brother were raised by an aunt. Stanley attended the Peabody Demonstration School and Ward's Seminary in Nashville. Her intellectual ability and money inherited from her parents enabled her to secure several academic degrees: an A.B. from Peabody College at the University of Nashville in 1903; a B.Ed, from the University of Chicago in 1906; and an A.M. from Columbia University in 1907. She then studied biochemistry at Yale University

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Stanley with Lafayette B. Mendel, receiving a Ph.D. in 1911. The years Stanley devoted to her education coincided with the emergence of home economics as a promising profession, offering many able women employment opportunities and the chance to combine scientific interests with educational programs. Joining the home economics faculty at the University of Missouri in 1907, she was department chairman by 1917, a post she held until 1923. Stanley's influence rapidly extended beyond the university as she joined with other progressive reformers, educators, and scientists to improve the quality of life in American homes and, specifically, to secure federal support for home economics education. Following passage of the Smith-Hughes Act ( 1 9 1 7 ) , which provided funds for agricultural, industrial, and home economics education in the public schools, Stanley played a significant role, as head of the American Home Economics Association's legislative committee, in the campaign for additional federal encouragement of home economics. When the Bureau of Home Economics was formed in the U S D A in 1923, Louise Stanley was selected by Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace as the department's first female bureau chief. During her tenure, the foundations were carefully laid for effective and growing programs of research and public education. Under her direction, research in nutrition, undertaken in the 1920s, led to the four basic diet plans for families at different economic levels, developed by Hazel K. Stiebeling. These were widely utilized in government programs during the depression and World W a r II, and for later war relief programs abroad. Stanley also directed the first national survey of rural housing and the Consumer Purchase Study ( 1 9 3 8 - 4 1 ) , which compiled information on family income, expenditures, and savings. Breaking down consumption patterns by regional and residential categories, this large-scale study established base year prices for the cost-of-living index, a significant economic indicator. The Bureau also conducted time and motion studies of housekeeping methods and did studies of body measurements which encouraged the standardization of clothing sizes. Stanley believed family well-being was the primary goal of the Bureau's work, an attitude that sometimes brought her into conflict with agricultural interests. On one occasion in the 1930s farmers and members of Congress objected to the dietary plans, claiming that the Bureau was using public funds to discourage consumption of wheat and sugar. Stanley continued to defend consumer interests and good

nutrition and was supported in her efforts by a coalition of women's organizations. During World W a r II Stanley's appointment as special assistant to the administrator of agricultural research gave her an opportunity to develop home economics internationally. Her particular interest was Latin America, and she directed nutrition surveys and educational programs in Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico. In 1943 she participated in the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, and she was actively involved in the work of the United States National Commission for U N E S C O . Following her retirement in 1950, Stanley served as consultant for home economics in the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations of the U S D A until 1953. Throughout her career, Stanley consistently aimed to serve those she considered most needy and to defend blacks and others whom she considered victims of injustice. Objecting to discriminatory membership policies, Stanley refused to join the Daughters of the American Revolution although she was eligible. Her concern for the rural poor in the United States later expanded to include those living in poverty in other countries. Stanley's personal life was closely intertwined with her public career. She was part of an extensive network of professional colleagues, and became a mentor for younger women interested in home economics. It was perhaps her professional interest in family life and children that motivated her in 1929 to adopt a daughter, Nancy. Louise Stanley died of cancer in Washington, D.C., in 1954. Among her many honors, the Latin American scholarship established in 1953 by the American Home Economics Association and the School of Home Economics building at the University of Missouri, dedicated in 1961, bear her name. An effective national leader, Stanley succeeded in institutionalizing home economics at the federal level and hastened the evolution of home economics as an accepted academic discipline, a valid subject for scientific research, and a respected profession for women. Her greatest contribution to her profession was the example and the encouragement she provided to later generations of home economists. [The Jour. Home Economics includes many articles written by and about Stanley. The main source of information about her career is Helen T. Finneran, "Louise Stanley: A Study of the Career of a Home Economist, Scientist and Administrator, 1923-1953" (M.A. thesis, American Univ., 1966). The USDA Yearbook for 1962 also describes Stanley's career and includes a photograph of her, while other departmental publications describe the work of the

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Stern Bureau and contain data from studies. Also see Paul Betters, The Bureau of Home Economics (1930), and Marie Dye, Home Economics at the University of Chicago, 1892-1956 (1972). Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times and Wash. Post, July 16, 1954, and in Jour. Am. Dietetic Assoc. and Jour. Home Economics, Sept. 1954. Additional information for this article was provided by Hazel K. Stiebeling and Sadye F. Adelson, and by Stanley's daughter. Death certificate supplied by D.C. Health Dept.] CHARLOTTE W .

CONABLE

STERN, Catherine Brieger, Jan. 6, 1894-Jan. 8, 1973. Educator. An innovator in the teaching of elementary mathematics and reading, Catherine Stern was born Käthe Brieger, second of four children and only daughter of Oscar and Hedwig (Lyon) Brieger, residents of Breslau, Germany. Her father and two grandfathers were prominent physicians and she grew up in a tightly knit circle of medical and academic families. Hedwig Brieger, who combined family care with work in an early volunteer kindergarten, shared an extraordinary intimacy with Käthe, passing on to her daughter an abiding interest in the education of children. The Briegers were prosperous and had at least one private tutor; Käthe Brieger studied formally as well at the Mädchen Gymnasium in Breslau (1904-12) and then at the University of Breslau, concentrating in physics at the urging of her father. After his death in 1914, she taught briefly in the Mädchen school; her graduate research was further delayed by World War I, during which she served in a hospital. Brieger persisted, however, and in January 1918 she obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics and physics from Breslau. Vivacious, talented, and serious, Käthe Brieger combined her scientific training with a fondness for language and literature. Fluent in French, she also produced plays and wrote poetry to her Breslau companions. Among them was Rudolf Stern, like her a member of a medical family, who went on to become a physician and researcher. She and Stern were married on April 19, 1919; in forty-three years, she wrote after his death in 1962, "we were, almost every day, together." A daughter, Toni, was born in 1920 and a son, Fritz, in 1926. As a young mother, Stern's interest in the education of children grew both practically and theoretically. From 1921 to 1923 she studied the official Montessori teaching method and conducted a preschool at home. In 1924 she opened Breslau's first Montessori kindergarten—later ex-

panded to an after-school club for older children and a teacher-training institute. Although she had domestic help, she continued to work by choice within her home, obtaining state certification to teach at grade school levels there; her daughter was among her pupils. While directing her school during the 1920s Stern designed the first of the materials for teaching reading and arithmetic for which she later became known, and wrote articles for various journals. In 1932, at the insistence of her friend and adviser chemist Fritz Haber, she published Methodik der täglichen Kinderhauspraxis, which discussed her teaching experiences within a theoretical framework; she followed this with Wille, Phantasie und Werkgestaltung (1933), a vivid discussion of the practical aspects of running a kindergarten. Stern's educational doctrine, which renounced drills and routines in an effort to adapt learning "to the natural development of the child," found little encouragement in Hitler's Germany. Her situation was further aggravated by the fact that, while raised as Lutherans, both she and her husband came from Jewish families and so were subject to the persecutions of the Nazis. Although the Sterns first attempted to emigrate via Paris in 1933, it was not until 1938 that they, along with Hedwig Brieger (who went to live in Canada), left Germany for good. They arrived that October in New York City. There Käthe became Catherine Stern, and took United States citizenship in 1944. Working as a teacher, researcher, lecturer, and author, Stem continually refined and improved the mathematics and reading approaches she had developed in Germany. Her teaching materials were designed to reduce dependence on rote memorization by encouraging young children to explore relationships fundamental to the understanding of reading and arithmetic. She made numbers concrete by fashioning colored blocks of lengths varying from one to ten units which fit into corresponding slots on boards or within frames. With these devices, children could count, add, subtract, divide, or multiply, while gaining insight into the basic structure of mathematics. The eight-slot, for example, could house either four two-unit blocks or two four-unit blocks, illustrating the commutative principle. Similarly, Stern's approach to reading broke language down into concrete units. In contrast to traditional approaches in reading, which focused either on recognition of whole words by their overall shapes, or on the association of individual letters with single sounds which must then be blended, Stern began with what novice readers already knew, the spoken language. She

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challenged children first "to take spoken words apart and to put them together again," and then to analyze and reassemble written words in the same fashion. By stressing the correspondence of spoken sounds with letter clusters, Stern helped children approach reading, spelling, and writing as integral parts of the same constructive process. Catherine Stern's teaching methods received vital support from Max Wertheimer, founder of the school of Gestalt psychology in Berlin, whom she met in New York in 1940. Wertheimer, whose educational theory stressed that learning by insight is more productive for both student and teacher than learning by memorization, found this ideal embodied in Stern's materials. From 1940 until Wertheimer's death in 1943, Stern served as his research assistant at the New School for Social Research. There, funded by grants from the New York Foundation and Oberländer Trust, she studied Gestalt theory, gave lecture-demonstrations in Wertheimer's classes, and began a book primarily for teachers, published later as Children Discover Arithmetic ( 1 9 4 9 ) , relating her techniques to Gestalt principles. In turn, Wertheimer cited her materials in his book, Productive Thinking ( 1 9 4 5 , 1 9 5 9 ) , and devised for them the title, Structural Arithmetic, under which they were published for classroom use by Houghton Mifflin in the United States ( 1 9 5 1 , 1965, 1966; in England they became known as the Stern Apparatus). Catherine Stern conducted the experimental Castle School in Manhattan from 1944 to 1951 with her daughter Toni Stern Gould and Margaret J. Bassett, later her daughter-in-law. The school was one of the first to teach children of two to four years number concepts and reading. Stern summarized her Castle School approach in The Early Years of Childhood: Education Through Insight ( 1 9 5 5 ) , with Toni S. Gould, and later coauthored another book with Gould, Children Discover Reading ( 1 9 6 5 ) . In the meantime, she continued to teach, lecture, and do research, obtaining grants from the Carnegie Corporation ( 1 9 5 8 - 6 2 ) . She was also consulted by the School Mathematics Study Group, proponents of the new math program. Catherine Stern was a very private person, indifferent to public acclaim or conventional honors and devoted to her close friends and family. Many of her early teaching experiences involved family members; later, each of her grandchildren enjoyed her tutelage, and her daughter and daughter-in-law carried on her work. She read avidly; her passions ranged from detective stories to foreign languages. A few months before her death she returned to the study of Italian. Stern remained professionally

active until her death in New York City in January 1973, following a stroke. After her death, Stern's materials continued to be employed in classrooms throughout northern Europe, Israel, and North America. In the United States, her mathematics tools have proved particularly useful in the field of special education. Catherine Stern anticipated by a quarter of a century some of the key ideas of the "modern mathematics" movement and, in the field of early education, her lifework served as an argument against teaching based on rote drill, and for an approach stressing insight and understanding. [Stern's memoirs (unpublished MS.) and other autobiographical statements are held by her son, Fritz Stern. She collaborated on the Structural Reading series, published by Singer/Random House (1963, 1966, 1972, 1978). A revised edition of Children Discover Arithmetic (1971), with Margaret Bassett Stern, contrasts Catherine Stern's approach to that of the "new math." M. B. Stern's "Structural Arithmetic and Children with Learning Disabilities," Bull, of the Orton Soc., 1977, pp. 171-82, places Stern's arithmetic methods in a Piagetian context. See also Kenneth Lovell, The Growth of Basic Mathematical and Scientific Concepts in Children (1961); Martin Mayer, The Schools (1961); and Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking (1969). There is a biographical sketch and photograph in Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., LVII, 661. An obituary appeared in N.Y. Times, Jan. 9, 1973. Personal information supplied by Margaret B. Stern and Fritz Stern. Grant records furnished by Carnegie Fdn.; death record by N.Y. Dept. of Health.] RICHARD D.

S T E W A R T , Isabel Maitland, Jan. 14, Oct. 5, 1963. Nursing educator.

TROXEL

1878-

Isabel Maitland Stewart was born in Raleigh, Ont., Canada, the third daughter and fourth of nine children of Francis Beattie and Elizabeth (Farquharson) Stewart. The Farquharsons moved to Canada from Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1866, the Stewarts in 1871. Francis Stewart was a substantial farmer and sawmill owner in Fletcher, Ont., but when Isabel was in her early teens the business failed. Her father then moved his family to Manitoba, where, as an unordained Presbyterian missionary, he conducted services in rural communities. Isabel Stewart early exhibited a sense of responsibility for her family, "taking charge" and ruling in what her older brother termed a "benevolent autocracy." She later recalled the "adventurous and free" spirit of the pioneer west where she spent her young adulthood. She and her friends considered themselves "new women" and planned careers; living in a region where men far outnumbered

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Stewart women, they disdained marriage as commonplace. Stewart's parents encouraged the education of their daughters as well as their sons. She attended schools in Pilot Mound, Man., Chatham, Ont., and Winnipeg, where she qualified for teaching certificates. Once she was old enough, Stewart, like her brothers and sisters, supported her education by teaching in local schools. Though she considered a career as a teacher of high school English and history, Stewart turned to nursing. Her family and most of her friends opposed her decision, believing that as a nurse she would be wasting a good education. But she was encouraged by the enthusiasm of two nurse friends and by her desire for adventure, to see and experience more of life. In 1900 Stewart entered the Winnipeg General Hospital School of Nursing. As a student nurse, she spent long hours on the wards and received limited formal training. A smallpox epidemic at Winnipeg General, which developed an impressive spirit of comradeship among the staif, confirmed her choice of a career. Graduating in 1903, Stewart practiced private nursing for two years, relieved a district nurse in Winnipeg for several months, and returned for two years to Winnipeg General as nurse supervisor. She also joined with a group of other graduates to form an alumnae association and the Manitoba Association of Graduate Nurses, was cofounder of an alumnae journal, and contributed articles to the Canadian Nurse. Her experiences both as a student and as a teacher of nurses colored her later ideas about nursing education. She believed that nurses should learn in the classroom as well as on the wards, and throughout her career initiated and supported efforts to strengthen the theoretical component of nurse training. Far from satisfied with the education offered by Canadian nurse training schools, she responded enthusiastically to news of innovations in nursing education in the United States under the leadership of ADELAIDE NUTTING.

Returning from a summer trip to Great Britain in 1908, she entered the hospital economics program at Teachers College, Columbia University, which Nutting headed. Though her original aim had been to return to Canada to establish a preparatory course for Canadian nurses, Isabel Stewart remained at Teachers College for the rest of her professional life. She received a B.S. in 1911 and an A.M. in 1913; held the positions of assistant, instructor, and assistant professor; and in 1925 succeeded Adelaide Nutting as Helen Hartley Jenkins Foundation Professor of Nursing Education and director of the department.

When Stewart entered Teachers College, the program was chiefly concerned with the training of nurse administrators. In 1910, when an endowment by Helen Hartley Jenkins permitted the creation of an expanded nursing education department, Stewart persuaded Nutting to set up a program to train teachers, the first of its kind. Stewart was given full responsibility for this program from its inception, designing and teaching the first courses and planning and supervising the practice teaching. Under Nutting and Stewart, the department became the preeminent center for advanced work in the field, attracting students from all over the world. As director, Stewart further expanded its offerings. During her tenure, some students from the department for the first time qualified for doctoral degrees. A leader in various professional organizations, Stewart was active in efforts to raise the status of nursing and to introduce higher standards for training. In particular, as secretary and then chairman of the education committee of the National League of Nursing Education, she was instrumental in the design of the influential national curricula, published by the League in 1917, 1927, and 1937 as guidelines for evaluating nursing school instruction. She organized the subcommittees which accomplished most of the work on the first curriculum, and she personally wrote most of it. In addition she directed the two revisions, which stressed the need for nurses to consider the mental and social impacts of illness; recommended more courses in the basic sciences, psychology, sociology, and public health; and introduced the case study method and other innovations in teaching techniques. Stewart is credited with initiating the idea of standardized tests in nursing, and with reviving interest in the comprehensive study and grading of nursing schools. Completed in 1934, the study paved the way for the first system of voluntary accreditation in 1939. She also worked to improve standards of nursing education through the Association of Collegiate Schools of Nursing, an organization she helped to found in 1932, which promoted the establishment of nursing schools in colleges and universities, and as chairman of the education committee of the International Council of Nurses. During two world wars Stewart served in leadership roles. In the first, she chaired the curriculum committee of the Vassar Training Camp, which recruited college graduates to serve as nurses and gave them preliminary training. She also wrote most of the materials used in the campaign to recruit nurses for the war effort. In World War II, she chaired the committee on educational policies and resources of the Na-

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tional Nursing Council for War Service ( 1 9 4 0 4 2 ) , in which capacity she advocated federal appropriations for nursing education; she also served as a consultant to several government agencies. Isabel Stewart reached her largest audience through her research and writing. Her Opportunities in the Field of Nursing (1912) was one of the earliest publications offering vocational guidance in nursing. Two books, The Education of Nurses: Historical Foundations and Modern Trends (1943) and A Short History of Nursing (in five editions), became the standard sources on their subjects. Because she treasured the traditions of nursing and valued research, Stewart promoted the preservation of nursing documents, supporting the growth of the Adelaide Nutting Historical Nursing Collection at Teachers College and of local history collections. Stewart's interests extended beyond nursing. A liberal, with a keen interest in politics, she was for many years a member of the Foreign Policy Association. She was also an early and vigorous supporter of better education and economic justice for women. At the age of sixteen, she had written an essay on woman suffrage, and during her early years at Teachers College had joined Adelaide Nutting, l i l l i a n w a l d , and many of her colleagues in suffrage parades up Fifth Avenue. Before and after her retirement in 1947, Stewart's contributions to education were recognized by many honors, including the Mary Adelaide Nutting Award from the National League of Nursing Education ( 1 9 4 7 ) , a medal from the government of Finland (1946), and several honorary degrees. In 1961 Teachers College established the Isabel Maitland Stewart Research Professorship in Nursing Education. In retirement Stewart, indefatigable and generous as ever, continued to be consulted by former colleagues and students. She died suddenly in 1963 at the home of a nephew in Chatham, N.J., of a heart attack. [Major sources of biographical data include the Isabel Maitland Stewart Papers in the archives of the nursing education department, Teachers College, Columbia Univ., and The Reminiscences of Isabel Maitland Stewart ( 1 9 6 0 ) , Oral History Coll., Columbia Univ. Opportunities in the Field of Nursing was reprinted in 1920, 1925, and 1930. The first four editions of A Short History of Nursing from Ancient to Modern Times (1920, 1925, 1931, 1938) were written in collaboration with Lavinia L. Dock; the fifth, entitled A History of Nursing from Ancient to Modern Times ( 1 9 6 2 ) , was a joint effort with Anne L. Austin. "A List of the Published Writings of Isabel Maitland Stewart" ( 1 9 6 7 ) , comp. Anne Austin and available from Nursing Education

Alumnae Assoc., Teachers College, contains the titles of Stewart's pamphlets, forewords, introductions, and periodical articles. Information about her career and assessments of her impact on nursing education can be found in Stella Goostray, "Isabel Maitland Stewart," Am. Jour, of Nursing, March 1954; Mary M. Roberts, American Nursing: History and Interpretation ( 1 9 5 5 ) ; "Isabel M. Stewart Recalls the Early Years," Am. Jour, of Nursing, Oct. 1960; Teresa E. Christy, Cornerstone for Nursing Education: A History of the Division of Nursing Education of Teachers College, Columbia University, 1899-1947 ( 1 9 6 9 ) ; Stella Goostray, Memoirs: Half a Century of Nursing ( 1 9 6 9 ) ; Helen E. Marshall, Mary Adelaide Nutting: Pioneer of Modern Nursing ( 1 9 7 2 ) . See also Gladys Bonner Clappison, Vassar's Rainbow Division (1918). Useful biographical information was provided by Henry E. Sharpe and Margaret E . Hart. Obituaries appeared in Nursing Outlook, Nov. 1963; Am. Jour, of Nursing, Nov. 1963; N.Y. Times, Oct. 7, 1963. A birth record was supplied by Ontario Office of the Registrar General; death record provided by N.J. Dept of Health.] ANNE L. AUSTIN

STRANG, Ruth May, April 3,1895-Jan. 3,1971. Educator. Ruth Strang, a leader in the field of educational guidance, was born in Chatham, N.J., the only daughter and youngest of three children of Charles Garrett and Anna (Bergen) Strang. Her father's ancestors, Huguenots, had emigrated from France, her mother's ancestors from the Netherlands, both arriving in America during the colonial era. Charles Strang, a farmer who faced hard work and financial stringencies, moved with his family several times during Ruth's childhood, first from New Jersey to South Jamaica, Long Island, where he worked a farm inherited from his father, and then to Phoenix, Ariz. After recuperating there from bronchitis, he sold the Long Island farm and the Strangs settled finally in Brooklyn, where Ruth attended her fourth elementary school. Despite her mother's sympathetic presence, she later recalled growing up in an "atmosphere of anxiety." Ruth Strang's secondary school years, at Adelphi Academy, were happier, introducing her both to the classics and to women's athletics. She had to give up hopes of attending Wellesley College on graduation, however, when her father discouraged the idea (although he had helped her older brother Benjamin through Columbia ). She entered Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., instead, completing a two-year normal program in household science in 1916. Strang worked briefly as an interior decorator and cared for her ailing mother before becoming a home

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Strang economics teacher in a poor district of New York City ( 1 9 1 7 - 2 0 ) . Then, in the face of strong opposition from home and school advisers, she decided to continue her education at Teachers College, Columbia University. With close guidance and support from several faculty members, she earned her B.S. in 1922 and her Ph.D. four years later. In her graduate education as in her later career, Strang pursued a wide range of educational interests, supervising health education at the Horace Mann School, contributing to an experimental reading project for deaf and mute children, and serving as a research assistant and instructor in psychology. On receiving her doctorate, Ruth Strang accepted a research fellowship from Teachers College to investigate national trends in student personnel administration. The project focused on the role of deans of girls and women in American schools, and Strang coauthored two books on the subject. Subsequently she chaired the Research Committee of the National Association of Deans of Women ( 1 9 3 0 - 3 9 ) - w h i c h later became the National Association for Women Deans, Administrators, and Counselors—and edited its Journal, one of the leading publications in the guidance field, from 1938 to 1960. In the late 1920s Strang taught three summers at the Women's College at the University of North Carolina (Greensboro). She also completed one of her most widely consulted works, An Introduction to Child Study (1930), which she revised several times during her career. In 1929 Strang became assistant professor of education at Teachers College, where she remained for three decades, becoming full professor in 1940 and helping to make its department of guidance and student personnel administration a major center for graduate study. Strang not only taught guidance, she practiced it, serving as a model to many who profited from her advice. Living alone in a room near the college, Strang, a careless housekeeper, devoted most of her social energies to the success and friendship of her students. Her style was informal, and she favored casual dress and sneakers. Besides her work in guidance, to which Strang devoted over one-third of her roughly four hundred articles and books, she pursued a second major interest in the teaching of reading. She directed the High School and College Reading Center, begun at Teachers College in 1932, and wrote Problems in the Improvement of Reading in Secondary Schools and High Schools (1938), along with many other books and articles on the subject. Her work in this area supported the development of reading and communication centers at many American schools and colleges.

The remainder of her scholarly efforts were distributed among the fields of health education, testing, psychology and mental health, the teaching of gifted children, group work, and rural education. Active in professional organizations, she served as president of the National Association of Remedial Teachers (1955), and as a three-term member on the board of directors of the National Society for the Study of Education. Reaching the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, Ruth Strang left Teachers College in 1960 to serve as professor of education and direct the reading development center at the University of Arizona ( 1 9 6 0 - 6 8 ) . She then held a visiting professorship at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ( 1 9 6 8 - 6 9 ) , before retiring to Amityville, N.Y. Suffering from arteriosclerosis in her final years, she died in Amityville in January 1971. An instinctive moralist, Strang described herself as a Puritan, consciously dedicated to work, duty, self-improvement, and service. This ethic was tempered by a romantic humanism, however; she cited Emerson in her writings and brought to her vision of good education both a dislike for social engineering and a nostalgic fondness for the small, rural community of neighborliness and cooperation. She wanted a school to be such a community in miniature and accordingly emphasized face-to-face teaching, while arguing that the most important lessons are "caught, not taught." Strang did not originate or revolutionize this approach, nor did she conduct groundbreaking research, but she was a gifted synthesizer, communicating important professional ideas and innovations to workers in the field. Her career epitomized the progressive education movement with its vigorous competence, its faith in gradual change, and its utter dedication to the life of service. [The best source is Robert J. Havighurst, ed., Leaders in American Education: The Seventieth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (1971), pt. II, pp. 365-411. The volume devotes a chapter to Ruth Strang, including a revealing autobiographical statement by Strang shortly before her death, a selective bibliography, and a thoughtful analysis by Charles Burgess. A more thorough bibliography appears in Amelia Melnik, "The Writings of Ruth Strang," Teachers College Record, May 1960, pp. 464-76. See also Current Biog., I960; an editorial statement, Jan. 1961, pp. 69-70, and an obituary, Spring 1971, pp. 97-98, in Jour. Nat. Assoc. of Women Deans and Counselors. An obituary also appeared in N.Y. Times, Jan. 5, 1971. Personal information was supplied by Strang's faculty colleagues at Teachers College. Death certificate obtained from N.Y. State Dept. of Health.]

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D. K E R S H N E R ,

JR.

Strong

Strong STRONG, Anna Louise, Nov. 24, 1885-March 29, 1970. Radical journalist, writer. When Anna Louise Strong died in Peking at the age of eighty-four, journalists noted both the distance between the People's Republic of China and her birthplace in Friend, Neb., and the persistence of the pioneer spirit which had brought her such a distance. An internationally known propagandist for the Soviet Union and for the People's Republic, she was the eldest of three children (two daughters and a son) of Congregational minister Sydney Dix Strong and Ruth (Tracy) Strong. Her ancestors on both sides migrated from England in the 1630s. The family moved as Sydney Strong became pastor of various churches, going to Mount Vernon, Ohio, in 1887 and then to Cincinnati in 1892. There Anna attended a public and then a private school, finishing eight grades in four years. Her father became pastor of an Oak Park, 111., church in 1897 and she went to high school there, graduating at fifteen. She studied in Europe before beginning college at Oberlin (from which both of her parents had graduated) in 1902. At her mother's insistence, she transferred to Bryn Mawr in 1903. That year Ruth Strong died at sea as she and her husband were returning from a tour of South African missions. A religious and ambitious woman, she was the strongest influence on her daughter's life. As president of the Women's Home Missionary Union of Ohio and Illinois, she was also influential in gaining positions for her husband. Anna Louise Strong returned to Oberlin in 1904. After receiving her A.B. in 1905, she went in March 1906 to the University of Chicago. There she successfully defended her dissertation, published as The Psychology of Prayer, to gain her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1908. By then, however, her interests had shifted to reform work and the following year she joined her father in organizing a "Know Your City" civic betterment program in Seattle, the site of his new ministry. A committed pacifist, Sydney Strong shared his sense of mission with his favorite child. She went on to organize similar programs in other northwestern cities. Their success led the Russell Sage Foundation to invite her to serve as assistant director of the New York Child Welfare Exhibit in 1911. Although she left Russell Sage later that year, she continued to direct child welfare exhibits, which became popular with urban social reformers, from Kansas City to Dublin, Ireland. During one such exhibit, in St. Louis, Strong became engaged to Roger Baldwin, the future director of the American Civil Liberties Union. They failed to

marry because of Sydney Strong's opposition and her own conclusion that Baldwin was not a committed Christian. Strong was in the employ of Russell Sage again in late 1913, but in September 1914 went to Washington to become director of exhibits under J U L I A L A T H R O P at the Children's Bureau. Resigning in the fall of 1915, she returned to the west coast. The following year Strong joined C R Y S T A L EASTMAN'S Anti-Preparedness League and arranged antiwar rallies in the middle west. She turned decisively to politics later that year, returning to Seattle to run unsuccessfully for the state legislature. She was, however, elected to the Seattle School Board. Following United States entry into World War I, Strong, who had since 1912 considered herself a socialist, anonymously wrote antiwar and anticapitalist articles for the socialist Seattle Daily Call. Her attendance at anticonscription meetings and her defense of those who worked against the draft led to her recall from the school board in March 1918. Writing under the pseudonym of Anise, Strong found a refuge in becoming feature editor of the Seattle Union Record, a labor paper. On Feb. 4, 1919, she published an editorial, "No One Knows Where," which justified and in great part launched the Seattle General Strike of 1919. It made her even more notorious. With the collapse of Seattle labor's solidarity, in 1921 Strong left for Poland under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee to assist famine victims there. From Lincoln Steffens and others, she had heard exciting tales of the revolution in Russia, and she next went there hoping to make her life in the revolution. In Moscow, she found favor by teaching Trotsky English and defending Lenin's New Economic Policy in her book The First Time in History (1924). She identified strongly with the Bolsheviks and became a great admirer of Trotsky. Her attempts to join the Communist party were rebuffed, however. Wanting to do more for the revolution, Strong raised money to establish the John Reed Children's Colony, set up for the many children and teenage refugees left homeless by the Volga famine, and for the American Working School, a trade school in Moscow. Both ventures failed, and Strong's revolutionary idealism had to be channeled into her career as writer, journalist, and lecturer. From the mid19205 until the late 1940s she alternated periods of work in the Soviet Union with regular trips to the United States to lecture and raise funds. Anna Louise Strong went to China for the first time in 1925. Anticipating there the revolution she continued to seek, Strong returned to Hankow in 1927. She arrived in time to join Russian adviser Michael Borodin and a group of

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Russians and Chinese fleeing from the wrath of Chiang Kai-shek, who had turned against his communist allies. Strong became the diarist for this caravan as they raced for safety in Siberia. Strong also continued to seek ways to publicize the revolution in the Soviet Union. In 1930 she founded the English-language Moscow News to provide information to Americans working there. Two years later, when arguments among the editors led Strong to decide to abandon the paper, Stalin intervened at her request and brought about a decision to reorganize the paper into a daily. In her 1935 autobiography, I Change Worlds, Strong offered this episode, with its revelation of both Soviet administrative methods and Stalin's abilities as a leader, as the crucial event of her life. But her dissatisfaction with the newspaper returned and Strong resigned to cover the Spanish civil war in 1936-37 and to report from China in 1938-39. Strong had entered into a common law márriage in 1932 with Joel Shubin, a Communist party member and an editor of the Moscow Peasant's Gazette. Often separated because of her travels, they were together for a few months in 1939 when he became a director of the Soviet Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Strong was then in the United States writing a book on the New Deal, My Native Land (1940), undertaken at the suggestion of ELEANOR ROOSEVELT.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 prevented Strong from being with Shubin when he died there in 1942. Stranded in the United States, she defended Stalin's policies in her 1941 book, The Soviets Expected It, became technical adviser for an MGM film, Song of Russia, and wrote her first novel, Wild River (1943), about Russian heroism in the face of the German invasion. Given a United States passport and accredited to the Atlantic Monthly, Strong returned to Moscow in 1944 and accompanied the Red army that year as it drove the Germans back across Poland. Still seeking the Chinese revolution, Strong traveled there again in 1946. She lived at Communist Chinese headquarters at Yenan in 1946-47 and obtained there her famous interview with Mao Tse-tung in which he proclaimed that all reactionaries were paper tigers (published in English in Amerasia, April 1947). She was eager to remain with Mao, but he urged her to go and publicize the revolution abroad. Her publication of the thought of Mao Tse-tung led to accusations that she was a spy and she was deported from the Soviet Union in 1949, an early manifestation of Sino-Soviet tensions. Strong returned to the United States, where she was publicly shunned by party members

until the Soviet Union exonerated her in 1955. Three years later she returned again briefly to Moscow and then left to take up permanent residence in Peking. In 1962 she began to publish a newsletter, Letter from China, which became a regular source of information about Chinese positions in the Sino-Soviet debate and gave readers in the West a glimpse of life in China. Remaining an active partisan, she traveled to Tibet, Laos, and to North Vietnam three times to demonstrate her solidarity with the revolutionary cause. She explained to a friend: "I have to do what I want to do . . . I have to go on." In 1965 Mao Tse-tung honored her on her eightieth birthday and the following year the Red Guard made her an honorary member. But the Chinese Cultural Revolution struck too close to her in 1968 as her closest friends and associates were arrested as left deviationists. She decided in 1969 to return to the United States to work against the war in Vietnam, but died in Peking the following year of heart disease, unable to accomplish this last goal. She was buried in Peking's National Memorial Cemetery of Revolutionary Martyrs, near the grave of AGNES SMEDLEY.

Anna Louise Strong remained faithful to her belief that her most important role was to popularize the thought of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung for the masses. Her remarkable loyalty to the communist cause despite denunciation and spy charges reveals a woman of tremendous will and blinding devotion to her ideals. [The Anna Louise Strong, Sydney Dix Strong, and Tracy Strong, Sr., Papers are located at the Univ. of Wash., Seattle. Correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt, mostly between 1937 and 1939, is in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. There is abundant autobiographical material in other books by Strong: Red Star in Samarkand ( 1 9 2 9 ) , Road to the Grey Pamir ( 1 9 3 1 ) , I Saw the New Poland ( 1 9 4 6 ) , China's Millions ( 1 9 2 8 ) , and The Chinese Conquer China ( 1 9 4 9 ) . For her account of her expulsion from Moscow see "Jailed in Moscow," N.Y. Herald Tribune, March 27-April 1, 1949. Her article, "The Thought of Mao Tse-tung," appeared in Amerasia, June 1947. She also put out a newsletter, Today, from 1950 to 1956. For recollections of Strong by her colleagues see: Philip Jaffe, "The Strange Case of Anna Louise Strong," Survey, Oct. 1964; Rewi Alley, "Some Memories of Anna Louise Strong," Eastern Horizon, vol. 9, nos. 2 and 3 ( 1 9 7 0 ) . See also David Milton and Nancy Dall Milton's account of Anna Louise Strong during the Cultural Revolution in The Wind Will Not Survive ( 1 9 7 6 ) ; an entry in Current Biog., 1949; entries in Twentieth Century Authors ( 1 9 4 2 ) and First Supplement ( 1 9 5 5 ) , both of which include a bibliography; Robert L. Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike ( 1 9 6 7 ) , especially pp. 110-12; Robert W. Pringle, Jr., "Anna Louise Strong: Propagandist of

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Suckow (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Va., 1 9 7 2 ) ; and Ogle, "Anna Louise Strong: Seattle thesis, Seattle Univ., 1973). An obituin the N.Y. Times, March 30, 1970.] STEPHANIE F. OGLE

SUCKOW, Ruth, Aug. 6, 1892-Jan. 23, 1960. Writer. A writer whose fiction explored the life and landscape of Iowa, Ruth Suckow was born in that state, in the small town of Hawarden. Her parents, William John and Anna Mary (Kluckhohn) Suckow, were both children of German immigrants; Ruth visited her grandparents often as a child, acquiring a sense of family history that enriched her later work. She was deeply influenced by her father, a Congregational minister who held pastorates in several Iowa towns, including Hawarden and Algona, where Ruth began elementary school. In her autobiographical essay, "A Memoir" (1952), she recalls listening to her father's sermons with their "purity and economy of style," composing her earliest tales in the privacy of his study, and following his vocation by baptizing kittens and conducting "funeral services for birds, mice and broken dolls." Ruth's relationship with her mother was more difficult. Troubled by a thyroid condition which "destroyed her beauty as well as her health," Anna Suckow found little fulfillment in the social duties of a minister's wife, focusing her ambitions on Ruth and her older sister and only sibling, Emma. Growing up, Ruth found it difficult to accept her mother's demanding love: "I suffered from it." In 1907 the Suckows moved to Grinnell, Iowa, where Ruth completed high school while her father worked as a field secretary for Grinnell College. She entered Grinnell in 1910. Although she studied English there and contributed a few stories to campus magazines, her first passion was for the stage. Seeking more training as a dramatic reader and actress, she left Grinnell at the end of her junior year to complete a two-year program at the Curry School of Expression in Boston (1913—15). She then operated her own "school of expression" briefly in Manchester, Iowa, where her father held a pastorate, before joining her ailing sister in Denver, Colo. There at the University of Denver, Suckow earned her A.B. (1917) and A.M. (1918) in English. Living in Colorado, Suckow's ambitions shifted decisively from acting and teaching to writing. She focused initially on verse, publishing her first poems in 1918, and to support her craft, studied beekeeping with a woman outside Denver. After her mother's death in 1919, she returned to live with her father in Iowa. Aside

from a few winter visits to New York City, she spent the next six years in her home state, raising honey at her apiary in Earlville, writing poems, and producing a series of short stories set in rural and small-town Iowa which became the cornerstone of her literary reputation. In 1921 her story, "Uprooted," about an aging farm couple whose children convene to decide their parents' fate, appeared in The Midland, for which she subsequently served as assistant editor. The Midlands editor, John T. Frederick, urged her to send samples of her work to H. L. Mencken, who promoted her heartily: "I lately unearthed a girl in Iowa," he wrote to Sinclair Lewis, "who seems to me to be superb." Between late 1921 and 1923, a procession of stories by Suckow appeared in Mencken's The Smart Set, and in 1924 The Century Magazine followed suit, serializing her novella Country People, published later that year by Alfred A. Knopf. Knopf subsequently collected her first stories under the title Iowa Interiors (1926), which won enthusiastic reviews. This early work is remarkable for its dramatic economy and its acute, unsentimental vision of rural life. Swiftly and graphically, Suckow captures the plight of her characters, like the farm wife in "Renters" who is being evicted from her land: "She could smell the rich ripening corn in the hot night. It swelled her bitterness." Now an established author, Ruth Suckow sold her Earlville apiary late in 1926 and moved to New York City. Within four years she completed three novels: The Bonney Family (1928), Cora (1929), and The Kramer Girls (1930). These, like Suckow's earlier work The Odyssey of a Nice Girl (1925), portray the struggles of young women to forge identities apart from the customs and expectations of their midwestern friends and families. While uneven in quality, without at times the keen, objective edge of her best work, these novels are nonetheless honest, avoiding easy solutions—Suckow's young protagonists find refuge neither in nostalgic homemaking nor in heroic self-reliance. In March 1929 Ruth Suckow married Ferner Nuhn, a writer and critic. Born in Iowa in 1903, Nuhn appreciated and supported Suckow's effort to explore their native region in fiction; he later published The Wind Blew from the East: A Study in the Orientation of American Culture (1942). For several years after their marriage, Suckow and Nuhn lived variously in California, New Mexico (1929), and Iowa ( 1 9 3 0 - 3 2 ) ; they spent summers as well at the Yaddo and MacDowell Colonies (1933-34). Through most of this period Suckow worked steadily on her longest and most substantial novel, The Folks (1934). Following six members of an Iowa

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Suckow family, the Fergusons, from the first decade of the twentieth century to the dawn of the depression, The Folks relates personal to social and historical change more effectively than any of her previous work. In one of the novel's briefest and most intriguing episodes, the Fergusons' youngest child shocks his parents by bringing home his new bride, the strong, sullen, and radical daughter of poor Russian immigrants: "He wanted to take all this that was alien on himself and somehow absorb it." In a sense, The Folks was Ruth Suckow's summary work. As E. H. Walton suggested in the New York Times, she seemed to commit to it "all her knowledge and careful observation." While Suckow continued to produce novels and stories after 1935, her output in her last twenty-five years was relatively slender. Yet she was by no means idle. From about 1934 she lived in the Washington, D.C., area, where her husband worked for the Department of Agriculture; President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Suckow in 1936 to the Farm Tenancy Committee. By 1937 she and her husband had settled in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where they spent most of the next decade writing, running a rental agency inherited from Ferner Nuhn's father, and encouraging local interest in literature and the arts. She remained in touch during these years with her literary friends and mentors, including Robert Frost, d o r o t h y c a n f i e l d F I S H E R , and Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset (Suckow's work appeared in translation throughout Scandinavia). New Hope, Suckow's seventh novel and her most lyrical and nostalgic vision of an Iowa community, appeared in 1942. A pacifist, Suckow supported conscientious objectors during World War II by visiting civilian public service camps; after the war she joined her husband as an active member of the Society of Friends. She began to suffer from arthritis during this period, and partly for reasons of health, moved with Ferner Nuhn to Tucson, Ariz., in 1948. In the spring of 1952 they settled finally in Claremont, Calif., where Suckow completed her last novel, The John Wood Case (1959). She died at home in January 1960. Technically, perhaps, Ruth Suckow was not a virtuoso novelist. In longer works her urge to analyze in depth the motives and misgivings of her characters sometimes led her away from the taut description and sharp dialogue which grace her best short narratives, tales which drew the admiration of critics and artists alike. Sinclair Lewis found her early stories "lucid, remarkably real, firm," and Robert Frost praised her second collection, Children and Older People (1931), as "without guile or thesis . . . just stories of life

vividly restored." Suckow was not exclusively a realist, though, or a "regional painter" aiming for highly polished vignettes. Her overruling object, and the goal which led her to longer, more elaborate narratives like The Folks, was to do justice in fiction to the emotional quandaries of the family—or as her Iowans refer to their assorted relatives, "the relationship." To the study of such relationships Suckow brought great versatility, imagining the very old and very young with equal skill and realizing the guilt and affection tying one generation to the next. The result is a body of work examining common characters—and the forces that pull them apart and bind them together—with exceptional faithfulness. [Ruth Suckow's papers, including correspondence, photographs, MSS., and clippings, are in the Special Collections Dept., Univ. of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City. For a description of some of the correspondence held there see Frank Paluka, "Ruth Suckow: A Calendar of Letters," Books at Iowa, Oct. 1964, and April 1965. Clippings and family photographs are also located at the Ruth Suckow Memorial Library in Earlville, Iowa. Several of her early works are anthologized in Carry-Over ( 1 9 3 6 ) . Suckow's autobiographical essay, focusing on her childhood and her religious development, appears in Some Others and Myself ( 1 9 5 2 ) . See also Ferner Nuhn, ed., "Cycle of the Seasons in Iowa: Unpublished Diary of Ruth Suckow," The Iowan, Oct.-Nov. 1960; Dec.-Jan. 1960-61; Feb.-March 1961; April-May 1961. An extended bibliography of publications by and about Suckow appears in Leedice McAnelly Kissane, Ruth Suckow ( 1 9 6 9 ) , which also includes a chronology, biographical information, and an analysis of the fiction. Other full-length studies include Margaret O'Brien Stewart, "A Critical Study of Ruth Suckow's Fiction" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Illinois, 1 9 6 0 ) ; and Margaret Steward Omrcanin, Ruth Suckow: A Critical Study of Her Fiction ( 1 9 7 0 ) . Margaret Matlack Kiesel has contributed two helpful articles: "Ruth Suckow's Grinnell," Grinnell Mag., Nov.-Dec. 1975; and "Iowans in the Arts: Ruth Suckow in the Twenties," Annah of Iowa, Spring 1980. Biographical sketches can be found in Twentieth Century Authors ( 1 9 4 2 ) , p. 1368; Harry Warfel, American Novelists of Today ( 1 9 5 1 ) , pp. 4 1 6 - 1 7 ; and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XLVII, 3 5 2 - 5 3 . Obituaries appeared in N.Y. Times, Jan. 24, 1960; and Annals of Iowa, Spring 1960. A biobibliography by Alice Medin assisted with research; death certificate provided by Calif. Dept. of Public Health.] STEPHEN

G.

HYSLOP

SWINDLER, Mary Hamilton, Jan. 3, 1884-Jan. 16, 1967. Archaeologist, classicist. Mary Hamilton Swindler was one of the most quietly influential classical archaeologists in

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America. For six decades she was a central part of the work in classics and archaeology at Bryn Mawr College, helping to make Bryn Mawr a distinguished archaeological center. She was born in Bloomington, Ind., the second of the three surviving children and second daughter of Ida M. (Hamilton) and Harrison T. Swindler, a merchant. After attending Bloomington High School, she obtained both the A.B. (1905) and the A.M. (1906) in Greek from Indiana University. Her career at the university can be followed in many reviews of her theatrical performances and accounts of her successes as an intramural basketball player. Mary Swindler entered Bryn Mawr on a Greek fellowship in 1906 and remained there nearly all her life. Soon after her arrival she first displayed her powers of observation and analysis in the field of ancient painting. Her article on a Greek vase exhibited at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia assigned the red-figured body to a painter called the Master of the Penthesilea School and the signed foot to a lost black-figured cup by Nikosthenes. The article, published in 1909 in the American Journal of Archaeology, marked her as a scholar of promise and early authority. Aided by the Mary E. Garrett European Fellowship, Mary Swindler studied in Berlin in 1909 and then went on to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. This experience, which provided intense exposure to sites, monuments, and museums, was so valuable that she always encouraged all her students to visit Athens and the European museums. Later she raised an annual fellowship for Bryn Mawr students to study abroad, and founded a museum at Bryn Mawr to permit teaching from original works of art. When she returned to the American School as visiting professor in 1938, her lectures were so popular that the director had to limit the attendance. At Bryn Mawr Mary Swindler earned her Ph.D. in 1912 and rose to the rank of professor of classical archaeology by 1931. Her dissertation, Cretan Elements in the Cults and Ritual of Apollo (1913), was characteristic of Bryn Mawr interests at the time. The Cretan or Aegean world being uncovered in her student days remained a favorite subject and was treated authoritatively in her major published work, Ancient Painting (1929). A remarkable book, its contents ranged from Paleolithic cave paintings and ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern painting to late antique mosaics and the early Christian catacombs. It was the first of its kind, supported at every point by precise scholarly references and large bibliographies, as well as a wealth of small, clear illustrations. Mary

Swindler looked hard at every piece, and brought a formidable technical and aesthetic judgment to focus on it. Ancient Painting is impressive not only for its ambition, size, and learning, but also for the simplicity and power of the descriptive prose. The international reputation earned her by Ancient Painting was further enhanced by Swindler's editorship of the American Journal of Archaeology from 1932 until 1946. The first woman editor-in-chief, she not only changed the format and increased the journal's coverage and circulation, but also made it a truly international publication. This was perhaps her greatest scholarly achievement, and at the same time her students and colleagues benefited from the new discoveries that came to her desk as editor. With tremendous energy and vitality in those years, she began yet another monumental undertaking. To be titled "The Beginnings of Greek Art," this work was designed to follow the processes of creativity in Greece from Neolithic times through the Bronze and Dark Ages until the emergence of a preclassical style in the seventh century B.C. However, Mary Swindler's sense of perfection prevented her from ever being satisfied with the manuscript, while the burden of her duties and, later, failing eyesight and ill health kept her from completing it. At Bryn Mawr, Mary Swindler's modest yet vigorous, direct, and humorous style of teaching inspired generations of undergraduates. She instilled in students a sense of form and color, set fragments of antiquity in historical and literary perspective, and encouraged excellence. A beautiful woman, she had a lifelong vision of the comic, and a profound distaste for the shoddy and the sentimental. At seminars in her apartment, she challenged graduate students with recent problems or chapters from her book, and then served them tea, English muffins, and cherry jam. It is reported that she used a rowing machine to keep fit during the tedious hours of editing the Journal. Until the end of her life she kept an enormous file of archaeological clippings and photographs, which she pasted on shirt cardboards collected from her male colleagues. Warm-hearted and generous, Mary Swindler not only aided many of her own students but was also instrumental in finding the means to help refugee scholars from Nazi Germany obtain positions in the United States. When she retired from Bryn Mawr in 1949 on a very modest pension, she had barely provided for herself, so she continued to teach, at the University of Pennsylvania ( 1 9 4 9 - 5 0 ) , the University of Michigan ( 1 9 5 0 - 5 3 ) , and again at Bryn Mawr ( 1 9 5 3 - 5 6 ) . Even when she retired fully she

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read everything, and continued to help students informally. Mary Hamilton Swindler was honored by Indiana University with an LL.D. ( 1 9 4 1 ) , with the Achievement Award of the American Association of University Women ( 1 9 5 1 ) , and, as one of the three outstanding scholars in the humanities in 1959, with a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London and of the German Archaeological Institute. Mary Swindler died of bronchopneumonia in 1967 in Haverford, Pa. She left generations of classicists and archaeologists whose professional achievements testify to her influence both in the United States and abroad. [Mary Swindler's college and later career can be traced in excerpts from student and alumni publications provided by the Ind. Univ. Archives. A biographical sketch by Dorothy Burr Thompson, "Mary Hamilton Swindler," Am. Jour. Archaeology, Oct. 1950, pp. 292-93, also contains a bibliography. See also Sara Anderson Immerwahr, "Mary Hamilton Swindler," Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bull., 1966-67, no. 3, pp. 26-27. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 18, 1967. Birth record supplied by Monroe Cty. Health Dept., Bloomington, Ind.; family information by Indiana State Library; death certificate by Pa. Dept. of Health.] EMILY SARA

VERMEULE ANDERSON

IMMERWAHR

S W I T Z E R , Mary Elizabeth, Feb. 16, 1 9 0 0 - 0 c t . 16, 1971. Federal official. Mary Switzer, leader in the rehabilitation of the disabled, was born in Newton Upper Falls, Mass., the oldest child of two daughters and a son of Margaret (Moore) and Julius F. Switzer, a manual worker. Her father left the family, and when Mary was eleven her mother died. Mary and her sister subsequently lived with two maternal aunts and an uncle, a machinist. "Uncle Mike" Moore greatly influenced Mary Switzer: Irish patriot, woman suffragist, and socialist, he taught her about the world and encouraged her to do something useful with her life. Brought up as a Roman Catholic, Switzer attended public schools and graduated from Newton Classical High School in 1917. Through a scholarship and a variety of jobs, she was able to attend Radcliffe College, where she majored in international law and helped to found the reformist Inter-Collegiate Liberal League. Above all, she experienced "the excitement that comes from the stirring of the mind." After receiving an A.B. in 1921, Switzer moved to Washington and obtained a position

with the District of Columbia Minimum Wage Board. There she met other capable women in government, among them Isabella Stevenson Diamond, who became librarian of the Treasury Department and with whom Switzer made her lifelong home. For a dozen years, her work remained somewhat routine. After the first job, she served briefly as executive secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, but soon entered the federal civil service. Beginning in 1922 as a junior economist in the Treasury Department, she established a niche for herself preparing reports on current news and opinion for Secretary Andrew W. Mellon and for President Herbert Hoover as well. Switzer's career got off the ground with her appointment in 1934 as assistant to the assistant secretary of the treasury, Josephine Roche ( 1 8 8 6 - 1 9 7 6 ) , who assigned her to oversee the United States Public Health Service. Through her work on an interdepartmental committee, she had a hand in consolidating health and welfare programs into a new Federal Security Agency ( F S A ) , and later in its elevation to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In 1939 Switzer joined the FSA as assistant to the administrator, Paul McNutt, with responsibility for health and medical matters. During World War II she participated in the highly confidential War Research Service and in the Procurement and Assignment Service for medical personnel. For her war work Switzer received the President's Certificate of Merit, the first of a long series of honors. Later she advanced to the international scene and helped to set up the World Health Organization. In these activities she demonstrated a gift for organization and action which brought her not only promotion but also prestige and influence in circles of government, medicine, and social work, as well as on Capitol Hill. In 1950 Switzer was appointed director of the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation ( O V R ) , then part of the FSA. Already interested in this field of service, she now enjoyed autonomy in a position that called forth all her talents. Established in 1920, the OVR allocated grants-in-aid to the states in order to develop the ability of handicapped persons to work, but the program had reached only a few selected cases. Switzer set out with dynamic energy to make it "meet the total vocational needs of the mentally as well as the physically handicapped," to see that it became "responsible for meeting the . . . needs of all the people." An exceptionally skilled administrator, she developed and shaped vocational rehabilitation in the United States to such an extent that well after her death former col-

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Taba leagues could still say that the program "is the shadow of Mary Switzer." "I am amazed at myself," she remarked in 1951, "at how readily and easily I have fallen into the habit and pattern of an operator." Exercising her authority to the full, Switzer coordinated the efforts of state and federal agencies and private organizations toward a single goal: to assist all the disabled to find satisfying work. Even as federal grants increased, she insisted that the states should play an important role, and she herself visited all the state agencies. Largely through her efforts, the landmark Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1954 provided funds for research, for training of specialists, and for construction of comprehensive rehabilitation centers. As director of her agency and as chair of countless committees, Mary Switzer sparked conferences, wielded the power of the purse, and obtained appropriations to make services broadly available to groups formerly shunted aside as hopeless, including the mentally retarded. To energy and dedication, Switzer added diplomatic skill. A liberal Democrat, she survived political shifts. "No bureaucrat," she believed, "really comes of age until he or she has found the answer to accommodating to successive changes in administration, both inter- and intra-party, and growing in the process." Vital to success were her relations with Congress; she not only testified convincingly before committees but kept on excellent personal terms with powerful legislators who found themselves unable to refuse her the sizable appropriations she requested. In her pleasure at receiving a prestigious Albert Lasker Award in 1960, Switzer also observed that the splendid publicity came at a timely moment—"just as I was negotiating with the appropriations committee." She cared most for people. Hard work did not dampen her ebullient personality, and she remained accessible even when papers piled high. "She made light shine around her," said John Gardner, a former secretary of health, education, and welfare. "As you move up," she ad-

jured her nephew, then a young rehabilitation worker, "never forget the people you're working for-get out and touch them." Ties of affection linked her to her sister and to her brother and his family. She credited Isabella Diamond with teaching her "the advantage of a balanced life," with "interests as broad as life is—baseball—to Grand Opera—the circus—a bird with a broken wing, and the way to organize life to enjoy all" (Switzer, "Hope," p. 19). In 1970, as administrator of the Social and Rehabilitation Service in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Mary Switzer retired-or, as she insisted, merely left in order to head the Washington office of the World Rehabilitation Association. She died in Washington of cancer the following year. [The Mary E. Switzer Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, are voluminous. They contain correspondence, speeches, reports, articles, and other material, but little that is personal. Her short article "Hope, the Anchor of Life," Radcliffe Quart., Feb. 1959, is quite revealing. The Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare has compiled a typescript list of "Articles by Miss Mary E. Switzer," and there is a pamphlet by Isabella Diamond, "Mary Elizabeth Switzer, 'The Dedicated Bureaucrat.' " A brief biography can be found in Current Biog., 1962. An excellent photograph appears on the cover of Medical World News, March 3, 1967, accompanying an article, "Getting the Disabled on Their Feet." See also three works by Howard A. Rusk, "Career in Rehabilitation," N.Y. Times, March 1, 1970, "Mary Elizabeth Switzer: A Tribute," Rehabilitation Record, Jan.-Feb. 1972, pp. 1-2, and A World to Care For ( 1 9 7 2 ) , pp. 2 1 4 15, 293; and C. Warren Bledsoe, "Dedication to Mary Elizabeth Switzer ( 1 9 0 0 - 1 9 7 1 ) , " Blindness: Am. Assoc. of Workers for the Blind Annual, 1972, pp. ix-xii. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 17, 1971, and Am. Speech and Hearing Assoc., Dec. 1971, p. 729. Death certificate supplied by D.C. Dept. of Public Health. Additional information for this article was provided by Ann Switzer, Richard Moore Switzer, Arthur J. Switzer, Isabella Diamond, Anne Verano, Frances Curtis, Charles Schottland, Joseph V. Hunt, and Milton Cohen.] JEAN

CHRISTIE

T TABA, Hilda, Dec. 7, 1902-July 6, Educator.

1967.

Professor, author, and leader in curriculum development, Hilda Taba was born in south-

eastern Estonia, the eldest child of the four daughters and five sons of Robert and Liisa (Leht) Taba. Her parents, both Lutherans and native Estonians, had had elementary schooling and her father a secondary education as well. He

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Taba taught school for forty years while her mother assisted on the family farm; the land was part of the compensation for teaching. Although far from wealthy the Tabas encouraged education, and all their children went to college through a combination of hard work and scholarships. Hilda Taba received an A.B. from the University of Tartu, Estonia, in 1926. With the aid of a scholarship for graduate work in the United States, she came to Bryn Mawr College, where she received an A.M. in education and psychology in 1927. She then pursued doctoral study at Teachers College, Columbia University (Ph.D., 1933). Returning to Estonia during this time, she taught there for two years. In her dissertation, Dynamics of Education: A Methodology of Progressive Educational Thought (1932), written under William Heard Kilpatrick, Taba acknowledged her debt to Boyd H. Bode's writings and to the "inspiration and help" of John Dewey in "classroom and conferences." Her mentors were the leading philosophers of the progressive education movement, and although she was critical of certain aspects of the movement, many of the techniques and theories she later developed were rooted in progressive principles. Taba became involved in the Progressive Education Association's major project of the 1930s: its Eight-Year Study designed to extend the principles of progressive education to secondary schools and to provide freedom for those schools to innovate without jeopardizing their students' chances of acceptance to college. Taba was director of curriculum research at the participating Dalton School in New York City; later, she became a staff associate, evaluating student development in the thirty secondary schools involved in the study. Ralph W. Tyler, the evaluation research director, was an important intellectual and professional associate. Taba's appointments as assistant professor at Ohio State University ( 1 9 3 6 - 3 8 ) and at the University of Chicago in 1938 were a result of her work with the Eight-Year Study. While on leave from Chicago (1945—18), Taba became director of an intergroup education project, sponsored by the American Council on Education and financed by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. This project was designed to study intergroup relations in the areas of race, creed, and national origins, and their advancement within the educational system through revised teaching materials and methods. As director of the Center for Intergroup Education at the University of Chicago ( 1 9 4 8 - 5 1 ) , Taba continued to direct experimental programs in human relations, helped develop curriculum, and conducted workshops for

educators. She wrote, edited, or coauthored numerous books and articles based on these projects. When Taba became professor of education at San Francisco State College in 1951, she embarked on the most productive years of her professional career. Her most important book, Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice (1962), conceptualized a systematic approach to curriculum planning and design, incorporating concepts from the social sciences; it became a classic in the field. Taba sought to bridge the traditional gap between theory and practice by inverting the conventional sequence: rather than trying to impose a design, she advocated beginning at the classroom level with units planned by teachers. She was firmly convinced that teachers must be involved in curriculum development and could make important contributions to curriculum theory. Taba continued to work closely with teachers and school districts in the federally funded projects she directed. Her research on teaching strategies and children's thinking culminated in her Teachers' Handbook for Elementary Social Studies (1967), designed to teach students how to use specific facts to develop basic concepts and generalizations in a spiral curriculum. A companion project involved the development of an elementary social studies curriculum using this inductive approach to teach children thinking skills. In the 1970s Addison-Wesley published the Taba Program in Social Science, a textbook series for grades one through eight based on her concepts. A prolific writer, creative thinker, and effective teacher, Hilda Taba possessed a probing intellect and a vibrant personality. Friends remember her as a warm and caring person with tremendous energy and a zest for living. Her interests included music, traveling, theater, gardening, swimming, and reading. Taba died in Burlingame, Calif., in 1967 of peritonitis at the age of sixty-four. Although much of her pioneering work has since been surpassed, in her lifetime Taba influenced the areas of curriculum, student evaluation, human relations, social studies, and teaching for critical thinking. Some of her ideas remained influential in the 1970s; when the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development singled out a dozen "great persons" in the history of curriculum for their bicentennial yearbook (O. L. Davis, ed., 1976), Hilda Taba was one of two women to be included. [Among the nearly two dozen works written or coauthored by Hilda Taba are Adolescent Character and Personality (1949), with Robert Havighurst; Diagnosing Human Relations Needs (1951); Lead-

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Taeuber ership Training in Intergroup Education (1953); School Culture (1955); and Teaching Strategies for the Culturally Disadvantaged (1966), with Deborah Elkins. She also contributed over fifty articles to education journals and yearbooks. For analyses of Taba's ideas and methods see Selma Greenberg, Selected Studies of Classroom Teaching (1970); James E. Davis, "Taba Program in Social Science," Social Education, Nov. 1972, pp. 761-63; Roger L. Brown, "Taba Rediscovered," Science Teacher, Nov. 1973, pp. 30-33; and Wayne C. Hall, Jr., and Charles B. Myers, "The Effect of a Training Program in the Taba Teaching Strategies on Teaching Methods and Teacher Perceptions of Their Teaching," Peahody Jour. Education, April 1977, pp. 162-67. The main sources on her life are the brief accounts in Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., LIV, 113-14, which includes a photograph, and the N.Y. Times obituary, July 8, 1967. See also Patricia A. Moseley, "Hilda Taba, Curriculum Worker," in O. L. Davis, ed., Perspectives on Curriculum Development, 1776-1976 (1976), pp. 214-15. The entries in Leaders in Education (1948), Who's Who of Am. Women (1968-69), and Biog. Diet, of Am. Educators (1978) contain a number of factual errors. Information was provided by Ralph W. Tyler and by a brother, Paul Taba. Death record was obtained from the Calif. Registrar of Vital Statistics.] NATALIE A. NAYLOR

T A E U B E R , Irene Barnes, Dec. 25, 1 9 0 6 - F e b . 24, 1974. Demographer. Irene Barnes Taeuber was born in Meadville, Mo., the second of four children (two girls and two boys) of Lily (Keller) and Ninevah C. Barnes; her younger brother died in infancy. Her father, who alternated between farming and barbering, served for many years as justice of the peace. A restless man, he once left the family for over a year. Irene was very close to her mother and to her maternal grandparents who had come to Missouri from Ohio. She treasured over the years the memory of her Keller grandparents reading to her when she was severely ill with scarlet fever. After graduating from public high school, Irene Barnes went to college against her father's wishes. She attended Northeast Missouri State Teachers College in Kirksville for a year, and then transferred to the University of Missouri. With her mother's encouragement, she supported her education through scholarships and a variety of jobs. She majored in sociology, but was particularly influenced by a biology professor, W. C. Curtis. After earning her A.B. in 1927, she continued her study of sociology, and received an A.M. from Northwestern University ( 1 9 2 8 ) and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota ( 1 9 3 1 ) , where Pitirim Sorokin was an important influence.

Two years earlier she had married Conrad Taeuber, a fellow graduate student in sociology. While completing their dissertations, they both worked as research assistants for J. H. Kolb at the University of Wisconsin, gaining experience in rural demography and statistics. Then, in an arrangement unusual during the depression, both Taeubers received appointments in the department of economics and sociology at Mount Holyoke College in 1931, Irene as instructor, Conrad as assistant professor. In 1934, Conrad Taeuber accepted a research appointment with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and subsequently had a distinguished career as administrator, statistician, and demographer in the United States Department of Agriculture, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the United States Bureau of the Census. The Taeubers had two sons, Richard Conrad (b. 1933) and Karl Ernst (b. 1 9 3 6 ) . Both children later worked in fields related to their parents' interests—Richard in statistics and econometrics, Karl in demography and sociology. Irene Taeuber took time out from teaching after the birth of her first child; while the children were young, she limited herself to part-time work so that she could be at home when they returned from school. Irene Taeuber became involved in what was to be her life work early in 1935, when she helped Frank Lorimer, secretary of the newly organized Population Association of America (PAA), prepare a periodic bibliography of recent and current articles on population. The following year, when the Office of Population Research ( O P R ) was established at Princeton University under the direction of Frank W. Notestein, she became a staff member there and coeditor of Population Index, the successor of the publication on which she had been working. She was affiliated with the OPR for the rest of her life, commuting from her home in Hyattsville, Md., to Princeton every week or two. Working mainly from her Library of Congress study, she shouldered the major responsibility for Population Index from 1937 to 1954, and also wrote a quarterly column, "Current Items." After the death of Louise K. Kiser, who had been a coeditor since 1942, she asked to be relieved of responsibility for the journal in order to devote more time to her own research. Despite an international reputation and a prodigious scholarly output which amounted to sixteen books and monographs (most of them coauthored) and some 250 articles, it was not until 1961 that she was promoted to senior research demographer, a position she held until her retirement in 1973. Never one to emphasize

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Taft

the difficulties of working in a man's field, she nevertheless felt that she did not have as much clerical and research assistance as did her male colleagues at the OPR. Irene Taeuber became a demographer at a time of rapid expansion of the field. The governmental agencies established during the New Deal recognized the policy implications of population studies, as did the League of Nations, which in 1939 commissioned the OPR to study the future populations of European countries as a basis for postwar planning. Taeuber became deeply involved in this work, especially after America's entry into World War II, when the OPR, at the request of the Department of State, began to investigate Asian populations. She agreed to study Japan and after the war made several trips there, developing a lifelong love of the Far East. With the help of scholars and official agencies, she compiled historic demographic data on Japan; she did not know the language, but was quick to understand Japanese statistical tables. When The Population of Japan appeared in 1958, Japanese demographers proclaimed it the best work on the subject, a veritable Encyclopedia Demographica Japonica. In his foreword to this definitive work, Notestein predicted that it would "prove a landmark of demographic analysis." When it was translated into Japanese in 1965, the book provided a major stimulus for indigenous demographic analysis. Possessing the instincts of the true scholar, Taeuber in her population studies covered more than a dozen countries, including those in Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. With her husband she coauthored The Changing Population of the United States ( 1 9 5 8 ) and People of the United States in the Twentieth Century ( 1 9 7 1 ) , works of interest to historians as well as planners. I the view of her Princeton colleague, Clyde V. Kiser, Taeuber's work was distinguished by her interest in the social, economic, and cultural determinants of population trends. Indicative of this concern were her efforts to visit rural villages and to establish ties with local residents. The only woman among a group of four who made a study tour of the Far East for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1948, she emphasized the roles of women and children in her section of the report, published as Public Health and Demography in the Far East ( 1 9 5 0 ) . At the time of her death she was accumulating materials for a book on China. A paper of November 1973 presented to the American Public Health Association demonstrated that, despite the absence of hard data that plagued all students of Chinese population, she was making headway in inferring population and other trends. Data that be-

came available after her death confirmed her findings that the Chinese were rapidly bringing their fertility under control. Believing that the researcher could make contributions to policy, but also insisting on the distinction between scholarship and propaganda, Irene Taeuber served as a consultant for many governmental and international organizations. Widely recognized for her achievements, she was president of the PAA ( 1 9 5 3 - 5 4 ) and vice president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population ( 1 9 6 1 - 6 5 ) , the first woman to be elected to either position. During the 1960s, she received two honorary degrees as well as distinguished service medals from the Universities of Missouri and Minnesota. She was also visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University ( 1 9 6 1 - 6 5 ) . Colleagues at Princeton and elsewhere considered her a great if unofficial teacher. Irene Taeuber was admired for her warm human qualities as well as for her professional attainments. Sensitive to the feelings of persons of other cultures, she befriended many of the young Japanese and other foreign students who came to the OPR, and was the recipient of many confidences. Despite their busy work schedules, she and her husband devoted time on weekends to gardening—she was as meticulous about her roses as about her research—and to entertaining. Although beset by arthritis in her later years, she continued to work. Death came quickly at her home in February 1974 from pneumonia complicating severe emphysema. [Irene B. Taeuber's papers, consisting of research materials, including notes and MSS., and correspondence, are in the Western Hist. Manuscript Coll., Univ. of Missouri. The major published sources are Frank W. Notestein, "Irene Barnes Taeuber, 19061974," Population Index, Jan. 1974, pp. 3-17, which includes an extensive bibliography, and Ansley J. Coale, "Irene Barnes Taeuber, 1906-1974," The Am. Statistician, Aug. 1974, pp. 109-10. See also the N.Y. Times obituary, Feb. 26, 1974. Am. Men of Science, 11th ed. (1968) contains entries on all four Taeubers. For background information on demography see Philip M. Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan, eds., The Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal (1959), especially "The Development and Status of American Demography," by Rupert B. Vance, pp. 286-313. Further information was provided by Conrad Taeuber, Clyde V. Kiser, and Minoru Muramatsu. A death record was provided by the Md. Dept. of Health.] NATHAN

KEYFITZ

T A F T , Jessie, June 24, 1882-June 7, 1960. Psychologist, social work educator.

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Jessie Taft was born Julia Jessie in Dubuque,

Taft

Taft Iowa, the oldest of the three daughters of Amanda May (Farwell) and Charles Chester Taft, both of whom came from Vermont. Except for a year in an isolated part of Florida where Charles Taft had purchased land, the family lived in Iowa throughout Jessie's childhood and adolescence, moving from Dubuque to Des Moines. There her father had a prosperous wholesale fruit business and the family led a comfortable middle-class life. Amanda Taft's progressive deafness increasingly isolated her from her children, and during her childhood Jessie was particularly close to an aunt who, with her invalid husband, lived with the family. After graduating from West Des Moines High School, Jessie Taft went on to receive an A.B. from Drake University in 1904. Eager for knowledge, she spent the following year at the University of Chicago, where she received a Ph.B. degree in 1905. She then went home to teach mathematics, Latin, and German at West Des Moines High School for four years before a fellowship in philosophy enabled her to return to the University of Chicago to work on a doctorate. The years at Chicago were of major importance both personally and professionally. There Taft studied philosophy and psychology with George Herbert Mead, James H. Tufts, and Addison W. Moore. She read the works of William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Havelock Ellis, and became particularly interested in the writings of women such as Olive Schreiner, CHARLOTTE

PERKINS

GILMAN,

IDA

TARBELL,

GRACE ABBOTT, a n d EDITH ABBOTT. H e r

Ph.D.

dissertation, published in 1915 as The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness, defined the problem of women— and society as a whole—as the need to resolve the dualism between the world of social relationships in the home and the material world of the wage earner. At Chicago Taft met Virginia Robinson, who became a lifelong personal friend, professional partner, and living companion. On leave from the university in the spring of 1912, Taft spent six months in New York with Robinson, interviewing women committed to prisons and reformatories for a study initiated by KATHARINE B E M E N T DAVIS. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1913, she returned to New York, working first for Davis as assistant superintendent of the New York State Reformatory for Women in Bedford Hills. Then, in 1915, she became director of the Social Services Department of the New York State Charities Aid Association's Mental Hygiene Committee. Her major responsibility was to promote mental hygiene programs in the state, but she also worked with individual cases at the New York Hospital Mental Hy-

giene Clinic and established the Farm School in New Jersey for children referred to the clinic because of problems in school. Taft's reputation as a therapist as well as mental hygiene consultant and expert on social casework with children grew rapidly after her move to Philadelphia in 1918. There she became director of the new Department of Child Study of the Seybert Institution, a temporary shelter for children awaiting placement. In 1920 the Bureau of Children of the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare and the Children's Aid Society of Pennsylvania took over her department, and she greatly expanded the mental hygiene services offered to the children served by these agencies. Under her leadership, the department also participated in training staff, finding placements, and counseling foster parents. As a speaker, Taft was in great demand by social workers, teachers, nurses, and parents. In her numerous talks and papers during this period she developed her views on foster care, adoption, and the role of the caseworker and the agency in the helping process. Her personal experience informed these writings: in 1921 Taft and Robinson adopted a nine-year-old boy, Everett Taft, and later they adopted a six-yearold girl, Martha Taft. They lived in a home the two women purchased in Flourtown, Pa. In 1924 Jessie Taft first met Otto Rank, who became a major influence on her life and work. In Rank's concept of the will she found "a key to my own as well as to my patients' psychology," and in 1926 she underwent analysis with him. A major opportunity to apply to social work the ideas she adopted from Rank's theories came in 1934, when Taft joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania School of Social Work (later the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work). Until her retirement in 1950, she served as professor of social casework and, with Robinson, who had been at the school since 1918, she built the school's curriculum and shaped its distinctive ideology, which came to be known as functionalism. During the decade which followed her arrival at the Pennsylvania School, Taft played a major role in the controversy which developed in social work education between the Freudian, or diagnostic, approach to casework practice and the Pennsylvania School's functional approach. Taft defined her concept of function in casework as the particular social service offered by an agency, which determined the interaction between client and worker. In a 1937 article she distinguished between the Freudian "psychology of cure" and a "psychology of helping." Whereas the Freudian approach emphasized diagnosis and treatment plans determined by

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Tamiris the therapist, functional casework put the client at the center of an "internal, self-determined growth process to be released with the aid of the therapist." While Taft stressed that Rank was not responsible for the concept of function, she identified his contribution to her theories and practice as the recognition of the effects on the therapeutic process of time limitations and of the will of both therapist and client. Taft wrote many articles on functionalism and its implications for social work education. She also published The Dynamics of Therapy in a Controlled Relationship (1933) and a twovolume translation of the work of Otto Rank, Will Therapy: An Analysis of the Therapeutic Process in Terms of Relationship (1936) and Truth and Reality: A Life History of the Human Will (1936). She devoted much of her time in retirement to a biography of Rank which was published in 1958. Taft died in a Philadelphia hospital of a stroke in 1960. Jessie Taft identified herself above all as a professional, believing that "the professional self is the real self, the self that carries value, the immortal self." Described as forceful and straightforward, she attracted friends and associates alike by her vitality. She was, according to a colleague, "the living exponent of her own credo of the power of the positive will, a lover and liver of life" (quoted in Robinson, p. 9). [Taft's foreword to Otto Rank, A Biographical Study Based on Notebooks, Letters, Collected Writings, Therapeutic Achievements and Personal Associations ( 1 9 5 8 ) contains autobiographical notes detailing her relationship to him. The major source of biographical information is Virginia Robinson, ed., Jessie Taft, Therapist and Social Work Educator: A Professional Biography ( 1 9 6 2 ) , which contains biographical chapters by Robinson, selections from Taft's major works tracing the development of her interests, and a bibliography of her writings. A brief biographical article may be found in the Encyc. Social Work ( 1 9 6 5 ) . An article about the origins and development of the functional school of social work in the Encyc. Social Work ( 1 9 7 7 ) is also useful. An obituary appeared in Social Service Rev., Sept. 1960. Death certificate supplied by Pa. Dept. of Health.] J U N E AXINN

TAMIRIS, Helen, April 24, 1902?-Aug. 5, 1966. Dancer, choreographer. Helen Tamiris was born Helen Becker on the Lower East Side of New York City, the only daughter and youngest of five children of Isor and Rose (Simoneff) Becker, who were Russian Jewish immigrants. Her father worked as a tailor. Of her brothers, one became a painter, another a sculptor and musician. Helen knew

early that she wanted to be a dancer. She began dance lessons at the Henry Street Settlement House with I R E N E L E W I S O H N and Blanche Talmud. Against her father's wishes she auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and was accepted on scholarship to study under prima ballerina Rosina Galli. After graduating from high school, Becker joined the Metropolitan's company in 1920. She also studied ballet at the studio of Michel Fokine and natural (modern) dancing at an ISADORA DUNCAN studio. Leaving the Metropolitan Ballet after the 1922-23 season, Becker toured South America in the summer of 1923 as second soloist with the Bracale Opera Company which went broke in Bogotá. Returning to the United States she danced in nightclubs and revues, appearing in Chicago in 1924 at the Villa Venice nightclub as the Señorita Tamiris. The name came from a poem about a Persian queen: "Thou art Tamiris, the ruthless queen who banishes all obstacles." Later that year she was a featured dancer in the Music Box Revue in New York with F A N N Y B R I C E and Bobby Clark, performing in a Chinese dance and as the Red Queen in an "Alice in Wonderland" sketch. In 1927 Tamiris decided to leave her career in musical revues for the less remunerative but more challenging concert stage. She produced her first solo program on Oct. 9, 1927, at the Little Theatre in New York; in addition to choreographing and performing the dances, she also designed and made her costumes. The beautiful, energetic, red-haired Tamiris premiered twelve works: they included "1927," to music by George Gershwin; "The Queen Walks in the Garden," a dance to no music; and "Subconscious," in which, according to a contemporary review, Tamiris appeared nude for "one long and devastating moment." In her second solo concert, on Jan. 29, 1928, she danced to two Negro spirituals; in later years her dances for spirituals became her most famous works. Tamiris saw herself as engaged in a crusade to reform dance. On the program for her second concert, she printed a manifesto which declared that the principal duty of an artist is "to express the spirit of his race." Dance was not to be circumscribed by rules or tradition: "Dancing is simply movement with a personal conception of rhythm . . . The dance of today must have a dynamic tempo and be vital, precise, spontaneous, free, normal, natural and human." In 1928 Tamiris traveled to Europe, dancing first in Paris and then at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, the first American woman invited to perform there. She also gave a concert in Berlin in February 1929. Later that year she opened

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Tamiris

her School of American Dance in New York City. In her initial concert after her return she included "Revolutionary March," the first example of her developing belief that dance should make a social statement. From 1930 to 1939 Tamiris was active in the growth of the new art form termed modern dance. With her contemporaries Martha Graham, DORIS H U M P H R E Y , and Charles Weidman she formed the Dance Repertory Theatre, the first of her several attempts at "creative collaboration." The organization lasted two seasons (1930 and 1931) before conflict among the various personality styles forced the experiment to a close. She then trained and choreographed for her Group, which appeared with her in concerts from 1931 and became a mature entity in 1934 with the performance of Tamiris's cycle "Walt Whitman Suite," a lyrical blending of Whitman and jazz. In developing her social dances during the early 1930s, Tamiris encountered criticism both from those who believed modern dance should be a pure art form and from revolutionary dancers who saw her message as not explicit enough. With the founding of the Federal Theatre Project in 1935, Tamiris organized the Dance Association and convinced H A L L I E F L A N A G A N , the Project's director, that dancers should be recognized as a separate group. From the beginning of the Dance Project in January 1936 until 1939 when the entire Federal Theatre Project was closed down by Congress, Tamiris put aside her personal career to devote her energies to bringing modern dance with social themes to a wide audience. Most important of her dances during these years were How Long, Brethren? (1937), based on seven Negro songs of protest, and Adelante (1939), her brilliant dance on the theme of the civil war in Spain. (In Adelante she billed herself for the first time as Helen Tamiris, rather than the more exotic Tamiris.) During these years Tamiris and her Group also gave benefit concerts for the Daily Worker and appeared in a pageant at the Lenin Memorial Meeting in Madison Square Garden (1936), leading critics to describe her as a "Red sympathizer." In 1937 Tamiris's Dance Association merged with two other dancers' groups to form the American Dance Association (ADA), intended to look after the economic needs of dancers and to further the cause of dance generally; Tamiris became first president of the ADA. In the same year she received the first Dance Magazine award for group choreography for How Long, Brethren? In the years just after the demise of the Federal Theatre, Tamiris divided her time between

concert and nightclub performances and public and political benefits. In 1940 she opened a New York studio where she taught and gave performances with her Group; "Liberty Song," one of her most successful works, was presented there in 1941. The following year she played two six-week engagements at the popular nightclub, the Rainbow Room. In 1943 she choreographed for the United States Department of Agriculture a production designed to promote wartime meat rationing; she appeared as Porterhouse Lucy, the Black Market Steak. Tamiris and Daniel Nagrin, her former student and longtime dance partner, performed in a twentyfive city tour of "The People's Bandwagon" in 1944, part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's reelection campaign. Tamiris and Nagrin were married on Sept. 3, 1946; they separated in January 1964 but did not divorce. Tamiris had been married in the early 1930s to James Fuller, who was not connected with the theater. In 1944 Tamiris's career took a new direction as she began to choreograph for Broadway musicals. The first two, Marianne and Stovepipe Hat, were flops. But Up in Central Park (1945), with its famous skating ballet, ran for over 500 performances in New York, toured nationally (1946-47), and was made into a film (1948), and Tamiris was well-established and in demand. Working from her belief that "the choreographer must respect . . . the script," she had the rare ability, dance critic John Martin noted, "to see a show whole." A revival of Showboat (1946) and Annie Get Your Gun (1948) were enormous hits. In 1949 she won the Antoinette Perry Award for the best choreography of the season for Touch and Go. By 1955 she had worked on ten more shows, including Fanny (1954) and Plain and Fancy (1955). Nagrin assisted his wife in staging most of the musicals; he also performed, most notably as The Wild Horse in Annie Get Your Gun. Success affected Tamiris's politics. As dance critic Walter Terry commented, the "comfort of a mink coat and a bank balance seemed to make her more conservative." With her husband she founded the TamirisNagrin Dance Company in 1960 but the company disbanded when Tamiris and Nagrin separated. Her last work as a choreographer was The Lady from Colorado, done in 1964 for the Central City, Colo., Opera Association. In 1965 Tamiris was artist in residence at Indiana University. Later that year she entered the Jewish Memorial Hospital in New York, suffering from cancer; she died there in August 1966. In her will she left one-third of her estate "for the benefit of American Modern Dance"; a fund, the Tamiris Foundation, was established to con-

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Taylor tinue her contributions to this unique American art form. [The Tamiris scrapbooks and all her papers were given to the Dance Coll., N.Y. Public Library; also there are many photographs of Tamiris and her Group and films of Tamiris performing "Negro Spirituals" and "Dances for Walt Whitman." Christena L. Schlundt, Tamiris, A Chronicle of Her Dance Career, 1927-1955 (1972), is the most useful and complete study. Tamiris is discussed in John Martin, America Dancing (1968); Joseph Mazo, Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America (1977); Don McDonagh, The Complete Guide to Modern Dance (1976); and Walter Terry, The Dance in America (1971). See also John Martin, "The Dance: Tamiris," N.Y. Times, Dec. 1, 1946, and Biog. Encyc. and Who's Who of the Am. Theatre (1966). Most printed sources give Tamiris's birth date as 1905; both Daniel Nagrin and Tamiris's close friend, Florence Becker Lennon, say she was born in 1902. They provided further helpful information as did Bruce Becker, Tamiris's nephew, and her friend Ann Mackenzie Payne. A biobibliography by Margaret Cline assisted with research.] IRIS M .

FANGER

TAYLOR, Lily Ross, Aug. 12, 1886-Nov. 18, 1969. Classicist. Lily Ross Taylor was born in Auburn, Ala., the eldest of three children of William Dana Taylor, a well-known railway engineer, and his first wife, Mary (Ross) Taylor. Both parents were born in Alabama. Mary Taylor died in 1895, and in 1897 William Taylor married Annie L. Mclntyre; three more children were born of this marriage. In Lily Ross Taylor's childhood the family often accompanied her father where his work took him, as when she attended the preparatory department of Pritchett College, Glasgow, Mo. When in 1901 her father was appointed professor of railway engineering at the University of Wisconsin, she went to Madison High School and obtained her A.B. at the university in 1906. She majored in mathematics at first, but in her junior year a course on Lucretius with Moses Slaughter convinced her that her real interest was in Roman studies. She entered the graduate school of Bryn Mawr College in 1906, studied for a year at the American Academy in Rome (1909-10), and received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr in 1912. Her thesis became her first book, The Cults of Ostia (1912). In this and her second book, Local Cults in Etruria (1923), she amplified evidence from literary sources with archaeological and inscriptional material. Appointed instructor in Latin at Vassar College in 1912, Taylor remained until 1927, rising

to the rank of professor. In 1917 she became the first woman fellow of the American Academy in Rome, but soon joined the American Red Cross to serve in Italy and the Balkans during and after World War I. Her fellowship at the American Academy was renewed for 1919-20. In 1927 she was appointed professor of Latin and chairman of the department at Bryn Mawr College. As a scholar, building on the work of the nineteenth century, Lily Ross Taylor made major contributions to the more dynamic twentiethcentury interpretation of Roman political history and religion. Her third book, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor (1931), took her into a wider and more speculative area than her earlier studies of local religious cults. She discussed the origin of the cult of the emperor and its possible sources in the thought of earlier Rome, of the Hellenistic kingdoms, and of Persia. This book involved a study of the close relationship between the religious and political life of Rome, on which her later work shed further light. It also led to her subsequent research on the political structure of the Roman Republic. Her insatiable curiosity about institutions and how people function within them inspired and enlivened her research, as did her intense interest in contemporary events and politics. These qualities, as well as a deep love of Latin literature, made her an outstanding teacher. "My aim as a teacher," she said, "is to make my students feel that they are walking the streets of Rome, and seeing and thinking what Romans saw and thought" (Broughton, Am. Philosophical Soc. Year Book, p. 178). When in 1942 she became dean of the graduate school at Bryn Mawr, she gave up her chairmanship, but continued to teach. Her achievements in the classroom were recognized by the Life Magazine Teachers Award (1952). In addition to her duties at Bryn Mawr, during the 1940s Lily Ross Taylor also served as an associate editor of Classical Philology and principal social science analyst in the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. (1943-44). Active in various professional organizations, she became president of the American Philological Association in 1942; earlier, she had served as vice president of the American Institute of Archaeology (1935-37). In 1947 she was the first woman to be appointed Sather Professor of Classics at the University of California, and she delivered the Sather Lectures, published as Party Politics in the Age of Caesar (1949). This lively study demonstrates the importance of the individual leader and the absence of any real parties at the end of the Republic, and shows how factions were formed, how they broke

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Taylor down, and how the electoral and legislative processes could be manipulated. After her retirement from Bryn Mawr College in 1952, Lily Ross Taylor was professor in charge of the Classical School of the American Academy in Rome until 1955, when she returned to live in Bryn Mawr. In 1956-57, as Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, she lectured around the country. During the late 1950s and early 1960s she was visiting professor at several universities and spent a year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 1960 Taylor published her second study of Roman political institutions, The Voting Districts of the Roman Republic: The Thirty-five Urban and Rural Tribes. A detailed analysis of the geographical distribution of the tribes in which Roman citizens were registered and in which they voted, it also included data on individual tribe members. Appointed Jerome Lecturer at the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan ( 1 9 6 4 - 6 5 ) , Taylor published her lectures as Roman Voting Assemblies (1966). Her last book, it deals with the complex organization and workings of the assemblies in which Romans voted, and contains an illuminating description of the construction of voting places and ways of casting votes. Lily Ross Taylor's capacity for work, to the end of her life, was remarkable. She was sustained by excellent health and retained the vitality of thought and expression which, along with her sense of humor, engaged her host of friends. She also enjoyed travel, especially in Italy where her fluent Italian made easy those explorations on which, in her seventies, she could walk the legs off younger friends. Taylor always maintained close relations with her brothers and sisters and their many children. From 1932 until her death she lived with Alice Martin Hawkins, who gave Lily Ross Taylor intellectual companionship and took over the domestic duties which bored her. The recipient of honors and awards throughout her career, Taylor was elected to the American Philosophical Society and made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1952 she received the Achievement Award of the American Association of University Women; in 1960 Bryn Mawr gave her its Citation for Distinguished Service at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the college. She was also given the Award of Merit of the American Philological Association (1962), and the Cultori di Roma gold medal given by the city of Rome ( 1 9 6 2 ) . She was working on a book about the Roman Senate when in 1969 at the age of eighty-three she was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Bryn Mawr.

[The Bryn Mawr College Archives contains MSS. of unpublished lectures, notes on work in progress, a small amount of professional correspondence, and many letters received by Agnes Michels on the occasion of Lily Ross Taylor's death, as well as a few photographs of her. In addition to her books, Taylor published seventy articles and over sixty reviews. A bibliography of her publications to 1966 was published by Bryn Mawr College. A 1977 French edition of Party Politics in the Age of Caesar, translated as La Politique et les Partis ä Rome au Temps de Cesar, by Elisabeth and Jean-Claude Morin, with an introduction by Elizabeth Deniaux, contains a complete bibliography. Accounts of her life and career include Agnes Kirsopp Michels, "Lily Ross Taylor," Am. Philological Assoc. Proceedings, 1969, pp. xviii-xix; T. R. S. Broughton, "Lily Ross Taylor ( 1 8 8 6 - 1 9 6 9 ) , " Am. Phil. Soc. Year Book 1970 ( 1 9 7 1 ) , pp. 172-79; T. R. S. Broughton, "Lily Ross Taylor," Gnomon, Nov. 1970, pp. 7 3 4 - 3 5 ; Agnes Michels, "Lily Ross Taylor," Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bull, Winter 1970. A lecture by T. R. S. Broughton, "Roman Studies in the Twentieth Century," given at a convocation in her honor at Bryn Mawr, Feb. 28, 1970, is kept in the College Archives. Obituaries appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Evening Bulletin, Nov. 19, 1969; N.Y. Times, Nov. 20, 1969; and London Times, Nov. 27, 1969. Family background was supplied by Taylor's niece Mary Reed Naish, as well as by Thomas Owen, Hist, of Ala. and Diet, of Ala. Biog., vol. 4 ( 1 9 2 1 ) . Additional information was provided by T. R. S. Broughton; death record provided by Pa. Dept. of Health.] AGNES KIRSOPP

MICHELS

T E R R E L L , Mary Eliza Church, Sept. 23, 1 8 6 3 July 24, 1954. Community leader, social reformer, lecturer, suffragist. Mary Church Terrell was born in Memphis, Tenn., the first of two children and the only daughter of Louisa (Ayres) and Robert Reed Church. Her mother, a house slave before emancipation, afterward became the proprietor of a successful hair store in Memphis. When Louisa Church divorced her husband in the late 1860s, she left the south and, for more than thirty years, operated a beauty parlor in New York. Robert Church was born in Holly Springs, Miss., in 1838, the son of Captain Charles B. Church, a white man, and Emmeline, a slave. He worked on his father's Mississippi River boats until a Union fleet drove them from the river; he then opened a saloon in Memphis. Investing his savings in local real estate after a yellow fever epidemic drove prices down, he became by the 1880s the south's first black millionaire. Mary Eliza, called Mollie, spent her early years in a comfortable home on the outskirts of Memphis, protected from the problems that

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Terrell most blacks faced. She knew her white grandfather as a kindly gentleman who filled her arms with fruit and flowers when she visited him. Only her maternal grandmother, dark-skinned Eliza Ayres, told her tales of slavery and gave her some perception of her African heritage. After her parents' divorce, Mollie was sent north to school. Boarding with a black family in Yellow Springs, Ohio, she attended the model school on the Antioch College campus for two years, followed by two years in public schools. She moved to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1875, for high school (graduating in 1879) and college. Energetic and high-spirited, she skated, swam, danced, rode horseback, and read widely. At Oberlin College, where she enrolled in the four-year classical course instead of the two-year "ladies' course," she was an editor of the Oberlin Review. The fact that she was often the only black student in her class, and sometimes the only woman, spurred her to excel, to prove that she was the equal of her companions in every way. Encountering little overt discrimination, she schooled herself to ignore occasional snubs or to defuse them by exercising diplomacy. Graduating from Oberlin in 1884, she returned to Memphis. Although she had trained herself for a life of usefulness, her father wanted his daughter to be a "real lady" and forbade her to work. At the end of an unhappy winter as his hostess, she disregarded his wishes and joined the faculty of Wiiberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. From Wiiberforce she moved to Washington, D.C., in 1887 to teach Latin at the M Street High School, the capital's secondary school for blacks. In 1888, her father, by then reconciled to her activities, offered to send her abroad to study. For over two years, she toured western Europe, perfecting her knowledge of French, German, and Italian, and taking advantage of cultural opportunities. Cordially received wherever she went, she rejoiced in the absence of racial barriers and considered remaining abroad. But, recognizing that she had had a better education than any other black woman in the United States, and than most whites, she felt it her duty to return in 1890 to her teaching position in Washington "to promote the welfare of my race." Church's marriage on Oct. 28,1891, to Robert Heberton Terrell, who had been her supervisor at the M Street High School, ended her teaching career, since married women were not permitted to work in the District schools. Robert Terrell, one of the first blacks to graduate from Harvard (1884), was a school principal and lawyer. In 1901 he was appointed justice of the peace for the District of Columbia by Theodore Roosevelt and was soon made a judge of the mu-

nicipal court, a position he held until his death in 1925; he was the only black federal judge. The first years of the Terrells' marriage were marred by the death of three children, each of whom lived only a few days. Believing that they might have survived with better medical care than Washington's segregated hospital afforded, Mary Terrell went to New York for the birth, in 1898, of her daughter Phyllis. In 1905, she adopted her brother's daughter, Mary, four years older than Phyllis. A devoted mother who supervised every detail of her daughters' upbringing, Terrell was also deeply involved in community work. For eleven years, from 1895 to 1901, and again from 1906 to 1911, she was a member of the District of Columbia Board of Education, the first black woman to receive such an appointment. In 1896, she became president of the newly organized National Association of Colored Women; after serving three terms, she was in 1901 voted honorary president for life. During the 1890s she also began her career as a public speaker. Long concerned with women's rights issues, she addressed the 1898 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association on "The Progress of Colored Women." In 1904, Terrell traveled to the convention in Germany of the International Council of Women, where she spoke in flawless German and French on the problems and progress of black women. By the turn of the century, Mary Church Terrell had become a professional lecturer, bringing the story of black America to leading forums and college campuses across the country. Sugarcoating her message with such titles as "Uncle Sam and the Sons of Ham" and "The Bright Side of a Dark Subject," she campaigned against lynching, disfranchisement, and discrimination, and highlighted black achievements. Handsome, well-dressed, with a skin color that she described as "swarthy," she sometimes passed for white when traveling in order to avoid the indignities of Jim Crow, but never without resentment at the deception or fear of exposure. While her daughters were young, she limited her lecture tours to three weeks at a time, leaving her mother in charge of her household. Between lectures, Terrell wrote on black history and life for newspapers and liberal magazines. A charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she became a familiar figure on Capitol Hill and at the White House as she led delegations to protest injustice and to urge corrective legislation. During World War I, as a patriotic duty, she took a clerkship in the War Department, only to be humiliated by a transfer to an all-black

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section. Although she was forbidden to work with white women in federal offices, she was then, and later, associated with some of the nation's most progressive women. She picketed the White House with the National Woman's party on behalf of suffrage and, in 1919, traveled to Zurich to address the second congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. For several years after the war she was a member of the executive committee of the league. With the passage of the nineteenth amendment, she served as director of work among colored women in the east for the Republican National Committee, later performing a similar function for the 1930 senatorial campaign of RUTH HANNA MCCORMICK (SIMMS). After Robert Terrell's death in 1925, Mary Church Terrell continued her speaking and writing career. She had long planned to write an uncompromising account of the hurdles that black women faced: "Be sure to be courageous and tell everything," she admonished herself in a 1919 diary. But when her book was published in 1940 as A Colored Woman in a White World it had become conventional autobiography. A lifetime of meeting rebuffs with "a more or less genuine smile" had kept her from expressing the emotions that she sometimes revealed in her diaries. In the last decade of her life, however, age seemed to free her from the shackles of convention. While universities gave her honorary degrees and women's organizations feted her, she stepped up her efforts to fight for first-class citizenship. She was eighty-five when she broke down the color bar in the American Association of University Women. In 1950, she was one of a group attempting to desegregate the John R. Thompson restaurant in Washington, D.C. When the effort failed, she brought suit and, at eighty-nine, was leading picket lines in the campaign to desegregate the capital's lunchrooms. Victory came when, in 1953, the Supreme Court upheld the 1872-73 acts banning discrimination in places of public accommodation in the District of Columbia. During the McCarthy period, when protest was muffled, she urged clemency for E T H E L ROSENBERG, and pleaded for the life of Rosa Lee Ingram, a Georgia sharecropper who had killed a white man. She was planning a second trip to Georgia on Ingram's behalf when, two months before her ninety-first birthday, she died of cancer in Annapolis, Md. [Mary Church Terrell's A Colored Woman in a White World ( 1 9 4 0 , reprinted with supplementary chapters, 1 9 6 8 ) is the main source for her biography. All quotes are taken from this volume. It must be checked carefully, however, with letters, diaries, and

scrapbooks in the Mary Church Terrell and Robert H. Terrell Papers, Library of Congress, and with diaries in the possession of Phyllis Terrell Langston. The Library of Congress papers also include articles and speeches by Mary Church Terrell and some photographs. Papers concerning her work with the Nat. Assoc. of Colored Women are in the Nat. Archives for Black Women's History, Nat. Council of Negro Women, Washington, D.C. Gladys B. Shepperd's Mary Church Terrell—Respectable Person ( 1 9 5 9 ) adds little new information. Annette E . and Roberta Church, The Robert R. Churches of Memphis: A Father and Son Who Achieved in Spite of Race ( 1 9 7 4 ) , includes biographical material on Robert Reed Church. A brief biography of Robert H. Terrell can be found in A. B. Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro and His Institutions, vol. VI ( 1 9 2 2 ) . See also Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, ed., Lifting as They Climb: An Historical Record of the National Association of Colored Women ( 1 9 3 3 ) ; Charles Kellogg, NAACP, vol. I ( 1 9 6 7 ) ; August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 ( 1 9 6 3 ) ; Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. Five. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, July 29, 1954, and the Wash. Post, July 29, 1954; death record provided by Md. Dept. of Health. Interviews with Phyllis Terrell Langston, Dorothy Porter, and Annie Stein provided personal details and a valuable account of Terrell's last years.] DOROTHY STERLING

THOMPSON, Clara [Mabel], Oct. 3, 1893Dec. 20, 1958. Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst. Clara Thompson was born in Providence, R.I., of American parents who had grown up within the religious and seafaring tradition of the area around Narragansett Bay. She was the older of two children, her brother, Frank, being six years younger. Her father, T. Franklin Thompson, a self-made man, worked briefly as a tailor—having learned this skill from his father —and then as a traveling salesman for a wholesale drug company, ultimately becoming its president. As a child, Thompson was always called "Mabel" by her family in order to avoid confusion with her mother, Clara (Medbery) Thompson, a quiet but forceful housewife. As an adult, Thompson hated the name Mabel, and she became simply Clara Thompson. Shortly after the birth of her brother, the family moved from a small house near the center of Providence to their own large two-family house on the outskirts of the city, which was inhabited over the years by various relatives, including her Medbery grandparents, who lived in the first-floor flat, and her widowed paternal grandmother. Clara Thompson's lifelong love of the sea and of adventure seems to have emerged from her association as a child with her grandparents. Her grandmother Thompson

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Thompson drew her pictures of ships and told her about her Swedish-born grandfather, then long dead, who had run away to sea when he was nineteen and had earned his living thereafter as a rigger for whaling ships. In adult life, Thompson sometimes referred to herself as "the Swede," although three of her grandparents were American-born. Her grandfather Medbery had his own romantic tales of making his way as a young boy to California, trying belatedly to follow the trail of the forty-niners in search of gold. By the time Thompson knew him, he earned his living as a peddler of vegetables and a lamplighter for the city. The move into an extended family setting also exposed the child to the wide-ranging and strongly held religious beliefs of different adults. Members of her family belonged to the Free Baptist sect, which, like Rhode Island, was founded on the principle of the separation of church and state. Family arguments over interpretations of the Bible coincided in time with a wider theological argument among all Baptists generally over Calvinist theology versus the Arminian doctrine of the Free Baptists. By 1913, the argument had been largely resolved both regionally and locally, but the imprint of that struggle stayed with Thompson. Within her profession, she insisted on an eclectic dialogue, while avoiding unproductive arguments over doctrinal details. Thompson reported that she was a tomboy until she reached puberty, participating in a carefree way and as an equal in the various outdoor activities of boys her age. She credited her father with helping her to achieve a somewhat lighthearted childhood. When, at twelve, she was baptized by total immersion, she did not take the experience very seriously, by her own account, splashing about delightedly in the waters. But the somewhat Calvinist values for proper behavior for a girl her age, as dictated by the Medbery women-her mother and grandmother-gradually changed the nature of her life. Shortly after she entered the Classical High School in 1908, she announced that she had decided to become a medical missionary in India, thus resolving the conflict between her love of adventure and the religious dedication prescribed by the Medbery women; at the same time, she overcame any anticipated opposition to being the first person in the family to go to college—and a woman at that. Studies now became her first priority, although she continued to be active in sports and excelled in debating. In 1912 she graduated from high school with top honors. That fall she began her premedical training, as a commuter, at Pembroke College, the

women's college affiliated with Brown University. Here she found a new intellectual stimulation sharply at variance with the religious debates at home, and she began to arrive at the painful decision to become a physician but not a missionary, much to the consternation of her mother. She began to refer to herself as "Clara," sometimes varying it by calling herself "Maggie," the heroine of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss; this book mirrors Thompson's life as well as Eliot's. She went through a rather acute period of turmoil and confusion, marked by great loneliness interspersed with intense relationships with classmates. Near the end of her undergraduate work, her romantic interest in a major in the Army Medical Corps was terminated by her refusal to abandon her medical career—his condition for marriage. At about the same time, she stopped going to church regularly and began to express the rights of a free person rather than a Free Baptist. Later her estrangement from her mother was intensified when she began to experiment openly with what was then defined as free love. Thompson graduated from Brown in 1916, with membership in both Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa, and entered Johns Hopkins Medical School that fall. In her second year, her friendship with a fellow student, Lucile Dooley (1884-1968), a psychotherapist who was preparing for a career as a medically trained psychoanalyst, became crucial for her own professional development. Through Dooley, Thompson spent one summer at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where she came under the influence of William Alanson White. By the time Thompson finished her medical training, she had decided on a career in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. After completing her clinical requirements, she began a three-year residency in psychiatry under Adolf Meyer in the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Hopkins. Meyer accorded her increasing responsibility until she decided in 1925 to undergo psychoanalysis, a decision he considered politically unwise at that time in a university setting. As an outcome, Thompson left Phipps and began the private practice of psychoanalysis in Baltimore, receiving support for this move from Harry Stack Sullivan, then at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital near Baltimore. Thompson had met Sullivan in 1923, and their friendship and active collaboration continued until his death in 1949; she described the relationship as the longest and most important in her life. In the late 1920s, Sullivan persuaded Thompson to study psychoanalysis under Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest and then teach him, in the apprenticeship fashion of the period—a plan that was

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Thompson implemented intermittently over several years. After Thompson's return from Budapest in 1933, she began to live and practice in New York City, where Sullivan was already living. In the 1930s Sullivan and Thompson were particularly influenced by the influx of psychoanalysts from Europe, and welcomed both Erich Fromm and KAREN HORNEY to their ongoing weekly intellectual interchange, playfully designated the Zodiac group; each member was identified with an animal—Thompson was a puma and Horney a water buffalo. Thompson and Sullivan had already been engaged, since the Baltimore days, in a dialogue on the delineation of cultural forces in the development of female adolescence; and she wrote the chapter entitled "Notes on Female Sexuality" for Sullivan's book Personal Psychopathology, completed in 1933. While the various intermittent members of the Zodiac group must all be credited for major collaboration on a more clinically sound formulation of female sexuality, the collaboration between Thompson and Horney, which lasted for almost a decade, was particularly significant since it combined the clinical observations of two perceptive women who had grown up in different cultures. In 1943, Thompson wrote her most important paper on women, " 'Penis Envy' in Women," in which she denied any biological basis for penis envy, tracing it to cultural pressures. The major part of her writings on women, which combined significantly the biological, psychological, and cultural determinants of women's behavior, was discovered after her death in an uncompleted book. During her lifetime, her ideas found their greatest influence through the wide professional range of her many students, including physicians, social workers, teachers, and nurses. The collaboration among members of the Zodiac group was marred in 1943 by a schism in the American Institute of Psychoanalysis. Fromm was forced to resign from this Institute when Horney refused to make an exception for him as a lay psychoanalyst, in spite of his membership in the International Psychoanalytic Institute. Thompson and Sullivan resigned in protest. At that time, Thompson set up her own training institute as a New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry, which later became the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York. Thereafter Fromm and Thompson shared the direction of that Institute for over a decade. In the early 1950s, Thompson again manifested her independence when she threatened to bring suit, under the Sherman AntiTrust Act, against the American Psychoanalytic Association, which was attempting to bar from

membership anyone who trained or taught at the William Alanson White Institute. Over the years, Thompson gained a reputation as an expert clinician, teacher, and administrator. She held many important posts in mental hospitals and professional organizations, beginning with her election as the first president of the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society in 1930. Her first teaching experience was an innovative course in mental hygiene at the Institute of Euthenics at Vassar College in 1929. From 1936 to 1941, she was an analyzing instructor for the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and she headed the William Alanson White Institute from 1946 until her death. Clara Thompson's chief joy in life was centered around her summer holidays in Provincetown, Mass.; after she met the Hungarian artist Henry Major in the late 1930s, they spent the summers together there until his death. He continued to maintain his marriage to a woman who had been Thompson's speech therapist at one time. Major represented, like others of Thompson's Hungarian friends, a particular release from the restrictions of her girlhood. But the relationship had its own measure of frustration, since Thompson felt an affection for Major's wife and had to accept the reality of his continued relationship with his wife during the winter months. In 1947, Major became fatally ill; in the summer of 1948, he returned to Provincetown as usual, where Thompson nursed him through his last illness. Although Thompson became over the years a source of generosity and warmth for a large group of dedicated students and trainees, she retained a certain shyness, even a surface blandness in her relationships with most people, mixing friendliness with a capacity for periodic withdrawal. After Major's death in 1948, Sullivan's death in 1949, and Fromm's increasing involvement in Mexico in the 1950s, she maintained an even more stoical life, although she continued to be productive. In 1957, she had an unsuccessful operation for cancer; and although she told her brother and his family the medical reality, she acted toward colleagues and students as if there were no remaining problem. She died at her apartment in New York City in December 1958. Her grave is in the same Provincetown plot as that of Henry Major, at her request. The bronze marker gives her name as Clara M. Thompson, as decided by her family. Her friend Barbara Malicoat had small seashells placed on each corner of the marker to echo the sea motif that Thompson had arranged for Major's grave. In the end the conflicts of her life as an independent and intelligent woman seemed to fall

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Thompson into some kind of simple order, so that her family experience, her early religious training, her love of the sea and of the Hungarian artist had come together. [A selection of Thompson's papers was published posthumously by Maurice R. Green as Interpersonal Psychoanalysis ( 1 9 6 4 ) ; a shorter selection, focusing on women, appeared as On Women (1971). Thompson also wrote, in collaboration with Patrick Mullahy, Psychoanalysis: Its Evolution and Development ( 1 9 5 0 ) , based on a series of lectures at the Washington School of Psychiatry and the William Alanson White Institute. For her early formulations on women see "Notes on Female Adolescence," in Harry Stack Sullivan, Personal Psychopathology ( 1 9 7 2 ) , pp. xxi-xxii, 2 4 5 - 6 4 . A bibliography of Thompson's writings may be compiled by incorporating articles in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis with her bibliography from 1930-47 published in Psychiatry, May 1947, pp. 2 3 7 - 3 8 . The main source of published information on Thompson's family and professional life is Maurice R. Green's "Her Life," the final section of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis; the book also contains a photograph. For a history of her major professional affiliations see Thompson, "The History of the William Alanson White Institute," available from the Institute's office; and the "History of the Washington Psychoanalytic Society" ( 1 9 6 9 ) , by Douglas Noble and Donald L. Burnham, available at the office of that society. Brief summaries of her professional significance can be found in the N.Y. Times obituary, Dec. 21, 1958, and in Psychiatry, Feb. 1959, p. 87. Dates and factual information about family history came from birth certificates, her parents' marriage certificate, death certificates, and grave markers. Additional information came from Maurice R. Green, Frank and Peg Thompson, Barbara Malicoat, and from personal acquaintance.] HELEN SWICK PERRY

THOMPSON, Dorothy, July 9, 1893-Jan. 30, 1961. Journalist. Dorothy Thompson, newspaper columnist and political commentator, was born in Lancaster, N.Y., eldest of the three children and two daughters of Peter and Margaret (Grierson) Thompson. Her English-born father was a Methodist clergyman noted for his pulpit eloquence; her mother was of English and Scottish parentage. In 1900 the family moved to Hamburg, N.Y., near Buffalo. Dorothy's mother died the following year, and in 1903 her father married Elizabeth Abbott. Two years later the family moved to nearby Gowanda, N.Y., where Dorothy entered the local high school. She did not get along well with her moralistic stepmother, and in 1908 her father sent her to Chicago to live with relatives. There she attended the Lewis Institute, a private school offering

both high school work and a two-year college program. Entering Syracuse University as a junior in 1912 on a scholarship available to children of Methodist ministers, she won a reputation as a gifted and articulate student with a propensity for monopolizing conversations and for forming intense attachments with other young women. Caught up in the surge of woman suffrage activity, she joined the Syracuse Equal Suffrage League. Upon graduating in 1914 she took a publicity job in Buffalo with the state woman suffrage association; .in the successful New York suffrage campaign of 1917 she lectured widely in the upstate region. After briefly sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village with Barbara De Porte, a Cornell graduate, in 1918-19 Thompson spent some months in Cincinnati as publicity director for the Social Unit, a New York based reform organization dedicated to awakening political consciousness in the slums. A European trip with Barbara De Porte in July 1920 saw the modest beginnings of Thompson's career in journalism. Her interview with the Irish independence leader Terence MacSwiney and a story done with De Porte on striking Fiat workers in Rome were both carried by the International News Service (INS). When De Porte returned to London to marry, Thompson spent a few months in Paris and then early in 1921 went to Vienna as a publicist for the American Red Cross and unsalaried correspondent for Cyrus Curtis's Philadelphia Public Ledger. Shortly after her arrival, with the aid of Marcel Fodor, Hungarian-born correspondent for the Manchester Guardian who became a lifelong mentor and friend, she wrote a first-hand account of the attempt of Charles, grandnephew of Emperor Franz Josef, to reestablish the Hapsburg monarchy. Thanks in part to this coup she was placed on salary and in 1924 made Central European bureau chief for the Ledger and the New York Evening Post (another Curtis newspaper), with headquarters in Berlin. A full-fledged journalist at last, she savored the role to the full, covering developments in Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, and elsewhere with growing professional ability, while assiduously cultivating what her biographer has called "the Thompson legend in which the intrepid girl reporter, braving unimaginable perils to get the news, becomes as much a part of the story as the events she is covering" (Sanders, p. 81).

Thompson found the febrile cultural atmosphere of Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s intensely stimulating. An affair with Josef Bard, a Hungarian Jew with saturnine good looks, vague literary ambitions, and a reputation as a

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playboy led to their marriage early in 1922. Bard's amorous adventuring did not diminish, however, and in 1927 they were divorced. She speculated that his "talent for treachery" might be "a Jewish talent . . . I am afraid I am becoming anti-Semite" (Sheean, p. 19). In 1927 she toured the Soviet Union for the Evening Post, producing a perceptive series of articles, later published as The New Russia (1928). Resigning from the Curtis newspapers in March 1928, on May 14 of that year, in London, she married the recently divorced novelist Sinclair Lewis, whom she had met the preceding year in Berlin. Returning to America they purchased the 300-acre "Twin Farms," in South Pomfret, Vt., which would be for Thompson a center of stability through many marital and professional vicissitudes. Their only child, Michael, was born June 30, 1930. She also acquired an eleven-year-old stepson, Wells Lewis, to whom in time she became deeply attached; he was killed in World War II. Marriage and motherhood did not long interrupt her career. Recrossing the Atlantic late in 1930, she spent much of the next five years in Europe, with summer visits to Twin Farms and periodic lecture tours throughout the United States. In articles for the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines she documented the ominous turn of events in Central Europe and especially in Germany. A 1931 interview with Adolf Hitler for Cosmopolitan magazine, later expanded into a book (I Saw Hitler! [1932]), enhanced her reputation and increased her lecture audiences. In a judgment she soon had cause to regret, she portrayed Hitler as "inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure"— a man of "startling insignificance" who would never be able to seize supreme power. During the 1932 holiday season, spent with Lewis in Semmering, Austria, Thompson conceived a second child, but it was eventually lost in a miscarriage. On the same holiday she became involved in an intense erotic relationship with the Baroness Hatvany of Budapest, a longtime friend who under the pen name Christa Winsloe had written the lesbian novel Mädchen in Uniform. In a diary entry Thompson reviewed the "Sapphic" undercurrent of her sexual life and the "incredible feeling of sisterhood" it evoked, but concluded that she sought only "warm friendship" in such relationships, and that physical homosexuality was for her unsatisfactory and even distasteful. For the next several years, Baroness Hatvany was Thompson's frequent traveling companion and guest at Twin Farms. While Sinclair Lewis professed tolerance toward his wife's female friends, his 1932 novel Ann Wickers, a satirical portrayal of

the woman suffrage movement, dismayed many of them. "Sometimes I think you don't see me at all, but somebody you have made up, a piece of fiction like Ann Vickers," Thompson wrote him shortly after its publication (Sanders, pp. 178-80). There were other strains on the marriage as well. While Thompson's reputation was growing, Lewis's was on the wane. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930, but much of his subsequent work was undistinguished. Though his 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here, dealing with a fascist takeover in America, reflected his wife's influence, he did not in general share her preoccupation with politics and world events. Lewis's drinking produced further conflicts; after 1933 their lives increasingly diverged and by 1937 they had separated. They were divorced in 1942. Between Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and the United States's entry into war in 1941, Dorothy Thompson emerged as one of the nation's most powerful voices denouncing Hitlerism and demanding American intervention against the fascist threat. Her expulsion from Nazi Germany in July 1934 attracted worldwide notice, and two articles on fascism in Foreign Affairs (July 1935 and April 1936) enhanced her standing as a serious political commentator. After February 1936 her column "On the Record" appeared regularly in the New York Herald Tribune, the voice of the eastern, internationalist wing of the Republican party; it was soon carried by some 170 newspapers. A shrewdly intuitive thinker rather than a profound political analyst, in her columns Thompson gave her own inimitable stamp to observations on events abroad by such journalist friends and advisers as William L. Shirer and John Gunther, Max Ascoli, émigré authority on Italian fascism, and others. In 1937, while maintaining a heavy lecture schedule, she added a monthly column in the Ladies' Home Journal and became a regularly featured NBC radio commentator. The two most influential women in America, it was said in these years, were E L E A N O R R O O S E V E L T and Dorothy Thompson. The plight of refugees aroused Thompson's particular attention in the late 1930s. She helped many European acquaintances to secure visas to the United States, often offering them temporary shelter. On a public level, she insistently called on the United States to develop a coordinated political strategy for dealing with the growing tide of refugees. Her article "Refugees, A World Problem" (Foreign Affairs, April 1938) was influential in bringing about the July 1938 international refugee conference at Evian-les-Bains, France, called by President

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Thompson Franklin D. Roosevelt, which led to the creation of an Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. Thompson's efforts were honored at a dinner in New York on May 6, 1941, where messages from President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were read and representatives of refugee and antifascist groups paid her tribute. Some, however, even among her ideological supporters, found Thompson strident and emotionally self-indulgent. When a collection of her columns appeared in 1939 as Let the Record Speak, one reviewer suggested that it be retitled Let the Record Shout. In these years, nonetheless, she was read, listened to, quoted, and talked about. Her confident, authoritative style, expressed in simple declarative sentences and short staccato paragraphs liberally sprinkled with exclamation points, appealed deeply to people frightened and confused by events abroad. In the 1940 presidential campaign Thompson first proposed a bipartisan ticket of Franklin D. Roosevelt for president and the Republican Wendell Willkie for vice president. When this idea was ridiculed, she dramatically switched her support from Willkie to Roosevelt, declaring that his world leadership role outweighed all domestic considerations. This led to the termination of her Herald Tribune contract in 1941, and she switched to the Bell syndicate, whose flagship newspaper was the liberal New York Post. Initially, the outbreak of war served only to intensify her activities: she lectured, wrote, broadcast regularly (including, in 1942, a series of anti-Hitler talks in German broadcast to Germany via shortwave), and worked for refugees as a member of the Emergency Rescue Committee. At a more fundamental level, however, the coming of the war brought Dorothy Thompson to a turning point in her career. Once the great debate of the 1930s was resolved in favor of intervention and war, she was robbed of her great subject. "Politically," observed a friend, "she was like a great ship left stranded on the beach after the tide has gone out" (Sanders, p. 341). In the immediate postwar years, seeking a new issue upon which to focus her journalistic energies, she turned from Europe to the Middle East, and specifically to the touchy issue of Zionism. Her reputation as a strong supporter of the movement to establish a Jewish nation in Palestine went back as far as 1920, when she had met Chaim Weizmann and other Zionist leaders in London, but in 1946 she emerged as a sharp critic of the movement. The sources of this about-face, which dismayed many American Jews, were complex. One cause was the emergence of a new militancy among Zion-

ists in Palestine, of which she became aware on a trip to the Middle East in the spring of 1945. In her column for July 29, 1946 (soon after a bomb planted by Zionist militants in Jerusalem's King David Hotel resulted in ninety-one deaths) she urged British and American Zionists to repudiate Zionist extremism. In addition, Thompson had consistently advocated a broad approach to the problem of resettling refugees, utilizing all possible nations, while certain Zionist organizations placed a high and sometimes exclusive priority on channeling European Jewish refugees to Palestine. In her 1938 book, Refugees, Anarchy or Organization? she had even suggested that Palestine, with its deepening Arab-Jewish conflicts, was unsuitable as a haven for the masses of European Jewry. Her long-standing interest in refugees also made her particularly sensitive to the plight of Palestinian Arabs uprooted by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Gradually Thompson moved toward a fixed anti-Zionist, pro-Arab position, and this issue came to dominate her columns and lectures as fascism had earlier. In 1950 she toured the Middle East on a trip covertly financed by the State Department. The following year she helped found and became president of the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), financed in part by the Arabian American Oil Company and apparently, although unknown to Thompson, by the Central Intelligence Agency. Though the organization's aim, in her view, was not to oppose Israel but to publicize "the problems and achievements of other Middle Eastern states" (Sanders, p. 337), in practice it functioned mainly as a conduit for anti-Israel pronouncements, particularly on the Palestinian refugee issue. Thompson's partisanship aroused sharp criticism not only from American supporters of Israel but also from editors and readers who felt that her reputation for journalistic independence was being compromised. As early as 1947 the New York Post, which had a large Jewish readership, dropped her column, and the number of newspapers carrying it declined steadily thereafter. She resigned the presidency of AFME in 1957, in response to criticism, but did not modify her views. Her newspaper columns now lacked their earlier zest, and readers often found them vacillating and contradictory, though reflecting a generally rightward drift on domestic issues, as in her 1952 endorsement of Dwight D. Eisenhower for the presidency. The final column appeared in 1958. Her magazine writing, primarily the monthly Ladies' Home Journal column which continued until her death, covered a broad range of sub-

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jects. While occasionally displaying the old polemical fire—particularly when the subject was progressive education or the decline of morality and the family—increasingly they dealt with noncontroversial matters, including her endless battle against obesity. Initially ambivalent about her role as a mother, Thompson found relations with her son often difficult; her Journal columns, however, frequently upheld the values of motherhood. In the early 1950s she often adopted a strongly anticommunist position, but later in the decade she wrote more frequently of the need for world disarmament and portrayed the cold war as more of a cultural and ideological than a military struggle. In her private life, Dorothy Thompson achieved a measure of tranquillity. On June 16, 1943, she married Maxim Kopf, an Austrian émigré artist of modest talent and easygoing ways. The marriage was amicable and lasted until Kopfs death in 1958. In November 1960, after a visit to Sinclair Lewis's birthplace, she published an affectionate, although shrewdly objective, profile of him in the Atlantic Monthly, demonstrating that her journalistic skill and her fundamental decency of spirit had survived the ravaging years. She died of a heart attack in Lisbon, Portugal, early in 1961. Her estate, in excess of $600,000, went mainly into a trust fund for her two grandchildren. Like H A R R I E T B E E C H E R S T O W E in the 1850s, Dorothy Thompson emerged in the 1930s as a person whose outlook, preoccupations, and intellectual style were uncannily relevant to the larger issues of the period. Her ability to penetrate to the emotional heart of complex situations and her propensity for viewing world events and leaders in black-and-white moral terms were well suited to the convulsive decade which witnessed the rise of Adolf Hitler. When the Nazis rose to dominance she was unsparing in expressing her contempt for their racist ideology. She was equally vehement in denouncing their attacks on the "decadence" of the Weimar period, for it was that cultural milieu which had allowed her to overcome the taboos of her early life and explore unacknowledged dimensions of her nature. For a brief but crucial span of years, she played an opinion-molding role that assured her a place not only in journalistic history but also in the larger sweep of world events in the twentieth century. [The voluminous collection of Thompson papers at the Syracuse Univ. Library includes correspondence, family papers, MSS. of speeches, broadcasts, and other writings, notes and research materials for her columns, typescripts of both newspaper and magazine columns, diaries, photographs, and copies of articles about her. Books not mentioned above

are Once on Christmas ( 1 9 3 9 ) , a memoir of her girlhood; Dorothy Thompson s Political Guide ( 1 9 3 8 ) ; Listen, Hans ( 1 9 4 2 ) , a compilation of her wartime propaganda broadcasts; and The Courage to Be Happy ( 1 9 5 7 ) . On her post-1946 anti-Zionism see her "America Demands a Single Loyalty," Commentary, March 1950. For the "Dorothy Thompson legend" in full-blown form see "Girl from Syracuse" and "Rover Girl in Europe," Sat. Eve. Post, May 18 and 25, 1940. The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, 1927-1961, is the best source for listings of articles by and about her. There is no fully satisfactory biography. Marion K. Sanders, Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time ( 1 9 7 3 ) , and Vincent Sheean, Dorothy and Red ( 1 9 6 3 ) , an account of her marriage to Sinclair Lewis, both draw selectively on her papers. See also Current Biog., 1940; New Yorker, April 20 and 27, 1940; Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis ( 1 9 6 1 ) ; American Council for Judaism, Information Bull., Aug. 15, 1946 (reprint of her column of July 29, 1 9 4 6 ) ; and David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (1968). Although her birth date is often given as 1894, the U.S. Census ( 1 9 0 0 ) confirms the 1893 date. An obituary and editorial appeared in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 1, 1961.] PAUL BOYER

THOMPSON, Helen Mulford, June 1, 1908June 25, 1974. Orchestra manager, organization executive. Helen Thompson was the driving force behind the development of symphony orchestras throughout the United States from 1950 to 1970. Born in Greenville, a small town in Illinois, she retained an affinity for small towns and cities and believed that in them lay the future of American symphonic music. Helen was the second of three surviving children and younger daughter of Jobe Herbert and Lena (Henry) Mulford, both of English heritage. Her father, a druggist by trade, played the clarinet and was actively involved in the town band and Sunday school orchestra. Recruiting his own children to fill the gaps in those ensembles, he assigned Helen to the violin at the age of six. In high school, she was concertmistress of the school orchestra and then, from 1926 to 1927, studied music at DePauw University in Indiana. Deciding against further music studies, she worked for two years in a library and on her savings enrolled in 1929 at the University of Illinois, where she majored in sociology and psychology and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1932. At Illinois, she took a chemistry course taught by a graduate assistant, Carl Denison Thompson, who went on to become a research chemist for Union Carbide. He

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and Helen Mulford were married in Waukegan, 111., on April 8, 1933. Helen Thompson was employed as a social worker, directing and supervising casework for public and private agencies in Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York state from the year before her marriage until 1940. Carl Thompson was then relocated to the Union Carbide plant in Charleston, W.Va., where on May 4, 1940, their son, Charles Denison, was born, prompting Helen Thompson to retire from social work. She did not confine herself to the role of housewife, however, but joined the newly formed Charleston Symphony in 1940 as a second violinist. She became its volunteer manager soon thereafter. To increase concert attendance and improve the orchestra's quality, Thompson employed a number of innovative techniques, placing an ad at one point in the Chemical and Engineering News for "chemists who are also symphony musicians." The notice attracted talent to Charleston and attention to its young orchestra. Later Thompson helped the orchestra obtain as director the American-born Antonio Modarelli, formerly conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony. Modarelli greatly influenced Thompson's ideas on orchestral repertoire, management, and community relations. In 1943 Thompson, striving to gain more publicity and engagements for her orchestra, became affiliated with the nascent American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL), founded in Chicago the year before to serve civic orchestras. As the League expanded during the 1940s, Thompson's role grew with it. In 1948 she became the editor of its Newsletter (later Symphony News), where her talents as an organizer and publicist for civic orchestras drew notice. One of those who recognized her abilities was Max Risch, a building contractor and amateur bassoonist, who in 1950 made an anonymous donation of $2,000 to the League, stipulating that Helen Thompson be appointed its first full-time paid executive. Thompson moved the League's headquarters into her home, and from that point on, as several who later worked with her asserted, "Helen Thompson was the League." Her official title at the ASOL shifted in 1963 from executive secretary and treasurer to executive vice president and treasurer, and she remained the organization's key figure until her departure in 1970. In her work for the ASOL, Thompson sometimes lobbied publicly for its interests, as in 1951 when she appeared before a congressional committee to argue successfully for the repeal of the 20 percent excise tax on symphony tickets. More often, though, she worked through private channels. Meeting with conductors,

managers, and board members of most of the country's orchestras, Thompson identified firsthand their mutual problems and concerns, and developed programs in response. To improve orchestra management, for example, the ASOL cosponsored the nation's first course in that subject in 1952. In the same year, realizing that opportunities for conductor training in the United States were inadequate, Thompson combined with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra to found the Conductors Workshop. Thompson also instigated music critic workshops and promoted a dialogue between conductors and composers. As Gerald Deakin of the American Society of Composers and Publishers pointed out, it was "through her help and her good work . . . that the contemporary composer [was] able to get . . . performances in the United States." Author of The Community Symphony Orchestra: How to Organize and Develop It (1952), and several other studies, Thompson later coedited with Leslie White a Survey of Arts Councils (1959). Reflecting her skills as a researcher, the ASOL became the best source for accurate statistical data on symphony orchestras in the United States, a fact the Ford Foundation recognized in 1966 by appointing Thompson its primary consultant for grants to American orchestras. Helen Thompson combined intelligence with a well-honed business and organizational sense, reflected in the growth of the ASOL. By 1970, when she resigned her position there, the League had grown from 72 member orchestras to 1,400, becoming one of the nation's most representative professional groups in the performing arts. In April 1970, Thompson became manager of the New York Philharmonic. The first woman since the early 1930s to manage one of the Big Five orchestras, she played an important part in the Philharmonic's campaign to expand its public educational services. Reaching the Philharmonic's compulsory retirement age of sixtyfive in 1973, Thompson then left New York for California, where she formed her own arts consulting and research firm. She died of a heart attack in Carmel, Calif., in June 1974. During her career, Helen Thompson used her considerable influence in the American musical establishment wisely and impartially to raise performance standards. As her friend David Hatmaker commented, she brought to America's developing orchestras the "sophistication and knowledge and expertise" they needed. [Interviews conducted by Diane Jordan with David Hatmaker, Gerald Deakin, Carl Thompson, and others who knew Helen Thompson are stored in the

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archives of the Music Educators Nat. Conference Hist. Center, McKeldin Library, Univ. of Md., College Park. There are ASOL files at the ASOL office, Vienna, Va., and in an ASOL archive, Special Collections, George Mason Univ. Library, Fairfax, Va. Studies published by Thompson for the ASOL include Report of Study on Governing Boards of Symphony Orchestras (1958) and A Report on Conductor Study and Training Opportunities (1960). For Thompson's activities at the ASOL see the twentieth anniversary issue of Newsletter of the American Symphony Orchestra League, April—May 1962; "Helen Thompson Remembered, 1908-1974," Symphony News, Oct.-Nov. 1974. Diane Jordan is preparing a master's thesis, "Helen M. Thompson and the Conductors Workshop of the American Symphony Orchestra League: 1952 to 1970," at the Univ. of Md. See also Gail Stockholm, "New Philharmonic Manager: 'Penchant for Being Ahead of the Game," Music and Artists, April-May 1970. Thompson's contributions are cited in two books: Philip Hart, Orpheus in the New World: The Symphony Orchestra as an American Cultural Institution (1973); and Howard Shanet, Philharmonic: A History of New York's Orchestra (1975). Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 26, 1974, and Symphony News, Aug.-Sept. 1974. Information supplied by Carl Thompson; birth certificate by 111. Dept. of Public Health; marriage license by clerk of Lake Cty., 111.; and death certificate by Calif. Dept. of Health Services.] DIANE

MARIE

JORDAN

THORNE, Florence Calvert, July 28, 1877March 16, 1973. Labor researcher and editor. Florence Thorne was born in Hannibal, Mo., the second of three daughters of Stephen and Amanthis Belle (Mathews) Thorne. Her father, a native of Georgia whose family had moved there from New York, had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. In 1870 Stephen Thorne went to Hannibal, where he taught school and later became a partner in a grocery establishment. Amanthis Thorne was descended from Sir George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore; the Mathews family, which had migrated from Kentucky to Missouri, were among the earliest settlers in Marion County, Mo. Florence Thorne attended public schools and graduated valedictorian of Hannibal High School in 1896. Entering Oberlin College the following year, she studied Latin, Greek, and Middle English. With its heavily northern student body, Oberlin was an eyeopener for a young woman raised in a southern tradition. She left in 1899 to teach for a year in Eastman, Ga., and then returned to Hannibal, where she taught history, English, and civics in the public schools (1902-12). Beginning in 1903, she completed her undergraduate education, studying

history and political science during the summer sessions of the University of Chicago, which awarded her a Ph.B. in 1909. In her last undergraduate quarter at Chicago, Thorne received her first introduction to the trade union movement through a course taught by economist Robert F. Hoxie. The class met many of Chicago's labor leaders and Thorne found her academic study leading out into "a real life struggle." Continuing at Chicago in graduate school, in the summer of 1910 she began a thesis on the American Federation of Labor (AFL). During the course of the research, she met AFL president Samuel Gompers. In a long, unhurried interview in Chicago, Gompers strongly impressed Thorne; he offered her the opportunity to do research in the files at AFL headquarters in Washington, D.C. She accepted, spending the summer of 1911 in the AFL offices, where Gompers dropped by frequently to discuss her work. In the fall, she returned to Hannibal to teach. The following year Gompers, impressed by her abilities and her "understanding of human problems," wired Thorne offering her the assistant editorship of the American Federationist. She took the post and began a forty-year career with the AFL, during which she served first as one of Gompers's key aides, and later as the organization's research director. From 1912 to 1917, Thome's role at the AFL was shaped by her close working relationship with its chief. She became Gompers's confidential assistant, occasional speechwriter, and gatekeeper, controlling access to the president. She later referred to these years with Gompers as her "apprenticeship." Studying his life and policies first-hand, she came to understand the larger problems of organized labor and gradually assumed major responsibilities at the AFL headquarters. Although Gompers was listed as editor of the American Federationist, Thorne assumed responsibility for all editorial work and wrote many articles. She also interested Gompers in the idea of labor-oriented research, and carried out studies of legislation, politics, and economics. America's entry into World War I interrupted Thome's work for the AFL. Like Gompers, she enthusiastically supported the war effort and in 1917 was appointed to the Subcommittee on Women in Industry of the Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense. The following year she left the AFL to serve in the Department of Labor, where as assistant director of the Working Conditions Service in the War Labor Administration, she helped promote health, safety, and better worker-employer relationships in wartime industries.

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Thorne After the war, Thorne assisted Gompers in preparing his autobiography. She spent five years researching and writing the manuscript, submitting a draft of each chapter to him for approval; Gompers acknowledged her help in the book's foreword. In 1924, before the work was completed, Gompers died. Thorne, who was with him at the time, wrote and signed the last chapter of Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography, which was published in 1925. Although closely tied to Gompers, Florence Thome's commitment to the AFL continued after his death. She reassumed her editorial responsibilities under the new president, William Green, serving also as his administrative assistant. Green supported her efforts to institutionalize research. In 1926 Thorne put together a volunteer research staff and initiated the first unemployment reporting by local unions. (No national unemployment statistics were available at the time.) Recognizing the importance of such work, the AFL formally organized the research department with a paid staff and appointed Thorne director in 1933. Through the depression years, Thome's research staff played an influential role at the AFL. Under her direction, the department provided unions with information for collective bargaining and for National Recovery Administration code negotiations. Her work also contributed to the development of social security and unemployment benefits and to child labor regulation. At the same time, she sought to encourage the confidence of union executives in their researchers. Earlier, Thorne had experienced the suspicion trade union officials often harbored for intellectuals: "It is very difficult to give these labor men advice," she wrote a friend in 1921. Thome countered such resistance by insisting that the experts' function was to give information, not to make decisions or policy. "Ours is a service function," she pointed out in 1941, and "leadership and responsibility must rest with those we serve." Despite this policy, she did not always limit herself to behind-thescenes activities. Thorne often represented the AFL on delegations, acting during World War II as a member of the Federal Advisory Commission for Employment Security and as a labor adviser to the International Labor Organization. Thome resigned from the AFL in 1953, shortly after George Meany became president. Aside from work on a biography, Samuel Gompers, American Statesman (1957), and occasional trips abroad, she spent her retirement quietly in the Virginia home she shared with her friend Margaret Scattergood, Thome's

colleague in research at the AFL since 1928. Originally a Baptist, Thorne converted to Catholicism shortly before her death of pulmonary emboli in Falls Church, Va., in March 1973. A small slender woman, she usually wore lace cuffs and ruffles, and skirts that brushed the floor, which gave her a "deceptively mild turn-of-the-century look." Strongly identifying with her Calvert ancestors, she was dedicated to individual freedom, and shared with Gompers the belief that workers should rely on their own initiatives rather than on government action. Accordingly, Thorne opposed protective legislation, arguing that economic action through trade unions should be "the main effort for promoting the welfare of women." Even as she shunned publicity and personal credit, Thorne made a major contribution to the development of labor research, by bridging the gap between research experts and labor leaders. [A large collection of Florence Thome's official papers are in the AFL Papers, State Hist. Soc. of Wis. Relevant files include those of the Research Director, the American Federationist, and the Office of the President for the Gompers era. Other letters can be found in the precommerce section of the Herbert Hoover Papers at the Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa, and in the Selma Borchardt Papers at Wayne State Univ. The State Hist. Soc. of Mo. and the Marion County Hist. Soc. contain information about Thome's family background. See also interviews conducted in 1957 with Florence Thorne and her successor as research director at the AFL, Boris Shishkin, in the Oral Hist. Coll., Columbia Univ. Useful secondary sources include Bernard Mandel, Samuel Gompers: A Biography (1963), and Philip Taft, The A.F. of L. in the Time of Gompers (1957). Obituaries appeared in N.Y. Times and Wash. Post, March 17, 1973, and in AFL-CIO News, March 24, 1973. Personal information was furnished by Margaret Scattergood, academic records by Hannibal Public Schools and Oberlin College, and a death certificate by the Va. Dept of Health.] ELIZABETH

FONES-WOLF

THURSTON, Matilda Smyrell Calder, May 16, 1875-April 18, 1958. Missionary, educator. Matilda Calder Thurston, founder and first president of Ginling College for Women in Nanking, China, was born in Hartford, Conn. Both her father, George Calder, a carpenter who migrated to the United States from Scotland, and her mother, Margery (Patterson) Calder, who came from northern Ireland, were staunch Presbyterians. The eldest of three children, Matilda Calder had a sister and a brother. She recalled her childhood as uneventful; she

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Thurston had few friends and minimal social life outside her tightly knit family. Her closest companion was her sister and her deepest interest was school. She joined the church in 1888, "taking the step entirely of my own accord." After graduating from the Hartford public schools, Matilda Calder left home for the first time to enter Mount Holyoke College, where she delighted in the intellectual stimulation of the college atmosphere. Decisive in her choice of career were the visit of a missionary delegation during her senior year and her enrollment in a mission study class on India. One of twenty-four Mount Holyoke students who joined the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), an organization founded in 1886 to encourage college youth to enter the mission field, she resolved to become a missionary. After receiving her B.S. degree from Mount Holyoke in 1896, Calder taught for four years in Connecticut secondary schools. She continued volunteer church work and attended SVM summer conferences at Northfield, Mass. Enthusiasm generated at these meetings strengthened her determination to volunteer for foreign mission service, a step she took in 1900. She was by this time acquainted with her future husband, John Lawrence Thurston, son of a minister and member of the SVM. A graduate of Yale University, he was a student at Hartford Seminary. Calder taught at Central Turkey College for Girls, Marash, for two years, then returned to marry Lawrence Thurston in 1902. Her husband had helped organize the Yale University Mission, which decided to concentrate on educational work in China. Shortly after their marriage, the Thurstons sailed for China. After only a few months studying Chinese and seeking a location for Yale-in-China, they were forced by Lawrence Thurston's ill health to return to the United States in August 1903. He died in California of tuberculosis on May 10, 1904. Matilda Thurston spent the next two years as SVM secretary, visiting branch associations in eastern colleges, and then returned to China to the Yale mission in Changsha, Hunan. For five years she taught in the boys' preparatory school and worked in the hospital attached to the mission. The revolution of 1911 broke out as she was departing for home furlough, and numerous westerners fled the civil conflict in interior China. Anticipating that the revolution would open new opportunities for educated women, refugee missionaries in Shanghai formulated plans for a women's Christian college in central China. Though one or two mission schools provided education for women at the junior college level, no four-year women's college then existed

in China, and coeducation was considered unacceptable. Thurston returned to China in 1913 under the auspices of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, one of five societies pledging support to the proposed interdenominational school. In November of that year she was elected first president of the institution, later named Ginling College for Women, and assumed primary responsibility for finding a campus, gathering a faculty, and publicizing the venture among potential applicants, particularly in Christian middle schools. Ginling opened with six faculty members and eight students in September 1915. The curriculum was modeled on that of American liberal arts colleges but included four years of Chinese. As in most mission institutions, religious courses and activities were required and instruction was largely in English. Thurston added to her administrative duties the teaching of astronomy, advanced mathematics, synoptic Gospels, and the life of Jesus; she also conducted a choir and gave regular chapel talks in Chinese. On her furloughs to the United States she made use of her SVM contacts to plead the cause of Ginling. Close ties were established with Smith College, which made annual contributions. Teachers from both Smith and Mount Holyoke frequently came to Ginling on short-term assignments. Although Ginling remained a women's college while other schools introduced coeducation, its enrollment expanded to 152 in 1926 and to over 200 during the 1930s. The school increasingly attracted the daughters of the wellto-do as well as Christians of modest means. Majors in the social sciences were popular, though Ginling also became known for its courses in the sciences, English, music, and physical education. Most graduates became teachers, mainly in middle schools. During the 1920s Chinese nationalists criticized the Christian schools for their foreign atmosphere, western administration, and religious requirements. Thurston resigned the presidency in 1928 in favor of one of Ginling's first graduates, Wu Yi-fang. Until 1936 she remained as adviser and took a special interest in supervising building construction on the campus, whose architecture combined Chinese form and western techniques. Three years in the United States (1936-39) preceded three years in China as treasurer and aide to war and relief organizations. When the Japanese occupied Nanking, Thurston was interned. Repatriated in 1943, she lived with her sister, Helen Calder, in Auburndale, Mass. Despite declining health, she cooperated with Ruth

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Tilly M. Chester in writing a history of Ginling College (1955). She died in Auburndale of the effects of arteriosclerosis in 1958. In 1952 the People's Republic of China reorganized all institutions of higher education into a national system, and Ginling was amalgamated with other institutions in Nanking. Though Ginling graduated only about 1,000 students before its demise, it claimed to have awarded the first bachelor's degrees to women in China. Thurston saw the school and its students as pioneers, and she hoped through education to open new opportunities for professional careers for women as well as to extend Christian influence. She expected Ginling alumnae to assume leadership positions and tried to instill a sense of obligation to China, to the Christian cause, and to the goal of achieving greater independence and respect for women. A member of the first graduating class characterized Matilda Calder Thurston as a genteel and dignified lady general, respected, demanding, and beloved. Thurston herself took pride in the fact that almost half of the alumnae of the first decade studied abroad and that many attained national prominence in education, medicine, and other professions. [The Mount Holyoke College Hist. Coll. has some Thurston correspondence, materials on Ginling College, and a memorial tribute by Mrs. Way-sung New, delivered at the Wellesley, Mass., Congregational Church, April 28, 1958. Additional Thurston correspondence and other manuscript materials on Ginling are located at the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, N.Y. City. The Presbyterian Hist. Soc., Philadelphia, has a biographical folder on Thurston which contains a brief autobiography submitted in her 1900 application for mission service. The papers of Lawrence Thurston at the Yale Univ. Library contain some correspondence and a copy of Ginling College Mag., June 1928, which was dedicated to Matilda Thurston. Information on her public career is available in Matilda Thurston, "Ginling College," Educational Rev., July 1918, pp. 2 4 2 - 4 3 , and in her book, Ginling College. Reuben Holden, Yale in China, The Mainland, 19011951 ( 1 9 6 4 ) , and Henry B. Wright, A Life With a Purpose: A Memorial of John Lawrence Thurston, First Missionary of the Yale Mission ( 1 9 0 8 ) , describe the founding of the Yale Univ. Mission and the trip to China to locate a site. Obituaries were published in the N.Y. Times, April 20, 1958, and Boston Globe, April 22, 1958. Additional information for this article was provided by a biobibliography by Susan E . Shehee and by Anne Calder Piskor, Thurston's niece. Death certificate supplied by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] J E S S I E G. LUTZ

TILLY, Dorothy Eugenia Rogers, June 30, 1883-March 16, 1970. Civil rights reformer.

Dorothy Rogers Tilly, a leader of Methodist church work in the southeast and founder of the Fellowship of the Concerned, was born in Hampton, Ga., the third daughter and fourth of eleven children of Richard Wade and Frances (Eubank) Rogers. Both of her parents were descendants of early English settlers of Virginia. From 1896 to 1901 Richard Rogers, a Methodist minister, was president of Reinhardt Junior College in Waleska, Ga. Frances Rogers, the daughter of a planter, was a graduate of Wesleyan College in Macon, Ga. Both parents sought to instill in their offspring a love of learning and compassion for the less fortunate. Dorothy Tilly remembered hearing as a child "the troubles of people . . . as they flowed over our doorsteps. They hurt me deeply." The eight Rogers children who survived infancy all received a college education. Dorothy Rogers graduated with honors from both Reinhardt College (1899) and Wesleyan (Ga.) College, where she received her A.B. in 1901. Two years later, on Nov. 24, 1903, she married Milton Eben Tilly, an Atlanta chemical distributor. They had one son, Eben Fletcher, born in 1904. Tilly credited her husband with calling to her attention the plight of southern blacks. In the 1920s he insisted upon her accompanying him on morning drives through black slums, and she watched children raiding garbage cans behind Atlanta's fashionable Piedmont Hotel. When she protested, he responded, "If [seeing this] . . . hurts you enough, you will tell other people and they will do something" (Smith, p. 6 6 ) . Milton Tilly promised financial assistance for her projects and consistently encouraged her efforts to promote social change. Theirs was an especially happy marriage.

In the 1910s and 1920s Tilly became prominent in the Women's Missionary Society of the North Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. She served as secretary of children's work and taught courses at Lake Junaluska, N.C., and elsewhere. Around 1929, she became director of the summer leadership school at Paine College in Augusta, Ga., which trained black Methodist women as community leaders. In 1931 Dorothy Tilly joined the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). She was soon named to the national executive committee of the ASWPL and made secretary of its Georgia chapter. With J E S S I E DANIEL A M E S , founder of the ASWPL, she investigated lynchings in Georgia and crusaded for better treatment of blacks in the south. Meanwhile she continued her work for the

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Tilly Methodist church, serving as secretary of Christian social relations for the Women's Society of Christian Service of the southeast. Tilly's work on behalf of racial justice in the south led to her appointment in 1945 to President Harry S Truman's Committee on Civil Rights. She was the only white woman and one of only two southerners on the committee. Tilly encouraged committee members not to single out the south as the only racist section of the nation, but she fully endorsed the committee's condemnation of segregation as morally wrong. When the committee report, To Secure These Rights, was issued in 1947, Tilly spoke on its behalf in more than twenty states. She denounced segregation in the nation's capital and publicly began to support integration in the south. Meanwhile she became a field worker and later the director of women's work for the Southern Regional Council (SRC), which succeeded the CIC in 1944. For the SRC Tilly investigated a race riot in Columbia, Tenn., and the lynching of four blacks in Monroe, Ga., in 1946. She also launched a crusade against the Ku Klux Klan and helped lead successful campaigns to persuade the legislatures of Georgia and South Carolina to pass antimask laws. In September 1949, under SRC sponsorship, Tilly started a new group to carry on the aims of the ASWPL, which had dissolved in 1942. The new interracial and interfaith organization, which came to be called the Fellowship of the Concerned, drew its members from churches and synagogues in twelve southern states. An informal network of women who shared a religiously motivated commitment to "equal justice under the law," its original aim was to promote fair treatment of blacks in the courts. Tilly believed that if prominent women attended trials of blacks accused of crimes, judges, juries, and prosecuting attorneys would be less likely to violate the defendants' civil rights. Fellowship members were urged to report to Tilly on their activities, which also included accompanying registered black women voters to the polls and educating law enforcement authorities on methods of averting race riots and lynchings. By 1950 the Fellowship of the Concerned had more than 4,000 members, many of whom found it prudent to conceal from their husbands that they were attending the organization's workshops. Tilly became an effective fund raiser, frequently obtaining the money to pay the expenses of workshop delegates. Starting in 1953, in anticipation of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, the Fellowship shifted its focus and began to hold workshops to promote support for integrated schools; it

also directed attention to the United Nations and to human rights. From the 1930s on Tilly engaged in a wide variety of activities in addition to her work for the Fellowship and for the Methodist church. An advocate of United States participation in the League of Nations and an opponent of war, she joined CABRIE CHAPMAN CATT'S Committee on the Cause and Cure of War. She served as president of its Georgia chapter in 1936 and was later named head of the southeastern branch. In 1943 Tilly joined the private Emergency Committee for Food Production, and in 1944 led its lobbying effort in Washington to extend the life of the Farm Security Administration. She was also a trustee of Wesley an (Ga.) College, and was active in the Americans for Democratic Action and the American Civil Liberties Union. In December 1949, she was one of six people sent to Israel by the American Christian Palestine Committee to study the status of Jerusalem. Barely five feet tall, aristocratic, addicted to hats with roses, sincerely religious, and a staunch prohibitionist, Tilly never shunned controversy, and was frequently honored for her courage. Segregationists detested her, calling her a communist and a parasite. Tilly kept a phonograph near her telephone and played a recording of the Lord's Prayer whenever she received a threatening phone call. After a Ku Klux Klan plot to bomb her house was uncovered in the 1950s, the mayor of Atlanta arranged for police protection and installed a street light in front of her home. In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, despite bone fractures which frequently confined her to a wheelchair, Tilly refused to curtail her activities and traveled to numerous meetings and speaking engagements. The death of her husband in 1961 and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., profoundly distressed her. At the last meeting of the Fellowship of the Concerned in the fall of 1968 she was so weak that her speech could barely be heard. Late in 1969 her son had her admitted to a nursing home in suburban Atlanta, where she died of respiratory arrest a few months later. [The Dorothy Rogers Tilly Papers at Emory Univ. contain correspondence, clippings, biographical information, records of her work for the Methodist church and the Committee on Civil Rights, and a scrapbook. Other manuscript material is in the CIC and ASWPL papers at Atlanta Univ.; the SRC papers, which will be placed at Atlanta Univ.; and the Winthrop ( S . C . ) College Archives, where articles, letters, and other materials on Tilly have been deposited. Other sources of information include

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Toklas Margaret Long, "Mrs. Dorothy Tilly, a Memoir," New South, Spring 1970; Beulah Mackay, "Dorothy Tilly: Pioneer," The Church Woman, March 1964; Sarah Cunningham, "A Woman Beyond Her Times," The Church Woman, Dec. 1966; Helena Huntington Smith, "Mrs. Tilly's Crusade," Collier's, Dec. 30, 1950; Ruth Collins, "We Are the Inheritors," Response, July-Aug. 1971; Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South (1978); Arnold Shankman, "Dorothy Tilly, Civil Rights, and the Methodist Church," Methodist Hist,. Jan. 1980, pp. 95-108; and Jessie Arndt, "Women's Crusade Spurs Fair Treatment of Negroes in Southern U.S.," Christian Sei. Monitor, Jan. 9, 1953. Obituaries appeared in the Atlanta Journal, March 17, 1970, and the Atlanta Constitution, March 18, 1970. Additional information was provided by Eben Tilly and Thelma Stevens.] ARNOLD

SHANKMAN

TOKLAS, Alice Babette, April 30, 1877-March 7, 1967. Writer. Alice B. Toklas was born in San Francisco. Her mother, Emma Levinsky, born in Brooklyn, N.Y., was the daughter of German Jews: Louis Levinsky, who went to California during the 1849 Gold Rush and made money in mining and merchandising, and Louis's cousin, Hänchen Lewig, who was interested in music and culture. Toklas's father, Ferdinand, a Polish Jew, had immigrated to the United States in 1865, to become another successful western merchant. Toklas was raised comfortably. Educated in private schools in San Francisco and Seattle, where her family moved around 1890, she entered the music conservatory of the University of Washington in 1893. Her mother's illness helped to end her formal education and also brought the family back to San Francisco. Emma Toklas died in 1897 and Alice Toklas assumed responsibility for the family home and for her only sibling, a brother ten years younger than she. For the next decade, she scrupulously fulfilled her domestic obligations without sacrificing all her other interests. She read Henry James. She studied the piano, with some hope of becoming a concert performer. She was aware of local Bohemian circles. She was both a dutiful daughter and a woman with exotic impulses at discreet variance with family standards. In 1907, impulse overcame duty. Toklas traveled to Europe with Harriet Levy, one of several close women friends. In September, in Paris, Toklas met GERTRUDE STEIN, whose family she had known in California. Symbolically and literally, her life began again. In her memoirs, What Is Remembered ( 1 9 6 3 ) Toklas recalled, "Gertrude Stein . . . held my complete attention,

as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then." By 1910, Toklas had fully settled into the famous home and salon at 27 rue de Fleurus that Stein then shared with her brother Leo. For more than thirty years, the two women were physically, emotionally, and socially inseparable. Except for an American lecture tour in the 1930s, they remained in Europe. Though aging Jews, they survived the German occupation of France during World War II. Like Stein, Toklas resisted open talk about their private world and their sexuality. Her public labels were often "secretary" or "companion." Nevertheless, Stein and Toklas created a lesbian relationship that has become legendary. After Stein's death in July 1946, Toklas fiercely nurtured her literary reputation. She also established a separate public identity. She talked and lectured. She wrote: some journalism; her highly selective memoirs; the shrewd, incisive, opinionated, gossipy letters later published and praised; and two cookbooks, contributions to a genre she cherished and used. Her texts are, as her talk was, pungent, efficient, observant, often ironic and acerb. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book ( 1 9 5 4 ) , which her friend Sir Francis Rose illustrated, is a famous confection of anecdote, advice, comment, and gourmet extravaganzas. Because the editing of the second, Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present (1958, with Poppy Cannon) displeased her, she tended to distance herself from it. In 1957, Toklas returned to the Catholic church into which she claimed to have been baptized as a child. (Biographers have been unable to verify the claim.) She hoped that by joining the church she would be ensured of a posthumous reunion with Stein. Though her last years were both willful and interesting, loneliness and illness disfigured them, as did financial insecurity and quarrels that Stein's heirs initiated over Stein's estate. Increasingly fragile, lame from the effects of arthritis, and blind, Toklas died in Paris on March 7, 1967, and was buried there, next to Stein. Both Victorian and twentieth-century elements characterize Toklas's history. She explicitly, self-consciously, and apparently happily accepted the role of loyal "wife" to Stein's "husband," of mother to Stein's prodigal child. She organized her "marriage" meticulously. She guarded Stein passionately, often jealously, and believed in and applauded her "genius." With her printing of the Plain Editions of Stein's writings, she even served as her publisher. The stability of her devotion, inseparable from the couple's mutual dependence, clearly helped Stein to work. Yet, Toklas was also unconven-

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Tourel tional. Although she acted on occasion like a powerful wife, she repudiated the securities of heterosexual marriage. She simultaneously integrated several marginal subcultures, those of the Jew, the American westerner, the American expatriate in Europe, the artist's mate, and the homosexual. She was committed to tradition and change, to service and independence. Because of this paradox, two lives reflect her achievement: Stem's and her own. [Toklas's letters after Stein's death were well edited by Edward Burns, Staying on Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas, with an introduction by Gilbert A. Harrison (1973); see also Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, with a memoir by Samuel M. Steward (1977). Linda Simon, The Biography of Alice B. Toklas (1977), is a solid, mature, accomplished biography. For a helpful review see Donald Sutherland, "The Biography of Alice B. Toklas," New Republic, Aug. 20 and 27, 1977. Other sources of information and interpretation are books about Stein and Stein's own work, both her quasi-disguised autobiographical writing and the celebratory, playful Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in 1932 and published in 1933, with photographs.] CATHARINE R.

STIMPSON

TOUREL, Jennie, June 22, 1900?-Nov. 23, 1973. Opera and concert singer. Jennie Tourel was born in Vitebsk, Russia, one of four children, three girls and a boy, of a Jewish couple, Solomon and Pauline (Schulkin) Davidson. Her father was a banker, and although the family lost much of their wealth when they fled Russia in 1918, they remained well off. Living first in Danzig and then in Berlin, they settled eventually in Paris. Jennie Davidson's studies of voice and piano began before her arrival in France, but the only teacher identifiable by name is Anna El-Tour, an émigré Russian artist, with whom she studied voice in Paris for two years in the late 1920s. Otherwise, Tourel (as she called herself, reversing the syllables of her teacher's name) was largely selftaught. Later she identified the Spanish mezzo Conchita Supervia and the lieder singer Marya Freund as major influences; she also admired Madeleine Grey and her friend Eva Gauthier. After numerous concert appearances, by 1931 she had made her opera debut as Jennie Tourel at the Opéra-Russe in Paris. In 1933 she joined the Opéra-Comique, appearing immediately in the stellar role of Carmen. Emil Cooper, conductor of the Opéra-Russe, arranged for her first appearance in the United States; during the 1930-31 season of the Chicago Opera she sang in Ernest Moret's Lorenzaccio, took the role of Lola in Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, and

shared the stage with M A R Y G A R D E N in the world premiere of Hamilton Forrest's Camille. Visiting the United States again in 1937, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Mignon in Thomas's opera by that name. Until World War II, Tourel sang throughout France; her roles included Charlotte in Massenet's Werther, Cherubino in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, and the title roles in Mignon and in Bizet's Djamileh. She left Paris in June 1940, just days before the Nazis entered the city. Delayed by illness in Lisbon and then forced to wait in Cuba for a visa, she did not arrive in the United States until January 1941, too late to be included in the Metropolitan Opera's roster of singers for that season. Soon after her arrival, Tourel was invited by Wilfred Pelletier to sing Carmen and Mignon under his baton in Montreal. She later sang these and other roles in Havana, Toledo, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, and Baltimore. In New York, she sang Lisa in Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame with the New Opera Company, and, in 1944, presented her uniquely sensitive Carmen during the debut season of the New York City Opera. Tourel returned to the Metropolitan Opera in March 1944 to sing Mignon. Within a few seasons, she presented Adalgisa in Bellini's Norma and offered audiences the original mezzo version of Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville, the first time that version was heard at the house. Tourel's American concert career began spectacularly in October 1942, when she performed with Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic in Berlioz's dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette. Virgil Thomson, then critic of the Alew York Herald Tribune, reported: "She is a singer in the great tradition. Her voice is beautiful, her diction clear, her vocalism impeccable and her musicianship tops." Following her many performances of Berlioz and her later offerings of Mahler, the music of these two composers acquired new popularity. Tourel also successfully rendered the songs of then little-known South American composers such as Villa-Lobos. She sang with Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony and, with Stokowski and the National Broadcasting Company Orchestra, gave the American premiere of Prokofiev's cantata Alexander Nevsky. Also with Stokowski, she was soloist in Bach's Saint Matthew Passion at the Metropolitan Opera House in April 1943. She became an American citizen in 1946. Tourel was particularly responsive to unfashionable music and to the contemporary composers. She created the role of Baba the Turk in the 1951 Venice premiere of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, and promoted Hindemith's song

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cycle Das Marienleben. She also sang the songs of Ned Rorem and Francis Poulenc, Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis, Ravel's Chansons Madécasses, and Joaquin Nin's Pano Murciano. Tourel collaborated often with Leonard Bernstein. In 1944 in Pittsburgh she gave the first performance of his Jeremiah symphony. She also sang in this work in the summer of 1973, in her last public appearance in Israel, with whose musicians and people she felt a kinship. Tourel, who had a decided gift for making and holding close friends, particularly among men, kept her personal life private. She was married three times: first in Paris to Bernhard Michlin, a businessman; later to the artist Leo Michaelson; and from 1955 to 1957 to Dr. Harry Gross, a heart specialist. All three marriages ended in divorce. She began teaching in 1957 and joined the faculty of the Juilliard School in 1964. Her public master classes at Carnegie Recital Hall beginning in 1963 drew many nonsingers along with professionals. In the 1950s, Tourel achieved success in concert versions of less familiar operas, most often with the American Opera Society—notably in Rossini's Otello and Offenbach's La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein. She appeared on National Educational Television as the countess in Pique Dame in 1971 and the following year she returned to staged opera in Pasatieri's Black Widow for the Seattle Opera. Shortly before her death from lung cancer in New York in 1973, Tourel, with her indefatigable energy, appeared in the speaking role of the Duchess of Krakenthorp in Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment with the Chicago Lyric Opera. Jennie Tourel combined a first-rate musical intelligence with great emotional and intuitive gifts. Everything she sang, from the complex music of Hindemith to the sensuous compositions of Debussy, was deeply felt. Her legendary aptitude for languages originated in her childhood, when she heard Russian and French within the family. Later she learned German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew; she had acquired English before she arrived in the United States. Her voice was remarkable, a rich, deep mezzo with a range through high C, but even more remarkable was the way she cultivated it. A perfectionist, she never stopped working, refining and polishing what were already superb performances. She never had trouble winning audiences, captivating them with her distinctive style of performance, but the more sophisticated the audience, the more they appreciated her artistry. [Biographical material on Tourel, particularly her early life, is scanty, and much of it is inaccurate. Articles about her include Robert Jacobson, "The

Gist of Jennie," Musical America, June 1963; Richard Dyer, "The Spell of Jennie Tourel," N.Y. Times, Sept. 22, 1974; Time, Jan. 27, 1947, pp. 44-45; and entries in Current Biog., 1947, and Baker's Biog. Diet, of Musicians (1978). An attempt to sort out fact from fiction is made by Robert Offergeld, "Some Notes on the Future of Jennie Tourel," Stereo Rev., Nov. 1975. She is also discussed in David Ewen, Encyc. of the Opera (1955) and Musicians Since 1900: Performers in Concert and Opera (1978), and Irving Kolodin, The Metropolitan Opera (1966). Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Nov. 25, 1973, and Opera News, Jan. 12, 1974. A memorial by Leonard Bernstein, "Jennie Tourel—1910-1973," appeared in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 9, 1973. Additional information for this article was provided by Friede Rothe, Tourel's longtime manager, and by Robert Offergeld. No birth record is available. Tourel claimed that she was born in 1910 in Montreal; however, recent sources, including Offergeld, Ewen, Baker's, and the obituary in Opera News, give the year as 1900. Offergeld indicates that early passports supply this date as well as the correct place of birth. Both Friede Rothe and the U.S. Office of Passport Services say Tourel was born in 1903; the passport office, however, incorrectly lists the birthplace as Montreal.] ELAINE

BRODY

TOWLE, Charlotte Helen, Nov. 17, 1896-Oct. 1, 1966. Social work educator. Charlotte Towle was born in Butte, Mont., the second of four children (three girls and a boy) of Emily (Kelsey) and Herman Augustus Towle. Her father's Scottish ancestors had settled in New Hampshire around 1640. As a young man Herman Towle had moved from Indiana to Montana, where he became a prosperous jeweler. Emily Towle, who was of French and Scottish ancestry, had been a schoolteacher before her marriage. In their home in Butte, a copper city, the Towle children heard discussions of absentee ownership, labor-management conflict, unemployment, and, especially, party politics, in which both parents took a keen interest. The young Towles attended public schools with children of immigrants from many lands. After Charlotte graduated from Butte High School in 1915, she and her older sister were sent to a junior college in Virginia. The next year she transferred to Goucher College with the hope of becoming a writer, but she decided to major in education so that she could earn her living. In her senior year Towle enrolled in an elective course in social work and did field work with the Baltimore Prisoners' Aid Society and the American Red Cross. Upon graduating with an A.B. in 1919, she was convinced that she wanted a career in social work.

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Towle

In Baltimore, Denver, and then in Thermopolis, Wyo., Charlotte Towle was a Red Cross caseworker from 1919 until 1921. She then worked for the United States Veterans Bureau, first in San Francisco ( 1 9 2 2 - 2 4 ) and then at the neuropsychiatric hospital in Tacoma, Wash. ( 1 9 2 4 - 2 6 ) . Towle received a Commonwealth Fund fellowship in 1926 to study at the New York School of Social Work (later the Columbia University School of Social Work). Dissatisfied with the traditional casework of the day, in which the agency and the worker were central, she sought an alternative in psychiatric social work. Although the school did not offer an academic degree, Towle was attracted by its highly individualized programs which were designed for students who already had social work experience. After studying for a year with leaders in the social casework field and with well-known psychiatrists, Towle emerged with a firm base in psychoanalytic theory and with a wide-ranging interest in all that had to do with human behavior. Spending a year in Philadelphia as director of the home-finding department of the Children's Aid Society (1927—28), she also taught part-time at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work, where she came to know JESSIE TAFT and Virginia P. Robinson ( 1 8 8 4 - 1 9 7 7 ) , who became leaders of the so-called functional school of social work. She then went to the Institute for Child Guidance in New York, where she supervised students from the New York and Smith College schools of social work. In 1931-32 Towle was a full-time field instructor in the New York School, working with students placed at the Institute. Charlotte Towle's long association with the University of Chicago began in 1932 when she accepted the invitation of EDITH ABBOTT, dean of the School of Social Service Administration (SSA), to develop a program in psychiatric casework. She went to Chicago with a sense of mission: she was to do pioneering work in an institution known primarily for its interest in social welfare policy, a setting which many of her friends in the east considered hostile to psychiatric casework. But, although Towle came to be considered a leader in the so-called diagnostic or psychosocial school of social work, she refused to be labeled, and worked effectively with all groups in the profession. Appointed as assistant professor at the SSA in 1932, Towle was promoted to associate professor in 1935 and to professor in 1944. She spent her first Chicago years in developing new courses and field placements in psychiatric casework. She also produced several important journal articles and published her first book, Social Case Records from Psychiatric Clinics (1941).

The experience of the depression increased Towle's sensitivity to the impact of social and economic adversity upon human personality. It also strengthened her belief that all caseworkers, not just those who specialized in psychiatric social work, needed a depth of understanding of human behavior. Once she had the psychiatric sequence in order, Towle therefore took the lead in developing generalized casework courses; a single generic course replaced separate courses in family, child welfare, medical, and psychiatric casework. This change, which was considered an important innovation in the 1940s, soon became common in other schools. In 1954 Towle was invited to the London School of Economics for a year to help develop a unified training program for social workers founded on the generic casework approach. At the SSA Towle also became known for her teaching of social work instructors. From her early courses in supervision, she developed a course on dynamics of learning, in which she sought to integrate learning theory and dynamic psychology. Out of this course came her last book, The Learner in Education for the Professions (1954). Still later, she devoted much of her time to developing a new course in human behavior to be taught by social workers rather than by psychiatrists. Towle frequently served as a consultant to social agencies in Chicago and elsewhere. In 1944 the Bureau of Public Assistance of the United States Social Security Board, headed by JANE HOEY, asked her to develop a manual for its workers who dealt with needy families in local agencies administering old-age assistance, aid to the blind, and aid to dependent children. In Common Human Needs, published by the United States Government Printing Office in 1945, Towle wrote of the inalienable right to food, shelter, and health care, and of the duty of the public assistance worker to help clients prove their eligibility for help. Those were dangerous words. Protests from journalists, and later from the president of the American Medical Association, who accused Towle of advocating socialism, caused the government, under order of the director of the Federal Security Administration, to discontinue the manual and to destroy its stock. In response to counterprotests from social workers and others, the American Association of Social Workers began publishing the work, which was translated into several languages and was still in print in the late 1970s. (Towle again ran afoul of the government before her 1954 trip to England, when her passport was delayed until she could explain her membership in two allegedly subversive organizations and her signature on a petition for

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clemency for Julius and E T H E L R O S E N B E B G . ) Over the years Towle served on many committees of professional organizations and held important advisory posts with the Veterans Administration (1946-48), the American Red Cross (1945-48), and the Mental Health Division of the United States Public Health Service (194749; 1953). For many years she was also a member of the editorial board of the Social Service Review. Her contributions to the profession were recognized by several honorary degrees and by the Fiorina Lasker Award for distinguished service to the field of social welfare (1956) and the Distinguished Service Award of the National Conference on Social Welfare (1962). Charlotte Towle lived near the University of Chicago campus with her older sister Mildred and with Mary E. Rail, a social worker and later district supervisor in the United Charities of Chicago. Towle and Rail shared a love of the out-of-doors and vacationed together in New England. Although her salary was limited, Towle for many years provided some support for her parents and siblings, including Mildred, who had been partly crippled in an accident. After her official retirement in 1962, Towle continued teaching on a part-time basis for two years and then worked two more years for the Scholarship and Guidance Association before retiring completely. She died of a stroke while on vacation in North Conway, N.H., in 1966. After her death she was honored by a memorial fund, established by friends and former students, which has been used for lectures to alumni of SSA in various parts of the United States and for special symposia in Chicago. [Teaching materials, unpublished autobiographical notes, clippings, photographs, bibliographies, and other material may be found in the Charlotte Towle Coll. in the Dept. of Special Collections, Univ. of Chicago Library. The Charlotte Towle Memorial Library of the Spence-Chapin Adoption Service, N.Y. City, contains a complete set of Towle's books and professional articles, as well as memorabilia and some letters to members of the board. Some of Towle's most important articles have been collected in Helen Harris Perlman, ed., Helping: Charlotte Towle on Social Work and Social Casework (1969). A biographical sketch, tributes by friends and colleagues, and a bibliography are included in SSA Newsletter, Autumn/Winter 196667. A brief biography appears in Encyc. of Social Work (1977), vol. 17, pp. 1956-57. Material on her early teaching may be found in Shirley C. Hellenbrand, "Main Currents in Social Casework, 18981936: The Development of Social Casework in the United States" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univ. School of Social Work,. 1965). In 1969 the Charlotte Towle Memorial Symposium on Comparative Theoretical Approaches to Social Casework resulted

in the volume Theories of Social Casework, ed. Robert W. Roberts and Robert H. Nee (1971). An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Oct. 2, 1966. A birth certificate was supplied by Mont. Bureau of Vital Statistics; death certificate supplied by town clerk of Conway, N.H. Additional information was provided by John H. Towle and Elise Towle Nickerson, her brother and sister, and by Mary E. Rail.] RACHEL B. MARKS

TRÄUBEL, Helen Francesca, June 16, 1899July 28, 1972. Opera and concert singer. Helen Träubel, Wagnerian soprano and, throughout the fifties, a beloved presence in American popular entertainment, was born into a prominent middle-class family of German descent in St. Louis. Her maternal grandfather founded the Apollo Theater there, the first to present important German drama in the middle west. Her father, Otto Ferdinand Träubel, a druggist and a man of many talents and interests, exerted a great influence upon his daughter's life, although he died when she was twelve. Her mother, Clara (Stuhr) Träubel, chose marriage over a singing career; according to her daughter, she possessed "the most exciting and thrillingly beautiful soprano voice I have ever heard." Träubel inherited not only voice, but also physique from her mother: her five-footnine 175-pound frame was very much that of the Stuhr women. Helen and her older brother Walter had a rich and varied childhood, filled with music (she had seen about thirty operas by age twelve) and the enjoyment of local vaudeville and St. Louis Browns baseball; Träubel bought a small interest in that woebegone team in 1950, "for sentimental reasons." By her early teens Träubel was substituting for her mother in a church choir, and in that period she sang her first concert for money. In 1916 she became the pupil of Louise VettaKarst, a brilliant St. Louis voice teacher who for nearly eighteen years was at once Traubel's closest friend and "my most overbearing tyrant and female Svengali." The prize pupil left high school after her sophomore year to devote herself fully to her vocal training, and for many years she sang little in public beyond church work. In 1922 she married Louis Franklin Carpenter, a St. Louis car salesman; they separated after a short time. Träubel made her debut in 1924 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra under Rudolph Ganz, a close friend and supporter who featured her in two midwest tours. In 1926 she sang the "Liebestod" in a Ganz concert at Lewisohn Stadium in New York, and gained her first offer from the Metropolitan Opera. She refused be-

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cause she felt unready, but she did consent to a concert tour for the noted impresario Arthur Judson. Ever conscious of her vocal development, she left Judson after four months to return to her studies in St. Louis. After another decade of Lulu Vetta-Karst, church singing, and local concertizing, Traubel sang under the American "Pope of Music," Walter Damrosch, at the 1935 St. Louis Sangerfest. Damrosch was so won over by this local "unknown" that he rewrote his opera The Man Without a Country to include a part for her. A private performance brought another (refused) Met offer, as well as a radio contract from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). In the spring of 1937, Traubel finally made her Met debut in the world premiere of the Damrosch opera. She received critical acclaim, but her success was overshadowed by the opera's failure. Her radio successes, however, were bringing the phenomenon of an American-born, Americantrained Wagnerian soprano to the appreciative attention of a large public. In fall 1937 she appeared for the first time with Kirsten Flagstad and her future partner, Lauritz Melchior. The following year she divorced Louis Carpenter to marry William L. Bass, who became her manager and principal adviser. The first year of their marriage was one of financial hardship because Traubel had stopped her radio career and returned to her studies, this time with Giuseppe Boghetti, teacher of Marian Anderson. The characteristically cautious Traubel rejected $25,000 worth of radio contracts to live on stew, spaghetti, and voice lessons. Her Town Hall debut, Oct. 8, 1939, elicited reviews of the kind she had learned to expect ("remarkable beauty and eloquence," "consummate artistry"); they hailed a career that was, at last, truly launched. She made her Carnegie Hall debut two weeks later. Traubel's somewhat scandalous nonrelationship with the Met came to an end when the management agreed to her choice of role for her second debut, Dec. 28, 1939, when she appeared to rave reviews as Sieglinde in Die Walkiire. A few months later, she gave a brilliantly successful concert in Philadelphia singing a program identical to one which Flagstad had sung there just ten days before. This gesture of rivalry symbolizes a basic fact of the Traubel career: it took place during the Age of Flagstad (only four years her senior). Despite Traubel's enormous success, she was fated always to be compared with the great Norwegian in her central repertoire, the three Ring Briinnhildes, and Isolde. Still, they were friendly colleagues, and any direct rivalry ended when Flagstad returned to Norway in 1941. When she returned for the 1950-51 season, she insisted to

Metropolitan manager Rudolf Bing that she share the Wagner roles with Traubel: "She is a great singer, and I will not be the one to push her aside." Throughout the forties Traubel reigned as "Queen of the German Wing" of the Met, the greatest American Wagnerian since L I L L I A N NORDICA, and the new partner of Lauritz Melchior. The Associated Press twice voted her "Woman of the Year in Music"; she won a raft of major musical awards and two honorary doctorates; and in the 1942-43 season she became the first American-born, entirely Americantrained singer to do Isolde and all three Briinnhildes in a season. Her career became international with tours of Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and South America. In the early 1950s she made two world tours, including a historically triumphant stint in Japan. She was, however, essentially American, a symbol of what the homegrown variety could accomplish in a world dominated by hallowed European traditions, traditions she often defied— most controversially when she traded Briinnhilde's armor for flowing gowns designed by Adrian of Hollywood. By the mid-1940s Traubel was feeling the restraints of her devotion to opera, and she turned to a variety of new interests. During World War II she experimented with popular music in USO concerts, with rousing success. In 1948, captivated by the enthusiasm and determination of her fellow Missouri singer Margaret Truman, Traubel became "background adviser" to the president's daughter; the role ballooned into a major problem as she futilely attempted to convince her to resist the blandishments of show business opportunists. Traubel's commanding figure and booming laughter became famous to a vast new audience as she appeared on NBC television in 1950 with Jimmy Durante, Red Skelton, Ed Sullivan, and others. In yet another realm of activity, she wrote a short mystery novel, The Ptomaine Canary (1949), which was syndicated in 200 papers. Its lightness of spirit brought it a better reception than its more ambitious successor, The Metropolitan Opera Murders (1951), in which a large, statuesque Wagnerian soprano with a golden voice and a booming laugh escapes murder and finds romance. Her last book, her autobiography St. Louis Woman, was written in collaboration with Richard Hubler and published in 1959. For all her success, Traubel was unable to pursue her dual career as Met diva and popular entertainer for long. Her 1953 decision to add the role of nightclub entertainer to her activities was too much for Rudolf Bing, who in effect made her choose between nightclubs and the

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Met; the result of their very public argument was that she chose nightclubs, leaving the Met for good after her last 1953 Isolde, and accusing her erstwhile boss of "rank snobbery." She further demonstrated her versatility by starring in the successful MGM musical Deep in My Heart (1954) and in the Rodgers and Hammerstein show Pipe Dream (1955). In 1964 she appeared again with Jimmy Durante, and in 1967 made another movie appearance, in Gunn. She died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., in 1972. Helen Träubel made hundreds of recordings for RCA and Columbia, the most famous that of the Immolation scene from Götterdämmerung, in which she is accompanied by Arturo Tos-canini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra— the first recording that Toscanini ever consented to make with a singer. Träubel had a huge song repertoire, but she sang only ten roles in opera, all but two of them Wagnerian. Her talent, her versatility, and her generous embrace of life won her a much larger place in the American consciousness than could ever have been expected for a Wagnerian "specialist." She was a joyous, confident presence who for a time brought some liberation to an all-toostratified American culture. [The best single source of biographical information —and reviews, both good and bad—is St. Louis Woman; it is not entirely reliable, however. She claims there a 1903 birth date and alters other dates to suit; her birth certificate, giving 1899, is available from the St. Louis Div. of Health. It also lists her middle name as Frances. Charles O'Connell's often very revealing book, The Other Side of the Record ( 1 9 4 7 ) , has an excellent chapter on Träubel and the politics of recording. She is given passing notice in all Metropolitan Opera and other opera histories; there is an interesting negative view in Quaintance Eaton, Miracle of the Met ( 1 9 6 8 ) . She received much coverage in the press throughout her career ( T i m e , Newsweek, the major papers); the nightclub vs. opera issue inspired much comment (see Life, Oct. 12, 1953, and Musical America, Oct. 1953, which inclines toward Bing). A N.Y. Times obituary, July 30, 1972, and accompanying article are good, but not entirely accurate. Irving Kolodin's notice in Sat. Rev., Aug. 19, 1972, and Edwin McArthur's in Opera News, Sept. 1972, are informative and affectionate. A death record was provided by the Calif. Dept. of Public Health.] JOHN

SWAN

TUCKER, Sophie, Jan. 13, 1884-Feb. 9, 1966. Entertainer. Sophie Tucker was born Sophia Kalish in Russia to Jennie (Yacha) Kalish, a Russian Jew on her way to Boston to join her husband, who at some point took the name Charles Abuza. In

the early 1890s the Abuzas moved to Hartford, Conn., where they opened a restaurant. Sophie, the second of four children and the first of two girls, attended the Brown School in Hartford and worked in the restaurant. She hated the work and wanted to become an entertainer. Instead, shy because she weighed 145 pounds at age thirteen, she played piano for her sister at amateur shows. In her autobiography, Some of These Days (1945), Tucker recalled: "Gradually, at the concerts I began to hear calls for 'the fat girl' . . . Then I would jump up from the piano stool, forgetting all about my size, and work to get all the laughs I could get." She concluded that "maybe in show business size didn't matter if you could sing and could make people laugh." In 1903, Sophie Abuza married Louis Tuck, a local beer wagon driver. She soon had a son, Bert, and when her husband could not support his family, they separated. In 1906 she left Bert to be raised by her family, with her support, and went to New York to get into show business. Changing her name to Tucker, she literally sang for her supper and began to work her way up. According to her autobiography, when she entered an amateur show the manager hollered: "This one's so big and ugly the crowd out front will razz her. Better get some cork and black her up." Many white entertainers then used blackface makeup, but men like Al Jolson chose to do it. Tucker had to—because of her looks; in American show business, a woman's size and shape did matter. She hated the blackface, but felt she needed it. She made her professional debut in New York Dec. 9, 1906, at the 116th Street Music Hall, and was soon hailed as the "World-Renowned Coon Shouter." Certain that her 165 pounds would keep her out of "pink tights and a spangled G string," in 1908 she joined a burlesque show. Only when her luggage did not arrive for a show did Tucker attempt a performance without the makeup. Although she worried about appearing without a "disguise," the audience loved the way she belted out her zesty ragtime tunes. She was through with blacking up. In 1909 she won a spot in Ziegfeld's Follies, but lost it when the female stars refused to compete with the show-stopping new performer. In vaudeville Tucker achieved stardom by developing a distinctive stage personality and making her size an asset. In 1910 she began singing double-entendre songs like "Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love." Being "big and gawky," she explained, "I made a song such as that funny but not salacious." In 1911 she played in two musical comedies in Chicago and introduced "Some of

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These Days," which was to become her trademark. With new confidence and an act blending catchy rags, suggestiveness, and humor, Tucker rose quickly in vaudeville, her career reaching its first peak in 1914 when she played the prestigious Palace Theatre in New York. When jazz began to replace ragtime, Tucker organized a jazz band and billed herself as "The Queen of Jazz." After her father's death in 1915, she began to sing sad, sentimental ballads. Her success with them led her to dramatize songs, introducing them with skits and monologues that gave them an aura of realism and enhanced their emotional impact. By 1920 her act was essentially complete. She used her booming voice, emotional delivery, and suggestive humor on material that ranged from bouncy jazz tunes to tear-jerking ballads. After five years in a New York nightspot, Tucker in 1922 made the first of many tours of England, where her emotional, honky-tonk style made her a star. Her English popularity was to sustain her throughout her career. Following a big-time American vaudeville tour which began at the Palace, she returned to England in 1925, winning great acclaim in London's fashionable Kit Kat Klub and in English music halls. With the demise of American vaudeville in the early 1930s, the country's top nightclubs became the scene of her greatest American successes. In 1934 Tucker returned to England, where music halls continued the live variety tradition, on a tour that climaxed with her command performance for King George V. Between 1929 and 1945 she made eight movies, two of them British, and continued to play in musicals like Leave It to Me ( 1 9 3 8 ) and High Kickers ( 1 9 4 1 ) . Although she appeared regularly on radio and later on television, Tucker was always best with live audiences. The restrictions of the mass media inhibited her wide-open, earthy style. " I couldn't even say 'hell' or 'damn,' " she complained about radio, "and nothing, honey, is more expressive than the way I say 'hell' or 'damn.'" In her personal life Tucker was caught between traditional values and new realities. She wanted to be with her family and son, but her profession required continual travel, which kept them apart. In marriage, part of her wanted to be led by a strong man, but another part wanted independence and power. She never found a solution to this dilemma. After divorcing Louis Tuck in 1913, Tucker married Frank Westphal, her pianist, in 1914. They were divorced in 1919, and a third marriage, in 1928, to A1 Lackey, a fan who had become her personal manager, also ended in divorce, in 1933. In each marriage, she was the provider and leader.

In addition to supporting her family, Tucker was an active fund raiser and philanthropist. She established the Sophie Tucker Foundation in 1945 and ten years later endowed a chair in the theater arts at Brandeis University. She helped to organize vaudevillians in the controversial American Federation of Actors (AFA), which elected her president in 1938. Conflicts with Actors' Equity ended with the AFA being absorbed in Equity's American Guild of Variety Artists. But the performers ended up with a strong union. By the late 1930s, Sophie Tucker had become an entertainment institution. Her fame in itself made her an attraction, but it was her explosive live performances which sustained her popularity for over fifty years in the United States and England. Like F A N N Y B R I C E , Eddie Cantor, and other unique performers of her generation who served long apprenticeships before live audiences, Tucker was a consummate performing artist with a distinctive stage personality. "I'm the 3-D Mama with the Big Wide Screen," she boomed to a new generation of fans. Audiences never tired of her, and she never retired. In 1962 she gave another command performance in London, and, only four months before her death in New York in 1966, she was enthralling audiences there at the Latin Quarter. In many ways, the song Sophie Tucker first sang in 1928 was prophetic: she was "The Last of the Red Hot Mamas." [The Sophie Tucker Coll. in the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library, contains nearly 300 scrapbooks, as well as reviews, clippings, photographs, memorabilia, and some correspondence. There is a file of clippings in the Harvard Theatre Coll. The best published source of information on her life and career is her autobiography. The entry in Current Biog., 1945, essentially summarizes the autobiography. Biog. Encyc. and Who's Who of the Am. Theatre (1966) lists the major facts about her career. Tributes to her long career in show business appeared in Newsweek, Oct. 5, 1953; Theatre Arts, Oct. 1953; and the N.Y. Times Mag., Sept. 27, 1953. The Cumulative Dramatic Index, 1909-1949 (1965) contains a bibliography of articles about her. An obituary in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 10, 1966, describes her career. The year and place of her birth appear in the U.S. Census, 1900.] ROBERT C. TOLL

TURNBO-MALONE, Annie Minerva, Aug. 9, 1869-May 10, 1957. Entrepreneur, philanthropist. Born in Metropolis, 111., Annie Turnbo-Malone was the tenth of eleven children of Robert and Isabella (Cook) Turnbo. Family tradition claims that Robert Turnbo, a farmer, fought

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with Union troops in the Civil War, his wife and children fleeing Kentucky to find refuge in Metropolis. Orphaned before school age, Annie Turnbo was reared by her elder siblings. After attending public school in Metropolis, she lived with a married sister in Peoria, 111. There she attended high school before withdrawing because of frequent illness. Fascinated as a child with dressing her sisters' hair, she later claimed to have studied chemistry, thus learning to make her unique mixture for enhancing the sheen and texture of hair. In 1900, while living in the all-black town of Lovejoy (now Brooklyn), 111., Annie Turnbo manufactured and sold her "Wonderful Hair Grower." In 1902 she moved her thriving business to St. Louis, where she and three assistants sold her products door-to-door, giving free hair and scalp treatments to attract clients. A brief marriage in 1903 to a Mr. Pope ended after he attempted to interfere in her business. Impressed with the demand for her products during the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, Turnbo launched an extensive advertising campaign in the black press. She held press conferences, toured the southern states, and recruited women whom she trained to administer and sell her products. According to Claude Barnett, founder of the Associated Negro Press, one of her agents in St. Louis in 1905 was SARAH B R E E D L O V E (Madame C. J.) W A L K E R . In 1906, competition from what Turnbo called "fraudulent imitations" led her to copyright the trade name "Poro" for her products and merchandising system. By 1910 she had built a national enterprise. Though many companies sold hair straighteners and pomades at the time, Poro's sales appear to have outstripped the field because of Turnbo's system of franchised agent-operators. On April 28, 1914, Turnbo married Aaron Eugene Malone, an ex-teacher and traveling Bible salesman. In 1918, with profits soaring, Annie Turnbo-Malone built an impressive fivestory factory and beauty-training school in the heart of St. Louis's upper-middle-class black neighborhood. Envisioning a campuslike environment, she named it Poro College. The building's modern facilities were used not only for manufacturing and training but also for religious, fraternal, civic, and social functions. The National Negro Business League made its headquarters at Poro College and black St. Louisans, denied admittance to the city's restaurants and hotels, cherished Poro's hospitality. Annie Turnbo-Malone displayed an abiding interest in the improvement of material and cultural life for blacks. She advertised Poro College as a "constructive force in the development of the race," and her pamphlets dwelled upon the

virtues of cleanliness, good grooming, thrift, and industry. Annual brochures called for "ambitious women to enter a profitable profession" and promised economic independence as Poro agents. Turnbo-Malone personally supervised the training of Poro's "beauty-culturists" with a benevolent, if autocratic, concern for their welfare; one of her several annual awards was given to those who invested in real estate or helped their parents to do so. In St. Louis Poro employed 175 people; in addition, its franchise schools and supply stations in North and South America, Africa, and the Philippines created jobs for almost 75,000 women. In addition to her business acumen, Annie Turnbo-Malone had an instinctive grasp of popular tastes. A Poro girls' orchestra captured headlines in the 1920s. Exotic African coiffures graced Poro advertisements; even the name "Poro" was said to derive from a West African organization devoted to physical perfection. Poro profits reportedly made Annie TurnboMalone a millionaire. Her income tax in 1924— close to $40,000—was publicized as the highest in Missouri. Yet she lived modestly; her money, she explained, belonged to God and should "draw interest in human character." She gave thousands to the local black YMCA and to Howard University Medical School and donated $25,000 to the 1925 St. Louis YMCA campaign, "to show that the Negro . . . is willing to bear his share of responsibility." In 1919, she gave the site for the St. Louis Colored Orphans' Home and raised most of the costs of construction; she served on the Home's executive board from 1919 to 1943. In 1946, over her protest, the trustees renamed it the Annie Malone Children's Home. Turnbo-Malone received many honorary degrees specifically acknowledging her philanthropy. Retaining control of her business, however, was not easy. In 1927 Aaron Malone filed suit for divorce, demanded half of her business, and forced Poro College into a court-ordered receivership. Black St. Louis split in partisan uproar. For political reasons, many sided with Aaron Malone, who had become prominent in local and state Republican politics (partly because of contributions from his wife's business). But black churchmen, the black press, Poro workers, and such leaders as M A R Y MCLEOD B E T H U N E rallied in behalf of Turnbo-Malone, one editorial noting that Poro College had prospered "without the guiding hand of man." An out-of-court settlement on May 9, 1927, affirmed her sole ownership of Poro, and a divorce was granted. Bitter memories lingered, though, and in 1930 TurnboMalone moved her business to Chicago's South Parkway, where she bought an entire city block.

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Tuve In 1937, settlement of a long-standing suit, in which a disgruntled former employee claimed credit for her success, forced the sale of the St. Louis property. A symbol of respectability and success into her old age, Annie Turnbo-Malone died in 1957 of a stroke at Chicago's Provident Hospital. Childless, she willed her establishment and diminished fortune to her nieces and nephews. [The Claude A. Barnett Papers at the Chicago Hist. Soc. contain correspondence, clippings, photographs, press releases, publications, and typescript biographies of Annie Turnbo-Malone. Research materials on Poro College and the Children's Home are also available in the Western Hist. Coll., Univ. of Missouri-St. Louis. Turnbo-Malone's national stature is recognized in J. L. Nichols and W. H. Crogman, Progress of a Race (1920); Carter Woodson, The Negro in Our History (1927); Edwin R. Embree, Brown Americans: The Story of a Tenth of the Nation (1943); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States (1969). Her career is also cited in Eva DelVakea Bowles, "Opportunities for the Educated Colored Woman," Opportunity, March 1923, and in Gladys Porter, Three Negro Pioneers in Beauty Culture (1966), in the Moorland-Spingam Coll., Howard Univ. Brief sketches appear in the Official Manual—State of Missouri (1971-72); the Missouri Hist. Rev., July 1973; the Jour, of Negro History, vol. 9 (1924); and The Ville: The Ethnic Heritage of an Urban Neighborhood (1975). Obituaries appeared in the Si. Louis Argus, May 17, 1957; the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 12, 1957; and the Chicago Daily Defender, May 13, 15, and 16, 1957. Julia Davis, former associate of Annie Turnbo-Malone, provided additional information.] JEANNE

CONWAY

MONGOLD

TUVE, Rosemond, Nov. 27, 1903-Dec. 20, 1964. Literary scholar, teacher. Rosemond Tuve was born in Canton, a small South Dakota town between the Big Sioux and the prairies, the only daughter of Anthony Gulbrandssen and Ida Marie (Larsen) Tuve. Her father was a mathematician and the president of Augustana, a small Lutheran college in Canton, where her mother had also taught music. Her four grandparents all had come from Norway. Her three brothers became successful scientists: George Lewis (mechanical engineering), Merle Anthony (physics), Richard Larsen (physical chemistry). Of her early life she writes: "As the third child among four I chiefly did what my three brothers thought was important, such as learning the Morse code to take down their wireless messages, and playing in neighborhood gangs, but I learned without noticing it before I was ten to care about most of the things I have since

thought or written about—and no doubt was equally inescapably made ready to miss the rest." Her father died when she was fourteen, and the family moved to Minneapolis "to put safely into the University of Minnesota my next oldest brother . . . to prevent him from saving the family fortunes by going on the boards with a Chicago opera company." At sixteen Rosemond Tuve entered the university high school, graduating in 1920. Staying on at Minnesota as a college student, from 192324 she was the student assistant of the renowned Old English scholar Friedrich Klaeber. She claimed that she learned to type overnight in order to get the position. Between sophomore and junior years she taught fourth and fifth grades in the "tiny prairie town" of Toronto, S.D. After receiving the A.B. cum laude in 1924, she borrowed one thousand dollars to go to Bryn Mawr, where she received the A.M. the following year and was awarded the Bryn Mawr European Fellowship. Debts forced her to postpone the fellowship to accept a position at Goucher College, where she taught for two years (1926-28) while also attending seminars at Johns Hopkins. In 1928, with the additional bounty of an American Association of University Women fellowship, Rosemond Tuve was finally able to go to England. She took up residence in Somerville College, Oxford, where she completed the B.Litt. courses and passed the viva. Unable to fulfill the residence requirements, she returned to teach English at Vassar (1929-31) with summers teaching at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, "an experience which left me forever (I hope) left of center, at least of where this country has taken to placing the center." In 1931 she received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr and returned to France to see her dissertation through the press: Seasons and Months: Studies in a Tradition of Middle English Poetry (1933, 1974). She stayed on in Oxford, London, and Ireland, and after a second year with friends in Somerset, went to Connecticut College in 1934. It was at Connecticut that she established herself; for twenty-eight years it was home, providing nurture and appreciation. Minnesota and Bryn Mawr had started her out as a medievalist; Connecticut confirmed her as the foremost American literary scholar of the Renaissance. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947) was the first successful attempt to deal with Renaissance logic and rhetoric as those subjects impinge on poetic images. It was also the most comprehensive effort of traditional historical criticism to answer the ahistorical premises of the New Criticism.

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Van Blarcom This concern with the proper understanding of poetic images continued throughout her career. A Reading of George Herbert (1952)— which began as a refutation of William Empson's reading of "A Sacrifice"—developed out of Tuve's deep understanding of the ways in which Renaissance readers understood Herbert's images. The same concern for the proprieties and subtleties of Renaissance images informs Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (1957) and the posthumous Allegorical Imagery (1966). These books and numerous articles and reviews established her reputation as learned, judicious, and vivacious. Connecticut College lacked one thing that Rosemond Tuve grew to know she required: a group of graduate students with whom she could share her learning, and whom she could train as she herself had been trained by her teachers to serve the poets. During her last ten years at Connecticut she held visiting lectureships at Minnesota (1952), Harvard (1956), Aarhus, Denmark (1960), and Princeton (1961). In all of these institutions her formidable learning and unorthodox teaching induced many others to serve the poets in ways that they had not thought possible. She also received a number of awards during these years: an honorary degree with her brother Merle from Augustana College (1952), a Fulbright fellowship to study at

Oxford (1957-58), and a $10,000 prize for extraordinary scholarly achievement from the American Council of Learned Societies (1960). In 1963 Rosemond Tuve joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She died the following year in her home at Bryn Mawr of a stroke. Deeply religious, compassionate, humane and jovial, intelligent and learned, she served the Lord and the poets and showed two generations of Renaissance scholars the way, if they had but the patience and perseverance to heed. [The most complete bibliography of Tuve's writings is in Thomas P. Roche, Jr., ed., Essays by Rosemond Tuve: Spenser, Herbert, Milton ( 1 9 7 0 ) , which also includes a photograph. Tuve's letters to Thomas Roche, 1960-64, will eventually be placed in the Princeton Univ. Library. Autobiographical information appears in Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement ( 1 9 5 5 ) , pp. 1011-12, from which all quotations are taken, and the Vita on pp. 2 3 1 - 3 2 of her Seasons and Months. For further biographical details see Contemporary Authors: Permanent Series, I, 637-38, and the brief appreciation by Dorothy Bethurum in "For Members Only," Publications of the Modern Language Assoc., June 1960, p. i. Assistance with research was provided by a biobibliography by Patricia Buck Dominguez. A death record was supplied by Pa. Dept. of Health.] THOMAS P . ROCHE,

JR.

V VAN BLARCOM, Carolyn Conant, June 12, 1879-March 20, 1960. Nurse, midwife. Carolyn Van Blarcom was born in Alton, 111., the second of two daughters and fourth of six children of William Dixon and Fanny (Conant) Van Blarcom. Her father's ancestors were Dutch, her mother's English. Carolyn spent most of her childhood in Alton, where her father, a native of Passaic, N.J., was a financier. He apparently abandoned his family sometime prior to 1893, leaving his wife to care for six growing children. Fanny Van Blarcom, a native of Troy, N.Y., and a fluent linguist and pianist, managed to raise her family in a middle-class fashion despite the absence of her husband. Most of Carolyn Van Blarcom's early education was informal and conducted at home, where her mother served as her principal teacher. A bout with rheumatic fever at the age of six left her extremely weak and made formal schooling

impracticable; her health was further impaired by the onset of rheumatoid arthritis. These illnesses kept her bedridden for long periods throughout her life. At the age of fourteen, when her mother died, Van Blarcom went east to live with her grandfather, Alban Jasper Conant, a portrait painter, and other relatives. In 1898, despite the resistance of her family, she enrolled in the prestigious three-year course of study at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses. Sickness kept her from her assignments for over a year, but she performed so ably that upon her graduation in 1901 she was invited to become a member of the nursing school faculty. For the next four years Van Blarcom served as an instructor in obstetrics and as the assistant superintendent of nurses at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School. Upon leaving Johns Hopkins in 1905, Van Blarcom went to St. Louis, where she helped to

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Van Blarcom reorganize a training school for nurses. Her work was interrupted for three years by her worsening arthritic condition. When her health improved, she accepted the directorship of the Maryland Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Sibillisville. Her success there led to a similar post at a sanatorium near New Bedford, Mass., which she upgraded from a bleak, underequipped clinic to a well-funded and much-emulated hospital. Her organizational ability and executive skills attracted widespread attention, and in 1909 she was appointed secretary of the New York State Committee for the Prevention of Blindness. There she seized the opportunity to play a leading role in investigating the causes of blindness and in educating the public to ways in which it could be prevented. Van Blarcom found that an eye infection called ophthalmia neonatorum was the leading cause of preventable blindness among newborns. It could almost always be avoided by applying a solution of silver nitrate, but many birth attendants—approximately 50 percent of whom were midwives—were unfamiliar with this relatively simple procedure. This finding prompted Van Blarcom, working with the Committee for the Prevention of Blindness and a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, to conduct a study of midwifery practices in the United States, England, and fourteen other countries. The results of this investigation, published in Van Blarcom's most important work, The Midwife in England ( 1 9 1 3 ) , demonstrated that the United States was "the only civilized country in the world" that did not protect its mothers and infants by providing for the training and licensing of midwives. The book established Van Blarcom as one of the foremost midwife reformers in the United States. She herself was the first American nurse to become a licensed midwife. She wrote articles for medical journals and popular periodicals, addressed health conferences throughout the United States and abroad, and helped establish a midwives' school in affiliation with Bellevue Hospital in New York City. In 1916 she became secretary of the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness, and in World War I was director of the Bureau of Nursing Service of the Atlantic Division of the American Red Cross. Van Blarcom expanded her efforts in behalf of mothers and infants during the 1920s. She served as health editor for the Delineator and published three books. Her textbook Obstetrical Nursing ( 1 9 2 2 ) was so popular that it eventually appeared in six editions. A comparable book for the lay person, Getting Ready to Be a Mother ( 1 9 2 2 ) , went through four editions.

Another work, Building the Baby, was published in 1929. Carolyn Van Blarcom's chronic ill health forced her into retirement during the 1930s. She briefly resumed her career during World War II to direct the nurses' aid training program of the American Red Cross chapter in Pasadena, Calif. Although Van Blarcom was not one to engage in self-pity, she did bemoan the fact that her recurrent illness often hindered her nursing activities. During the post-World War II years, her health further deteriorated. She died in Arcadia, Calif., of bronchopneumonia in 1960. [Manuscript materials, including letters by Van Blarcom, are located at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions; at the Inst, of the Hist, of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Univ.; and at the headquarters of the Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumni Assoc., Baltimore. Biographical sketches appear in Biog. Cyc. Am. Women, 3 (1928), 228-37; and in Meta Rutter Pennock, Makers of Nursing History (1940), which also includes a likeness. Obituaries were published in Alumnae Mag., Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, Oct. 1960; and in Am. Jour. Nursing, June 1960. Assistance was also given by Van Blarcom's niece Eleanor Van Blarcom Hughes. Death certificate was obtained from the Calif. Dept. of Health.] JUDY

BARRETT

LITOFF

VAN DOREN, Irita Bradford, March 16, 1 8 9 1 Dec. 18, 1966. Literary editor. Irita Van Doren, who directed the New York Herald Tribune's Book Review for thirty-seven years, was born in Birmingham, Ala., the oldest of two daughters and two sons of Ida Henley (Brooks) and John Taylor Bradford. Her unusual given name was coined by her mother from Ida and Marguerite. Both parents were of English descent, her father born in Florida, her mother in Alabama. The family moved to Tallahassee, Fla., when Irita was four. Her father, a merchant and owner of a sawmill, was killed by a discharged workman when she was nine; her mother, an accomplished musician and a good cook, then supported the family by giving music lessons and selling preserves. The children helped pare fruit, while one read aloud from Dickens or Trollope. On one occasion Ida Bradford used a small legacy to take her daughters to New York and introduce them to the theater, museums, concerts, and opera, a cultural investment which became a determining influence on Irita's future career. Irita Bradford graduated from the Florida State College for Women at Tallahassee (later Florida State University) in 1908 at the age of seventeen, and the next year received a master's

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Van Doren degree. She then left for New York to pursue doctoral studies in English at Columbia University. There she met Carl Van Doren, who later became a major literary critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer; they were married on Aug. 23, 1912. The Van Dorens had three daughters: Anne (b. 1 9 1 5 ) , Margaret (b. 1 9 1 7 ) , and Barbara (b. 1 9 2 0 ) . They divided their time between New York and an old farm, Wickwire, which they purchased at Cornwall, Conn. The marriage ended in divorce in 1935. Irita Van Doren joined the editorial staff of The Nation in 1919 and became literary editor in 1923. When in 1924 the New York Herald Tribune launched a Sunday supplement entitled Books, later known as the Book Review, the editor, Stuart Sherman, chose her as his assistant. Upon Sherman's death in 1926, Van Doren succeeded him. During the next thirty-seven years, she came to exert a broad cultural influence, not only in New York but across the country, as booksellers followed the Review's reports and bought accordingly. Van Doren drew around her a brilliant group that included her brother-in-law, Mark Van Doren, and such other Columbia lights as Joseph Wood Krutch and John Erskine, as well as writers from the broader literary world, among them Stephen Vincent Benêt, Carl Sandburg, and John Gunther. French and English authors-André Maurois, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, and Harold J. Laski—were also friends and contributors. Irita Van Doren helped to shape her times not only because of the post she held but also because of the person she was. She made the Book Review "one of the liveliest, best balanced, best written, and most authoritative" of American literary publications. Through her wide acquaintance in the literary world, she convincec1 famous writers to become contributors, despite the modest fees she could afford to offer. During a career that stretched from the era of G E N E S T R A T T O N - P O R T E R ' S enormously successful sentimental novels to that of Norman Mailer, Van Doren's editorial policy remained catholic. Books should be appraised, she believed, "from the point of view from which they are written so that they will ultimately find the audience for which they are intended." Irita Van Doren's literary activities extended beyond her editorship of the Book Review. Beginning in 1938, she presided over the Book and Author luncheon series cosponsored by the Herald Tribune and the American Booksellers Association and designed to bring together contemporary writers and the reading public. Though many publishers wished to gather Van Doren's informative, incisive introductions of

her author-guests into a book, she gently refused, describing herself as the nonwriting Van Doren. She served on the editorial board of The American Scholar ( 1 9 3 5 - 6 6 ) and on the board of directors of the Herald Tribune during the years when the Reid family owned the newspaper. She retired from the Book Review in 1963 to become consultant to William Morrow & Co., the publishers. Outside the publishing world, Irita Van Doren had friends as diverse as Virgil Thomson and Houdini. She assisted her longtime friend, the industrialist and 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, in the preparation of his speeches and of his influential book, One World ( 1 9 4 3 ) . She is also said to have counseled him in the phrasing of his letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, supporting the administration but stating Willkie's unwillingness to accept a post in it (Barnard, p. 136). Van Doren received several honors, including the Constance Lindsay Skinner Award in 1942. She was known throughout the writing and publishing field for her personal warmth, her professionalism, and her serene management of her private life. She maintained close relationships with her daughters while supervising two homes and a domestic staff. Irita Van Doren had sparkling dark eyes, dark hair, later turning gray, and a trim figure which remained youthful. She suffered a stroke in July 1966, rallied, but died five months later in New York of a heart attack. Her ashes, like those of her ex-husband, were scattered at the family home in Cornwall, Conn. [Irita Van Doren's papers, containing correspondence, manuscripts of speeches, articles, poems, and book reviews, are at the Library of Congress. Mark Van Doren, "Irita Van Doren," an unpublished typescript (n.d.) in the author's possession, is an intimate and affectionate memoir. For biographical facts see Current Biog., 1941, which also includes a portrait. A detailed account of her work as editor appeared in " 'Books' Covers the World of Books," Publishers Weekly, Sept. 30, 1939, pp. 1338-47. Printed estimates of her influence include John K. Hutchens, "Irita Van Doren (1891-1966)," Authors Guild Bull., Jan.-Feb. 1967; Maurice Dolbier, "Salutation to an Emeritus," N.Y. Herald Tribune, June 9, 1963; and "Irita Van Doren," Publishers Weekly, Jan. 2, 1967, p. 39. Van Doren as confidante and adviser to Wendell Willkie is discussed in Ellsworth Barnard, Wendell Willkie: Fighter for Freedom (1966), and in Joseph Barnes, Willkie: The Events He Was Part Of-The Ideas He Fought For (1952). Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 19, 1966, and Publishers Weekly, Dec. 26, 1966. Additional information came from Louis M. Starr, Jean Stipicevic, and Van Doren's daughters, Mar-

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Van Hoosen garet Bevans and Barbara Klaw, as well as from personal acquaintance.] GERALD

CARSON

VAN HOOSEN, Bertha, March 26, 1863-June 7, 1952. Surgeon, feminist. Bertha Van Hoosen, a founder and first president of the American Medical Women's Association, was born on a farm in Stony Creek, Mich., the younger of two daughters of Joshua and Sarah Ann (Taylor) Van Hoosen. Her father, whose parents had migrated from Holland, was a self-made man who lacked formal education. Born in Canada, he had purchased a comfortable homestead in Stony Creek with money earned digging gold in California; soon after he married the daughter of the farm's former owners. Sarah Van Hoosen was a teacher whose grandfather had migrated with his family from New York state in 1823 to pioneer in the Michigan Territory. Bertha Van Hoosen attended district public schools, graduated from high school in Pontiac, Mich., in 1880, and then entered the literary department of the University of Michigan, as her sister Alice had done. After receiving her A.B. in 1884, she enrolled in Michigan's medical department, despite her mother's objections and her father's consequent refusal to finance her training. She later attributed her choice of career to the independence and the opportunity to "mitigate suffering and save life" that medicine afforded (Petticoat Surgeon, p. 5 5 ) . To pay her way, she did obstetrical nursing, demonstrated classroom anatomy, and taught school. Graduating in 1888, Van Hoosen felt her medical training at Michigan to have been clinically inadequate. She devoted the next four years to clinical residence at the Woman's Hospital in Detroit, the Kalamazoo (Mich.) State Hospital for the Insane, and the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston. Van Hoosen opened a private practice in Chicago in 1892. It developed slowly at first, but she kept active during the lean years by teaching anatomy and embryology at the Woman's Medical School of Northwestern University and by giving public health lectures to such organizations as the Kindergarten Association. Her competence as a physician eventually overcame the handicap of being female, and within five years she had more paying patients than she could handle. She also began to make her mark on Chicago's medical community. After the Woman's Medical School closed in 1902, she became professor of clinical gynecology at the Illinois University Medical School ( 1 9 0 2 - 1 2 ) , despite strong opposition to the appointment of

a woman. She was later named professor and head of obstetrics at Loyola University Medical School ( 1 9 1 8 - 3 7 ) , thus becoming the first woman to head a medical division at a coeducational university. She attended at several Chicago hospitals, and in 1913 became chief of the gynecological staff at Cook County Hospital, the first time a woman physician received a civil service appointment; in 1920 she also became chief of the obstetrical staff there. Throughout her career, Bertha Van Hoosen devoted herself to women's health concerns. Although a brilliant general surgeon, like many women physicians of her generation she was particularly interested in obstetrics and treated mostly women and children. She helped develop better methods of prenatal care and in 1930 established the first human breast milk bank in Chicago. An enthusiastic feminist, she lectured for many years on sex education to the Committee on Social Purity of the Chicago Woman's Club. Van Hoosen also pioneered in the use of scopolamine-morphine anesthesia in childbirth. Known as twilight sleep, the popular German method became a cause célèbre for some American feminists who demanded in 1914 that physicians recognize the right of every woman to choose painless delivery. Van Hoosen, who had been experimenting with the method since 1904, considered it "the greatest boon the Twentieth Century could give to women." She was in a minority among her medical colleagues, many of whom considered twilight sleep unsafe, but by 1908 she had delivered 2,000 healthy babies with the help of scopolamine, and later published her research in a book, ScopolamineMorphine Anaesthesia ( 1915), and two articles. Van Hoosen, who confessed to the ambition of being "as good a doctor as the best man," did much to advance the position of women in medicine. She trained over twenty women surgeons, many of whom served as missionaries in China, and were proud to be considered her "surgical daughters." A peppery perfectionist, this small outspoken woman with flaming red hair and a temper and sense of humor to match had a profound impact on medical students, especially women, who found her a demanding but inspiring teacher. Van Hoosen also assisted other women physicians, traveling as far as Detroit to consult with and perform operations for nonsurgical colleagues. As her medical career advanced, Van Hoosen became increasingly irritated by her anomalous position as a woman physician in relation to her male colleagues. She smarted at the fact that the Chicago Gynecological and Obstetrical Society still barred women members, and felt isolated at

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Van Kleeck American Medical Association conventions. Consequently, in 1915 she called a meeting of Chicago medical women which led to the formation of the American Medical Women's Association (AMWA). As the first president of AMWA, she fought unsuccessfully for the right of women physicians to serve in the armed forces during World War I. Although many of her colleagues were suspicious of separatism, Van Hoosen remained convinced that a woman's organization was a necessity as long as women physicians experienced discrimination. Over the years she served the AMWA in numerous capacities. Though she never married, Bertha Van Hoosen found a family in her widowed sister Alice and her beloved niece, Sarah Van Hoosen Jones, whom she treated like a daughter. Despite their early objections to her choice of medicine, her parents later gave her support. Always vibrant and full of energy, she performed her last operation in 1951 at the age of eighty-eight. She died a year later of a stroke at a convalescent home in Romeo, Mich. [The Bentley Historical Library, Univ. of Michigan, has correspondence, diaries, and clippings on Van Hoosen's years at the Univ. of Michigan and on her professional activities, and correspondence with her sister and niece. The AMWA Coll., Cornell Univ. Archives, has numerous references to her, and the Chicago Hist. Soc. has some newspaper and magazine clippings on her public career. A reference to her dissatisfying term as resident physician at the New England Hospital is in the New England Hospital MSS. in the Sophia Smith Coll. at Smith College. Van Hoosen's autobiography, Petticoat Surgeon ( 1 9 4 7 ) is the best source of information on her career and private life. Her articles on twilight sleep are "The New Movement in Obstetrics," Woman's Med. Jour., June 1915, pp. 121-23, and "Scopolamin Anesthesia in Obstetrics," Currert* Research in Anesthesia and Analgesia, May-June 1928, pp. 151-54. She also wrote a short history of AMWA, "Looking Backward," Jour. Am. Med. Women's Assoc. (JAMWA), Oct. 1950, pp. 4 0 6 - 0 8 . Tributes include Mabel E. Gardner, "Bertha Van Hoosen, M.D.," JAMWA, Oct. 1950, pp. 4 1 3 - 1 4 (with photograph); Rose V. Menendian, "Bertha Van Hoosen: A Surgical Daughter's Impressions," JAMWA, April 1965, pp. 3 4 9 - 5 0 ; and "Bertha Van Hoosen, M.D. ( 1 8 6 3 - 1 9 5 2 ) , " JAMWA, July 1963, pp. 533^13. A death record was provided by Mich. Dept. of Health.] REGINA M A R K E L L

MORANTZ

VAN KLEECK, Mary Abby, June 26, 1883June 8, 1972. Social researcher and reformer. Mary Abby van Kleeck was born in Glenham, N.Y., the second daughter and youngest of three children of the Reverend Robert Boyd and Eliza

(Mayer) Van Kleeck. Her mother was the daughter of a founder of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; her father, an Episcopal minister of Dutch ancestry, came from a family of clergymen. A member of the National Society of Colonial Dames, Mary Van Kleeck—she later changed the capitalization of her last name—was proud of her Dutch heritage. After her father's death in 1892, the family moved to Flushing, N.Y., where Mary was educated in public schools. Graduating from Flushing High School in 1900, she went on to Smith College and received her A.B. in 1904. The following year the socially conscious minister's daughter began her long and influential career as a social investigator. As a fellow of the College Settlements Association, she conducted research on girls in New York City factories and child labor in tenements (1905-06) and then, as industrial secretary of the Alliance Employment Bureau, began her investigations of women's employment. The Russell Sage Foundation, which had supported her studies since 1908, made them an integral part of its committee on women's work established in November 1910. From these beginnings came the foundation's department of industrial studies, which, except for the brief period 1918-19, van Kleeck served as director until she retired in 1948. The department functioned from the start as a research rather than a propaganda agency. But, like other Progressives, van Kleeck believed that the facts, once publicized, would provide the essential impetus for action. Her own research led to a series of pioneering studies, including Artificial Flower Makers (1913), Women in the Bookbinding Trade (1913), and Wages in the Millinery Trade (1914). Her work, and that of her collaborators—some of them her students at the New York School of Philanthropy, where she taught from 1914 to 1917— influenced judicial opinion and helped shape protective legislation. A tireless perfectionist, van Kleeck testified at committee hearings, worked closely with public and private agencies, and served on Mayor John Purroy Mitchel's Committee on Unemployment in 1915. Concerned about the economic opportunities of middle- as well as working-class women, she served as president of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations, an organization designed to help women find work in fields other than teaching. As one of the nation's leading experts on women's employment, Mary van Kleeck became an influential figure in Washington, D.C., during World War I. After earlier advisory work, she joined the army's Ordnance Department at the beginning of 1918 as director of the women's

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Van Kleeck branch of its industrial service section. There she drew up standards for the employment of women in war industries that were ultimately adopted by the War Labor Policies Board. (She was herself a member of the Board, 1918-19.) With strong endorsement from the Women's Trade Union League, van Kleeck was appointed director of the women in industry service, set up in the Department of Labor in July 1918. Gathering information by field visits, negotiating with employers and with other government agencies, the service sought to avoid or correct substandard conditions of employment. It was perhaps most important as the forerunner of the permanent, peacetime Women's Bureau. When van Kleeck resigned her post after a year, her assistant director, M A R Y ANDERSON, succeeded her. Returning to the Russell Sage Foundation in 1919, van Kleeck led the department of industrial studies in new directions. The department had already begun to focus on broad issues of labor and unemployment that affected men as well as women. After the war it turned to the experiments in employer-employee relations— the operation of company unions, wage earners' participation in management, and other plansthen taking place throughout the country. The department also developed an interest in unemployment statistics, and during the twenties and thirties investigated the economic roots of insecurity and the causes of workers' dissatisfaction, notably in the coal industry. Throughout this period, van Kleeck kept up her interest in matters concerning women's employment, remaining in close touch with the Women's Bureau. Like other reformers of her generation, she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment which she feared would undo protective legislation for women. A woman of great intelligence, van Kleeck commanded attention whenever and wherever she spoke. As a sought-after member of government committees, she served on the President's Conference on Unemployment (1921) and Committee on Unemployment and Business Cycles (1922-23). Her humanitarian interests were broad: she chaired the executive committee that established the National Interracial Conference held in Washington (1928), helped to draft a report to the International Labor Organization on the economic position of women (1936), and was a member of the executive committee of Hospites, a relief organization that offered employment and financial aid to refugees from Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s. Van Kleeck remained active in the field of social work in the United States and abroad, lecturing at the Smith College School of Social

Work in the 1920s, and serving as president of the Second International Conference of Social Work, Frankfurt-am-Main, in 1932. She was also a trustee of Smith College from 1922 to 1930. The urgencies of World War I and the depression, together with a strong Episcopal faith that led her to Christian socialism, changed van Kleeck from a Progressive-style moral reformer, interested in alleviating working conditions for women, into a bold social critic. The change was dramatically illustrated during the early days of the New Deal. When F R A N C É S PERKINS appointed her to the Federal Advisory Council of the United States Employment Service in August 1933, van Kleeck resigned after one day, citing her objections to New Deal policies that she believed weakened labor unions, gave increased power to monopolies, and failed to recognize the right of workers to bargain collectively. By this time she had come to believe that a fundamental reconstruction of American society was necessary. In Miners and Management (1934), a study of union-management cooperation in the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company owned by Josephine Roche (1886-1976), van Kleeck advocated socialization of all industry. Collective ownership would, she believed, set free not only the workers but also the rest of society, and would be wholly in keeping with a democratic political system. In Creative America (1936), a synthesis of her political and social views, she argued strongly against private ownership of the means of production. Her proposals for accomplishing change were not extreme, however. Rather, she continued to argue for a strong labor movement and an economic base of modified collectivism. Believing that economic crises were worldwide and interlocking, van Kleeck became increasingly involved in international affairs. As associate director of the International Industrial Relations Institute from 1928 to 1948, she organized and participated in conferences designed to further international economic cooperation and to use social and economic planning to improve the world's productive capacity. With Mary L. Fleddérus, director of the Institute and a close friend who joined the department of industrial studies in 1937, van Kleeck wrote Technology and Livelihood (1944), an analysis of changes in labor requirements and employment opportunities growing out of technological developments. Stirred by the commitment of Soviet socialism to common ownership and the elimination of private profit, van Kleeck joined SovietAmerican friendship societies and traveled to the

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Van Waters

Soviet Union. Beginning in the early thirties, she defended Soviet foreign policy, advocated five-year plans for the United States, and contributed articles praising Soviet society to the Daily Worker, Soviet Russia Today, and New Masses. In the decades that followed, she maintained her loyalty to the ideals of Soviet socialism. Van Kleeck continued to write and lecture in the 1940s and developed new interests in community organization, disarmament, and the peacetime use of atomic energy. In 1948, after forty years, she retired from the Russell Sage Foundation. That year she supported the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace and herself ran unsuccessfully for the New York state senate as the candidate of the American Labor party. Her radical sympathies led to a subpoena in March 1953 from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Joseph McCarthy. A woman of great integrity with a keen and penetrating mind, Mary van Kleeck possessed considerable human sympathy and great determination to improve conditions for working people. Her sense of a Christian duty to promote progressive social change found expression in lifelong affiliation with the Episcopal League for Social Action, social service arm of the Episcopal church, and with the Church League for Industrial Democracy. She was also a member of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, the Episcopal organization of women devoted to contemplation and to the study of social issues. Van Kleeck retired to Woodstock, N.Y. In 1972, shortly before her eighty-ninth birthday, she died in Kingston, N.Y., of a heart attack. [The papers of Mary van Kleeck, including clippings, addresses, articles, industrial studies, and scrapbooks, are in the Sophia Smith Coll., Smith College. Additional material is in the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs of Wayne State Univ. and in the Nat. Archives, Social and Industrial Branch. Van Kleeck's publications include: "Working Hours of Women in Factories," Charities and the Commons, Oct. 6, 1906; "Child Labor in New York City Tenements," Charities and the Commons, Jan. 18, 1908; Working Girls in Evening Schools (1914); and A Seasonal Industry (1917), as well as her investigations and those she directed, which are published by the Russell Sage Foundation. She collaborated in the preparation of Charles S. Johnson, The Negro in American Civilization (1930). Details about her personal life are scarce; see her entry in Who's Who in America, 1972-73. Information concerning her career may be found in John M. Glenn, Lilian Brandt, F. Emerson Andrews, Russell Sage Foundation 1907-1946, 2 vols. (1947), and in Mary Anderson, Woman at Work (1951), writ-

ten with Mary Winslow. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Time?, June 10, 1972; death certificate was supplied by N.Y. State Dept. of Health.] ELEANOR

MIDMAN

LEWIS

VAN W A T E R S , Miriam, Oct. 4, 1887-Jan. 17, 1974. Penologist, social worker. Miriam Van Waters, the leading figure in female corrections from the 1920s through the 1940s, was born in Greensburg, Pa., the second of four daughters and five children of George Browne and Maude (Vosburg) Van Waters. (The eldest daughter died in infancy.) In 1888 George Van Waters, an Episcopal minister who preached a vigorous social gospel, moved his family to Portland, Oreg., and began church colonization work throughout the northwest. An adventurous child, Miriam once got up in the middle of the night to join a cougar hunt. She received a classical education at home and then at St. Helen's Hall, a local school begun by her father, from which she graduated in 1904. As a teenager, she assumed significant responsibilities at home because of her father's pastoral absences and the prolonged trips to Pennsylvania of her homesick mother. Aided by two uncles, she cared for her sometimes rebellious sisters, managed the rectory, and attended to visiting clergymen. But she was often lonely, once writing her mother: "We have so little home life." Van Waters continued her active pace at the University of Oregon, where she founded and edited a literary magazine, wrote for the college newspaper, and participated in dramatic productions. She graduated with honors in philosophy in 1908 and two years later earned an A.M. degree in psychology. Encouraged by her Oregon professors, Van Waters applied for a fellowship at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., then headed by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall. She received the award but soon encountered difficulty working with Hall, refusing to use data on female delinquency to confirm Hall's recapitulation theory. (He maintained that repeated delinquent behavior meant that an individual's development was mired in a "primitive" period of history.) After this clash Van Waters continued her work with anthropologist Alexander Chamberlain and received her Ph.D. in 1913. Her dissertation, "The Adolescent Girl Among Primitive Peoples," anticipated the work of R U T H B E N E D I C T and Margaret Mead ( 1 9 0 1 - 1 9 7 8 ) in its appreciation of diverse cultures and awareness of the force and legitimacy of female sexuality. Even before she began her dissertation, Miriam Van Waters had shown more interest in reform movements than in an academic career.

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Van Waters In 1911 she visited Judge Harvey H. Baker's Boston Juvenile Court, observing the results of parent neglect and inadequate educational and recreational facilities, and two years later she was appointed an agent of the Boston Children's Aid Society, in charge of young girls appearing before the court. Here she became aware of the special burdens of female delinquents, most of whom were charged with sexual offenses and, under the prevailing Victorian code, were assumed to be "morally insane" and incapable of rehabilitation. Van Waters challenged this view by improving court health care services and by vigorously seeking foster homes for her charges. Her reputation flourished but the effort exhausted her, and in 1914 she returned to Portland to head Frazer Hall, the county juvenile detention center. Her work had just begun when she learned she had tuberculosis; her career was interrupted for three years. During her recovery, Van Waters visited college friends in Los Angeles. There, in 1917, she passed a civil service examination and was appointed superintendent of the county juvenile home. Her success in improving conditions at the home led in 1919 to a supplementary appointment to head El Retiro, an experimental county home for delinquent girls, which she called a "preventorium." The routine was distinguished by a degree of inmate self-government, by the payment of wages to inmates, and by the availability of choice of vocational training. A halfway house donated by the Los Angeles Businesswomen's Club aided the transition from the home to jobs. As in her subsequent work, Van Waters tried to give the girls a sense of belonging and infused institutional life with emotional intensity through dramatic productions, poetry readings, and celebrations of birthdays, holidays, and graduations. She also criticized the judicial double standard which penalized women more severely than men for sex offenses. Her distinctive influence, however, derived from her close identification with the rebellious young women whose sexuality she sought to justify and guide rather than suppress. Van Waters's work at El Retiro attracted the attention of Chicago philanthropist E T H E L STURGES D U M M E R , who provided her with funds to complete a national study of schools for delinquent girls. In "Where Girls Go Right," published in Survey Graphic in 1922, she praised institutions that met United States Children's Bureau standards for humane care and condemned schools practicing corporal punishment. With Dummer's continued aid, she wrote two books, Youth in Conflict (1925) and Parents on Probation (1927), in which she related delin-

quency to adult enthusiasm for mechanized civilization. In 1920 Miriam Van Waters passed the California bar exam and was appointed referee of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court. This job provided professional visibility and her dynamic speeches at penal and social work conventions further enhanced her reputation. In 1927 Felix Frankfurter invited her to evaluate juvenile facilities in Boston for the Harvard Law School Crime Survey. Two years later she was appointed a consultant to the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (the Wickersham Commission), for which she prepared a study of juvenile offenders against federal law. In The Child Offender in the Federal System of Justice (1932) she condemned the failure of district courts to utilize juvenile court procedures or to supervise juvenile reformatories. Stimulated by the social and intellectual life in Cambridge, Van Waters seized the opportunity to succeed the late J E S S I E HODDER in 1932 as superintendent of the Massachusetts Women's Reformatory at Framingham. There Van Waters carried on Hodder's liberal policies of conditional release and day service indenturing and, like Hodder, permitted some inmates to keep their children in the institution's nursery. She also increased medical and psychological services and added a distinctive touch by organizing numerous clubs for inmates, whom she preferred to call students. The clubs reflected Van Waters's emphasis upon self-government as well as her acceptance of prevalent social divisions; black prisoners, for example, had their own club. In the 1930s and 1940s, however, the Framingham institution was considered avant-garde. Miriam Van Waters, enjoying the support of Gov. Leverett Saltonstall and Commissioner of Corrections Francis Sayre, was at the peak of her career. She also continued to play the leading role within her family. When her father's investments failed, she contributed to the education and support of her siblings. Her brother Ralph and his wife Bertha held various jobs at Framingham, and her mother lived there after she was widowed. Attractive and vivacious, Miriam Van Waters had a number of suitors, but never married. In 1932 she adopted a child, Sarah Ann (b. 1922), whom she had first met as a seven-year-old ward of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court. Sarah Ann Van Waters, who married young, had three children, and was divorced in 1949, had a troubled life. She was killed in an automobile accident in 1953. On Nov. 10, 1947, Miriam Van Waters's life changed abruptly when an Italian prisoner from

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Van Waters Boston's North End committed suicide at Framingham. Commissioner of Corrections Elliott McDowell, under pressure from the Hearst press (always critical of Van Waters for her opposition to capital punishment), conducted a lengthy series of investigations. He charged her with condoning lesbianism, illegally permitting ex-inmates to become institution employees, and failing to supervise indenture for day work or adult education. In January 1949 McDowell fired Van Waters, but a special governor's commission reversed his decision. Her defense was publicized and paid for by the Friends of Framingham, which rallied supporters of liberal penology, and by her friends throughout the nation. At the crowded and dramatic final hearings, the group's lawyer disproved most of McDowell's charges. Van Waters returned to Framingham to be emotionally welcomed by the inmate choir singing the "Te Deum." She remained superintendent until 1957, reaping plaudits for her defense of liberal penological principles and receiving several honorary degrees. The reformatory program itself was much reduced. Under pressure from the department of corrections, the nursery was phased out, day work severely curtailed, and visits by former inmates forbidden. In her later years Miriam Van Waters reaffirmed her beliefs in speeches and articles and in 1963 she began to write a book entitled "Redemption in Prison." Until her death of pulmonary disease in 1974, she continued to live in Framingham, not far from the reformatory. [The Miriam Van Waters Papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, contain personal and professional correspondence and drafts of articles and speeches, and of "Redemption in Prison." Related collections are the Ethel Sturges Dummer Papers and the Friends of the Framingham Reformatory Papers, also in the Schlesinger Library. Information about Van Waters's work for the Boston Crime Survey and for the Wickersham Commission is in the archives of the Harvard Law School. She wrote many articles and book reviews, the most distinguished of which are "Adolescence," En eye. Social Sciences, vol. I ( 1 9 3 0 ) ; "Juvenile Delinquency and Juvenile Courts," Encyc. Social Sciences, vol. VIII ( 1 9 3 2 ) ; "Philosophical Trends in Modern Social Work," Nat. Conference of Social Work, Proceedings, 1930. The only published biography, Burton J. Rowles, The Lady at Box 99 ( 1 9 5 9 ) , is entertaining but hagiographic. Janet T. St. Goar, "Extending the Boundaries: Miriam Van Waters, Superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women, 1 9 3 2 - 1 9 5 8 " (B.A. honors thesis, Harvard Univ., 1978), is a more serious study. See also Current Biog., 1963. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 18, 1974, and Boston Globe, Jan. 19, 1974.

Additional information for this article was provided by Mason Wilson and Kathleen Marquis. Death certificate supplied by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] ROBERT M. MENNEL

VERNON, Mabel, Sept. 10, 1883-Sept. 2, 1975. Suffragist, feminist, pacifist. Mabel Vernon, tireless fund raiser, organizer, and speaker for the causes of women's rights and world peace, was born in Wilmington, Del., the youngest of seven children of George Washington and Mary (Hooten) Vernon. She had five brothers and one sister; four half brothers and one half sister from her father's first marriage also lived in Wilmington. Her father, whose family had migrated to America from Wales in the eighteenth century, was the editor and publisher of the Wilmington Daily Republican until his death in 1901. He was of Quaker background, but the family worshipped at a Presbyterian church. Mabel Vernon attended the small, private Miss Bigger's School and graduated from the Wilmington Friends School in 1901, returning there to study German after a month at Smith College. She entered Swarthmore College in 1903 and earned her A.B. in 1906. At Swarthmore Vernon met Alice Paul (1885-1977), a fellow student, and it was this friendship that later focused her interest in women's rights. To support herself after college, Vernon taught German and Latin at Radnor High School in Wayne, Pa. Meanwhile her interest in the suffrage movement was already growing, and she served as an usher at the Philadelphia National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) convention in 1912. When Paul asked her to work as a suffrage organizer in 1913, Vernon left teaching and, working for a small salary, devoted full time to the cause. She brought to it the skills developed as an award-winning college debater, and she became the first national suffrage organizer for NAWSA's militant offshoot, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which in 1917 merged with the National Woman's party (NWP). In 1914 Vernon was sent to Nevada to work with ANNE MARTIN in the campaign for ratification of that state's suffrage amendment. The next year she arranged SARA BARD FIELD'S transcontinental auto campaign for woman suffrage. Vernon is credited with one of the first acts of militancy of the suffragists' campaign, interrupting President Woodrow Wilson in a Washington, D.C., speech of July 4, 1916. She was a vocal member of a small commission that met with Wilson in May 1917 to demand support for a federal suffrage amendment. That same year

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Vernon she picketed the White House and was among the first suffragists to be sent to prison. She spent three days in the District of Columbia jail, and after her release traveled through the midwestern and northwestern states to explain the NWP actions to the public. Vernon's activities in this period were as varied as her interests. She served as campaign manager for the 1918 and 1920 senatorial campaigns of Anne Martin, and, after passage of the suffrage amendment by Congress in 1919, spoke out for its ratification. For a time she left political activity, acting as superintendent for the Swarthmore Chautauqua, organizing meetings and lecturing on feminism. In 1923 she returned to school and earned her A.M. in political science from Columbia University (1924). But women's rights continued to engage her, and in 1924-25 she traveled across the country supporting women candidates for Congress. She then returned to the NWP as executive secretary to work for the Equal Rights Amendment. In what was considered her most impressive speech, she championed the NWP's unsuccessful membership bid at the Tenth Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Paris (1926). In 1930 Vernon joined the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom ( W I L P F ) , moving on from the NWP to devote herself to the causes that would become her life's work: peace and disarmament. As campaign manager, she organized a transcontinental Peace Caravan in 1931, gathering signatures for petitions to be presented at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference in Geneva. She represented the United States at the W I L P F conferences in Zurich in 1934 and in Geneva in 1935. Vernon also acted as campaign director in 1935 for the Peoples Mandate to End War, a committee of the W I L P F which stressed a worldwide campaign for peace. By 1944 Vernon had come to focus her efforts specifically on Latin America. She served as director of the renamed Peoples Mandate Committee for Inter-American Peace and Cooperation, and chaired the committee from 1950 until her retirement in 1955. Vernon applied the methods used in the suffrage fight to the cause of peace, often working behind the scenes to raise money and organize petition drives. She led the United States delegation of the Peoples Mandate to the InterAmerican Conference for the Maintenance of Peace in 1936 in Buenos Aires, spoke at the Pan American Conference at Lima in 1938, and was a member of the Inter-American delegation at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. In 1942 she was awarded the

Diploma de Honor by the Ecuadorean Red Cross and in 1944 received the Al Mérito from Ecuador in recognition of her longtime commitment to peace. Vernon shared her Washington, D.C., apartment with Consuelo Reyes-Calderon, a close friend and Peoples Mandate colleague, from 1951 until her death there in 1975 of arteriosclerotic heart disease. She was remembered— and often praised during her lifetime—as an articulate speaker with a strong and resonant voice, and as a successful fund raiser. Above all, it was her political acumen—reflected in endless canvassing, petitioning, lobbying, even picketing when necessary—which made Mabel Vernon an effective as well as loyal and energetic advocate of equality and peace. [The Anne Martin Coll., at the Bancroft Library, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, contains the Mabel Vernon correspondence, 1914-20, as well as an excellent file of clippings on suffrage and on Martin's senatorial campaigns. Information about Vernon's activities with the W I L P F and the Peoples Mandate can be found in the Swarthmore College Peace Coll. The most valuable source on Vernon's life and career is her own oral history, Speaker for Suffrage and Petitioner for Peace ( 1 9 7 6 ) , taken in 1972 and 1973 by the Regional Oral Hist. Office, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley. The appendix of the oral history contains newspaper articles, photographs, information on the W I L P F and the Peoples Mandate, and a transcription of the memorial service for Vernon. It also contains her article, "A Suffragist Recounts the Hard-Won Victory," which appeared in the Am. Assoc. of Univ. Women Jour., April 1972. Oral histories of Alice Paul and Rebecca Hourwich Reyher at the Berkeley Regional Oral. Hist. Office contain additional information on Vernon. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman: On Women and Revolution ( 1 9 7 8 ) for Vernon's speech at the 1926 Congress of the Internat. Woman Suffrage Alliance. Inez Haynes Irwin, Story of the Woman's Party ( 1 9 2 1 ) , and Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (1920, 1976) provide useful information about Vernon's suffrage work. An obituary appeared in the Wash. Post, Sept. 4, 1975. Birth order information from 1880 and 1900 U.S. Census. Death certificate supplied by D.C. Dept. of Human Resources.] LUCY EVE

VON MISES, Hilda. See

geiringer,

KERMAN

Hilda.

VORSE, Mary Heaton, Oct. 9, 1874-June 14, 1966. Journalist, writer. Mary Heaton Vorse was born in New York City into comfort and the expectation of social position; she became an ardent champion of labor and a vivid example of the arduous life of the working writer. Her father, Hiram Heaton, from an old New England family, had owned

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Vorse the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Mass. Her mother, Ellen (Blackman), also had five considerably older children by an earlier marriage; her ancestors had come from England to New England in 1635. Mary was the Heatons' only child. Retired while his daughter was growing up, Hiram Heaton provided his family with a comfortable income based partly on his wife's real estate holdings in California. They spent the summers in Amherst, Mass., and many winters in Europe, where Mary Heaton attended school and was tutored by her mother. At sixteen, she went for a time to Paris to study art; her sketchbooks reveal a competent if derivative style. In 1898, Mary Heaton married Albert White Vorse, a boat-loving explorer and writer. They lived in Europe and in New York, where their children were born: Heaton in 1901 and Ellen in 1907. Mary Heaton Vorse's first book, The Breaking In of a Yachtsman's Wife, appeared in 1908. The year before, Mary ynd Albert Vorse had bought the seventeenth-century Captain Kibbee house in Provincetown, Mass. It became a centrally important place for her. In Time and the Town (1942), she described her symbiotic relationship with the house; later, in her eighties, writing many lists of the activities of sixty years, she noted with sorrow the many months of every year that she had had to spend away from home. Vorse also discovered Provincetown for other New York writers. Because of her enthusiasm, Hutchins Hapgood and his wife, Neith Boyce, came there, as well as SUSAN G L A S P E L L , George Cram Cook, and Max Eastman, the group that was to become the nucleus of the original Provincetown Players. It was on the Vorse wharf that the first company production was given, and Mary Vorse remained a godmother to the several theater groups which carried on the Players' name. Vorse's secure world of family and friends fell apart in 1910: in one day her husband and her mother died. She had much admired her brisk and remarkable mother, and vividly captured Ellen Heaton's refusal to let her children make her old in what is perhaps her best book, Autobiography of an Elderly Woman (1911, 1974). Unable to depend on her father, who had lost most of his income as a result of the 1906 California earthquake, Vorse turned to her writing as a source of support. She had for some time been writing stories in the vein of Stories of the Very Little Person (1911), warm, comic tales of her daughter, and she knew that stories about marriage and children always found a ready market. Vorse later said that her involvement in the cause of labor had its source in her anger and

concern over the miserable lives led by workers' children. It was that interest which brought Vorse to Lawrence, Mass., during the 1912 textile mill strike. Investigating the disappearance of a trainload of food designated for striking workers' children, she discovered the appalling living conditions of mill families. Her anger was transformed into a lifelong commitment to labor, a commitment deepened by her association with the radical journalist Joseph O'Brien, with whom she covered the Lawrence strike. There they joined E L I Z A B E T H G U R L E Y F L Y N N (who remained a lifelong friend), Big Bill Haywood, and Carlo Tresca in demanding a political solution to the continuing oppression of labor. Vorse chose not to join a radical political party, however, maintaining a fiercely partisan support of labor without the confines of a political ideology. Vorse and O'Brien were married in 1912; their son, Joel, was born in January 1914. Their passionate and intense marriage ended with his death in 1915, shortly after Vorse returned from Europe, where she attended the peaceseeking international congress of women at The Hague and wrote of the misery of war. Mary Heaton Vorse (she retained that name for professional purposes) married again in 1920, but divorced two years later. Her third husband, Robert Minor, a cartoonist, was secretary of the Communist party of the United States. She returned to Europe in 1918-19, partly on a Red Cross assignment, to record the aftermath of war, and went to the Soviet Union in 1921 and 1922, reporting on the Russian famine for the Hearst papers. Living in Provincetown, she resided in New York when on assignment, leaving her children at home in the charge of a governess. When Vorse was at home, she devoted every morning to writing—in bed—and tolerated no interruption. Her schedule often annoyed her children, but writing was a matter of family survival. During the late 1920s and 1930s, Heaton Vorse became her frequent companion in covering labor uprisings. Mary Heaton Vorse was a continuous presence during the great labor struggles from Lawrence in 1912 through the Chrysler strike of 1950. Her books and articles in such periodicals as Harper s Magazine, The Nation, and The New Republic provide a history of the evolution of labor militancy. In the early days, when unions pitted themselves against management in a fierce battle to exist, she reported on the mass unemployment in New York in the winter of 1914, the strike by metal miners of Minnesota's Mesabi Range in 1916, and the attempts to murder the leaders of the Industrial Workers

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Vorse of the World ( I W W ) . Her book Men and Steel (1920) gives a vividly detailed picture of the great steel strike of 1919—20. There is anger and compassion in her work on striking textile workers in Passaic, N.J., and in the 1930 novel Strike!, a thinly fictionalized account of the textile strike in Gastonia, N.C., where she was accredited as an organizer of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. During the 1930s, Vorse's writings mirror a change in working-class protest, with workers' demands focusing, after passage of the Wagner Act, on a decent wage. Vorse was on the scene in Flint, Mich., in 1937 where she supported the striking auto workers and with J O S E P H I N E H E R B S T wrote a living newspaper to dramatize the protest of the sitdown strikers. Violence directed at strikers had not abated, however. That same year, in Muncie, Ind., Heaton Vorse was wounded while covering the steel strike. Almost immediately afterward, while Mary Vorse was standing on a women's picket line in Youngstown, she received a grazing wound from a policeman's bullet. That type of armed struggle ended with World War II, and Vorse reported that the business community was coming to recognize that the economic benefits of high wages and contented workers were good for the economy. She was particularly impressed by the skill of Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers (UAW) in meeting the needs of union members by cooperating with the community. Returning to Youngstown in 1949 to report on the steelworkers' strike for old age pensions, Vorse described it as "a restrained, almost a puritanical strike," supported, in the name of the town's prosperity, by merchants, real estate agents, and even policemen. A 1953 Nation article on the "State of the Unions" described joint management-labor support of better working conditions, higher wages, and old age insurance. "American labor," she commented, "has swung away from its old ideas of a class struggle almost without realizing it." Still active as a journalist in her late seventies, in 1952 Mary Heaton Vorse reasserted her view that to be prolabor was not necessarily to be prounion when she exposed the corruption rampant along New York's waterfront. Attacking the longshoremen's union for cooperating with stevedore companies in an illegal hiring system, she applauded the wildcat strikes along the waterfront, as workers attempted to cast off their corrupt union. Never free, according to her friend Dorothy Day, of the need to help "support her children and even her children's children" (Day, p. 1 5 8 ) , Vorse continued to turn out occasional

pieces and to write fiction, the domestic romances which she called "lollipops." Known among her friends as a wit, she wrote several humorous pieces and she published a number of travel articles. In 1939 she had traveled to Europe, reporting on the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia, the German invasion of Poland, and Paris immediately before the occupation. From 1945 to 1947, she returned to Europe on a hard-won assignment from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She had worked as a publicist for the National Consumers' League in the 1920s, and for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the mid-1930s (as an editor on Indians at Work); she began a history of the Massachusetts Consumers' League in the 1950s. Although ill health curtailed some of her activities in the 1960s, she was able to accept the United Auto Workers' Social Justice Award in 1962. She died four years later at her home in Provincetown. Mary Heaton Vorse's significance in her lifetime is at interesting odds with her later obscurity. Working as she did on the edges of many histories—literary, theatrical, radical, labor—she fell from view once she no longer had a by-line. [The extensive collection of Vorse's papers at the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State Univ., Detroit, contains personal and business correspondence, clippings, drafts and MSS., and various documents and autobiographical jottings. Papers relating to her work with the Mass. Consumers' League are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. The Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse (1957) are in the Oral History Coll., Columbia Univ. Vorse's books on labor also include Labors New Millions (1938, 1969). She published more than 190 short stories between 1905 and 1942 in such magazines as Woman's Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, Everybody's Mag., McClure's, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Monthly Mag. (later Harper's Mag.), and the New Yorker. An extensive list of her publications appears in an excellent biobibliography prepared by Rusty Byrne. Biographical material is scarce. There is an enthusiastic chapter, "The Rebel Girl," in Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments (1955), and reminiscences of her in Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (1952), pp. 158-60. Entries on Vorse appear in Twentieth Century Authors (1942) and First Supplement (1955). An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 15, 1966. Further information provided by Beatrix Faust, Miriam De Witt, and Catherine Huntington. Vorse's birth date frequently appears as 1881. The 1874 date is confirmed by the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs and by the 1880 U.S. Census. A death certificate was obtained from the Mass. Dept. of Public Health.]

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LESLIE CAROL

GOULD HURD

GREEN

w WALDO, Ruth Fanshaw, Dec. 8, 1885-Aug. 30, 1975. Advertising executive. Ruth Waldo, a leader in the advertising business in an era of tremendous growth, was born and reared on a farm in the village of Scotland, in eastern Connecticut. She was the only daughter and first of three children of Gerald and Mary (Thomas) Waldo, descendants of eighteenth-century settlers. After attending Windham High School in Willimantic, Conn., she entered Adelphi College, where she concentrated in languages (A.B. 1909). She received an A.M. from Columbia University in 1910 and became a social worker in New York City. After four years she began to look for a field with more opportunity for advancement. Waldo had made the acquaintance of Helen Resor, whose husband, Stanley, was negotiating to buy the J. Walter Thompson Company advertising agency from its founder; when the Resors invited her to join the company as an apprentice copywriter at fifteen dollars a week in 1915, she accepted. Between 1915 and 1930, Ruth Waldo established a solid reputation as a talented and creative copywriter for the Thompson Company, dividing her time among its Chicago, London, and New York offices. These years saw the national advertising of branded consumer products in magazines and newspapers, backed by million-dollar budgets, become standard practice for large businesses. In Waldo's first fifteen years in advertising, it was almost exclusively an art of the written word and of the commercial artist's talent for illustration. As space costs rose, and the challenge posed by color photography and printing became more evident, the need to get and hold the reader's attention placed new demands on writers. And as the share of family income that was disbursed by housewives grew rapidly, "creativity" came to mean the ability to appeal to women, not only in their functions as wives and mothers, but as individuals. Waldo became an authority in such matters at the Thompson Company; after playing an important part at the London office in the early 1920s, she returned to New York, where she supervised women's copy for the entire agency beginning in 1930. While her poise would probably have marked her as someone with more clout than a secretary, Waldo helped establish the idea at the New York headquarters that female copywriters should wear their hats at work, thus leaving no room for misunderstanding. Soon clients, male account executives, writers, and art directors found nothing remark-

able in the growing number of hatted women on the eleventh and twelfth floors of the Graybar Building. During the 1930s and 1940s, Waldo and her colleagues carried out a series of advertising campaigns whose slogans became household phrases. Notable was that devised in 1942 for Pond's, one of the agency's oldest and largest accounts. "She's lovely! She's engaged! She uses Pond's!"—with its society lady elegantly endorsing a low-price cold cream intended for the millions—was emblematic of Waldo's approach to cosmetics, household items, foods, and other products purchased principally by women. Waldo left the business side of agencyclient relations to the account executives of the company, who were exclusively male, but she knew that it was first-class copy that the client was really paying for, and in creative matters she usually managed to get her own way. Ruth Waldo was proud of what she called her hobby—"getting on successfully with people, especially difficult people"—and she coped equally well with economic realities, adapting her approach shrewdly to accommodate depression, then war, and the television-based advertising boom that followed. In 1944 she was appointed vice president of the J. Walter Thompson Company, becoming one of the most prominent women in her field. At her retirement in 1960 she was no prouder of being the J. Walter Thompson Company's first woman vice president than she was of being the first of several, most of whom she trained. Like her friends Helen and Stanley Resor, Waldo was devoted to her work and it remained her consuming interest. One of her close associates later described her in the }. Walter Thompson News as an "intelligent, 'high-intensity' woman, small and birdlike, with a high-pitched, 'chirpy' voice." She was a hard taskmaster, and suffered fools poorly, but she gained a reputation for fairness and honesty in a profession that has been famous for neither. Waldo never married, and lived well within her means, saving a good deal of money over the years. Concerned with peace issues, she joined the Society of Friends in 1953 and on retirement established a trust fund, with the principal later divided between Adelphi University and the American Friends Service Committee. She spent her last years in Connecticut, first in Willimantic, then after 1967 in an apartment in Bridgeport, where she died in 1975 at the age of eighty-nine. She bequeathed her eighteenth-century Waldo homestead to the public.

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Waller [Ruth Waldo published an article, "Invention—the Essence of Advertising," J. Walter Thompson News Bull., Dec. 1929, pp. 9-12. For background information on the agency during her years there see the second section of Advertising Age, Dec. 7, 1964, commemorating the centennial of the J. Walter Thompson Co. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Sept. 5, 1975, and a tribute in }. Walter Thompson News, Oct. 1975. There are tributes in publications of Adelphi Univ., Garden City, N.Y.: Adelphi Now, Jan. 1976, p. 11; and Planned Giving Today, Sept.-Oct. 1977, pp. 1-3. Waldo's college transcript supplied by Adelphi; other information furnished by Bridgeport Public Library, Religious Society of Friends, N.Y. City, and her brother Russell H. Waldo. A copy of her will was provided by Bridgeport Probate Court.] ALBHO

MAHTIN

W A L L E R , Judith Cary, Feb. 19, 1889-Oct. 28, 1973. Broadcasting executive. Judith Cary Waller, pioneer broadcaster and first manager of radio station WMAQ, Chicago, was born in Oak Park, 111., the oldest of four daughters of John Duke Waller, a physician and surgeon, and Katherine (Short) Waller, daughter of the first president of what became MacMurray College, in Jacksonville, 111. Waller's father was of moderate means, but one of his sisters was wealthy and treated Judith Waller to a year's tour of Europe after her graduation from Oak Park High School in 1908. On her return she enrolled in business college and then worked for several firms, including the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in both Chicago and New York. In 1922 Walter Strong, business manager of the Chicago Daily News, whom Waller had met on her European trip, asked her to run the radio station recently purchased by the newspaper. Although she had never even heard of a radio station and doubted her ability to run one, she accepted the offer and became manager of WGU, one of the first stations to go on the air in Chicago. Located in the nation's third largest market, the station, which soon changed its call letters to WMAQ, was from its inception an important broadcasting property. From the beginning Waller showed a talent for programming. Noting that a competing Chicago station was playing jazz and popular music, she developed a classical music format for her station. Her first program featured a visiting opera star, with a piano and violin accompaniment. Radio carried no advertising then, so to attract talent to WMAQ Waller used the lure of publicity in the Daily News. She called regularly on music schools, lyceums, and Chautauqua agencies to invite their performers to appear

on WMAQ. When they accepted, she wrote the publicity for the paper, then went to the studio where she produced and announced the program. She and one engineer comprised the entire staff. Waller was an innovator in many diverse programming areas. She produced the first play-byplay broadcast of a college football game in 1924 when the University of Chicago played Brown. She was also directly responsible for convincing Chicago Cubs owner William Wrigley, Jr., to permit WMAQ to carry all the team's home games in 1925. At Waller's direction, WMAQ broadcast both political conventions in 1924 and Coolidge's inauguration in 1925. She was also responsible for the first broadcast of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and played an important role in the immense success of "Amos 'N' Andy." For two years Waller negotiated with Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, originators of the show, then known as "Sam 'N' Henry," and with Daily News executives, to bring the program from rival W G N to WMAQ. Finally, on March 19, 1928, the first broadcast of "Amos 'N' Andy" was heard on WMAQ. The program's meteoric climb to popularity in both network radio and television confirmed again Waller's remarkable talent as well as her tenacity in programming. The program with which she was most closely associated in the public mind was the prestigious "University of Chicago Round Table," which was originated by WMAQ in 1931 and later carried by the National Broadcasting Company ( N B C ) network. For over twenty years it set the standard for intellectual excellence in broadcasting. The program exemplified Waller's enthusiasm for the great potential of radio and later television as educational media. Earlier she had broadcast lectures from Northwestern University and had introduced a series of educational programs into the Chicago schools. Later she was responsible for the creation of "Ding Dong School," the first successful television program for preschoolers. Waller's career closely paralleled the development of the broadcasting industry. She participated directly in all four of the national radio conferences called in the 1920s by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. In response to a dispute with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) over payment of music copyright holders, she joined with other broadcasting representatives in forming the National Association of Broadcasters ( N A B ) . Waller was also active in the debate over the introduction of advertising into broadcasting, and she used her station's newspaper ties to promote the growth of radio news.

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Waller Preeminent among the broadcasting pioneers, Waller truly worked for the spirit of public trusteeship embodied in both the Radio Act of 1927 and its successor, the Communications Act of 1934, rather than adopting the more common private profit approach. Her conviction that radio should serve the public interest enabled Waller to step down without objection from the positions of vice president and general manager of WMAQ, which she had become in 1929, to become educational director of NBC's Central Division when the network bought the station in 1931; she later became public service director. During her years with NBC, Waller pursued her interest in education in various ways. She served on the Federal Radio Education Committee, and on the Educational Standards Committee of the NAB, and as a board member of the University Association for Professional Radio Education. In the summer of 1942 she worked with Northwestern University to establish a program for persons aiming for jobs in broadcasting. Waller became codirector of the resulting NBC-Northwestern University Summer Radio Institute. In 1946 she wrote a textbook, Radio, the Fifth Estate, which was widely used in college and university broadcasting courses. In an industry not noted for its acceptance of women in positions of leadership, Judith Cary Waller won universal respect and admiration from her male colleagues. Upon her retirement from NBC in 1957, she was praised for her "tough, original, critical mind, and an aversion to stuffiness." After retirement she remained active, heading television workshops at Purdue University and lecturing at Northwestern. She died of a heart attack in 1973 at eighty-four in Evanston, 111., where she had shared a home with a sister. [The primary sources of biographical material are two taped interviews with Waller, conducted in 1951 and 1965, in the Broadcast Pioneers Library, Washington, D.C. That library also has transcripts of speeches delivered by Waller as well as reports and correspondence concerning the Federal Radio Education Committee. Tapes of other speeches are in the Northwestern Univ. oral history archives. The only substantial account of her career is Mary E. Williamson, "Judith Cary Waller: Chicago Broadcasting Pioneer," Journalism History, Winter 1976-77. An obituary appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Oct. 29, 1973, and in the Evanston (111.) Rev., Nov. 1, 1973; death record from 111. Dept. of Public Health. Information was also supplied by Waller's former assistant at WMAQ-TV, Betty Ross West, and by former associates Sydney Eiges and Williams S. Hedges.] MARY

E.

WILLIAMSON

WARD, Winifred Louise, Oct. 29, 1884-Aug. 16, 1975. Children's theater specialist. Winifred Ward, the most influential figure in children's theater from the 1930s through the 1950s, was born in Eldora, Iowa, the youngest of three daughters and third of four children of George William and Frances Allena (Dimmick) Ward. Her parents, both of English ancestry, met and married when George Ward attended law school in Washington, D.C., and later migrated to Eldora, where they became prominent middle-class citizens. George Ward served as mayor, school board member, and county attorney; Frances Ward devoted her time to raising children and participating in civic activities. Winifred Ward remembered her mother as "the dominating force in my early life. She was large and capable, able to do well anything she undertook, but preferring always the big things." To her daughter, Frances Ward represented the world outside their small Iowa town, and on visits to her maternal grandparents in Washington, D.C., an excitingly different environment opened to Winifred Ward. As a child, Ward was particularly impressed by her father's dramatic readings and her mother's cultured musical tastes, as well as by the presentations she witnessed at the local Chautauqua assemblies. After finishing her public school training in Eldora in 1902, she entered the Cumnock School of Oratory in Evanston, 111. Completing the diploma course in oratory in 1905, she directed plays and declamation contests in Eldora for two years before returning to the Cumnock School for the postgraduate course in oratory ( 1 9 0 7 - 0 8 ) . Ward taught for the next eight years in the public schools of Adrian, Mich., then, in 1916, entered the University of Chicago, where she earned her Ph.B. in English. Completing her college work in 1918, Ward was invited to join the faculty of the Cumnock School (which in 1920 became the Northwestern University School of Speech). It remained the focal point for her entire career. During her first ten years there, Ward, with the support of the school's dean, Ralph Dennis, expanded the speech education curriculum from two to twelve courses and negotiated the use of the Evanston Public Schools for field testing her ideas concerning the educational possibilities of story dramatization with children. She became supervisor of dramatics in the Evanston schools, a position she held until her retirement in 1950. In addition, in 1925, with Alexander Dean, head of the University Theatre, and Dennis, and under the sponsorship of Northwestern, Ward cofounded the Children's Theatre of

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Ward Evanston. This theater, which she directed until 1950, provided children with high quality productions of worthwhile drama and served as a laboratory where university students could develop their abilities as actors, producers, directors, and technicians. Unlike the handful of other children's theaters established in the United States during the 1920s, Ward's theater used college students in all adult roles and children from the public schools in juvenile parts. It was therefore a joint university/community venture both serving education and promoting the arts. As Northwestern grew and attracted students and teachers from all parts of the United States, Ward acquired a national audience for her work. A prolific and effective writer as well as a teacher and director, she addressed that audience in numerous articles and several books. Her first book, Creative Dramatics (1930), showed her debt to the progressive education movement, which advocated a child-centered approach to instruction. In it she made a careful, even rigid, distinction between drama with children and drama for children. In creative dramatics, the name she gave to her concept of drama with children, the emphasis was always clearly on the process of creating, thus making the creative act a vehicle for the education of the child. Conversely, in children's theater—drama for children—the emphasis was on the product, or the aesthetic credibility of the thing created. She further expounded this idea in her next book, Theater for Children (1939). In contrast to her first two books, which were written for trained specialists, Ward's Playmaking With Children (1947) was intended for "young people who wish to learn how to guide boys and girls in playmaking, or creative dramatics" and for "experienced classroom teachers who have the desire and the philosophy but not the technique of teaching improvised drama" to children ages five through fourteen. The most comprehensive manual for inexperienced creative dramatics leaders, Playmaking became the standard text in the field. Her last book—the first of its kind—was Stories to Dramatize (1952), an ambitious compilation of stories drawn from world literature suitable for dramatization with children; it, too, became a standard text. In addition to this book, Ward published many articles after her retirement. Besides her accomplishments in teaching, directing, and writing, Ward became involved in national professional organizations such as the American Educational Theatre Association (AETA). When AETA was founded in 1936, Ward was invited to chair a committee on children's theater. Through the committee, she developed a connection between leaders in cre-

ative dramatics and children's theater by founding at Northwestern in 1944 the Children's Theatre Conference, later known as the Children's Theatre Association (CTA), a division of AETA. The CTA has been described as "the most significant organization contributing to the growth of children's theatre in the United States." Ward never married but throughout her adult life was surrounded by intelligent and creative people. One close friend was Harold Ehrensperger, editor and also a teacher at Northwestern. Another was Charlotte Chorpenning, a playwright whom Ward had encouraged to write for children. Over the many years of their friendship they collaborated on numerous productions at the Children's Theatre of Evanston. Hughes Mearns, artist and teacher, with whom she long corresponded, was one of the strongest influences on her work. She was closest to Hazel Easton, her colleague at Northwestern and housemate of over fifty years. Winifred Ward died in Evanston of a stroke in 1975. [The most important source of information on Ward's life and career is the Winifred Ward Papers, Northwestern Univ. Archives, which include biographical material about Ward and her family, personal and professional correspondence, Ward's history of the Children's Theatre of Evanston, creative dramatics materials, speeches, reviews, articles, scrapbooks, programs, and other memorabilia. Also in the collection is the most comprehensive study of Ward's life, Jan A. Guffin, "Winifred Ward: A Critical Biography" (Ph.D. diss., Duke Univ., 1975), which contains a bibliography of her work. An issue of Children's Theatre Rev., vol. XXV, no. 2, 1976, devoted to Ward was expanded into a pamphlet, Ruth Beall Heinig, ed., Go Adventuring! A Celebration of Winifred Ward: America's First Lady of Drama for Children ( 1 9 7 7 ) . It includes an autobiographical sketch written in 1918 and a summary of GuiBn's dissertation, as well as personal appreciations, photographs, and excerpts from correspondence. Books which help place Ward's work in a national context include Nellie McCaslin, Theatre for Children in the United States: A History ( 1 9 7 1 ) , and Geraldine Brain Siks and Hazel Brain Dunnington, eds., Children's Theatre and Creative Dramatics ( 1 9 6 1 ) . Additional information was provided by Hazel Easton, by Ward's niece Louise Nuckolls, and by Geraldine Brain Siks, Ward's former student and professional associate for many years. Death record supplied by 111. Dept. of Public Health.] J A N A. GUFFIN

WEBSTER, Margaret, March 15, 1905-Nov. 13, 1972. Director, actress, writer. Margaret Webster, whose achievements as a director of Shakespeare in America are un-

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rivaled, was born prematurely in New York City where her father, Benjamin Webster III, was then appearing on stage. He and his wife, Mary Louisa (May Whitty), were both superior British stage performers who fostered high theatrical sense and sensibility in their only child. (A son, born Christmas 1903, had died at birth.) During her first three years, Margaret remained in the care of close family friends while her parents toured and appeared on Broadway, often separately. The family then returned to London, where Margaret went to private schools; from the onset of World War I, she attended country boarding academies, graduating from Queen Anne's School, Caversham, in 1923. That same year she underwent two successful operations to correct an eye disorder which had marred her sight from birth. Although as a child Margaret Webster resented the separations necessitated by her parents' professional commitments, she thrived in the artistic atmosphere at home and determined at an early age to become a great actress. Making her first stage appearance at eight, reciting the prologue to the York Nativity Play in a special matinee performance directed by Ellen Terry, she continued to appear in amateur productions, both in and out of school. Webster decided against formal education and enrolled instead in the Etlinger Dramatic School in London in 1924. She made her first professional appearance the same year, as a chorus member in The Trojan Women, and, soon after, was engaged by a longtime family friend, John Barrymore, to portray a gentlewoman in his London production of Hamlet (1925). The bustling theater between the wars offered Webster a unique opportunity to improve her craft. She understudied Sybil Thorndike in Saint Joan (1925), joined the Macadona Players, graduating from minor to major roles in their Shaw repertory and touring Great Britain in 1926, and then appeared with J. B. Fagan's Oxford Company, a collegiate enterprise well known for its presentation of Chekhov's plays. Webster attained her most valuable stage experience beginning in 1928 while a member of Sir Philip Ben Greet's Players, a troupe famous for its consistently commendable production of Shakespeare. She played major roles: she might act Viola in the afternoon, Portia in the evening, and Lady Macbeth, sleepwalking up and down a fire escape, the next day. As a member of the Old Vic Company, led by John Gielgud, during the 1929 season Webster took on second leads; she returned to the company three years later to portray Lady Macbeth. In 1934, Margaret Webster began to direct

drama. Her first endeavor consisted in part of directing eight hundred Kentish countrywomen in the final scene of Henry VIII. Departing from traditional methods, Webster gave individual direction, thus ensuring a balanced staging while demonstrating to each actress her importance in the drama. Such innovation, founded on her empathy with performers, became Webster's signature. Upon her return to London from the Moscow Theatre Festival in 1935, Margaret Webster's career took a decisive turn. She began to enlist more directorial than acting assignments. Her work, particularly for Lady from the Sea (1936) and Old Music (1937), gained increasingly good notices and led to an invitation from her former colleague British actor Maurice Evans to direct Richard II in New York. Convinced by his belief that there was an audience for Shakespeare in the United States, but frightened by the task of directing unknown work (Richard II had not been seen since 1878) for an audience new to her, Webster crossed the Atlantic for the first time in twenty-nine years. The production drew rave reviews and had a record run. For the next thirteen years Margaret Webster's name would be linked to that of William Shakespeare. She became devoted to the production of his plays and to the parallels his works, "the abstract and brief chronicles of time" (Hamlet, II, i, 511-12), offered to modern conditions. After garnering respectable notices as Masha in the Alfred Lunt-Lynn Fontanne production of The Sea Gull (1938), Webster again directed Evans, this time in Hamlet. Conceived as two separate productions, one cut and one uncut version, Webster labored over various play editions, adamant in her dedication to textual fidelity. "Inevitably I applied an actor's ear and a knowledge of stage practices to arguable points," she recalled. She and Evans felt there would be small demand for the uncut version so she asked him to bill it as "Shakespeare's Hamlet in its entirety. Eight minutes shorter than Gone With the Wind" (Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, pp. 26, 37). The response was overwhelming and the reviews were glorious; the shorter version was quickly eliminated, and the production subsequently went on two national tours. The Webster-Evans team followed with Henry TV, Fart I (1939), an equally triumphant production; they had proved the existence of an American audience for Shakespeare. That same year, Webster, working alone, staged and directed four abbreviated Shakespearean comedies for the Merrie Old England exhibition at the New York World's Fair. Meanwhile, Webster's parents had moved to Hollywood. They appeared occasionally, but al-

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ways notably, in film, and worked actively in such war-related efforts as the successful plan to rescue English orphans, all children of theatrical families, and bring them to the United States. Margaret Webster shared in these efforts. In 1940 she spent six months at the Paramount studio before she decided film was not her medium. She had had the unusual opportunity of directing her parents: Ben Webster in The Young Mr. Disraeli (1937) and Dame May Whitty (she had been made a Dame of the British Empire for her humanitarian efforts during World War I) in The Trojan Women (1941) and Therese (1945). Her mother recalled: "The last time I was in Boston I was teaching Peggy to speak. This time she's teaching me to act" (Don't, p. 141). Her father died in 1947, her mother the year after. The 1940s produced the maturation of Margaret Webster's directorial effort and the evolution of her style, both anchored in her commitment to the spoken word. While working with a Shakespearean play, she sought inspiration in the text itself and rarely relied on scholarly interpretation. In 1942 she wrote her superb first book, Shakespeare Without Tears, which included her credo for directors: "We must know our author and our audience and see to it that the actors interpret justly between them." Abhorring gimmicks and stage trickery, she took infinite pains to see that her actors relied on neither. Webster returned to New York in the fall of 1940 to direct Maurice Evans and Helen Hayes in the Theatre Guild's production of Twelfth Night. The following year she again directed Evans, this time with Judith Anderson in Macbeth. Although these productions were wellmounted and well-received, they lacked the inspiration of her previous efforts. For her next project, she cast Paul Robeson in the title role of Othello, and faced "every possible hostility and prediction of doom" (Don't, p. 112). Although an active proponent of civil rights, Webster based her selection rather on the "paramount importance to the play, to its credibility and to the validity of every character in it" (Shakespeare, p. 178) of having a black portray the Moor. Othello premiered at the Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, Mass., in August 1942, and opened in New York in October 1943, four years after the project's inception. Webster portrayed Emilia, as well as directing and partially producing the play; she was especially proud of this production and of the many obstacles it helped to overcome. After a short respite from Shakespeare, during which she first directed The Cherry Orchard and then replaced Eva Le Gallienne in the lead-

ing role (1944-45), she mounted her last great Shakespearean revival. For a production of The Tempest (1945), she daringly cast Canada Lee, a black boxer, as Caliban, and Vera Zorina, a ballet dancer, as Ariel, and employed a revolving stage, flying apparatus, and a small orchestra. Again, critical acclaim attended the run. Margaret Webster, with Le Gallienne and producer Cheryl Crawford, founded the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in 1946. Although it was originally conceived as a resident company, funded by local subsidy, for a major metropolitan area other than New York, ART found its home on Columbus Circle. The founders were motivated by the difficulties each had had while working within the established commercial theater and they strongly believed that ART would fulfill the demands of the nonBroadway theatergoer. After one season, in which Webster both acted and directed, ART failed financially. Webster attributed its demise to the critics' inability to foster noncommercial drama and to the lack of public subsidy for the arts. Webster went on to form her own bus-andtruck troupe, the Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company (Marweb). Modeled after Ben Greet's players, the group of twenty-two actors and eight staff members barnstormed America. Beginning in 1948, and for two years after, Marweb performed in gymnasiums, auditoriums, and civic centers, in thirty-six states and four Canadian provinces. Presenting Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and The Taming of the Shrew, they afforded many their first exposure to Shakespeare or to drama of any kind. The troupe was a financial as well as a popular success; moreover, many young performers gained there valuable training unavailable elsewhere in the United States. Exhausted, but elated by a sense of accomplishment, the company disbanded in 1950. Webster rightly claimed that this was her greatest contribution to the theater. In November 1950 Margaret Webster became the first woman to direct a production of the New York Metropolitan Opera Company when she directed Don Carlos, the season's opener. For six months she had concentrated on the technical aspects of operatic staging, ingeniously using toy soldiers to block the opera. When the production went into staging, she requested that all cast members—including the chorus, a heretofore unheard-of request—participate in full rehearsals. Her efforts were so successful that she continued to direct opera throughout the 1950s: Aida (1951) and Simon Boccanegra (1960), both at the Met; Troilus and Cressida (1955), Macbetto (1957), The

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Taming of the Shrew and The Silent Woman (both 1958), at the New York City Opera. Webster also continued to act and to direct drama, most notably with the New York City Theatre Company. Her career suffered severely, however, after José Ferrer (who had portrayed Iago in her production of Othello) named her before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in May 1951. She underwent a series of ugly experiences: first, the United States government denied her a passport but, because she still held dual citizenship, England granted her one; then she was dismissed from consideration for pending broadcasting assignments; and, finally, she received no offers to work in the theater. Webster had worked for and been associated with many political organizations, most of them theater-connected, but none was communist-oriented. Even after she appeared before HUAC in May 1953 and was cleared of all charges, Webster, like so many of her colleagues, was stung and humiliated by condemnation and fear. She found work in England, however, where she directed The Merchant of Venice at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1956, Measure for Measure the following year at the Old Vic, and Noel Coward's Waiting in the Wings in London in 1960. Webster, with characteristic wit, referred to this period as one of "transatlantic schizophrenia." She regained something of her former position in the United States when the Department of State invited her in 1961 to travel to South Africa under its auspices. As a member of the American Specialists Program, Webster lectured, gave concert readings of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, and directed a production of Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet throughout the country, for both black and white audiences. During the remainder of the 1960s, Webster divided her time between residencies at various American universities, where she taught and staged drama, and performances of one-woman shows, an endeavor she had begun in the early 1940s. She retired to her Martha's Vineyard retreat to write her family's history, The Same Only Different (1969), and her autobiography, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage (1972), thus fulfilling her lifelong mission "to keep language a live and beautiful thing." When Margaret Webster died in 1972 in London, one of Britain's finest theater families came to an end. [The Margaret Webster Theatre Coll., Library of Congress, contains the bulk of her personal and professional papers; additional family material is in the British Museum and the Harvard Theatre Coll. Material relating to Marweb is in the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library, which also has

clipping files on Webster and on individual productions; material concerning her Theatre Guild association is in the Guild's archive, Beinecke Library, Yale Univ. Webster adapted a play from German, Royal Highness (pub. 1949); revised Shakespeare Without Tears, issued in Great Britain as Shakespeare Today (1957); and wrote Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre, Fifth Lecture on the Helen Kenyon Lectureship at Vassar College (1944). A bibliography of her magazine and periodical articles appears in Cumulated Dramatic Index, 1909-1949, and in Ely Silverman, "Margaret Webster's Theory and Practice of Shakespearean Production in the United States, 1937-1953" (Ph.D. diss., N.Y. Univ., 1969), which also includes an interview with her and citations of reviews and works about her. Other dissertations include Janet Carroll, "A Promptbook Study of Margaret Webster's Production of Othello" (La. State Univ., 1977) and Ronald Wolsey, "Margaret Webster: A Study of her Contributions to American Theatre" (Wayne State Univ., 1973). Biographical essays appeared in Current Biog., 1940, 1950, and in the New Yorker, May 20, 1944; a list of credits is in Biog. Encyc. and Who's Who of the Amer. Theatre (1966). Obituaries appeared in N.Y. Times, Nov. 14, 1972, and London Times, Nov. 14, 1972; see also Laurence Olivier's tribute, London Times, Nov. 16, 1972.] HARWETTE L.

WALKER

WEED, Ethel Berenice, May 11, 1906-June 6, 1975. Military officer. Ethel Weed, Women's Army Corps officer in occupied Japan and advocate of the rights of Japanese women, was born in Syracuse, N.Y. She was the oldest of the three daughters and one son of Grover Cleveland and Berenice (Benjamin) Weed, both of British ancestry. Ethel attended school in Syracuse until her father, an engineer who had learned his trade through correspondence courses, moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1919. Grover Weed was a well-read man who enjoyed games, music, and travel and who encouraged his children to be adventurous. Berenice Weed, a homemaker, was very close to her oldest child and supported her efforts as a social reformer. Ethel Weed attended Lakewood High School in Cleveland and Western Reserve University, earning an A.B. in English in 1929. She was the first of her family to seek a college degree. After graduation, she worked for eight years as a feature writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and then, for a brief period, worked and traveled in Europe. In 1937 she returned to Cleveland to pursue a public relations career and until 1941 was assistant executive secretary of public relations for the Women's City Club. She then opened her own office, handling publicity for various women's and other civic organizations.

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Weed In May 1 9 4 3 Ethel W e e d closed her business and joined the Women's Army Corps ( W A C ) , a decision she made after talking with a W A C recruiter whose public relations tour to Cleveland she had arranged. Following basic training, she was sent to Officers' Candidate School at Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in August 1944. As an army public relations officer she did recruiting until 1945. At Officers' Candidate School W e e d had heard about a course in Japanese studies to be held at Northwestern University to prepare a select group of twenty women officers for assignment in Japan once the war ended. Intrigued by the prospect of working in the F a r East, she applied and was accepted. Japan surrendered in August 1945, and Ethel W e e d and her fellow W A C s were soon dispatched to Yokohama on the first American convoy sent to Japan. Their mission was to help set up an Allied Occupation under Gen. Douglas MacArthur to demilitarize and democratize Japan. W h e n W e e d reported to General Headquarters in Tokyo in October 1945, she was given the title of Women's Information Officer in the Civil Information and Education Section, and assigned the task of formulating policy and developing "programs for the dissemination of information pertinent to the reorientation and democratization of Japanese women in [the] political, economic, and social fields." Operating initially from a borrowed table set up in a corner of General Headquarters, she began her work b y developing a circle of Japanese women leaders who became her consultants and close associates. Most of these women had been leaders in the prewar suffrage movement and advocates of other women's rights causes in the 1920s and 1930s. Weed's first big assignment was to promote women's suffrage, which had been granted in D e c e m b e r 1945. American officials, confident that women would b e a force for peace, wanted to assure a high turnout in the first postwar election on April 10, 1946. W e e d undertook an extensive campaign to encourage women to vote, using radio shows, motion pictures, displays, press conferences, and other promotional methods. Despite press predictions that as few as 10 percent of the eligible women would vote, the women's turnout was an astonishingly high 67 percent, not far behind the rate for men. T h e election brought an unprecedented thirty-nine women into parliament, and W e e d was widely credited for the successful outcome. Another major area of her activity was promoting the development of women's clubs and organizations on a democratic basis. Drawing on her experience with women's clubs in Cleveland,

W e e d helped women leaders organize, and in some cases reorganize, such groups as the Women's Democratic Club, the Japanese Association of University W o m e n , the Housewives' Federation, and the Japanese L e a g u e of W o m e n Voters. A pamphlet she prepared on how to run organizations according to democratic principles was widely used by women's groups throughout Japan. In recognition of her efforts in this and related areas, E t h e l W e e d received an Army Commendation Ribbon on Sept. 23, 1 9 4 6 . During 1 9 4 6 the Occupation initiated a number of legal reforms to improve the status of Japanese women. W e e d worked closely with legal experts in revising the Civil Code, providing women freedom of choice in marriage, and equality under property, divorce, and inheritance laws. She also conducted a series of speaking tours throughout Japan to win women's support for such reforms. In 1 9 4 7 she was instrumental in the formation of a Women's and Minors' Bureau within the newly established Japanese Ministry of Labor and from 1 9 4 7 to 1 9 5 2 she acted as the Bureau's defender, ensuring that the ministry would not restrict its funds. She also organized two major trips to the United States, in 1 9 5 0 and 1951, for groups of Japanese women leaders. Her most important achievement, however, was to help women's groups understand and make use of their new legal rights. W e e d had resigned from the W A C s in 1 9 4 7 with the rank of first lieutenant, continuing her duties with civilian status until the last days of the Occupation. In April 1 9 5 2 she returned to the United States. F o r a time she pursued a doctorate in East Asian studies at Columbia University, but she did not complete the degree. In 1954 W e e d and her cousin, Thelma Ziemer, established the E a s t and West Shop in New York City, a bookshop specializing in works on Asia. T h e y moved the shop to Newton, Conn., in 1969. Over the years, E t h e l W e e d maintained contact with a large circle of Japanese women from Occupation days. In 1 9 7 1 she returned to Japan as their guest, and was honored by prominent government and civic leaders for her efforts on behalf of Japanese women. She died of cancer in Newton, Conn., in 1975. [The Women's Affairs Activity File, Nat. Records Center, Suitland, Md., includes memos, correspondence, reports, clippings, and other materials in English and Japanese relating to Weed's work as Women's Information Officer of the Civil Information and Education Section of the Occupation ( 1 9 4 5 - 5 2 ) . A smaller collection of her personal papers, clippings, and correspondence remains with the family. Correspondence between Weed and

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Wells Mary Beard is in the Beard Coll. at Smith College. An account of Ethel Weed's activities in the Allied Occupation appears in Japanese in Shukan Shincho, ed., Makkasa no nihon ( 1 9 7 0 ) , and in Susan J. Pharr, "Soldiers as Feminists: Debate Within U.S. Occupation Ranks over Women's Rights Policy in Japan," in Merry I. White and Barbara Molony, eds., Proceedings of the Tokyo Symposium on Women ( 1 9 7 9 ) . A forthcoming book by Susan Pharr on political women in Japan provides background on Occupation initiatives in the area of women's rights and Japanese women's responses to those initiatives. Articles on Weed's career appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Aug. 25, 1944, Dec. 3, 1945, and March 17, 1946; the Cleveland News, Oct. 2, 1946; and the Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 4, 1946. Assistance was provided by Dr. Elizabeth ( W e e d ) Van Hamersveld.] SUSAN J . PHARR

WELLS, Marguerite Milton, Feb. 10, 1872Aug. 12, 1959. Suffragist, civic leader. Marguerite Milton Wells, third president of the National League of Women Voters, was born in Milwaukee, the eldest of four children (three daughters and one son) of Nellie (Johnson) and Edward Payson Wells. She was descended on both sides from seventeenth-century English settlers in New England, one of whom, Thomas Welles, was an early governor of Connecticut. Her father came as a young man to Minneapolis in 1868, met and married her mother, originally of Farmington, Maine, and together they moved to the very edge of the settlement in the then Dakota Territory. There at Jamestown he began a career in banking, railroading, and politics that made him one of the great figures in the development of the upper Mississippi Valley west. Marguerite Wells spent her childhood and youth with unbroken prairie at her door. The town and subsequently the state were organized as she grew up, and the experience of watching a heterogeneous group of people forming a community and living under a government they themselves had created made an indelible impression on her, nurturing her conviction that democracy could indeed work. She took a precocious interest in government and once persuaded her father, a member of the territorial legislature, to let her accompany him to the allmale party caucus. Dressed as a boy in a slicker, with a cap pulled down over her short bobbed hair, she was exhilarated by the talk she heard and returned home to write an account of it in rhyme. At fifteen she took teacher's examinations and taught a summer session in a one-room Dakota school. Later she attended Miss Hardy's school

in Eau Claire, Wis., and in 1891 entered Smith College, where she rapidly won distinction as a scholar, receiving a B.L. in 1895. Her association with Smith was to be a long one, for in 1915 she was asked to become a permanent trustee, a post she held until her resignation in 1930; five years later Smith conferred on her an honorary LL.D. Apart from two years of teaching in New Jersey, Wells spent the first decade after her graduation from college alternating long periods of travel and residence in Europe with stays at home in Minneapolis, where her family had now permanently settled. In both settings she characteristically took responsibility for other members of her close-knit family, her mother in recurrent illness and her younger sisters during stages of their education in Europe. When in Minneapolis she pursued volunteer work, serving on innumerable civic and charitable boards. Then suddenly, in 1917, came a critical turning point in her life. It is possible that she sensed that her powers had not yet found an object that challenged them. Whatever the cause, she came home one day, resigned from every public office that she held, and went directly to the headquarters of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association to offer her services. Never attracted to causes, she had nevertheless come to the conclusion that the issue of woman suffrage must be decided once and for all so women could turn their energies to more important public questions. Working closely with CLARA UELAND, president of the Association, she threw herself into the final stages of the suffrage struggle, organizing and leading Minnesota's successful campaign to ratify the nineteenth amendment. At the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in St. Louis in 1919, the president, CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, suggested that a league be formed to educate the newly enfranchised voter. Marguerite Wells, who remembered the day and hour that she read Catt's words, was caught up by the idea. While Catt thought that the task might be completed in five years, Wells saw the possibility that this fresh infusion of women into the electorate could contribute something of permanent importance to the functioning of government in the United States. The National League of Women Voters, born in 1920 out of the old suffrage movement, took up this challenge. For the next twenty-five years Wells poured her talents into the organization, serving first as president of the Minnesota League for ten years, simultaneously as a member of the National Board, and, succeeding B E L L E SHERWIN, as the League's national president from 1934 to 1944.

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Wells In the burst of creative educational activities Wells inspired in the early Minnesota years, she soon came to realize that it was through political action on specific legislation or in working for specific governmental reforms that League members learned best the realities of political life. Here failure often taught as much as success. She saw the League's inability to secure ratification of the child labor amendment in crucial states and the failure to prolong the life of Sheppard-Towner, the Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921, as vivid proof not only of the power of entrenched special interests but also of the absence of a voice speaking for the public interest. Here, Wells perceived, was the nub of the problem. If the League were to supply that voice effectively, Wells wrote in 1930, "there must be a nucleus of people in each community who would carry a continuing responsibility for government and would give an intelligent and disinterested political leadership on issues as they arose." To train such people, and to sustain them in an organized way with current political knowledge and know-how was the real reason for being of the League of Women Voters, she felt. More than any other single individual, Wells became the architect of the League's philosophy of government over these years. With the collapse of democratic governments one after another, as Hitler overran western Europe in the spring of 1940, the fate of democracy everywhere seemed in jeopardy. Wells saw this as the League's great opportunity and her letters to state League presidents during the war years, published in 1944 under the title Leadership in a Democracy, Marguerite Milton Wells, convey brilliantly her vision and her sense of urgency. Within this context she began the effort to get the League to educate beyond its own membership. In A Portrait of the League of Women Voters at the Age of Eighteen, written in 1938, she had noted the danger in the League's increasing preoccupation with study, when the need was for action in the outside world where political decisions are made. Asking the League to change its habits, she was pulling it in unaccustomed directions. She sought as well to bring about a restructuring of the League that would make it possible for the national office to work more directly with members. The League's structural problem, apparent for some time, was thrown into high relief in January 1941 at the beginning of the great debate on Lend-Lease. Members received information and calls for action only from state League offices, many of whom failed to forward the material sent by the national, and the force

of the League's work on this critical issue was thus severely weakened. With this in mind, at the National Convention in 1944, when she was retiring from the presidency, Wells proposed for debate a plan to restructure the League. What she sought was open consideration of the issues by the Convention and a conscious choice of direction for the future. Wells's hope was never realized, however, because the Convention became absorbed in the election of a new president, rejecting the official nominee and nominating another from the floor. The plan was thus sidetracked. Pieces of the proposed changes found their way slowly into League practice in subsequent years. Marguerite Wells was not a feminist in any orthodox sense nor was the League of Women Voters an organization that focused on women's issues as such. Wells strongly supported efforts to remove the legal disabilities of women but felt such action in itself would not alter public attitudes. In her view the latter would come only as more women succeeded in responsible jobs. That she underestimated the difficulties women were to encounter in getting those jobs may have been due, in part, to the freedom she enjoyed as a single woman, with education, private income, and rare intellectual endowments. More important, however, was the fact that her focus was on the broader problem, the League's overall objective, of making the democratic process in government work. Small of stature, agile, with snapping black eyes and characteristic flashes of humor, she was a magnetic personality and a natural leader. Her mind fastened on one of the most elusive problems of political science, the role of the electorate in a democracy. What did the system demand of the individual, the citizen, the governed, but likewise of the person who was ultimately responsible through the vote for what happened? There were no easy answers. She was unpersuaded by theories that class structure or the power of money were the sole sources of political evil. Like the Founding Fathers, whose writings she read avidly, she pinned her faith on the belief that, if informed and given time, a majority of men and women would act wisely. An advancing arteriosclerosis clouded her last years and she died of pneumonia at her sister's home in Minneapolis in 1959. [The Wells Family Papers, 1861-1932, Minn. League of Women Voters Papers, 1919-60, and Minn. Woman Suffrage Papers, 1894-1921, in the Minnesota Hist. Soc. Archives, St. Paul, are the richest sources of information about Marguerite Wells. The official records of the Nat. League of Women Voters are in the Library of Congress. A small collection of Wells papers in the Schlesinger

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Wheeler Library, Radcliffe College, contains material on the 1944 League convention and on Wells in retirement. The clipping collection of the Minneapolis Tribune, 1920-59, includes articles from several Minneapolis newspapers tracing her activities. A privately printed volume, Welles-Wells Family, 1636-1936 (1936), which is in the Minn. Hist. Soc. Archives, contains a fascinating account of the career of Edward Payson Wells. See also Mother's Letters (1930), selected by Marguerite M. Wells, and Autobiography of Stuart Wilder Wells (1956). Among Wells's own writings see especially "Some Effects of Woman Suffrage," in the Am. Acad, of Political and Social Sci. Annals, May 1929. Biographical information can also be found in Mary C. Brown, "Among Those We Know," Golfer and Sportsman, Jan. 1940. Avis D. Carlson, "Trail-Blazers in Citizenship," Survey Graphic, Sept. 1945, is a brief history of the League of Women Voters. Mary Wells provided helpful assistance. Death certificate supplied by Minn. Dept. of Health.] JEANNETTE

BAILEY

CHEEK

W H E E L E R , Anna Johnson Pell, May 5, 1 8 8 3 March 26, 1966. Mathematician. Anna Johnson was bom in Hawarden, Iowa, to Andrew Gustav and Amelia (Frieberg) Johnson. She was the second of three daughters, and third of four children. Her parents were Swedish immigrants, her father a furniture dealer and undertaker in Akron, Iowa. After attending Akron High School, Anna Johnson obtained an A.B. degree from the University of South Dakota in 1903. There her exceptional mathematical ability was noticed and nurtured by a professor, Alexander Pell, who later became her husband. Pell encouraged her to go on to graduate study in mathematics, and she received A.M. degrees from the University of Iowa in 1904 and from Radcliffe College in 1905. She then won an Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship from Wellesley College to attend Gottingen University during 1 9 0 6 - 0 7 . She studied there with the noted German mathematician David Hilbert, but she left without taking a degree. In Gottingen, in July 1907, she married Pell, whose wife had died in 1904. Pell, a former Russian revolutionary whose real name was Sergei Degaev, had escaped from Russia in the 1880s after being implicated in the celebrated murder of a secret police inspector. Coming to the United States with a price on his head, he had changed his name and begun a new career as a mathematician. The couple returned to the University of South Dakota, but Alexander Pell soon resigned to teach at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago. Anna Pell completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1910

under Eliakim Hastings Moore, then chairman of the mathematics department. She had hoped, she wrote, "for a position in one of the good universities like Wisconsin, Illinois, etc.," but she found "there is such an objection to women that they prefer a man even if he is inferior both in training and in research." When Alexander Pell suffered a stroke in 1911, she temporarily took over his teaching responsibilities. Her first regular faculty position was at Mount Holyoke College, where from 1911 to ,1918 she taught classes, continued her research, and took care of her ailing husband. In 1918 Anna Pell went to Bryn Mawr College, where she remained until her retirement in 1948. She continued to be extremely active not only as a teacher of mathematics, and later as head of the department, but also as a researcher. Alexander Pell died in 1921, and in 1925 she married Arthur Leslie Wheeler, a classics scholar and colleague, who that year became professor of Latin at Princeton University. The Wheelers moved to Princeton, but she continued to lecture part-time at Bryn Mawr College. She moved back to Bryn Mawr in 1932 after her husband's sudden death. Anna Pell Wheeler's mathematical ability was widely respected. At Gottingen Hilbert had interested her in integral equations, and much of her subsequent work was focused in this area. She extended and generalized some of Hilbert's results. Particularly noteworthy was her work on biorthogonal systems of functions and their applications to integral equations. In 1927 Wheeler was invited by the American Mathematical Society to deliver the Colloquium Lectures, an annual series of three or four lectures by a distinguished research mathematician. Wheeler was the first woman, and as late as the 1970s remained the only woman, so honored. Her lectures, on quadratic forms in infinitely many variables, and their applications, surveyed the broader scene in which her own research had played a part for twenty years. Wheeler had a reputation for being a fine teacher who imbued her students, both graduate and undergraduate, with her own all-consuming love of mathematics. Seven women working under her direction received doctorates at Bryn Mawr. Keenly aware of the difficulties encountered by women as mathematicians, Wheeler often took her students to mathematical meetings and urged them to participate on an equal professional basis with men. She herself was active in the American Mathematical Society, serving on both its council and board of trustees, and in the Mathematical Association of America. An able administrator, Wheeler also strove to enhance the reputation of the Bryn

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White Mawr mathematics department. Recognizing that research was a necessary part of an instructor's development, she advocated reduced teaching loads and encouraged her faculty in their research efforts. She organized exchange programs with other colleges in the Philadelphia area, and in 1 9 3 3 Wheeler succeeded in attracting the eminent German-Jewish algebraist Amalie E m m y Noether ( 1 8 8 2 - 1 9 3 5 ) to Bryn Mawr College. During her second marriage Wheeler and her husband built a summer home in the Adirondacks which they named " Q . E . D . " There she spent many happy hours and b e c a m e an avid bird watcher and wildflower enthusiast. She was also generous in inviting her students to Q . E . D . Despite recurrent attacks of arthritis, after her retirement Wheeler continued to attend mathematical meetings and to support and encourage women in mathematics. Early in 1 9 6 6 she suffered a stroke and died a few months later in Bryn Mawr at the age of eighty-two. [A listing of Anna Pell Wheeler's publications to 1931 appears in Johann Christian Poggendorff, Biographischliterarisches Handwörterbuch zur Geschichte der exakten Wissenschaften ( 1 9 4 0 ) , vol. VI, part 4, p. 2861. Not included are two papers: "Linear Ordinary Self-Adjoint Differential Equations of the Second Order," Am. Jour, of Mathematics, 1927, pp. 3 0 9 - 2 0 , and "Spectral Theory for a Certain Class of Non-Symmetric Completely Continuous Matrices," Am. Jour, of Mathematics, 1935, pp. 847-53. The Colloquium Lectures were never published. Church records of the Immanuel and Union Creek Lutheran Churches, Akron, Iowa, contain information about the Johnson family. A scrapbook of letters from colleagues and students compiled at Wheeler's retirement is in the Bryn Mawr Archives. Louise S. Grinstein and Paul J. Campbell, "Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler, 18831966," Assoc. for Women in Mathematics Newsletter, Sept. and Nov. 1978, includes a brief biography, discussion of her research, and bibliography. An account of the memorial service held at Bryn Mawr College as well as a photograph appear in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bull., Summer 1966, pp. 2 2 23. Other sources include an entry in Am. Men of Sei., vol. I ( 1 9 5 5 ) , and an obituary in the N.Y. Times, April 1, 1966. A death certificate was supplied by the Pa. Dept. of Health. Invaluable information was provided by Wheeler's niece Jean Hoagland Owens, and by Ruth Stauffer McKee, Fern Roy, and Paul J. Campbell.] LOUISE S. GRINSTEIN

W H I T E , Eartha Mary Magdalene, Nov. 8, 1 8 7 6 - J a n . 18, 1974. Social welfare and community leader, businesswoman. Eartha White, known as the Angel of Mercy

to thousands of poor, ill, elderly, and homeless people, was born in Jacksonville, Fla. She was the daughter of Mollie Chapman, a black woman, and a young white man of good family whose name was never revealed. Soon after birth she was adopted by Lafayette and Clara (English) White. Clara White, the daughter of freed slaves, had worked as a domestic and cook, and as a stewardess on several steamship lines. Lafayette White, himself an ex-slave, had served with the Union army during the Civil W a r as a member of the 34th Regiment, Company D, United States Colored Troops. T h e Whites instilled in E a r t h a a deep pride in her Afro-American heritage; many years later she established an Afro-American museum to preserve and transmit that heritage. Eartha White attended Stanton School in Jacksonville (grades one to e i g h t ) , where one of her teachers was Mary Still, whose family had been abolitionists and supporters of the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania. In 1 8 8 8 , fleeing an epidemic, Clara and Eartha W h i t e moved to New York City (Lafayette W h i t e had died in 1 8 8 1 ) . During the next six years they returned to Jacksonville intermittently, but Eartha attended schools in New York: Dr. Reason's school, Madam Hall's school, where she studied hairdressing and manicuring, and Madame Thurber's National Conservatory of Music, where one of her voice teachers was the famed Harry T . Burleigh. In 1 8 9 5 she was invited to join the Oriental-American Opera Company, one of the first black opera companies in the United States. She remained with the company for a year, touring within the country and in Europe and the Orient. During this period Eartha W h i t e met James Lloyd Jordan, a young black man from South Carolina. T h e y b e c a m e engaged, but a month before the wedding Jordan died. Eartha W h i t e returned to Jacksonville. From 1 8 9 6 to 1 8 9 8 she attended the Florida Baptist Academy, teaching subsequently in nearby Bayard and at the Stanton School. An energetic woman, she also worked for a time as a secretary at the AfroAmerican Life Insurance Company, and risked her life to save the firm's records during the great fire of 1 9 0 1 that destroyed Jacksonville. From 1 9 0 5 to 1 9 3 0 W h i t e owned a series of small businesses: a dry-goods store, a general store, an employment agency, a janitorial contracting service, a real-estate business, and a steam laundry (where she claimed she could "clean anything but a dirty conscience"). She invariably started each venture on a small scale, worked hard to build it up, sold it for a profit, and started a new one. She continued to buy and sell real estate for most of her life, using the

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White profits to support her public-service activities. White also became the city's first black social worker and census taker. In all these endeavors Eartha White was very much the follower of Booker T. Washington; in 1900 she had joined hands with him in Boston as a charter member of the National Negro Business League. Like Washington, she believed that education, business success, and racial uplift could be effective instruments against prejudice. She protested segregation, but in a somewhat muted and supremely dignified way, believing cooperation to be the best means toward achieving racial equality. White devoted her life to encouraging others, through her own example, to become informed, active, and responsible citizens. Many organizations and groups benefited from White's skills. She became a speaker for organizations like the Colored Citizens' Protective League, which she helped organize in 1900, revived the Union Benevolent Association to aid elderly Civil War veterans (1901), and raised funds for the Colored Old Folks' Home (built in 1902). For many years she operated the only orphanage for black children in Duval County— possibly the only one in the entire state. In 1904 she organized the Boys' Improvement Club and launched a campaign called "Save 1,000 Boys from Juvenile Court," to raise money for a recreation center. When this project failed, White induced a friend to donate land for a park, and used her personal funds to hire a recreation worker; not until 1916 was the city council persuaded to take over the operation. For over fifty years White conducted Sunday Bible classes at the county prison and worked to improve conditions for the inmates; the men routinely sought her assistance after their release. During World War I Eartha White was the director of War Camp Community Services and Coordinator of Recreation in Savannah, Ga. She was the only woman chosen to participate in the Southeast War Camp Community Service Conference, held in Jacksonville. Later, she was the only Negro to attend a White House meeting of the Council of National Defense. Active in politics as well, White became a precinct worker for the Republican party and campaigned for moderate candidates. In 1920 she headed the Negro Republican Women Voters, and won praise for her leadership. She also became the only woman member of the Duval County Republican Executive Com' mittee. Eartha White's zeal for community service was inspired by her adoptive mother, who always made generous contributions of food and clothing to the ill and needy. In 1928, eight

years after Clara White's death, Eartha White established in her memory the Clara White Mission—considered by many to be her most important work and Jacksonville's counterpart to Chicago's Hull House. White herself lived at the mission with the transients and the downtrodden. During the depression, the mission became the center of black relief activities: more than 2,500 persons received either food packages or soup at the kitchen in February 1933 alone. The mission also served as headquarters for numerous Works Progress Administration activities. With the coming of World War II, White became an honorary colonel in the Women's National Defense Program. She set up canteen service and managed various Red Cross activities in a building she donated for a servicemen's center. In 1941 she worked with A. Philip Randolph to organize a march on Washington as a protest against job discrimination. Although the march was never made, the movement led to the issuance by President Franklin D. Roosevelt of Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in employment in defense industries and in the federal government, and to the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee that same year. The Clara White Mission became a base for the establishment of Eartha White's many other service agencies: a maternity home, a child placement center and orphan home, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Community Center, and a tuberculosis rest home, among others. In 1967 White's proudest achievement, the Eartha M. M. White Nursing Home, was completed. Begun with her personal funds and supported by a federal grant, this 120-bed institution had facilities for physical therapy, occupational therapy, and recreational activities for county and state welfare patients. Over the years Eartha White became one of Jacksonville's most decorated citizens. Already the holder of honorary degrees, in 1969 she was given the Good Citizenship Award by the local Jaycees. In 1970 she received the Lane Bryant Volunteer Award, and in 1971 the American Nursing Home Association gave her its Better Life Award. Two years later the National Negro Business League honored White, its longtime official historian, with the Booker T. Washington Symbol of Service Award. Eartha White remained active well into her nineties. Confined to a wheelchair, she still attended civic and government meetings, but it was the mission and the nursing home that always received the largest share of her attention. She died of heart failure in Jacksonville in 1974, at the age of ninety-seven.

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White [The Earth a White Coll. at the library of the Univ. of North Fla. contains over 1,000 documents, letters, photographs, and other items. Biographical material is also located at the Clara White Mission, Jacksonville, Fla. The Booker T. Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, and the Rollins College Archives, Winter Park, Fla., contain primary source material relevant to White's career. Information on White's adoption can be found in the Deed Books, Nassau Cty. Courthouse, Fernandiana Beach, Fla.; at the Duval Cty. Courthouse in Jacksonville; and in Nat. Archives, Record Group 94. Information about White's life and work can be found in Fred Wright, "Eartha White," Floridian, Aug. 1, 1971; C. Frederick Duncan, "Negro Health in Jacksonville," The Crisis, Jan. 1942; L. W. Neyland, Twelve Black Floridians (1970); and Harold Gibson, "The Most Unforgettable Person I Have Met," Readers Digest, Dec. 19, 1974. The last two contain many inaccuracies. Interviews with White in her later years were printed in St. Petersburg Times, Aug. 1, 1971, and N.Y. Times, Dec. 4, 1970. Obituaries appeared in N.Y. Times, Jacksonville Journal, and Florida TimesUnion, Jan. 19, 1974; and in the Nat. Business League's National Memo, Jan. 1974. Death certificate was obtained from the Fla. Dept. of Health.] DANIEL SHAFER

W H I T E , Edna Noble, June 3, 1879-May 4, 1954. Educator, home economist. Edna Noble White, a pioneer in child development, nursery school education, and parent education, was born in Fairmount, 111., the younger daughter and second of three children of Angeline (Noble) and Alexander L. White. Her father, a native of Logan, Ohio, was one of Fairmount's most respected citizens; he was manager of a firm dealing in lumber, hardware, and agricultural implements and held several posts in the town government. Her mother, born in Indiana, was well educated and active in community affairs. After graduating from the Fairmount High School and receiving her A.B. from the University of Illinois in 1906, Edna White taught in the Danville, 111., high school and at the Lewis Institute in Chicago before joining the home economics faculty of Ohio State University in 1908. Within seven years she became a full professor, head of the department, and supervisor of the home economics extension service. Her work during flood disasters and during World War I as director of Ohio food conservation for the Council of National Defense earned her a reputation beyond the state. When L I Z Z I E M E R R I L L P A L M E R , widow of Senator Thomas W. Palmer of Michigan, left three million dollars for the founding and maintenance of a school to train young women for motherhood and home-

making, White was chosen in 1919 to be its founding director. There was no precedent for the kind of school and research center Edna White developed at the Merrill-Palmer Institute in Detroit during her twenty-seven years as director. When the Institute opened in 1920 it was the second center for child development research in the country (the first was the Iowa Child Welfare Station, founded in 1 9 1 7 ) , and it was for many years the only such center not affiliated with a university. Edna White was determined to go beyond the traditional interpretation of motherhood training as merely practical instruction in homemaking skills, and to prove that the physical, mental, and emotional development of children was worthy of study at the college level. From a first class of twelve children and six students recruited from Michigan State University, the Institute grew to attract the attention of educators throughout the world. Initially, courses lasted six months; later a one-year residency requirement was set for master's degree candidates. The Merrill-Palmer laboratory nursery school, unlike nursery schools in England that were established primarily for the physical care of poor children, was designed to help college students and parents learn more about children and to provide opportunities for research on child development and parent education. The growth of the school, founded in 1922, coincided with the development in the United States of the parent education movement, which reached its height between 1925 and 1935. Gathering together specialists in pediatrics, nutrition, psychology, education, home economics, and social work, Edna White organized the staff so as to integrate their knowledge and methods into the development of an all-round view of the child; she thus initiated one of the first interdisciplinary efforts in the new field of child development. Weekly meetings of the entire staff were held, and independent research by specialists was discouraged. Focusing at first on the preschool child, the Institute soon broadened its view to include all phases of child development from conception to adulthood and began some of the first longitudinal studies of children. Another innovation was the shift from the individual child to the family as the unit of study. The fame of the Institute reached distant parts of the world: the King of Siam, greeting visitors from Detroit, is said to have welcomed them as from the home of Merrill-Palmer. Believing that the Institute should serve the community, Edna White initiated at the city and state levels programs such as the Visiting Housekeepers and the Detroit Youth Council;

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many of these programs were later taken over by other institutions. Above all, she believed: "Merrill-Palmer must never crystallize its program or become static in what it does. If this ever happens, it can never justify its existence." White disseminated her ideas on child development and parent education as a leader in numerous organizations. She was president of the American Home Economics Association from 1918 to 1920 and chairman of its advisory committee on child development and parent education. In 1923 she became an adviser to Lawrence K. Frank, chief architect and administrator of the fund which established the nationwide network of Rockefeller institutes for child development research. She also served as chairman of the National Council on Parent Education from 1925 to 1937, and during the depression as chairman of the National Advisory Committees on Nursery Schools and Parent Education of the Works Progress Administration. After her retirement from Merrill-Palmer in 1947, Edna White served with the American Mission to Greece to help organize the study of child development and family life in Greek universities. Later, she developed and administered a gerontology program in Detroit. She received honorary degrees from four colleges and universities. During most of her adult life she lived with her sister and acted as foster mother to her brother's two sons. She died suddenly of a heart attack at her home in Highland Park, Mich., in 1954. [Biographical material, photographs, copies of articles by and about Edna White, and historical sources on the Merrill-Palmer Institute are in the Merrill-Palmer Archives in Detroit. Her publications include: A Study of Foods (1914), with Ruth A. Wardall; "Nursery Schools (United States)," in Encyc. Britannica, 14th ed. (1929); "Parent Education in the Emergency," School and Society, Nov. 24, 1934; "The Nursery School-A Teacher of Parents," Child Study, Oct. 1926; "The Objectives of the American Nursery School," The Family, April 1928; "The Role of Home Economics in Parent Education," Bull. Am. Home Economics Assoc., Jan. 1929; "The Scope of Parent Education in America," in Towards a New Education (1929, Report, 5th Internat. Conference, New Educational Fellowship, Elsinore, Denmark). Illuminating anecdotes about Edna White and the Institute are included in the oral histories of Pauline P. W. Knapp (1971), Lawrence K. Frank (1963), and Lois Meek Stolz (1968), in the Milton J. E. Senn Coll., Nat. Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md. For information on White's career see Lawrence K. Frank, "The Beginnings of Child Development and Family Life Education in the Twentieth Century," Merrill-Palmer Quart., Oct. 1962; Dorothy Tyler, "A Study of Leadership in the Making of an Institution," Social Forces, May 1932; Merrill-Palmer Institute Report,

1920-1940; and Harry Overstreet and Bonaro W. Overstreet, Leaders for Adult Education (1941), pp. 105-8. Obituaries appeared in the MerrillPalmer Quart., Fall 1954, and the Detroit News, May 5, 1954. White's birth date appears in some printed sources as 1880. The 1879 date is confirmed by the 1880 and 1900 U.S. Censuses and by the death certificate, provided by the Mich. Dept. of Health. Information was also obtained from Lois Meek Stolz and Dorothy Tyler and from a biobibliography by Iris B. Durden.] ALICE

SMUTS

WHITE, Helen Constance, Nov. 26, 1896-June 7, 1967. Scholar, teacher, novelist. Helen White was born in New Haven, Conn., the first of four children of John and Mary (King) White. In 1901, Helen's family moved to Roslindale, Mass., where her father, of Irish Catholic descent and formerly a clerk with the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, entered the civil service. Growing up, Helen White enjoyed a close relationship with her two younger sisters: all three went on to become teachers of English. At Girls' High School in Boston from 1909 to 1913, her teachers encouraged her interest in literature, and in such social issues as woman suffrage and the condition of Boston's immigrants. In 1913, Helen White entered Radcliffe College, where in four years she earned both an A.B., summa cum laude, and an A.M. in English. She then served as assistant in English at Smith College from 1917 to 1919, before joining the English department at the University of Wisconsin to teach and study for her doctorate. She completed the Ph.D. in 1924 and remained at Madison, which became her second home after Boston: she consistently presented herself as "from" these two places and two educational traditions, eastern women's and midwestern coeducational. Promoted from instructor to assistant professor at Wisconsin in 1925, White became a full professor in 1936, the only woman then at that level in the college of Letters and Science. White later served as chairman of the English department, from 1955 to 1958 and again from 1961 to 1965. A committed teacher, Helen White also successfully combined three other pursuits: scholarly research in medieval and Renaissance literature, the writing of novels on turning points in the history of ideas in the Catholic church, and public service in education. White's scholarly work is characterized by attention to the social and intellectual traditions within which writers work. Her dissertation, The Mysticism of William, Blake, published in 1927, explores the history of mystical thought and illustrates

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White's concern for the connections between religion and literature, an interest reflected in such later works as The Metaphysical Poets: A Study in Religious Experience ( 1 9 3 6 ) , Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the Sixteenth Century ( 1 9 4 4 ) , and Prayer and Poetry ( 1 9 6 0 ) . Similarly, White's fiction presents the social environment in which new ideas are developed and religious values lived out. Her first novel, A Watch in the Night ( 1 9 3 3 ) , concerning a thirteenth-century Franciscan, was first choice of the Pulitzer Novel Committee, although Caroline Miller's Lamb in His Bosom! received the prize that year because of its American setting. White's second novel, Not Built with Hands ( 1 9 3 5 ) , is the story of Matilda, Countess of Tuscany. Matilda, White said, fascinated her as the suffragists had; she is a political leader who consciously acts out of women's values. Dedicated to White's mother, the novel features a strong mother-daughter relationship. White wrote four more novels, continuing the pattern of carefully observed everyday life in times of ideological change. In the field of education, Helen White served as president of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) from 1941 to 1947. She believed that women should support the war effort and be subject to the draft; she also emphasized the responsibility of educated women to use their trained intelligence for peaceful social change. "We must not forget," she wrote in 1944, "that the great problem of the world is the replacement of force as the arbiter of men's destiny." After World War II, Helen White demonstrated her commitment to educational service as a member of the United States Educational Mission to Germany ( 1 9 4 6 ) , and the National Commission for UNESCO ( 1 9 4 6 - 4 9 ) . She was also a board member of Catholic educational foundations and committees as well as the National Conference of Christians and Jews ( 1 9 4 0 4 9 ) . The recipient of numerous honorary degrees and several major grants during her career, including both Guggenheim ( 1 9 2 8 - 3 0 ) and Huntington Library ( 1 9 3 9 - 4 0 ) fellowships, White helped in turn to promote the careers of students and fellow scholars, acting on an advisory board of the Whitney Foundation, a selection committee for Marshall Scholars, and as president of the Modern Humanities Research Association ( 1 9 6 3 ) . She was also president of the American Association of University Professors from 1956 to 1958. For all White's professional responsibilities, generations of Wisconsin students knew her chiefly as a devoted and slightly eccentric

teacher. She admitted to making more than her "due contribution to the saga of the absentminded professor" (Current Biography, p. 670); a dull set of seminar papers once put White to sleep in class, and she found that students' presentations became more lively as a result. "I have often thought since then," she wrote later, "that it would be better for teachers to fall asleep than to leave all the sleeping to the students." Known as "the lady in purple," White stayed with the color because it was easy to coordinate for travel. The same pragmatic approach was apparent in her advice to students. Dissertations and novels, personal organization and professional advancement, all were subject to her standard advice: "Get on with it." After her retirement as chairman of the English department in 1965, White received an appointment to the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities. She suffered from heart disease in her last years and died of a stroke in Norwood, Mass., in June 1967. Through her full career as a teacher, novelist, and policymaker, Helen White maintained an integrated view of the importance of the life of the mind and demonstrated the potential of educated women to serve society. [White's flies, including newspaper clippings, MSS., and some correspondence, are in the Univ. Archives, Memorial Library, Univ. of Wis., Madison. In addition to the books cited, White's scholarly works include English Devotional Literature (Prose) 16001640 (1931), The Tudor Booh of Private Devotion (1951), and Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (1963). Her other novels are To the End of the World (1939), Dust on the King's Highway (1947), The Four Rivers of Paradise (1955), and Bird of Fire: A Tale of St. Francis of Assisi (1958). White cites the influence of her high school teachers in "An English Professor Examines Her Role in Teacher Education," Jour. General Education, April 1966, pp. 31-39. She discusses her education and development as a literary critic in "Criticism in Context," College English, Oct. 1965, pp. 17-23, and in Changing Styles in Literary Studies, Presidential Address of the Modern Humanities Research Assoc. (1963). As the organization's president from 1941 to 1947, White published a number of articles in the AAUW Jour., including "University Women in War and Peace," Fall 1944, pp. 3-7. Biographical sources include Current Biog., 1945; Catholic Authors (1948), pp. 782-84; Twentieth Century Authors (1955), p. 1072; Contemporary Authors, vol. 5-8, pp. 1234-35; and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., LIII, 460-61. See also Jane Agard's article in State Hist. Soc. of Wis. Women's Auxiliary, Famous Wisconsin Women, 6 (1976), 73-79, and an obituary, AAUW Jour., Oct. 1967, p. 29. A biobibliographical report on Helen White was prepared by Susan Simenz; death record from Mass. Dept. of Public Health.]

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Wightman

Wightman WIGHTMAN, Hazel Virginia Hotchkiss, Dec. 20, 1886-Dec. 5, 1974. Athlete. Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman, whose name became synonymous with the game of tennis, was bom in Healdsburg, Calif., the only daughter and fourth of five children of William Joseph and Emma Lucretia (Grove) Hotchkiss. Descended from seventeenth-century immigrants, her paternal grandparents had moved west from Kentucky in 1850; her maternal grandparents had come from Virginia after the Civil War. William Hotchkiss was a well-to-do rancher and cannery owner. Her parents encouraged Hazel, a frail child, to play baseball and football with her brothers. In 1900 the family moved to Berkeley. Two years later she saw her first tennis—a sport thought more proper for ladies—and won her first tournament. In 1909 she claimed the first of her record fortyfour national titles, going on in 1909, 1910, and 1911 to win all three national events, Singles, Doubles, and Mixed. As late as 1978, this feat had never been duplicated. In 1924 she won Olympic Gold Medals in Doubles and Mixed and Wimbledon Doubles. She was a National Squash Champion in 1927 and runner-up in National Badminton Mixed. Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman's last national title came in 1954, and her final appearance in a national tournament was in 1960, at the age of seventythree. Hotchkiss graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1911. The next year she married George William Wightman, member of a prominent Boston family, a former Harvard tennis player and later a wealthy lawyer. The couple had five children. She was nursing her first child, George, in 1913 when she defeated the national champion at the Longwood Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, Mass., a club that was to be identified with her name. Her father wrote that he was glad she was continuing to play, and that it was important for married women to keep up their interests. In 1919, after the birth of two more children, Virginia and Hazel, she won the National Singles again. Dorothy was born in 1922 and William in 1925. She was divorced from George Wightman in 1940, and thereafter lived in a large house near Longwood, which became the tournament home for the dozens of young women tennis players she taught and encouraged. Born shortly after tennis was introduced into the United States, Wightman was a molder of the game. Her famous rivalry with May Sutton of southern California marked the real beginning of women's tennis. While Sutton introduced hard-hitting into women's tennis, Wight-

man launched the volleying game, hitherto thought possible only for men. This style capitalized on her quickness and alertness, offsetting her size of barely five feet. To free her arm for overhead smashes, she wore sleeveless dresses, contributing to the revolution in dress. Her game was "skillful, versatile and heady," according to the San Francisco Call. "She went up into the air to volley a ball like a fox terrier after a butterfly" (undated clipping, International Tennis Hall of Fame). The extended rivalry with Sutton attained a strained grimness, yet Wightman kept herself under control, proving that "an athlete can be fiercely competitive and at the same time . . . perform with authentic sportsmanship" (Wind, "From Wimbledon," pp. 116, 118). Another remarkable asset was her ability to concentrate on her game. "Nothing bothered Hazel," Dick Williams, her Olympics Doubles partner, later commented. "She had marvelous anticipation and coordination—but her concentration was incredible." In 1919 Wightman conceived the idea of an "International Cup" so that women players might have an objective comparable to that offered men by the Davis Cup. When she presented the Cup, with the hope of setting up matches among British, French, and American women, the International Lawn Tennis Federation vetoed the idea as expensive and without interest. Only the arrival in this country of some of the best British players and the need of the West Side Tennis Club of New York for an event to inaugurate its stadium led to the first Wightman Cup Match in 1923. Wightman played five times (1923, 1924, 1927, 1929, and 1931) and was team captain in thirteen competitions. The success of the Wightman Cup matches proved that women's tennis could flourish independent of men's. In the 1920s Wightman embarked on her long career as a teacher of tennis. In Better Tennis (1933), she offered readers the advice she gave students: "Shoulders high, arms out"; "Skip before and after hitting"; "Cultivate a buoyant spirit." A later edition added an alphabetical series of maxims from "Always Alert" to "Xceed Xpectations" and "Zip Zip." Her success with such champions as Sarah Palfrey, Helen Wills, and her rival Helen Jacobs proved the keenness of her judgment and the soundness of her methods. But it was ordinary players with whom she most enjoyed working. "I have a special feeling about the awkward and shy ones. By doing something well that other people admire they will gain confidence and poise." In 1922 she started free clinics, open to all, at Longwood. She ran tournaments at all levels and

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Wilder opened her home to tournament players from champions to twelve-year-olds. Although originally shocked by the idea of professional tennis for women, Wightman came to support demands for equal purses. She presented the first equal pay check at the United States National Championships in 1973. "A bouncy, warm, unpretentious accumulation of unnervous energy," Hazel Wightman also possessed an "inalterable determination to help her neighbor" (Wind, "Run, Helen," p. 31). In addition to her work with young tennis players, she served the Red Cross in Boston for fifty years and supported the Boston Children's Hospital for over forty. Her long career brought honors: the United States Lawn Tennis Association Service Bowl was donated in her honor and she was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Wightman Cup, in 1973, she was made an honorary Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. The Californian who had become, according to the Boston Globe, the "epitome of the Bostonian grande-dame" died of a heart attack in her Newton home just before her eighty-eighth birthday. [Scrapbooks and other papers and mementos of Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman are at the Internat. Tennis Hall of Fame, Newport, R.I. A taped interview, made June 7, 1972, is part of the Boston Tradition in Sports Coll., Boston Public Library. Major articles about her include two by Herbert W. Wind: "Run, Helen," New Yorker, Aug. 30, 1952, and "From Wimbledon to Forest Hills," New Yorker, Oct. 13, 1975. See also Melvin Maddocks, "The Original Little Old Lady in Tennis Shoes," Sports Illustrated, April 10, 1972; Barbara Klaw, "Queen Mother of Tennis," Am. Heritage, Aug. 1975; Edwin S. Baker, "Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman," Tennis USA, Aug. 1973. The program for the fiftieth anniversary of the Wightman Cup matches at the Longwood Cricket Club contains a biographical article by Nancy Norton and several pictures of Hazel Wightman. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times and the Boston Globe, Dec. 6, 1974, and in Tennis USA, Jan. 1975. Commemorative pieces containing biographical information include "Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman, 1886-1974," Boston Globe, Dec. 8, 1974; Larry Eldridge, "Hazel H. Wightman," Christian Sei. Monitor, Dec. 12, 1974; and an article in Kappa Kappa Gamma, The Key, Spring 1975. Death record provided by Mass. Dept. of Public Health.] NANCY

NORTON

WILDER, Laura Ingalls, Feb. 7,1867-Feb. 10, 1957. Writer. When Laura Ingalls Wilder was sixty-five years old, in 1932, she published Little House in

the Big Woods, the first of the fictionalized memoirs of her western girlhood that would make her reputation. It was followed by Farmer Boy (1933), Little House on the Prairie (1935), On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939), The Long Winter (1940), Little Town on the Prairie (1941), and Those Happy Golden Years (1943), all narrative rich in quotidian detail. They immediately found a large audience; all except Farmer Boy were Newbery honor books, and the entire series was reprinted, with new illustrations by Garth Williams, in 1953. In 1974 a weekly television series was begun, loosely based on the books, and they have been translated into at least fourteen languages and Braille. In 1954 the American Library Association established the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, given every five years to the author who, over a period of years, has made a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children. She was its first recipient. Laura Elizabeth Ingalls was born in Pepin, Wis., the second child and second of four daughters of Caroline (Quiner) and Charles Philip Ingalls; a son died in infancy. Seeking better land and easier farming, they moved repeatedly throughout Laura's childhood: by covered wagon to Missouri in 1869, and then on to Kansas in 1870, where they squatted illegally on Indian land. They returned to Wisconsin in 1871 and then went to Walnut Grove, Minn, (which would figure in her books as Plum Creek). The family lived briefly in Burr Oak, Iowa, where Charles Ingalls managed a small hotel in 1876. It was a period of her life so dismal that it did not figure in any of Wilder's books. In 1877 they returned briefly to Walnut Grove, then in 1879 moved permanently to De Smet, S. Dak., where Charles Ingalls worked briefly for the railroad and took out a homestead claim. Laura and her three sisters grew up in De Smet. Like many of their contemporaries, the family not only broke the soil for each of their successive farms, but built their own houses, dug their own wells, raised and preserved their own food, made most of their own clothes. They were usually deeply in debt; they sold the farm at Walnut Grove after a summer drought and grasshoppers. Laura and her sisters were aware of the financial pressures on their parents, and they were always deeply involved in the household economy, to which women's work was integral. When she wrote her books, Wilder recounted this labor in explicit detail. There are accounts of how to build a log cabin, how to stitch a sheet, and what to feed the chickens. Domestic work is respected, but never romanticized. On the eve of her own marriage, Laura

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hesitated: "I don't want to marry a farmer . . . a farm is such a hard place for a woman" (The First Four Years, pp. 3 - 4 ) . Laura Ingalls's education was sporadic. It took place in a series of one-room schools, beginning with the Barry Corner School in Pepin when she was four. Not until the winter of 1880, when she was thirteen, did her schooling take on any regularity. She attended the school in De Smet whenever it was in session, until she was nearly sixteen, and briefly again after her first teaching position, though she never formally graduated. It was always assumed that Laura Ingalls would contribute to family expenses (especially for the schooling of the eldest daughter Mary, who was blind). Occasionally she worked in town, once sewing shirts for twenty-five cents a day. Although teachers were required to be sixteen, a complaisant member of a local school board administered the test for a certificate for her in December 1882, two months before her sixteenth birthday. She went immediately to her first job, a brief winter session at a small settlement twelve miles from home. The woman in whose home she boarded suffered a severe depression in the fierce Dakota winter, and Laura Ingalls remembered the experience as a warning of the effect the frontier could have on a woman not strong enough to resist it. On Aug. 25, 1885, Laura Ingalls married Almanzo James Wilder, ten years her senior. His parents had moved from New York state to Spring Valley, Minn., and from there Wilder and his brother had left home to stake out their own claims near De Smet. In her account of the wedding in These Happy Golden Years Laura Ingalls announces that she will not say obey. " 'Are you for woman's rights . . .?' Almanzo asked in surprise. 'No,' Laura replied, 'I do not want to vote. But I can not make a promise that I will not keep.' " Almanzo Wilder filed both a homestead and a tree claim. But the early years of their marriage were a succession of tragedies: crop failures, increasing debts, the death of an infant son. The house burned to the ground; both contracted diphtheria, from which Almanzo Wilder never seems to have recovered fully. After two years in western Florida and a brief return to De Smet, they set out again, searching for a healthier climate. Using money Laura Wilder had earned as a seamstress, they bought a small farm in Mansfield, Mo., in the Ozarks, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Wilder raised chickens and fruit on a substantial scale. From August 1919 until September 1927 she was secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield Farm Loan Association, through which farmers could

borrow money from the Federal Land Bank in St. Louis. Laura Wilder was its sole paid officer, and she handled loan applications and transfers of funds with skill and efficiency. The Wilders' only surviving child, Rose, was born on the Dakota homestead on Dec. 5, 1886; a boy, born in 1889, died twelve days after his birth. Rose Wilder was educated in one-room rural schoolhouses in Mansfield and became a telegrapher, a field newly open to women. After her marriage in 1909 to Gillette Lane (they divorced in 1917), she had a brief but successful career as one of the first female real estate agents in California, and then began to write for the San Francisco Bulletin and for Sunset magazine. An extraordinarily prolific writer, Rose Wilder Lane became a nationally known journalist. In the 1930s she was a vigorous critic of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and she later worked for conservative causes. When she published the Woman's Day Book of Needlework in 1963 she saw it as a "proAmerican, anti-Socialist" statement celebrating traditional women's folk art. In 1965, age seventy-nine, she traveled to Vietnam on assignment for Woman's Day, reporting that the communist threat there should be halted before it reached the Philippines, Australia, and even Hawaii. She died on Oct. 30, 1968. Rose Wilder Lane had encouraged her mother to write; indeed she served her as agent, editor, and even collaborator. Although the first editor of the Little House books publicized them as the artless accounts of an unsophisticated pioneer woman, Laura Ingalls Wilder served a very long apprenticeship. She wrote columns about farm households for-the Missouri Ruralist between 1911 and 1924, and about poultry for the St. Louis Star; she also sold a few articles to McCall's and Country Gentleman. In 1915 she went to San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the longest trip of her life, explicitly "to see a lot of new things to write" (West From Home, p. 5). She made herself Lane's pupil: "Rose and I are blocking out a story of the Ozarks for me to finish when I get home. If I can only make it sell, it ought to help a lot" (West From Home, p. 67). Not until 1931 did Wilder begin her first book, Little House in the Big Woods. Rose Wilder Lane directed the negotiations with the Knopf publishing house and then with Harpers which ultimately published the series; her literary agent was involved in handling the subsequent volumes. Letters between Wilder and Lane in the 1930s show their continuing dialogue on the shaping of plot, characterization, and style. Little House in the Big Woods was successful

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Wilder as soon as it was published. The account of a self-sufficient family, making it through hard times on their own, always providing security for their children, had an obvious message in the depression years. Praise continued to build. Reviewers admired the spare prose, "aways dignified and restrained, often elegant," and the lack of sentimentality. In the last years of her life, Wilder carried on extensive correspondence with children who read her books. Almanzo Wilder died in 1949, aged ninety-two. Three days after her own ninetieth birthday, in February 1957, Laura Ingalls Wilder died in Mansfield of a stroke. The Little House books were written from the perspective of a child; indeed the manuscript revisions show Wilder's care in making sure that this point of view was consistently maintained. After Wilder's death, an unfinished manuscript was published as The First Four Years ( 1 9 7 1 ) . In tone and characterization it differs markedly from the previous books. The young couple face an unremitting series of calamities: drought, debt, illness, and death. In earlier books similar experiences had been described as challenges that could be overcome. But the happy security of childhood vanishes in The First Four Years, where parents no longer stand as a buffer between their daughter and the cruel reality of the frontier. Wilder's books did not lose their popularity; twenty years after her death it was estimated that the total sale of all her books since their original publication was more than twenty million copies. They remain a rich chronicle of a woman's life—as child and adult—on the plains frontier, with "a dramatic force that derives from honesty and accuracy" ( E . B. White, Horn Book Mag., Aug. 1970, p. 3 4 9 ) . They retain their immediacy. "Now is now," thinks the child Laura at the end of Little House in the Big Woods. "It can never be a long time ago." [Small collections of Laura Ingalls Wilder's correspondence are held by the Detroit Public Library; the Pomona (Calif.) Public Library; the Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane Home and Museum, Mansfield, Mo. (which also has artifacts and documents); and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society in De Smet. The Society also maintains the Ingallses' 1879-80 home and the school Wilder attended. Wilder donated manuscript drafts of The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years to the Detroit Public Library. Examiner's reports of Wilder's conduct of the Mansfield Farm Loan Assoc. are in the records of the Farm Credit Admin., Record Group 103, Nat. Archives. Some Rose Wilder Lane correspondence is in the Dorothy Thompson Papers, Arents Research Library, Syracuse Univ.; her letters to Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, are in the Bancroft Library,

Univ. of Calif., Berkeley. Other papers of both Wilder and Lane are held by Lane's executor, Roger Lea MacBride, of Charlottesville, Va. The first editions of the Little House books were illustrated by Helen Sewell. A special edition of the Horn Book Mag., Dec. 1953, includes comments by Garth Williams on his illustrations for the new edition of the series published that year, and by Virginia Kirkus on the decision to publish Little House in the Big Woods. Wilder's diary of the trip from De Smet to Mansfield in 1894 was published as On the Way Home (1962), with an introduction by Rose Wilder Lane. The letters Wilder wrote during her visit to San Francisco were published in West From Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder to Almanzo Wilder—San Francisco 1915 (1974). Two of Rose Wilder Lane's books, Let the Hurricane Roar (1933) and Free Land (1938), are concerned with themes similar to those in Wilder's books, treated from an adult viewpoint. Rose Wilder Lane: Her Story (1977) is a fictionalized biography, loosely based on letters and diaries, written by Roger Lea MacBride. The most subtle scholarly analyses of Wilder's prose appear in two articles by Rosa Ann Moore, "Laura Ingalls Wilder's Orange Notebooks and the Art of the Little House Books," Children's Literature (1976; annual of the Modern Language Assoc. Seminar on children's literature), pp. 105-19, and "The Little House Books: Rose-Colored Classics," Children's Literature (1978), pp. 7-16. The only biography is Donald Zochert, Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1976), which emphasizes the period of Wilder's life described in the Little House books, with a brief final chapter on the years after 1894. William Anderson, curator of the Wilder Memorial Soc., emphasizes the later years of her life in Laura Wilder of Mansfield (1974). The most significant of Rose Wilder Lane's books are The Peaks of Shala (1923), Hill-Billy (1926), Let the Hurricane Roar (which was reprinted in 1976 as Young Pioneers), and Free Land. An obituary of Laura Ingalls Wilder appeared in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 12, 1957; of Rose Wilder Lane, Nov. 1, 1968. A death record was provided by the Div. of Health of Mo. Preparation of this article has been facilitated by a biobibliography prepared by Ivy Lerner.]

W I L H E L M I , Jane Russell. See

LINDA K.

KERBER

russell,

Jane.

WILLEBRANDT, Mabel Walker, May 23, 1889-April 6, 1963. Lawyer, federal official. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, hailed by her contemporaries as the "First Lady in Law," was assistant attorney general of the United States from 1921 to 1929. Born in a homestead cabin in Woodsdale, Kans., she was the only child of Myrtle (Eaton) and David William Walker. Her mother was born in Illinois, her father, who was of German ancestry, in Pennsylvania. Mabel shared their nomadic frontier life as they variously taught and edited newspapers in Mis-

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Willebrandt souri and Oklahoma. Reading at home and learning through setting type in her father's office, she was thirteen before she entered the sixth grade in Kansas City, Mo., for her first formal schooling. She then attended Park College, Parkville, Mo., until expelled for expressing her religious differences with the administration. By seventeen Mabel Walker had passed her teaching examinations. Moving with her parents to the lumber town of Buckley, Mich., she taught in the local public school. In February 1910 she married the principal, Arthur F. Willebrandt. To treat his tuberculosis the couple went to Tempe, Ariz., where in addition to nursing her husband Mabel Willebrandt completed a degree program at the State Normal School in 1911 and taught briefly in Phoenix. With her husband and mother-in-law she moved to Los Angeles, where she became the youthful principal of Buena Park School, and then of Lincoln Park grammar school in South Pasadena. She wanted to study medicine but, as no night classes were available, she began instead to take law classes at the University of Southern California, where her husband was also a law student. Her job as principal supported them both. Admitted to the bar in 1916, Mabel Willebrandt received an LL.B in 1916 and an LL.M. in 1917. Her concern with the problem of legal assistance for the poor led Willebrandt to press for the establishment of a public defender's office in Los Angeles. Soon after its inception in 1915, she was appointed to the nonsalaried post of assistant public defender with special responsibilities for cases involving women. While simultaneously developing a private practice, she worked on the defense of over 2,000 women; her vigorous and sympathetic handling of prostitution cases resulted in a changed practice in court procedures as judges began to mandate the appearance of both man and woman before the bench. She spoke persuasively before a joint session of the legislature for a married women's property bill (1918) and worked for legislation that would forbid corporations and banks from practicing law in California. In addition, Willebrandt was active in civic and political affairs, and in professional women's clubs. She served on the legislative committee of the California Bar Association, and became a member of the Republican State Committee. During World War I, Mabel Willebrandt was appointed head of the Legal Advisory Board for draft cases for district eleven, the largest draft board in Los Angeles. Subsequently, she was recommended by Senator Hiram Johnson and by every member of the bench in southern

California for the post of assistant attorney general in the Harding administration. During his interview with her, President Warren G. Harding noted that the only thing against her was her age, a condition, she noted, that would be solved by time. She later reminisced, however: "I was a young lawyer, much too young (only 32) when appointed for the responsibilities heaped on me." Only the second woman to receive an appointment as assistant attorney general and the first to have an extended term ( A N N E T T E ABBOTT ADAMS, appointed in 1920, served less than a year), Willebrandt began her service under the controversial Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. She was responsible for the division in the Justice Department which dealt with tax, prison, and prohibition matters. Much of her effort was expended in corporate, estate, and income tax cases; her arguments in such cases have been credited with establishing the foundation for interpretations of the income tax amendment (Griswold and Knoeller interviews ). Her most publicized activities, however, were in the area of prohibition. Before her appointment, Willebrandt had not been a prohibitionist; in office, she was determined to uphold the law. The major obstacles, she noted in The Inside of Prohibition (1929), were political interference, official incompetence, and public indifference. She especially chafed at the indifference of Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, and described many United States marshals' offices as "filled with broken down politicians, fond of drink and low company" (Winter, p. 63). Congressional drinking was particularly repugnant, especially the sight of a "Senator in drunken condition holding onto his desk to block legislation." The performance of some United States attorneys in bringing cases to trial ranged from inefficient to obstructionist. Under Daugherty's successor, Harlan Fiske Stone, she was able to secure the dismissal of several attorneys hostile to the prosecution of prohibition violations. Angered at the dismissal of a protégé, California Senator Samuel Shortridge later blocked Willebrandt's hoped-for appointment to the federal bench in California. Despite the obstacles, major cases were broken under Willebrandt's direction. In 1923, the Big Four of Savannah, allegedly the largest bootleg ring in the country, was cracked, as were the Cincinnati operations of bootlegger George Remus (O'Donnell, p. 16). The attorney general's annual report for 1925 noted that of 48,734 cases brought by Willebrandt's division between June 1924 and June 1925, 39,072 ended in convictions. Willebrandt submitted

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278 cases on certiorari to the Supreme Court dealing with the defense, clarification, and enforcement of the prohibition amendment and the Volstead Act. She also argued over forty Supreme Court cases, a total that has rarely been exceeded; particularly noteworthy were her victories in cases controlling liquor sales on American and foreign vessels. Earning the title of "Prohibition Portia," Willebrandt wrote and spoke extensively urging public support of the law. She consistently argued that the government should aim at the major offenders, complaining that "going after the hip pocket and speakeasy cases" was "like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter" (O'Donnell, p. 16). At the time, she challenged allegations that the eighteenth amendment was unenforceable, but later concluded that it "covered too much territory" and that local enforcement should have been left to local authorities (Willebrandt memoir, Stone MSS.). In her efforts to enforce the law, Willebrandt proposed the reallocation of federal judges to respond more flexibly to prohibition case loads, the transfer of enforcement from the Treasury to the Justice Department, better articulation of law enforcement agencies, and stiffer, more consistent sentences for convicted offenders. She also recommended J. Edgar Hoover to head the Bureau of Investigation (Mason, p. 150). If Mabel Willebrandt's prohibition efforts proved frustrating and controversial, her prison work was universally applauded. Her "energy and resourcefulness" led to the establishment in West Virginia of Alderson, the first federal prison for women. The first warden, MARY B. HARRIS, was her choice. She also effected the establishment of the Chillicothe, Ohio, reformatory for young male offenders, worked to reform the administration of the Atlanta prison, and brought in professional Sanford Bates as chief of the Bureau of Prisons. In 1928 Willebrandt became a central figure in the heated presidential campaign. The first woman to chair a committee at a Republican National Convention, she skillfully handled the credentials disputes and effectively seated thirtyfive contested delegates for candidate Herbert Hoover. Soon after, she was accused of planning a series of raids on New York speakeasies to coincide with the Democratic National Convention, meeting to nominate Alfred E. Smith. Most controversial were her speaking tours. A strong, vital speaker, who had briefly toured on the Redpath Chautauqua circuit, Willebrandt was dispatched to the midwest, border south, and far west. In Ohio in September she urged 2,500 pastors of the Methodist Episcopal

church to support Hoover because the enforcement of prohibition "must be in the hands of those who believe in it." Smith immediately attacked her for bringing religion into the campaign, the hostile New York Times urged Hoover to silence her, and an Independent editorial announced "Mrs. Willebrandt Runs Amuk." Dry forces cheered her as Deborah, "a woman of God carrying a great message." Dismayed at the furor, Willebrandt secured a statement from the Republican party speakers bureau that she spoke under its auspices; she later declared that she had twice asked the bureau to excuse her from giving the speech (Inside of Prohibition, pp. 1 1 - 1 2 ) . Collier's concluded in an October issue: "No other woman has ever had so much influence upon a presidential campaign as this one." Following Hoover's election, Willebrandt decided to return to private practice and in May 1929 he accepted her resignation with regret. She had met all the responsibilities of public office while facing major challenges in her personal life. Physically strong, she faced an increasing hearing disability. In a letter to her mother in October 1923, the night before arguing a case before the Supreme Court, she worried: "Each time it's such a struggle not to be terrified over my ears. They talk so low—the Justices." After an eight-year separation, her marriage ended in divorce in 1924. Believing that life was not complete without children, and having failed to have any of her own after an early miscarriage, she adopted two-year-old Dorothy Rae in 1925. She shared the care of Dorothy with her housemates, LOUISE STANLEY, chief of the Bureau of Home Economics, and Annabel Matthews ( 1 8 8 3 - 1 9 6 0 ) of the legal department of the Treasury, as well as with nurse-cook Rose Gainor, and the Walkers, who made frequent visits. After 1929 Willebrandt renewed her private practice, establishing offices in Washington and California. In a flurry of press attacks, Methodists and other dry forces decried her work with her client the California Grape Growers and their affiliate, Fruit Industries Ltd., which produced a grape concentrate that could be fermented in the home. Later Willebrandt helped the beleaguered grape growers to obtain $20,000,000 in Federal Farm Board funds. Other major clients reflected such new industries as aviation and communication. Willebrandt served as Washington counsel for the Aviation Corporation and compiled the first comprehensive review of common law and state and national statutes on the control of air space; subsequently she was the first woman to head a committee of the American Bar As-

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sociation, the Committee on Aeronautical Law. She was a friend of aviators A M E L I A E A R H A R T and Jacqueline Cochran, and obtained her own pilot's license in the 1940s. In the communications industry, Willebrandt represented the Screen Directors Guild and was instrumental in gaining the guild's first victory in a 1938-39 labor struggle with producers. She was also the attorney for many Hollywood figures, including Clark Gable, J E A N H A R L O W , and W. S. Van Dyke. In 1932 she represented Indiana station WJKS in a case that established the authority of the Federal Radio Commission to allocate radio licenses from over- to underutilized regions. Concerned with the position of women and the law, Willebrandt served as national president of the women's legal fraternity Phi Delta Delta from 1922 to 1926 and worked to bring talented women lawyers into the Justice Department. She urged that women should lead in ending sex discrimination in law and business "by accepting a fair field for all, with no particular favors to the fair" ( N e w York Times, Sept. 20, 1929). Maintaining homes in Washington and California and a farm in Gettysburg, Pa., Willebrandt managed a warm social life despite her arduous work schedule. Her deep concern for others, vividly demonstrated in her early teens by her insistence that her parents adopt a homeless young girl, was later evident in her continued help to many of the women she met through her public defender cases. Attractive, outgoing, and vital, she built deep and lasting friendships, and was an accomplished hostess, known for large Sunday gatherings at her farm. On one of her Gettysburg holidays, she began a lively discussion of religion with a Roman Catholic priest visiting from nearby Emmitr burg, Md. Raised in the Christian Church, she had become a Christian Scientist in the mid1920s. In 1952 her reading and reflection led to her conversion to Roman Catholicism. She died of lung cancer at her home in Riverside, Calif., in April 1963. Reviewing her long career of firsts, her friend Judge John J. Sirica observed: "If Mabel had worn trousers she could have been President." [A small collection of Willebrandt Papers at the Library of Congress contains clippings, family papers and correspondence, and material relating to her work in the 1920s. Her long memoir written to Alpheus Mason in 1951 is in the Harlan Fiske Stone Papers at the Library of Congress. Information on her work with Alderson prison, and with prohibition and tax law are in the Archives of the Justice Dept. Her monograph, The Inside of Prohibition, was published in 1929. Willebrandt's articles appealing for

public observance of prohibition appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal, July 1929; The Woman Citizen, Feb. 23, 1924; and Good Housekeeping, April 1924. "First Impressions," on child rearing, was in Good Housekeeping, May 1928. Biographical articles include "Who's Who-and Why," Sat. Eve. Post, Sept. 27, 1924; Alice Winter, "First Lady in Law," Ladies' Home Journal, June 1925; "First Legal Lady of the Land," Literary Digest, March 31, 1923; Jack O'Donnell, "Can This Woman Make America Dry?" Collier's, Aug. 9, 1924; Avery Strakosch, "A Woman in Law," Sat. Eve. Post, Sept. 24, 1927; Frances Parkinson Keyes, "Homes of Outstanding American Women," Better Homes and Gardens, March 1928; and John S. Martin, "Mrs. Firebrand," New Yorker, Feb. 16, 1929. For background information on her prohibition and Justice Department years see Thomas M. Coffey, The Long Thirst (1975), and Alpheus T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (1956); for Alderson and prison reform, Mary B. Harris, I Knew Them in Prison (1936), and Sanford Bates, Prisons and Beyond (1936); for aviation, Jacqueline Cochran, The Stars at Noon (1954); for the Screen Directors Guild, Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title (1971), and Robert C. Cannon, Van Dyke and the Mythical City, Hollywood (1948, 1977). Obituaries appeared in the L.A. Times, April 8, 1963, and the N.Y. Times, April 9, 1963. A death record was provided by Calif. Dept. of Public Health. Interviews with her daughter, Dorothy Rae Van Dyke, and with her friends and associates Grace Knoeller, Paula Knoeller Gore, John J. Sirica, May Lahey, Erwin N. Griswold, and Myra Dell Collins were valuable.] DOHOTHY M .

BROWN

WILLIAMS, Anna Wessels, March 17, 1863Nov. 20, 1954. Physician, bacteriologist. Anna Wessels Williams, who gained national recognition for her contributions to the understanding of infectious diseases and to effective diphtheria immunization, was born in Hackensack, N.J. She was the second child and second daughter of six children (three girls and three boys) of William and Jane (Van Saun) Williams; there were also half sisters and brothers from her father's first marriage. Anna Williams's family was religious. Her mother especially was an avid supporter of missions for the First Reformed (Dutch) Church of Hackensack. Her father, English by birth, had been a private school teacher; in 1875 he became a trustee of the State Street Public School where Anna began her formal education at age twelve. Before then, her parents had taught their children at home, not approving of the public schools and unable to afford private education. At the State Street School Williams became interested in science when she looked under a teacher's "wonderful microscope." A diploma from the New Jersey State Normal

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Williams School in Trenton in 1883 and a brief teaching stint ( 1 8 8 3 - 8 5 ) preceded her choice of a medical career. The decision came in 1887 when her sister Millie lost her baby and almost died. Greatly disturbed by the doctors' inability to intervene, that fall Anna Williams entered the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary. Her father gave his full support, and her mother withdrew her initial objections when Williams suggested she might become a medical missionary. After obtaining an M.D. degree in 1891, Williams remained at the New York Infirmary until 1893 as an instructor in pathology and hygiene. She also served as assistant to the chairman of the department of pathology and hygiene ( 1 8 9 1 - 9 5 ) , and as a consulting pathologist ( 1 9 0 2 - 0 5 ) . In 1894 Williams volunteered to assist in the diagnostic laboratory of the New York City Department of Health, the first municipally operated diagnostic laboratory in the nation, which had opened the year before. There Williams assisted the director, William Hallock Park, an early exponent of applied bacteriology, in his effort to find a more effective antitoxin for diphtheria, a leading cause of childhood deaths. By the end of her first year, she had published two papers, and in 1895 she became a full-time staff member with the title of assistant bacteriologist. Early in 1894 Williams isolated a strain of the diphtheria bacillus (later classified as Corynebacterium diphtheriae) from a case of mild tonsillar diphtheria. This strain, known throughout the world as Park-Williams # 8 or occasionally as the Park strain, possesses an unusual capability for generating toxin, and remains in use for commercial toxin production. (Park was on vacation at the time of isolation, but he oversaw subsequent experimental and clinical trials; due to his position as laboratory director and the nature of the collaborative research much of the credit has been attributed to him.) Williams's discovery greatly facilitated antitoxin production and enabled New York City to undertake its successful campaign against diphtheria. By the autumn of 1894 antitoxin was made available to physicians without charge for patients who could not afford to pay. The program was soon adopted by public health authorities throughout North America and Great Britain. Two decades later the New York City public health laboratories championed the active immunization of children with modified toxins, and in this work Anna Williams also played a role, albeit a less central one. Due to these pioneering efforts diphtheria became a rare disease in many countries, including the United States.

Williams had the ability to work on a multiplicity of problems; in addition to her work on diphtheria, between 1894 and 1896 she investigated the bacteriology of streptococcal and pneumococcal infections. In 1896 she went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris to obtain a toxin for scarlet fever which she hoped would yield an antitoxin comparable to that used in the treatment of diphtheria. Although her endeavors were unsuccessful, her visit there led her to another advance in disease control in the United States. When Williams returned to the New York City Laboratories in September she brought with her a culture of rabies virus. Through her efforts, sufficient vaccine was prepared from this culture so that by 1898 large-scale rabies vaccine production could be undertaken. In her effort to find a rapid method of diagnosing suspected rabid animals, Williams noted the consistent appearance of a distinctive body or cell in infected brain tissue from proven cases. Concurrently, Adelchi Negri, an Italian physician, published in 1904 his observations of the presence and significance of these cellular inclusions, which became known as "Negri bodies"; they have remained the criterion for the pathological diagnosis of rabies. Undaunted, Williams, in 1905, published a new rapid method for preparing and staining brain tissue in order to detect Negri bodies. This was a major step forward in rabies diagnosis and subsequent control; her staining method was not improved upon until 1939. The significance of this work was recognized when the American Public Health Association, at its annual meeting in 1907, established a Committee on the Standard Methods for the Diagnosis of Rabies and named Williams its chairman. Williams also studied chronic inflammatory eye infections then being diagnosed as trachoma which were rampant among underprivileged school children in New York City. Trachoma leads to scarring and sometimes blindness and "trachoma centers" had been established throughout the city. Williams's studies were undertaken in cooperation with the Division of Child Hygiene, under the directorship of s. JOSEPHINE BAKEH. After seeing over 3,000 cases, Williams found that more benign infections than trachoma were responsible and the centers were closed. Meanwhile, the New York City Research Laboratories had grown rapidly and in 1905 Williams was named assistant director, a post she held until her retirement in 1934. Team work became well organized under her leadership and the staff, which included many women, greatly expanded. During World War I Williams was

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Wilson

appointed to an influenza commission jointly sponsored by the research laboratory, medical schools, and an insurance company. At the request of the War Department she directed a training program at New York University for workers for war service in medical laboratories in the United States and in Europe. She also participated in the program for the detection of meningococcal carriers in the military. Williams was a prolific writer. In 1905 she joined Park as coauthor of the second edition of Pathogenic Microorganisms Including Bacteria and Protozoa: A Practical Manual for Students, Physicians and Health Officers. Park and Williams, as the text was widely known, enjoyed immense popularity; its final, eleventh, edition (1939) was published after Park's death. In 1929, also with Park, she wrote Who's Who Among the Microbes, a book for lay readers— a first of its kind. Williams's intensive studies of streptococci, which extended the work of others including George and G L A D Y S D I C K , helped demonstrate that several toxins are involved in streptococcal infections. In 1932 she published a definitive monograph, Streptococci in Relation to Man in Health and Disease. On March 31, 1934, Williams was forced to retire when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, despite petitions from her colleagues, refused to make an exception to the mandatory retirement principle. Retiring to Woodcliff Lake, N.J., ten years later she moved to Westwood, N.J. There she lived with her sister, Amelia Wilson, until her death in 1954 from heart failure. Among her honors, Williams was the first woman to be elected to an office in the laboratory section of the American Public Health Association, serving as vice chairman (1931); the following year she became chairman of the section. She was also honored at a testimonir' dinner given by the New York Women's Medical Society in 1936 for her significant services to the city, and for advancing the cause of women doctors. In her acceptance speech, Williams, whose achievements had been overshadowed by her close association with Park, characteristically mentioned the names of the coworkers—many of them women—who had contributed to her own success. [The Anna Wessels Williams Papers, which include an autobiographical manuscript, correspondence, clippings, and photographs, are located in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Williams published in several scientific journals between 1893 and 1935, especially Collected Studies of the Research Laboratories of the N.Y. City Health Dept., 1905-26, and the Monthly Health Bull, N.Y. City Health Dept., 1911-18. Her major works include: "Persistence of Varieties of the Bacillus Diphtheriae

and of Diphtheria-Like Bacilli," Jour. Medical Research, June 1902; "The Etiology and Diagnosis of Hydrophobia," Jour. Infectious Diseases, May 1906; "A Study of Trachoma and Allied Conditions in the Public School Children of New York City," Jour. Infectious Diseases, March 1914; "Relationship of the Streptococci Causing Erysipelas," Am. Jour. Public Health, Dec. 1929; "The Etiology of Influenza," Proceedings of the N.Y. Pathological Soc., Jan.-May 1918. Miscellaneous studies may be found in Women's Medical Jour., April 1909 and April 1910; Am. Jour. Obstetrics and Gynecology, April 1933; Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, Sept. 1934; and East African Medical Jour., Oct. 1934. Secondary works include: Wade W. Oliver, The Man Who Lived for Tomorrow: A Biography of William Hallock Park ( 1 9 4 1 ) , an excellent source, containing several letters from Williams to Park; Esther P. Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World (1957); New York Health Department Centennial, 1866-1966 ( 1 9 6 6 ) ; Who Was Who in America, V ( 1 9 6 9 - 7 0 ) ; and Elizabeth D. Robinton, "A Tribute to Women Leaders in the Laboratory Section of the American Public Health Association," Am. Jour. Public Health, Oct. 1974. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Nov. 21, 1954, and the Bergen Evening Record, Nov. 22, 1954. Some family information from U.S. Census, 1880. Annis Thomson provided useful information. Death certificate provided by N,J. Dept. of Health.] ELIZABETH

D.

ROBINTON

WILSON, Edith Boiling Gait, Oct. 15, 1872Dec. 28, 1961. Edith Boiling Wilson, second wife of Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States, was born in Wytheville, Va., the seventh of eleven children and fourth of five daughters of William Holcombe and Sallie (White) Boiling. The Boilings were among the oldest families in Virginia (Edith's grandmother seven times removed was P O C A H O N T A S ) and had been plantation owners before the Civil War. His plantation devastated and his slaves gone, William H. Boiling moved to the backwater town of Wytheville in southwestern Virginia, opened a law practice, and soon became a judge of the circuit court. Edith Boiling grew up in genteel poverty in an extended family which included both grandmothers and two aunts. She enjoyed a happy childhood and remained extremely close to her family. Her father, a devout Episcopalian, influenced her greatly. Her formal education consisted of a year's attendance at Martha Washington College, afinishingschool in Abingdon, Va., and a second year at Powell's School in Richmond. What skills Boiling acquired, she learned for the most part at home from her paternal grandmother. Although she wrote that she loved hearing the classics read to her as a

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child, she apparently did little reading before her marriage to Woodrow Wilson. Her penmanship was primitive; as late as 1915 her letters were almost illegible. However, she possessed keen native intelligence and was a shrewd judge of character. She also had a lively wit, was a great raconteur, and possessed charm, warmth, and impeccable manners according to Victorian standards. In the early 1890s Edith Boiling went to Washington, D.C., to visit her sister Gertrude Boiling Gait, whose husband, Alexander, was a partner in his father's jewelry and silver goods store, Gait's. Norman Gait, a cousin of Alexander and also a partner in the store, became her constant suitor. They were married in 1896. Norman Gait soon became sole owner of the store, and the couple prospered and moved in upper-class circles in Washington. For Edith Gait, the marriage was not a happy one. The Gaits had one child, a boy, born in 1903, who lived only three days; she was incapable of having children afterward. After Norman Gait's death in 1908, Edith Gait delegated the responsibility for running the business to trusted and able employees. She traveled frequently to Europe, entertained, and attended the theater. An avid motorist, she owned the first electric car in Washington. Among a number of young women she befriended was Alice Gordon, who was being courted by Cary T. Grayson, Woodrow Wilson's physician and aide. Through Grayson, in late 1914 Edith Gait became acquainted with Wilson's cousin Helen Woodrow Bones, mistress of the White House after E L L E N A X S O N W I L S O N ' S death in August 1914. The two women soon became intimate friends. About mid-March 1915, an accidental meeting with the president in the White House led to an invitation to dinner. Wilson, who had suffered severe depression and loneliness since Ellen Wilson's death, was at once smitten by Edith Gait. He wrote his first letter to her on April 28, 1915, and professed his love on May 4. From that day until near the time of their marriage, he wrote her at least one and often two long letters a day, except when they spent several weeks together at his summer home in Cornish, N.H. Edith Gait said that she was "dead to love"; Wilson rekindled her capacity for love. Insecure and uncertain whether she had the qualities that a first lady should possess, she hesitated in accepting his offer of marriage. Wilson persuaded her that she not only was fully capable but was absolutely indispensable as a lover and helpmate. On June 29 she agreed to marry him. They announced their engagement on October 6 and were married in her home on Dec. 18, 1915. The dark and

gloomy White House became bright and gay again after the marriage, for Edith Wilson loved parties and was a gracious hostess. From the time of their marriage until Woodrow Wilson's death in 1924, Edith Wilson rarely left her husband's side. She had a keen interest in all aspects of domestic and foreign problems, and he kept her completely informed. They read diplomatic dispatches together; he read all his important state papers to her before he prepared the final text; and she decoded messages in the president's secret code. In 19191 she went with him to the Paris Peace Conference. Edith Wilson had strong opinions and expressed them vigorously to her husband. He valued her advice; indeed, he seems to have regarded her as his wisest and certainly most trusted counselor. However, he made important decisions upon the basis of his own independent conclusions. Her most important role was to provide him with the companionship and love that was indispensable to his happiness and well-being. She is known to have engaged in only one political intrigue. In late 1916 she made a compact with Col. Edward M. House that she would persuade her husband to dismiss his secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, and House would persuade the president to dismiss Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. Thus importuned, President Wilson asked Tumulty to resign but relented when his secretary begged to stay on; House did not keep his part of the bargain. Much controversy has arisen about Edith Wilson's role in governing during Woodrow Wilson's illness following a massive stroke on October 2, 1919. Her sole concern was the health and recovery of her husband, and she accepted the judgment of his physicians who, when she suggested that it might be best for him to resign, replied that resignation would impair his chances for recovery. She insisted that she never made an important political decision during the period of her husband's illness, and there is abundant documentary evidence confirming the truth of her assertion. Her method was, first, to go over important letters and reports with Tumulty; together they decided which should be shown to the president. She then took the documents to him and either read them aloud or, when he had strength enough, let him read them. He then instructed her what to say in reply, and she wrote on the documents, "The President instructs . . ." or "The President believes . . . " The single known instance when Edith Wilson tried to influence her husband at this time occurred during the height of the controversy over the Treaty of Versailles. According to her own account, she begged the

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Wolff president to accept Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge's reservations to the treaty, which would have specified the limits of United States obligations to the League of Nations. Wilson's refusal to do so is considered a crucial factor in the defeat of the treaty. The Wilsons moved to a home on S Street in Washington upon Woodrow Wilson's retirement in 1921. Edith Wilson was a faithful nurse and companion to her husband until his death on Feb. 3, 1924. During the balance of her life she encouraged and took great interest in organizations and projects perpetuating her husband's memory and ideals, such as the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University, and the publication of his papers. She retained ownership of Gait's until 1934, when she sold it to her employees. Her active interest in political affairs never diminished, and one of her last public appearances was at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Edith Wilson died quietly in her home of heart failure in December 1961. [The basic sources are the Edith Boiling Wilson Papers and the Woodrow Wilson Papers, both in the Library of Congress. All the letters between Woodrow Wilson and Edith Boiling Wilson, as well as many of her other letters, will be published in forthcoming volumes of Arthur S. Link and others, eds., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. No adequate historical literature on her life exists. Her autobiography, My Memoir ( 1 9 3 8 ) , is anecdotal and often unreliable. Alden Hatch, Edith Boiling Wilson ( 1 9 6 1 ) , and Ishbel Ross, Power with Grace: The Life Story of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson ( 1 9 7 5 ) , both rely heavily upon My Memoir. Accounts of the Gait-Wilson courtship and marriage appear in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson; Life and Letters: Facing War, 1915-1917 ( 1 9 3 7 ) , and Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, 1915-1916 ( 1 9 6 4 ) . An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 2 9 , 1 9 6 1 . ] ARTHUR

S.

LINK

WOLFF, Sister Madeleva (Mary Evaline), May 24, 1887-July 25, 1964. College administrator, religious educator, poet. Mary Evaline Wolff, who became a leader of Catholic education for women, was born in Cumberland, Wis., the second of three children and only daughter of August Frederick and Lucy (Arntz) Wolff. A third brother died in infancy. Affectionately nicknamed Eva, she had a happy childhood in the small island lumber town. Eva Wolff imbibed an esteem for education from her parents. Her mother, the daughter of German immigrants, had been a schoolteacher before her marriage. August Wolff, who

had emigrated from Germany as a child, was a skilled harnessmaker who also served as mayor of Cumberland. It was taken for granted that Eva would go to college, and, after deferring entrance for a year because of family finances and her youth, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1905 intending to specialize in mathematics. A chance reading of a magazine advertisement for St. Mary's College, Notre Dame, Ind., led her to transfer to that college in 1906. There she encountered Sister Rita Heffernan, whose genius for literature, teaching, and friendship brought Eva Wolff not only to write poetry but also to redirect her life. In December 1908 Wolff entered the novitiate of the Holy Cross sisters who conducted St. Mary's. Taking the religious name of Sister Madeleva, she set herself to learn the ways of prayer and the meaning of poverty, chastity, and obedience as practiced by her order. In 1909 she received her B.A. from St. Mary's and was assigned to teach at the college. Membership in the community, in which she made a permanent profession of vows in 1914, reinforced a contemplative habit of mind, and directed her into the professions of teaching and administration; it also provided the context for her poetry. She earned an M.A. in English from neighboring Notre Dame University in 1918. From 1919 to 1922 she taught at Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden, Utah; between 1922 and 1924 she commuted between her teaching in Woodland, Calif., and the University of California at Berkeley, where she completed a Ph.D. in 1925. Chaucer's Nuns and Other Essays, and her thesis, Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness, both published in 1925, illustrated her critical talents. It was as a poet that Sister Madeleva became noteworthy, however. Never a prolific writer, between 1915 and 1964 she composed slightly over two hundred poems. Her first collection, Knights Errant (1923), displayed her control of classic forms and a lyric brilliancy. By 1927, when the Penelope collection appeared, she had fully adopted the colloquial idiom, or "syntax^ prose," which became her trademark. Then and later her poetry offered a unique blind of artistry, wry humor, and a bold imagery used to express both a love relationship with God and a wide range of human emotions. Her struggles to create poetry came during hours of chronic insomnia and recurrent hospitalization for exhaustion in the midst of an extremely active life. For over thirty years she served as a college president: first of St. Maryof-the-Wasatch in Salt Lake City, Utah ( 1 9 2 6 33), and then, after a year's interlude in Europe,

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Wolff of her alma mater St. Mary's (1934-61). During her presidency, many outstanding thinkers, literary critics, and dramatists came to St. Mary's and both a library and fine arts center were built. She also made curricular innovations, organizing interdisciplinary sequences around the medieval trivium and drawing on the concepts of Christian humanism as advanced by British historian Christopher Dawson. Sister Madeleva's concern with both religious education for women and the formal training of women religious led in the 1940s to two major developments. In 1943, St. Mary's created the first Catholic graduate program in theology open to women. The program trained women to teach religion at the college level at a time when no Catholic university admitted women as graduate students in theology. By the time St. Mary's program closed in 1969—after Marquette and Notre Dame Universities opened their theology programs to women—it had awarded seventy-six doctorates and over three hundred master's degrees. Her concern with the education of women religious on a broader scale led Sister Madeleva in 1948 to organize a new section of the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA) to focus on that subject. Papers from a panel she led at the 1949 NCEA convention, published that year as The Education of Sister Lucy, supplied the basis for the reform of training programs organized in the 1950s under the leadership of the Sister Formation Conference. As a result of Sister Madeleva's concern, women entering religious communities began to work toward college degrees prior to being assigned to apostolic work and women's education for ministry became more commensurate with that afforded men through the Catholic seminary system. Conversations with Cassandra (1961) distilled the essence of Sister Madeleva's confidence in women's potential and her belief in the role of higher education in the development of women's powers. Recognition of Sister Madeleva's abilities and achievements came in the form of numerous honors and offices. She was vice president of the Indiana Conference of Higher Education and the recipient of six honorary degrees as well as several awards for her poetry. Keenly interested in ecumenical affairs as the daughter of a Lutheran father and a Catholic mother, at one time she chaired the Indiana section of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Sister Madeleva retired in 1961, leaving a college which had sharpened its sense of mission and gained in national prestige. Her retirement years were brief. She continued an extensive speaking schedule and personal corre-

spondence; served in a consultative capacity to her successor; indulged in her hobby of gardening; continued to write; and turned, in hours of silence, to the contemplative reading of Dante's Paradiso. Much to her frustration, the episodes of extreme exhaustion which had continually plagued her worsened and necessitated her spending whole months in bed. On July 23, 1964, in Boston, she underwent an operation for a nonmalignant condition; she died there two days later of septicemia. The body she had described in one of her poems as "woven" by her mother, and "textured through with life and time and place," was laid to rest. [Principal collections of Sister Madeleva's papers are in the St. Mary's College Archives and in the St. Mary's Convent (General Motherhouse) Archives. In addition to her initial works mentioned above, she published nine books of poetry between 1935 and 1955. All of her earlier poems are reprinted in The Four Last Things: Collected Poems ( 1 9 5 9 ) . A Child Asks for a Star appeared posthumously in 1964. The Columbia Broadcasting System televised her script, "Praise Be My Lord," Dec. 24, 1963. Other writings include her autobiography, My First Seventy Years ( 1 9 5 9 ) , and A Lost Language and Other Essays on Chaucer ( 1 9 5 1 ) . Her literary essays appeared in The Bookman, Commonweal, Thought, and the Am. Benedictine Rev. Essays on biographical themes and educational philosophy include "Saint Hilda of Whitby," in Clare Boothe Luce, ed., Saints for Now ( 1 9 5 2 ) ; Addressed to Youth ( 1 9 4 4 ) ; "Education for Immortality," in A College Goes to School, a volume she edited ( 1 9 4 5 ) ; Theology and the Teacher ( 1 9 5 3 ) . Biographical detail appears in Sister Mary Immaculate Creek, A Panorama: 1844—1977 ( 1 9 7 7 ) ; Barbara C. Jencks, The Sister Madeleva Story ( 1 9 6 1 ) ; Twentieth Century Authors ( 1 9 4 2 ) ; Catholic Authors, 1930-1947; and Current Biog., 1942. See also Carol Frances Jegen, "Women in Theology," Listening: Jour, of Religion and Culture, Spring 1978, and Sister Maria Concepta McDermott, The Making of a Sister-Teacher ( 1 9 6 5 ) . St. Mary's alumnae quarterly, Courier, has also published several articles by and about Sister Madeleva. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, July 26, 1964, and The CPSA [Catholic Poetry Society of America] Bull, July-Aug. 1964.] KAREN K E N N E L L Y ,

C.S.J.

WOLFSON, Theresa, July 19, 1897-May 14, 1972. Labor economist and educator. Theresa Wolfson was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the first of three children and only daughter of Adolph and Rebecca (Hochstein) Wolfson. Theresa's parents were Russian-Jewish radicals who had immigrated to the United States a few years before her birth. During her childhood, Adolph Wolfson worked as a news dealer until

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the family bought a large house, where both parents shared the tasks of keeping boarders. Wolfson attended Eastern District High School in Brooklyn and then entered Adelphi College. While an undergraduate she helped organize a chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (later the League for Industrial Democracy), and in the summer of 1916, took a job investigating wage standards in the ladies' garment industry. After receiving her A.B. from Adelphi in 1917, Wolfson continued her involvement in social and economic issues, serving as a health worker for the Meinhardt Settlement House in New York City and speaking occasionally at socialist rallies. This partisan commitment did not survive the factional struggles that followed the October Revolution of 1917. Thereafter, her socialism was of the heart and her belief in industrial democracy transcended party politics. From January 1918 to June 1920, Wolfson worked as a field agent and investigator for the National Child Labor Committee, a job that took her to a number of states in the south and midwest, and provided the impetus for her first published articles. These studies confirmed what was to become one of her guiding principles: that a worker's ability to deal effectively with society depended on a sound education. While working for the National Child Labor Committee, Wolfson was courted by Iago Galdston, a medical student beginning a career in public health. The two were married on July 19, 1920, and Galdston, who later switched to psychiatry, took a job at the Union Health Center of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). For the next several years Wolfson, who retained her maiden name, pursued graduate studies in economics at Columbia University and held two jobs that brought her into close touch with the problems of working women. From 1920 to 1922, she campaigned for minimum wage legislation and the eight-hour day under the auspices of the New York Consumers' League. She then investigated the seating, posture, and fatigue of sewing machine operators for the ladies' garment industry's Joint Board of Factory Control. In the process she collected data for her master's thesis, completed at Columbia in 1923. In 1925, convinced that workers could achieve economic and social justice only through trade unions, she moved to the ILGWU, where she served as education director of the Union Health Center for two years. The virtual exclusion of women from trade union leadership disturbed her, however, and she decided to devote her doctoral thesis to exploring the reasons for their absence. This study, which earned Wolfson a Ph.D. from the

Brookings Institution in 1926, became her first book, The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions, published the same year. During the 1920s, Wolfson found a practical focus for her social convictions in the workers' education movement, a loosely organized network of trade unionists, socialists, and academics who believed that effective trade unionism required educated workers trained for leadership. Wolfson had been contributing to this effort since 1921, teaching labor history and economics to workers in a variety of union-sponsored schools; in 1928 she began teaching at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers. Wolfson pursued a traditional academic career as well, starting in September 1928 as an instructor at the Brooklyn branch of Hunter College, which became Brooklyn College two years later. She remained there as a professor of economics and labor relations until her retirement. Along with her busy teaching schedule, she raised two children: Richard (b. 1926) and Margaret Beatrice (b. 1930). Wolfson's marriage to Galdston grew strained, ending in divorce in 1935; three years later she married Austin Bigelow Wood, professor of psychology at Brooklyn College. Wolfson's work for the balance of her career was animated by her belief in the potential of industrial democracy to create a just society. She kept her faith in trade unionism, at a time when unions were threatened with schismatic attacks from the left and accusations from the right. She believed that unions could be democratized through broader participation by women and the unskilled, and by education. Workers, she maintained, "cannot hope to solve the problems of their industry or of their economic world without specific information concerning both." Wolfson did not limit her educational efforts to blue-collar workers; during the thirties and forties, she played a prominent role in summer schools for office workers, and in the whitecollar workshops sponsored by the American Labor Education Service. As a member of the public panel of the War Labor Board ( 1942-45 ), Wolfson urged a continuing role for wage-earning women in the American economy after the conflict. Women who have worked in wartime industries, she wrote in 1943, should not "be cast aside like an old glove." After the war, Wolfson took a new direction, joining the national panel of arbitrators of the American Arbitration Association, which provided a base for resolving unionmanagement disagreements. For her efforts at mediating industrial disputes, she was corecipient of the John Dewey award of the League for Industrial Democracy in 1957.

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Wong A vital person and an inspiration to her students and colleagues, Wolfson retired from Brooklyn College in 1967. She went on to teach women in the continuing education program at Sarah Lawrence College. Wolfson died in Brooklyn in May 1972. In her memory, her former students at Brooklyn College donated a collection of books to the college she had served so long. [Theresa Wolfson's personal letters and papers are still in the possession of her family; most are held by her daughter, Margaret Frank. There are some Wolfson letters in the papers of her brother, the dramatist Victor Wolfson in the Twentieth Century Archives, Boston Univ. Professional correspondence, a curriculum vitae, and a complete bibliography prepared by Wolfson are in the Labor-Management Documentation Center, Catherwood Library, Cornell Univ. The Special Collections Div., Brooklyn College Library, contains a brochure reprinting eulogies delivered in services for Wolfson held at Community Church, June 3, 1972. Significant published works include two books Wolfson coauthored: Labor and the N.R.A. ( 1 9 3 4 ) and Frances Wright, Free Enquirer: The Study of a Temperament ( 1 9 3 9 ) . The progress of Wolfson's thought can be traced in a number of articles: "People Who Go to Beets," Am. Child, Nov. 1919, pp. 2 1 7 - 3 9 ; "Posture and Fatigue," Survey, April 8, 1922, pp. 5 2 - 5 3 ; "Where Are the Organized Women Workers?" Am. Federationist, June 1925, pp. 4 5 5 - 5 7 ; "Schools the Miners Keep," Survey, June 1, 1926; "Trade Union Activities of Women," Am. Acad, of Political and Social Sei., Annals, May 1929, pp. 120-31; "Industrial Unions in the American Labor Movement," New Frontiers, Feb. 1937, pp. 3 - 5 2 , with Abraham Weiss; "Should White Collar Workers Organize?" Independent Woman, Nov. 1936; "Union Finances and Elections," Am. Acad, of Political and Social Sei., Annals, Nov. 1946, pp. 3 1 - 3 6 . No biography of Wolfson exists, but Victor Wolfson published a fictionalized account of the family, My Prince! My King! ( 1 9 6 2 ) . Information was provided by Margaret Frank and Victor Wolfson. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, May 15, 1972.] ALICE

KESSLER-HARRIS

WONG, Anna May, Jan. 3, 1905-Feb. 3, 1961. Actress. In a career spanning four decades, Anna May Wong achieved a measure of stardom despite her humble origins, but never realized her lifelong ambition to be an actress of the first rank. She was the second of eight children and second daughter of Wong Sam Sing and Lee Gon Toy, who gave her the Chinese name Liu Tsong at birth. Little is known about her parents, who were of Chinese descent, except that they operated a laundry business, one of the few occu-

pations open to Asians in the United States at the turn of the century. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she attended public schools while helping in the family laundry. Wong exhibited a keen interest in film early in life. As a youngster she often played truant and frequented the local nickelodeon. This precocious interest brought her into conflict with her father, who considered the world of film disreputable, unfit for a proper Chinese-American daughter. Strong-willed and fiercely independent, she decided upon an acting career in her early teens and, defying her father, began to make the rounds of the casting offices. At the age of fourteen, Wong appeared as an extra in her first film, The Red Lantern (1919). She later attributed her appearance in it to James Wang, an actor who recruited Chinese extras. Subsequently, she appeared in minor roles in other silent films, all with sinister Asian characters. She played her first leading role in a minor film, The Toll of the Sea ( 1 9 2 2 ) , as a Chinese Madame Butterfly who renounces her true love by dutifully committing suicide after he finds a woman of his own race. Critics praised her performance in this film whose antimiscegenation theme recurs in her later films. In 1924 Wong savored her first taste of fame by appearing in a lavish, landmark production, The Thief of Bagdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks. Though she performed only a supporting role as a "Mongol slave," her beauty and grace captured the public eye. Highly photogenic, with high cheekbones, expressive eyes, and jet black hair with horizontal bangs set against an ivory complexion, she became a favorite of photographers as a glamorous, exotic figure. Accordingly, she was groomed as Hollywood's "oriental siren." Her success coincided with the production of a number of new films which used China, Chinatown, or London's Limehouse district as background for crime and mystery, and in which Chinese were generally associated with evil, intrigue, treachery, and even savagery. By 1928 she had appeared in more than twenty silent films, most of them of this genre, including Mr. Wu (1927), The Devil Dancer (1927), and Chinatown Charlie ( 1 9 2 8 ) . In 1928, tired of being typecast as an oriental villain in minor roles, Wong set off for Europe to seek international fame. She went abroad under contract to Richard Eichberg, an independent German producer. For her performance in her first German film, Song (1928), she was acclaimed by Berlin critics. After a decade of struggle in Hollywood she gained recognition in Europe by landing several leading screen and stage roles, reaching the pinnacle of her success during the late 1920s and the early 1930s. From

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Wong 1928 to 1930 she was cast in leading roles in German, English, and French melodramas, including Piccadilly (1929) and The Flame of Love (1930). As talkies succeeded silents, Wong learned German and French; she also revealed new talents for singing and dancing. In March 1929 she made her stage debut in The Circle of Chalk with Laurence Olivier in London. Neither the play, based on a Chinese legend, nor her lead performance was favorably reviewed. Responding to criticism, she took voice lessons to cultivate a British accent. Fresh from her European achievements, Wong returned to America in the fall of 1930. The depression years proved to be her most lucrative. In October 1930 she appeared on Broadway for the first time, playing a cunning, vengeful "half-caste Chinese moll" in the successful play On the Spot, by Edgar Wallace. During her absence from the United States, Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu, a character personifying the so-called yellow peril, whose avowed purpose was the wholesale subjugation of the white race, came into vogue in Hollywood. In 1931 Wong returned there to perform the title role of Daughter of the Dragon (1931), based on Rohmer's Daughter of Fu Manchu. Her other American and British films of this period were in the main suspenseful melodramas. Notable among these were Shanghai Express (1932), A Study in Scarlet (1933), Limehouse Blues (1934), Chu Chin Chow (1934), and Java Head (1935). In 1935 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered her the supporting role of the vindictive concubine in The Good Earth, a screen adaptation of P E A R L S. BUCK'S best-selling novel. Wanting the lead role of O-lan instead, Wong spurned the offer of this only unsympathetic role in a film featuring an all-white cast portraying Chinese characters. On her first visit to China in January 1936, Chinese officials, to her surprise and dismay, chastised her harshly for her negative portrayals of Chinese characters. She explained that such roles were the only ones open to her. With the Sino-Japanese conflict intensifying, Wong returned home to perform for the first time in a film sympathetic to the Chinese. Reflecting changes in Sino-American relations, Daughter of Shanghai (1937) represented a favorable shift in Hollywood's portrayal of Chinese. Her remaining major roles in the 1930s were all in undistinguished class B mystery films, including Dangerous to Know (1938) and King of Chinatown (1939). During World War II she appeared only in a couple of Pacific war films. Off screen, she raised money for various China relief funds and entertained American troops. In the last two decades of her life, Wong

faded into middle-aged obscurity, managing to work only intermittently in film and television. After a long absence, she returned to the screen in a suspenseful melodrama, Portrait in Black (1960), as Lana Turner's mysterious maid. Her last film, The Savage Innocents, was released in 1961, the year she died of a heart attack at the Santa Monica, Calif., home she shared with her brother Richard. Anna May Wong was a person of contrasts and contradictions whose career was shaped by sex and race discrimination. To pursue her career, she had to defy her parents. Yet she retained a strong sense of family responsibility and loyalty; she helped to support her large family and even sent her widowed father and several siblings to China in 1934 for a lengthy visit. Scorned by many of her own people who were affronted by her screen caricatures of Chinese, she herself was disenchanted with the negative racial stereotypes which, ironically, made her acting career possible. Throughout her long career, the film industry adhered to a general policy of racial exclusion, reserving major Asian roles in class A films for white performers. Circumscribed by forces beyond her control, Wong did not have a real chance to realize her true worth as an actress. Even in death, this pioneer Asian-American actress was unable to escape her Hollywood image as the "foremost Oriental villainess" (Time, Feb. 10, 1961, p. 78). [Published materials about Anna May Wong are fragmentary and scattered; most should be used with care. An article by Judy Chu, "Anna May Wong," Gidra, Jan. 1974, is reprinted in Emma Gee, ed., Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America ( 1 9 7 6 ) , pp. 2 8 4 - 8 9 . See also Betty Willis, "Famous Oriental Stars Return to the Screen," Motion Picture, Oct. 1931; J. Parker, ed., Who's Who in the Theatre ( 1 9 3 6 ) , p. 1551; and Conrad Doerr, "Anna May Wong," Films in Review, Dec. 1968, pp. 6 6 0 - 6 2 . A list of her film credits is in Evelyn Mack Truitt, Who Was Who on Screen ( 1 9 7 7 ) . For a study of American screen treatment of Asian characters and settings see Eugene Franklin Wong, "On Visual Media Racism: Asians in the American Motion Pictures" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Denver, 1 9 7 8 ) . Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, N.Y. Herald Tribune, and L. A. Times, Feb. 4, 1961. A biobibliography prepared by Rexanne D. Newnam assisted in the research for this article. Additional information was provided by Richard Wong and Terence Tam Soon, who also made available his private collection of material on Anna May Wong. Birth certificate supplied by Registrar-Recorder, Los Angeles Cty.] EMMA GEE

WOOD, Sara Bard Field. See

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Woodsmall WOODSMALL, Ruth Frances, Sept. 20, 1883May 25, 1963. YWCA leader. General secretary of the World's YWCA from 1935 to 1947 and a crusader for women's rights, Ruth Woodsmall was born in Atlanta, the younger daughter and last of four children of Hubert Harrison and Mary Elizabeth (Howes) Woodsmall. Woodsmall's English ancestors had migrated to the United States as early as 1621, her Bavarian forebears in the mid-eighteenth century; both groups settled largely in New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Her father, a Union soldier during the Civil War, was a lawyer who also obtained a degree in religion and became an active teacher and worker for the Baptist Home Mission Society. (Ruth Woodsmall later joined the Baptists as well.) Her mother, an educated southern gentlewoman, supported the family by teaching painting and decorative arts after her husband's death in 1889. The family moved to Indianapolis, where Ruth grew up. Eager to continue her ancestors' traditional involvement in higher education, Ruth Woodsmall attended Franklin College in Indiana (1901-03), Indiana University (1903-05), and the University of Nebraska, where she received her A.B., Phi Beta Kappa, in 1905. In addition to summer graduate work at Columbia University and the University of Heidelberg, she studied at Wellesley College, earning an A.M. in German there in 1906. Woodsmall began work that year as a high school principal in Ouray, Colo., serving subsequently as a German and English teacher in Reno, Nev., Pueblo, Colo., and Colorado Springs. In 1916 she left teaching to travel for a year through India and the Far East, observing social conditions and developing insights later applied in her international efforts for the YWCA. Beginning in 1917 with the United States' entry into World War I, Woodsmall spent more than three decades with the YWCA. Her first assignment, with the National Board of the United States, included War Work Council service, directing Hostess Houses near bases in the United States and France. After the armistice, she entered Germany with the army of occupation and later visited Poland to evaluate postwar conditions. Woodsmall's comprehensive field surveys in Baltic and Balkan countries (1918-20) helped to initiate YWCA activities there. In 1920 Woodsmall became executive secretary of the YWCA in the Near East (Turkey and Syria) and also secretary of the YWCA Eastern Mediterranean Federations (Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt). Her special field

research in these countries, carried out with the help of American business and welfare organizations, yielded contributions to a social survey of Constantinople (1920-21) as well as a comprehensive study of American philanthropy in the Near East (1924). A traveling fellowship from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation in 1928 enabled Woodsmall to begin a two-year critical study of the changing status of Moslem women in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, Iran, and India. Her report, issued in 1930, was later published as Moslem Women Enter a New World (1936). It was regarded as a seminal work as it revealed the dramatic transition being made from the strict observance of Islamic tradition to a more liberal interpretation of the status and role of Moslem women. Woodsmall expanded the scope of her research in the early 1930s, studying the roles of women in Burma, India, China, and Japan as a member of the Laymen's Foreign Mission Inquiry. This, and her related work for the International Missionary Council in Japan, led to another book, Eastern Women Today and Tomorrow (1933). Woodsmall returned to the United States in 1932 to serve as an international affairs staff specialist on the National Board of the YWCA. Then in 1935 she resettled in Geneva, Switzerland, to launch her twelve-year tenure as general secretary of the World's YWCA. Woodsmall brought to this task her unerring diplomatic skills, combining an earnest appreciation for diverse customs and cultures with an ability to emphasize the problems faced in common by women around the world. Energetic, resourceful, and courageous, she also had a special gift for attracting and sustaining a large, varied circle of friends with whom she shared her private and public life. Drawing on all of these qualities, Woodsmall continued to explore the changing status of women in a variety of settings, from Nazi Germany in the 1930s to Latin America during World War II. The World's YWCA Council regarded her field reports both as resources for evaluating the social and other conditions that effectively restricted women's advancement, and as guides for directing an organization with a distinctly Christian orientation in its efforts to redress those problems. These reports, along with her many other writings during her tenure as general secretary, provide a remarkably complete record of the YWCA's structure, goals, and achievements; they also document a critical era of world history. Her work for the YWCA was recognized by honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska and Indiana University.

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Woodward vember 1947, Woodsmall continued to work for the YWCA's Special Service in China, Japan, Korea, and several other Asian countries until April 1948. The following year she returned to government service, remaining in Occupied Germany until 1954 as Chief of Women's Affairs, first under the Military Government and then under the United States High Commission for Germany. In this capacity, she helped German women rebuild channels of communication with women of other nations, a contribution acknowledged in 1962 with a Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of West Germany. Complementing her work in Germany, she was an adviser for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women at meetings in Beirut (1949) and Geneva (1952), and contributed in Paris to the UNESCO Working Party on the Equality of Access of Women to Education (1951). Ruth Woodsmall devoted the last decade of her life principally to research and writing. Aided by two Ford Foundation grants, she effectively updated her earlier pioneering studies of near and far eastern women in two books: Study of the Role of Women, Their Activities and Organizations in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria (1955) and Women and the New East (I960). She was living in New York City in May 1963, when she died at the age of seventy-nine. Friends later scattered her ashes in the woods near Geneva, where she had spent many happy and productive years. [Ruth Woodsmall's personal and professional papers are preserved in the Sophia Smith Coll., Smith College. Extensive files ( 1 9 0 4 - 6 0 ) include family, personal, and professional correspondence, diaries, brief autobiographical and biographical sketches, records, reports, photographs, and clippings. No definitive biography exists, but the following articles contain information on Woodsmall: Anna Rice, "To Ruth Woodsmall, for Twelve Years General Secretary of the World's Y.W.C.A.," Woman's Press, Nov. 1947, pp. 19, 46; "Personalities and Projects: Social Welfare in Terms of Significant People," Survey, March 1949; Ethel Johnson, "Lady Ulysses," Independent Woman, April 1949, pp. 1 0 5 - 6 ; Jean Storke Menzies, "Changing Roles of Women Studied by World Traveler," Santa Barbara News-Press, Nov. 3, 1957; Norma Green, "Books in Review," Nebraska Alumnus, March 1961, p. 23; "Tributes" [to R.F.W.], World Y W C A ( 1 9 6 4 ) , pp. 1-11. See also Current Biog., 1949. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, May 27, 1963. Personal and career information was furnished by Woodsmall's niece Marlen E . Neumann and by her friend and associate Elizabeth Palmer.] MARY-ELIZABETH MURDOCK

WOODWARD, Ellen Sullivan, July 11, 1887Sept. 23, 1971. Federal official, state legislator.

Born in Oxford, Miss., Ellen Sullivan Woodward went from Mississippi state politics to become a leading New Deal official, administering both relief programs for women and the federal arts and writers projects. Ellen was the fourth of five children of William Van Amberg and Belle (Murray) Sullivan, and the second of three daughters. Her parents, descendants of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish immigrants, enjoyed a respected position in the community. William Sullivan, the first law graduate of Vanderbilt University, served as a Mississippi congressman (189798) and United States senator (1898-1901). He was particularly close to his children after his wife's death in 1894 and often permitted Ellen to accompany him as he argued his cases in court. He once told a friend his young daughter "had no such thing as fear of anyone in her composition." Ellen Sullivan's informal education in civic affairs continued during her life in Washington as an adolescent. She graduated from Oxford High School and received a diploma from Sans Souci College in Greenville, S.C., in 1905, and a music certificate from Washington (D.C.) College. Noted for her intelligence and beauty, Ellen Sullivan was a socially prominent young woman. On June 27, 1906, she married Albert Young Woodward, an attorney who served successively as a state district judge, city attorney, and member of the Mississippi legislature. Their son, Albert Y. Woodward, Jr., was born in 1909. As a young matron in Louisville, Miss., Ellen Woodward became a leader in community affairs. She also conducted her husband's successful campaign for the legislature. After Albert Woodward's sudden death on Feb. 6, 1925, she succeeded him in the 1926 legislative session, defeating her male opponent decisively. The second woman to serve in the Mississippi House of Representatives, Ellen Woodward was supported by her colleague n e l l i e n u g e n t s o m e r v i l l e . Her service on legislative committees on libraries, higher education, the liquor traffic, and eleemosynary institutions presaged her later work for women and children. As a widow and the mother of a teenage son, Woodward declined to seek reelection and in late 1926 accepted a more remunerative position with the Mississippi State Board of Development as director of civic development. Promoted to executive director of the board in 1929, she served until 1933. She also held executive or trustee posts with a variety of charitable institutions and with the first Mississippi State Board of Public Welfare. Wide public recognition and her own political astuteness led to her election as a delegate to the 1928 Democratic

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National Convention. In 1932 she was named the Mississippi Democratic Committeewoman, but resigned the post in 1934 because of her federal employment. Through her vigorous work in Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 presidential campaign, Woodward came to the attention of M A R Y DEWSON, head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. When Harry L. Hopkins, director of the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), sought an assistant to direct women's work programs, Dewson urged Woodward's appointment. In September 1933, Ellen Woodward came to Washington to become assistant administrator in charge of emergency relief programs for women; she remained in Washington for the rest of her life. During the New Deal she instituted or supervised direct relief and work relief programs that assisted nearly 500,000 women who were heads of families or had no other means of support. Believing in the traditional values of home and children, Woodward sponsored programs which developed women's work within that context. The largest of the projects promoted household training, sewing rooms, school lunchroom management, rural library development, and public health services. Most of Woodward's forty-eight state directors were women. In July 1936, Woodward's duties expanded when she became director of the WPA cultural projects for writers, musicians, actors, and artists, administering programs for an additional 250,000 persons. As director of the Women's and Professional Division of the WPA, she was the second highest-ranking woman in the federal government, outranked only by FRANCÉS PERKINS. Under Woodward's administration, federal involvement in state cultural projects increased. Central to her work was her belief that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work and that emergency programs should train women for future gainful employment. She once said, "Unemployment and unhappiness are synonymous. Our programs aim to end both." Woodward's competence and tact, as well as her keen political sense and humanistic approach to the problems of the needy, won her the support of E L E A N O R ROOSEV E L T , with whom she maintained close professional and personal ties. Directing a politically sensitive agency while also dealing with artists and writers was far from easy. She was sympathetic to the experimental aims of the cultural projects, and defended them tenaciously but unsuccessfully in her 1938 appearance before the congressional investigating committee headed by Martin Dies. After Hopkins's resignation from the WPA, Wood-

ward accepted a presidential appointment to the three-member Social Security Board, taking the seat vacated by Dewson. She was reappointed in 1943. In accepting the Social Security post, Woodward said she welcomed the "opportunity for service where my deepest interests lie—security for the home and family." She directed her efforts to the expansion of social security for women and dependent children, focusing her attention during World War II on the opening of new job opportunities for women, the extension of unemployment insurance coverage for women, and the promotion of women in postwar policymaking. From 1943 to 1946 she was a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, serving as a member of the Standing Technical Committee for Welfare and as an observer of German camps for displaced persons. In July 1946, when the Social Security Board was abolished, President Harry S Truman appointed Woodward director of the Office of Inter-Agency and International Relations of the Federal Security Administration (FSA). As the FSA liaison officer with the United Nations and the State Department, she attended the 1947 Lake Success organizational meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council. Ellen Woodward retired from government service on Jan. 1, 1954. She remained active in many women's organizations, including the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, for which she had been national chairman for public affairs from 1944 to 1946. In 1971, she died of arteriosclerosis at her Washington home. [The Woodward Papers and Scrapbooks in the Miss. Dept. of Archives cover her entire career; they include extensive correspondence, memoranda, public documents, speeches, and photographs. A smaller collection of her papers is in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Other pertinent manuscripts are in the Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and Mary Dewson Papers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. The Truman Library in Independence, Mo., has a number of letters endorsing her 1946 appointment. Numerous Woodward articles and speeches appeared in the leading women's popular magazines and professional journals during the 1930s and 1940s. Holland's contains two biographical articles (March 1936 and June 1 9 4 4 ) ; several issues of the Democratic Digest contain news items of her work and party activities. Two dissertations discuss Woodward's work: Elsie L. George, "The Women Appointees of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations: A Study of Their Impact and Effectiveness" (American Univ., 1 9 7 2 ) and Susan Ware, "Political Sisterhood in the New Deal: Women in Politics and Government, 1 9 3 3 -

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1940" (Harvard Univ., 1978). Woodward's WPA administration is evaluated in William F. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts ( 1 9 6 9 ) ; Jane DeHart Mathews, The Federal Theatre, 19351939: Plays, Relief, and Politics ( 1 9 6 7 ) ; Richard McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists ( 1 9 7 3 ) ; Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers Project, 1935-1943 ( 1 9 7 2 ) . Obituaries appeared in Wash. Evening Star, Sept. 24, 1971, Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 26, 1971, and Winston County (Miss.) Journal, Sept. 30, 1971. Numerous photographs of Woodward and of WPA women's projects are in the Miss. Dept. of Archives.] MARTHA

H.

SWAIN

WRIGHT, Mary Clabaugh, Sept. 25, 1917June 18, 1970. Historian. Mary Wright was a leading figure in the study of modern Chinese history during the 1950s and 1960s when it came of age as a major discipline in the United States. During the 1950s, as a collector and curator of the modern China collection at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Palo Alto, and then during the 1960s as professor of history at Yale, she inspired new work, fostered the structural development of the field, and set a brilliant example in her own teaching, research, and publication. Mary Oliver Clabaugh was born in Tuscaloosa, Ala., the second of five children and eldest of four daughters of Samuel Francis and Mary Bacon (Duncan) Clabaugh. Her father, a native of Birmingham and graduate of the University of Alabama, was a successful business executive, publisher of the Tuscaloosa News (1910-14), and later head of life insurance companies in Birmingham. Her mother was born in Eutaw, Ala., attended Agnes Scott College, and graduated from the University of Alabama. Mary Clabaugh was thus born into a wellestablished family rooted in Alabama. From an early age she enjoyed outdoor life and sports, especially swimming, tennis, and horseback riding. A pacesetter for her three younger sisters, she was also a leader in high school and college. At Ramsay High School in Birmingham, she became president of the student body and of the National Honor Society; while at Vassar College, which she entered on scholarship in 1934, she was president of the student Political Union. Graduating from Vassar as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, she began her postgraduate studies at Radcliffe College in the fall of 1938 in European history. She soon became interested in the history of China, a country she had visited briefly in 1934. A new field, modern China was

then taught in less than a dozen American universities. Chinese diplomatic documents had just been published and at Harvard it was also possible to study the Chinese language and begin to use Chinese sources for research. Mary Clabaugh's imagination responded to this challenging opportunity and her passion for thoroughness soon had her deeply involved. At twenty-one her beauty and southern accent were accompanied by an extraordinary intellectual vitality. She met another, more advanced, graduate student, Arthur Frederick Wright (1913-1976), whose interests complemented and supported hers to a remarkable degree. Arthur Wright, after receiving his A.B. from Stanford University in 1935, had turned away from automotive America, represented by his father's burgeoning automobile sales and service business, and elected to begin studies of Chinese Buddhism at Oxford. After receiving the B.Litt. (Oxon.) in 1937, he came to Harvard to pursue both Chinese and Japanese, a young man of great charm and gaiety with broad aesthetic interests and a strong intellectual commitment to the humanities, especially the history of thought. Arthur and Mary Wright were married in an Episcopal service in Washington, D.C., on July 6, 1940, and at once departed for Kyoto to spend a year on fellowships pursuing their doctoral researches. Their plan was to spend a second year in Peking (then Peiping) and in fact they did so, but it would be seven years before they returned to the United States. During 1940-41 Arthur and Mary Wright lived in a Japanese house in Kyoto, studying both Japanese and Chinese with half a dozen teachers. Determined not to forgo the arduous on-thespot training so necessary for their careers as area specialists, they moved to the bustling city of Peking in June 1941 to a fine house, formerly part of a prince's palace. Under the pro-Japanese local government, American funds were hard to convert, but they visited Peking's sites and enjoyed the well-served social life that continued in the Sino-foreign community. They tried to allay the natural concern of their families by arguing that few other Americans were leaving Peking and that the city would not be a military target. After December 1941, when war began for America with the Japanese attack on Hawaii, life in Peking continued pleasantly, though precariously, until March 24, 1943, when Peking's enemy aliens were finally interned in a camp which they administered themselves at Weihsien, Shantung. The indignities, hard work, and comradeship of the next two-and-a-half years in camp were a contrast to Peking. Arthur

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Wright Wright was a butcher, water-carrier, and fireman, among other things, Mary Wright a washer of dishes and clothes, but she also baked cakes and studied Russian. When evacuated from Wei-hsien on Oct. 17, 1945, the Wrights returned to Peking to get back to their studies. Suddenly a new world of practical action opened up. The Hoover Library began a program to collect contemporary materials on the Chinese revolution. Arthur and Mary Wright became its China representatives and arranged to visit major cities on American army planes. In October 1946 they visited the Chinese Communist party capital at Yenan, met Mao Tse-tung, dined with Chu Te, and saw the many model institutions. Later during three weeks in Nanking Mary Wright secured some 3,000 volumes from Nationalist government offices. She also saw postwar conditions and found materials in Shanghai, Hankow, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. The collection program became essentially hers, benefiting from her initiative, persistence, and persuasiveness with people. From being a postwar displaced scholar out of funds she became an operator in the American establishment in China. She also became an expert on Chinese contemporary materials. In April 1947 the Wrights returned to the United States. That year Arthur Wright completed his Ph.D. at Harvard and accepted appointment in the history department at Stanford. Mary Wright became China curator at the Hoover Library under Harold Fisher. Her experience of China in turmoil before, during, and after World War II had prepared her unusually well to be a historian. Mary Wright's Radcliffe Ph.D. was completed in 1951, but conversion of the thesis into a book was delayed by circumstances that seldom equally affect the work of male historians: Charles Duncan Wright was born on May 9, 1950, Jonathan Arthur Wright on Jan. 9, 1952. The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung-chih Restoration, 1862-1874 was published in 1957. In approaching the postrebellion China of the 1860s, Mary Wright had begun with foreign relations, for which the Chinese documents were first published in 1932. But the demands of the subject—how the dynasty was restored both by appeasing the British, French, and Russian invaders and by using foreign arms to suppress the Taiping, Nien, and other rebelssoon led her into a much larger undertaking, a study of the Ch'ing administration of the 1860s in all its aspects, using the 4,000-volume dynastic Veritable Records published in 1936, of which she obtained her own copy. The result was a "first"—a detailed study of the ideology,

problems, successes, and failures of an entire generation of Chinese and Manchu leaders who struggled to preserve an ancient and outdated order "amid lengthening shadows," as she put it. The Last Stand was the most daring, ambitious, and significant single work in its field and marked her at once as a major historian. Her new understanding of the Ch'ing officials whose writings she pursued so voraciously naturally led her to give credit to their aims and hopes; but she found the old China incapable of genuine remaking short of revolution. Later work has in some respects modified her picture, but her book of 1957 is still a milestone. It set a model of studying modern China from the inside. While Mary Wright had done some lecturing under the Stanford history department, she was not made a faculty member. In the Hoover Library, where she became assistant professor in 1951 and associate professor in 1954, she had built up a unique collection of materials through her contacts around the world. She had also sponsored a series of half a dozen bibliographic studies of major topics such as the Overseas Chinese, the Chinese Red Army, the student movement. But she did not want to be classed primarily as a library curator. In 1959 Arthur and Mary Wright were invited to the history department at Yale, he as professor, she as associate professor, making her the first tenured woman in the faculty of arts and sciences. This coup, combined with Yale's strength in Chinese language and literature, made that university overnight a major center of Chinese studies. The Wrights avoided setting up special arrangements for Chinese history and kept it in the mainstream of history teaching, with the Yale stress on undergraduate instruction. In 1953—54 they had spent a first sabbatical in Japan; in 1962-63 the family of four, plus a congenial tutor for the boys, traveled through Europe and South Asia and again spent several months on sabbatical in Japan. Both parents, though by now heavily engaged in the organizational activity of American academic life, remained strongly family-centered. Mary Wright's interest in modern China had moved on to the overwhelming fact of revolution and she set herself to study the processes at work. In August 1965 she presided over a research conference on the Chinese Revolution of 1911 from which emerged in 1968 China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913. Mary Wright's long introduction, "The Rising Tide of Change," is notable for its comprehensive interest in the whole Chinese scene and the spectrum of issues of interpretation. Her eloquent thesis, that "the foreign omnipresence" in China

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and the danger of intervention to protect foreign interests were major factors that "stopped the revolution short and brought Yuan Shih-k'ai to power," has been the starting point for much further work. In the organizing of the China field, Mary Wright founded the Society for Ch'ing Studies and its journal Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i, and served on a central developmental agency, the Joint Committee on Contemporary China. She received several honorary degrees and became the first woman trustee of Wesleyan University at Middletown, Conn. A kinetic imagination and a passion for thoroughness, when combined, are hard taskmasters. Mary Wright's achievements in family life, teaching, research, and increasingly in the public scene taxed her strength, and at age fortyeight she suffered a nervous exhaustion. She got back into action, but only to find herself in late 1969 a victim of inoperable lung cancer. Typically, she took charge of this emergency, set her affairs in order, saw her family and friends, spent a spring fortnight with her husband in Florence, and died at her home in Guilford, Conn., on June 18, 1970. History is of course rewritten by each generation and historians live by this fact. Their influence is in their writings, their students, and their example. Mary Wright was a pioneer in several respects. She entered the China field out of intellectual curiosity pure and simple, responding to its challenge as unknown territory. Her original training at Harvard was very brief and she had to find her way later in both language work and source materials. Her husband was of enormous help to her at every turn, but she remained at all times an equal coworker pursuing her own career, not subordinate to his. Her intellectual vigor is evidenced in her books. Her beauty, which did not fade, enhanced her symbolic role as a woman professor. But her outstanding trait was total commitment to the task at hand, whether it was defending Owen Lattimore, campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, opposing the Vietnam War, criticizing a sloppy manuscript, or advocating the publication of a good one. She was eloquent both in denunciation and in advocacy, and a force to be reckoned with in any meeting. Perhaps the primary example she set, as at the time of her death, was one of intellectual realism and courage. [There is no collection of Mary Clabaugh Wright's papers, but the Archives of Stanford Univ. contain the papers of the Asian Survey Project, in which she participated. The Radcliffe College Archives contain some of Mary Wright's letters from Japan and China, 1940-45. The Last Stand was reprinted in 1966 with a new preface and added notes. Important

articles by Mary Wright include "From Revolution to Restoration: The Transformation of Kuomintang Ideology," Far Eastern Quart., Aug. 1955, pp. 5 1 5 32, and "The Adaptability of Ch'ing Diplomacy: The Case of Korea," Jour, of Asian Studies, May 1958, pp. 3 6 3 - 8 1 . Other publications through 1965 are listed in the Cumulative Bibliography of Asian Studies, 1941-1965, vol. IV ( 1 9 6 9 ) , p. 699. The N.Y. Times carried news stories about Mary Wright on Nov. 4, 1956, and May 7, 1964; see also Who Was Who in America, V ( 1 9 7 3 ) . There are obituaries by John K. Fairbank in Am. Hist. Rev., Oct. 1970, pp. 1885-86, and Jonathan Spence in Jour, of Asian Studies, Nov. 1970, p. 131; an obituary also appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 19, 1970. A death record was provided by Conn. Dept. of Health. Mary Wright's sister, Jean Clabaugh Hiles, provided family letters and useful information. A biobibliography prepared by Mary Jane Conger was also helpful.] JOHN

K.

FAIRBANK

WRIGHT, Muriel Hazel, March 31, 1889-Feb. 27, 1975. Historian, community leader. Muriel Hazel Wright, the first of two children of Eliphalet Nott and Ida Belle (Richard) Wright, was born near Lehigh, Choctaw Nation (later Coal County, Okla.). Eliphalet Wright was half Choctaw Indian; his father, a graduate of Union Theological Seminary and chief of the Choctaw Nation (1866-70), had married a Presbyterian missionary teacher of colonial American ancestry. Ida Wright, of English and Scottish ancestry, was a graduate of Lindenwood College in St. Charles, Mo., who also came to the Choctaw Nation as a Presbyterian missionary. At the time of Muriel's birth, her father, a graduate of Union College and Albany (N.Y.) Medical College, was practicing medicine and serving as company physician for the MissouriPacific Coal Mines. Education was a priority in the Wright family, and in 1895, when Muriel was old enough to enroll in school, they moved to Atoka, a major town in the region. There she attended Presbyterian and Baptist elementary schools until 1902. The family then returned to their farm near Lehigh, and Ida Wright tutored her two daughters at home. In 1906 Muriel Wright set out for schooling in the east, entering Wheaton Seminary (later Wheaton College) in Norton, Mass. During her two years at Wheaton she excelled in her studies. When in 1908 her family moved to Washington, D.C., where her father served as resident delegate of the Choctaw Nation to the United States government, Wright joined them. In Washington she studied privately, taking French, piano, and voice lessons. After the family's return to Lehigh, Muriel Wright enrolled

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Wright at the newly founded East Central State Normal School in nearby Ada, Okla., in 1911. Upon graduation the following year, she embarked upon a teaching career. Her first position was in Wapanucka, Okla., and, after a year in nearby Tishomingo, Wright returned to Wapanucka in 1914 as high school principal. As principal she also taught Latin, English, and history, coached the girls' basketball team, and directed the senior play. A desire for further education attracted Wright to New York in 1916, where she began work on a master's degree, studying history and English. The outbreak of World War I forced her to return to Oklahoma in 1917. She served as principal of the Hardwood District School in Coal County, near the Wright farm, from 1918 to 1920 and from 1922 to 1924. Again she acted as both teacher and administrator, and she introduced a student-administered assistance program for children who could not afford school supplies. Although Wright briefly returned to teaching ( 1 9 4 2 - 4 3 ) , she devoted most of her career to researching and writing about the Oklahoma Indians and their role in shaping the history of Oklahoma, the west, and American culture in general. Her work found an audience beyond her home state, and she achieved national recognition for her editing of The Chronicles of Oklahoma, the quarterly journal of the Oklahoma Historical Society. A contributor beginning in 1922, she served as associate editor ( 1 9 4 3 - 5 5 ) and then editor ( 1 9 5 5 - 7 3 ) , raising the publication's standards of scholarship while encouraging diversity in submissions. During Wright's tenure, The Chronicles published several series of documents, including the "Oklahoma War Memorial-World War I I " ( 1 9 4 3 - 4 9 ) , her unique collection of historical and biographical records from the war era. Her own writing, published in The Chronicles and many other periodicals, has been praised for its "depth of research in primary sources, personal interviews, the use of topography and geography, enthusiasm, insight, creativity and thoroughness" (Fischer, p. 1 9 ) . Among Wright's other literary achievements are the four-volume work Oklahoma: A History of the State and Its People ( 1 9 2 9 ) , written with Joseph B. Thoburn, and three widely used standard texts of Oklahoma history. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation assisted her in preparing A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma ( 1 9 5 1 ) , a reference work cited for distinction by the American Association for State and Local History. Muriel Wright remained dedicated to her Choctaw heritage throughout her life. After Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the Choctaw

tribe had begun the long and complicated process of transferring tribal lands to private hands. As secretary of the Choctaw Committee from 1922 to 1928, Wright was involved in settling the multifarious economic and business affairs of the tribe. She subsequently helped to organize the Choctaw Advisory Council and served as its secretary ( 1 9 3 4 - 4 4 ) during a period of continuing efforts to make a final settlement of Choctaw properties. Wright was also among those Native Americans who fought for just government recompense for the plunder of Indian territory following Oklahoma statehood. Another lasting contribution reflecting a lifelong interest was her initiation with George Shirk of a statewide historical marker program. Wright's dedication and efforts on behalf of the program helped make Oklahoma a leader in identifying and preserving historic sites. In one instance she succeeded in blocking an attempt to remove the Choctaw Council House from Tuskahoma. Frequently honored for her accomplishments, Wright was elected to the Oklahoma Hall of Fame ( 1 9 4 0 ) and received a Distinguished Service Citation from the University of Oklahoma ( 1 9 4 9 ) for her historical writing, civic work, and service to her tribe. In 1971 the North American Indian Women's Association recognized her as the outstanding Indian woman of the twentieth century. After retiring in 1973, she maintained an oifice at the Oklahoma Historical Society, continuing to write and plan future projects, including a biography of her father. Muriel Wright died of a stroke in 1975 in Oklahoma City. [Biographical material on Muriel Wright is limited. The Okla. Hist. Soc. Div. of Library Resources has a collection of Wright's papers that is not yet open to research. An article she wrote about her father, "A Brief Review of the Life of Doctor Eliphalet Nott Wright," appeared in Chronicles of Okla., June 1932. Probably the best and most accessible source of information about her life is the tribute by Le Roy H. Fischer, "Muriel H. Wright, Historian of Oklahoma," Chronicles of Okla., Spring 1974, pp. 3-21, which is accompanied by a bibliography of her writings. Another tribute is Lucyl A. Shirk, "Muriel H. Wright: A Legend," Chronicles of Okla., Fall 1975, pp. 397-99. Who's Who in Oklahoma (1964) has a short piece, as does Lu Celia Wise, Indian Values Past and Present (1978). An obituary appeared in the Daily Oklahoman, Feb. 28, 1975. Interviews with Harriet O'Leary James, Patricia Lester, and Martha Blaine provided additional information. Death certificate supplied by Okla. Dept. of Health.] BUTH ARRINGTON

WURSTER, Catherine Catherine Krouse.

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See

BAUER,

Y YEZIERSKA, Anzia, 1880?-Nov. 21, 1970. Writer. Anzia Yezierska, whose work was celebrated in the 1920s and then fell into eclipse, wrote fiction and essays about poor Jewish immigrants from New York's Lower East Side whose experiences she shared. In the 1970s renewed interest in ethnic and feminist themes led to a rediscovery of her significance. Yezierska never knew the date of her birth. She invented one, Oct. 19, 1883, but was probably born in 1880 or 1881, in the village of Plinsk near Warsaw in Russian Poland. She was the third youngest of eight or nine brothers and sisters, the children of Bernard and Pearl Yezierska—an impecunious Talmudic scholar and a housewife. When they emigrated to America, some time between 1890 and 1895, the family name was changed to "Mayer" by immigration inspectors, and Anzia was renamed "Hattie Mayer." Yezierska took back her own name before she began publishing her stories. In 1915 her first published story, "The Free Vacation House," depicted the humiliation of the poor by unfeeling charities; in 1919 "The Fat of the Land" won the O'Brien prize for the best short story of the year. Both stories were included in Yezierska's first volume, Hungry Hearts (1920). That book was purchased by Samuel Goldwyn for $10,000, and she went to Hollywood to work on the screenplay. The film appeared in 1922, after Yezierska had refused a screenwriter's contract and returned to the New York life she thought essential to her creativity. Her early efforts to free herself from povertyworking in sweatshops and laundries—and from an oppressive family situation, were fictionalized in Bread Givers (1925). The book was significantly subtitled "A struggle between a father of the Old World and a daughter of the New." One route to escape was through education. Yezierska, who had attended public school briefly and gone to night classes in East Side settlement houses, had invented a high school education that got her accepted as an unclassified student at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1900. Four years later she had received a diploma in domestic science which she then taught, unhappily, for a few years—she loathed the subject but it was the only free education she could get. In Arrogant Beggar (1927) she described with some bitterness charitable patrons who provided financial aid for such a student. Yezierska always identified with the poor and oppressed. A strong individualist, there is

no evidence that she belonged to any radical parties. Around 1910, however, she lived for a time in a house set up by the Rand School to encourage a community of socialist thinkers. In 1910 she married Jacob Gordon, an attorney, but the marriage was annulled in a few months. The following year she married Arnold Levitas, who taught in vocational high schools and wrote textbooks. Yezierska desired only a religious ceremony, rather than the legally binding civil ceremony, so when their daughter Louise was born in 1912 she was formally adopted by her father to legitimize her. Yezierska hated cooking and housekeeping, disappointing her sociable husband's expectations. She left him temporarily in 1914, taking her daughter with her for a year to visit a sister in Los Angeles. Hiring a nursemaid, she took a job and began to write. In 1916, the year after her first story was published, she returned to New York, quit the marriage, and left her daughter with the father. Unable to obtain more than substitute teaching, she decided impetuously to enlist the aid of John Dewey at Columbia to secure accreditation. Her dynamic, striking presence (auburn hair, velvety white skin, blue eyes, short robust figure) and the stories she showed him impressed Dewey. Unprecedentedly, he allowed her to audit his seminar on social and political philosophy. Through the academic year 1917-18 their relationship became a romantic attachment. Their short-lived—probably not consummated—affair deeply affected them both. Dewey encouraged her to write, inspiring her with self-confidence at a critical juncture of her career, as can be seen in one of the poems he wrote to her: Generations of stifled worlds reaching out Through you Aching for utt'rance, dying on lips That have died of hunger, Hunger not to have, but to be (Boydston, p. xxvi).

She fictionalized her experience as translator on Dewey's project among Philadelphia Poles in All 1 Could Never Be (1932)—one of several stories about an aspiring girl of the people who encounters an upper-class man. Between that book and the autobiographical novel Red Ribbon on a White Horse (the title comes from a ghetto proverb, "Poverty becomes a wise man like a red ribbon on a white horse") in 1950, her reputation and fortune declined sharply. In the 1950s she wrote several reviews of books with ethnic and immigrant -themes for the New York Times; in the 1960s she published a few essays and stories on aging in The Re-

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porter, Commentary, and smaller journals. Aside from anthology pieces culled from Hungry Hearts and Children of Loneliness (1923) on the meaning of America to immigrants—"A deathless hope—a world still in the making"— her work was little known. Yet even in her extreme age Yezierska kept writing. The title of her last published story, "Take Up Your Bed and Walk" (Chicago Jewish Forum, 1969), testifies to her spirit. In her last year of life, almost blind after cataract operations, she dictated her work. She had left New York by then to live near her daughter, and died of a stroke in a nursing home in Ontario, Calif., on Nov. 21, 1970. Yezierska's novels often read like soap opera and her style can be overwrought ("She longed to throw herself at his feet and weep. Ach! America—God from the world! Ach!" Salome of the Tenements, 1922), yet 1920s critics responded to her portrayal of direct, strong emotions. No critic hinted at her years of preparation (including a writing course at Columbia in 1918), or noted that the translation of Yiddish vernacular spoken by her characters resulted from careful artifice and craft, not untutored genius. Bread Givers is a strong book; Red Ribbon on a White Horse is well-made and subtle. The narrator's accounts in Red Ribbon of Hollywood, of her relationship with a Dewey-inspired character, of palmy Algonquin days, hard times, and the Works Progress Administration Writers' Project—one of her coworkers was Richard Wright—and finally an interlude in Vermont in search of a simple and emotionally fulfilling life, convince that who touches this book touches a person. [The collection of Yezierska's papers at Boston Univ. —including some MSS., personal correspondence, and published and unpublished materials—is largely disappointing. The YIVO Inst, for Jewish Research in N.Y. City contains a few scattered letters of little significance. There is no biography or extended critical study; there is a dissertation by Ralda Sullivan, "Anzia Yezierska, an American Writer" (Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, 1975). The best evaluation of her life, work, and importance is Alice KesslerHarris, introduction to Bread Givers (1975). Jo Ann Boydston, introduction to The Poems of John Dewey (1977), illuminates admirably the Dewey relationship. Twentieth Century Authors (1942) contains a good photograph but is factually unreliable; the First Supplement (1955) is appreciative. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (1976), pp. 268-70, emphasizes her struggle with her father. A collection of Yezierska's stories, The Open Cage (1980), includes a sensitive essay by Alice KesslerHarris and a moving and informative afterword by Yezierska's daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen. Yezierska's accounts of her life in interviews and

writings are often fictionalized, and the date of her birth remains a question. Kessler-Harris gave 1885 in her introduction to Bread Givers but now agrees (correspondence with author) with the 1880 date given by Louise Henriksen, based on the dates of her attendance at Teachers College, internal evidence in stories, and her probable age at the time of her daughter's birth. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Nov. 23, 1970; death record from Calif. Dept. of Public Health.] JULES

CHAMETZKY

YURKA, Blanche, June 19, 1887-June 6, 1974. Actress. Blanche Yurka was born in Saint Paul, Minn., the third of four children of Anton and Karolina (Novak) Jurka. Both parents had emigrated from Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the large Czech colony in Chicago. From her father, Blanche inherited scholarly and artistic interests, a nature not easy to intimidate, and the joy of staging and acting in plays. Her mother, who spoke no English, had an unfortunate first marriage which ended in divorce. But Mila, Blanche Jurka's half sister, was as close to her as her older sister Rose and her two brothers. In Saint Paul, Blanche finished grade school before her father lost his job teaching Czech at Jefferson School and accepted a position as executive secretary for the Czech Benevolent Society in New York. He moved his family there in 1900. In New York Blanche Jurka began singing lessons before entering Wadleigh High School (1901-03), where she proved an erratic student. Music fascinated her, however, and she appeared in an amateur production of Balfe's The Bohemian Girl, which later supplied her with the title of her memoirs. She studied first at the Metropolitan Opera School (1903-05) and made her stage debut as the Grail-bearer in a 1903 Metropolitan production of Parsifal. Dismissed from the school for injuring her voice by singing the role of Leonora in an amateur production of II Trovatore, she went to the Institute of Musical Art (1905-07), the predecessor of the Juilliard School, which released her for the same reason. Having lost her chance at a career in opera, she finally accepted the suggestion of the Institute's director: "Why not go on the stage?" With customary persistence, she obtained an audition from David Belasco, who, she claimed, told her: "Your diction is clear and pure. Your voice has good timbre. I can sense that you have temperament. We must find out if you can act" (Bohemian Girl, p. 37). She soon had a small part in Belasco's The Rose of the Rancho (1906), and the following

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Yurka year received a contract from the impresario. (It was apparently at this time that she changed the spelling of her last name.) But her rise to stardom was slow, even disheartening. Beginning with The Warrens of Virginia (1907), and for a decade thereafter, Yurka alternated between stock company and touring productions, most notably appearing in three plays with E. H. Sothern. Her first real success was in Daybreak (1917), with J A N E COWL, a play which ran twelve weeks on Broadway before touring. She also toured in The Naughty Wife, then returned to New York to play in Allegiance (1918), which failed after forty-four performances. It was during an engagement in The Law Breaker (1922) that she met Ian Keith (born Ian Keith Ross), whom she married in September 1922. An actor whose career never reached great success, Keith's charm was offset by his jealousy; they were separated in 1925 and divorced in 1928. From the early 1920s through the mid-1930s Blanche Yurka achieved her greatest success as an actress. For 125 performances she played Gertrude to John Barrymore's Hamlet (1922). Because Barrymore at forty-two seemed a little old to be her son, she vented her irritation by making herself as youthful as possible. Her greatest popular success was in a slight melodrama called The Squall (1926), which played one year on Broadway and toured for another. Artistically, however, Yurka had already established herself in the part of Gina in The Wild Duck (1925), a role she modeled upon her mother. She also acted in Hedda Gahler (1929) and Lady from the Sea (1929), prompting critics to rave that she was making Ibsen one of the most popular playwrights of the day. Tall and imposing, with a voice and style of acting well suited to classical drama, Yurka was enthusiastically received in Norman Bel Geddes's production of Electra (1932). The following year she read the narrator in André Obey's Lucrece, enjoying a passionate interest in "wellspoken words." She won critical acclaim in 1935 when she replaced Edith Evans as the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, with KATHARINE C O R N E L L . Although her reputation rests firmly on classical drama, Blanche Yurka had other interests. In 1935 she started a career in the movies, performing in more than twenty films from A Tale of Two Cities (1935), in which she created a memorable Madame DeFarge, to Thunder in the Sun (1959). Beginning in 1936 she produced a series of successful one-woman shows in which she recreated scenes from classical drama. During World War II Yurka gave generously to the war effort with her time and talent, always emphasizing the cause of good theater. Both

before and after the war she toured with theater groups through Europe. Always a perceptive and forthright critic of the theater to which she had devoted her life, Yurka was also an independent and dynamic woman. She supported the actors' strike in 1919, later vigorously defended American actors and acting against the British invasion of American theaters, and endorsed T A L L U L A H BANKHEAD'S defense of the Federal Theatre Project at the 1939 Senate Appropriations Committee hearings. While noting that the Federal Theatre needed improvement, Yurka observed: "After all, you do not chloroform a child who happens to have the measles." When the occasion demanded, she could and did castigate Broadway for poor productions. After World War II she was more active in Hollywood than in New York, and her enthusiasm for theater waned. Her growing distaste for "the passion for ugliness that seems so much a part of our theatre today," expressed in a Nov. 6, 1955, letter to the New York Times, led her to announce her retirement that year. However, she could not long remain away from the theater. During the ensuing years, Yurka combined intermittent stage appearances with a career as a writer. Her enthusiasm for the theater illuminates Dear Audience (1959), a fascinating introduction to the art she loved; she went on to edit two collections of plays before writing Bohemian Girl (1970). Visiting Athens under the United States International Exchange of Artists to open the Greek Drama Festival in 1957, Yurka appeared in a reading of EDITH HAMILTON'S translation of Prometheus Bound. Few good roles came during her last years—the brevity of her part as the cook in Dinner at Eight (1966) shocked her—and she made her final stage appearance in The Madwoman of Chaillot in 1970. Historians tend to chronicle Yurka as an actress of strong-willed women and, indeed, in such roles she left her mark upon American acting. She died in New York City shortly before her eighty-seventh birthday. [The Blanche Yurka Coll. in the Billy Rose Theatre Coll., N.Y. Public Library, contains correspondence, reviews, photographs, and programs. Clippings can also be found in the Robinson Locke Scrapbooks at that library, and in the Harvard Theatre Coll. The most complete published source, despite some errors

in dates and chronology, is Bohemian Girl: Blanche Yurka s Theatrical Life (1970), a well-written auto-

biographical account. It also has excellent photo-

graphs. Yurka edited Three Scandinavian Plays (1962) and Three Classic Greek Plays (1964).

"Speed Mania the Curse of Modern Drama," Theatre Mag., May 1929, pp. 20, 58, indicates the kind of criticism she could write. The Biog. En eye. and

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Zaharias Who's Who of Am. Theatre (1966), pp. 937-38, lists her credits. See Louis Sheaffer's interview in the N.Y. Times, Nov. 6, 1955, and the interview in Opera News, April 3, 1971, pp. 12-13. For other observations on her work see William C. Young, Famous Actors and Actresses of the American Stage (1975), II, 1209-14 (which contains some inaccuracies); Arthur William Row, "A Star Who Is a

Luminary," Poet Lore, Spring 1928, pp. 132-33; John Mason Brown, Two on the Aisle ( 1938 ), pp. 68-71. An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, June 7, 1974. Information on the original spelling of Yurka's name came from the 1900 U.S. Census. A biobibliography prepared by Hampton Marshall Auld assisted in the preparation of this article.] WALTER

J.

MESERVE

z ZAHARIAS, Mildred Ella (Babe) Didrikson, June 26, 1911?-Sept. 27, 1956. Athlete. Babe Didrikson, the extraordinarily versatile athlete who broke records in several sports, acquired her nickname as a girl because she reminded her playmates of Babe Ruth. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, she was the sixth of seven children and the fourth girl of Norwegian immigrants, Ole Nickolene and Hannah Marie (Olson) Didriksen. Babe Didrikson later changed the spelling of the name to what she believed to be the Norwegian form (Johnson and Williamson, Whatta-Gal, p. 3 6 ) . Her father was a carpenter who refinished furniture and built his family's house; her mother, who had won skating championships in Norway, sometimes worked as a practical nurse and on occasion took in washing. In 1915 the Didriksens moved to a working-class neighborhood in Beaumont, Texas, where Babe grew up playing sandlot baseball with the boys. A high school basketball star, she was hired as a typist in February 1930 by Melvin McCombs, who ran the women's athletic program of the Employers Casualty Company of Dallas. Industrial athletic programs for women were common, since opportunities for women in college athletics were few. A three-time All-American, Didrikson led the company's semiprofessional basketball team, the Golden Cyclones, to two finals and a national championship. This rapid transition from small-town girl to national star may have accounted for the ambitious Didrikson's arrogance and boastfulness, which alienated her teammates. She soon had more to boast about. Introduced to track, by 1932 Didrikson had set American, Olympic, or world records in the eighty-meter hurdles, javelin, high jump, broad jump, and baseball throw. In the 1932 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championships she entered eight events and won five, tied one, and finished fourth in another, thus single-handedly winning

the team title. Limited to three events in the 1932 Olympics, she won gold medals in the javelin and hurdles. Tying the winner in the high jump, she was given the second place silver medal because of her unorthodox style. The Olympics brought fame and adulation from both press and public, to which Didrikson responded with naive pride and brash wit. Fame was one thing, but there was no competitive context in which a woman athlete could earn a living. After being suspended by the AAU for allegedly accepting a car and appearing in a Chrysler Corporation advertisement, Didrikson turned professional in December 1932. She spent a week with a vaudeville act in which she ran on a treadmill and displayed her real ability as a harmonica player. Later she toured for a season with a mixed basketball team, Babe Didrikson's All Americans. She drew so well that, after pitching in some major league spring training games in 1934, she played 200 games with a traveling, bearded baseball team called the House of David. For pitching an inning or two, she received $1,500 a month—and much scorn. Despite her singular success, Didrikson was often classed with other women athletes as a joke. No woman athlete can be taken seriously, Paul Gallico claimed; they are "at best secondrate imitations of the gentlemen" (Gallico, Farewell to Sport, p. 2 4 4 ) . Didrikson resented this kind of stereotyping and also objected to being called a "muscle moll," complaining that "they seem to think I'm a strange, unnatural being . . . The idea seems to be that Muscle Molls are not people" (Didrikson, "I Blow My Own Horn," p. 1 0 4 ) . In later years, she liked to tell about the dressmaking prize she had won at a state fair, and talked of her interest in cooking and gardening. In 1932 Didrikson made the fateful decision to try golf, at the urging of her friend the sportswriter Grantland Rice. During the spring and summer of 1933, in Los Angeles, she received

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Zaharias free golf lessons from Stan Kertes. In November 1934, in her first tournament, the Fort Worth Women's Invitational, she shot seventy-seven to qualify, but lost in the first round. Then in April 1935, in the hostile upper-class atmosphere of the River Oaks Country Club in Houston, she won the Texas Women's Amateur Championship, her first tournament victory. Immediately, the United States Golf Association branded her a professional. With only two professional tournaments for women then in existence, it was back to barnstorming, this time with a top male golfer, Gene Sarazen. She earned $150 per day plus a retainer from Wilson, the sporting goods manufacturers. In 1938 Didrikson qualified for a men's tournament in Los Angeles, where she was by then living, and was paired with George Zaharias, a prosperous professional wrestler and promoter. They were married in St. Louis on Dec. 23, 1938. George Zaharias successfully took on the management of his wife's career and made it possible for her to sit out the three years necessary to regain amateur status. From 1940 to 1943, she played in professional tournaments but refused the cash prizes. In 1940 she won the Western Opens, her first tournament victories since 1935. With the postwar resumption of a full schedule of tournaments, she put together a string of fourteen consecutive titles, climaxed by the British Women's Amateur Championship in 1947. She was the first American to win that prestigious title. In winning tournaments, Zaharias played a short, sharp game, a fact obscured by the fame of her 245yard drives. After turning professional in August 1947, Babe Didrikson Zaharias and five others founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association in January 1948, with the Wilson Company providing $15,000 prize money for nine tournaments. Zaharias was the leading money winner in 1949, 1950, and 1951. In 1952 she had a hernia operation; the following year she developed cancer of the rectum and had a colostomy. Fifteen months later she won her third United States Women's Open title by twelve strokes. But the cancer recurred in the spring of 1955, and she died in a Galveston hospital the following year. Babe Didrikson Zaharias converted women's golf to an exciting power game, breaking seventy, the women's four-minute mile; she also made it entertaining. She played to the galleries with wisecracking repartee which some found damaging to the image of the woman athlete; but her sense of theater gave women's golf the color it needed. A hustler, a practical joker, and at times a prima donna, she was above all

competitive and aggressive. A "remarkably fierce spirit" matched her extraordinary physical attributes, and the combination of physical coordination, hard work, and temperament produced her records. In launching big-time women's golf, she led the way for other women's sports. Golf made Babe Didrikson famous and earned her most of the $1,000,000 she accumulated in her lifetime. But it was her versatility which made her unique. In addition to her successes at basketball and baseball, she won tennis tournaments and a diving championship, and had a bowling average around 170. The Associated Press chose her six times as Woman Athlete of the Year; in 1950 they named her the Woman Athlete of the Half-Century. Not an overt campaigner for women's equality, "everything that was natural about Babe led her to sports, traditionally a man's world" (Johnson and Williamson, Whatta-Gal, p. 21). Her skills and accomplishments made her a symbol of what women could achieve in that arena. [A collection of letters to Zaharias's friends William (Tiny) and Ruth Scurlock are in the John Gray Library at Lamar Univ., Beaumont, Texas. Shortly before her death she collaborated on an autobiography with Harry Paxton, This Life I've Led ( 1 9 5 5 ) . She also wrote "I Blow My Own Horn," American Mag., June 1936, and Championship Golf ( 1 9 4 8 ) . Most thorough and objective of the accounts of her life are three articles in Sports Illustrated, Oct. 6, 13, and 20, 1975, by William Oscar Johnson and Nancy P. Williamson, and their book based on the articles, "Whatta-Gal": The Babe Didrikson Story ( 1 9 7 7 ) . Betty Hicks's account "Babe Didrikson Zaharias," Womensports, Nov. and Dec. 1975, contains some errors, but is a revealing assessment by an opponent. Representative of hostile male opinion is Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sport ( 1 9 3 8 ) . Grantland Rice, The Tumult and the Shouting: My Life in Sport ( 1 9 5 4 ) , offers an enthusiastic appreciation. Articles about her appeared frequently in national magazines through the thirties and forties and after her operation for cancer. See also Current Biog., 1947. Babe Didrikson Zaharias claimed various birth dates, and no birth certificate is available. The 1911 date was chosen on the basis of information supplied to her biographers by one of her sisters. Obituaries appeared in the N.Y. Times, Sept. 28, 1956, and in the Oct. 8, 1956, issues of Life, Time, and Newsweek; death record provided by Texas Dept. of Health. Photographs are in her autobiography and in the works by Johnson and Williamson. A biobibliography by Jacqueline Pratt provided assistance in research.] NANCY NORTON

ZIMBALIST, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, Aug. 6, 1876-Jan. 4, 1970. Music patron, philanthropist.

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Zimbalist Mary Curtis Zimbalist was best known for her support of musicians and musical organizations, notably the Curtis Institute of Music, founded in Philadelphia in 1924. She was born in Boston, the only child of the publisher Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis, of Portland, Maine, and Louisa (Knapp) Curtis. Three months after her birth, the family moved to Philadelphia, where printing prices for Curtis's People's Ledger were lower. Mary Louise Curtis grew up in a musical atmosphere: her father played the organ, her mother sang, and they all attended concerts. She studied the piano and specialized in music at the Ogontz School for Young Ladies. By 1883 Cyrus Curtis had become the sole owner and Louisa Curtis editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Having boosted Journal circulation to over a million, Curtis also purchased the Saturday Evening Post in 1897. These ventures ensured the growth of the Curtis Publishing Company, which came to stand for high quality editorial work and glorified middleclass values. In 1889 Edward William Bok, a Dutch immigrant and self-made publishing success, succeeded Louisa Curtis as editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. An active philanthropist in later life, Edward Bok spearheaded a successful endowment campaign for the Philadelphia Orchestra and willed over two million dollars to charities. On Oct. 22, 1896, he and Mary Louise Curtis were married. They had two sons, William Curtis (b. 1897) and Cary William (b. 1905). Mary Bok devoted her life to music through a variety of philanthropic activities in which she always maintained a practical involvement. After her mother's death in 1910 she gave funds for a building in her honor to house the Settlement Music School, which served the children of a disadvantaged neighborhood of Philadelphia. Grateful for all that music had given her, Bok aspired to communicate self-respect and good citizenship through exposing others to music. Her most ambitious contribution was the founding of the Curtis Institute of Music, named for her father, in October 1924. Considered a pioneering undertaking in music education at the time, the Institute offered courses in musicianship and academic subjects in addition to applied instruction. Bok aimed at producing "all-around" musicians, and the school also provided students with opportunities such as recitals, lectures, and contact with leading artists. Close ties were cultivated with the Philadelphia Orchestra; its conductor, Leopold Stokowski, led the student orchestra, and many of the orchestra's principals joined the faculty. In addition, Bok and her family were active

both on the orchestra's board of directors and in the school's administration. Among those who attended the Curtis Institute over the years were Samuel Barber, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Leonard Bernstein. A more direct beneficiary of Bok's patronage was the futurist composer George Antheil, whom she began to assist in 1921. Despite fundamental aesthetic conflicts, this unlikely artist-patron collaboration and friendship survived for nineteen years the tempestuous course of Antheil's career. Though she frequently disapproved of his behavior as well as his music, Bok always responded generously to Antheil's requests for supplements to the allowance she granted him. In 1927 Mary Bok substantially increased her initial grant of $500,000 to the Curtis Institute. With the total endowment raised to $12,500,000, the school was able to abolish tuition. Bok also provided living expenses for needy students and their families, lent grand pianos, and sponsored tours of Europe. The Rockport summer music colony established near the family summer home in Maine likewise grew out of her generosity. In 1930 Bok's husband died, and she nursed her father through his final illness until his death in 1933. In memory of her father, she later donated the Curtis organ in Irvine Auditorium to the University of Pennsylvania, had his home organ rebuilt for Christ Church, and presented the world's largest movable pipe organ to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On July 6, 1943, Mary Bok married Efrem Zimbalist. A Russian-born concert violinist, Zimbalist had joined the Curtis Institute's faculty in 1928 and became its director in 1941. Mary Bok Zimbalist's philanthropy at times extended outside the music world. Civic and harbor improvement programs, jobs for the unemployed during the depression, and construction of libraries and the Bok Amphitheater were among her charitable undertakings in Rockport and Camden, Maine. She also donated the Annie Russell Theater to Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. Mary Zimbalist died of heart failure in Philadelphia at ninety-three. A tribute to her on the fiftieth anniversary of the Curtis Institute, which she had served as president for forty-five years, described her as "calm, wise, gracious, understanding, tolerant, a lady of exquisite taste and poise: a woman of enormous strength and determination." Although conservative tastes placed her in opposition to much of modern and popular music, she endeavored to remain publicly neutral, in unswerving belief that the music would speak for itself.

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Zimbalist

Zimbalist [Manuscript sources include a collection at the Curtis Institute, which contains drafts of correspondence, commencement speeches, newspaper clippings, and photographs. It is available to scholars by appointment only. The Grace Spofford Papers in the Sophia Smith Coll., Smith College, contain personal as well as official correspondence between Spoiford, the first dean of Curtis, and Zimbalist. The Music Div., Library of Congress, holds her correspondence with George Antheil; see Wayne D. Shirley, "Another American in Paris: George Antheil's Correspondence with Mary Curtis Bok," Quart. Jour, of the Library of Congress, Jan. 1977. The Hist. Soc. of Pa. has a cross-section of material, including the Cyrus Curtis Papers, and the George H. Lorimer Papers (Post series), mostly concerning business, and Charles J. Cohen's 1924 Rittenhouse Square scrapbook, which contains a letter from Zimbalist with a brief autobiographical sketch. The most useful published source on Zimbalist's life and

career is Overtones, the Curtis Institute newsletter, published with her support from 1929 until 1940. The fiftieth anniversary issue (1974), edited by Nellie Lee Bok, contains a tribute and biographical sketch with photographs. Early Curtis Institute catalogs are also of interest. An entry appears in Baker's Biog. Diet., 6th ed. Sources of information about her family include entries on Cyrus Curtis and Edward Bok in Diet. Am. Biog., Supp. One; Edward Bok, A Man From Maine (1923), a biography of Cyrus Curtis, and his autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920). Also see Robert A. Gerson, Music in Philadelphia (1940), and Herbert Kupferberg, Those Fabulous Philadelphians: The Life and Times of a Great Orchestra (1969). An obituary appeared in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 6, 1970; death certificate supplied by Pa. Dept. of Health.]

759

DEBORAH B.

THOMAS

CLASSIFIED L I S T OF BIOGRAPHIES

Agriculture and Rural Life Chase, Mary Agnes Cunningham, Minnie Fisher Hagood, Margaret Loyd Jarman Lowry, Edith Elizabeth Sewell, Edna Belle Shambaugh, Jessie Field Stanley, Louise

Anthropology and Folklore Cadilla de Martinez, Maria Deloria, Ella Cara Densmore, Frances Theresa Hurston, Zora Neale Pound, Louise Powdermaker, Hortense Reichard, Gladys Amanda Sawyer, Ruth

Archaeology See Classics and Archaeology

Brooks, Romaine Dreier, Katherine Sophie Fuller, Meta Vaux Warrick Griffin, Marion Mahony Halpert, Edith Gregor Hesse, Eva Hoffman, Malvina Cornell Huntington, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Johnson, Adelaide Liebes, Dorothy Wright Miner, Dorothy Eugenia Moses, Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma) Pereira, Irene Rice Rebay, Hilla Richter, Gisela Marie Augusta Ryan, Anne Saarinen, Aline Milton Bernstein Sage, Kay Linn Savage, Augusta Christine Swindler, Mary Hamilton See also Photography

Astronomy Maury, Antonia Caetana De Paiva Pereira

Architecture Barney, Nora Stanton Bauer, Catherine Krouse Griffin, Marion Mahony Hayden, Sophia Gregoria Morgan, Julia See also Landscape Architecture

Aviation

Art

Biochemistry

Ames, Blanche Ames

See Medicine: Researchers; Nutrition

Nichols, Ruth Roland Omlie, Phoebe Jane Fairgrave Willebrandt, Mabel Walker

761

Classified List Biology Carson, Rachel Louise Harvey, Ethel Browne Hyman, Libbie Henrietta Morgan, Ann Haven Nice, Margaret Morse

Birth Control Ames, Blanche Ames Kleegman, Sophia Josephine Levine, Lena McCormick, Katharine Dexter Sanger, Margaret

Muller, Gertrude Agnes Pennington, Mary Engle Post, Marjorie Merriweather Rosenthal, Ida Cohen Rubinstein, Helena Rudkin, Margaret Fogarty Shaver, Dorothy Turnbo-Malone, Annie Minerva Waldo, Ruth Fanshaw Weed, Ethel Berenice White, Eartha Mary Magdalene

Chemistry Carr, Emma Perry Pennington, Mary Engle See also Medicine: Researchers; Nutrition

Botany Braun, Emma Lucy Chase, Mary Agnes Eastwood, Alice Ferguson, Margaret Clay

Broadcasting Allen, Gracie Berg, Gertrude Edelstein Brice, Fanny Gordon, Dorothy Lerner Hennock, Frieda Barkin McDaniel, Hattie Mack, Nila Moorehead, Agnes Phillips, Irna Saarinen, Aline Milton Bernstein Thompson, Dorothy Waller, Judith Cary

Children's Literature Arbuthnot, May Hill Brown, Margaret Wise Forbes, Esther Irwin, Inez Haynes Gillmore Massee, May Miller, Bertha Mahony Mitchell, Lucy Sprague Moore, Anne Carroll Sawyer, Ruth Wilder, Laura Ingalls

Civil Liberties Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley Hughan, Jessie Wallace Kenyon, Dorothy King, Carol Weiss

Business

Civil Rights

Adler, Polly Arden, Elizabeth Auerbach, Beatrice Fox Barney, Nora Stanton Carnegie, Hattie Frederick, Christine McGaffey Gilbreth, Lillian Moller Grossinger, Jennie Halpert, Edith Gregor Hawes, Elizabeth Knopf, Blanche Wolf Liebes, Dorothy Wright Mesta, Perle Morgan, Julia

Ames, Jessie Daniel Baker, Josephine Barker, Mary Cornelia Bass, Charlotta Spears Bethune, Mary McLeod Fauset, Crystal Dreda Bird Gaines, Irene McCoy Hansberry, Lorraine Haynes, Elizabeth Ross Jemison, Alice Mae Lee Lampkin, Daisy Elizabeth Adams Ovington, Mary White Robeson, Eslanda Cardoza Goode Robinson, Rubye Doris Smith

762

Classified List Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor Smith, Lillian Terrell, Mary Church Tilly, Dorothy Eugenia Rogers

Classics and Archaeology Goldman, Hetty Hamilton, Edith Richter, Gisela Marie Augusta Swindler, Mary Hamilton Taylor, Lily Ross

Dewson, Mary Williams Herrick, Elinore Morehouse Kenyon, Dorothy Kyrk, Hazel Mason, Lucy Randolph Perkins, Frances Stanley, Louise

Cookery Davis, Adelle Rombauer, Irma Louise von Starkloff Rudkin, Margaret Fogarty Toklas, Alice Babette

College Administration See Education

Community Affairs Auerbach, Beatrice Fox Barron, Jennie Loitman Bowen, Louise deKoven Butler, Selena Sloan Carter, Eunice Hunton Cunningham, Minnie Fisher Davis, Frances Elliott Dummer, Ethel Sturges Gaines, Irene McCoy Gellhorn, Edna Fischel Haynes, Elizabeth Ross Hogg, Ima Jemison, Alice Mae Lee Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Lampkin, Daisy Elizabeth Adams Sherwin, Belle Terrell, Mary Church Wells, Marguerite Milton White, Eartha Mary Magdalene Wright, Muriel Hazel

Conservation Akeley, Mary Lee Jobe Braun, Emma Lucy Carson, Rachel Louise Eastwood, Alice Morgan, Ann Haven Nice, Margaret Morse

Consumer Affairs Brady, Mildred E die Campbell, Persia Crawford

Dance Burchenal, Elizabeth Castle, Irene Chace, Marian Humphrey, Doris St. Denis, Ruth Tamiris, Helen

Demography Hagood, Margaret Loyd Jarman Taeuber, Irene Barnes

Economics Balch, Emily Greene Campbell, Persia Crawford Kyrk, Hazel Rochester, Anna (see under Hutchins, Grace) Wolfson, Theresa

Education College Founders and Administrators Bethune, Mary McLeod Blunt, Katharine Clapp, Margaret Antoinette Comstock, Ada Louise Drexel, Mother Mary Katharine Flanagan, Hallie Mae Ferguson Gildersleeve, Virginia Crocheron Lloyd, Alice Spencer Geddes Meyer, Annie Nathan Mitchell, Lucy Sprague Thurston, Matilda Smyrell Calder White, Edna Noble Wolff, Sister Madeleva (Mary Evaline)

763

Classified List School Founders and Administrators

Entertainment

Andrus, Ethel Percy Arbuthnot, May Hill Barker, Mary Cornelia Bethune, Mary McLeod Brown, Charlotte Eugenia Hawkins Burroughs, Nannie Helen Cooke, Flora Juliette Cooper, Anna Julia Haywood Frazier, Maude Hamilton, Edith Jarrell, Helen Ira Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Lloyd, Alice Spencer Geddes Lusk, Georgia Lee Witt McLaren, Louise Leonard Parkhurst, Helen Shambaugh, Jessie Field Stern, Catherine Brieger

Allen, Gracie Baker, Josephine Brice, Fanny Castle, Irene Garland, Judy Henie, Sonja Holiday, Billie Joplin, Janis Lyn Lee, Gypsy Rose Tucker, Sophie See also Broadcasting; Dance; Film; Music; Theater

Writers and Researchers Arbuthnot, May Hill Fisher, Dorothy Canfield Goodenough, Florence Laura Gruenberg, Sidonie Matsner Littledale, Clara Savage Mitchell, Lucy Sprague Stern, Catherine Brieger Strang, Ruth May Taba, Hilda

Other Barker, Mary Cornelia Barron, Jennie Loitman Blaine, Anita McCormick Borchardt, Sei ma Munter Butler, Selena Sloan Dummer, Ethel Sturges Fisher, Dorothy Canfield Hughan, Jessie Wallace Jarrell, Helen Ira Meyer, Agnes Ernst Terrell, Mary Church Ward, Winifred Louise See also Physical Education

Engineering and Industrial Design Barney, Nora Stanton Clarke, Edith Flügge-Lotz, Irmgard Gilbreth, Lillian Moller Muller, Gertrude Agnes Pennington, Mary Engle Rand, Marie Gertrude

Exploration Akeley, Mary Lee Jobe Seton, Grace Gallatin

Fashion Bernstein, Aline Frankau Carnegie, Hattie Chase, Edna Woolman Hawes, Elizabeth Liebes, Dorothy Wright McCardell, Claire Rosenthal, Ida Cohen Shaver, Dorothy

Feminism Ames, Blanche Ames Barney, Nora Stanton Bass, Mary Elizabeth Beard, Mary Ritter Blair, Emily Newell Cadilla de Martinez, Maria Dock, Lavinia Lloyd Hawes, Elizabeth Irwin, Inez Haynes Gillmore Johnson, Adelaide Kenyon, Dorothy Laughlin, Gail Lee, Muna Lovejoy, Esther Pohl McCormick, Katharine Dexter Martin, Anne Henrietta Mesta, Perle Miller, Emma Guffey Phillips, Lena Madesin Pollitzer, Anita Lily Rohde, Ruth Bryan Owen Sanger, Margaret Scott, Ann London

764

Classified List Seton, Grace Gallatin Van Hoosen, Bertha Vernon, Mabel

Film Bara, Theda Barry, Iris Bauchens, Anne Bow, Clara Gordon Deren, Maya Garland, Judy Gish, Dorothy Grable, Betty Hayward, Susan Heme, Sonja Holliday, Judy Hopper, Hedda McDaniel, Hattie MacDonald, Jeanette Marion, Frances Monroe, Marilyn Moorehead, Agnes Parker, Dorothy Rothschild Parsons, Louella Oettinger Pitts, ZaSu Wong, Anna May Yurka, Blanche

Geology Edinger, Tilly Gardner, Julia Anna Goldring, Winifred Knopf, Eleanora Frances Bliss

Government and Politics Appointees Adams, Annette Abbott Anderson, Mary Bethune, Mary McLeod Brunauer, Esther Caukin Campbell, Persia Crawford Clapp, Margaret Antoinette Flanagan, Hallie Mae Ferguson Frazier, Maude Harriman, Florence Jaffray Hurst Hennock, Frieda Barkin Hoey, Jane Margueretta Lee, Muna Mesta, Perle Miller, Frieda Segelke Perkins, Frances Priest, Ivy Maude Baker

Rohde, Ruth Bryan Owen Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor Stanley, Louise Switzer, Mary Elizabeth Van Kleeck, Mary Abby Woodward, Ellen Sullivan

C ongresswomen Lusk, Georgia Lee Witt Mankin, Helen Douglas Norton, Mary Teresa Hopkins Rankin, Jeannette Pickering Rogers, Edith Nourse Rohde, Ruth Bryan Owen

Other Elected Officials Fauset, Crystal Dreda Bird Ferguson, Miriam Amanda Wallace Frazier, Maude Laughlin, Gail Lusk, Georgia Lee Witt Mankin, Helen Douglas Priest, Ivy Maude Baker Somerville, Nellie Nugent Woodward, Ellen Sullivan

Party Workers and Officials Adams, Annette Abbott Bass, Charlotta Spears Blair, Emily Newell Cline, Genevieve Rose Cunningham, Minnie Fisher Dewson, Mary Williams Fauset, Crystal Dreda Bird Gaines, Irene McCoy Harriman, Florence Jaffray Hurst Miller, Emma Guffey Pinchot, Cornelia Elizabeth Bryce Priest, Ivy Maude Baker Sabin, Pauline Morton

Wives of Presidents Coolidge, Grace Anna Goodhue Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor Wilson, Edith Boiling Gait

History Beard, Mary Ritter Bowen, Catherine Shober Drinker Clapp, Margaret Antoinette Cooper, Anna Julia Haywood Forbes, Esther

765

Classified List Green, Constance McLaughlin Hyslop, Beatrice Fry Putnam, Bertha Haven Wright, Mary Clabaugh Wright, Muriel Hazel

Home Economics Blunt, Katharine Frederick, Christine McGaffey Gilbreth, Lillian Moller Kyrk, Hazel Morgan, Agnes Fay Roberts, Lydia Jane Stanley, Louise White, Edna Noble

Housing Reform Bauer, Catherine Krouse Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury

International Affairs Brunauer, Esther Caukin Dean, Vera Micheles Lee, Muna McCormick, Anne Elizabeth O'Hare Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor Thompson, Dorothy Woodsmall, Ruth Frances See also Peace

Journalism Bass, Charlotta Spears Brady, Mildred Edie Burgos, Julia de Craig, Elisabeth May Adams Cunningham, Minnie Fisher Fleeson, Doris Furman, Bess Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether (Dorothy Dix) Gordon, Dorothy Lerner Herbst, Josephine Herrick, Elinore Morehouse Hickok, Lorena Higgins, Marguerite Hopper, Hedda Jemison, Alice Mae Lee Littledale, Clara Savage Lloyd, Alice Spencer Geddes McCormick, Anne Elizabeth O'Hare Meyer, Agnes Ernst

Parsons, Louella Oettinger Patterson, Alicia Post, Emily Price Reid, Helen Miles Rogers Rippin, Jane Parker Deeter Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor Saarinen, Aline Milton Bernstein Strong, Anna Louise Thompson, Dorothy Van Doren, Irita Bradford Vorse, Mary Heaton

Labor Anderson, Mary Barker, Mary Cornelia Bloor, Ella Reeve Borchardt, Selma Munter Christman, Elisabeth Cohn, Fannia Mary Dickason, Gladys Marie Dreier, Mary Elisabeth Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley Hawes, Elizabeth Herrick, Elinore Morehouse Hutchins, Grace Jarrell, Helen Ira Kellor, Frances McLaren, Louise Leonard Mason, Lucy Randolph Miller, Frieda Segelke Norton, Mary Teresa Hopkins Parker, Julia Sarsfield O'Connor Perkins, Frances Pesotta, Rose Schneiderman, Rose Thome, Florence Calvert Van Kleeck, Mary Abby Vorse, Mary Heaton Wolfson, Theresa See also Social Research

Landscape Architecture Farrand, Beatrix Jones

Law Adams, Annette Abbott Allen, Florence Ellinwood Barron, Jennie Loitman Bartelme, Mary Margaret Borchardt, Selma Munter Carter, Eunice Hunton Cline, Genevieve Rose

766

Classified List Hennock, Frieda Barkin Kenyon, Dorothy King, Carol Weiss Laughlin, Gail Mankin, Helen Douglas Phillips, Lena Madesin Willebrandt, Mabel Walker See also Penology and Criminology

Librarianship Eastman, Linda Anne Haines, Helen Elizabeth Moore, Anne Carroll Mudge, Isadore Gilbert

Literature Editors and Publishers Anderson, Margaret Carolyn Beach, Sylvia Woodbridge Fauset, Jessie Redmon Heap, Jane ( s e e under Anderson, Margaret Carolyn) Knopf, Blanche Wolf Loveman, Amy Moore, Marianne Craig Van Doren, Irita Bradford

Scholars Pound, Louise Scudder, Vida Dutton Tuve, Rosemond White, Helen Constance

Burgos, Julia de Cadilla de Martinez, Maria Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) Fauset, Jessie Redmon Ferber, Edna Field, Sara Bard Fisher, Dorothy Canfield Forbes, Esther Hamilton, Edith Herbst, Josephine Hurst, Fannie Hurston, Zora Neale Irwin, Inez Haynes Gillmore Jackson, Shirley Hardie Keller, Helen Lee, Gypsy Rose Lee, Muna Lowe-Porter, Helen Tracy Luhan, Mabel Dodge McCullers, Carson Mitchell, Lucy Sprague Meyer, Annie Nathan Moore, Marianne Craig Norris, Kathleen Thompson O'Connor, Flannery Parker, Dorothy Rothschild Plath, Sylvia Post, Emily Price Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan Rinehart, Mary Roberts Sandoz, Mari Seton, Grace Gallatin Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey Smith, Lillian Suckow, Ruth Toklas, Alice Babette Vorse, Mary Heaton White, Helen Constance Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wolff, Sister Madeleva (Mary Evaline) Yezierska, Anzia

Translators Bogan, Louise Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) Hamilton, Edith Lee, Muna Lowe-Porter, Helen Tracy Moore, Marianne Craig

Writers Barney, Natalie Barry, Iris Blair, Emily Newell Bogan, Louise Bowen, Catherine Shober Drinker Buck, Pearl

Magazine and Journal Editing Abbott, Edith Brady, Mildred Edie Chase, Edna Woolman Dean, Vera Micheles Isaacs, Edith Juliet Rich Littledale, Clara Savage Miller, Bertha Mahony Miner, Dorothy Eugenia Roberts, Mary May Strang, Ruth May Swindler, Mary Hamilton Wright, Muriel Hazel See also Literature: Editors and Publishers

767

Classified List Mathematics Fliigge-Lotz, Irmgard Geiringer, Hilda Hagood, Margaret Loyd Jarman Stern, Catherine Brieger Wheeler, Anna Johnson Pell

Sabin, Florence Rena Slye, Maud Williams, Anna Wessels

Microbiology See Medicine: Researchers

Medicine Physicians Alexander, Hattie Elizabeth Andersen, Dorothy Hansine Apgar, Virginia Bass, Mary Elizabeth Cori, Gerty Theresa Radnitz Dick, Gladys Rowena Henry Dunbar, Helen Flanders Dunham, Ethel Collins Frantz, Virginia Kneeland Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda Goldsmith, Grace Arabell Hall, Rosetta Sherwood Hamilton, Alice Homey, Karen Danielsen Jordan, Sara Claudia Murray Kleegman, Sophia Josephine L'Esperance, Elise Strang Levine, Lena Lovejoy, Esther Pohl Macklin, Madge Thurlow Mendenhall, Dorothy Reed Minoka-Hill, Lillie Rosa Pearce, Louise Sabin, Florence Rena Scudder, Ida Sophia Thompson, Clara Van Hoosen, Bertha Williams, Anna Wessels

Researchers Alexander, Hattie Elizabeth Andersen, Dorothy Hansine Cori, Gerty Theresa Radnitz Dick, Gladys Rowena Henry Evans, Alice Catherine Frantz, Virginia Kneeland Goldsmith, Grace Arabell Hazen, Elizabeth Lee L'Esperance, Elise Strang Macklin, Madge Thurlow Mendenhall, Dorothy Reed Pearce, Louise Pool, Judith Graham Russell, Jane Anne

Military Blanchfield, Florence Aby Gildersleeve, Virginia Crocheron Rogers, Edith Nourse Weed, Ethel Berenice Woodsmall, Ruth Frances

Music Bauer, Marion Eugénie Coolidge, Elizabeth Sprague Crawford-Seeger, Ruth Porter Daniels, Mabel Wheeler Densmore, Frances Theresa Diller, Angela Eames, Emma Hayden Farrar, Geraldine Fields, Dorothy Garden, Mary Garland, Judy Harrison, Hazel Lucile Holiday, Billie Jackson, Mahalia Joplin, Janis Lyn Leginska, Ethel McDaniel, Hattie MacDonald, Jeanette MacDowell, Marian Griswold Nevins Mitchell, Abbie Price, Florence Beatrice Smith Spofford, Grace Harriet Thompson, Helen Mulford Tourel, Jennie Traubel, Helen Francesca Zimbalist, Mary Louise Curtis Bok

Nursing Arnstein, Margaret Gene Blanchfield, Florence Aby Breckinridge, Mary Davis, Frances Elliott Dock, Lavinia Lloyd Gardner, Mary Sewall Goodrich, Annie Warburton

768

Classified List Roberts, Mary May Sanger, Margaret Sherwin, Belle Stewart, Isabel Maitland Van Blarcom, Carolyn Conant

Nutrition Blunt, Katharine Davis, Adelle Goldsmith, Grace Arabell Morgan, Agnes Fay Roberts, Lydia Jane Stanley, Louise

Coolidge, Elizabeth Sprague Dummer, Ethel Sturges Grossinger, Jennie Hoey, Jane Margueretta Hogg, Ima Hurst, Fannie McCormick, Katharine Dexter Meyer, Agnes Ernst Morgan, Anne Tracy Post, Marjorie Merriweather Rubinstein, Helena Tucker, Sophie Turnbo-Malone, Annie Minerva Zimbalist, Mary Louise Curtis Bok

Philosophy Paleontology Arendt, Hannah See Geology

Peace Barney, Nora Stanton Balch, Emily Greene Hamilton, Alice Harkness, Georgia Elma Hughan, Jessie Wallace Hull, Hannah Hallowell Clothier Hutchins, Grace Martin, Anne Henrietta Rankin, Jeannette Pickering Scudder, Vida Dutton Suckow, Ruth Terrell, Mary Church Vernon, Mabel

Photography Akeley, Mary Lee Jobe Arbus, Diane Nemerov Bourke-White, Margaret Johnston, Frances Benjamin Lange, Dorothea

Physical Education Bancroft, Jessie Hubbell Burchenal, Elizabeth Kellor, Frances Perrin, Ethel See also Sports

Penology and Criminology Physics Bartelme, Mary Margaret Bowen, Louise deKoven Bronner, Augusta Fox Dewson, Mary Williams Dummer, Ethel Sturges Harris, Mary Belle Glueck, Eleanor Touroff Rippin, Jane Parker Deeter Van Waters, Miriam Willebrandt, Mabel Walker

Anderson, Elda Emma Mayer, Maria Gertrude Goeppert Rand, Marie Gertrude

Political Science Arendt, Hannah Dean, Vera Micheles

Philanthropy Politics Blaine, Anita McCormick Bowen, Louise deKoven

See Government and Politics

769

Classified List Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis Dunbar, Helen Flanders Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda Horney, Karen Danielsen Levine, Lena Thompson, Clara

Psychology Bronner, Augusta Fox Bühler, Charlotte Bertha Frenkel-Brunswik, Else Gilbreth, Lillian Moller Goodenough, Florence Laura Rand, Marie Gertrude Strang, Ruth May Taft, Jessie Taba, Hilda

Drexel, Mother Mary Katharine Dunbar, Helen Flanders Hall, Rosetta Sherwood Harkness, Georgia Elma Hull, Hannah Hallowell Clothier Jackson, Mahalia Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Lowry, Edith Elizabeth Lyman, Mary Ely Rogers, Mother Mary Joseph (Mary Josephine) Scudder, Ida Sophia Scudder, Vida Dutton Thurston, Matilda Smyrell Calder Tilly, Dorothy Eugenia Rogers Wolff, Sister Madeleva (Mary Evaline)

Science See Astronomy; Biology; Botany; Chemistry; Geology; Medicine; Nutrition; Physics

Public Health Settlements Anderson, Elda Emma Apgar, Virginia Arnstein, Margaret Gene Breckinridge, Mary Davis, Frances Elliott Dick, Gladys Rowena Henry Dock, Lavinia Lloyd Dunham, Ethel Collins Evans, Alice Catherine Gardner, Mary Sewall Goldsmith, Grace Arabell Hamilton, Alice Hazen, Elizabeth Lee Jarrett, Mary Cromwell L'Esperance, Elise Strang Lovejoy, Esther Pohl Mendenhall, Dorothy Reed Pearce, Louise Pennington, Mary Engle Sabin, Florence Rena Van Blarcom, Carolyn Conant Williams, Anna Wessels

Radio and Television See Broadcasting

Balch, Emily Greene Bowen, Louise deKoven Cameron, Donaldina Mackenzie Diller, Angela Dock, Lavinia Lloyd Hamilton, Alice Ovington, Mary White Scudder, Vida Dutton Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury Spofford, Grace Harriet White, Eartha Mary Magdalene

Socialism and Radicalism Bambace, Angela Bloor, Ella Reeve Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley Herbst, Josephine Hughan, Jessie Wallace Keller, Helen King, Carol Weiss Robeson, Eslanda Cardoza Goode Rosenberg, Ethel Greenglass Scudder, Vida Dutton Strong, Anna Louise Van Kleeck, Mary Abby

Religion Social Reform Boole, Ella Alexander Burroughs, Nannie Helen Cameron, Donaldina Mackenzie

Abbott, Edith Balch, Emily Greene

770

Classified List Cameron, Donaldina Mackenzie Dewson, Mary Williams Dock, Lavinia Lloyd Dreier, Mary Elisabeth Hamilton, Alice Keller, Helen Kellor, Frances Kenyon, Dorothy Mason, Lucy Randolph Perkins, Frances Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor Schneiderman, Rose Scudder, Vida Dutton Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury Terrell, Mary Church Van Kleeck, Mary Abby See also Birth Control; Civil Liberties; Civil Rights; Consumer Affairs; Feminism; Housing Reform; Labor; Peace; Socialism and Radicalism; Suffrage; Temperance and Prohibition

Cannon, Ida Maud Colcord, Joanna Carver Coyle, Grace Longwell Dewson, Mary Williams Glueck, Eleanor Touroff Hamilton, Gordon Hoey, Jane Margueretta Jarrett, Mary Cromwell Lundberg, Emma Octavia Rapoport, Lydia Rippin, Jane Parker Deeter Taft, Jessie Towle, Charlotte Helen Van Waters, Miriam

Sociology Glueck, Eleanor Touroff Hagood, Margaret Loyd Jarman Lee, Rose Hum Taeuber, Irene Barnes

Social Research Abbott, Edith Colcord, Joanna Carver Dewson, Mary Williams Hagood, Margaret Loyd Jarman Haynes, Elizabeth Ross Kellor, Frances Lundberg, Emma Octavia Miller, Frieda Segelke Ovington, Mary White Van Kleeck, Mary Abby Wolfson, Theresa See also Labor

Sports Henie, Sonja Pound, Louise Sears, Eleonora Randolph Wightman, Hazel Hotchkiss Zaharias, Mildred Ella (Babe) Didrikson See also Physical Education

Suffrage

Social Welfare Andrus, Ethel Percy Bremer, Edith Terry Buck, Pearl Dummer, Ethel Sturges Keller, Helen Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Lee, Rose Hum Lowry, Edith Elizabeth Morgan, Anne Tracy Switzer, Mary Elizabeth White, Eartha Mary Magdalene See also Community Affairs; Women's Organizations

Social Work Abbott, Edith Bremer, Edith Terry

Allen, Florence Ellinwood Ames, Blanche Ames Ames, Jessie Daniel Barney, Nora Stanton Beard, Mary Ritter Blair, Emily Newell Bloor, Ella Reeve Bowen, Louise deKoven Burns, Lucy Cadilla de Martinez, Maria Chase, Mary Agnes Cunningham, Minnie Fisher Dewson, Mary Williams Dock, Lavinia Lloyd Dreier, Katherine Sophie Dreier, Mary Elisabeth Field, Sara Bard Gellhorn, Edna Fischel Hull, Hannah Hallowell Clothier Irwin, Inez Haynes Gillmore Johnson, Adelaide Lampkin, Daisy Elizabeth Adams

771

Classified List Laughlin, Gail McCormick, Katharine Dexter Martin, Anne Henrietta Miller, Emma Guffy Park, Maud Wood Pinchot, Cornelia Elizabeth Bryce Pollitzer, Anita Lily Rankin, Jeannette Pickering Reid, Helen Miles Rogers Schneiderman, Rose Seton, Grace Gallatin Sherwin, Belle Somerville, Nellie Nugent Terrell, Mary Church Vernon, Mabel Wells, Marguerite Milton

Antisuffrage Meyer, Annie Nathan

Temperance and Prohibition Boole, Ella Alexander Norris, Kathleen Thompson Somerville, Nellie Nugent Willebrandt, Mabel Walker

Prohibition Repeal Miller, Emma Guffey Sabin, Pauline Morton

Theater Adams, Maude Bankhead, Tallulah Brockman Barrymore, Ethel Berg, Gertrude Edelstein Bernstein, Aline Frankau Cornell, Katharine Crothers, Rachel Draper, Ruth Ferber, Edna Fields, Dorothy Flanagan, Hallie Mae Ferguson Gersten, Berta Hansberry, Lorraine Helburn, Theresa Holliday, Judy Isaacs, Edith Juliet Rich Jones, Margo McCullers, Carson Mitchell, Abbie Moorehead, Agnes Rosenthal, Jean

Ward, Winifred Louise Webster, Margaret Yurka, Blanche

Women's Organizations American Association of University Women Brunauer, Esther Caukin Comstock, Ada Louise Gildersleeve, Virginia Crocheron White, Helen Constance

League of Women Voters Ames, Jessie Daniel Blair, Emily Newell Cunningham, Minnie Fisher Gellhorn, Edna Fischel Mason, Lucy Randolph Miller, Emma Guffey Park, Maud Wood Sherwin, Belle Wells, Marguerite Milton

National Association of Colored Women Bethune, Mary McLeod Butler, Selena Sloan Gaines, Irene McCoy Haynes, Elizabeth Ross Lampkin, Daisy Elizabeth Adams Terrell, Mary Church

National Council of Negro Women Bethune, Mary McLeod Brown, Charlotte Eugenia Hawkins Carter, Eunice Hunton Lampkin, Daisy Elizabeth Adams Terrell, Mary Church

National Federation of Business and Professional Women Laughlin, Gail Phillips, Lena Madesin

National Woman's Party Barney, Nora Stanton Beard, Mary Ritter Burns, Lucy Dock, Lavinia Lloyd Field, Sara Bard Irwin, Inez Haynes Gillmore Laughlin, Gail Lee, Muna

772

Classified List Martin, Anne Henrietta Mesta, Perle Miller, Emma Guffey Pollitzer, Anita Lily Vernon, Mabel

Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Balch, Emily Greene Hull, Hannah Hallowell Clothier Martin, Anne Henrietta Rankin, Jeannette Pickering Terrell, Mary Church Vernon, Mabel

Women's Trade Union League Anderson, Mary Balch, Emily Greene Christman, Elisabeth Dreier, Mary Elisabeth Miller, Frieda Segelke Parker, Julia Sarsfield O'Connor Schneiderman, Rose

YWCA Bremer, Edith Terry Brown, Charlotte Eugenia Hawkins Carter, Eunice Hunton Coyle, Grace Longwell Fauset, Crystal Dreda Bird Haynes, Elizabeth Ross McLaren, Louise Leonard Mason, Lucy Randolph Phillips, Lena Madesin Shambaugh, Jessie Field Woodsmall, Ruth Frances

Other Ames, Jessie Daniel Cline, Genevieve Rose Fuller, Meta Vaux Warrick Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Morgan, Anne Tracy Rippin, Jane Parker Deeter Sewell, Edna Belle Tilly, Dorothy Eugenia Rogers Weed, Ethel Berenice

773