Dorothy Height (with one of her signature hats in the photo above) met Martin Luther King when he was 15. She was impressed that King had already thought seriously about his future, and how he might contribute. I am trying to imagine what it was like for Dorothy Height, born in 1912, to dream of what her future as an African American woman would bring. She won an oratory contest in high school, with the prize of a four-year college scholarship. After getting accepted into Barnard, she was told by the Dean, right before classes began, that they had already reached their quota of two Negro students. Height went on to a B.A. and Masters degree from NYU, and from there, had an influential career, as an executive at the YWCA and for 40 years, as President of the National Council of Negro Women. Along with Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan, Height helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. She met with every President since Roosevelt, and upon hearing of her death at 98, Obama hailed her as the godmother of the civil rights movement, who witnessed “every march and milestone along the way.”

Photo: Martin Luther King, delivering his, “I have a dream” speech, August, 1963, Washington D.C.

Which brings me to the late, great Wendy Wasserstein. She died a few years ago at the tender age of 55, and the theater world mourned. Her birthday is Sunday. Through her many plays and essays, Wasserstein was so adept at capturing smart, ambitious women who found their romantic lives coming up short. After years of trying, she became a mother when she was 48 (and wrote a beautiful piece about it in The New Yorker).

Here’s a fragment from her 1988 Pulitzer-prize winning play The Heidi Chronicles, in which Scoop explains to Heidi (a girlfriend he could never commit to) why he’s marrying Lisa:

SCOOP

Do I love her…? She’s the best that I can do.
Is she an A+ like you? No. But I don’t want to
come home to an A+.  A- maybe, but not A+.

This painting, Watusi (Hard Edge) by Alma Thomas, 1963, is now on loan to the White House.

So much for make believe. There was a famous flesh and blood Brent, but she wasn’t a Protestant. Margaret Brent, born in 1601 was a Catholic, who fled England to the American colonies in search of religious freedom. I’ve been keeping tabs on her for my “Single Women’s Hall of Fame,” and was reminded of this yesterday, on the anniversary of the land grant she received on October 4, 1639, which made her one of the first Colonial women to be a landowner. She ended up acquiring almost 1000 acres, some of which she called, “Sister’s Freehold.” She was also a successful attorney and entrepreneur (practically unheard of for a woman) and most notably, 200 years before the organized call for women’s rights, Margaret Brent went in front of the Maryland Assembly and demanded the right to vote. (They said no.)

Ivins was an unapologetic “lefty,” and famously coined the name, “Shrub,” for George W. Bush, whom she first met while they were in high school. She was a towering presence, figuratively and literally, at 6 feet tall, born in California, raised in Texas, and educated in elite schools in the Northeast. She had a brief tenure at the New York Times, but it was not a happy marriage. She was stifled at the paper, and it drove her crazy. She returned to Texas to write, and made the legislature (or Lege, as she called it) one of her favorite targets.

Molly Ivins described herself as a “left-wing aging Bohemian journalist, who never made a shrewd career move, never dressed for success, never got married, and isn’t even a lesbian, which at least would be interesting.”

Though probably not the best way to realize this goal, yesterday, I decided to go to an early morning screening of The Hurt Locker, about a group of soldiers who defuse bombs during the Iraq war. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, it’s a compelling and tense film, the best I’ve seen this year, but not exactly a mood elevator.

It’s good that I also found my way to Maria Mitchell, who was born 191 years ago on August 1, and  is America’s first noted woman astronomer. Mitchell was encouraged by her father at an early age to study math and science. In 1847, peering through a telescope on the roof of a bank where he worked as a cashier, she noticed an object in the night’s sky that didn’t appear in her charts. It was a comet, and her discovery brought international fame and a big career. Mitchell became Professor of Astronomy at the newly-formed Vassar College, she was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and helped found the American Association for the Advancement of Women. (Look for her in my Single Women’s Hall of Fame.) The comet, C/ 1847 T1, is named “Miss Mitchell.”

I’m glad to be on the upswing.

I came across a 1999 article, “Cassatt’s Children,” by one of my favorite New Yorker writers, Adam Gopnik. It’s interesting and witty, as usual with Gopnik, and he admires Cassatt, but I was struck by some of his spinsterisms. Describing her remarkable ability to paint mothers and children, he writes of a “maiden-aunt gift for empathy.” As an old women, Cassatt became “crusty,” and when people made pilgrimages to see her, they might have “their heads bitten off.”

I’m going to spend more time with Cassatt, to see if this rings true, and get back to you.

(Painting: Woman Bathing, 1890)

I’m fascinated by the eldest sister, Elizabeth, who was the intellectual dynamo of the clan and the most ambitious. She had a remarkable impact on the cultural landscape, carving out a luminous career as a writer, publisher, translator and educator, and established the first American kindergarten. Elizabeth was an impresario of sorts, and owned a bookstore, which served as a nightly “salon,” and hub for the great reformers and literary figures of the day. 

None of the Peabody sisters viewed marriage as their primary goal, although Sophia and Mary ended up with famous husbands (Sophia wed Nathanial Hawthorne, and Mary married Horace Mann, considered the father of public education). Elizabeth had her share of suitors and romantic longings (Nathaniel and Horace among them, and that’s a story for another day), but she vowed to “be myself and act”  and stayed single during her long and productive life.

(Now published in The Huffington Post)

It’s Mother’s Day and I would like to honor my beloved mother, by using the word mother in a sentence as often as possible. No, not that sentence. The next one. I am taking this moment to pay tribute to Anna M. Jarvis, the mother of Mother’s Day, who in an ironic twist of fate was never a mother herself. Did I write ironic? I don’t honestly see it that way, but rather it was precisely because Ms. Jarvis did NOT become a Mrs. nor a mom, that she devoted her life’s work to persuading the nation (and 43 other countries) to officially revere mothers and in doing so, carved out a 24-hour time slot in which we get to feel like we haven’t done enough.

Anna was tormented by not doing enough for her Mom. In 1907, a few years after her mother died (and left her a tidy inheritance), she created and led the “Mother’s Day Movement,” and began one of the most organized and successful letter-writing campaigns in history, reaching out to influential businessmen, religious leaders, newspaper editors, mayors and eventually to governors of every state. Within seven years, a resolution was passed by both houses of Congress for a national observance of Mother’s Day. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation calling for a “public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country,” setting aside the second Sunday in May, which also commemorated the anniversary of Anna’s mother’s death.

As it was her mother’s favorite flower, and she was in charge, Anna declared the carnation the official Mother Day’s emblem. Florists quickly began to reap the benefits. Soon confectioners and card companies wanted a piece of the action, and the holiday got commercialized to such an extent that Anna Jarvis could hardly recognize it. “This is not what I intended,” Anna wrote in letters to hundreds of newspapers. “I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit.” She spent the rest of her life (and life savings) in desperate battle against those who didn’t demonstrate the proper piety and respect for what she considered a holy day, and died penniless and alone.

Anna M. Jarvis was born in 1864 in the rural community of Grafton, West Virginia, and she grew into a tall, attractive, redhead, eager to find her way in the world. She had watched her mother put aside pleasure and ambitions for the considerable duties of motherhood, and Anna wanted more out of life. At 27 and unmarried she took a bold, modern step and moved away from home to live in Philadelphia, working first as a stenographer and then as a writer for the advertising department of an insurance company. As to why she didn’t wed, a family friend said, “she had a disastrous love affair when she was young. It left her shocked and disillusioned, and thereafter she turned her back on all men.” (My theory is, she wanted a career.) After years of living on her own, Anna moved her widowed mother to Philadelphia. In 1905, she went into a period of “pathological mourning” when her mother died, creating an alter of dried flowers, and talking about little else.

I asked my therapist friend why Anna was so obsessed. “In a word,” he said, “guilt.” When my dear mother was still alive (did I mention that she was one of the greats!) I used to procrastinate before calling her on Mother’s Day, for fear that I hadn’t done enough. The first misstep was moving to San Francisco, which put me three time zones away, so my call would land at her New York doorstep in the afternoon. I would always send a card, but a card wasn’t flowers (e.g. carnations) and on the rare occasion when I got it together to mail a gift, I wasn’t there in person to deliver it. Once, when I timed a visit to coincide with Mother’s Day, that effort also fell short because, I figured, my ultimate misstep boiled down to not having a husband or children.

Now that I understand Anna Jarvis, it all adds up. Mother’s Day was created by a talented, entrepreneurial woman, who felt terrible about not following in her mother’s footsteps. She spent an operatic life trying to make up for it, and embedded in her glorious, global tribute, the essence of never doing enough. But we all keep trying, as we should, because our mothers deserve it (especially mine).

(“Sunday Morning,” photograph by Eudora Welty)

Before her literary career took off, Eudora Welty, one of the great writers of the 20th century, used to snap photos. She had a job as a junior publicity agent for  the W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration, started by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, to jump start the economy) and traveled through rural Mississippi, taking pictures of people coping with the Depression.

Her Depression photographs were exhibited in New York in 1936, at around the same time she sold her first story, “The Death of the Traveling Salesman,” and again most recently a few months ago at the Museum of the City of New York. “Photography,” Ms. Welty said, “taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.”

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson Mississippi on April 13, 1909, and lived most of her life in the family homes she grew up in. When asked why she never married, the prolific Ms. Welty, who died at the age of 92, said, “it never came up.”