Emily Warren Roebling - The Woman Behind the Brooklyn Bridge

"Some people's beauty lies not in the features, but in the varied expression that the countenance will assume under the various emotions. She is...a most entertaining talker, which is a mighty good thing you know, I myself being so stupid." - Washington Roebling on his wife Emily, in a letter to his sister, 1865

 

I’ve always found the story of Emily Warren Roebling inspiring, because it’s a story of how a woman came into her own and learned what she was capable of through adversity.  It’s also a deeply moving love story. When Washington Roebling was unable to continue hands-on work as chief engineer, his wife Emily worked tirelessly to relay his wishes to the workers, and to keep the vision that father and son had worked long and hard to achieve.  This was during the late 19^th century, when the idea of a woman being able to understand complex mathematics or science, was unheard of.  Many men (and women) believed that women’s brains weren’t developed enough or that they were too weak. The idea that a woman could be even partly responsible for building one of the world’s marvels was just too ridiculous to contemplate.  Without Emily’s perseverance and faith, Washington Roebling might have been replaced, and the history of the Brooklyn Bridge would have turned out much differently.

Emily Warren was born on September 23, 1843 in Cold Spring, New York. She was the second youngest of a dozen children (only six of whom lived to adulthood) born to New York State assemblymen Sylvanus Warren and his wife Phebe. Although the family wasn’t wealthy, they were one of the most prominent families in Putnam County.  Her father Sylvanus had been a close personal friend of the writer Washington Irving. Even though he was fourteen years older than her, Emily was incredibly close to her eldest brother, Gouverneur Kemble Warren, (known to his family as GK) who would eventually become a general in the United States Army during the Civil War.  

 

GK had just returned to take up an appointment teaching as an assistant professor in Mathematics at West Point when their parents died. Her brother took a deep interest in his younger siblings including Emily.  He encouraged her interest in science, particularly botany. GK enrolled her in the Georgetown Visitation Convent in Washington D.C. to further advance his favorite younger sibling’s education. Emily studied a wide variety of subjects including history, geography, rhetoric and grammar, algebra, French, as well as housekeeping, tapestry, and piano. By the time of her graduation, Emily had grown into a tall, handsome young woman with dark hair and deep brown eyes, a graceful carriage, and a button nose. She was considered an exceptional horsewoman.

 

It was also through her brother GK that Emily met her destiny. Despite the war, she managed to convince her siblings to let her visit GK at his military camp in Virginia. In February of 1864, Emily met Colonel Washington Roebling at a military ball. The young man had been serving on her brother’s staff. It was love at first sight, at least on his part. Six weeks after they had met, he’d bought a diamond and after 11 months of constant correspondence, she and Roebling were married in January of 1865 in a double ceremony with her brother Edgar and his bride Cordelia. Washington’s father, John A. Roebling, was an engineer, responsible for building the wire rope suspension bridges across the Niagara River as well as across the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, PA.  Among his many achievements was the first company to make wire rope. Washington followed in his father’s footsteps, studying engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

After the war, Emily traveled with her husband to Cincinnati where he worked with his father on the Cincinnati-Covington Bridge (now the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge) and then to Europe on a mission to study the construction of pneumatic caissons.  While overseas, she gave birth to her first and only child, John A. Roebling II, on November 21, 1867. He was born in the same town where Washington Roebling's father had been born, Muhlhausen, Germany.  There would be no other children.  Emily suffered a bad fall before her son was born, and nearly died.

It was at this time that Washington’s father was undertaking his dream project, constructing a bridge that would connect Brooklyn to New York. It would be the longest bridge to date and cost millions of dollars. But the project seemed both impossible and cursed from the beginning (Twenty men would die over the fourteen years that it took to build the bridge). Three days into construction, one of John Roebling’s feet was badly crushed in a freak accident; he died in agony two weeks later of tetanus. As a result Washington took over the role of Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.  However in 1872n Washington suffered several attacks of decompression sickness or “the bends” while working in the caissons for the bridge piers, deep beneath the river’s surface.  Soon the illness became so debilitating that he was unable to go down to the building site to oversee the work.

His illness would leave him bedridden for the remainder of the bridge construction. Emily and Washington spent time abroad in Germany hoping to improve his condition. After six months they returned, but his condition was no better. He suffered from headaches, nervous exhaustion, his eyesight grew poor, and the only person he could stand to see was Emily. Returning to New York, the couple moved from their home in Trenton to a house in Brooklyn Heights, where Washington could see the building site from his bedroom window. About his illness Washington stated, “I thought I would succumb, but I had a strong tower to lean upon, my wife, a woman of infinite tact and wisest counsel.” Emily Warren Roebling would prove her husband’s praise to be true by undertaking multiple roles to ensure her husband would remain the Chief Engineer. Her first task was to convince the president of the New York Bridge Company, Henry C. Murphy, that Washington could continue his duties as Chief Engineer despite his illness. Fortunately he agreed.

With Washington confined to his sickroom in their Brooklyn Heights home and fearing he wouldn't live to finish the project, Emily began taking down copious notes on what he said remained to be done. She also began a crash course in engineering, learning everything she could about strength of materials, stress analysis, cable construction, and calculation of catenary curves. Over the next 11 years, Emily played pupil, secretary, and messenger throughout the remainder of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Every day without fail, she went to the site to convey her husband's instructions to the workers and to answer questions. She kept records, answered the mail, and represented her husband at social functions. When bridge officials or representatives for the various contractors called on the Roebling house, it was Emily who received them on her husband’s behalf. Despite the heavy burden, Emily never once complained or succumbed to the pressures that she faced.  She was his eyes, ears and legs and the more she did, the more people talked. Rumors abounded that Emily had actually taken over her husband’s job as Chief Engineer, that she was the real brains behind the bridge.

 

Emily Warren Roebling painted by Carolus Duran (Brooklyn Museum)

 

As David McCullough wrote in his book, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, "By and by it was common gossip that hers was the great mind behind the great work and that this, the most monumental engineering triumph of the age, was actually the doing of a woman, which as a general proposition was taken in some quarters to be both preposterous and calamitous. In truth, she had by then a thorough grasp of the engineering involved." As the project faced delays and cost increases, skepticism mounted that the bridge could be completed under Washington Roebling and it was proposed that he be removed as chief engineer. Emily Roebling wrote down her husband's statement, citing the reasons why he should not be replaced. She delivered it as an address before the American Society of Civil Engineers, becoming the first woman to address the group.

Due to her dedication to the construction of the bridge, Washington asked that Emily be the first one to cross the Brooklyn Bridge as a test. Carrying a rooster as a sign of victory, Emily rode in a carriage from the Brooklyn side of the bridge to the Manhattan side without incident.  The dedication and hard work put into the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge by Emily Warren Roebling was noted by Congressman Abram S. Hewitt at the dedication ceremonies prior to the opening of the bridge on May 24, 1883. Hewitt determined the Brooklyn Bridge to be, “An everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of woman” and stated “The name of Mrs. Emily Warren Roebling will thus be inseparably associated with all that is admirable in human nature.”  Today the Brooklyn Bridge holds a plaque dedicated to the memory of Emily, her husband and her father-in-law.

 

After the bridge was completed, Emily and Washington moved back to Trenton. She assumed a more traditional social life, joining the Daughters of the American Revolution, and other civic organizations. She traveled extensively, attending the coronation of Nicholas II in Russia, and was presented to Queen Victoria in London in 1896. She also served as both a nurse and construction foreman at Montauk, Long Island camp, established to house soldiers returning from the Spanish-American War. In her spare time, Emily managed to obtain a law degree from New York University’s Women’s Law class, enrolling in 1899. Unfortunately Emily didn’t have long to savor her triumph.  She became ill with stomach cancer, passing away on February 28, 1903 in the Roebling’s Trenton mansion.

Emily began her married life expecting to honor the traditional Victorian values that a woman’s greatest accomplishment was to be a wife and mother.  But when life gave Emily lemons, she made lemonade becoming the public face of the era’s most massive construction project In doing so, she helped to forge a new path for women on the road to equality. It was a role that she never dreamed of or planned for but she took up with courage and determination. 

Further Reading:

David McCullough, The Great Bridge:  The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, Simon & Schuster, 1983.
Antonia Petrash, More than Petticoats: Remarkable New York Women, Globe Pequot Press, 2001.
Marilyn Weigold, Silent Builder:  Emily Warren Roebling and the Brooklyn Bridge, Associated Faculty Press, 1984

A Dangerous Woman - The Life of Lady Deborah Moody

I know I have been neglecting this blog shamefully of late.  I apologize profusely.  I’ve been writing and sending out book proposals over the past couple of months, and also continuing my attempts to write fiction.  That has meant that I’ve been writing more book reviews and fewer posts about women.  Since March is women’s history month, I’ve decided to focus on some Noted and Notorious New York Women for your entertainment.  First up is Lady Deborah Moody, who I have long found fascinating, although there isn’t as much information on her as there is about some of her contemporaries such as Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dwyer or Elizabeth Winthrop.  She was the first woman to be granted a land patent in the colonies, founding one of the 6 original towns in Brooklyn, the only woman known to launch a settlement in Colonial America and the first woman to cast a vote in her adopted land.  She fought religious prejudice and braved native tribes at an age when most English women were happily in their dotage. She had to be tough as old boots and brave to leave England, her family, and everything she’d known to face an uncertain future.

 

Memorial for Lady Deborah Moody in Gravesend Cemetary, Brooklyn

Early colonial American history teems with women who bucked the status quo. Perhaps it is the very nature of picking up stakes and moving across the ocean to an unknown and foreign land that inspires women  to do and say things that they might not have done back in the old world. In some cases, such as Anne Hutchinson and Lady Deborah Moody, the New World just encouraged them to be even more open and ballsy they were back in England.

She was born Deborah Dunch in 1586 in London. Although Deborah’s father was a Member of Parliament, she spent most of her childhood on the family’s country estate in Wiltshire, along with her three sisters and her brother.  Deborah and her sisters were taught to read and write, along with the expected social graces of embroidery, music and dancing. In 1606, she married Henry Moody who was soon after knighted by King James. Now Lady Moody, she gave birth to two children; Henry (born in 1607) and Catherina (born in 1608). The couple soon climbed the social ladder at court when Henry was named Sheriff of Wiltshire and then made a baronet. Henry didn’t get to enjoy his success for long; he died in 1629 at the age of 47 after a brief illness. At the age of 43, Deborah was now a wealthy widow, with several large estates and manors.

Lady Moody's Triangle today, Gravesend, Brooklyn

 

During Deborah’s early years, the dominant religion was Protestant, Catholics had to worship in secret, and there many who were beginning to question the tenets of the Church of England, in particular the baptism of infants.  During the reign of Elizabeth I, she showed a considerable amount of tolerance towards other beliefs but her cousin and successor James I was of a different metal.  Believing wholeheartedly in the divine right of Kings, he had no tolerance for those he felt strayed from the one true path. That included Catholics, Puritans, Quakers and Anabaptists. Deborah believed as the Anabaptists did, that baptism was not for infants; that it was something only an older child should undertake once they were able to think for themselves. Although Deborah disagreed with many of the Church of England’s practices, she kept her feelings to herself to avoid persecution.

Lady Moody was not a young woman when she decided to leave England in 1639.  Charles I, who was even more autocratic than his father James I, had decreed that the nobility needed to stay on their estates and not come to London.  Instead of spending their money on frivolous things, they should plow their money back into their communities.  Deborah found this edict intolerable.  She enjoyed visiting her friends and family as well as learning about other faiths.  Her maternal grandfather, who was a Protestant bishop, had often spoken out about religious intolerance and Deborah believed quite strongly that people should worship as they pleased.  Deborah defied the edict that she leave London to return to her country estate.  This brought her to the attention of The Star Chamber, a court of criminal and civil jurisdiction. King Charles had given The Star Chamber far –reaching powers and its decisions were feared, the court stopped short only of handing out the death penalty when meting out punishment for offenses which could include perjury, libel and conspiracy.  Even jurors were subject to the Court, if they ruled decided against the Crown. When Deborah learned that the Star Chamber was investigating her activities, she decided that it was best for her to get the hell out of Dodge.

Deborah arrived in Boston in 1638.  She was warmly welcomed by the Governor of the Colony, John Winthrop.  Having a noble woman of Deborah’s stature was a coup for the colony and caused great excitement.  By 1641, Deborah had amassed considerable property in the colony, spending £1,100 to buy the estate of Sir John Humphrey who had decided to return to England.  The General Court also granted her 400 acres of land for a plantation near the town of Lynn, Massachusetts.  She bought a house in Salem and joined the local church.  But if Deborah thought she would find religious freedom in Salem, she was quickly disabused of that notion. The Puritans who had fled England to escape religious persecution were not inflicting the same punishment on the colony.  They believed that the strict religious laws helped to develop a strong state.  Punishments were meted out for card playing, dancing, and even public displays of affection.  Women could only wear certain styles of clothing, they were forbidden to cut their hair short or voice beliefs that were different from the clergy (which got Anne Hutchinson into trouble), and they were even forbidden to sing in church.

Even more horrifying to Deborah was the hypocrisy of the Puritans preaching about God’s love and then engaging in the slave trade.  The elders of the church in Salem insisted that she give up her Anabaptist leanings.  Instead Deborah decided to that it was time to leave Salem and go elsewhere.  When she left the colony, she didn’t go alone.  Several families decided to go with her.  Knowing that Holland had offered dissenters like the Puritans refuge, Deborah thought that the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam might be the answer.  The small group decided to take their chances at sea rather than risk the possibility of encountering hostile Indian tribes if they traveled by land. Immediately upon their arrival, they were forced to seek the protection of the local fort against a band of marauding Mohican Indians.

Deborah was tired of fighting and began to wonder if she had made a mistake.  She was now 57 years old.  But there was no turning back.   She’d been excommunicated by the Salem church and the Governor’s deputy John Endecott discouraged the community’s reacceptance of her, unless she repented.  “I shall desire that she may not have advice to return to this jurisdiction, unless she will acknowledge her evil in opposing the churches, and leave her opinions behind her, for she is a dangerous woman.”  Deborah just had to make the best of it.  The group petitioned the Governor Kieft of New Amsterdam for permission to start their own community were they could make their own laws.  In 1645, they were granted a patent for a tract of land on the southwest corner of Long Island to be called Gravesend. Gravesend was a planned community based on Kent, England, one of the earliest in the New World to employ a block grid system.  The outlines of Gravesend’s block formation are still faintly visible in the outline of the streets.

The 16 square acre tract of land was divided into 4 squares, 10 houses on each lot for a total of forty houses in all. A public plain was designated in the center of town for grazing, and to keep the town safe, a palisade fence surrounded it.  Eventually a school and a church would be built.  Town meetings were held and all settlers were required to attend. Homesteaders were required to build a habitable house, and to help maintain the wall that surround and protected the settlement. The group was allowed to govern themselves and to worship God freely in the privacy of their own homes as they chose.  The town eventually opened its doors to the Quakers, who fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, ultimately becoming the center for the Quaker religion on Long Island.

By the time Deborah passed away in 1659, the small town of Gravesend was thriving.  She founded the town hall government, started a school, and eventually established a church.  She also amassed one of the first libraries in the colonies, with over 200 volumes, which she eagerly loaned out. Buried in the cemetery at Gravesend, she could rest in peace knowing that the town’s policy of religious freedom set it apart from most colonial settlements.

Further Reading: 

Antonia Petrash, More than Petticoats - Remarkable New York Women. Guildford, CT, The Globe Pequot Press, 2002

Victor H. Cooper, A Dangerous Woman: New York's First Lady Liberty. Bowie, MD; Heritage Books, 1995

Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them

Title:   Swoon:  Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them

Author:  Betsy Prioleau

Publisher:  W.W. Norton and Company

Pub Date:  February 4, 2012

How Acquired:   Through the publisher for TLC Book Tours

What it’s About:   Swoon is a glittering pageant of charismatic ladies’ men from Casanova to Lord Byron to Camus to Ashton Kutcher. It challenges every preconceived idea about great lovers and answers one of history’s most vexing questions: what do women want?

Contrary to popular myth and dogma, the men who consistently beguile women belie the familiar stereotypes: satanic rake, alpha stud, slick player, Mr. Nice, or big-money mogul. As Betsy Prioleau, author of Seductress, points out in this surprising, insightful study, legendary ladies’ men are a different, complex species altogether, often without looks or money. They fit no known template and possess a cache of powerful erotic secrets.

While these men run the gamut, they radiate joie de vivre, intensity, and sex appeal; above all, they adore women. They listen, praise, amuse, and delight, and they know their way around the bedroom. And they’ve finessed the hardest part: locking in and revving desire. Women never tire of these fascinators and often, like Casanova’s conquests, remain besotted for life.

Finally, Prioleau takes stock of the contemporary culture and asks: where are the Casanovas of today?

My thoughts:  I had read and enjoyed Betsy Prioleau’s previous book Seductress immensely. Funnily enough, I had also bumped into her one day in the romance section of Posman Books here in New York City as she was doing her research for the book. So when Lisa at TLC Book Tours emailed me about reviewing the book, I leapt at the chance.

First of all, the cover is absolutely gorgeous.  The jacket painting is entitled the Storytellers of the Decameron by Boccaccio by Francesco Podesti.  I have never seen this painting before, but I love the fact that it seems to embody the title of Swoon.  Swoon is a fun, frothy look at the myth and reality of lady killers or Casanova’s from the dawn of time to the 21^st century.  She discovers that these men, far from being heartless seducers, love, respect and even admire women.  They take pride in being able to give a women not just pleasure but fun.  They are not only great conversationalists, but they actually listen to women and what they want, they are people pleasers.

While I devoured the book in one sitting, the book can also be read a little bit at a time, dipping into each section like dipping into a box of particularly good chocolates accompanied by a bottle of expensive wine.  The book is divided into mini-sections with titles such as ‘The Satanic Seducer,’ ‘The Real Alpha Male,’ and ‘Social IQ’ just to name a few.  Prioleau provides examples of as they pertain to each section. Some of the men fit into more than one category such as Casanova or Gabriele D’Annunzio. Prioleau provides bite-size nuggets of information about each man which left this reader wanting more.  She mentions that one of Napoleon’s sisters was the lover of Metternich but doesn’t mention which one (Pauline, Caroline, Elise?).

Prioleau gives details of not just historical lovers but also how figures of both Western and Eastern mythology.  By far my favorite parts of the book, however, are her interviews with contemporary lady killers, none of whom are rich or particularly handsome.  In fact, for the most part, the historical and contemporary figures she profiles would never make People Magazine’s Sexy Man Alive issue.  Men like Jean Paul Sartre who was not quite five feet tall and blind in one eye, or Robert Louis Stevenson who suffered from tuberculosis.  It’s interesting that a large number of the men profiled in the book were raised and pampered by women. Perhaps that early exposure to the feminine world helped to shape their perceptions that women weren’t the enemy, or inferior creatures but should be cherished and adored. Above all, most of the men profiled in the book took the time to be friends with the women they loved and seduced, which is probably why so many of these men had great relationships with their ex-lovers after the relationship ended.  The art of how to end a relationship successfully could be a whole other book.

Prioleau points out that the contemporary man seems to have gotten the wrong idea of how to go about being a ladies man.  They are inundated with images in men’s magazines from Maxim to Playboy that sexualize women as objects of desire but not as real women.  They are also mis-educated in romance by their friends and popular books by pick-up-artists who are all about the conquest which is just the starting off point if one wants to be a ladies man.  Another interesting fact that Prioleau points out is that a great number of great seducers had a strong feminine side or an androgynous side.  Just look at Scott Disick, the boyfriend of Kourtney Kardashian.  That’s a man who isn’t afraid to rock pastel colors or to spend a great deal of time on his appearance.

I found the men who were left out of the book to be particularly interesting, in particular men such as Rasputin, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, HG Wells, Henry Fuseli, Henri IV, Louis XIV and Louis XV of France.  Even Emo boy Shelley doesn’t make the cut. I was however disturbed by Prioleau describing romantic fiction strictly as fantasy or ‘fantasyland’ as she calls it.  Yes, there is an element of fantasy in romance but that sells the whole genre short.  She seems to have read only a handful of romances by a few bestselling authors such as Mary Jo Putney, Jennifer Crusie, Nora Roberts, Susan Elizabeth Phillips and Lisa Kleypas. She states in a Q&A that romance novels reflect women’s fondest erotic dreams.  I think these books reflect women’s fondest desires of the type of relationship that they are seeking, not just sex.

In the end, this is a book that the men of the world desperately need to read, if they want to learn what it is that women really want from a man in a relationship.  Whether or not they do is another story.

Pain, Parties and Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953

Title:  Pain, Parties and Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953

Author:   Elizabeth Winder

Publisher:  Harper Collins

Pub Date:  April 16, 2013

How acquired:  Through the Publisher

What it’s about:  In May of 1953, a twenty year-old Plath arrived in New York City, the guest editor of Mademoiselle’s annual College Issue. She lived at the Barbizon Hotel, attended the ballet, went to a Yankee game, and danced at the West Side Tennis Club. She was supposed to be having the time of her life. But what would follow was, in Plath’s words, twenty-six days of pain, parties, and work that ultimately changed the course of her life.

Thoughtful and illuminating, featuring line drawings and black-and-white photographs, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 offers well-researched insights as it introduces us to Sylvia Plath—before she became one of the greatest and most influential poets of the twentieth century.

My thoughts:  Like most teenage girls, I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar when I was in high school.  It was a rite of passage, the female equivalent of reading The Catcher in the Rye.  I remember identifying with Plath’s protagonist Esther, as I’m sure most girls my age did back then.  I’ve been fascinated with Sylvia Plath since then, less so her poetry than who she was as a person and her tumultuous marriage to Ted Hughes. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s a Scorpio (I swear one day I’m going to write a book and the only theme is going to be that all the women are Scorpios!).
2013 is not only the 50^th anniversary of the publication of The Bell Jar but also the 50^th anniversary of Plath’s death (February 11, 1963).  To mark the occasion, several new biographies have been published about the short life of the poet, including Pain, Parties and Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953.  While the other biographies deal with Sylvia’s early life before she met Ted Hughes (Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and LifeBefore Ted), as well as the scope of her life and career (American Isis: The Life and of Sylvia Plath), Pain, Parties and Work specifically deals with the summer of 1953 when Sylvia won a coveted guest editorship at Mademoiselle Magazine. Her experiences that summer inspired her only novel.  Back in the 1950’s, winning a guest editorship of the annual College issue was a dream come true for many girls.  For many it was their first experience of life in a big city. Nowadays, internships are commonplace, a necessary rite of passage if you hope to land a job after college but back then internships for something much more extraordinary.

The book is as much a cultural history of young women in the 1950’s as it is a biography of Plath.  The book is filled with insights from Plath’s co-guest editors, who ranged from the ages of 18 to 21 during that summer. 

When Plath arrived in New York, she had spent two years at Smith College where she was torn between writing and becoming an artist.  Winder includes one of Plath’s sketches from her notebooks that indicate that Plath had a certain amount of talent as an artist.  However, Plath had also begun to make a name for herself as a writer, she’d won Mademoiselle’s fiction prize (yes, once upon a time magazines like Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle  & Harper’s Bazaar published fiction as well as articles!), and had her poems published in Seventeen.  Because of her talent as a writer, Plath was assigned to work with the managing editor which may not have been a good fit for her.  Plath loved fashion, spending a great deal of time and money putting together her career girl wardrobe for her time in New York.

That was one of the joys of reading this book, realizing that Sylvia Plath was not always this depressed, haggard woman trapped in a marriage gone bad.  That once upon a time, she’d been a vibrant, fashion loving, foodie whose favorite past-times including baking in the hot sun, enjoying the simple pleasures of living near Cape Cod.  Where the book falls short is giving an explanation for what caused Sylvia’s breakdown when she returned from New York and how her time in New York may have contributed to it.  Winder writes about how Sylvia was a perfectionist, and how unhappy she might have been stuck working solely with the managing editor, that they perhaps worked her to hard, and that the magazine may not have really made the best use of her talents. 

Winder points out that Sylvia was restless, that she was seeking something from her New York experience that she wasn’t getting, the men weren’t sophisticated enough or worldly enough.  Perhaps her expectations had been too high. Winder does mention that the magazine had the guest editors’ handwriting analyzed and Sylvia’s handwriting indicated that she was close to a nervous breakdown. The book also suggests that Sylvia also chafed under the expectations of young women of her era, that their sole ambition should to be wives and mothers.

What the book does extremely well is give the reader an idea of what it must have been like to be a young woman in college in those post-war years,  torn between their ambitions and what society expected of them, finding a husband and settling down to have children, putting those ambitions aside.  The reader also gets a small glimpse into not only the magazine world but the mixed signals that magazines such as Mademoiselle and Glamour gave young women.  I would have liked to have learned more about the history of Mademoiselle, for instance I had been under the impression that Conde Nast always owned the magazine.  I had no idea that they only bought it in 1959.  I find the whole history of women’s fashion magazines fascinating.  I had no idea either that there had been something called Charmed. 

Winder briefly in the epilogue details the reactions of the other women to The Bell Jar when it was finally published in the United States in 1971.  Many of the women felt betrayed by their portraits in the book, and none of them had any idea that Sylvia had been going through any kind of emotional turmoil, she hid it so well.

Verdict:  A wonderful snapshot of a turning point in the life of one of America's most intriguing female poets but lacking in depth and analysis.

Presidential Scandals: The Affairs of Warren G. Harding

“It’s a good thing I’m not a woman. I would always be pregnant. I can’t say no,” President Warren G. Harding speaking to a group of reporters at a private party at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

I’m a little obsessed with the TV show Scandal on ABC, a captivating saga of illicit relationships, unchecked power, and shocking political intrigue in the administration of President Fitzgerald Grant. Grant had been having an illicit affair with Olivia Pope who not only worked on his campaign but also in the White House as his press secretary. Now she’s a crisis management consultant whose job frequently involves the White House. Grant is married to Mellie, the ice-queen who would stop at nothing, even faking a miscarriage to get her husband elected. And then there is Cyrus, the Machiavellian chief of Staff who also happens to be gay, and Hollis Doyle, the Texas oilman who has a stake in the Grant Presidency. Oh, and did I mention that Fitzgerald Grant is a Republican? Although the show is of course fictional, looking back at past occupants of the White House, it’s clear that Shonda Rhimes has a lot of material to work with.

It wouldn’t be President’s Day without talking about one of the most Scandalous Presidents in U.S. History. No, I’m not talking about JFK or Bill Clinton. I’m not even talking about LBJ or Richard Nixon. No the vote for most Scandalous President in more than two hundred years goes to another Republican Warren Gamaliel Harding, our 29^th President. The Rodney Dangerfield of politics, he can’t get no respect. Poor Warren was only President for twenty-nine months before dying mysteriously on a trip out West (it was rumored that his wife Florence had poisoned him because of his adulteries). Like another reviled public figure, Marie Antoinette, he was also born on November 2 in 1865. In 2010 He was ranked #2 on a list of the 10 worst Presidents in US History in US News and World Report but at the time of his death, it was a different story.

He was the poor boy who made good; a self-made newspaper publisher from America’s heartland, one of 8 U.S. Presidents from Ohio. He was not only the first incumbent United States Senator to be elected President but also the first newspaper publisher. It was Harding who first coined the phrase “Founding Fathers” including it in his keynote speech to the 1916 Republican convention. Harding won the Presidency by promising Americans a ‘return to normalcy’ after World War I. His affable manner as well as his conservatism made him the compromise choice at the 1920 convention. He just looked presidential. In the election that year he won the popular vote by a whopping 60%. Everything seemed to be coming up roses for Harding. African-Americans loved him because he openly advocated African-American political, education, and economic equality, especially in the South, and sponsored an anti-lynching bill. Women loved him because he supported their right to the vote, improved health care for mothers, and he enacted the first child welfare program. The country’s unemployment rate dropped in half during his administration. When he died, millions lined the tracks to pay their respects as the funeral train moved through the small towns and cities on its way to Washington. It was the first such procession since Lincoln died.

After his death, the floodgates opened, and all sorts of nasty goings on came out in the press. Anyone remember learning about the Teapot Dome Scandal in school? That was just the tip of the iceberg. Like most incoming presidents, he rewarded friends and political allies with powerful positions in the government but Harding’s friends turned out to be a bunch of crooks for the most part. There were scandals involving the Justice Department, the Veterans bureau, the shipping department and the Prohibition bureau (Harding served liquor in the White House to guests despite Prohibition). “I have no trouble with my enemies,” Harding once said. It was his friends who “keep me walking the floor nights.” There was a rumor that not only was he part African-American, but also that he was a member of the Klu Klux Klan.

And then there were the scandals of a more intimate nature. It appears that long before JFK was sneaking women into the White House behind Jackie’s back; good ole Warren was having an illicit affair with not only a young campaign volunteer but there were other women as well. Two of the women were personal friends of his wife Florence, and the campaign volunteer was a young woman named Nan Britton who developed a big honking crush on the President when he was still a mere congressman and was determined to make him hers.

Like JFK and Lyndon Johnson, Harding was an unrestrained womanizer. The ladies thought him virile and handsome, plus he photographed well. “I cannot hope to be one of the great Presidents, “ he once said, “but perhaps I may be remembered as one of the best loved.” From Ohio, Harding had been a small-town newspaper publisher, two term state senator and lieutenant Governor, before he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Although he considered himself to be uniquely unsuited for the job of President, he had actually had more experience in government than Obama and George W. Bush combined. However, he looked presidential, and that was good enough back in the 1920’s. Like Mellie on Scandal, his wife Florence, known as the Duchess, was the power behind the throne. Five years older than her husband, Florence married Harding against her wealthy father Amos Kling’s wishes. Her first husband had been the ne’er do well son of a wealthy family. As far as Kling was concerned, Harding was cut from the same cloth. But Florence saw a diamond in the rough and was determined to polish him up. Their marriage was a solid business partnership, not a love match. She brought drive and money to the table, and Warren brought her political opportunity.

Harding first cheated on Florence three years into the marriage with Susie Hodder, his wife’s best friend since childhood. Then he began a 15 year affair with another friend of the couple Carrie Fulton Phillips. Carrie was blonde and beautiful with the figure of a Gibson girl, tiny waist and a generous bosom. To make it even more complicated, Harding and Carrie’s husband were good friends. The affair started in 1905, a year after Carrie and her husband James lost their young son. James had a nervous breakdown and spent time at Dr. Kellogg’s sanitarium in Battle Creek. While he was a way, the grieving wife was comforted by Harding. Despite their respective marriages, Harding and Carrie found ample time for their trysts. They would sneak away when the two couples took joint vacations to Europe. Once they even managed to meet up in Montreal for New Year’s Eve.

Most historians consider Carrie to be the love of his life. More than 100 intimate letters were discovered in the 1960’s but publication of the letters has been enjoined by a court order until 2014. Historians who have seen them say that they are very touching in some ways and also very erotic. The relationship foundered when Carrie developed a passion for all things German, moving to Berlin in 1911, where she may or may not have become a spy for Germany during World War I. At the very least she was outspokenly pro-German. When Harding supported President Wilson’s aggressive response to the sinking of the Lusitania, Carrie was pissed. She threatened to reveal their affair if he voted for war with Germany, but she didn’t go through with her threat. Harding warned Carrie that if she kept it up she faced arrest. Still Carrie was such critic that the Bureau of Investigation put her under surveillance. The Bureau got wind of Harding’s affair but kept silent.

After fifteen years, Carrie was tired of being Harding’s mistress, she wanted to be his wife. Unlike President Grant on SCANDAL who was eager to divorce his wife despite the damage to his political career, Harding was not. While he had no passion for his wife, he did for politics. Carrie had had enough. During the presidential election of 1920, Carrie blackmailed Harding ending up with lump-sum of $25,000 and $2,000 a month for as long as Harding was in politics. She and her husband were also sent on an all expense paid trip to the Far East courtesy of the Republican party until the election was over.

There were minor flings with Augusta Cole, whom Harding impregnated and then forced to have an abortion; Rosa Hoyle, who gave birth to Harding's illegitimate son; a distraught New York woman who committed suicide when Harding refused to leave his wife. There is also some evidence that Harding may have been responsible for the accidental death of prostitute at one of the many wild parties he hosted. Apparently Hardings cronies had a secret bank account to buy the silence of his ex-flames.

His third mistress Grace Cross had been one of Harding's secretaries during his senate years, and received a substantial blackmail payment for the return of incredibly sappy and juvenile love letters Harding wrote her. But it was his fourth mistress who was the most infamous, a beautiful blonde named Nan Britton. Britton was a campaign volunteer began sleeping with Harding when she was 20 and he was 51. While other girls pasted photos of movie stars on their walls, Nan plastered his campaign photos on her bedroom walls. Harding and her father were friends, and he knew of her infatuation but pooh-poohed it at the time, insisting that she would meet someone her own age.

Harding helped her get a job in the newspaper business, and they began an affair that would last for six years. Nan allegedly lost her virginity to Harding in an New York hotel room but not before driving him into a frenzy of desire by coyly refusing to sleep with him. She followed him to Washington when he became a U.S. Senator, allegedly giving birth to a daughter named Elizabeth Ann in 1919 (concieved during a tryst in the Senate Office building). When Nan told Harding she was pregnant, he offered to pay for an abortion. Nan refused, moving to Chicago with the baby to live with her sister. She saw him secretly during the Republican convention, apparently he spent more time with Nan then he did attending to the business of the nomination.The affair continued even after Harding was in the White House, aided by two Secret Service Agents James Sloan and Walter Ferguson. According to Nan, Florence almost caught them in mid-tryst in one of the cloakrooms in the Oval Office after being tipped off by another agent.

After Harding’s death, Britton tried to get the Harding family to continue financial support for Elizabeth. While Harding was alive, he sent Nan money, $150 per week. Now Nan wanted part of Harding's estate, estimated at a half a million dollars. When no money was forthcoming, she wrote what many consider the first presidential kiss and tell book entitled The President’s Daughter. The book was so salacious, filled with titillating tidbits including a tryst in an Oval Office closet, that it was suppressed as obscene. Britton spent years arguing that her daughter was Harding’s heir before finally giving up. She busied herself with the Elizabeth Ann Guild, a foundation that provided legal aid for unwed mothers.

Some historians believe that Nan Britton's story of her affair with Harding was nothing but fiction.  There is no hard evidence one way or the other, no surving love letters.  Both Harding’s relatives and Elizabeth Ann’s descendents refuse to take a DNA test to prove conclusively one way or the other that Harding was her father.

It seems ironic that there was one ambition that Harding almost achieved. "I cannot hope to be one of the great Presidents, " he said, "but perhaps I may be remembered as one of the best loved."
For further reading:

James David Robenalt, The Harding Affair, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach, PhD, One National Under Sex, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
Michael Farquhar, A Treasury of Great American Scandals: Tantalizing True Tales of Historic Misbehavior by the Founding Fathers and Others Who Let Freedom Swing, Perigee, 2003

Scandalous Romance: Crazy/Love - The Story of Burt and Linda Pugach

Happy Valentine's Day!  I wrote this blog post way back in 2007, when the documentary Crazy/Love came out. It was one of the most outrageous stories of love gone wrong, that if I read it in a novel, I wouldn't have believed it.  Linda Pugach recently passed away this January at the age of 75. If you get the chance, I urge you to seek out Crazy/Love on Netflix.

Everyone knows about Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuco. They had an affair while she was underage, he broke up with her, she shot his wife. Now allegedly they're back together. Well, meet the 1950's equivalent. Instead of Amy Fisher, we have Burt Pugach, the man from whom 1-800-Shyster could have been invented. Burt, not very good-looking, but apparently smart and charismatic works as an ambulance chaser in the Bronx. He's also a film producer, and owns a night club. He spies Lnda Riss, a sheltered dark haired beauty said to look like Elizabeth Taylor, on a park bench and decides than and there that he has to have her.

Linda comes from a broken home, with a mother who had to work to support them since her father apparently abandoned them with no support. So Linda like most girls of that era is looking for a husband who would be a good provider. So despite not finding Burt attractive, she goes out with him.

He puts on the full court press, taking her to work, picking her up at lunch, taking her out to dinner. You have to wonder when he found time to chase any ambulances. He's madly, passionately in love with her. She's impressed by the people he knows, his fancy car, airplane, and the night clubs that he takes her too.

Then she finds out he's married, and refuses to see him. He tells her he'll get a divorce but stalls. This goes on for two years while he is disbarred, and starts drinking heavily, imaging that she cheating on him. She refuses to give up the goods without a ring. He fakes a divorce. The upshot is, she finds out what a lying jerk he is, and dumps him, getting engaged to another man. Burt flips out and hires three guys to disfigure her by throwing lye in her face. She ends up virtually blind from the attack. Later on, she loses her sight completely.
 

Now things get screwy. I won't go into too much detail, but you have to see this movie to believe it. Burt goes to jail, although he feels he doesn't deserve too, after all, he didn't actually cause the attack. He claims that he just told the men that he hired to rough her up a bit. Linda testified at his trial that he told her "If I can't have you, no one else will, and when I get finished with  you, no one else will want you."  Once during the trial, Burt took out one of the lenses from his glasses and tried to slash his wrists crying, "Linda, I need you.  Linda, I love you.  Linda, I want you.'

He was declared insane three seperate times, only to have the decisions reversed at this behest.  Eventually he's sentenced to 15 to 30 years.  While in prison, he writes her constantly, promising to get her a seeing eye dog. Meanwhile her world shrinks to the point of loneliness, and she faces a future of clipping coupons and cats. He gets out of prison, and manages to convince her to marry him. Now when I first heard about this story, I couldn't believe it. Then I saw Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuco smooching for the cameras. So I thought, stop judging these people and see the film for yourself. So I went to a free screening last night, and I'm glad I did. Whatever draws Burt and Linda together, it seems to work for them.

The one moment that was telling for me was when Linda admitted that Burt sees her the way that she used to be, not as this disfigured woman. Of course, one can argue that the reason she's disfigured at all is because of him. But time seems to have stopped for both of them in 1959 when this all happened. Call it guilt or what have you, but strangely it works for them. You could call it redemption or revenge on her part. The director of the film mentioned in an interview that Linda always wore her dark glasses and never took them off once the entire time they were filming.  Apparently she dated a man in the 1960's, and she showed him what she looked like without the glasses and he recoiled at her scars. Burt not only knew her when she was beautiful, but in his eyes, she's still that woman.

I personally think that she married him because she felt that he owed her because of what he did to her, so taking care of her for the rest of her life was his punishment.  For him, I think it's the fact that she's elusive, she's there but she's not there. He seems to have her on some kind of pedestal. The ultimate dream girl for a not very good looking guy from the Bronx. A prize. The whole Madonna whore syndrome. The movie is also a cautionary tale about what happens when mistake love and obsession, and you opt for economic and material in a relationship. 

February Book of the Month – The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paul Byrne

Title:  The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

Author:  Paula Byrne

Publisher:   Harper Collins

Publication Date:  1/29/2013

How Acquired:  Through the Publisher

What it’s about:  I came to Jane Austen relatively late in life it feels.  I didn’t read Pride and Prejudice until my senior year of high school.  As a moody teenager, I reveled in the gothic novels of Emily and Charlotte Bronte.  It was actually the film version of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson that got me interested in reading the book.  I found the movie so delicious and fun that I had to read the book.  Since then I’ve read Northanger Abbey, Emma and Persuasion and I’ve seen almost every single adaptation of all the books.  I’ve even read several biographies but I’ve never really felt as if I knew who Jane was.  She certainly wasn’t the character played by Anne Hathaway in BECOMING JANE that much is for sure.

The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things offers a startlingly original look at the Jane through the key moments, scenes, and objects in her life and work.  Instead of a chronological ‘then she did this, and then she did that,’ birth to death biography, each chapter starts off examining a particular object; the topaz crosses that her brother Charles bought her and her sister Cassandra, marriage bans, her first royalty check, an Indian shawl.  Byrne uses these items to explore the lives of Austen’s extended family, friends, and acquaintances. Through their absorbing stories, we view Austen on a much wider stage and discover unexpected aspects of her life and character. We learn fascinating stories about Jane Austen’s paternal aunt Philadelphia Hancock and her extraordinary journey to India to find a husband.  Then there is Jane’s maternal aunt Mrs. Leigh-Perrot and her sticky fingers which led to jail time as she awaited her trial.   Byrne also uses the objects to examine how Jane used the things that she learned, the gossip, navy life to inform and enrich her writing.  The reader learns that Jane Austen was actually fairly well-traveled for her time, traveling back and forth from Bath to Steventon, the seaside villages of Lyme, naval ports such as Portsmouth and Southampton and many trips to London where she had the occasion to see actors such as Edmund Kean and Sarah Siddons grace the stage.

What Byrne does is so fantastic, that I’m amazed that other writes don’t tackle their subjects this way.  It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion, as each layer is removed, more and more of the real person is revealed. My favorite chapters were actually the ones that dealt with characters and situations from Mansfield Park which is funny because it's actually my least favorite of her novels. However, Byrne's chapter in particular on the Earl of Mansfield and his great niece Dido Elizabeth Belle is so fascinating.  In each chapter, I met a new and fascinating person.  I think I spent almost as much time looking up people like the poet William Cowper as I did reading the book.

The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things introduces us to a woman who was much worldlier than she has previously been portrayed. Jane was far ahead of her time in not just her independence and ambition but also in her opinions. Byrne also examines how later generations of biographers and family members created the image of the genteel, unworldly spinister, and hid the tougher, more biting, woman who was both politically and socially aware of what was going on in the outside world.  Austen may have focused her fiction on four or five families living in the country, but those characters all interact with others who come from the outside world.  Byrne points out how ballsy it was for Jane to want to be published.  Although there were women authors like Mrs. Radcliffe, Fanny Burney (a particular favorite of Austen's), and Maria Edgeworth, Jane's novels fell into a category all by themselves, altogether quieter but much more realistic. By the time I put the book down, I felt as if Jane Austen had become a dear and treasured friend.

My verdict:  I strongly encourage everyone to buy this book, even if you’ve read other Austen biographies.  You will walk away from this book looking at not just Jane Austen but the novels with fresh eyes.