Harvard University Press Blog

A Conversation with Elizabeth Cobbs about Fearless Women

For Women’s History Month, we are highlighting the work of Elizabeth Cobbs, whose new book Fearless Women shows how the movement for women’s rights has been deeply entwined with the history of the United States since its founding. Cobbs traces the lives of pathbreaking women who, inspired by American ideals, fought for the cause in their own ways. These stories offer valuable lessons for the state of the nation today.

 In Fearless Women, you argue that feminism has been as important in shaping who we are as Americans as were the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. Why?

Up to now, this fact has not been largely recognized, but my book shows that many of the major achievements that have defined US history are connected with strides in women’s rights and the civic activism of feminists. The Industrial Revolution depended on the creation of a literate labor force—one that female teachers produced after women won the right to attend school. Susan B. Anthony organized the petition campaign that sped passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and Frances Perkins (the first female member of any presidential cabinet) spearheaded the creation of Social Security and fair labor laws. This list of transformative developments could—and does—go on.

How did you pick the women that you profiled in the book? For instance, you profile Susan B. Anthony but not Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Why?

This was the fun part: deciding whose work was most transformative, or whose own life experience reflected the biggest challenges that American women faced in any given era. In this case, while Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the more famous writer and orator, it was Anthony who literally got the word out. She did the painstaking, relentless, uncompensated, unglamorous work of organizing, year in and year out, sweeping from Maine to California. By the end, she took my breath away. Every chapter presented the same set of choices. Sometimes I picked the more famous individual, but equally often the less famous: someone who made a difference in a new way, like Martha Cotera of Texas, who made women’s rights into a Mexican-American cause during the 1970s.

When you look back at the struggle for women’s rights, can you describe what life was like for the average American woman in 1776? What were the personal consequences of not having specific rights at different points in US history?

Marriage was the key determinant of a woman’s rights in the former English colonies and new nation. An unmarried woman—so long as she was not enslaved or indentured—could own property and sign contracts on her own behalf. But once a woman married, she in effect vanished from the law. Her legal identity was “covered” by her husband. Everything she owned became his, including any children she “gave” him. He had the right to “chastise” her as he saw fit, and even forbid her from leaving the house.

Patriotism and feminism are not usually mentioned in the same breath. Why do you put them together?

The movement for women’s rights began in 1776, as a consequence of the Revolution. People like Abigail Adams saw women’s fight for liberty as directly connected with the larger fight for freedom. In my research, I found that every generation in some way or another linked their goals with the stated promise of America. This fed their convictions—and improved their success. Most considered themselves patriots.

The women’s movement is sometimes criticized as being white-dominated and even racist. What do you make of that as a historian?

Historically, feminists could be racist (and some were) just as Civil Rights activists could be sexist (and some were). This is an easy charge to prove. Much more commonly, however, people in these causes worked together and shared similar values. If I had chosen a man to represent feminism, I would have picked Frederick Douglass. Similarly, a book on abolition could easily feature Susan B. Anthony. To me, the charge that feminism has been a “white” movement betrays a lack of knowledge about the valuable—and valued—contributions of women of color. That knowledge gap, if you will, helped motivate this book.

In writing this book, did you notice unsuccessful as well as successful strategies for expanding women’s rights that might inform the struggle today?

Absolutely! Something that became particularly clear was the turn towards non-partisanship after the US Civil War. Republican and Democratic stalwarts kept trying to suck women into endorsing their candidates, but Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton renounced their ties to Lincoln’s party and turned the movement away from partisanship—a technique that persisted until the vote was won in 1920. That heritage continues in groups like the League of Women Voters, started by Anthony’s protégé, Carrie Chapman Catt. Nonpartisanship or bipartisanship served feminism until the 1980s, when Phyllis Schlafly made opposition to women’s rights a badge of party identity, and Democrats cooperated.

 When you consider the struggle for women’s rights in America today, with the reversal of Roe, do you think that this is the beginning of a significant reversal or a temporary stumbling block?

There are no light switches in history. Long-term trends don’t just turn off. The movement towards greater freedom for all individuals, including women, is nearly 300 years old, so it is hard to see it ending abruptly. If I had to guess, I would call this a setback that could (and should) have been anticipated. Indeed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others worried that the constitutional reasoning behind Roe was susceptible to challenge. Advocates for reproductive choice will now have to undertake the hard campaigning that anti-abortion forces did for decades if they want states to protect rights that the federal government no longer does.

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On Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston

We round out our celebration of Black History Month with an excerpt from Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award and a Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year. “Vivid, joyful, and heartbreaking in its passionate understanding of soul in all its manifestations,” says Hilton Als, “Liner Notes for the Revolution is itself a new kind of music: propulsive, witty, wise, and true.”

The little women lurk at the very heart of the modern, the place where Zora Neale Hurston and her girl Ethel [Waters] are keeping the beat. And of course, they were friends, that Zora and Ethel. It may have taken some time to meet each other “across the footlights,” as Hurston put it in her memoir, but once they connected through their mutual friend Carl Van Vechten, the bond between this untrained singer and a woman referred to by some as “the Voice of an Era” was strong and intimate. Aesthetically too, they had more in common than one might think. Born in Philadelphia and raised in a multicultural, working-class neighborhood where, as Waters puts it, “whites, blacks, and yellows, were outcasts…together,” she made use of an “elephant memory and gift of mimicry” in school. As feminist blues archivist Rosetta Reitz contends, “It was this magnificent ear and the awareness that there was authority in language, that gave Ethel Waters an edge which she used to empower her life.”

Like Hurston, she mastered the art of multilingual colloquialisms and phrasings, assumed multiple personas in her vocal performances, and finessed the art of deeply performative storytelling as she crafted a distinctly theatrical, vaudevillian style of blues singing that was magnetic and lasting. Only her peer, the passionately adored stage ingenue Florence Mills (whose 1927 premature death rocked Harlem), could match Waters in this regard, having ushered in the 1920s as “the agent of the modern spirit of unmasked feeling.” Of Waters, Hurston would marvel, “She is one of the strangest bundles of people that I have ever met. You can just see the different folks wrapped up in her if you associate with her long. Just like watching an open fire—the color and shape of her personality is never the same twice. She has extraordinary talents which her lack of formal education prevents her from displaying.” Listen to her burning up the scene with her slinky 1926 smash, “Shake That Thing,” and you’ll know what Hurston’s talking about. Dolling out double entendres left and right, Waters shifts personas with the turn of a phrase. She’s the swinging seductress one moment and the cool cultural observer the next. “Now it ain’t no Charleston, ain’t no Pigeon Wing,” she assures,

Nobody has to give you no lessons, to shake that thing
When everybody can shake that thing
Oh, I mean, shake that thing!
I’m gettin’ tired of telling you how to shake that thing!
Oooh, oooh, with this kind of music, who wouldn’t shake that thing?

Ascendant as the queen of Black 1920s vaudeville, Waters knew how to work the drama and suspense in a jook-joint hot number celebrating the joys of carnal movement. Hers is an anthem that condenses the shifting energies of an epoch encapsulating mammoth change: migrated Black peoples spilling into northern cities, bursting with socioeconomic aspiration and artistic ambition, revolting against the norms that had historically sought to violently police their profit as well as their pleasures. In other words, all that “shaking” was evocative of the tumult in Waters’s midst. As Saidiya Hartman points out, she “made music” out of the “noise” all around her in her adopted city of New York, soaking up and translating into her own sonic language “the sounds of life, the loving and fighting and laughter and suffering,” all the while “describ[ing] the deprivation and vitality of cramped living from the inside” of her own Harlem flat.

Both Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston believed that the Black body, that their own kinesthetic bodies, could serve as prodigious and vital instruments in their musical endeavors. While Waters’s massive breakthrough hit “Shake That Thing” (first performed in 1925 at the Plantation Club) would take the sexual energy of the jook (a realm Hurston refers to as the pinnacle of Black theatricality in her 1934 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” essay) to its ludic extreme, Hurston would also put her body to work not only as a narrative device, an instrument to convey big ideas about the dynamism of Black life, but as a form of performative epistemology called on to reference and revivify the cultural and historical memory of the work song archive. And crucial to this epistemology was an emphasis on the beautifully unpredictable idiosyncrasies manifest in her own voice both caught on tape and loudly leaving its imprint on her own indelible, discursive style. Like Hopkins before her, Hurston pursued the preservation and cultivation of voice—but in this case, it was her own rather than a literary character’s that once again revolutionized Black sound writing as well as the relevance, meaning, and value of recording Black women’s vocality.

That Hurston not only theorized the sounds in her scholarship and incorporated them in her folk concerts but also performed them herself makes plain the ways that she embraced the act of singing as an extension of her critical ethnographic work. Zora’s singing traverses the presumptive boundaries between Diana Taylor’s conception of the archive and the repertoire, “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice / knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).” Zora’s singing intervenes in what she believed to be the so called hegemony of Harlem Renaissance Black concert hall culture with its refined music, sounds that she abhorred for, in her opinion, watering down the voices of the folk.

“Everything I Wanted”: Black Women Listeners and the High Fidelity Culture of Taste-Making

Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, praises Hulu’s High Fidelity series, whose main characters are creative, intelligent Black women who are passionate about music and confident in their tastes and opinions. Where are the other shows like it?

Blink and you would’ve missed it. Last year’s short-lived Hulu reboot of High Fidelity, the upstart reimagining of Nick Hornby’s 1995 cult favorite novel and its subsequent year 2000 film adaptation emerged in mid-February 2020, that uncertain period when the whispers of a deadly virus were just beginning to gain traction in the U.S. media. Preoccupied with mourning NBA legend Kobe Bryant’s tragic death just a few weeks earlier, American culture turned its attention toward the winter awards season and then leaped into the tabloid eccentricities of Netflix’s Tiger King as a form of hearty streaming escape once the pandemic reared its head in full that March. Reviews of the remixed High Fidelity, a gender-inverted, millennial version of Hornby’s Gen-X record nerd, breakup-and-wake up adulting tale, arrived right in the run of this storm, and they were decidedly uneven in spite of a strong cast—Zoe Kravitz, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, David H. Holmes, and Kingsley Ben-Adir—anchoring an unprecedented TV series, one which featured, in part, Black women popular music wonks debating and pursuing the musical passions and tastes that rule their world.  Some feminist critics lamented what they read as the unreconstructed masculinist politics of the Fidelity narrative’s core dynamics involving dudes duking it out about the music that matters to them. Others bemoaned a plot structure that seemingly failed to “commit” to more nuanced character development. By summer, the show had been canceled.

I seem to be one of the few who lamented this turn of events as is evident by the fact that I’ve spent the past few months pitching a feature on the history-making elements of the next-generation High Fidelity to no avail. No one, it would seem, wants much to do with this show which is a shame since, in my mind, it brings to life the critical, cultural, and intellectual passions of two vastly different, wildly intelligent, curious, and artistically passionate Black women living by the creed of their nuanced and urgent convictions. No show before it has taken the tastes and opinions of Black women—young, old, of any age—so seriously and matter-of-factly and invites you to live in their universe. Co-produced by Kravitz, who took to Instagram last August to call out Hulu’s decision to cancel the series, particularly in light of its diversity-challenged programming, the series broke barriers by experimenting with a distaff scenario: what if Black women characters could inhabit the original’s white masculinist ideas about contemporary popular music culture and the semi-self-conscious “rock snobbery” sentiments of Hornby’s original novel as well as its slightly more expansive film (the casting of Kravitz’s mom, Lisa Bonet, had to mean something)?

The High Fidelity motion picture starred John Cusack and Jack Black in his breakout role as Barry Judd, a full-on manifestation of record store denizen hyperbole and music wonk excess. As the gender-flipped leads, Ms. Kravitz and Ms. Randolph quietly made history, holding down a show that takes seriously the tastes and passions of their two Black women characters. Fandom matters in High Fidelity 2.0, just as it did in the original, but the fans are now Black women, vastly distinct from one another and yet both deeply invested in music as both a salve and a form of their felt and complicated self-making journeys. As Ms. Randolph put it in a phone interview last August, these “women are allowed to study with each other, to study culture and to have opinions and ideas and convictions about their beliefs about cultures.” The classically-trained vocalist and Yale School of Drama alum who boldly reinvented Black’s original character delivered one of the most ingenious and exhilarating small screen performances of 2020. And she clearly recognized the beautiful and pathbreaking complexities of what she and Ms. Kravitz were given the room to do on the show together. These “conversations about artistry” are vital, she suggested to me. “[W]hen that artist did this at that one part, and that bridge is killer. She’s learning. This is her education. This is her grad school.”

Her Cherise is a marvel of a character, a Black woman, Wesley Morris reminds, “with all of these opinions about art and taste and is conversant in all of these modes of being.” She is a fireball of eclectic pop music knowledge and obsessions and along with Ms. Kravitz’s “Rob,” the heartbroken record store owner who swoons over scoring a rare copy of David Bowie’s classic album, The Man Who Fell to Earth, they exist in a universe in which they each have to tolerate the casual ways in which they are not consistently seen, heard, or taken seriously as cultural intellectuals, and in the case of Cherise, as a real, bonafide, aspiring musician. [Spoiler alert] Rob’s reparative gesture, gifting Cherise with her dream guitar, a Daphne Blue Fender, in the wake of her spat with Cherise is the emotional denouement to a one-season show in which a pair of Black women music lovers, aficionados, critics, and record collectors reconnect with one another through the gift of being seen. “Someone invested” in her artistry, said Randolph, who grew up learning to play guitar by watching Lauren Hill on MTV’s Unplugged and India.Arie, and “it manifests within the guitar, but every time that girl sees that guitar, she knows that someone believes in her. And it urges her to keep on going.”

The capacious inner world of a character like Cherise’s (one that we who watched with great interest were longing to see more of on this show) is the beginning of a way to tell the story of Black women’s relationship to popular music culture from the ground up, and it is a reminder that Black women across the century have been having what artist Carrie Mae Weems describes as “endless conversations” with the music and not just churning it out for the industry Big Machine. High Fidelity joins with Empire’s not-yet-done final season (featuring Cookie and company’s Bossie record label female empowerment narrative and the 2020 Tracee Ellis Ross feature The High Note) in calling our attention to the variety of African American women’s roles, challenges, and ambitions in the business and culture of pop music today. More stories please….

International Women’s Day 2021: Women You Should Know About

In celebration of both International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we spoke to HUP’s Executive Editor for History, Kathleen McDermott, and Executive Editor for Science, Janice Audet, to learn more about some exceptional women who challenged the societal standards in their fields, from groundbreaking astronomers to a seventeenth-century African Queen.

Vera Rubin

When some people hear the name Vera Rubin, they might think of Rubin’s pioneering work on galaxy rotation rates, or her data that provided evidence for dark matter. For others, a new facility in Chile comes to mind, recently named the National Science Foundation Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the first large observatory in the world to be named after a woman. And for still others, Rubin’s legacy is for her support of other women in science. When writing Vera Rubin: A Life, Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton were the first people to have access to Rubin’s papers and correspondence, now preserved in the US Library of Congress. This gave them unique and in-depth insight into her character and her fascinating life as she dealt with discrimination and combined family life with an outstanding career.

Rubin’s fascination with the stars and the night sky began as a child and expanded as she studied the motion of the galaxies. An astute observer, her research provided evidence for the existence of galactic superclusters and corroborated theories about dark matter. Rubin surpassed society’s conventional ideas about women in astronomy and female scientists, especially those with children. Indeed, while breaking new ground as the first female astronomer at Palomar Observatory, Rubin and her husband, Bob, were also raising four children. When Rubin discovered there were no women’s restrooms at Palomar, she took action, establishing the first women’s restroom at the observatory and promptly kicking an outdated conception of who an astronomer could be out the door. As Rubin’s reputation and experience grew, she raised her voice for other women in science. She participated on committees and wrote reports sharing data about discrimination against women in science. She challenged colleagues to cease using sexist language and prioritize female representation and recognition whenever scientists were honored or invited to speak. Furthermore, she advocated to increase women’s representation in the leadership of astronomical associations and other scientific societies, championing equality within the most prestigious scientific organizations. From her early days as a girl who stayed up late to gaze out the window to her honor as a National Medal of Science recipient, Rubin was fueled by her love of the stars. For her contributions to research and to women in science, Vera Rubin continues to be an inspiration.

—Janice Audet

Henrietta Szold

Henrietta Szold is certainly a familiar name to members of Hadassah and to most Israelis, but she deserves even wider recognition as one of the most influential women in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Baltimore in 1860, one of eight daughters of immigrant Jews from Hungary, Szold from a young age sought to alleviate the social ills she saw around her. As Dvora Hacohen shows in To Repair a Broken World, she aimed especially to better the lives of women and children.

As an intelligent, ambitious teenager, Szold desperately wanted to attend university, but Johns Hopkins University did not accept women and her parents could not afford to send her away to college. It was a bitter disappointment and her first significant encounter with the exclusion of women, although she would face similar discrimination throughout her life. At age seventeen, Szold began working as a teacher and became a weekly columnist for The Jewish Messenger. She established a night school in Baltimore for immigrants, raising funds, providing materials, and even teaching there herself. In her thirties, she worked as an editor at the prestigious Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia, where she translated works from German and French and edited the American Jewish Year Book. Yet her title remained “secretary.” At the age of 42, Szold moved to New York and became the first woman to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where a love affair with the scholar Louis Ginzberg ended in heartbreak. To her lifelong sorrow, she would never marry or have children.

In 1912, Szold founded Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. It led to the second major chapter of her life, which began in 1920 when at age 60 she traveled to Palestine, now under British mandate, to set up a healthcare system, dramatically reducing rates of disease and infant mortality. Under her leadership, hospitals and clinics established by Hadassah offered medical services to Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. The only woman elected to the Zionist executive, Szold served in the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, overseeing its health and education departments and working tirelessly to improve the educational system and social welfare network. In 1933, in response to the growing threat to Jews in Europe, Szold founded Youth Aliyah, which would provide homes for 30,000 children, including orphaned survivors of the Holocaust.

Scholar, feminist, and activist, Henrietta Szold was a visionary leader whose devotion to helping others remains a source of inspiration to thousands.

—Kathleen McDermott

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

In early twentieth-century England there were few female scientists, let alone astronomers. Often the lone woman in her courses and the observatory, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin faced constant skepticism from her peers and a lack of recognition for her work. And still, clear-eyed and determined, she went on to pen what fellow astronomer Otto Struve would call “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.” In it, she proposed a theory that was eventually proven true: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin revealed the atomic composition of stars. Now, for any astronomer it was difficult to posit a revolutionary theory, but for a woman in science it was almost impossible. As Donovan Moore reveals in What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a notable male colleague dismissed her work, stating that her conclusions were wrong. But Payne-Gaposchkin was not deterred by her critics, and eventually, she was duly recognized for correctly theorizing what stars are made of.

This discovery was one of many illustrious firsts throughout the course of Payne-Gaposchkin’s life. She became the first woman to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College. She was the first woman to be promoted to full professor by Harvard and the first woman to head a department at Harvard. Throughout a lifetime of facing obstacles and closed doors, Payne-Gaposchkin rose to the challenge time and again, and through her commitment to science, she cut a path for others to follow.

—Janice Audet

Queen Njinga

Asked to name one of the most powerful ruling women of the early modern era, many people might point to Queen Elizabeth I of England. Few would likely name her near contemporary Queen Njinga, ruler of Ndongo, a large territory in central Africa. But they should. Born in 1582, descendant of a royal line reaching back to the founding of the kingdom of Ndongo, Njinga learned statecraft at her father’s court. After her brother assumed the throne, she served as his envoy to the Portuguese, who were conducting relentless wars of conquest in the region for land and slaves. Njinga proved more adept than her brother in both diplomacy and strategy. Upon his death, she became the real defender of Ndongo’s independence.

In Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen, Linda Heywood recounts the dramatic twists and turns in the life of this fascinating and complex woman. After a short reign as ruler of Ndongo, Njinga was forced into exile and lived in the bush, where she transformed herself into a fierce military leader who fought alongside her soldiers. She conquered the neighboring state of Matamba and established a court that was a powerhouse in the region. Njinga upended traditional gender norms, declaring herself “king” and keeping many young male consorts. She owned slaves and engaged in slave trading. She converted to Christianity and corresponded with the Vatican, even concocting a clever plan to have the pope recognize her as a Christian monarch and Matamba as a Christian state. Once, during peace negotiations with the Portuguese, she refused to sit before them on carpets, which signaled defeat. She instead ordered a slave on all fours to act as a chair, on whom she sat before the Europeans as an equal.

This astute and innovative leader, named one of UNESCO’s twenty-five most influential women in African history, became an icon of resistance and a folk hero throughout the African diaspora in the Atlantic. Daring warrior, master diplomat, and crafty politician, Queen Njinga was a force to be reckoned with. We should all know her story.

—Kathleen McDermott

We’ll be highlighting other books for Women’s History Month across our social media channels throughout March. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter, and be sure to follow our international office on Twitter, too.

Q&A with Jacqueline Mitton, coauthor of Vera Rubin: A Life

While astronomer Vera Rubin made significant contributions to our understanding of dark matter and championed the advancement of women in science, she is not that well known outside of the scientific community. HUP Executive Editor for Science, Janice Audet, spoke with Jacqueline Mitton, coauthor (with her husband) of  Vera Rubin: A Life, about Rubin’s remarkable life and work and the writing of the book.

Vera Rubin: A Life is the first official biography of Rubin, even though many astronomers are familiar with her scientific findings and as an advocate for women in science. Why do you feel her work and leadership should be known by more people outside of scientific circles? 

There aren’t many celebrities who achieve their fame through science. The number of women who do is tiny and Vera Rubin is one of them.

People who don’t know much about her might have a preconception that the life of a scientist can’t be very interesting to a general reader or have any relevance to the everyday lives of other women and men. After all, her name is usually spoken in the same breath as that totally baffling concept “dark matter.” But when she died in 2016, Rubin was described as “a national treasure” and no one gets that kind of accolade for being dull or ordinary.

Rubin persevered against the odds to achieve the dream of being an astronomer she’d cherished since her teens, while at the same time raising four children. How she managed it, with the support of her family, especially her husband Bob, is an inspiration to anyone. She was possessed of a certain stubbornness and capacity for hard work, and yet it was her warm personality, kindness, and willingness to give unstintingly of her time and support to others, especially aspiring female astronomers, that endeared her to all who knew her. And with persistent doggedness, she led the way in the battle to improve the status of women in astronomy. She was funny, literate, and passionate about trees, nature, and old astronomical globes.

To Rubin, almost everything she did was “fun.” Her sense of joy in her work was so palpable that one of her young sons once asked her if she had to pay to be allowed to do it. Her astronomer daughter, Judy, described her mother’s life as a “love story”: love of astronomy, love of learning, and love of family and friends. We agree, and that’s the story we set out to tell.

I greatly appreciate how clearly you explain astronomy for the reader, allowing even those readers without scientific background to understand Rubin’s findings. How did you balance the personal and scientific sides of Rubin’s story?

A biography is a special kind of book. You are writing not just about a person, but also about their world—what they did every day—as well as charting events in history. And the challenge is to weave all that together into an interesting read. With Rubin, it wasn’t difficult because she never compartmentalized her science and her personal life. They were always inseparably entwined into one colorful fabric. So we took the lead from her. It really wasn’t about balancing two aspects, but trying effectively to capture the whole person and what made her the remarkable woman she was.

Between us, Simon and I felt very well equipped to do that. We both have many years of experience bringing astronomy to a wide range of audiences. We’ve written popular books, worked with the media, taught outreach classes, and talked to community groups. And we’ve found that getting people interested in astronomy is nearly always like pushing on an open door because it is so fascinating, amazing—inspiring even. Many of the ideas and discoveries are not really difficult to understand when someone explains them properly. It’s all a question of putting yourself as a writer in the position of the readers, though, of course, we have had to make some assumptions about our readers’ knowledge. On the other aspect, writing about people and history, Simon brought considerable expertise to our joint project, having taken up a new career as a historian of astronomy since retiring as a publisher. He’s written a book-length biography of the cosmologist Fred Hoyle and has been researching and writing on the lives of other 20th century astronomers.

What aspects of your own lives inspired this book?

Although I did not go on to have a research career, I strongly identify with many of Rubin’s feelings and experiences, both positive and negative. Like Rubin, I became fascinated by the stars as a child and had formed the ambition of making astronomy my life by my mid-teens. Like her, I had a small backyard telescope and read as many astronomy books as I could get my hands on. For me it was always a “calling” rather than a job. I know from personal experience what it is like to pass a long night observing in a cold dome, to spend hours at a measuring machine poring over a spectrum on a glass plate. And I remember very well just how difficult it was to be a woman in the male-dominated world of physics and astronomy.

Like Vera, I met my future husband (and coauthor) when I was just 18—unsurprisingly, perhaps, at an Oxford University Astronomical Society meeting. Like Vera Rubin and her husband Bob, we have enjoyed a long marriage, which has also been a supportive partnership in which we share our mutual passion for astronomy, and—in our case—our equally strong commitment to reaching out to others so they can share our enthusiasm.

When I became the first woman President of the Oxford University Astronomical Society, my first move was to look for women speakers. There were so few women astronomers in the United Kingdom at that time it was a real challenge, but I succeeded in finding two. One of them, Carole Jordan, went on to be the first female President of the Royal Astronomical Society. I was a student at Somerville College at the time. That connection with the greatest woman scientist in 19th century Britain, Mary Somerville, later became one of my inspirations for doing all I could to make women astronomers and scientists more well known. How could I have resisted the opportunity to be the first biographer of Vera Rubin?

What do you hope readers take away from this book?

We hope our readers will feel they have come to know Vera Rubin as the remarkable scientist and human being she was. And we’d like them to remember what Rubin herself would often repeat: “There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that can’t be solved by a woman,” and “half of all brains in the world are in women.”

We hope, too, that our readers may learn some science they didn’t know before and something about how the advancement of astronomy works, partly by diligent hard work and partly through serendipitous discovery. Above all, we hope readers will feel they have been entertained as well as informed, and maybe even persuaded that a life in science really can be—in Vera’s own word—“fun.”

Q&A with Sharon Strocchia, author of Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy

As part of Women’s History Month, we spoke with Sharon T. Strocchia about her new book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, which uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance.

Your research demonstrates that women in Renaissance Italy played a major role in providing health care. Why have historians failed to recognize their centrality until so recently?

I would highlight two reasons why Renaissance women healers have been hiding in plain sight for so long. First, the historiography of Italian Renaissance medicine has been dominated by developments in academic medicine—anatomy, dissection, humanistic debates. Although this body of scholarship has been invaluable for understanding transformations in medical thinking, it has been less concerned with the lived experience of illness on the streets or the activities of frontline healers in households and hospitals. As a result, studies of women’s entanglements with household medicine, care practices, and the culture of experimentation on the Italian peninsula have not flourished to the same degree as elsewhere. Second, many of the care practices performed by Renaissance women have either been naturalized as “women’s work” or coded as charitable activities. The first interpretation makes women’s labor and know-how less visible, while the second often empties it of medical meaning. In addition, a persistent focus on practitioners’ official titles and occupational identities, along with the greater value assigned to cure over care, have led scholars to both undercount and undervalue the healthcare services women provided to household and community. In order to capture a more accurate, dynamic picture of medical provisioning in the early modern period, we need to redefine what “counts” as medical work.  

What was one of the most surprising discoveries you made while conducting archival research for this book?

I was amazed by the extent to which sixteenth-century Italian urban women kept abreast of market trends and new technologies for making remedies and wellness products. Religious women living in convents, for instance, kept their finger on the pulse of commercial life, in part because selling medicinal remedies represented such a vital revenue stream for their communities. Thanks to their wide-ranging information networks, they could respond nimbly to shifts in the medical marketplace, such as the globalization of new medicaments and changing consumer preferences. They also stayed connected to the knowledge circulating in local health markets by exchanging treasured recipes with friends and family and by experimenting directly with various health-giving products.

You focus on the various spaces where women practiced medicine—the household, the pox hospital, and the convent. Can you give an example of how nun apothecaries worked “at the nexus of religion, magic, and medicine”? How did they understand their work to be both sacred and scientific?

Take the case of the Tuscan nun Orsola Fontebuoni, who was active in the 1620s. This recognized charismatic seamlessly melded her spiritual gifts with naturalistic healing skills. An accomplished pharmacist, Orsola was conversant with old standbys from medieval Mediterranean pharmacopeia as well as newer additions to the European medicine chest imported from the Americas. She helped expand the convent’s pharmacy business while also attracting powerful patrons, thanks to her visions and ecstasies. Even while she was experimenting with new remedies in her workshop, she trafficked in healing relics, circulating them within local female networks that included members of the Medici court. Among her most intimate clients was the Tuscan grand duchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, to whom she provided magico-religious remedies like amulets, informed medical advice gleaned from long years of experience, and priceless consolation in the form of healing eloquence. For Orsola, these healing activities comprised an integrated whole that simultaneously tapped the powers of the natural and sacred worlds.

Your book moves between the micro and the macro in terms of historical scope, zeroing in on the lives of individual women and health practitioners to analyze the broader systems of their time. Who do you find to be one of the most fascinating figures in the book, and what do you think readers would want to know about her?

One of the most intriguing figures I encountered was the Florentine nun Giovanna Ginori. She came from a renowned local family that had deep investments in civic politics and social welfare initiatives. Giovanna entered the convent around age twelve and took vows four years later in 1517. Many of her female relatives were known for their charitable work, such as founding shelters for at-risk girls. So there was a shared family interest in helping the helpless, which probably accounts for Giovanna’s placement in the convent pharmacy at an early age. She apprenticed there for six years with an older, skilled mentor, from whom she learned her craft—how to identify and process medicinal herbs, how to prepare efficacious remedies, how to experiment with new techniques and materials. In the thirty-seven years that she ran the convent pharmacy, Giovanna also read widely in the medical literature of her day and experimented with new medical remedies in her workshop. Often working around the clock as a back-up nurse in the convent infirmary, she became a renowned pharmacist and healer. At the same time, she had a keen business sense that led her to develop innovative products, expand the pharmacy’s client base, and build its reputation. We still have several signed sales receipts written in her own hand. Gifted with skilled hands and an inquiring mind, Giovanna Ginori is proof positive that women have enjoyed a long history in medicine, science, and technology.   

We tend to focus on how far medicine has come since the 1500s, but what are some of the enduring effects or lessons of Renaissance medicine? How might we turn to the Renaissance to think about developing a culture of care and consolation?

I think there are a couple of things we can learn from these forgotten healers and their world. One is that the task of healing is complex. Renaissance medicine took a holistic view of health that wove together physical, mental, and spiritual or emotional elements. By contrast, modern biomedicine tends to divide the body into many constituent parts and to divorce human health from the broad ecosystems in which it is embedded. Renaissance notions of health and healing remind us that we’re deeply interconnected, both as individuals and as a species. I would also say that, while Renaissance medicine lacked the hallmarks associated with modern biomedicine, it was much richer in community-based resources. The importance of cultivating personal relationships with our healthcare providers as well as the crucial role played by support networks in sustaining health and well-being are lessons we’re learning over and over again.

Going Downtown

As a child in Chicago, Emily Remus was enchanted by the sights and sounds of its downtown. Here she tells how those early experiences influenced her in writing A Shoppers’ Paradise, a book about how women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown.

“Downtown,” Petula Clark’s 1964 hit single about the vibrancy of the city center, entranced me long before I began studying urban life. In the early 1990s, nearly three decades after the song’s release, I replayed it endlessly on a plastic phonograph in my bedroom in suburban Chicago. Clark’s crooning insistence that “everything’s waiting for you” downtown seemed patently true to me as a young girl. Downtown—in my case, Chicago’s Loop—was the site of my greatest adventures, a font of novelty and excitement. The lights were “much brighter there,” I thought. You could “forget all your troubles, forget all your cares.”

The commercial landscape of the downtown was especially captivating to my youthful imagination. On every trip with my parents and sisters, I would marvel at the grand hotels, elegant theaters, and lively restaurants. Even more enticing were the glittering store fronts of State Street, especially during the holidays. The mix of color, light, and glass seemed to transform the retail district into a bustling winter wonderland. Nowhere was this effect more pronounced than at Marshall Field & Co., Chicago’s most beloved department store (later acquired by Macy’s). After surveying Field’s elaborate annual window displays, we would, like countless other families, retreat to the store’s seventh floor to sip hot cocoa beneath the twinkling glow of the Walnut Room’s famous Christmas tree. 

Even as a child, I wondered how and by whom the downtown had been created. I could not then have appreciated that the Loop was a product of innumerable policy decisions, commercial choices, cultural priorities, social inequalities, and political exigencies. Nor could I have grasped that its contours had been shaped not only by government officials, business leaders, and reformers but by historical actors not very different from my mother, sisters, and me—by women shoppers.      

This history began, slowly, to come into focus when I entered graduate school at the University of Chicago to study gender and capitalism. Inspired by historians such as Lizabeth Cohen and William Cronon, whose landmark works illuminated the imprint of industrial capitalism on Chicago’s material and cultural landscape, I began to investigate how the expansion of consumer capitalism influenced the urban environment. I probed the early growth of the State Street retail district, tracing the rise of new commercial spaces that catered primarily to female customers—department stores, theaters, grand hotels, restaurants, and soda fountains. These businesses, which proliferated in the 1880s and 1890s, drew an unprecedented number of moneyed white women into the downtown.

As I dug into my research, I expected to find a seamless incorporation, even a warm embrace, of these women into the commercial life of the Loop. After all, their consuming practices helped to fuel Chicago’s remarkable economic development in the late nineteenth century. To my astonishment, I instead uncovered heated conflict and resistance. Far from welcoming female consumers, many Chicago industrialists, city officials, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens challenged the growing presence and pursuits of moneyed women in the city center. Their conspicuously feminine clothing, street etiquette, dining and drinking preferences, entertainment choices, and very manner of walking distinguished them from traditional male occupants of the Loop and provoked intense opposition. The battles ranged from efforts to deny women shoppers access to downtown sidewalks during evening rush hour to the enactment of new laws banning voluminous hoopskirts and large hats to crusades against alcohol consumption in ladies’ cafés and tearooms.

A Shoppers’ Paradise probes these tensions and their consequences. As the book reveals, incorporating women into a downtown dominated by men—and creating an atmosphere favorable to female consumption—was not easy or automatic. In negotiating the terms of women’s public presence, Chicagoans clashed over the appropriate use of downtown space, the rights of women, and the moral legitimacy of new forms of consumption. This conflict, I argue, shaped the creation of a built environment and cultural norms that upheld moneyed white women’s new consuming habits and sustained the growth of American consumer capitalism. Indeed, it produced the class-bounded, racially-homogenous consumer playground that my sisters and I would unthinkingly enjoy a century later. 

I can no longer visit State Street without reflecting on its fraught history, on the opportunities and disparities produced by its development. I am also keenly aware that its landscape is still evolving. Many of the spaces I visited as a girl have since shuttered. State Street, like countless other urban retail districts across the country, has been struggling for decades to attract customers and retain businesses. These problems have only intensified as more and more commerce shifts to the digital realm. A century ago, Chicago civic and business leaders debated how—and whether—to accommodate the growing stream of downtown shoppers. Now, the concern is that this stream may someday dry up. Each moment conjures the same important question—what is a downtown for?

I pose this question not only in A Shoppers’ Paradise but on annual field trips to Chicago for my course on the history of consumer culture at the University of Notre Dame. After touring the Marshall Field building, I prompt my students to wander up and down State Street surveying the architecture and infrastructure. Our goal is to encounter the urban environment as a primary source, a clue to the past. The landscape opens up for my students new vistas for understanding power, inequality, and capitalist transformation. Standing with thirty undergraduates on a crowded street corner discussing the purpose, meaning, and uncertain future of America’s downtowns, I am reminded of the sheer dynamism of these spaces and, at least for a moment, can still find some truth in Petula Clark’s claim that there is “no finer place for sure.” 

Stop Blaming Feminists: The Feminist Movement We Should Remember

In Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family, a spirited defense of feminism, Kirsten Swinth argues that the lack of support for working mothers is less a failure of second-wave feminism than a rejection by reactionaries of the sweeping changes they campaigned for. Here, she dispels some common myths that plague the history of the feminist movement.

Feminism is cool in the age of Donald Trump. The movement is surging. #MeToo, women in Congress, and massive women’s marches are all signs of a new feminist moment. One would think we would be looking to feminist foremothers for inspiration. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Instead, pervasive, sometimes pernicious myths about the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s keep rearing their head.

For the feminist movement we need in the Trump era, these myths must be banished. Bad history blocks urgently needed gains. Today’s distorting myths systematically blame feminist foremothers, rather than their opponents or media misrepresentations, for the predicaments we face today. The facts tell a different story: of a diverse, progressive women’s movement, brimming with visionary solutions for the inequality women faced in workplaces as well as in intimate relationships. If we are to make progress on these issues, we need to hear their voices and take up the mantle of their struggles once again.

So let’s get the facts straight.

Fact #1: Feminists were horrified at the media invention of the liberated woman “having it all” by dint of efficient life management. In reality, feminists fought for changes in family and workplaces to make sure that having a family and having a job could be an option for every woman, just as it had been for men. They believed that society had to change the rules of the game in both workplace and family life in order for equality to truly exist. They demanded a national system of childcare and guaranteed incomes for mothers (especially poor mothers) to care for their children. They fought for equal childcare and housework with men, even writing “marriage contracts” to pin recalcitrant men down to their promises to share the load. Their vision was broad and deep—requiring society and systems to change as much as individuals.

Fact #2: Feminists of all stripes and backgrounds made universal, 24-hour, community-controlled childcare a rallying cry of the movement. The absence of a national childcare system today is often chalked up to feminists’ lack of interest in the issue. This is simply not true. In coalition with civil rights and labor groups, feminists nearly achieved a national childcare system in 1971, until conservatives persuaded Richard Nixon to veto legislation approved by Congress. Even then, that did not stop feminists. A grassroots do-it-yourself ethos spread across the country as feminists passed around tattered manuals on how to start your own daycare center, complete with designs for tot-sized furniture. Childcare centers grew by almost a third nationally between 1970 and 1976.

Fact #3: Feminists of color were leaders, indeed among the vanguard, on many feminist issues. African American feminists in the welfare-rights movement fought for a universal basic income so mothers could care for their children without being forced to work. Domestic workers, largely African American, led a feminist fight to recognize the value of household labor by demanding the minimum wage for nannies, house cleaners, and other household employees. Women of color were leaders in major national organizations like the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), as well as of the National Black Feminist Organization and the Third World Women’s Alliance. Shirley Chisholm and LaDonna Harris were, for example, among the founders of the NWPC which pledged to fight “sexism, racism, institutional violence and poverty” at its founding in 1971. Well-justified frustrations at the insensitivity of many white feminists to the needs of women of color should not erase the leadership and critical contributions of feminists of color to a rich, varied movement.

Fact #4: Feminist activists of the 1960s and 1970s led creative, vibrant campaigns to value housework and caring for children. Feminists saw firsthand the vulnerability of homemakers all around them, particularly with skyrocketing divorce rates in the 1970s. Anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly attacked them for being anti-family and hating housewives, but her charge was unfounded. Women’s rights activists proposed steps still touted today as essential. They calculated the value of household labor and argued that it should count in the gross national product. Feminist legislators and lawyers fought to ensure homemakers had basic rights, like the security of an independent social security account for retirement and a fair share of family property at divorce. The National Organization for Women issued a Homemakers Bill of Rights.

Fact #5: Feminists did not fail and leave us in the pickle we live with today. They were defeated. What they dreamed of achieving was visionary, and ahead of its time. Their opponents found the changes women’s rights activists proposed threatening. If enacted, family relationships and workplace hierarchies would all be upended. These opponents therefore mobilized and successfully countered many feminist proposals. Yet when we look at what feminists really fought for, we see a road map for our own time—a comprehensive vision for changing home and workplace, for involving society in supporting childcare and guaranteeing parental time with children, while accommodating workers with family responsibilities (that is, all of us).

We have foremothers to turn to for inspiration. Edith Barksdale Sloan led domestic workers in their fight for higher wages and better working conditions. Members of the New York Wages for Housework Committee taught us that housework has economic value. Ida Phillips of Florida took her case all the way to the Supreme Court to win the right for mothers not to be denied a job simply because they had children.

By promoting pernicious myths about feminism that have no basis in fact, we do conservatives’ work for them. It’s time to stop blaming feminists and instead to pick up where they left off.

School Is Her Refuge

ref • uge
noun
A condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble.

If we want girls to succeed, we need to teach them the audacity to transgress. Through the lives of students at three very different schools, Sally A. Nuamah makes the case for “feminist schools” that orient girls toward a lifetime of achievement. In How Girls Achieve, Nuamah advocates for creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms and allow them to carve out their own paths to success. She says in the book, “The goal must be for girls everywhere to have the power to end up wherever it is that they want to be without bearing significantly different costs than their peers for doing so.”

 

 

 

 

 

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To show how educational institutions can make changes to help all students, regardless of their gender, Nuamah provides a feminist school tool kit:  

Feminist School Tool Kit

Is your school a gender-equitable institution? Assess your school’s policies and practices using this checklist. If you find that you are saying “no” to some of these, then your school may be engaging in biased gender practices. Work with your students to become a feminist school!

Physical Environment

• Does your school have flush toilets?
• Are there separate bathroom facilities, and are they open to students based on their preferred gender identification?
• Are there gender-neutral bathrooms?
• Do you provide free sanitary pads?
• Does your school maintain its supplies of toilet paper?

Classroom Instruction

• Do you ask students what pronoun they identify with?
• Do your textbook examples defy gender-based stereotypes?
• Are girls and boys grouped together on projects?
• During gym or dance class are gender-neutral roles promoted?
• Do you ensure that girls and boys are participating in class at similar levels?
• Do you openly talk about menstruation and puberty in sex-education courses?
• Do you teach students to recognize abuse and give them the resources to respond?

School Policies

• Is there a specific place for students to report sexual abuse or misconduct?
• Are students reprimanded for reporting what happened to them?
• Are girls and boys able to wear the school uniform option that is most comfortable to them?
• Are girls and boys held to the same standard in terms of their body language?
• Do your curricula and policies account for those who may be differently abled, trans, queer, or gender-fluid?

Research and Data

• Do you ask students about their needs annually?
• Do you make this data available to all stakeholders—parents, teachers, community partners?
• Do you regularly assess your policies and design interventions to respond to them?

Let’s continue to build this assessment together. Send your ideas to [email protected].

 

Conceived in Freedom, Dedicated to Women’s History: An Appreciation of Anne Firor Scott

Historian and activist Anne Firor Scott, who helped pioneer and advance the field of women’s history, passed away on February 5. Susan Ware, whose forthcoming book Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote is dedicated to Anne, honors her dear friend and colleague and the impact her scholarship and activism had on the historical profession.

When historian Anne Firor Scott turned eighty in 2001, the Schlesinger Library held a symposium to celebrate the event and asked me to introduce our honored guest. When I was searching for a way to convey her remarkable career and accomplishments to assembled scholars and friends who were already well aware of them, I did some simple math and realized that Anne had been born nine months after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, thus providing the theme of my remarks. Alas, my math was a bit too simple, as Eva Moseley, the library’s meticulous curator of manuscripts pointed out afterwards. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 26, 1920, and Anne was born on April 21, 1921. That’s eight months, not nine. But I still loved the juxtaposition of the milestone in American women’s history with the birth of a historian whose work fundamentally shaped the field.

When I decided to dedicate Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote to Anne, I used that historical coincidence to frame the wording: “To Anne Firor Scott, born eight months after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and an inspiration to women’s historians ever since.” The dedication acknowledges our long friendship, Anne’s pioneering role in the field of women’s history, and her place in suffrage history. I readily admit that the math doesn’t quite work out, but I still fancy the idea she might have been conceived on the very night that the Nineteenth Amendment formally became part of the U.S. Constitution.

Last summer I reached out to Anne through her children to tell her of my idea for the dedication. By now I so associated her life with the upcoming suffrage centennial that it seemed she might live until 2020, even though she had been in declining health for several years. It was not to be. On February 5, 2019, she died peacefully at the age of ninety-seven.

Like so many other good things in my life, my friendship with Anne Firor Scott was intimately connected with the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. I can’t remember when I first met her, but I am certain it was through Barbara Miller Solomon, one of my mentors at Harvard (Frank Friedel was the other) who helped me navigate the often chilly reception that my chosen field of women’s history received in the Harvard history department of the 1970s. Anne, who had received her Ph.D. from Radcliffe in 1958, was a longtime member of the advisory board of the Schlesinger Library and would journey to Cambridge for its twice-yearly meetings, where she always stayed in what she called Barbara’s Brattle Street “attic.” When Barbara died, I inherited her houseguest. Anne happened to be in town the night of November 7, 2000, and always keenly engaged in current affairs, stayed up late watching the Bush–Gore election returns. When we convened at breakfast, there was still no winner. Little did we know that it would be five weeks before the election was decided.

Book dedications are often personal and quirky, as they should be. In my case, I feel especially privileged to acknowledge a scholar who not only was a dear friend but who also had such a key impact on the field of women’s history generally, and suffrage history particularly. Even before there was a field of Southern women’s history, Anne Firor Scott embarked on the research that became her first book, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970). While later scholarship has deepened and complicated the story, The Southern Lady remains a foundational text.

By the time the field of women’s history picked up momentum, Anne was already happily ensconced at Duke University, which was her professional home for practically her entire career. I can’t decide if she would have been tickled or embarrassed to hear that flags were flown at half-staff on the Duke campus when the news of her passing was announced. Probably a bit of both.

Anne Firor Scott never published a book with Harvard University Press, although her daughter Rebecca Scott has. But I still consider her an HUP author for her role in the three-volume biographical dictionary Notable American Women, which was originally sponsored by Radcliffe College in the 1950s and published by Harvard University Press in 1971, 1980, and 2004. I served as the editor of the final volume, which covered 483 women who died between January 1, 1976, and December 31, 1999. Anne contributed the essay on League of Women Voters president Anna Lord Strauss, which gave her the distinction of being the only author to write entries for all three volumes, a matter of great pride to us both.

When I contemplate the upcoming suffrage centennial and the question of why suffrage mattered, I think of an observation Anne Scott once made about how winning the vote was part of larger changes in women’s lives: “Suffrage was a tributary flowing into the rich and turbulent river of American social development. That river is enriched by the waters of each tributary, but with the passage of time it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the special contribution of any one of the tributaries.” I can’t point to specific pages in Why They Marched where the impact of Anne’s scholarship is visible but it is clearly there. So, too, is the personal encouragement she gave me over our decades of friendship. With my dedication I am honored to acknowledge that debt.