All-Night Party
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been spending a a fair amount of time in recent months in New York City in the 1910s and 1920s, especially the corners of it dedicated to artists, bohemians, and modernists, self-declared and otherwise. Consequently, when All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 by Andrea Barnett crossed my path, I immediately snapped it up.
I expected it to be a companion to Hotbed, Joanna Scutts’ account of radical women in Greenwich Village during much the same period. And in many ways, it is. Barnet discusses many of the women who appear in Hotbed, and makes an occasional passing reference to Heterodoxy, the social club that stands at the center of Scutt’s account. But where Scutts focuses on the radical activism of the women she discusses, using their personal lives as means of entry to the larger social story, Barnet’s account is driven by what she describes as “Creative dissent, whether expressed as artistic innovation or as liberating lifestyle.” Where Scutts’ radical women were for the most part white, with one or two carefully noted exceptions, Barnet divides her subjects evenly between Greenwich Village and Harlem, and the often uncomfortable intersection between the two.
That said, Barnet’s careful attempt at looking at both the white bohemians of Greenwich Village and their Black counterparts in Harlem underlines the fundamental differences between the two worlds. The white women whose stories she tells include poets, artists, magazine publishers, activists, journalists, a photographer, the dancer Isadora Duncan, and at least one woman who seems to have been famous for being famous. With one exception, the Black women she discusses are blues singers. The only place at which their experiences overlap is at the level of the wealthy salon hostesses Mabel Dodge and A’Leila Walker—and the contrast between the two is striking.
I have mixed feelings about All-Night Party, though that may say more about me than it does about the book. I could easily imagine myself as part of the world Scutts depicts in Hotbed; the lives Barnet shares seemed totally alien, even when there is considerable overlap between the two sets of characters. Nonetheless, reading the two in conjunction gave me a richer picture of a complex and fascinating time and place than either book would have provided alone.
Worth the time if you are interested in the period.
From the Archives: Daughters of Chivalry
I’m getting closer to having enough bandwidth to write new posts, honest. In the meantime, here’s one of my favorites from 2019.
In Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Princesses of King Edward Longshanks, historian Kelcey Wilson-Lee tells the stories of the five daughters of Edward I of England and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, who survived into adulthood: Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth.
I’ve got to say the book has a shaky start. Wilson-Lee sets up a questionable and unnecessary straw woman in her introduction: a “popular” vision of medieval princesses as powerless and passive that she describes as built on “an empire of fairy stories, Hollywood films, theme parks and cheaply produced ball gowns.” Personally, I’m not sure anyone believes in the powerless princesses she describes–not the little girls who wear those ball gowns with attitude* and certainly not anyone who would chose to read a book titled Daughters of Chivalry. Maybe that version of princesses existed once upon a time, but my own memory of fairy tales includes a fair number of princesses who used every ounce of power they held to control who they married–something only one of the real-life medieval princesses in Daughters of Chivalry managed to control.
That quibble aside, Daughters of Chivalry is an excellent book.
Like even the most elite medieval women, Wilson-Lee’s princesses left a spotty trail in the historical record, most often appearing in official chronicles in the context of their relationship with one of the men in their lives. She fleshes out the picture of their lives using a variety of sources—most notably the account records for the various royal households**—plus a certain amount of informed speculation.
Wilson-Lee uses her sources to good effect. She creates portraits of five clearly defined individuals. Joanna, for instance, frequently defied her father and took full advantage of the opportunities accorded to a young, wealthy widow in medieval society. Mary, who entered the convent of Amesbury at the age of six, had a taste for luxury and a gambling habit at odds with her vow of poverty. She also places the sisters within the larger context of royal women in the late medieval period, exploring questions of education, marriages (political and otherwise), widowhood, property, travel, and the role of royal women as political intercessors. Like the women she describes, Wilson-Lee never loses sight of the fact that what power these women enjoyed was derived from their relationship to the king, but she fully explores the nature of that power and how they used it.
*A year or two ago, I saw a little girl stomping through the aisles of my local grocery store wearing hiking books with a princess gown and carrying a sword. I’m pretty sure she didn’t share Wilson-Lee’s “popular” vision of princesses.
**The nature of her sources means there is a lot of description of real-life princess dresses. This is not a complaint. Just an observation.
Back in March, I celebrated Women’s History Month here in the Margins with a series of mini-interviews with people who are involved in creating and studying women’s history. A lot of you seemed to enjoy it. (I know I did.) So I’m thinking about doing it again in 2020. If there is someone you think would be a good fit, let me know.
From the Archives: The Fabric of Civilization
Another post from the past. This time from 2021. (I promise. New posts will be coming soon.)
Two sentences early in Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World caught my imagination:
“What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric technologies were literally intertwined.”
I was predisposed to enjoy the book, which combines two of my favorite things—history and textiles—in a big picture exploration of commerce, technology, and civilization itself. But with those two sentences I was hooked. And I remained hooked for the entire book. If I had been reading in a hard copy instead of an e-galley, I would have put lots of exclamation marks in the margins and stuffed it full of sticky notes.
The Fabric of Civilization is a story of innovation, or more accurately a series of stories. Postrel convincingly argues that textiles have played a central role in the histories of technology, commerce, and civilization itself. She describes innovations in the creation of textiles, from the game-changing discovery of string in the Stone Age to current efforts to engineer “smart textiles.”* She explains the fundamental principles of spinning and weaving, and the unexpected relationship between weaving and binary code.** She considers how changes in textile manufacturing shaped the larger world, including the textile mills that sparked the Industrial Revolution and the search for better dyes that created the modern chemical industry. She looks at the development of information technologies as a result of long-distance textile trades: business letters in ancient Assyria, regular mail service in medieval Italy, double-entry bookkeeping in Renaissance Italy and the roots of modern banking in the need for international credit arrangements in the early modern era.
Postrel is writing history on a global scale, but she never loses sight of the people in her story. A woman weaver in ancient Assyria responding to changing market demands, the teenaged Niccolo Machiavelli*** mastering the “new math” of Hindu-Arabic numerals, paleoanthropologists attempting to reproduce prehistoric fibers, and modern textile chemists and engineers all play a role.
Combining exhaustive research with an accessible writing style, The Fabric of Civilization will appeal to both fans of micro-histories and to textile junkies interested in the history of their passion.
*I doubt that I’ll be an early adopter.
**She describes weavers as “visually trained people with strong number skills.” This was reinforced in my research for a piece on Afghan war rugs for MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. When one scholar asked an Afghan weaver how she translated images into rug patterns she said: “I don’t see it as a picture. I see it as numbers and I make it a song.” But I digress.
***I assume that most of you recognize the name Machiavelli, or at least the term machiavellian. A minor fifteenth century Italian diplomat, he is best known as the author of The Prince, a work of political philosophy that argues princes must see things as they are and take action accordingly, rather than act based on ideal principles.