Lady Business: Summer gratitude, Jane Addams, and names lost to history

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 107th issue, published August 2, 2020. 
 

‘Mrs. Man’

I returned to New York City this week to stay for the first time in months, and am finding myself overwhelmed with gratitude for all the ways in which I’ve been able to resume some semblance of my pre-March 2020 life.
 
An easy flight back from Chicago, reassuringly half-empty. A Covid test that returned negative results, within only 36 hours—instead of the two weeks I’d been warned to expect for NYC testing. Dinner with a friend at the riverside restaurant we usually haunt in the summer, even if the rose is now in takeout coffee cups. The subway, with almost everyone wearing masks. A Saturday spent reading at the beach.
 
Those are the upsides. There are, of course, many darker markers—the restaurants and small businesses closed for good, the Outbreak-level protective gear donned by the nurse who conducted my Covid test, the posters still up for the last Broadway show I’ll see in 2020, the knowledge that those performers and more than 30 million other Americans are losing the slight unemployment assistance that sustained them through the beginning of the pandemic. (A pandemic that, I was thoroughly depressed to report this week, is very likely to continue for at least 18 more months.)
 
More locally, there’s also an ugly ongoing fight in my neighborhood about temporarily sheltering homeless people in luxury hotels here, a piece of pandemic-heightened NIMBYism that had the dubious distinction of giving Sean Hannity more fear-mongering fodder. (Albeit with some notable fact-checking errors.)
 
It reminds me of some reading I was doing in Chicago about Jane Addams, the suffragist, pacifist, and social-welfare activist who in 1931 became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Born into wealth and privilege, by the time of her death in 1935 she was a “world-famous … friend of the poor,” according to the headline of her front-page New York Times obituary. She became so in part by establishing the first so-called “settlement house” in the United States, a Chicago institution where wealthy people actually had to interact with lower-income and less privileged people—and provide them with crazy luxuries like childcare:
 

In 1889, Addams and [Ellen Gates] Starr founded Hull House in Chicago’s poor, industrial west side, the first settlement house in the United States. The goal was for educated women to share all kinds of knowledge, from basic skills to arts and literature with poorer people in the neighborhood. They also envisioned women living in the community center, among the people they served.… Under Addams’ direction, the Hull House team provided an array of vital services to thousands of people each week: they established a kindergarten and day-care for working mothers; provided job training; English language, cooking, and acculturation classes for immigrants; established a job-placement bureau, community center, gymnasium, and art gallery.

 
That summary and her 1935 obit gloss over some of the more recent revisions to Addams’ biography, like her romantic relationships with Starr and her longtime companion/financial backer, Mary Rozet Smith. And the NYT obit, while giving Addams her due and her full name, also off-handedly tosses off references to several other prominent women known only by their husbands’ identities, including “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt” and “Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen.”
 
While Eleanor Roosevelt has since long reclaimed her own name in history, poor Louise deKoven Bowen continues to pop up as “Mrs. Joseph T.” in articles from as recently as 2013. It’s fortunately a rare exception these days, if an indication of how hard it can be to shake out the real history hidden behind past attitudes about, and erasures of, women.
 
“‘Mrs. Man’ is historically specific to the 19th and 20th centuries, and some people are still wedded to it in the 21st century believing it is ‘time-honored’ or ‘immemorial,’” as Cambridge University’s Dr. Amy Erickson told the NYT’s ‘Mrs. Files’ project this spring. “For those women who adopt(ed) it, it seems to have represented some sort of status. For the rest of us, it’s incomprehensible.”
 

Lady Bits

--My love for history, with all of its imperfections, was nurtured early on by Deloris Bridy McFadden, my junior-high history teacher and the reason I spent several years trekking to Penn State to compete in National History Day state finals. She was a remarkable mentor, teacher, and human being, and will be greatly missed.
 
--Of course, I didn’t spend all of my free time in Chicago reading Improving Women’s History; I also watched Indian Matchmaking, and kind of hated it by the end! Aside from all the well-argued criticisms about the show’s failure to interrogate colorism or caste bias, its last couple of episodes were just incredibly poorly constructed. You can’t end an episode on a cliffhanger and then never return to that storyline again!
 
--"The new girl remained the sick girl. She said no thank you. She would not die for Doritos.” Hemingway writes The Babysitter’s Club, courtesy McSweeney’s (and Felicia).
 
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