Thanksgiving: invented by women?; a foremother artist: Laura Knight

Laura Knight (1877-1970), Flying a Kite in the Open Air (1910)

Dear friends and readers,

I promise no false piety though we are not in the doleful dumps either. As witness my choice of picture and exhilarating foremother artist.

We are planning an ordinary day, the difference will be a turkey at 6 instead of say a chicken at 7. Champagne in lieu of wine. Since there are just the three of us, baked potatoes and buttered baked brussel sprouts, with that will be way more than enough. Izzy goes to the latest Bond movie, I’ll read about Anne Radcliffe and Jane Austen in French (to understand how French people see them) and maybe maybe just start a translation of Radcliffe by someone other than Victorine Chastenay. For context and then comparison for a possible coming paper if my proposal to present a paper on Victorine de Chastenay’s French translation of Udolpho is accepted for a coming Chawton conference. Maybe I’ll watch a movie too, From Prada to Nada, the latest film adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Spanish, the free type (set today). Jim, well Jim will potter about with cats, read on the Net, and if his knee is up to it, walk a little with me on this beautiful November fall day.

Where was I? Ah, Thanksgiving. Did you know it was invented and pushed by a woman? Sarah Josepha Hale

Hale, a young New Hampshire widow with five children to support, moved her brood to Boston and, in 1828, became editor of Ladies Magazine, the nation’s first such publication.

“Editor” is not truly accurate, for she also wrote almost everything in the magazine during its early days. She turned it into the century’s most successful periodical — even after a new owner named it for himself, dubbing it Godey’s Lady’s Book. Along the way, Hale’s editorials crusaded for many things, especially female education and an annual day of thanksgiving.

She still was writing editorials in the 1860s, when Lincoln accepted her idea during the somber days of the Civil War; and so the holiday’s genesis was political, a definite Yankee PR move, and it took a while for Southerners to accept the notion. Our national mythology therefore slowly reworked itself, skipping Lincoln and Hale, and focusing instead on 1621 and the Pilgrims.

But Plymouth was not the first colony. Another piece of women’s history: did you know that Jamestown was the first colony, set up by these gentlemen types who brought along lower class women as their sex-partners:

The capitalists who owned the Jamestown enterprise found these women in London’s prisons and brothels, brought them to Virginia and literally sold them to the highest bidder.

The winter after the women arrived, the truly dark days of 1609-10, was called the “starving tyme”: Out of approximately 500 Jamestown colonists, some 450 died. Captain John Smith’s records even report that one man “did kill his wife…and had eaten part of her before it was known, for which he was executed” … in a culture that claimed to protect women, they suffered disproportionate hardship. Of the 104 people aboard the Mayflower, just 18 were adult women — at least three of whom were pregnant when they ventured into the unknown in autumn of 1620. By the end of their first terrible winter, 14 of those 18 women were dead.

This 78 percent mortality rate compares with 40 percent for Plymouth’s men, and just 16 percent for children; during an era when childhood deaths often were higher than that under perfectly normal circumstances. Given women’s generally greater survival rates in crises, the probability is that the Mayflower women literally starved themselves to death so that their children could eat.

Plus ca change, moins ca change? Let’s hope not. We had such a beautiful win in congress in the US this year, 14 women, and just about all pro-women progressive initiatives passed, pro-marriage for LBGTQ people.

Why, then, is Thanksgiving so firmly associated with Plymouth? asks my source,
Doris Weatherford?

Not only Hale, but also and especially the tens of thousands of teachers who were educated in Massachusetts, beginning with the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary that Mary Lyons established in 1837. Its graduates and other New England schoolmarms went West to one-room schoolhouses, where they taught the Pilgrim version of history.

Still, Thanksgiving was not an official holiday until Franklin Roosevelt ensured it during the Great Depression — and he set the permanent date of the fourth Thursday in November not because of any historical or religious meaning, but as an inducement for early Christmas shopping. The Pilgrim women who gave their lives for the nascent nation, ironically, did not recognize Christmas, considering it much too merry.

Life in Plymouth was actually very hard:

The sadness began while still at sea, when Elizabeth Hopkins’ son, Oceanus, died soon after birth. Susanna White delivered another boy, Peregine, while the ship lay at anchor in Cape Cod Bay. Mary Norris Allerton’s child also was born aboard the Mayflower; he died in dark December and she in February.

The Pilgrims did not begin to build on land until Dec. 25 – a date of no significance to them – and still were living on the ship when Dorothy Bradford went overboard and drowned in the icy water on Dec. 7. Although her husband, Gov. William Bradford, and his fellow patriarchs tried to explain it as an accident, anyone who has seen the high-walled deck of the ship’s replica at Plymouth knows that it likely was a suicide.

Like other Pilgrim women, Dorothy Bradford came from a fairly affluent English family. These women were not the Jamestown impoverished, but instead were accustomed to comfortable homes and servants. They were not sickly when they left Europe, for they had access to medical care in London and later in Holland, where they lived prior to making the final voyage. It was the passage, on the windy Atlantic of approaching winter, that weakened them.

Now they found themselves living in a 20-foot square communal building, “as full of beds as they could lie one by another.” In the bitter cold of Massachusetts, their food supply ran out and everyone was too sick to seek more. Death visited almost daily in February and March, with evening funerals under the cover of darkness, lest natives see the diminishing numbers of the newcomers.

Four adult women and 11 girls remained alive when spring’s light again appeared. Because they were so greatly outnumbered by eager males, there was a great deal of pressure for girls such as Priscilla Alden to reach “marriageable” age. The only unmarried adult female survivor, Susannah White, became a bride again just 11 weeks after her husband’s death. Fertility dominated women’s lives and the governor wrote that as soon as the ground was warm, that this tiny remnant of females “went willing into the fields and took their little ones with them to set corn.”

So we remember these real heroines of the 17th through 19th century — pre-contraception alas. And I move to the 20th century to celebrate another, post-contraception and what a difference it makes. Foremothers bought us Thanksgiving and I add what a 20th century woman can now contribute.

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Laura Knight, Self-Portrait (1913)

Laura Knight (1877-1970) (born Laura Johnson) rates a paragraph in Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race as one of the many women painters who became part of a long-lived team, man and woman (often man and wife), and ended up allowing the husband to dominate the relationship. In Knight’s autobiography, The Magic of a Line Knight wrote:

The broadcasting of talent in the fine arts is not nature’s daily practice. Harold Knight was one student whose work leaped beyond all others … Whenever possible I fixed my easel close to his; if he started the drawing of a head first blocking in the outline, I did the same; if he first of all drew detail of an eye, I copied that method — though never to attain his subtle realization of the whole head.

So (says Greer, Laura treated Harold as “a greater genius than herself,” even though Laura’s career progressed far more than his. She would “defer” to him in matters of taste, praise his wit and (silent) wisdom. She said he was the controlling influence in her life even if in the end she had to differ: in her autobiography she admires his “building up of dense images,” while she relied on the “magic of a single line.” Perhaps she was tactful? She did (says Greer) achieve “the almost impossible, a long happy married life with
another artist and the realization of an independent artistic career.” Greer reprints a powerful depiction by Knight, The Nuremberg Trial (1946), a commissioned work where we look down at four rows of people watching what’s happening, with two of them involved (with papers in front of them). Quietly grim and intense.

Not Summertime, Cornwall whose limpid summer light and deep rich
colors suggest a kind of paradise. The picture made me remember Ladies in Lavender where the two aging women have their home in Cornwall, and we see them walking by the sea many times. Knight is also remembered as a Cornish artist, because she painted so often in Cornwall.

Lamorna Cove

China Clay Pit (1912)

On the docks

Laura Knight was a “Dame”. One online blurb declares: Laura Knight “was a leading artist in the first half of the twentieth century. She also became the first woman artist to be elected into the Royal Academy since the first female members Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser. During her lifetime, she was praised for her lively scenes of the circus and the baler but she now receives more praise for her landscapes. Knight served as an Official War Artist during World War II and she also traveled to Nuremberg in 1946 to record the War
Criminals’ Trial.” Harold Knight gets a mention where she is called “wife of Harold Knight, a portrait painter (1874-1961), so maybe he made money that way.

I’ve long loved and admired her work, and especially now that it’s Cornwall she turns to. She is also cheering for this day. I’d not done a foremother artist in so long ….

Ellen