Winter Solstice Revels at FP
Bozena
pekindc
FYI: The following notice came in today's Writer's Almanac.
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It was on this date in 1869 that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. The 15th Amendment was being considered, granting voting rights to African American men, but not to women. The women's suffrage movement was divided over whether to support the bill. One faction felt that any advancement in civil rights would eventually help women. But the other faction, led by Stanton and Anthony, opposed giving these rights to another group of men who, they felt, would then have no further interest in advancing the cause of women. They split from the American Equal Rights Association, forming their own national organization to be run by women.
Stanton and Anthony worked together for 50 years, and they made a good team. Anthony never married, so she was free to devote her life to the women's movement. Stanton wasn't free to travel for many years. She stayed home, raised the kids, did the research, and wrote the speeches that Anthony delivered.
Stanton once said, "I am the better writer, she the better critic... and together we have made arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of thirty long years; arguments that no man has answered."
pekindc
Greetings,
This came in my Writer's Almanac Email today. What a hard-fought battle took place for so long to ensure women the right to vote! Thank goodness for all those brave women who fought so hard to win that precious right!
Have a good day,
Dian Pekin
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On this date in 1919, the 19th Amendment passed the Senate and gave American women the right to vote.
Susan B. Anthony drafted the original amendment, with the help of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and it was first formally introduced in 1878. It sat in committee for nine years before it went before the Senate in 1887 and was voted down. Over the next decades, several individual states approved women's voting rights, but a Constitutional amendment wasn't considered again until 1914. It was repeatedly defeated, and an anti-suffrage movement campaigned against it, claiming that it was unfeminine for women to venture outside their natural domestic sphere.
But in 1918, Woodrow Wilson threw his support behind the suffrage movement. Women had entered the workforce in large numbers during World War I, and in a speech that President Wilson gave in September 1918, he said: "We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of right?" The amendment passed both Houses of Congress the following May.
pekindc
This came in my Writer's Almanac email today. Thought you would enjoy seeing it. - Dian
Wikipedia comments about Higginson's relationship with Dickinson are included here.
Relationship with Emily Dickinson
Higginson is remembered as a correspondent and literary mentor to the poet
Emily Dickinson.
In April 1862, Higginson published an article in the Atlantic Monthly, titled "Letter to a Young
Contributor," in which he advised budding young writers. Emily Dickinson, a
32-year-old woman from Amherst, Massachusetts sent a letter to Higginson,
enclosing four poems and asking, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse
is alive?" (Letter 261) He was not — his reply included gentle "surgery" (that
is, criticism) of Dickinson's raw, odd verse, questions about Dickinson's
personal and literary background, and a request for more poems.
Higginson's next reply contained high praise, causing Dickinson to reply that
it "gave no drunkenness" only because she had "tasted rum before"; she still,
though, had "few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you,
my tears would block my tongue" (Letter 265). But in the same letter, Higginson
warned her against publishing her poetry because of its unconventional form and
style.
Gradually, Higginson became Dickinson's mentor and "preceptor," though he
almost felt out of Dickinson's league. "The bee himself did not evade the
schoolboy more than she evaded me," he wrote, "and even at this day I still
stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy." ("Emily Dickinson's Letters,"
Atlantic Monthly, October 1891) After Dickinson died, Higginson
collaborated with Mabel Loomis Todd in publishing volumes of her
poetry — heavily edited in favor of conventional punctuation, diction, and
rhyme. In White Heat (Knopf, 2008), an account of Higginson's friendship
with Dickinson, author Brenda Wineapple credits Higginson with more editorial
sensitivity than literary historians have assumed. Higginson's intellectual
prominence helped gain favor for Dickinson's altered but still startling and
strange poetry.
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From The Writers' Almanac:
Emily Dickinson
by Linda Pastan
We think of her hidden in a white dress
among the folded linens and
sachets
of well kept cupboards, or just out of sight
sending jellies and
notes with no address
to all the wondering Amherst neighbors.
Eccentric as
New England weather
the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle,
blew
two half imagined lovers off.
Yet legend won't explain the sheer sanity
of
vision, the serious mischief
of language, the economy of pain.
"Emily Dickinson" by Linda Pastan, from PM/AM: New and Selected Poems. © W.W. Norton & Co., 1971. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
150 years ago today (1862) Emily Dickinson (books by this author) wrote a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (books by this author), asking him to be her friend and adviser. Higginson was a Unitarian minister, an abolitionist, and essayist. A couple of months earlier, he had written a piece for The Atlantic Monthly, called "Letter to a Young Contributor." In it, he gave advice to aspiring writers. After Dickinson read the article, she wrote to Higginson and asked if he would comment on her poems. She was so shy about contacting him that she didn't even sign her letter, and she wrote, he said, "in a handwriting so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum." His letters to her don't survive, but he must have offered her some constructive criticism because after he wrote her back, she responded, "Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed."
Thus began a correspondence that would last the rest of her life. Higginson only met Dickinson twice, and he advised her not to publish her poetry because he felt it was too unconventional. But after she died, he co-edited two volumes of her work. He published the poems in edited form, perfecting her imperfect, "slant" rhymes, and standardizing the punctuation and grammar—which to modern readers seems a shameful thing—but he did resist the efforts of his co-editor who wanted to change them even more. "Let us alter as little as possible," he said.