Heterodoxy
Sep. 27th, 2012 12:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerMy first argument against suffrage is that the women would not use it if they had it. You couldn't drive them to the polls. My second argument is, if the women were enfranchised they would neglect their home, desert their families and spend all their time at the polls. You may tell me that the polls are only open once a year. But I know women. They are creatures of habit. If you let them go to the polls once a year, they will hang round the polls all the rest of the time.
This is a quote from Marie Jenney Howe's satirical An Anti-Suffrage Monologue, appendicized in Judith Schwartz's enchanting - now that's a word you don't often append to academic texts - enchanting book Radical Feminists in Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940, which offers glimpses of the life and times of the members of the radical feminist group Heterodoxy.
Glimpses - only glimpses. Normally academics at least try to create the illusion that they have something like a complete story. Schwartz throws illusion to the winds. "When some good woman finally invents a time machine," she comments, "my first desire is to become an invisible observer at a Saturday Heterodoxy meeting."
(This is why no one calls your average everyday academic book enchanting: not enough time machines.)
Although all the members seem like fascinating women - they include Sara Josephine Baker, the health reformer featured in Kate Beaton comics - Marie Jenney Howe, the organizer of Heterodoxy, is the beating heart of the book as she was of Heterodoxy itself. Schwartz's book is based around a scrapbook Heterodoxy members put together in tribute to Marie, in fact.
Where was I? O yes, Marie.
How we have nagged her because she hasn't signed her name
to a book, or a poem or a play or something.
What does she do anyway?
She has only a genius for friendship.
She only throws her great motherheart open to us all.
She did publish a book in the end, a biography of George Sand, despite her crippling certainty that she couldn't write - "Poor domestic Marie, trying to write, it's impossible," she wrote. But later, she noted - "Today I received my first letter from a stranger in response to my book. She found her own self in George. Somehow when I was sitting here alone working, always tired, always depressed and full of doubts, I never realized that I was writing a sort of letter to a woman living in a hotel in Scranton, PA."
Or: someone may need to hear what you have to say. So write it; and let it free, so they can read it.
This is a quote from Marie Jenney Howe's satirical An Anti-Suffrage Monologue, appendicized in Judith Schwartz's enchanting - now that's a word you don't often append to academic texts - enchanting book Radical Feminists in Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940, which offers glimpses of the life and times of the members of the radical feminist group Heterodoxy.
Glimpses - only glimpses. Normally academics at least try to create the illusion that they have something like a complete story. Schwartz throws illusion to the winds. "When some good woman finally invents a time machine," she comments, "my first desire is to become an invisible observer at a Saturday Heterodoxy meeting."
(This is why no one calls your average everyday academic book enchanting: not enough time machines.)
Although all the members seem like fascinating women - they include Sara Josephine Baker, the health reformer featured in Kate Beaton comics - Marie Jenney Howe, the organizer of Heterodoxy, is the beating heart of the book as she was of Heterodoxy itself. Schwartz's book is based around a scrapbook Heterodoxy members put together in tribute to Marie, in fact.
Where was I? O yes, Marie.
How we have nagged her because she hasn't signed her name
to a book, or a poem or a play or something.
What does she do anyway?
She has only a genius for friendship.
She only throws her great motherheart open to us all.
She did publish a book in the end, a biography of George Sand, despite her crippling certainty that she couldn't write - "Poor domestic Marie, trying to write, it's impossible," she wrote. But later, she noted - "Today I received my first letter from a stranger in response to my book. She found her own self in George. Somehow when I was sitting here alone working, always tired, always depressed and full of doubts, I never realized that I was writing a sort of letter to a woman living in a hotel in Scranton, PA."
Or: someone may need to hear what you have to say. So write it; and let it free, so they can read it.
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Date: 2012-09-27 12:36 pm (UTC)She has only a genius for friendship.
Quite apart from the fact that she did end up writing something, I think that the genius for friendship is underrated, and is a huge, wonderful thing. I know people who have it, and I appreciate and admire it, and I try to imitate it, the way I try to imitate good writers or good artists or good singers or good parents, etc.
I love your conclusion here, too: I heartily agree. And: success is reaching even one person. If even one person feels changed and better because of something you've done, that's success.
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