Caroline Hague

In doing family research I've uncovered some stories that my parents didn't tell me, possibly didn't even know. So it is that my great-uncle Adolph C.E. Windmuller, whom my father characterized as a ne're do well, turns out to have been husband of an extremely successful business woman who was renowned as owner of one of New York's most exclusive fashion houses and who was also, at one time, deeply involved in an extensive smuggling ring.

Adolph let his father pay most of the bills while he was alive and then inherited enough that he could live well without exerting himself to do much work. My father said Adolph had almost no contact with his sister, my grandmother, and that he was hardly ever to be seen. As a child, my father recalled glimpses of the man driving around in his Rolls Royce, presumably enjoying his role as a favored member of New York's high society.

So far as I can recall, he never mentioned Adolph's wife. When he married her in 1901 the event generated news coverage in a dozen or so newspapers that can now be accessed via the internet. His new wife was a few years older than he and had two small sons by a previous marriage. Unlike him, she earned a good living as owner of a high class ladies' clothing store in one of Manhattan's wealthiest shopping districts. After their marriage, their names appeared on the Social Register of wealthy and well-connected New Yorkers (as it happens, in fact, theirs are found immediately below those of the Wilson family in the White House).

The woman was Mrs. Caroline (or Carolyn) Hague. She was daughter of a German immigrant named Leopold Thurn and his wife Sidonie. She had a sister named Clara and a brother named Leopold. On her wedding day in 1901, her mother hosted a reception for the two immediate families and a few friends. She was then a widow, Leopold having died in 1898. Sidonie was an assumed name. Her full maiden name was Sophie Caroline Dittmarsch.

Caroline Hague's matron of honor was her sister, identified as Mrs. Patterson. On the death of that sister 40 years later, her name is given as Clara Emile Leopoldine Thurn Wilson, so presumably Mr. Patterson had died or they had by then divorced. The news account of Clara's estate says she left everything to her sister, Carolyn Thurn Windmuller (New York Times Feb 22, 1941, pg. 1).

Caroline was also known as Lilly or Lillie. She shows up as Lillie in the 1880 census and is identified as Lilly Hague in the database of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Before 1914, Caroline used the business name of Mme. Thurn. Her millinery shop was located at 424 5th Avenue, on the corner of 5th and 38th St. This corner, and indeed the whole block, was taken over Lord & Taylor in 1914 for construction of a new flagship department store. From 1914 to 1933, she ran a dressmaking concern called The House of Thurn, a name which gained luster from its association with the German family, Thurn und Taxis, famous for building castles. During that time she called herself Mme. Hague. After 1933, while in her 70s, she worked as a designer for the Manhattan fashion house of Jay-Thorpe and other dressmaking concerns. Throughout these years she was a successful businesswoman.

Under the names Thurn, Hague, and Windmuller, Caroline transacted business that got her name in the press from time to time. She was a self-made person in the classic 19th-century Horatio Alger mode, except, unlike almost all others, she was a woman. She would have faced many hardships on her upward journey and hers would have been much more difficult than those of her masculine peers.

She came from an immigrant family whose business (man and wife) was stated as "Children Furnishing Goods" in the 1880 census. Furnishings in this sense are decorations, trimmings, and notions. She was 15-year-old Lillie Thurn when the census taker filled in the questionnaire for the family. As an adult she earned the reputation of leading figure in the American fashion industry.**

One account says she began in the children's clothing trade in which her parents specialised. Her first venture was the importing of materials for making up these clothes. Succeeding in this, she expanded into making them up herself, both to her own designs and to designs she copied from European models. Her next move was to import fashionable clothes from abroad, and, once again succeeding, she shifted business into design and manufacture of women's fashions.*** She would find her niche at the high end of the business, catering to the blue bloods of America's Gilded Age, their children and grandchildren. The authors say:

One of the infant clients of early days was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Thurn made his first pair of trousers. This, we hasten to confess, was discovered by us, not confided, for this grand old house guards its clients' secrets in the British manner. Even the brides' pictures in the trousseau room are keyed, not marked outright with names, but here, too, our detective instincts helped and we recognized the photographs of Ailsa Mellon of the Pittsburg Mellons and Isabella Rockefeller of the Rockefellers. -- New York is Everybody's Town by Helen Josephy and Mary Margaret McBride (G.P. Putnam s Sons, 1931)

Some of the challenges Hague would have to face in establishing and maintaining her flourishing business are described in Wendy Gamber's book, The Female Economy. In reviewing that book, Pamela Nickless wrote:

Most proprietors of retail establishments were single women ("man milliner" was an epithet)... Gamber also finds strong evidence of the working class origins of many of the "Madams" and, she argues, dressmaking and millinery was one of the few paths to independence for the working class daughter. Although this seems a very female world, men controlled access to credit and in the case of customers, husbands often decided when and which bills would be honored. Millinery and dressmaking was a risky business and few women became wealthy but many did manage to maintain a "precarious independence." ... A worker might rise from apprentice to shop owner. Gamber describes the transmission of skills and how a young woman, with hard work and luck, might learn a craft and own her own small shop. [But success became more and more difficult at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th and the number of independent shops declined dramatically.] Gamber is careful to note the complex interaction among consumers, retailers, wholesalers and producers in this process of transforming an industry. The development of the department store and the availability of factory-made dresses (altered in the store for the up-scale customer) in the early twentieth century completed the transformation of dressmaking. -- from a review by Pamela Nickless, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina- Asheville, of The female economy: the millinery and dressmaking trades, 1860-1930, by Wendy Gamber; series: The working class in American history; Women in American history (University of Illinois Press, 1997)

The business in which Hague was engaged was a complex one. It was seasonal, requiring agility to stay ahead of the fashion curve. More than an unerring sense of style and understanding of fashion, it required excellent financial and managerial skills. I don't know about her access to credit, but she showed unusual business sense in keeping herself independent of clothing wholesalers (all of them men), importing both raw materials and finished goods on her own. By the end of the 19th century she was running a large, complex design, manufacturing, and retail establishment. Businesses of the type she ran kept anywhere from 10 and 70 workers on the payroll; given its prominence, hers probably was on the high end.

The dollar value of her business must have been enormous. Even single transactions could involve extremely large sums. Evidence of this comes from a successful legal action that she took in 1893 against a non-paying customer. In an afternoon's shopping, a woman had bought $1,000 worth of hats at Madame Thurn's and failed to pay what she owed. After considerable trouble, Hague obtained a judgment against the woman. The $1,000 she owned would be worth at least $24,600.00 today, probably closer to $69,000.****

Hague's success is evident in her real estate transactions. When she was forced to close the shop of 5th Avenue, she did not rent, but rather bought a new place. She chose the new location wisely in an area that was about to become equally chic. The new address was 108 East 57th St, near what was then 4th Avenue, soon to be renamed Park Ave.***** Though unprepossessing in 1905, the address would tote considerable caché by the 1930s. Then, the phrase "Fifty-Seventh Street" would convey an atmosphere of "ultra-ultra" ladies' clothing shops.

By the 1930s it was known that one did not stop by one of these shops at the height of the season without being known or having an introduction. Customers were treated royally and the staff were trained to be extremely discrete. A book (MacBride's, quoted above) describes the ambience:

The stately house of Thurn is easily the most dignified institution left in New York. To the right as you enter is the famous stone staircase so often seen in news photographs of the season's fashionable brides both because its curve is perfect for trains and because so many brides get their white satin at Thurn's. In the impressive drawing room upstairs, elegant, gleaming mannequins, some of them Junior Leaguers, saunter past and into the fitting rooms. All the blue-bloods in town come here at some time or other, as do many rich and aristocratic out-of-towners, to put themselves into the competent hands of Madame Hague.

It's interesting to note that even after her marriage to Adolph, she seems to have been the one to make real estate transactions. As for example in 1815 when she rented a summer place in upscale Darien, Connecticut, along the Long Island Sound:

THE REAL ESTATE FIELD New York Times; Mar 18, 1915 Fish & Marvin have leased furnished for the Summer the Colonial House and three acres owned by John D. Crimins at Collender's Point, Noroton, to Mrs. A.C. Windmuller of this city.

She gave up running her own shop in 1933, but she continued to prosper. Working as a designer, in the mid-1930s, at the height of the Depression, she was reported to be making $65,000 a year from "a Manhattan concern specializing in women's apparel" (New York Times, Jul 10, 1937, p. 32).

When in 1914 Lord & Taylor took over her shop at 5th and 37th St, she not only moved her business to the new place she had bought on 57th, but also changed its name. The new name, House of Thurn, was dignified and sounded appropriately exclusive, but it also lacked unpleasant associations with an event that occurred in 1909. In that year Hague had been forced to admit guilt in federal court for having defrauded the government of customs revenue by smuggling expensive French fabrics through US customs. She was fined $7,500 and was not made to serve time in jail. Although other milliners were involved in the "sleeper trunk" scheme by which dressmakers avoided payment of heavy federal duties on imported fabrics, Hague's business was deemed to be one of the largest and most visible. I'll write about the gimmick they used in a separate post.

Hague almost certainly engaged in other forms of cheating to boost her profits at that time. For example, a 1912 article in the New York Times by a designer who worked for her shop admitted to faking labels:

"The support of the press of New York City and the co-operation of the dressmakers and tailors with American manufacturers -- these are the two great things which the movement for American-made fashions needs." James B. Blaine, head designer for Thurn is energetic in his indorsement of The New York Times's competition for American-designed hats and gowns.... Blaine is very frank in admitting the use of the fake label in the American-made gown. "It was a well-known trick of the trade, you understand. We all did it, and many do yet.... When the public got on to the fake French label,... [the Americans would] send their silks to Lyons, brings them back again and sell them plus export and import duties at a greater profit than they could have obtained for them sold as American-made silks." -- IT WAS AMERICA THAT MADE PARIS; Thurn's Head Designer Tells How We Made France a Present of Fame and Fortune. New York Times, December 22, 1912, Sunday, Page 11, 1249 words.

There's much to be said for Caroline Hague's acumen, artistic ability, and spunk. What she achieved is simply amazing, particularly given the special difficulties faced by women entrepreneurs of her time. It's also true that, as an admitted smuggler and probable deceptive merchant, she's not really an admirable ancestor.

The photo below shows a Thurn design from 1921. The ensemble was intended for overseas travel. The accompanying description says: "For her trot-about street dress one may take advantage of fashion's verdict for two-faced fabrics and wear a Thurn gown of dove down satin, the duvetyn face enhanced with embroidery.Circumstances alter wardrobes just as they do every other case in the world. Some plans will call for what might be described as an extensive wardrobe, even for the traveler, while others will permit the shopper to limit her needs to bare necessities. But there are certain fundamentals that almost any sea voyage will demand. After all, life on the great floating palaces is very much that of the everyday routine at a metropolitan hotel. Within the prescribed limits one eats and sleeps and drinks; walks a little, chats a great deal, bridges and teas and dances, and in fact even indulges in the good old sport of shopping. Of course it is life at sea, but life at sea today is very much like life ashore, everything is so up to date."

{source: When She Travels - Fine Women's Fashions for Ocean Liner Travel - 1921

Here are two photos taken between 1939 and 1941 that come in a collaboration between the Works Progress Administration and the New York City Tax Department. Their goal was to collect photos of buildings throughout the city. My source is the NYC Municipal Archives. The first shows the building at 108 E. 57th St.

The second shows 15 E. 57th Street, just off 5th Avenue. That was Hague's third and final retail location.

Chanel now occupies that prestigious location.

{source: fashiontraveler.com}

This is not the summer residence that Hague rented in 1915, but gives an idea of the wealth of Collender's Point residents.

{source: dariennewsonline}

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See also:

Millinery as a trade for women, Volume 5 of Studies in economic relations of women by Lorinda Perry, Susan Myra Kingsbury, and Marion Parris Smith (Longmans, Green and Co., 1916)
A seasonal industry: a study of the millinery trade in New York by Mary Van Kleeck (Russell Sage Foundation, 1917)
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Notes:

*It's possible that Caroline's mother had a second marriage to a man named Thorn after the death of Leopold Thurn because a death notice of 1938 identifies a Mrs. C. S. Thorn as daughter of Charles H. Chrystal:

Chrystal, Margaret R. , suddenly, at her home, 6 Gifford St., Tuckahoe, NY, beloved wife of Charles H., and mother of Mrs. C.S. Thorn and Mrs. F.J. Meyer, Paul and Charles, Jr. Requium Mass Church of the Immaculate Conception, Tuckahoe, Saturday at 10 AM Interment Gate of Heaven. -- New York Times, Nov 18, 1938, pg. 1

Charles H. Chrystal was a lawyer, judge, and local politician who resided in Tuckahoe, NY.

**As an example of Hague's standing in the business, see a report of a liability action she made against the New York Central Railroad. Of witnesses called to testify on her behalf, the reporter said: "An Italian baroness, a New York society matron and leading figures in the women's fashion world paraded to the Supreme Court witness stand Saturday and paid glowing tributed to seventy-one-year-old Mrs. Caroline T. Windmuller's former standing as a stylist." ("Once Style Expert Sues Railroad for $250,000 for Fall at Ardsley," Herald Statesman, Yonkers, N.Y., White Plains, Nov. 27, 1936

***The account says she "went into business as an importer of white goods for children's dresses, fine nainsook, dotted swiss and French piques, which were snapped up by aristocratic mamas who later persuaded Mrs. Thurn to try making up clothes for their treasures. From this the house of Thurn went on to importing and copying children's models and finally to women's clothes and the present business."

**** Here is an extract from a report of the final decision in Hague's suit for payment of the money owed her:

Receiver in a millinery Case One Woman Suing Another in a Jersey City Court An interesting millinery suit was before Vice Chancellor Green at Jersey City yesterday on the application of Mme. Thurn of Fifth Avenue, New-York, for the appointment of a receiver for property at South Orange, N.J., and Wilkes-barre, Penn., owned by Mrs. Margaret Paine, wife of a New-York lawyer. Some time ago Mrs. Paine lived at the Marlborough House, New-York. One day, it is alleged, she went to Mme. Thurn's establishment and bought hats and bonnets. Her bill was $1,000. When Mrs. Paine did not pay, Mme. Thurn brought suit in a New-York court, but Mrs. Paine evaded process by removing to South Orange. Mme. Thurn availed herself of the New-Jersey courts, and then Mrs. Paine went back to New-York. Mme. Thurn's lawyer, William B. Gilmore, learned where Mrs. Paine's property was, and then went into Chancery with the case. It was shown that, besides the house she owned at South Orange, Mrs. Paine received $250 a month from the People's Bank of Wilkes-barre as the income of property she owned there, and Vice Chancellor Green decided to grant the application. -- New York Times, March 30, 1893, pg. 1

The $1,000 debt would be worth $24,600.00 today by the Consumer Price Index and almost $69,000 using the value of a consumer bundle. It would be even more by other constant-dollar measures of value).

*****The real estate transaction was reported in the New York Times in 1905:

Maria W. Burtin has sold to Mme. Thurn the four-story dwelling 108 East Fifty-seventh Street, 20 by 100.5. -- East Side Houses Find Buyers, NYT, Friday, July 7, 1905.

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Addenda:

1. My father's sister, Aunt Virginia, worked for Lord & Taylor at the flagship building on 5th Avenue for most of her adult life. My father said she was highly valued there and enjoyed her work.

2. When I was in sixth grade, my best friend Tommy moved from our suburban village in Westchester County to a big house close on Contentment Island, not far from the place Caroline Hague rented in 1915. Thereafter, I would spend a week or so of my summers with him out on the water just about every day.

3. In this post I've quoted from an interesting book by Mary Margaret McBride and Helen Josephy. McBride was a popular radio personality. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say she was the Oprah of her day. She was a talented journalist as well as talk show hostess. You can read about her in wikipedia and quite a few other sources. Before she succeeded on radio, McBride teamed up with another writer, Helen Josephy, to write New York Is Everybody's Town (G.P. Putnam s Sons, 1931). Subtitled Paris in Manhattan, it was a follow-up to two books the pair had previously written: Paris Is a Woman's Town (1929) and London Is a Man's Town (1930). Their style is informal and urban-chic. The sections on fashion and the dress trade are interesting and informative. Here's an excerpt that gives their flavor:

An effective, though refined, version of the bum's rush is to be expected if one drops in at an exclusive New York dressmaker's unknown and unintroduced, especially in the height of the season.

Not lack of hospitality but the instinct of self-preservation is the basis of this reception. The bug-a-boo of ultra-ultra shops is the copyist who comes in the guise of client and goes away with a dozen smart ideas which eventually will appear as $6.84 dresses in Fourteenth Street.

There is no need to feel insulted when suspected of being a copyist. A successful one is often beautiful, may be in the social register and as likely as not comes clothed in mink and with money enough to buy a dress or so while secretly sketching a dozen others.

Fifty-Seventh Street imports Paris models for ideas chiefly. The clever adaptations of these to American needs by skilled designers and fitters are extremely use-ful to Fourteenth Street.

And that, my children, is the true explanation of why the best houses religiously save their finest models for customers of long standing and show them in the sacrosanct privacy of fitting rooms! ...

Even after the couturier's perfect collection is assembled and adapted, even when he has successfully exterminated all copyists, there remains still the difficult and harassing American clientele.

Manhattan, it seems, is filled with goodlooking society women who honestly believe they should have clothes for nothing because they are "so chic and elegant that it will advertise the house." Then there is the woman who will not buy a dress if copies are being made and the richest one of all who goes into hysterics about prices that would have seemed bargains in the Place Vendome. ...

Workmanship and fit are undoubtedly better at good New York houses than in Paris, but due to higher wage scales and stricter laws governing working conditions, prices are considerably higher.

The older houses are notable for the dignified serenity of their atmosphere. ... At Thurn's a Scotch butler lends atmosphere. Tea or coffee is served at Bendel's. In other houses, cigarettes of a special brand are placed at Madame's elbow and messenger boys are on hand to run errands or to take care of fatiguing telephone calls.

The saleswomen in these houses are solicitous and trustworthy. They usually hold their places over a period of years and learn their clients' needs.

There are certain shops so well-established that their faithful following mostly of the Social Register depend upon the heads for sartorial well-being just as they depend upon the family physician for health.

Unhurried dignity so predominates at Thurn's that the story of a rush job of a few years ago is still told as a curious phenomenon. It seems a girl whose family had long been on the books was selected to be queen of the New Orleans Mardi Gras, and telephoned one after-noon for a royal robe. An all-night session of cutting out and pinning up followed and next morning, a weary fitter and two seamstresses left for New Orleans with a gorgeously-embroidered dress upon which they again worked all night so that it was practically complete by the time they reached their destination.

Two hundred dollars is the rock-bottom price for Thurn gowns, with the exception of an occasional sport dress.

-- New York Is Everybody S Town by Helen Josephy and Mary Margaret Mcbride (G.P. Putnam s Sons, 1931)

4. I haven't intended to violate anyone's copyright in putting together this post; if what I have done has strayed from what's permissible under fair use practices, I'll remove the offending items.

Angelina and Sarah Grimke

Angelina Grimke was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on this day in 1805. She and her older sister Sarah are famous anti-slavery advocates and early supporters of women's rights in America. An article from 1913 in a Philadelphia Quaker newspaper, The Friend, contains this brief description of them:

They were daughters of a prominent wealthy Judge in South Carolina, brought up in a home of luxury where every want was ministered to by slaves; but at the death of their father they felt it right to manumit the slaves that fell to their lot in the settling of the estate, and to seek a home in the North. At great pecuniary sacrifice they did this, and as Philadelphia was the place they selected, it is no wonder that Friends were the first people to notice them, and, in return, that they should be drawn to the Society of which their benefactors were members.

Lucy Stone wrote an eloquent appreciation of Angelina's life as an obituary in 1880. Published in the Woman's Journal, which Stone edited, it was reprinted in a Philadelphia Quaker paper, Friends' Intelligencer. Worth reading in full, it is copied below.*

Visiting New York in 1841, the English Quaker, Joseph Sturge, recorded a visit with them:

Angelina Grimke Weld, and her sister, Sarah Grimke, were natives of South Carolina, the daughters of a distinguished Judge of that State; for several years they resided in Philadelphia. Having long felt a deep interest in the condition of the slaves, in the year 1837 they, in accordance with what they believed to be a sense of religious duty, visited New York and New England, to plead the cause of those, with whose sorrows, degradation, and cruel sufferings, they had been familiar in their native State. They are evidently women of superior endowments, kind-hearted and energetic, and still retain something of the warmth and fervour of character peculiar to the South.[1]

A contemporary diarist, Pliny Earle, described the two sisters in 1837:

They are very intelligent and capable, and very much devoted to the abolition cause. Angelina takes the lead in public estimation. She is the best rhetorician, has the best person and voice, with a very imposing manner, and is considered eloquent. S. J. May, in speaking of one of her lectures, says he "never before heard such eloquence from human lips." Yet we were better pleased with Sarah. Her mind is naturally superior to Angelina's, and has been better disciplined. Her feelings, also, have been more disciplined; and that of itself has an important influence on character.

He also gives an instance of their success in opposing the Calvinist clergy of Massachusetts:

The First Day, on the evening of which Angelina was to give her first lecture, Woodbridge, minister of the Union Society, exhorted his hearers, as they loved religion, as they loved him, and by the most solemn obligations which rest upon Christians, not to violate their duty and their principles so much as to go and hear those who trampled under foot that Scripture which declares that a woman is not allowed to be heard in the church. Yet that very evening it is said that both his deacons and a great portion of his church members went to hear her, and I now hear that only four of his church members approve his views on the slave question. The walls of prejudice are evidently giving way. Abolition is looked upon, among Friends, with very different eyes from what it formerly was. An Indiana yearly meeting has recently advised its members, individually, to aid other Christians engaged in the work of anti-slavery.

The Pastoral Letter, an 1837 poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, expresses outrage at the clerical opposition to the sisters. Responding to a pastoral letter against female preaching from the General Association of Congregational ministers in Massachusetts, he wrote, in part:

So, this is all,--the utmost reach
Of priestly power the mind to fetter!
When laymen think, when women preach,
A war of words, a "Pastoral Letter!"
Now, shame upon ye, parish Popes!
Was it thus with those, your predecessors,
Who sealed with racks, and fire, and ropes
Their loving-kindness to transgressors?
. . .
For, if ye claim the "pastoral right"
To silence Freedom's voice of warning,
And from your precincts shut the light
Of Freedom's day around ye dawning;
. . .
What marvel, if the people learn
To claim the right of free opinion?
What marvel, if at times they spurn
The ancient yoke of your dominion?
. . .
But ye, who scorn the thrilling tale
Of Carolina's high-souled daughters,
Which echoes here the mournful wail
Of sorrow from Edisto's waters,
Close while ye may the public ear,
With malice vex, with slander wound them,
The pure and good shall throng to hear,
And tried and manly hearts surround them.
. . .

[Edisto = a beach south of Charleston, SC]
source: The Pastoral Letter. by John Greenleaf Whittier, 1837

{Angelina and Sarah Grimke. source: Library of Congress}

{Angelina and Sarah Grimke
Photos of Angelina (left) and Sarah Grimké. These two carte de visite photos were taken in Hyde Park, Mass. Angelina, then married to abolitionist Theodore D. Weld for many years, probably had this photo taken about 1875, possibly a bit earlier. It was taken in Hyde Park by the Barritt studio. Sarah's was taken sometime around 1870 by J.D Crane, Photographer, located at Connor's Block. These photos were made available by Hampton resident Robert Jackson. They may be downloaded and used by others with the following attribution: "Courtesy of The Lane Memorial Library and Robert M. Jackson of Hampton, NH".}

---

*Note
Friends' Intelligencer
Published by Wm. W. Moore, 1880

ANGELINA GRIMKE WELD.

From the Woman's Journal of Eleventh month 1st we take the following account of the life of this brave and faithful advocate of the cause of the oppressed.

She was in early life a member of the Society of Friends, and her life was marked by great sincerity and simplicity throughout its many changes,

She left written directions in regard to her burial: "I have purposely selected my old clothes to be buried in, that my good ones may be given to the poor, that they may do them good after I am gone."

Angelina Grimke Weld died at her residence in Hyde Park on Sunday night last, aged seventy-four years and eight mouths. She was born in Charleston, S. C., Feb. 20, 1805. Her father was John F. Grimke, judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina for a number of years.

Born and reared in the midst of slavery, she yet always felt great aversion to it, in all its forms, refusing to own a maid which her mother gave her to wait on her, and often using all her power with her family and friends against the condition of slavery. She came North to cast in her lot with the Abolitionists. Their cause was her cause. For the slaves' sake she endured all the persecution which sectarian bigotry and pro slavery hatred could devise against the first woman who dared to "speak in the church" or anywhere else in public.

It is impossible for those who to day see and hear women aa ministers and lecturers, to understand the state of mind and feeling forty-three years ago, when no woman's voice was heard in public anywhere, and when the injunction for her to "keep silence" in the church was held to be as sacred as the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal."

At such a time Angelina Grimke and her sister, Sarah Grimke, came forward to plead for the slave, and to answer the arguments of the apologists of slavery. Angelina had rare gifts. The eloquence which is born of earnestness in a noble purpose gave her anointed lips. It set around her a defence so strong and high that all the shafts and arrows of pro-slavery malignity fell harmless around her. She never stopped to think of herself. "Silence!" cried the pulpit. She spoke right on. "Shame!" said the press. "You are seeking notoriety," said all the gossips, and "getting out of your sphere." How like forgotten echoes those words come back! Angelina Grimke, if the heard, did not heed. A friend who knew her singleness of purpose, stung by this injustice and meanness, prepared a reply to these unnumbered and cruel attacks. But when Angelina heard of this plan or purpose, she refused to permit its publication, and said, "It is not necessary." She was justified to herself and that was enough.

She wrote an appeal to the Christian women of the South, which was sent broadcast over the North as well as the South; she visited New York by invitation, where she spoke in public on several occasions on the slavery question; she visited Massachusetts in 1836 and spoke several times before a committee of the Legislature on the same subject, and also delivered six lectures in the Odeon.

In 1838 she married Theodore D. Weld, who also had consecrated his great powers of mind and utterance to the service of the slave. In connection with him she assisted in writing, "Slavery As It Is: or the Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses," and several other articles published by the Anti-Slavery Society. Soon after her marriage she received an injury which prevented her from taking an active part in the movement personally, but she continued writing articles from her personal knowledge and observation. Quietly in her own home she still did what she could to further the cause of freedom. When emancipation came the freedmen were never forgotten by her. Clothes and books and many comforts packed in her house went down to their relief. She also once went herself.

At the time of the division of her father's property she and her sister, Sarah Grimke, requested that their share of the property might be in slaves, with the idea of emancipating them, but when they found they could not be liberated in South Carolina, as they would be sold again by auction, their brother became their technical owner, and they were finally liberated by the Emancipation Proclamation.

Several years ago Mrs. Weld had a paralytic stroke, from which she measurably recovered, though she has been in feeble health ever since.

In her last illness, when her mind wandered, she was back again in the scenes of her early life, and again urged the release of the slaves, "who had reaped down iheir fields, and whose wages had been kept back by fraud." She hummed again the old tune she sang when a young girl, and with her face all illuminated, sang, "Happy, happy, happy!" Her last breath went away so quietly that those who looked on could not tell when her spirit went.

The women of to day owe more than they will ever know to the high courage, the rare insight, and fidelity to principle of this woman, by whose sufferings easy paths have made for them.

Neither the justice of her cause, nor its great need, nor the quiet, persuasive eloquence with which she remembered those in bonds as bound with them, saved her and her equally noble coadjutors, Sarah Grimke and Abby Kelly Foster, from the pitiless scorn of men and women. If for once their lips had turned white with fear, or their feet fled before the mob, the banner for the equal rights of women which now floats plain in sight would still be furled.

A few years ago, after the death of Jane Smith, in Philadelphia, with whom in those perilous times Angelina Grimke found shelter and a home, the letters of Miss Grimke to Mrs. Smith were returned. These letters, written in the confidence and with the fullness of friendship, contain as nowhere else tie history of the fiery trials through which these first steps were cut in the solid rock of custom and prejudice to make a highway for other women. Should they be given to the public, as they ought to be, those who read them will know better than can now be told at what a great price the enlarged sphere and assured rights of women have been earned.

Her example is a bugle call to all other women. We shall never hear her voice. Her lips are silent. But "though dead she yet speaketh." L.S.

Lucy Stone eulegized the Grimke's again in a speech given on March 31, 1888 to a meeting of the International Council of Women. See Report of the International Council of Women, National Woman Suffrage Association (U.S.), 1888

---

Some sources:

A Visit to the United States in 1841
By Joseph Sturge
Published by Hamilton, Adams, 1842

Memoirs of Pliny Earle, M.D.
By Franklin Benjamin Sanborn
Published by Damrell & Upham, 1898

Report of the International Council of Women
By International Council of Women, National Woman Suffrage Association (U.S.)
Published by R. H. Darby, printer, 1888

The Friendly Craft
By Elizabeth Deering Hanscom
Published by The Macmillan Company, 1908

the inimitable Anita

It's the birthday of Anita Loos. I most happily first made acquaintance with her in a paper my daughter wrote in high school. A Hollywood brat when Hollywood was itself infant, she was a child actress but quickly transformed herself to screenwriter. Much of her fascination comes from this early decision. Glamorous, charming, and well-connected with studio big shots, she was a celebrity of a different sort. One that's still surprisingly rare.

Today in Literature profiles her today: Loos, Lorelei, Literature

The collection on her given by Answers.com is excellent.

Career highlights include the comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Her screen credits are summarized in the poster images (below) I've taken from the Answers.com presentation.

She also wrote for Broadway: The Whole Town's Talking (1932), Happy Birthday (1946), and her dramatization of Colette's novel Gigi (1951).

She wrote for high-brow magazines like Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and -- take note -- The New Yorker.

Memoirs include her successful autobios A Girl Like I (1966) and Kiss Hollywood Goodbye (1974), as well as books on Broadway such as her 1972 book Twice Over Lightly: New York Then and Now, written in collaboration with friend and actress Helen Hayes.

Posters of some of the movies for which she wrote scripts:


Some quotes:

"Fate keeps on happening."

"The people I'm furious with are the Women's Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket."

"If we have to tell Hollywood good-bye, it may be with one of those tender, old-fashioned, seven-second kisses exchanged between two people of the opposite sex, with all their clothes on."

"There is a serious defect in the thinking of someone who wants -- more than anything else -- to become rich. As long as they don't have the money, it'll seem like a worthwhile goal. Once they do, they'll understand how important other things are -- and have always been."

"I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever."

"A girl with brains ought to do something with them besides think."

"I once witnessed more ardent emotions between men at an Elks' Rally in Pasadena than they could ever have felt for the type of woman available to an Elk."

"Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse."

"The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of public relations. Without it, America would be grim indeed."

Wikipedia gives some good anecdotes:

In 1921, Loos was among the first to join the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage.

Asked how to say her name, she told The Literary Digest "The family has always used the correct French pronunciation which is lohse. However, I myself pronounce my name as if it were spelled luce, since most people pronounce it that way and it was too much trouble to correct them." (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)

She once commented. "I've had my best times when trailing a Mainbocher evening gown across a sawdust floor. I've always loved high style in low company." Anita Loos died in New York City at the age of 93 from natural causes. She is interred in Etna Cemetery, Etna, California, with her second husband, John Emerson, her parents, her brother and sister, and maternal relatives.

two women

I've wanted to write about Cathy Wilkerson and Hettie Jones, separately or together, but while my subconscious genie was pleased to send this little mania, it didn't give me a clue what to do with it. So this post starts out without an end in view. I'm eager to see where it takes me.

Some three-to-four decades past, Cathy was a couple classes behind me at college and Hettie worked at the nonprofit where I volunteered. My knowledge of each was infinitessimal and hardly more extensive now. They both stand for something: a test of the notion that a person can, by intention, achieve something large in the world. For Cathy this something large was to participate in a chivalric destruction of the Establishment's exploitation of weak, poor, and despised minorities in the US. For Hettie it was to help people who were members of these weak, poor, and despised minorities understand that they needed to break free of their servitude through their own initiative, and to help them learn how to do this. Cathy now admits that her attempt was a total failure. In Hettie's case, I think it's not clear whether things have changed for the better since her time: maybe they have, maybe not. I think it's safe to say we both wish it so.

So what did they do? You'll probably recall that Wilkerson made the newspapers when she and companions managed to blow up her parents Greenwich Village townhouse back in 1970. (Put your cursor over the dot on W 11th St in this map of the Radical Big Apple.) The group was going to use the bomb to blow up some soldiers at Ft. Dix in NJ.

{Click to view full size: This is Cathy today, outside the place she helped destroy. Photo credits: AP & NYT}

Jones did not make the news. She married a newsworthy man, gave birth to children, watched him go out and away from her and them, and moved on with her life.

The two women have in common a passion for righting society's wrongs. Both are literate, middle-class, and white. Both have endured and attempted to overcome male dominance within groups dedicated to overthrowing racial, class, and political injustices. Both have written memoirs.

But Wilkerson born in 1943, grew up in a prosperous Quaker home in Connecticut, while Jones (born Cohen), 9 years older, grew up in a less prosperous Jewish one in Queens.

Wilkerson says she was totally innocent of radical politics until 1962 when she entered college.

Swarthmore was a real hot bed of intellectual discussion. I mean the classes were peripheral and what happened amongst the students was more important to most of the students than what happened in the classes. And there were also people from every political sect on the left there. I had never met anyone from the left. I mean there were red diaper babies, there were Trots, there were Social Democrats, there were everything. ... My freshman year, I went to a couple of meetings ... I couldn’t understand a word anybody was saying about anything. And no women ever spoke. But the spring of my freshman year they organized trips to go down to Cambridge, Maryland, to participate in the demonstrations that were going on down there. ... If there’s one event that changed my life, that’s what it was. I don’t remember the demonstrations really clearly. But I remember, I think there were dogs and it was, you know, Southern, very Southern. ... It was big and intense and heavy. It just completely blew my mind, and nothing was ever the same again.*

After that for her it was SDS and then the Weather Underground, and the rest is history. She became single-minded, dogmatic, and driven by the notion that the ends justify the means. As she says,

Rather than listening closely to what people had said, I tried to manipulate them into adopting the organization's current perspective, into carrying out the organization's wishes in order to protect my own standing. Rather than facing the complexity of problems, I had settled for simplistic solutions and for the fiction that we, the authors of those solutions, were somehow superior to those we sought to guide.**

The transitions of Jones's life were less sudden, momentous, or radical.

{Click image at right to view full size: The cover of Hettie's memoir shows her in youth and middle age. Photo credit: Books.Google.com}

A quiet rebellion took her away from straight-laced, homogeneous Queens into the publishing and jazz scene of Manhattan. She says,

By 1951, the year we were labeled the Silent Generation, I'd been recommended to silence often. Men had little use for an outspoken woman, I'd been warned. What I wanted, I was told, was security and upward mobility, which might be mine if I learned to shut my mouth. Myself I simply expected, by force of will, to assume a new shape in the future. Unlike any woman in my family or anyone I'd ever actually known, I was going to become -- something, anything, whatever that meant. To accomplish this I felt the need to cloister myself for a while, away from the usual expectations, at what was knows as an "all-girls college." Accepted at Vassar I chose instead Mary Washington, the woman's college of the University of Virginia.

She went there because it was cheaper and, she thought, less snobbish than Vassar, but she knew nothing about the place. For the first time in her life she was among Christians and, even more frighteningly, immersed in the culture of the ladies of the American South.

These were the people of white gloves and horse breeds, who had patterns of culture officially, including formal dinners and vespers.... I felt very much the Yankee Jew from New York. In the dining room, with a kind of tense awe, I was asked, "Are you Puerto Rican?" ... I seemed unique. In my dorm a black woman who worked as a maid sometimes picked up extra money ironing. As I had with my mother, I ironed beside her. She seemed to understand, smiled when she saw me coming, and showed me how to handle the tucks in my blouses. Apart from her, I met no other black people regularly.

A drama major, she had only one role in a college production, but performed many times for in the classrooms of backwoods schools and in the meeting rooms of Veterans' Hospitals. On graduating, she moved into Manhattan, taking menial jobs to get by. She listed to Wanda Landowska playing Bach on the harpsichord, read Whitman in Riverside Park, and studied Brecht at Columbia in a class taught by Eric Bentley.

Her life-changing event was wholly unlike Wilkerson's. She had been dating men of other races, religions, and cultures and so it's not entirely surprising to find that meeting Leroi Jones was transformational for her. She was working as a clerk in a Greenwich Village record store at the time. Here is her description of the encounter:

Nearby, running half the length of a cluttered storefront office, is a six-foot-high row of wooden milk crates, housing old 78 rpm jazz records in crumbling paper sleeves. Flakes of this yellow-brown stuff drift down and settle like snow on the dirty linoleum, and the smell of it masks the casual funk from a darker back room, where Richard (Dick) Hadlock, editor of the Record Changer, the magazine published here, sleeps whenever he's not with his girlfriend.

But he's with her now--or somewhere--leaving me: Hettie Cohen. a small, dark, twenty-two-year-old Jew from Laurelton, Queens, with a paperback book in my hand, Kafka's Amerika. I'm the Subscription Manager and I'm about to interview an applicant for the job of Shipping Manager. It's March 1957 in Greenwich Village. A haphazard pile of boxes, holding unsold issues, partly obscures the unwashed front (and only) window of the store. From time to time I glance toward this pale daylight, up from Amerika, waiting.

The applicant, arrived on a gust of sweet afternoon, turned out to be a young black man, no surprise. It was he who was surprised. "You're reading Kafka!" he said happily. He was small and wiry, with a widow's peak that sharpened his closecut hair, and a mustache and goatee to match. Yet the rakishness of all these triangles was set back, made reticent, by a button-down shirt and Clark's shoes. A Brooks Brothers look. I sat him down and we started to talk. He was smart, and very direct, and for emphasis stabbed the air with his third -- not index --finger, an affectation to notice, of course. But his movements were easy, those of man at home not only in skin but in muscle and bone. And he led with his head. What had started with Kafka just went on going. An hour later, when Dick arrived, we were still talking. "Did you tell him about the job?" Dick asked me. "The.job?" I echoed, and blushed. Left responsible and gone derelict. No interview. I see myself, now, as the heat invades my face, a hand up to my open, astonished mouth. On the left is my subscription corner, the typewriter, unanswered mail. And on my right LeRoi Jones--square-jawed, pointy-browed, grinning at me shyly, and still, I think, a little surprised I'd had so much to say.

She stuck with Roi as she called him from then on. They stuck to each other, that is, until he unstuck himself. By then, she'd been through an abortion, wedding, and birth of two children. She wrote with him, edited a magazine with him, and supported their kids -- with no help from him -- after he left. She did not waver in her faith that she -- and anyone else -- could breach barriers of race, religion, ethnic origin, and the like by making a conscious effort to learn, understand, and honor the differences among people and treat none as simply a member of some group, whatever the group or its stereotype. When the path of my life briefly intersected with hers, she had helped design the innovative Head Start Program in which I worked, one which paid women on welfare to take care of the children of other women on welfare, freeing the women to work their way out of poverty and giving their children a high quality preschool education. While the money to support the program lasted, it worked well, but the money didn't last long enough for it to achieve its aims. She was a leader in what was, in the 1960s, a controversial effort to give people tools to overcome poverty. Accounts have since said the effort was bound to fail since as poor people began to exert influence in local affairs, they provoked insuperable resentment in their local jurisdictions -- the local power structure.

Hettie is still an author and now also teaches writing to others, including -- no surprise -- people incarcerated in state and federal prisons. You can read her academic curriculum vitae on The New School web site.

Cathy Wilkerson's memoir is Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman. Seven Stories Press, 2007. Hettie Jones' is How I Became Hettie Jones, Dutton, 1990. As well as showing their opposite approaches to making the world a better place (narrow-focussed and exclusive vs. broad-based and inclusive), the memoirs demonstrate the difficulties faced by women radicals during the 1960s and '70s.

You can read about Wilkerson's memoir in many places. I noticed it in a review by Scott McLemee in Newsday which I recommend. You can get yourself a second-hand copy of Jones' memoir very cheaply and it's widely available in academic libraries.

================
Some addenda:

1. Though closer in age to Wilkerson than Jones, I'm tempermentally more sympathetic to the latter. I envy her for being able to experience the cultural transformation effected by the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village of the '50s and '60s. (More on this here.) Her memoir uses a quote from Beat poet which is pertinent to her life: "The idea ... is to change first of our own volition and according to our own inner promptings before they impose completely arbitrary changes on us." (Janes Bowles, Two Serious Ladies, 1943). This faith in self-actualization through self-realization contrasts strongly with Wilkerson's tragic yielding to the rage she felt on encountering the repression of people poor, uneducated, and inarticulate.

2. Jones' husband is a subject all his own. Born Everette L. Jones, he re-made himself first to LeRoi Jones, then Imamu Amiri Baraka. The wikipedia article on him describes his transformations pretty well. I know him best as the author of the book Blues People.

3. Note that all three of these interesting people have mingled intellectual and activist pursuits in their lives. All three write. All three have produced readable memoirs.

4. I thought maybe one of the three might have released some writings into the internet under a Creative Commons license, but their idealism does not seem to take them that direction.

5. While researching this post, I came across an article on SDS at Swarthmore which quotes my friend and classmate Paul Booth.

6. Hettie Jones answered questions about her memoir in an interview entitled Women of the Beat Generation: Conversations with Joyce Johnson and Hettie Jones.