Anonymous in Their Own Names

Susan Henry

Description

Anonymous in Their Own Names recounts the lives of three women who, while working as their husbands' uncredited professional partners, had a profound and enduring impact on the media in the first half of the twentieth century. With her husband, Edward L. Bernays, Doris E. Fleischman helped found and form the field of public relations. Ruth Hale helped her husband, Heywood Broun, become one of the most popular and influential newspaper columnists of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925 Jane Grant and her husband, Harold Ross, started the New Yorker magazine.


Yet these women's achievements have been invisible to countless authors who have written about their husbands. This invisibility is especially ironic given that all three were feminists who kept their birth names when they married as a sign of their equality with their husbands, then battled the government and societal norms to retain their names. Hale and Grant so believed in this cause that in 1921 they founded the Lucy Stone League to help other women keep their names, and Grant and Fleischman revived the league in 1950. This was the same year Grant and her second husband, William Harris, founded White Flower Farm, pioneering at that time and today one of the country's most celebrated commercial nurseries.


Despite strikingly different personalities, the three women were friends and lived in overlapping, immensely stimulating New York City circles. Susan Henry explores their pivotal roles in their husbands' extraordinary success and much more, including their problematic marriages and their strategies for overcoming barriers that thwarted many of their contemporaries.

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Gender Studies
• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Index of urban studies articles
• History of the United States
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780826518484
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

ANONYMOUS
in Their Own Names
DORIS E. FLEISCHMAN,
RUTH HALE,
AND JANE GRANT

ANONYMOUS
in Their Own Names
DORIS E. FLEISCHMAN,
RUTH HALE,
AND JANE GRANT
Susan Henry
Vanderbilt University Press NASHVILLE
2012 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2012
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Excerpts from the Edward L. Bernays Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, are reprinted by permission of the Library of Congress.
Excerpts from the Doris Fleischman Bernays Papers, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, are reprinted by permission of the Schlesinger Library.
Excerpts from the Jane C. Grant Papers, Special Collections, University of Oregon Library, Eugene, OR, are reprinted by permission of the University of Oregon Library.
Excerpts from the New Yorker Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York Public Library, New York, NY, are reprinted by permission of the New York Public Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number: 2012003425
LC classification number: HQ759.H465 2012
Dewey class number: 306.872 30973-dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-1846-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1848-4 (e-book)
In memory of Janet Allyn Henry, Cathy Covert, and Kay Mills-three extraordinary women who should have lived much longer, and who continue to inspire, encourage, and guide me.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION: My name is the symbol of my own identity and must not be lost
PART I
Doris E. Fleischman
1 I just knew she was the brightest woman I d ever met
2 I won the right by the device of understatement
DORIS E. FLEISCHMAN ILLUSTRATIONS
3 Keeping up the appearance of independence
4 Whatever your job is, you do it
PART II
Ruth Hale
5 She totally conquered where she came from
6 A married woman who claims her name is issuing a challenge
RUTH HALE ILLUSTRATIONS
7 It was a curious collaboration
PART III
Jane Grant
8 I meant to remain in the East once I got there
9 There would be no New Yorker today if it were not for her
JANE GRANT ILLUSTRATIONS
10 I really preferred to get my financial reward from the magazine
11 I m Miss Grant, though married-and happily, too
CODA: I still feel that she is looking over my shoulder
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These biographies of three women owe the most to two men. Edward L. Bernays first sat down with me for several days of interviews at age ninety-four, then invited me back to his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home for two more long, interview-filled visits. Tremendously cooperative, he answered innumerable questions (some of them uncomfortable), offered me many photographs, and let me rummage through voluminous business records and personal materials in his home.
Heywood Hale Broun was equally generous with his time, memories, written documents, photographs, and hospitality. The dearth of archival material on his mother and father meant that without his unwavering help I could not have told Ruth Hale s story. Beyond that, he was so eloquent and erudite that I looked forward to visiting him simply to hear him talk, and occasionally to argue with him. He provided me with countless wonderful quotes.
Anne Bernays was an interviewer s dream: insightful, candid, vastly informative, welcoming, helpful in every possible way. Her sister Doris Held s different perspective on her mother and excellent guidance in understanding her also helped enormously. Camille Roman provided yet another perspective-that of someone who, as a young woman, was good friends with Doris Fleischman during the last decade of her life, and never stopped being grateful for their friendship. Two other friends, Eleanor Genovese and Carolyn Iverson Ackerman, helped me better understand Fleischman s Cambridge years.
Richard Hale, Ruth s brother, was close to her, so I was delighted when his daughter, Melissa Hale Ward, set aside a full day to talk with me. But I hadn t anticipated what a rich font of family history she would be, or the trove of useful materials she would gather up for me to borrow. Her other unexpected gift was helping me schedule an interview with-and later come to know and admire-Richard s third wife, the magnificent Fiona Hale.
My interviews with Ed Kemp let me tell the remarkable story of Jane Grant s papers finding a home in the University of Oregon Special Collections, even as he helped me better understand William Harris and the Grant/Harris marriage. Harris died before I could thank him for preserving and donating those papers, but fortunately I can thank Special Collections manuscript librarian Linda Long for repeatedly going out of her way to help me make the best possible use of them. I am indebted, as well, to numerous archivists and other staff members in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division, and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
My sister Marcy Alyn has avidly cheered me on ever since I first nervously flew off to interview Bernays in 1986. A talented graphic designer, in 2011 she also devoted a great deal of time and energy to arming me superbly well to fight for the best possible book cover. We won, Marcy. Inside, the quantity and high quality of the book s illustrations owe much to the efforts of Patrick Hale, Anne Bernays, Lesli Larson at the University of Oregon, and Dariel Mayer at Vanderbilt University Press.
No friend believed in this book more than Kay Mills, or did more to help me write it and get it published. I will always mourn her unexpected death in early 2011. Many other friends were stalwart in their support and helped in crucial ways, particularly Lori Baker-Schena, Barbara Cloud, Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Terry Hynes, Karen List, Zena Beth McGlashan, and Rodger Streitmatter. My heartfelt thanks to all of them, and to Eli J. Bortz at Vanderbilt University Press. I was lucky that my unusual manuscript made its way into his hands, for he was enthusiastic about it from the start, edited it with skill and sensitivity, and never ceased to be exceedingly knowledgeable, supportive, and patient.
INTRODUCTION
My name is the symbol of my own identity and must not be lost
The woman who wishes to be famous should not marry; rather she should attach herself to one or more women who will fetch and carry for her in the immemorial style of wives ; women who will secure her from interruption, give her freedom from the irritating small details of living, assure her that she is great and devote their lives to making her so.
-Psychologist Lorine Pruette, Why Women Fail, 1931 1
All three marriages were unexpected.
Edward L. Bernays had so often and persuasively declared he never would marry that his family was convinced the name Bernays would not be passed on to the next generation, since he had four sisters but was the only son. In reaction, soon after his sister Hella wed Murray Cohen in 1917, Cohen legally changed his name to Murray C. Bernays so their children would keep the name alive. Newspaper coverage of the unusual name change spread the story of Hella s brother s vow to remain single. Among those who knew the story well was her brother s friend Doris E. Fleischman, the first person he hired-as a writer and his office manager-in 1919 when he set up a business offering a new service he called publicity direction. He quickly realized her skills were invaluable but was glacially slow to acknowledge the growing romantic attraction between them, and only in the face of an ultimatum from Fleischman did he reconsider his vow.
Ruth Hale, too, had adamantly declared she never would marry. This did not interest newspapers, although in early 1916 her friend Heywood Broun s engagement to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova was the subject of a New York Times news story. Three months later Lopokova broke off the engagement and Broun began to focus his attentions on Hale. Smart, tenacious, sharp-edged, and argumentative, Hale could not have been more unlike his exotic, delicate ex-fianc e, even as she was strikingly different from Broun in both personality and accomplishments. When they first met in 1915 he had a low-status job as a sportswriter for the New York Tribune -where he was known for his light touch with words, geniality, and laziness-while she was a writer for the Sunday Times and had been one of the country s few women drama critics.
Jane Grant had no objections to marriage but she was finding life as an exceedingly popular single woman so enjoyable that marriage must have seemed a tame alternative. Her suitors included Harold Ross, whom she had met in Paris at the end of World War I when he was editing the Stars and Stripes , the newspaper for U.S. servicemen, and she was performing for some of the same troops as a volunteer entertainer. After the war she returned to her New York job, and he overcame his strong dislike for the city to take an unpromising editing position there so he could be near her. That proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated, however, because not only was she dating many other men, but his sparse social skills placed him at a competitive disadvantage.
Fleischman and Bernays married in 1922, Hale and Broun in 1917, Grant and Ross in 1920. The men the