History gets a woman’s touch

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —  It hardly seems like the gateway to immortality, this shabby temporary office just off Brattle Street, with its barren white walls and its sweating overhead pipes. But if you were the ghost of Erma Bombeck, Ayn Rand, Wilma Rudolph, Margaret Chase Smith, Tammy Wynette or any other accomplished female American who died in the last quarter of the 20th century, you might well be hovering here, peering anxiously over Susan Ware’s shoulder, hoping to spot your name on one of the nearly 500 slips of paper tacked to a bulletin board.

Ware is the editor of the latest volume in the “Notable American Women” series, which is scheduled for publication late this year. A biographical dictionary published initially by Harvard University Press in 1971, “Notable” was conceived as a scholarly antidote to the neglect of women in American historical writing. But it has also become a “who’s in/who’s out” filtering exercise in which Ware and assistant editor Stacy Braukman play history’s handmaidens.

A quick glance at the bulletin board reveals such diverse notables as comedian Lucille Ball and social activist Dorothy Day; dancer Martha Graham and civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer; actress Rita Hayworth and anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Keep glancing and you’ll run into the likes of Bette Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Dian Fossey, Barbara Jordan, Georgia O’Keeffe and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. And yes, Bombeck, Rand, Rudolph, Smith and Wynette.

Even more interesting, however, are some names you’re less likely to know.

Take Dorothy Arzner, the only woman to regularly direct Hollywood films in the heyday of the studio system. Or Pauli Murray, a multitalented lawyer and writer who bridged the gap between civil rights and women’s rights, then became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. Or Brownie Wise, the entrepreneur who taught Earl Tupper how to sell Tupperware.

Or take one of Ware’s personal favorites: the scientist who studied roaches.

As she learned more about women’s mid-20th century scientific careers, Ware says, she began to see a pattern of scientists marrying each other and forming lifelong professional partnerships. “But what happens is, because of nepotism rules, the women never get the academic appointments,” she says. “And so you have them working together in a lab -- it’s his lab, and the wife is an unpaid research associate.”

By way of illustration, she mentions Berta Vogel Scharrer, whose collaboration with her husband, Ernst, greatly advanced the nascent field of neuroendocrinology. The Scharrers had made a joint decision to follow the paid/unpaid pattern, Ware says, but this meant that Berta didn’t get research funding and had trouble acquiring subjects for her experiments.

No problem.

The basement of their lab offered plenty of cockroaches, and the work proceeded.

Beyond queens, mistresses

It’s easy to forget that women were barely considered part of the historical narrative until just a few decades ago.

Oh, you’d run into some powerful queens and influential mistresses in the textbooks, plus the occasional exception (Susan B. Anthony, Joan of Arc) from other walks of life. But as recently as the 1950s and ‘60s, when the original “Notable American Women” project was gearing up, history was assumed to be a record of the activities of men, with the defining of it largely a male prerogative.

This notion began to be seriously challenged in the early 1970s. And “Notable” came along at the perfect time to help.

The idea was first proposed in 1955 by Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. (not to be confused with his Harvard historian son, Arthur Jr.). The elder Schlesinger “had long deplored scholars’ neglect of women’s history,” wrote Edward and Janet James in the preface to the three-volume, 2,075-page work, whose 1,359 meticulously researched biographical essays they spent more than a decade commissioning and editing.

Like the Scharrers, the Jameses were an academic couple for whom the wife’s career was secondary. Yet Janet James contributed the ambitious introductory essay that attempted to synthesize 350 years of women’s history, ending it with the cautiously worded prediction that “the future might well witness a larger, long-term commitment to the world outside the home.”

By the time those first volumes came out in 1971, the so-called “second wave” of feminism -- whose origin is often dated to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” -- had started rocking America’s sociocultural boat. In profession after profession, women began forcing their way through previously barred doors. The study of history proved no exception, though the first women through those doors didn’t have an easy time of it.

“The scorn was incredible,” says Linda Kerber, a University of Iowa scholar and former president of the Organization of American Historians. Kerber is talking about the resistance she and her colleagues met, even in the early ‘70s, to the notion that studying women was a legitimate academic endeavor. Yet to examine the world from this new perspective was hugely energizing as well. “All the inherited history has to be redone. There ain’t no girls in it!” she says. “And suddenly they matter.”

Ware was one of the first to benefit from this change.

A 53-year-old historian who has taught at New York University and Harvard and whose books include biographies of aviator Amelia Earhart and New Deal politician Molly Dewson, Ware was a student at Wellesley College when she discovered feminism. “Summer of 1970,” she says. “One can be specific about these things.” She read Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” and Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook,” and she determined that she would do her senior thesis on a topic involving women.

“Of course there were no courses in women’s history,” she says, but she ended up writing about the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848, and when she applied to graduate school, she wanted women to remain her focus.

Her timing was perfect: Someone five years older likely would have “started off as a Russian historian or a diplomatic historian or something else.” But Ware, a cheerful self-described workaholic, has been able to make women’s history her whole career. She consulted the original “Notable” while researching her college thesis. She wrote a couple of essays for the first supplement, published in 1980, which covered women who died between 1951 and 1975. A couple of decades later, offered the opportunity to edit the next volume, she signed on gladly.

Then she started reading New York Times obituaries, ranking dead women on a scale of 1 through 4.

Making the cut

Dottie West didn’t make it. Neither did Patsy Montana, Mabel Mercer, Teddi King, Malvina Reynolds or Mary Wells.

Hasn’t anybody here heard the first lady of Motown sing “My Guy”?

“It was tough,” Braukman says of the no-Wells decision.

The two women have moved away from the bulletin board now. Braukman has pulled some manila folders from one of the file cabinets, and they’re looking at a list headed “Music, Popular.” Karen Carpenter’s name has been crossed off. “She was one I said was going in over my dead body,” Ware explains.

This makes Ware sound like the all-powerful “Notable” czarina -- and that’s not the way the selection process really worked.

Ware’s obituary reading was just a preliminary step, and even some women she rated “1” didn’t make it in the end. She and Braukman checked a variety of other sources for candidates, and once they had a long enough list in a given field -- physics, say, or theater -- they circulated it to numerous expert consultants and asked them to rank the lasting significance of each woman’s accomplishments.

That’s how prolific diarist and sometime literary pornographer Anais Nin, not exactly a Ware favorite, made the cut. The consultants rated her so highly that she couldn’t be ignored.

Ask Ware to name her favorite notables and she hesitates. Day after day, she says, she would encounter “yet another interesting life,” about which “I don’t think I ever failed to learn something or be stimulated.” Still, some stood out.

One of the first obits she read was that of talk radio host Mary Margaret McBride, “the Oprah Winfrey of her day,” who became a lifeline to the wider world for stay-at-home women of the 1940s and early 1950s. Ware was so fascinated by McBride that she’s written a biography of her, due out from NYU Press this fall.

She’s also proud of including Dorothy Fosdick, a vital if largely invisible foreign policy aide to Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Cold War powerhouse. “She’s one of these women that kind of disappeared behind a famous man,” Ware says, and “if we hadn’t done this essay, she would have been lost to history.”

Because it includes only women who have died, “Notable” comes with a built-in time lag. The upcoming volume mostly features women whose careers peaked between the 1930s and the 1970s, which means they built those careers at a time when expectations of full equality between the sexes were not yet in place. Ware was saddened by stories like that of conductor Antonia Brico, who had to scale back her aspirations when she couldn’t break into a notoriously male-dominated field. Mostly, however, she was impressed to see how so many women forged forward despite the odds.

She is “such a perfect example of resourcefulness and not being stopped by discrimination,” Ware says, “that I have always been very fond of her.”

The biggest sign of progress will be when “Notable American Women” becomes unnecessary because women’s lives are fully integrated into biographical dictionaries and historical writing generally. But there’s no consensus on when this might occur.

Carol Hurd Green, who co- edited the 1980 “Notable” supplement with Barbara Sicherman, remembers one of the project’s board members, historian Gerda Lerner, assessing the situation at the time:

“Well, we won’t need to do another one,” Lerner said.

Two decades later, when Harvard University Press decided to attempt a new volume after all, Ware remembers being questioned by the National Endowment for the Humanities on precisely this point. “There was a sense of ‘maybe it isn’t necessary,’ ” she says, though NEH ultimately provided more than $400,000 to fund her work.

So will another supplement be needed a quarter century from now? Braukman thinks not, but Ware says at least one more volume might be a good idea. The lives it chronicled “would feel different than the lives in this one,” she says. They would have been lived, at least in part, in the context of the novel assumption that women can do anything men can do -- and the contrast would be instructive.

Also, the next batch of notables would include many of the women whose efforts made this progress possible, and Ware thinks their granddaughters need to understand just how much they accomplished. “Even if these younger women don’t identify with the feminist movement,” she says, their lives will have been enriched by the opportunities it provided.

And while Ware and Braukman don’t mention it, there’s at least one more reason to root for a new volume:

Picking notable women is fun.

Ask the editors to speculate on who might make the next cut, and you’ll get unanimity on Gwyneth Paltrow (“no”), Grace Slick (“probably not”) and Britney Spears (“absolutely not”). They think Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) might make it, but Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) might not. They see Katharine Hepburn, Katharine Graham and Eudora Welty as locks.

How about Phyllis Schlafly -- lawyer, author, scourge of the Equal Rights Amendment, antifeminist icon and, according to her website, “America’s best-known advocate of the dignity and honor that we as a society owe to the role of fulltime homemaker”? Will she get in?

Ware has no doubt at all about this one. “Oh, absolutely!” she says. “Absolutely.”