| 12-17 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Excerpt from Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor
Roosevelt
Deborah Sampson
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
June Sochen and Ellen Taaffee Zwilich.
Blanche Wiesen Cook on Eleanor Roosevelt
The following is an excerpt from Blanche Wiesen
Cook's marvelous biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, the first biography of
ER that treats her like a real, human being : "...the
work and vision of an entire feminist community - a circle of intimate
friends connected to Eleanor Roosevelt - seemed to be trivialized and ignored.
It was in fact an historical outrage, born of closed archives, court biography,
misogynist interpretation, misinformation.
"As in the case of the women of Bloomsbury, ER's
British contemporaries, the work and the words were in the hands of sons
and surrogate sons who rarely sought to address or even recognize the complex
relationships of very complex lives. They tended to praise the fathers,
condemn the mothers, and misunderstand the others. It would be easy to
blame the sons and surrogate sons for the failure of our historical record,
but that would be only partly accurate. ER, as much as Virginia Woolf or
Vita Sackville-West, played a role in which we were allowed to know. Marriages
hid romances; romances were discreet and buried in archives; archives were
until recently closed. Although ER kept much of the historian record, the
private details of her life with others and with FDR were entirely obscured
in three volumes of memoir and several autobiographical essays. With certain
excepts, such as FDR's momentous affair with Lucy Mercer, ER's appointed
heirs follow her lead: if a subject appears in her books, in appeared in
theirs...
"Without her essential vision, the forcefulness
of her political activism, and the details of her intimate life, Eleanor
Roosevelt has been lost in an historian lie. Above all we have been denied
access to the core subject so intriguing to students of life, that place
where sex and power converge...
"The issue of sex and power is assumed to be
central to the lives of great men. When looking at the lives of great women,
we continue to divide the world into saints and sinners, and we make assumptions
based on race and class, even looks. White, Protestant, aristocratic, and
'unattractive' women are not supposed to flourish in the political arena,
and are not presumed to have sex or independently passionate interests.
Regarding these women, all questions concerning that wondrous crossroad
of sex and power have been traditional disallowed.
"We have tended to constrict the range of historian
inquiry about women, failing even to ask life's most elemental questions.
We have been encouraged to disregard the essential mysteries of a woman's
life: What is energy and where does it come from? How do we channel energy
- to write, to organize, to love? How do we acquire courage, develop vision,
sustain power, create style? What is the connection between chronic undiagnosed
illness, depression, suicide, and the refusal to acknowledge the fullness
of a woman's capacities, her right to love and to lead?
"Until recently, historians and literary analysts
have preferred to see our great women writers and activists as asexual
spinsters, odd gentlewomen who sublimated their lust in their various good
works. But as we consider their true natures, we see that it was frequently
their ability to express love and passion - and to surround themselves
with like-minded women and men who offered support, strength, and emotional
armor - that enabled them to achieve all that they did achieve. That fact
is that our culture has sought to deny the truths and complexities about
women's passion because it is one of the great keys to women's power.
"Now nothing shatters the myth of the angel in
the house, the fragrant spirit in the garden, so fundamentally as the appearance
of the independently passionate woman, who chooses her mate, her partner,
her lovers, for reasons of her own, and according to the needs and wants
of her own chemistry. The myths of Victorian prudery and purity have been
history's most dependable means of social control. Class-bound and gender-related,
obscured by privets and closets and vanishing documents, establishment
lust has followed the dictates of establishment culture; traditionally
for men only."
-- Blanche Wiesen Cook in Eleanor Roosevelt,
Volume One 1884-1933, New York: Viking Press. 1992. (p. 11-12)
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Deborah Sampson
Born 12-17-1760, Deborah
Sampson. On 05-20-1782, DS enlisted in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment in
the American Revolutionary War disguised as a man named Robert Shurtlieff.
She took a musket ball out of her own thigh rather than allow army surgeons
to discover she was a woman. She was also wounded in the head and the foot,
once by a saber in a skirmish near Tarrytown, New York.
DS had enlisted once before as a Timothy Thayer but
may have only done so as a lark to get the enlistment money.
She was discharged 10-23-1783, after her true sex
was revealed to her surprised commanders and fellow soldiers in a letter
from a family she had stayed with while recovering from a fever. Her honorable
service was formally noted, as well as the acknowledgement of her sex,
in official army records.
She worked as a farmhand for a time as a man but in
1784 shifted to skirts, married, and had three children.
She was awarded a full pension from Congress in September
of 1818. Her husband requested a full pension after her death 04-29-1827,
which he claimed was caused by her war wounds.
A monument to Deborah Sampson stands in her home town
of Sharon, Mass.
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12-17 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 12-17-1706, Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier
de Breteuil Chatelet, Marquise du, French mathematician and physicist.
B. 12-17-1734, Maria I of Portugal, ruled 1777-1816
and brought peace and prosperity to the country. Napoleon's invasion in
1806 forced the royal family to flee.
B. 12-17-1760, Deborah Sampson, fought in the
Revolutionary War under the name of Robert Shurtleff, wounded she cared
for herself rather than risk exposure. Received full veterans pension.
Wrote of her experiences in The Female Review (1797).
B. 12-17-1878, Grace Abbott, U.S. social worker
and public administrator. Worked for the rights of children when harsh
child labor conditions were considered normal by society.
B. 12-17-1881, Bess Streeter Aldrich, widowed,
started writing and working as the sole
supporter of her children. Book editor of the Christian Herald.
Authored A Lantern in Her Hand (1928), a bestseller for years. AKA
Margaret Dean Stephens.
B. 12-17-1901, Janet G. Travell, first woman
physician to hold the post of personal physician to the President of the
United States (John F. Kennedy). JGT was
a specialist in the study and treatment of musculoskeletal pain. She was
firm believer in rocking chairs as mild muscular exercisers and believed
that every person should choose their particular chair to fit their bodies.
JGT acted as a design consultant for a number of companies.
B. 12-17-1905 or 1908, Sylvia Ashton-Warner,
New Zealand author and noted teacher who
introduced mutual response teaching methods. Best known for her first novel
Spinster (1958).
B. 12-17-1930, Jacqueline Fontyn, Belgian composer
winner of the Grand Prix de Rome for composition (1959) as well
as numerous other awards. Her works were played extensively in Europe.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
SOCHEN, JUNE:
"Among
my particular concerns... is the similar treatment that WASMs (white, Anglo-Saxon
males) gave to all human beings other than themselves, as well as to the
environment. There are more similarities than differences between the white
male attitude toward women, Indians, black slaves, forest, and wildlife
than historians have realized. [My book] though largely concerned with
women's lives and thoughts, also includes material about these other less
privileged humans and about the preyed-upon environment. The intention
is to point out the multiple examples of WASMs consistency of attitude
and behavior throughout the American past."
-- from the preface of Herstory, A Record of American Woman's Past,
by June Sochen of Northeastern Illinois University. Sherman Oaks California:
Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. 1974 & 1981. ISBN 0-88284-115-7.
ZWILICH, ELLEN TAAFEE:
"There's
no reason on earth why women can't write music. If so-called serious music
has been the province of western white males, this tells you more about
politics and society than it tells you about the nature of music."
-- Ellen Taaffee Zwilich, first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for
Music and the first woman to obtain a doctorate from Julliard.
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