Now Let Us Praise Famous Women

I have collected many photographs of people who live in Appalachia, and one day as I was looking through them, I was struck by how beautiful some of the older women were--the grandmothers. Here is a selection of photographs of such women. I would love to sit down on their porch and hear some of their stories. I know they have stories that tell of a world different from the one I grew up in and have lived in. As you can see, their bodies are lean from a lifetime of hard work without amenities and less than enough food.

I am interspersing the photographs with excerpts about an Appalachian grandmother from the novel River of Earth (1940) by Kentucky's poet laureate James Still (1906-2001), who lived most of his life in a log house on a creek in coal-producing Knott County, Kentucky. This is a beautiful novel that chronicles how coal mining lured men away from homesteading and into the mines. The story, as told by the son of a farmer turned miner, is remarkable for its detailing of all kinds of plants, planting, and seasons.

Mrs. Frank Henderson, taken by Doris Ulmann.

One morning Grandma said we could wait no longer for Uncle Luce. She took her grapevine walking stick and we went into the cornfield. We worked two days pulling corn from the small hoe-tended stalks. When all the runty ears were gathered, she measured them into pokes, pulling her bonnet down over her face to hide the rheumatic pain. There were sixteen bushels. 'We won't be needing the barn this time,' she said. 'We'll just sack the puny nubbins and put them in the shedroom.'
With the corn in, we waited a few days until Grandma's rheumatism had been doctored with herbs and bitter cherry-bark tea. Then there were the heavy-leaved cabbages, the cashews and sweet potatoes to be gathered. The potatoes had grown large that year. They were fat and big as squashes. Grandma crawled along the rows on her knees, digging in the baked earth with her hands. It was good to see such fine potatoes. 'When Jolly comes home he'll shore eat a bellyful,' she said. 

Mountain woman with grandchild, taken by Jeffrey Potter.

'Eighteen-sixty-eight it was,' Grandmas said, and her words were small against the spring winds bellowing in the chimney top. She spread her hands close to the oak-knot fire. They were blue-veined like a giant spider's web. 'That was the year the pigeons come to Upper Flat Creek, mighty nigh taking the country.... Them pigeon-birds were worse than a plague writ in the Book,' Grandmother said. "Hit was my first married year, and Boone and me had grubbed out a homeseat on Upper Flat, hoe-planting four acres o' corn. We'd got a garden patch put in, and four bee gums working before I turned puny, setting in wait for our first-born. I'd take a peck measure outside and set me down on it where I could see the garden crap growing, and the bees fotching sweetening. There was a powerful bloom that year, as I remember, and a sight of seasoning in the ground.'

 Ella Dunn, midwife and herbalist, who lived in the Ozarks and lived to be 104 years old. 

Emma Dupree, an herb doctor who received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award in 1992 and lived to be 98 years old. 

Grandma wove her hands together on her knees. 'I been walking on these legs seventy-eight years,' she said. 'I'm figuring to walk a few more miles. I hain't going to set around and let rheumatiz tie 'em in a pinch knot. Hain't wear that breaks a door hinge, hit's rust.'

Two women on a porch, taken by Howard Greenberg.

'If I was stone-blind, I'd know a new season was coming,' Grandma said. ''This time o' year the rheumatiz strikes my hips. The pain sets deep and grinds. Five of my chaps was born in the spring and that might be the causing.' She took to bed for a spell, and Uncle Jolly cooked for us morning and evening.... It plagued her to lie abed, helpless. 'When spring opens,' Grandma said, 'I'll be up and doing. Three days' sun, and I'll be well enough to beat this feather tick and hang it to sweeten.'
One morning I saw a redbird sitting in a plum bush, its body as dark as a wound. 'Spring's a winding,' I told Grandma. 'Coming now for shore.'
'Even come spring,' Grandma said, 'we've got a passel of chills to endure: dogwood winter, redbud, service, foxgrape, blackberry.... There must be seven winters, by count. A chilly snap for every time of bloom.' 

You may also want to see:
Maude Callen (1898-1990)
The Trees by Conrad Richter
Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller
Housekeeping in The Fields

"When There Was Nothing to Preserve, She Began to Pickle"

Pioneer ladies before a sod house on the Great Plains.

In her O Pioneers! Willa Cather captured the efforts to create real homes of the women who with their husbands first came to the harsh landscape of the Great Plains. Cather describes the mother of her Norwegian heroine Alexandra Bergson like this:

John Bergson [Alexandra's father] had married beneath him, but he had married a good wife. Mrs. Bergson was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was something comfortable about her; perhaps it was her own love of comfort. For eleven years she had worthily striven to maintain some semblance of household order amid conditions that made order very difficult. Habit was very strong with Bergson, and her unremitting efforts to repeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had done a great deal to keep the family from disintegrating morally and getting careless in their ways. The Bergsons had a log house, for instance, only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house.

She missed the fish diet of her own country, and twice every summer she sent the boys to the river, twenty miles to the southward, to fish for channel cat. When the children were little she used to load them all into the wagon, the baby in its crib, and go fishing herself. Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden, and find something to preserve.  

Preserving was almost a mania with Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could not see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking her head and murmuring "What a pity!" When there was nothing to preserve, she began to pickle. The amount of sugar she used in these processes was sometimes a serious drain upon the family resources.

She was a good mother, but she was glad when her children were old enough not to be in her way in the kitchen. She had never quite forgiven John Bergson for bringing her to the end of the earth; but, now that she was there, she wanted to be left alone to reconstruct her old life in so far as that was possible. She could still take some comfort in the world if she had bacon in the cave, glass jars on the shelves, and sheets in the press. She disapproved of all her neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the women thought her very proud. Once when Mrs. Bergson, on her way to Norway Creek, stopped to see old Mrs. Lee, the old woman hid in the haymow "for fear Mis' Bergson would catch her barefoot."

O Pioneers! is wonderful in many ways. Willa Cather is an American treasure.

Fine Arts Any Day: Vermeer's Lacemaker

The Lacemaker by Johannes Vermeer, 1669-70.

In you are in England or heading that way, you have 15 days to see the exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge of Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Vermeer's Lacemaker, which is on loan to the Fitzwilliam from The Louvre. Surrounding this masterpiece of an artisan rapt in concentration as she creates an object of beauty are paintings by both Vermeer and other artists of the 17th-century Golden Age of Dutch painting. The exhibition, as discussed in a wonderful podcast by its curator Betsy Wieseman, has been designed to probe the Dutch portrayal of that edge where private and public spaces meet, the secrets found in the private space, and the silence of women, especially, as with the lacemaker, when they are at work.

There are paintings of women in all kinds of stances and activities. A young girl eavesdrops as an older woman reprimands a young boy, a woman writes a letter with an engaging smile at the artist (now us), a woman sits with her back to us but her face is present in a mirror so we can see her secret-not-so-secret expression, an elderly woman with her back to us leans over to look out the window at the pale face of a child, a woman stands poised right at the edge of the private space looking down the street while her maid and a child are walking in the inner courtyard. These are some of the images painted by the Dutch artists of this period in their celebration of the sacrosanct domestic space that their national bourgeoisie carved out for their homes--drawing the line against the public space that homes used to be in the time of the Middle Ages.

For Vermeer, this celebration of private space was also a celebration of the soul. His portrayals of women in domesticity are transformed into great art through his painting of space here on earth unified and transformed by God's celestial light.

Although I have not been able to view this exhibition, I am grateful for the Fitzwilliam Museum of Cambridge University for organizing it. You can read more about Dutch interior space here and here.

Who's Minding the Kitchen While Mom Is Out Working?

Holy Family at Supper, from the Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves.

In the United States, most mothers work: In 2007, the labor force participation rate for mothers with children under 18 was 71%, and this figure must be rising as women have gone to work as their husbands were laid off in the Great Recession.

Now, researchers at American University, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago studied 900 school-aged children and found a mother's employment outside the home correlates with a small but measurable increase in the child's body mass index (BMI). The researchappears in the January/February issue of the journal Child Development.

[A]mong sixth graders, a mother’s entry into employment was associated with an increase in BMI of about two fifths (40%) of a standard deviation, and those children were about 6 times more likely to be overweight. Additionally, among fifth and sixth graders, entry into employment was associated with an increase in the likelihood of being overweight of 8 and 11 times, respectively. However, there was no evidence that TV time or physical activity mediated this relation at either fifth or sixth grade, or that total HOME score, time spent unsupervised, in structured settings, or with parents mediated this relation at fifth grade (the HOME scale and time-use data were available at third and fifth grades only)....

Our FE results provide evidence for a cumulative influence of maternal employment; every period (averaging 5.3 months) a mother was employed was associated with an increase in her child’s BMI of 10% of a standard deviation. For a child of average height, this is equivalent to a gain in weight of nearly 1 lb every 5 months above and beyond what would typically be gained as a child ages. This link between maternal employment (vs. nonemployment) and children’s BMI is consistent with a growing body of evidence on this question (e.g., Anderson et al., 2003), including studies that have adopted comparable analytic approaches....

The results of this study have implications for policy and practice. We find that maternal employment has a cumulative influence on children’s BMI that, over time, could lead to an increase in the likelihood that a child is overweight or obese. We also find evidence that, among older children in particular, maternal employment status is linked to an increased likelihood of being overweight. Excess weight in childhood is a risk factor for excess weight in adulthood (Strauss, 1999), and the effects of obesity on chronic conditions have been found to be even larger than those of current or past smoking and problem drinking (Sturm, 2002). On average, in 2002, an obese adult and an overweight adult spent an additional $395 and $125 in health care costs per year, respectively, than healthy-weight individuals (Sturm, 2002).

In addition to the physical health and economic consequences as adults, being overweight as a child has social-emotional implications. During the early elementary school years, higher BMIs are associated with greater internalizing problems (Bradley et al., 2008). In adolescence, overweight status is associated with an increase in depression among girls (Needham & Crosnoe, 2005). Additionally, overweight teens have lower academic achievement, especially in contexts in which being overweight is stigmatized (e.g., schools with high rates of dating or lower average BMI; Crosnoe & Muller, 2004). For girls, higher BMIs are also associated with a reduction in dating (but not in having sex; Cawley, 2001; Cawley, Joyner, & Sobal, 2006). Overall, research suggests that stigma against overweight individuals is commonplace, including in the workplace, in the health care system, and in schools (reviewed in Puhl & Brownell, 2001).

Since many of the other factors measured in this study--such as TV time, sedentary life styles--did not budge the overall statistic, it appears that the culprit is the actual food consumed--its quantity and quality. A working mother is also simply less able to monitor her child's food intake and teach good eating habits throughout the day. My sister-in-law, who was a stay-at-home mom, did a great job of this with her children.

As a working single mom for more than half of the years that my daughter was growing up, I know that it is fatiguing to come home from a long day of work to make a decent dinner, set the table, and clean up after. In the days when I had a long commute, I resorted to feeding my daughter and myself like the mother in Little Miss Sunshine--fast food and ready-made frozen food. Since the food is basically unsatisfying and also heavy in salt or sugar (not to mention expensive), the tendency is to eat more.

Finally, I decided this was not fair at all. Why shouldn't my daughter be able to smell a good dinner cooking or be able to enjoy fresh homemade baked goods? So I tried to clean up my act.


Marion Cunningham -- to the rescue.

My cooking savior was Lost Recipes: Meals to Share with Family and Friends by Marion Cunningham. You can read about this wonderful book at Letters from a Hill Farm. I also used Mrs. Cunningham's The Supper Book, which has more easy recipes for preparing an easy and fast evening meal. A lot of her recipes can be created straight from the pantry and don't require a hunt for expensive exotics. Some recipes appear in both books. I especially savored her descriptions of the recipes and how she found them and her exhortations to revive the ritual of the family meal. For working mothers, who may be harried people, we need this kind of encouragement.

I also started baking with these books and Mrs. Cunningham's Fannie Farmer Baking Book.

When my daughter was in 10th grade and had her Humane Letters seminar for the first two hours of school every morning, I took a lot of pleasure in sending her off with a loaf of freshly made quick bread or muffins for her teacher and classmates to enjoy with their seminar coffee. (She went to Trinity School at Meadowview.) I rearranged my kitchen counter so that all the measuring cups, measuring spoons, and mixing spoons along with the flour and sugar canisters were alwayson the counter in front of me with baking powder, baking soda, spices and herbs, and oil in the cabinet above. In this way, I was able to whip up these morning items in no time flat.

I started using the crock pot. My daughter likes meat and potatoes, and it was easy to make a stew or a pot roast with potatoes in the morning and have the meal ready when we got home. I also made salmon or cod cakes that I could freeze and take out at the end of the day to cook. Mrs. Cunningham's cobb salad was a big favorite with my daughter and her friends.


Beef stew in a crock pot compliments of Audrey's Favorite Recipes.

Soon of course my daughter was off to college, and home cooking is more humdrum. Even so, yesterday morning I made a shrimp and rice dish based on Margaret Cunningham's "Sara Tyson Rorer's Spanish Rice with Chicken" in The Supper Book and looked forward all day to coming home, scooping some on to a plate, zapping it in the microwave, and sitting down to a decent home meal.

Welcome Back, Mr. Milkman!!

Some of you may remember my disgruntled post of a while back titled: "Where's the Milkman?" I noted that my mother, a suburban stay-at-home mom, had practically a parade coming to her own home every week: the milkman, the bread man, and the egg man, and that now, when many wives and mothers are working, this is the kind of service we need more than ever, but it's not there!

Now, I am happy to report I have a milkman! I was driving down the street where I live in northern Virginia about two months ago, and I saw a big truck in front of me, which said "South Mountain Creamery -- Milk Delivery." What! I noted the url on the truck and raced to the Web as soon as I got home to look it up.

Sure enough, some smart folks in rural Maryland are delivering milk and other necessities to your doorstep once a week. You can go online to change your order or to skip deliveries if you are going out of town. Along with milk, eggs, and bread,South Creamery delivers local jams and preserves and other condiments, their own yogurt and assorted dairy products, bacon and meats, and other specialties. The prices and the delivery charge are all reasonable.

I signed up for a weekly delivery of a quart of skim milk (IN GLASS BOTTLES--hurray!), a loaf of honey wheat bread, and a dozen eggs. This week, I also ordered some jam. They come every Friday, and I just set my cooler outside.
I hate going to the food store, and I figure that in a pinch I can scramble up a repast with these items. Thank you so much, South Mountain Creamery, which is getting busier by the week.

In today's delivery I also received a Season's Greeting card, signed by the owner and underneath, it read:
"Milkman"

Mr. Milkman, welcome back!

Fine Arts Friday: A Benefit of Working

Scrubwoman, by John French Sloan, 1910-1911

(Click on the paintings to get a better view.)

Here is a painting of scrub women working at the Astor Library in New York City, a place I used to spend a lot of time in as a reader. I like this painting, because it does not depict these ladies as victims of poverty-mandated drudgery, but instead draws our attention to their cheerfulness: they seem to be enjoying a friendly joke, although the shading of the painting indicates that they live in a different world than the silent scholars in the next room.

An atmosphere in which jokes are welcome is a crucial factor in selecting where I work. Once when I was a waitress at a New York City diner, if I made the slightest hint of a joke, the owner would snort, "Don't get fresh, Linda." It was dreary to work there, and I didn't last long. At another restaurant I worked in, all the waitresses, the cooks, the bartender, and the hands-on manager joked all day, and half the time I was in stitches. It was fun to work there. Even today, when I am buried under mountains of work on my job (the reason for the dribble of posts these last months), although the work is difficult and can be tedious, the atmosphere is convivial--which makes the job easier. If a spoil-sport like Ebenezer Scrooge ran the place, it would be intolerable. Women on the job jabber about their children, food, clothes, shopping, doing things for one another, their hobbies and crafts. Men report to each other on food, sports, trips, and sometimes (I overhear) what they are doing to keep their wives happy.

These conversations and jokes among fellow workers relieve tension, put a downward pressure on anxiety levels, and build team spirit to get a job done. It is a benefit of working.

John French Sloan (1871-1951) was a major figure of the Ashcan School of realist artists who resisted the pull of abstractionist art in the early decades of the 20th century. Born, raised, and trained in Philadelphia, he produced most of his art in New York City, where, he wrote in his diary, "I am in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it ... No insult to the people you are watching to do so unseen."

I think he had a particular knack for portraying women in conversation, as these paintings show:


Sunday Women Drying Their Hair, 1912


Three A.M., 1909


Spring Planting in Greenwich Village, 1913

Although he looks a little taciturn himself...


Self Portrait, 1890

Fine Arts Friday: Now Let Us Praise Flower Sellers

At the Florist by Childe Hassam, 1889

In Paris in the years 1888 and 1889, Childe Hassam created a series of paintings of flower sellers at their work. At the time, the flower sellers congregated around the Bastille. At the Florist is so beautiful pictorially, it nearly takes your breath away. (Click on a painting to see it better in a larger size.) I love that Hassam has painted the very young flower sellers wrapped in the same white as the flowers themselves. The one girl whose face we see has the feature and aura of a cherub from an Italian Renaissance painting. The same white wrapping is picked up in the cap of the maid accompanying her mistress to the florists.


The Flower Seller by Childe Hassam, 1889.

In this painting, Hassam highlights the relationship between the two girls in the painting: the flower seller and the girl walking with her mother. The flower girl looks imploringly at the younger girl, and one assumes that she wants the child to ask her mother to buy her flowers. The younger girl meanwhile is fascinated by the flower seller. Either she is looking at the flowers, but more likely she is apprehending the flower seller as a young girl, like herself, but in a startlingly different position than herself; the flower seller has no childhood, having been hurled into adult activities for reasons of family poverty or even loss of family. The mother meanwhile ignores the flower seller and is hustling onward. I find it noteworthy that in the painting Hassam's shadowing of the heads of all three figures makes it appear almost as if each has a nimbus. In the left middle ground is the figure of a mother and child, the mother clearly from the working class. "There but for the grace of God go I."


Flower Girl by the Seine by Childe Hassam, 1889.

In this painting again, Hassam is focusing on the contrast between the flower seller and the flower buyer. As can be seen from umbrellas carried by those who have already passed, it is raining, but the flower girl lacks cover. She is looking at the woman in black with her black umbrella, who has just bought flowers now held by her daughter. We have little doubt that the flower seller as she gazes at these two is pondering the difference in their stations in life.

Parisian flower sellers were organized. One hundred years before Hassam painted the subject, the flower sellers of Paris put forward a Cahiers de Doleances (Register of Grievanes) to the Estates-General (spring 1789--the year of the French Revolution) to protest the dismantlement of the flower sellers' association in 1777. The cahiers begins:

The freedom given to all citizens to denounce abuses that press on them from all sides to teh representatives of the nation is doubtless a certain omen of an impending reform. Confident of this, the flower sellers formerly forming the community of the female sellers of flowers and bouquets of flowers of the city and suburbs of Paris dare to address themselves to you our lords [the Estates General]....

Heretofore, flower seller candidates had to pay a fee to join the flower seller association, which had been formed in 1735 "through the kindness of Louis XV." The association's banning in 1777 under the laissez-faire doctrine of Finance Minister Anne Robert-Jacques Turgot, caused a leap in the number of flower sellers and hence a commensurate decrease in each woman's share of the market, "as the number of consumers does not increase proportionally" to the growing number of sellers. This was causing problems within the flower selling community:

The lure of thee earnings, however, limited as they are and even more a strong propensity to idleness, encourages a crowd of young peole of the fair sex to practice the profession of the supplicants, and since their profession cannot feed them, they seek the resources they lack in licentiousness and the most shameful debauchery. The supplicants' cause is also that of morality.

The flower sellers community particularly directed its cahiers to the Third Estate (the elected representatives), who are "friends and brothers and it is to them that it falls to plead the cause of the destitute."

The supplicants will not cease to send wishes to heaven for the preservation and prosperity of the representatives of the nation.
Signed, The said merchants, represented by Madame Marl, syndic of the community.

Source: Doleance particulieres des marchandes bouquetieres fleuristes chapeliers en fleurs de la vile and faubourgs de Paris in Charles-Louis Chassin, Les Election and Les cahiers de Paris en 1789, Vol. 2, pp. 53-57, found in The French Revolution: A Sourcebook, by Philip G. Dwyer and Peter McPhee.

I do not know what happened, or if the flower sellers that Hassam painted were organized into a legal association.

Women in Retail

Here is a painting by the American impressionist painter, Childe Hassam, titled La Bouquetiere and la Latiere. The scene is likely Paris; the year is 1888.

Click on the picture to see it in a larger size.

Here are two women at work. They do not seem at all posed; with their activity or lack thereof and particularly with the nonchalance of the woman in the door of the dairy, this painting could easily be a photograph, taken for instance, by Henri Cartier Bresson. The ladies are completely un-self-conscious of the painter.

This painting reminds us that retail is an arena that has always employed women. I have never come across a book that discusses women's role in the retail trade. Does the woman in the door own the dairy, or does she just work there? Does she have a family to go home to, or does she live above the shop? Is she waiting for someone? Or is it the end of the day, as the dairy jugs in the front of the store might indicate, and is she just standing by the door to stave off boredeom and waiting to go home? Any minute now, we expect her to raise her head slightly, turn around, and go back inside. Meanwhile, the younger woman is arranging flowers and either getting ready for the day or returning from it. She seems unmindful of the dairy seller watching from above.

There is nothing romantic about the women in this painting. Rather, Hassam has painted them with the highest respect.

But the women are also the right and lower side of a triangle with the five dairy jugs, that actually sit in the center of the painting--every day object that one takes for granted but made beautiful with the light reflected off the sloping tops of the jugs. In its spirit, the painting reminds me of Vermeer's The Milkmaid, painting 220 years earlier.



Eight of Hassam's works were shown at the 1913 Armory Show, the first major show of "modern art" in the United States, but Hassam opposed the shift to surrealism and cubism in no uncertain terms and his paintings receded to the background until the interest in the French Impressionists renewed interest in their American counterparts.