The Proud Surrender: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Love Letters to Edith Wynn Matthison

“This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness.”

No other form of human communication measures up to the mesmerism of an exquisite love letter, especially one that defies the romantic conventions of its age, like the stirring missives exchanged between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, or Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok.

In 1917, during her final year at Vassar College — which she had entered at the unusually ripe age of 21 — Edna St. Vincent Millay met and befriended British silent film actress Edith Wynne Matthison, fifteen years her senior. Taken with Matthison’s fierce spirit, majestic beauty, and impeccable style, Millay’s platonic attraction quickly blossomed into an intense romantic infatuation. Edith, a woman who made no apologies for relishing life’s bounties, eventually kissed Edna and invited her to her summer home. A series of disarmingly passionate letters followed. Found in The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay (public library), these epistolary longings capture that strange blend of electrifying ardor and paralyzing pride familiar to anyone who’s ever been in love.

Writing to Edith, Edna cautions of her uncompromising frankness:

Listen; if ever in my letters to you, or in my conversation, you see a candor that seems almost crude, — please know that it is because when I think of you I think of real things, & become honest, — and quibbling and circumvention seem very inconsiderable.

In another, she pleads:

I will do whatever you tell me to do. … Love me, please; I love you. I can bear to be your friend. So ask of me anything. … But never be ‘tolerant,’ or ‘kind.’ And never say to me again — don’t dare to say to me again — ‘Anyway, you can make a trial’ of being friends with you! Because I can’t do things that way. … I am conscious only of doing the thing that I love to do — that I have to do — and I have to be your friend.

In yet another, Millay articulates brilliantly the “proud surrender” at the heart of every materialized infatuation and every miracle of “real, honest, complete love”:

You wrote me a beautiful letter, — I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was. — I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love. … nothing that has happened to me for a long time has made me so happy as I shall be to visit you sometime. — You must not forget that you spoke of that, — because it would disappoint me cruelly. … I shall try to bring a few quite nice things with me; I will get together all that I can, and then when you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to you; I don’t talk like that to many people.

With love,

Vincent Millay

Complement with history’s most beautiful LGBT love letters, then see Millay on the love of music.

Thanks, Chel

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Oppression by Omission: Women Soldiers Who Dressed and Fought as Men in the Civil War

“Women lived in germ-ridden camps, languished in appalling prisons, and died miserably, but honorably, for their country and their cause just as men did.”

Conventional narrative has framed the Civil War as a man’s fight, with historical accounts focusing almost exclusively on the men who fought as Yanks and Rebs in the 1860s. But such commonly accepted accounts present, like all history, a revisionist history that excises the stories of the women who, despite the extraordinary obstructions of the era, took to the battlefields. In They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War (public library), historians DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook chronicle and contextualize more than 250 documented cases of women who served in the ranks of both the Union and Confederate armies dressed as men, “the best-kept historical secret of the Civil War” — an act at once rebellious and patriotic, using this usurped male social identity to claim full status as citizens of their nation and access male independence in an age when neither was available to women. Blanton and Cook write in the introduction:

Popular notions of women during the Civil War center on self-sacrificing nurses, romantic spies, or brave ladies maintaining their home front in the absence of their men. This conventional picture of gender roles does not tell the entire story, however. Men were not the only ones to march off to war. Women bore arms and charged into battle, too. Women lived in germ-ridden camps, languished in appalling prisons, and died miserably, but honorably, for their country and their cause just as men did.

To pass as a man, Union soldier Frances Louisa Clayton, who enlisted with her husband in 1861 as 'Jack Williams,' took up gambling, cigar-smoking, and swearing.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library

Sarah Edmonds Seelye, one of the best-documented female soldiers, served two years in the Union army as Franklin Thompson and received a military pension 25 years after the war ended.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library

So why did women do this? For some, like their male counterparts, the motivation was purely patriotic. Others did if for love, taking to the battlefields in order to remain close to a husband, lover, fiancé, father, or brother. But for many, the reason was economic — an army private made $13 a month, roughly double what a seamstress, laundress, or maid would make. At the time of the Civil War, women, unable to vote or have bank accounts and still subject to Victorian ideals of homemaking and motherhood as the sole purpose of female existence, had neither personal nor political agency. In fact, these female soldiers tended to come from particularly marginalized groups — immigrants, the working class, farm girls, and women living below the poverty line. The freedom to make and spend their own money, Blanton and Cook argue, was a source of unprecedented, if private, empowerment as they gained access to social opportunities and privileges previously unavailable to them. Blanton and Cook write:

Society placed enormous restrictions on females. While upper-class and educated middle-class women might find a small measure of independence through employment as teachers, writers, or governesses, working- and lower-class women had few appealing options outside of marriage. Their employment prospects were usually limited to sewing, prostitution, or domestic servitude. Statistically, the majority of unmarried working-class women chose the latter. In New York City in 1860, maids received between four and seven dollars a month, ‘good’ cooks earned seven or eight dollars a month, and laundresses might earn up to ten dollars per month. … On the other hand, three months’ service as a private in the Union army yielded a hefty sum of thirty-nine dollars in an age when most monthly salaries for men ranged from ten to twenty dollars.

Union soldier Albert Cashier, who was really Jennie Hodgers, fought in dozens of battles during the Civil War. In 1913, she made headlines upon being discovered as a woman in an old soldiers home.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library

Though once found out, these female soldiers were discharged from the army for “congenital peculiarities,” “sexual incompatibility,” or the unambiguously termed offense of “unmistakable evidence of being a woman,” most of these women went undetected, at least for a while — a fact not all that astounding in the context of Victorian society where the single most revealing litmus test, nudity, was a rarity given bathing was a rare occurrence and people often slept in their clothes. (But today, in an age when the tip of the devastating iceberg that is sexual assault in the military is only beginning to emerge, one has to wonder what happened to the women who did get found out.)

Thanks to the poorly fitted uniforms, some women were even able to disguise their pregnancies until the very end, startling their male platoon mates with the delivery. Others chose to continue dressing as men after the end of the war, raising gender identity questions also not discussed in the book. But perhaps most interesting of all is the question of how women got the idea for this in the first place. Blanton argues that much of it had to do with cultural influence — cross-dressing female heroines permeated Victorian literature, with military and sailor women often celebrated in 17th-century ballads, novels, and poems.

They Fought Like Demons goes on to explore the complex motivations, realities, and untold stories of women who fought as, and fought like, men, reminding us that omission is as much a tool of political oppression in the construction of cultural mythology as propaganda.

Some images via Smithsonian Magazine

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Lord Chesterfield on the Art of Pleasing: Outlandish Advice to His Teenage Son, 1748

“You may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live.”

Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, better-known simply as Lord Chesterfield, remains best-remembered for the hundreds of witty and wise letters he wrote to his son, spanning everything from history and literature to meditations on philosophy to advice on life and love — an intriguing addition to history’s greatest letters of fatherly guidance in some ways, and a compendium of terrible advice in others. Beginning in 1737 and ending with the young man’s sudden death in 1768 at the age of 36, which devastated Lord Chesterfield, the 400 or so surviving letters were collected by the son’s widow in 1774 and published in a hefty tome titled Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (public library; public domain).

Among Lord Chesterfield’s wide-ranging counsel is a section dedicated to “the art of pleasing,” peppered with outlandish suggestions that at once bespeak the era’s biases and reveal the earl’s deep investment in his son’s success and happiness.

Writing from Bath on March 9, 1748, he advises the 16-year-old boy:

I must from time to time remind you of what I have often recommended to you, and of what you cannot attend to too much: sacrifice to the graces. Intrinsic merit alone will not do; it will gain you the general esteem of all, but not the particular affection, that is the heart, of any. To engage the affections of any particular person you must, over and above your general merit, have some particular merit to that person; by services done, or offered; by expressions of regard and esteem; by complaisance, attentions, etc., for him; and the graceful manner of doing all these things opens the way to the heart, and facilitates, or rather, insures, their effects.

A thousand little things, not separately to be described, conspire to form these graces, this je ne scais quoi, that always pleases. A pretty person, a proper degree of dress, an harmonious voice, something open and cheerful in the countenance, but without laughing; a distinct and properly varied manner of speaking; all these things and many others are necessary ingredients in the composition of the pleasing je ne scais quoi, which everybody feels, though nobody can describe. Observe carefully, then, what displeases or pleases you in others, and be persuaded that, in general, the same things will please or displease them in you.

Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it; and I would heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh. Many people, at first, from awkwardness and mauvaise honte, have got a very disagreeable and silly trick of laughing whenever they speak.

This, and many other very disagreeable habits, are owing to mauvaise honte at their first setting out in the world. They are ashamed in company, and so disconcerted that they do not know what they do, and try a thousand tricks to keep themselves in countenance; which tricks afterwards grow habitual to them. Some put their fingers in their nose, others scratch their heads, others twirl their hats; in short, every awkward, ill-bred body has its tricks. But the frequency does not justify the thing, and all these vulgar habits and awkwardness are most carefully to be guarded against, as they are great bars in the way of the art of pleasing.

On September 5th the same year, Lord Chesterfield sends the boy a letter from London, offering further counsel on the acquisition of manners and the art of pleasing. Though at first glance his advice may appear to encourage superficiality by way of imitating the manners of others, perhaps the art of pleasing is no different from all art, which Virginia Woolf reminds us is invariably rooted in imitation. Lord Chesterfield writes:

Berlin will be entirely a new scene to you, and I look upon it, in a manner, as your first step into the great world; take care that step be not a false one, and that you do not stumble at the threshold. You will there be in more company than you have yet been; manners and attentions will, therefore, be more necessary.

You will best acquire these by frequenting the companies of people of fashion; but then you must resolve to acquire them, in those companies, by proper care and observation. When you go into good company — by good company is meant the people of the first fashion of the place — observe carefully their turn, their manners, their address; and conform your own to them. But this is not all either; go deeper still; observe their characters, and pry into both their hearts and their heads. Seek for their particular merit, their predominant passion, or their prevailing weakness; and you will then know what to bait your hook with to catch them.

The letter then takes a sexist turn for the so-appalling-it’s-almost-amusing as Lord Chesterfield shares with the boy a carefully guided secret about how to gain the favors of a creature useful in the honing of manners but otherwise witless, humorless, and generally useless:

As women are a considerable, or, at least, a pretty numerous part of company; and as their suffrages go a great way towards establishing a man’s character in the fashionable part of the world, which is of great importance to the fortune and figure he proposes to make in it, it is necessary to please them. I will, therefore, upon this subject, let you into certain arcana that will be very useful for you to know, but which you must, with the utmost care, conceal and never seem to know.

Women, then, are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid reasoning, good sense, I never knew in my life one that had it, or who reasoned or acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together. Some little passion or humour always breaks in upon their best resolutions. Their beauty neglected or controverted, their age increased or their supposed understandings depreciated, instantly kindles their little passions, and overturns any system of consequential conduct that in their most reasonable moments they have been capable of forming. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly, forward child; but he neither consults them about nor trusts them with, serious matters; though he often makes them believe that he does both, which is the thing in the world that they are proud of.

But these are secrets, which you must keep inviolably, if you would not, like Orpheus, be torn to pieces by the whole sex. On the contrary, a man who thinks of living in the great world must be gallant, polite, and attentive to please the women. They have, from the weakness of men, more or less influence in all courts; they absolutely stamp every man’s character in the beau monde, and make it either current, or cry it down, and stop it in payment.

It is, therefore, absolutely necessary to manage, please, and flatter them; and never to discover the least mark of contempt, which is what they never forgive; but in this they are not singular, for it is the same with men, who will much sooner forgive an injustice than an insult.

These are some of the hints which my long experience in the great world enables me to give you, and which, if you attend to them, may prove useful to you in your journey through it. I wish it may be a prosperous one; at least, I am sure that it must be your own fault if it is not.

Complement Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman with some decidedly more measured, thoughtful, and timeless fatherly advice from Sherwood Anderson, Charles Dickens and Ted Hughes.

Artwork by Wilber H. Schilling

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The Feminine Mystique Half a Century Later

How Betty Friedan “pulled the trigger on history” and awakened women to the freedom to question what it means to live a full life.

In 1957, turning the corner on her own 15th college reunion, reconstructionist Betty Friedan set out to survey university graduates about their education, life after college, and general life-satisfaction. Wading through the responses, she noticed an odd, discernible undercurrent — a kind of quiet but intense unhappiness described by women in the golden age of the housewife, which Friedan termed “the problem that has no name.” On February 19, 1963, she gave shape to the problem with the landmark publication of The Feminine Mystique (public library) — a centerpiece of modern gender politics, which sparked the second wave of the feminist movement, taught generations how to be a woman, and went on to become one of the most important and influential social critiques in contemporary history. In an age when women were reduced to a fertile uterus armed with lipstick and an oven mit, it championed women’s reproductive rights, called for better education, criticized workplace laws and cultural attitudes towards childcare responsibilities and, above all, advocated for women’s right to freely explore the fundamental question of what it means to live a full life. Though many of Friedan’s ideas may appear tired and painfully familiar today, that’s precisely the point: Like every cornerstone of social science, the true feat of The Feminine Mystique was identifying, articulating, and speaking up against the problem long before the problem had permeated the awareness of our collective conscience.

Today, some dismiss the spirit of feminism as a thing of the past, a social crutch we’ve outgrown and left behind — after all, in the decades since Friedan’s landmark manifesto, the world has seen its first female president, first woman in space, first female Secretary of State, and first woman to win an Academy Award as best director. And yet, even half a century later, we still witness gobsmacking gender generalizations, gaping gender gaps in education, egregiously unequal media coverage and profiling, and enduring bias in the scientific academy. The problem, it seems, has long been named — but it is yet to be solved.

In her excellent exploration of Friedan’s legacy, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (public library), historian Stephanie Coontz puts things in no uncertain terms:

The Feminine Mystique has been credited — or blamed — for destroying, single-handedly and almost overnight, the 1950s consensus that women’s place was in the home. Friedan’s book ‘pulled the trigger on history,’ in the words of Future Shock author Alvin Toffler.

Coontz sets out to tell the story of the women directly impacted by the iconic book through the countless, fervent letters they sent Friedan, seeking to understand why these women, despite the comforts and privileges of their material circumstances, felt “so anxious about their femininity and so guilty about their aspirations.” Coontz frames the necessity for such an approach, contextualizing Friedan’s work:

Many books have been written and movies made about ‘the greatest generation.’ But the subjects of these stories are almost invariably men — the army, navy, and air force men of WWII (only 2 percent of the military in that era were female); the ‘Mad Men’ of Madison Avenue who pioneered America’s mass consumer culture in the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy; the ordinary husbands and fathers who created a middle-class life for their families after the privations of the Depression and the war.

What do we know about these men’s wives and daughters? As their husbands and fathers moved into a new era, many women felt suspended between the constraints of the old sphere of female existence and the promise of a future whose outline they could barely make out. They were, as one of the women I interviewed told me, ‘a generation of intelligent women, sidelined from the world.’ Some were content to provide love and comfort when the men came home. But others felt that something was missing from their lives, though they could seldom put their finger on it.

These women — mostly white, mostly middle class — were at the eye of a hurricane. They knew that powerful new forces were gathering all around them, but they felt strangely, uneasily becalmed. …

To modern generations, these women’s lives seem as outmoded as the white gloves and pert hats they wore when they left the shelter of their homes. Yet even today, their experiences and anxieties shape the choices modern women debate and the way feminism has been defined by both its supporters and its opponents.

Friedan pulled into question the core tenets of The Century of the (male) Self and the ideals of suburban utopia:

Friedan told these women that their inability to imagine a fuller, more complete life was the product of a repressive postwar campaign to wipe out the memory of past feminist activism and to drive women back into the home. As a historian, I knew her argument ignored the challenges to the feminine mystique that already existed in the 1950s. But as I interviewed women for this book and read more about the cultural climate of the era, I came to believe that Friedan was correct in suggesting that there was something especially disorienting — ‘something paralyzing,’ as one of the women I interviewed put it — about the situation confronting women at the dawn of the 1960s. Freudian pronouncements about the natural dependence and passivity of females and the ‘sickness’ of women who are attracted to careers maybe have coexisted with sympathetic assurances that women were in fact capable and deserve equality. But such assurances only made it harder for women to figure out whether anyone besides themselves was to blame for their feelings of inadequacy.

Friedan captured a paradox that many women struggle with today. The elimination of the most blatant denials of one’s rights can be very disorienting if you don’ have the ability to exercise one right without giving up another.

Betty Friedan in junior high school

Image: Schlesinger Library, Harvard University

Still, Princeton professor and former State Department policy planning director Anne-Marie Slaughter observed in brushing up against a “rude epiphany” that feminists might have sold young women an impossible ideal and much has to change if we are, indeed, to have equal opportunity in every aspect of life. In Slaughter’s own brave and eloquent words:

A rude epiphany hit me soon after I got there. When people asked why I had left government, I explained that I’d come home not only because of Princeton’s rules (after two years of leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible. I have not exactly left the ranks of full-time career women: I teach a full course load; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book. But I routinely got reactions from other women my age or older that ranged from disappointed (‘It’s such a pity that you had to leave Washington’) to condescending (‘I wouldn’t generalize from your experience. I’ve never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great’).

The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome enough. But it was the second set of reactions — those implying that my parenting and/or my commitment to my profession were somehow substandard—that triggered a blind fury. Suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to take some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that she could spend more time with her family. I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).

But, ultimately, at the heart of Friedan’s message with The Feminine Mystique lies a tireless insistence on the freedom to find one’s purpose and do meaningful work as the bedrock of what it means to be human:

The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.

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