Tough Cookies

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Tough Cookies

There have been many strong-willed women, women who had agency--tough cookies--throughout history. Let's meet these women and explore their stride.
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Whether notable or obscure, they have made footprints on the human narrative. With cookies on the side.

23/02/2024

Lydia Ernestine Becker, born in Manchester, UK, on February 24, 1827, was a suffragette, a botanist, and women’s rights advocate. She founded the Women’s Suffrage Journal that was extant for 20 years, 1870-1890. Although home-schooled, like most girls her age, she surprised them all by showing an interest in the sciences and even won a gold medal for her academic paper on horticulture.

You’ve heard of Charles Darwin, right? Well, she had the audacity to initiate a kind of pen-pal relationship with him, sent him plant samples for his researching pleasure, and sent him her book “Botany for Novices” (1864) to, you know, help him out a little. She won a national prize in 1860, for devising a way to make sure dried plants retained their vibrant colors, and she delivered a paper at the British Association Biology section on the s*x life of a particular plant species. Hot stuff. However, her advocation of women’s equality in all spheres, including the field of science and politics, soon took over.

By 1867, Becker was on top of the suffrage movement and was instrumental in the establishment of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee. She formed a kind of grass roots get-out-the vote effort in Manchester and the surrounding area encouraging women to petition to get their names on the voting roster. Good effort, but the court dismissed their case.

That didn’t stop her. She went on the road lecturing on behalf of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage and in 1870, was one of four women elected to the Manchester School Board. Becker encouraged interested women to engage in speaking tours promoting women’s suffrage. Her journal was read by everyone who was anyone, which caught the eye of author Roger Fulford, who was following the suffrage movement. He writes: “The history of the decades from 1860 to 1890—so far as women’s suffrage is concerned—is the history of Miss Becker.” And, what do you know! Becker and her cohorts were successful in securing the vote for women in the Isle of Man. One step at a time.

Now you would be right to assume that Becker would have been considered a feminist, but she was not a feminist in the way feminism was considered in the context of her time period. Becker did not believe that women were essentially different from men—the Venus and Mars argument of the, what was it, 1970s? She argued that there was no inherent difference between the intellect of men and that of women. She wanted both girls and boys learning together in the classroom. The bathroom issue had not quite come up, yet. And her argument about women needing desperately to be able to vote was quite credible. She believed that widows and single women were especially in need to be able to control their lives, not having a source of income from husbands like many other women enjoyed. And if widows and single women could…

Of course, the men laughed and laughed. The press made fun of her and made her an object of ridicule in editorial cartoons—the brigands!

Diphtheria took Lydia Becker at age 63. The staff of the “Women’s Suffrage Journal” stopped publishing thereafter because Lydia Becker WAS the Journal. Becker’s name and image joins 58 others that are etched on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London. Paris named a street after her (the Allee Lydia-Becker—Lydia Becker Lane), as did the UK—Lydia Becker Way. Indeed, Lydia Becker was able to get her way, as women did eventually get the vote…and Charles Darwin got a lot of help with his research—thank you very much, Miss Becker.

Cookie today: Ginger Biscuits from bbcgoodfood. Picture from Wikipedia.

16/02/2024

Olivia Juliette Ho**er was born this week in 1915. A survivor of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, Ho**er was a psychologist, professor, and the first African American woman to enter the US Coast Guard, earning the rank of Yeoman Second Class during WW2. This, after her application to the WAVES was rejected because of her race. However, that did not stop her. She was a woman who knew what she wanted—and got it.

Her childhood experience of living through the Tulsa race riots never left her memory. It was May 31, 1921, that a passel of white thugs entered her home and ransacked everything in it—her sister’s piano, her father’s record player, her mother’s kitchen, her toys. Ho**er and her four siblings cowered behind a couch, draping themselves with a tablecloth. In an interview with Radio Diaries in 2018, Ho**er said: “It was a horrifying thing for a little girl who’s only six years old, trying to remember to keep quiet, so they wouldn’t know we were there.”

White citizens who lived in Tulsa were infuriated by the financial success of the Greenwood District, known as Black Wall Street, where there were several thriving Black-owned businesses. The criminals killed 300 people. Ruining homes and livelihoods for more than 10,000 people. Needless to say, the Ho**er family moved to Columbus, Ohio, as quickly as they could.

Ho**er was determined to go to college, and she did, earning a BA in 1937 from The Ohio State University. After her military service in the Coast Guard, she used the GI Bill to get a Master’s Degree in psychological services from the Teachers College of Columbia University. One of her first post-grad school positions was as a member of the staff in the mental hygiene department of a women’s correctional facility. Because the women were incarcerated it followed, according to administrators, that they had some kind of learning disability. Ho**er disagreed with this assessment and re-evaluated those inmates she supervised, finding that they could indeed be taught and could earn a degree leading to a decent job when they were released. All you had to do, Ho**er said, was to approach them “with an open mind.”

Her interest in using psychology in the field of education continued in her work as a clinical psychologist and research scientist leading to her receiving a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Rochester in her 40s. Her dissertation was entitled “Formboard Performance in Mongoloid, Undifferentiated, and Brain-injured Children,” especially focusing on those children with Down Syndrome. Ho**er continued her work in psychology and academia earning a professorship at Fordham University and later becoming one of the founders of the American Psychological Association’s Division 33, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.
In 1997 Ho**er and other survivors of the Tulsa race massacre founded the Tulsa Race Riot Commission to investigate the tragic incident and to seek reparation. An active member of the NAACP, she never stopped advocating for black justice. She retired from her day job at 87 in 2002, and in the next year she and more than 100 others filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Oklahoma requesting compensation for lives and property lost in the Tulsa attack. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 2005.

In 2008, she played the leading role in the documentary “Before They Die!” playing herself. Three years later, she received the American Psychological Association Presidential Citation from President Obama himself and was inducted into the New York State Senate Veterans’ Hall of Fame in 2012. Ho**er went on to garner several service awards from the Coast Guard and the Psychology Association. On November 11, 2018, Veteran’s Day, she got a “Google Doodle.” Shameen Anthanio-Williams published a children’s book about her entitled “Tulsa Girl,” and in 2023 a fast response cutter, the USCGC Olivia Ho**er was named in her honor.

Olivia Ho**er passed away at home in white Plains, New York, of natural causes at 103. Truly a life well-lived.

Cookie today: Pecan Pie Cookies from Bobsredmill (Rest in Peace Bob Moore). Picture from Wikipedia.

04/02/2024

Hazel Brannon Smith, born February 4, 1914, once described herself as “just a little editor in a little spot.” She was the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for her work on the Civil Rights Movement in 1964. Knowing the value of lifting up every voice, Smith said: “A lot of other little editors in a lot of little spots is what helps make this country. It’s either going to help protect that freedom that we have, or else it’s going to let that freedom slip away by default.” Words still true today.

However, she did not always feel this way. She was, as they say, “a woman of her times,” raised by southern Baptist segregationist parents in Alabama. She was taught that God meant for the two races to be separate. Let me give you a little back story.

Smith graduated high school at 16 and enrolled in the University of Alabama, graduating with a degree in journalism in 1935. Durant, Mississippi’s Holmes County “Durant News” drew her to Mississippi. So, she moved to the majority-black, agricultural district and bought the paper, one of several she eventually acquired. She continued to write for her newspapers through the 1980’s, advocating for social justice, especially for the Holmes County black community, much to white supremacists’ chagrin. Most print media reported on black activities only if the people in question were involved in crimes.

But in 1954, bolstered by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education, (after first writing against it, thinking that the races preferred to be separated), Smith had an epiphany of sorts. Appalled by the violence of some police officers, she reported on County Sheriff Richard Byrd’s having shot black resident Harry Randall to encourage him to “get moving” and called for his resignation. Byrd then sued her for libel. Her attitude was indeed unheard of at the time in the 1950s south. Byrd won the suit; however, the court of appeals overturned the verdict.

After that incident, she did not support segregation anymore. Instead, she used her editorial power to advocate for the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, she contested the politics of the White Citizens Council. In 1956, the Citizens Council of Holmes instigated the firing of her husband, Walter Smith, from his position as administrator of the county hospital. African Americans began losing their jobs if they were members of the NAACP; some were evicted from their housing. Black businesses were boycotted.

In 1960, Smith was awarded the “Elijah P. Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism.” Halloween night of that same year, an 8-foot cross was burned on her lawn. In ’61, the Council urged a boycott on advertising in her newspapers and on printing jobs she had been arranging for African American activists.

That didn’t stop her. She continued to write editorials about racism in the police department. In 1964, in what became known as Mississippi Freedom Summer, she wrote: “One of the most popular misconceptions in Mississippi is the idea that if everyone would just leave us alone we would work out all our problems. . .. The truth is we have been left pretty much alone for one hundred years—and we have not faced up to our problems as well as we should.”

That was the year she won the Pulitzer for her body of work and her “steadfast adherence to her editorial duty in the face of great pressure and opposition.” The violence didn’t end, though. In September, 1964, one of her newspapers was bombed, and in ’67 her Lexington printing plant was set ablaze. She did get help from donor organizations to keep up the good work, but she never really did dig herself out of economic trouble. She ended up having to sell her papers and in 1985 she declared bankruptcy. In ’86 she moved in with her sister in Gadsen, AL, suffering from early dementia, and died in 1994, in a Tennessee nursing home. Huge loss to America in more ways than one. Articles about her abound online. Worth your time to read some of them.

She garnered several journalistic awards over her life time and was featured in the 1973 documentary “An Independent Voice.” Jane Seymour played the title role in an ABC-TV film about her life entitled “A Passion for Justice: The Hazel Brannon Smith story,” which aired just weeks before she passed away. She would have been 100 today.

Cookie today: Yellowhammer cookies—Alabama state sandwich cookie from simplyrecipes. Picture from Encyclopedia of Alabama.

29/01/2024

Florida Ruffin Ridley, born in Boston, Massachusetts, January 29, 1861, was a civil rights and women’s rights activist, and editor of The Woman’s Era, the country’s first newspaper published by and for African American women. Ridley came by her talents “honestly,” as they say. Her father was the first African American graduate of Harvard Law and the first black judge in the US, and her mother was a writer, civil rights trailblazer, and suffragist. A financially well-off family that was not representative of most black families in Boston.

With her mother, Josephine, and Maria Louise Baldwin, Ridley co-founded the Woman’s Era Club, a support group for black women, in 1894. The next year they founded what became the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), where speakers lectured on racial equity and social reform. In 1918, the three women founded the League of Women for Community Service that was instrumental in providing educational and compassionate services to the black community. The women bought a house in the south end of Boston to hold their meetings and events that initially was built to support black soldiers during WWI but then went on to house black female students attending Boston universities. None other than Coretta Scott lived in this building while attending the New England Conservatory and dating her husband-to-be, Martin Luther King, Jr.

The motto of the NACWC was “Lifting as We Climb.” As Ridley writes in the Woman’s Era in 1896: “Women’s clubs are helping to bring us to a recognition of the truth that true dignity does not need barriers in order to preserve itself. . . . The club means the spirit of neighborliness with the world, the recognition of our duty toward our neighbor, and not only of our common humanity but our common divinity; the club helps us not only to make the best of that within us but to see the best of that in others.”

Because the club consisted of relatively affluent and most likely well-educated black women, the members felt it was their duty to use their privilege in the service of others less fortunate. However, it wasn’t just simple altruism that moved these ladies, not that altruism is simple. Social justice was also on their menu. Echoing fellow NACWC member Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching rhetoric, Ridley writes: “In the interest of common humanity, in the interest of justice, for the good name of our country, we solemnly raise our voice against the horrible crimes of lynch law as practiced in the south, and we call upon Christians everywhere to do the same or be branded as sympathizers with murderers.”

Passionate about keeping black history alive and relevant, she co-founded the Society for the Collection of Negro Folklore and established the Society of the Descendants of Early New England Negroes. Ridley and her mother were also the primary coordinators of the First National Conference of Black Women’s Clubs. They held this convention in Boston’s Berkeley Hall where they created committees to discuss problems such as lynching, treatment of convicts, and segregation. They listened to speeches from the likes of Booker T. Washington and Wiliam Lloyd Garrison, Jr.

In 1923, Ridley’s iconic exhibit of “Negro Achievement and Abolition Memorials” at Boston Public Library was a testament to the importance of African American triumph and is to this day an important presentation of African American history not to be forgotten. Ridley’s home on Charles Steet is a stop on the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, and in 2020, Coolidge Corner School in Brookline, MA, was renamed the Florida Ruffin Ridley School in her honor. Happy Birthday to an unsung champion of black women in an era when black women were practically invisible to mainstream America.

Cookie today: “Boston Cookies” from Fannie Merritt Farmer published in the 1918 Boston Cooking School Cookbook. Picture from Wikipedia.

23/01/2024

January 23, 1849, was the day that Elizabeth Blackwell became the first female physician in the US having received her MD from Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York, --the first female to enter an American medical school. All the other medical schools rejected her, but at Geneva, the 150 male students actually voted to let her in As. A. Joke. Pretty funny, huh?

Blackwell was born in Bristol, England, to a family who emigrated to New York after a fire ended her father’s sugar refinery business. Blackwell’s home life was considered “liberal” because Mom and Dad encouraged intellectual development at all levels so that Blackwell and her six siblings could hold forth on issues of the day: women’s rights, slavery, child labor, institutional educational opportunities for women. They had a governess and a tutor.

However, a kink in the upbringing, at least to me, is the household discipline for the children when they erred in their ways. Instead of correcting the children at the time of their infraction, the parents made a list of the incidents. If there were too many, the trespasser was sent to the attic to eat dinner alone (or not eat) to contemplate his or her delinquency. The attic?

The family eventually moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Blackwell and two of her sisters opened an academy: The Cincinnati English and French Academy for Young Ladies. It didn’t really attract pupils. Perhaps Blackwell’s attraction to Transcendentalism didn’t sit well with Ohio parents. Blackwell hopscotched from one teaching gig to another, not really happy with any of them, especially her position in Kentucky. Her explanation? “Kind as the people were to me personally, the sense of justice was continually outraged; and at the end of the first term of engagement I resigned the situation.” She was referring to slavery, the hint of her reform activity to come.

Blackwell’s interest in medicine had been simmering for years. After boarding with a sequence of physicians while working her day jobs and witnessing the death of a friend that she thought would not have occurred had the woman had a female doctor, she realized that being a physician was what she aspired to—and she was going to capture that goal. She was resolute: “My mind is fully made up. I have not the slightest hesitation on the subject; the thorough study of medicine, I am quite resolved to go through with.”

Of course, most of her physician contacts suggested she either go to Paris or disguise herself as a man to achieve her med school goal. Reasoning was: Clunky girls are intellectually inferior to big-brained men or else the men were afraid she’d surpass them in the cerebral department and they didn’t want to take the chance. While at Geneva Medical School, she put her head down and worked hard. During the summer hiatus, she worked at the Blockley Almshouse in Philadelphia, where some of the young residents refused to assist her in diagnosing and treating patients…and yet she persisted. The experience was unparalleled, propelling her to write her graduating thesis on the horrors of typhus wherein she connected overall physical health with material and moral issues associated with socioeconomic status. A nod to her desire to bring social reform to the forefront. When she received her MD degree, the Dean of the college rose to his feet and bowed to her.

There is so much to know about Elizabeth Blackwell. She couldn’t really be called a sweetheart; she was habitually snarky to her family, her students, and her colleagues—look her up. However, she was definitely a Tough Cookie in the best sense of the term and deserved the many accolades bestowed on her during her 89-year life.

Cookie today: Bristol Easter Biscuits from Foodsofengland. Picture from Wikipedia.

15/01/2024

This one's for you, Becky Johnsen:

Dorothe Engelbretsdatter, born January 16, 1634, in Bergen, Norway, is considered not only Norway’s first known female author but also the country’s first feminist before feminism was a gleam in, well, almost anyone’s eye. Daughter of the Dean of Bergen Cathedral, Engelbretsdatter wrote hymns and religious poems. Her first volume, “Siaelens-Sang-Offer” (The Song-Sacrifice of the Soul), was published in 1678, in Copenhagen, Denmark, and continued to be reprinted 30 times in seven editions.

When she was invited to Denmark to be presented at court to be recognized for her poetry, she greeted Thomas Hansen Kingo, thought to be the “father of Danish poetry” with spontaneously invented couplets, to which he responded in the same way. Too cute by half, if you ask me. But King Christian V of Denmark-Norway must have been besotted by her because he granted her full tax freedom for life. Not too shabby.

Engelbretsdatter’s second published work, “Taare-Offer” (Tear Sacrifice”) (1685), which she dedicated to King Christian’s wife, Charlotte Amalie, is actually a defense of female creative authority. It shook up the received notion of a female’s lack of wit and intellect among the Norse and Danish males. According to writer/scholar Inger Vederhus, using the term “sacrifice” in religious poetry was a trope in Engelbretsdatter’s poetry that was acceptable when referring to the day-to-day life of women. She writes: “’The Taare-Offer’ cycle is about the weeping . . . Mary at the feet of Jesus, anointing Christ with the hair of her head. By concentrating on such feminine images, Engelbretsdatter created dignified, active women so that she herself might achieve authority as a poet and professional writer.” A strategy that was difficult to refute.

Indeed, Engelbretsdatter was attempting to produce poems that encouraged meditation and spiritual agency that during her lifetime was quite an aspirational leap for women. A woman was defined only in her relation to a man: wife, mother, sister, spinster, woman of ill repute. Referring to terms of submission, self-sacrifice, abnegation, forfeit of autonomy was her “way in,” so to speak.

All of the aforementioned concepts were thought to be natural attributes of women, anyway. Engelbretsdatter wanted to modify these general descriptors associated with women by using a woman’s connection to God as a co-equal child of God, and her plan was to do so while not veering too far away from what was considered by many as “women’s sphere.”

When many of Engelbretsdatter’s hymns and poems were set to contemporary melodies complete with sheet music, the verses became even more popular. However, even though she took great pains to use gender-identified tropes so as to make no mistake about the fact that a woman wrote the verses, many critics insisted that she could not possibly have written such works. Had to have been a man, probably her clergyman husband.

Some printers tried to cheat her out of her recompense by not including her name as author. Prominent Dano-Norwegian poets, nevertheless, regaled her as a perfect example of female intellectual endeavor and creative ownership: a “Muse on the Parnassus,” according to Vederhus.

Engelbretsdatter’s savvy publisher Christian Cassube predicted that the increase in popular reading skills would lead to more book sales—including hymn books of the type arranged by the writer. He smelled money, lots of it. However, he thought he could steamroll her into leaving her name off the titles because she was an eager-to-please female. Little did he know. She wrote to him: “It pains me to the marrow that my song offering I offered God, should be so shamed for the sake of insatiable people’s worldly profit.” Old Cassube was fined one hundred “rigsdaler” per “spurious” published copy, and Engelbretsdatter was granted a 10-year royal license to her own work. Better than nothing.

There is so much more to know about Dorothe Engelbretsdatter—worth your time to look her up. Good to know there were women who stood up for themselves in the 17th-century when it just wasn’t done. Did I tell you she was also raising nine children? Good on you, Dorothe Engelbretsdatter! Happy Birthday.

Cookie today: Serinakaker from bowlofdelicious. Picture from Wikipedia Common.

03/12/2023

Te Ata, born Mary Frances Thompson Fisher, was a Chickasaw actress best known for telling and performing Native American stories. Her career spanned over 60 years, mind you, as she curated hundreds of origin stories, legends, ceremonies, and rituals from a variety of tribes. Let’s keep her voice alive.

Her name, Te Ata, is actually of Māori origin, meaning “bearer of the morning.” Her father, Thomas Benjamin Thompson, was a Chickasaw, who initiated her early schooling in a one-room Tribal school in Oklahoma. After two years, she went to Bloomfield Academy, a Chickasaw boarding school for girls, then on to a Tishomingo, Oklahoma, high school, graduating as salutatorian. At Oklahoma College for Women (currently University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, abbreviated USAO), Ata worked in the theater department, and it was there that in her senior year she began performing what became her oeuvre. News about her riveting performances got around and before she knew it, other institutions were inviting her to grace their stage.

When Ata graduated, she was recruited to join a traveling Chautauqua circuit and later she continued to hone her talents at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, which prepared her to skip over to where the neon lights are bright where she was cast as Andromache in the play “The Trojan Women.” However, the love of her native culture drew her back into one-woman performances of the Tribal kind. Eleanor Roosevelt noticed an important cultural presence when she saw one and invited her to the Governor’s mansion while her husband was governor of New York to perform for state government big shots. Ata performed at Hyde Park for the Roosevelts and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England, too, and the Royals asked her to come on over to the UK to introduce them to Native American culture from one of the bests.

Over the years Ata met many illustrious people, including Jim Thorpe, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison. In 1924 she was featured in McCall’s magazine in the “Types of American Beauty” series. She was also named the Ladies’ Home Journal Woman of the year in 1987 and had a lake in New York named after her, of all things. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1957, and was appointed Oklahoma’s State Treasure in ’87. In 1990, she was invited into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame. Her performances are enshrined in a film, “God’s Drum.”

Judy Lee Oliva, a Chickasaw playwright, wrote an award-winning play entitled “Te Ata” that premiered at USAO in 2006, and was featured at the Smithsonian in 2012. The film “Hyde Park on Hudson” depicts Ata’s meeting with FDR and the British King and Queen. In 2014, the Chickasaw nation got involved in film making with “Te Ata,” based on Ata’s life, released in 2017. In 1972, she became the first inductee into the USA) Hall of fame, and in 2006 they renamed the auditorium in Trout Hall in her honor. There’s even a statue you of Te Ata on campus there. She passed away in Oklahoma City at 99.

So, Happy Birthday, December 3, 1895, to Native American icon Te Ata. We salute you and are grateful.

Cookie today: Chickasaw Pumpkin cookies from justapinch. Picture from Chickasaw Hall of Fame website.

27/11/2023

I agree. This one is too long. You may be excused.

It’s time we knew about F***y Kemble born on this day, November 27, 1809. Born Frances Anne, F***y was born into a theatah family, the eldest daughter of actor Charles Kemble, niece of actress Sarah Siddons. Her younger sister, Adelaide Kemble, was an opera singer. F***y made her mark as an actress, yes, but mostly as a spoken word performer, playwright, poet, reviewer, travel writer, and, memoirist. Oh, is that all?

She is especially well-known for the private journal she kept about the time she spent on her husband’s Sea Island plantation documenting the horrific conditions under which his enslaved workers lived. Unlike her husband, she became a fervid abolitionist, and there is where she and her husband experienced inevitable discord. But first, her elitist upbringing and early adult life.

Educated at a Paris boarding school so as to study art and music, F***y leaned toward the fine arts at Mrs. Lamb’s Academy on the Champs Elysees. She studied performance art. At 19 Kemble portrayed Juliet in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” at Covent Garden Theater and then went on to play several of Shakespeare’s ladies in his other plays. The audience loved her. In 1827, Kemble wrote her first 5-act play, “Francis the First.” The critics gave it high praise, saying that it was just as significant as that of any popular modern playwright. Mind you, she was a teenager.

When she set out on a two-year theatrical tour in the US with her father, she was rather surprised that male theater-goers were not only charmed by her acting. They were also besotted with her as an attractive woman and followed her from city to city. One of these men apparently rose above the others: Pierce Mease Butler, the son of a South Carolina Founding Father, no less, and very wealthy. He overwhelmed her with expensive gifts, and at first Kemble was just that: overwhelmed and not necessarily a good way. However, his persistence paid off because she married him and thus was able to keep her nuclear family’s precarious economic situation at bay.

Although the marriage seemed like a winner at first, it quickly disintegrated because Butler didn’t realize he had to stop sleeping with other women once they were married. One of these women was an enslaved worker at his Georgia plantation. Some people said they were actually living together, unbeknownst to Kemble, who stayed at their mansion in Philadelphia and did not accompany her husband to the plantations. Butler had inherited his grandfather’s cotton, to***co, and rice plantations as well as over 400 slaves who lived and worked on the eponymous Butler Island. What Kemble didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, I guess, so he philandered away. That is, until she visited the plantation and was shocked and appalled at what she saw there.

Kemble, an abolitionist, and Butler, a pro-slavery rich man, did not share the same opinion about the role of the institution of slavery in the south. Not at all. Nor did they agree about women’s place in society. Butler thought women should submit to their husbands. Kemble, a working woman with a public persona and a popular celebrity, no less, thought women deserved to be treated as equal human beings. No cock-a-doodie submission for her. Hubby didn’t like that.

During her year in Georgia, Kemble journaled about her experiences on Butler’s Sea Island plantation and the pitiable living conditions of slaves. Entitled “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39,” her published observations of the shockingly intolerable life of the slaves and her disgust at the behavior of the overseer, Roswell King, Jr., who was said to have fathered a number of slave children, eventually became a valuable first-hand description of at least one example of a plantation community in the South. (There is an academic controversy over the biased tone and nativistic racism imbued in Kemble’s journal as well as some possible inaccuracies therein, but that is a subject for another “essay.”)

Butler was outraged at Kemble’s expose’ and threatened to deny her access to their two daughters if she published the work. But she did anyway and had to pay the price of losing sole custody of her two daughters in the divorce that ensued. She was not reunited with them for any length of time until each of them turned 21—when they could make up their own mind about whether or not to see Mom.

Kemble continued writing and publishing worthy tomes, including a volume of plays, several memoirs, and a collection of personal annotations of some of Shakespeare’s plays. Interestingly, Kemble’s older daughter, Sarah, agreed with her anti-slavery Mom’s philosophy about enslaving people and was pro-Union in the antebellum era. Sarah’s son grew up to be a novelist. He wrote the well-known western “The Virginian” (1902).

Kemble’s second daughter, Frances, pro-South girl, agreed with Dad about the functionality of slavery. She attempted to manage her father’s plantation with free workers at one point, but the enterprise failed. She moved back to Philly and wrote a rebuttal to her mother’s journal entitled “Ten Years on a Georgian Plantation Since the War” (1883) that echoed Butler’s attitude about the value of slavery as an economic and paternal institution. When Butler returned to his Philadelphia home place during the war, he was arrested for treason temporarily. When he was released, he decided not return to the South until the war was over. Good plan.

F***y Kemble passed away in London in 1893, having been among the first fan-favorite celebs of the era—prefiguring, who, Taylor Swift maybe? Fun Fact: One of the most well-received depictions of Queen Victoria was painted by American Artist Thomas Sully, who thought Kemble resembled her, so he used her as his model for Victoria in his works. I’m going to have to check that out.

Cookie today: Taylor Swift’s Chai Tea Eggnog Cookies from Seventeen Magazine online. Picture from Wikipedia.

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