Mother's Day thoughts and Book Suggestions May 8, 2021

Although I am a mother, of a daughter who is now 37 and fully independent, when I think of Mother's Day, my mind ofte goes to my female ancestors, beginning with my own mother and stretching back through the grandmother's I knew, the great-grandmother I knew, and the ones I never met.

Also, I often look back on those women I feel are my spiritual, political, literary mothers, the Mothers of the Movements for Suffrage and Abolition, the Mother's of Literature who wrote the great books, and those who worked in universities and academic settings to bring these women back to us. There was a feminist press that used to find and reprint out of print works by women writers, was it Virago Press? I just looked it up and YES it was and furthermore there is now an e-book about the history of Virago Press.

I had a lost and forgotten female ancestor, my mother's biological mother. My mother was adopted raised by her aunt Lavinia, after Lavinia's sister, Sarah died at the age of 25, leaving three little toddler daughter's behind. The three little girls were placed by their father in The Camden Friendless Children's Shelter. This episode in the family history was entirely buried and never spoken about. Many years into my adulthood, and my retirment, when I took up family history, I tried to find out as much as I could about this lost grandmother whose name was never spoken. I am not sure what she did to be so completely erased, but also, people in those days didn't do much reminiscing, as I recall.

My quest for our fore-mothers was begun long before my search for my biological grandmother. My search for my literary female ancestors began in my college days, when these writers, too, were lost and forgotten and never spoken of. By the time I took my second degree this time in Art, feminists had worked their way up the ranks of academnia and were making archaeological inroads in excavating these lost 'mothers.' I was fortunate enough to have had Wendy Slatkin for my teaher. She had written a supremely meaningful book on Women Artists and she was both a passionate and brilliant teacher and an exellent scholar and writer.

Today, the day before 2021 Mother's Days, I have been catchng up on the Sunday New York Times Book Review and I read a review of a book which I am going to buy from amazon as soon as I finish this blog post: THE AGITATORS, Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights, by Dorothy Wickenden

One of the details that struck a chord in reading the review of this book was that Harriet Tubman, one of the three women profiled, was illiterate, could neither read nor write. She was a monumentlly heroic feigure, as by now, you reader, and most of America knows thanks to the film HARRIET, as well as fairly dedicated revisionist history since the 1970's. A book I had bought but have not read yet about Frederick Douglas adn the women who supported, abetted, and loved him, spoke of his first wife, also a previously enslaved woman, who was illiterate. Both Harriet and Douglas's wife were mocked by contemporaries for their 'plantation dialect' and their illiteracy. This breaks my heart. And it reminds me of the long and arduous journey for women's educational equality that our fore-mothers made.

A few nights ago, I watched a documentary about one of my lifelong favorite male writers, Charles Dickens, and I was struck again by his ill treatment of his first wife, Catherine who bore ten children and was then abandoned by Dickens, forced to leave her home and children which were then taken over by a younger sister. What choice did she have? She would have gone to the "work house" "alms house' or been out on the streets if she didn't accept the obominable option forced on her by Charles Dickens who blamed her for all of the children he had to support, willfully oblivious to the part he played in their conception. Catherine had no occupation and no skills with which to support herself. She was at his mercy, and there was precious little of it.

One of the things for which I am most grateful has been the opportunity for me to get an education, develope a marketable skill, teaching (a stronghold of women's rights and employment throughout the past two hundred years) and thereby to escape poverty, desperation, and a deprived old age, thanks to our union and my pension.

Thank you, Mom, for all the books you bought me and read to me and thank you Lavinia Lyons for raising my mother when your sister died, and thank you to all my teahersin 2021.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com