Women With Words

By Stovall

The women in this volume of the Heads and Tales series have a way with words. They are remarkable women, all with remarkable and sometimes extraordinary stories.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: First Inning Press
• Release date: Feb 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781087905112

Book preview

Introduction

The most visible thread that stitches the chapters in this book together is that all of the subjects are female. They are all journalists or writers, with one or two exceptions that we could, if so inclined, quibble about. Many of these women were prominent in their day but have been largely forgotten, and I suspect that you, the dear reader, have never heard of quite a few of them. I had not come across many of them until I started a weekly newsletter a few years ago that focused mostly on writers and literature.

And that’s another thread that ties them together. I found them to be, without exception, interesting characters. What they did was not only interesting and but important, and how they got into a position of doing that was also interesting — and sometimes fascinating and even unbelievable.

These women need at least the nod of recognition from those of us who consider ourselves literate and at least half well-read. Each has proved that she was adept at handling the language. Each had an audience for her work that was substantial and loyal. Unfortunately, too many of these women have been forgotten or obscured – or overshadowed by their male counterparts – and we no longer hear enough about them.

That is why this book has been put together. Most of the chapters in this book have appeared in my weekly newsletter or on my website, jprof.com. Because of my interest in drawing caricatures of almost anyone whom I write about, I have included caricatures of these women. My hope is that you will understand that I am not in any way demeaning these fine writers by depicting them in caricature form. Rather, the caricature is a way of honoring them and recognizing that the work they have done is equal both in artistic form and in importance to that of their male contemporaries.

The efforts to produce this volume have not been mine alone, although the responsibility for the accuracy of the information is solely with me. My friend Ed Caudill has always, and not always wisely, encouraged me in all my efforts and generously consented to writing the Forward for this book. My friends in the reference department of the Blount County Public Library seem to be on 24-hour duty. Tom Gillem, Jim Doncaster, and Bill Gathergood did yeoman work in their proofreading and together did their best to correct and clarify my wayward prose. My art group of Marty Komorny, Cathy Madden, Frank Story, and Chipper Edwards has been an unstinting source of support. This only begins the list of those who should be named. You know who you are. Thanks to you all.

Finally, let me pay homage to one of the best and shortest words in the English language: fun. This book has required a lot of hours, a lot of writing, and a lot of hard work. But the word I would use to sum up all that effort is fun.

There’s another three-letter word I would use for the emotion I feel when I look over the whole of this book: joy. The fact that these women existed, followed their calling, and left a record of their lives brings me an immense amount of joy.

So, fun and joy. I hope the reader of this book can experience both of these along with its humble author.

Jim Stovall

Maryville, Tennessee

Forward

Ed Caudill

Here is evidence of women’s accomplishments over the last few centuries based on the appearance, in a single volume, of both caricature and acclaim.  In order to mix those two things, one needs individuals whose accomplishments don’t wither before the good-natured lampoon or whose egos — or their defenders, given that most of them are dead — withstand the exaggerations inherent in the art.  Also, the figures themselves need to be strong ones.  In all the cases that appear here, we see Sisyphean effort on the subjects’ parts.  However, Sisyphus only had to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain.  These women took on the mountain itself, usually the entrenched, unyielding male-dominated social-political-economic order of the day.

The women here range from some grossly under-appreciated individuals, such as Mary Mapes Dodge and her huge impact on children’s literature, to better known ones, such as Ida Tarbell and Eleanor Roosevelt. Before reading this, I had no idea that it was Eleanor from whom the first words emanated from the White House about the attack on Pearl Harbor.  It was a nationwide radio address. Ida Tarbell, to remind all, was a critical cog in the trust-busting machine at the turn of the century as she took on the likes of John Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Not a job for a reticent soul.  And who has heard of Aphra Behn, and as though it were not enough that a woman of the mid-1600s made her own way by writing, but that her work would venture into the risqué?  Women did not do that sort of thing at the time.  She did. 

Some favorites of my twisted psyche: Everyone knows of Louisa May Alcott and Little Women, which she deemed moral pap, and admittedly wrote for the money.  It was kids’ stuff. In her other life she was the author of blood-and-thunder sensational novels, written of course under a pseudonym, A.M Barnard, probably because no respectable women would write such scandalous stuff.  But it was what she really wanted to do.  And she did, in books such as A Long Fatal Love Chase.  I’ve yet to read it, but the title is suggestive.

Speaking of audacity, it is news to many of us that the first female candidate for president was in 1872, Victoria Woodhull.  She and her sister had started a newspaper, and she made plenty of money on Wall Street. Real brass.

Between those first and last entries in this volume, persist, as these women would have, and you’ll find out about the mother of our modern detective genre.  We’ve all heard of Edgar Allen Poe as the father of the genre.  But Anna Katharine Green took the idea further with complex plots, bodies in unlikely places such as libraries, clues sprinkled about (think Arthur Conan Doyle, who came along about a decade later), and even a coroner’s inquest. Her 1878 novel, The Leavenworth Case, was a bestseller.  Any aficionado of such tales is indebted to her for, if nothing else, her impact of such writers such as Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Reinhart, and Dorothy Sayers.

It would be a poorer literary world without the contributions of the individuals in this volume, too often unacknowledged or anonymous.

The scope of effort involved in writing and assembling this volume, like many of its subjects, is easily under-appreciated.  Consider:

Where did he find this person to start with?  (I’m going to ask.) Not in all cases, but in a number of them.

Getting information on some of the near-forgotten individuals meant substantial digging, dredging up some arcane sources. The work that some of these women produced, because they are unknown, would be difficult to unearth.

When the basic information is assembled, consider digesting and summarizing it into readable passages.

And the appreciation of these women as individuals as reflected in the details of the caricatures.

It is not just the appreciation of work that appears here, but dedication to good writing and journalism.  We all know that it must be a great truth spoken by journalist Christopher Hitchen when he said, Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases, remain.  Here, that is clearly not the case.  These individuals had something to say, oftentimes in books, and to their credit and our gratitude, they said it. 

A few of the illustrious women here had to use male pseudonyms as they launched their writing careers, raising the inevitable question of how much historical female talent might remain entombed in male monikers?  Perhaps a job for another volume. 

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott lived a double-literary life

The world knew her as Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women and other widely popular and deeply-loved books that children have  read for generations. These she called moral pap and said she wrote them only for the money.

An extremely small circle of people knew her as A.M. Barnard, author of what she termed blood and thunder sensational novels, the kind she wanted to write for her entire writing career. She was ashamed of these novels and worked to keep her connection with them a secret.

That secret held for nearly 90 years after her death in 1888.

In the mid-1970s, while helping Madeleine Stern research a biography of Alcott, Leona Rostenberg discovered a large, unknown cache of papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard University that indicated Alcott had written works no one knew about. They included Behind a Mask and A Long Fatal Love Chase, novels that featured strong, independent women and lavish, involved plots. Behind a Mask was published in serial form in 1866, two years before Little Women.

These were the kind of novels that Jo, her fictional alter ego, wrote in Little Women.

The success of Little Women turned Alcott away from writing sensational novels, and she never acknowledged the authorship of these blood-and-thunder works. In fact, she destroyed many of the letters that tied her to these books and asked others