Post 731 - March 15, 2025
About two hundred years ago, two women were born, each of whom would make an indelible mark on American literature.
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, MA, and Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Philadelphia, PA.
The world they both arrived in treated them differently from the way women born in our country would now expect. In the 1830s, women were fully second-class citizens. They couldn’t vote. In those years, women were expected to be housekeepers and raise families. In the rare event of a divorce, the men were almost always granted custody of the kids. Women were not allowed to hold political office or work at most jobs outside the home.
The United States legal system had inherited an English and French doctrine called coverture which applied to married women. Under coverture, married woman had no legal rights or identity separate from their husbands. Married women were not allowed to own property, make contracts, or have a say in how any monies they might earn would be used.
An unmarried woman, however, could own land and make contracts, but few professions would accept such a woman as an employee. It was the eldest son who would usually inherit most of a family’s wealth and holdings. Unless an unwed woman had no brothers to compete with upon the death of her parents, she was usually out of luck.
Neither Emily Dickinson nor Louisa May Alcott were born into wealthy families, but both were lucky enough to have fathers who were, at least by the standards of the day, fairly open-minded thinkers.
Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father, was a Transcendentalist. The Transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of humanity and nature. They valued individualism and intuition above conformity and reason. Among their friends and neighbors were like-minded figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom mentored Louisa while she was growing up.
Louisa’s father kept a record of her and her sisters’ progress. In one journal entry, he described his daughter as “fit for the scuffle of things.” To encourage Louisa’s literary ambitions Bronson did something that in some circles would have been considered a radical action. He built his daughter a desk.
Emily’s father was the son of one of the founders of Amherst College. He, himself, was a trustee. He supported his children’s education. He didn’t necessarily think that Emily should do anything with her education, but he firmly believed she should have one. Emily attended Amherst Academy and eventually studied at the school that has come to be known now as Mount Holyoke College.
Emily was also aware of the Transcendentalists and was greatly influenced by a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry. She described the effect his words had on her by saying that they “touched the secret Spring.”
Unlike Louisa, the bulk of Emily’s work was not published until after her death. Like Louisa, however, Emily’s writing changed the world.
Why am I writing about these two women, you might be asking? Yesterday we performed a concert in Groton which is almost equidistant in Massachusetts between the final resting places of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson.
The day before the concert, I visited Orchard House in Concord and saw the hand-made desk at which Louisa wrote Little Women and its sequels. This morning, the day after, I went to the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst and saw a replica of Emily’s desk in the room where she wrote most of her poetry. Harvard has the original.
Both women remained feme sole, or unmarried and were therefore not subject to the constricts of coverture. Both were considered by their neighbors to be somewhat eccentric. In their later years, neither of them left their homes very often. Despite both being acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson, there is no record of them ever having met or corresponded with each other.
I couldn’t help but think about how much has changed for women in the intervening two centuries. The women I choose to have in my life are independent, ambitious, and have just as much, if not more, agency than the men I surround myself with. A quick glance at my resume will show you that I have worked with and for some of the most formidable women in show business. It has never once throughout the four decades of my career entered my mind to question the hierarchy of those relationships. It has always been crystal clear to me which of us was the boss. Spoiler alert: I wasn’t me.
Most every woman I have worked for, and there are, of course, a few exceptions, has been more than fit for the scuffle of things.
Women’s rights may have changed but the men in this country haven’t always accepted that. If nothing else, this past election has shown us just how resentful many people – men and women both – are about the equalizing of the sexes.
We have twice run strong, capable, and qualified women for the top office in this country and both times they lost their elections to a common grifter, a con man. They lost to a man so flawed that he arguably embodies the biblical definition of the anti-Christ. That people would rather vote for him than face being led by a woman is something I will never understand.
Throughout the last couple of days, as I was exploring the historical homes and cemeteries of central Massachusetts, the news out of Washington has grown ever more dispiriting.
A couple of days ago, the President turned the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom to try to stop the bottoming out of his buddy Elon’s company’s stock. Never mind that that kind of hucksterism from the highest elected official in the land is not only crass beyond belief but also completely illegal. It seems as if we are just going to let it go, much like we are doing with everything else the man is doing.
My social media feeds exploded against the Democrats, particularly Senator Chuck Schumer, for caving to the Republicans and voting to pass the spending bill yesterday in the Senate to avert the government shutdown.
I’ve gone back and forth on whether I think the handful of Democrats who sided with the Republicans did the right thing or not. As recently as this past Wednesday, Senator Schumer, himself, was dead set against the measure which was drafted without any contributions from the Democratic caucus. He then completely changed his mind.
The spending bill strengthens the President’s ability to make financial decisions without Congressional oversight. The bill also cuts about $13 billion in non-military spending and adds about $6 million to the military’s budget.
As bad as all that might be the prospect of a government shutdown might possibly have been even more disastrous. The President and, more importantly, Musk could have used the stoppage as an opening to not only blame the Democrats but also to take on even more power than they already have. Some have said that there was no guarantee that if the shutdown happened we would ever be able to get our government back up and running again.
The more I read about it, the more of a “Sophie’s Choice” the decision seemed to be. That choice, of course, refers to the lead character in William Styron’s book who, when she arrives in Auschwitz as a prisoner, is forced by a brutally cruel camp guard to choose between the lives of her two children. It refers to a choice wherein neither option is anything short of traumatically devastating.
I don’t know yet whether to criticize Schumer for what he did. At the very least, the way he handled it was problematic. He broke ranks with the party and pushed it through with a few fellow defectors. There was little discussion. He just plowed ahead. One of those who joined him was his fellow New York Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand.
I’ve frankly never forgiven Gillibrand for spearheading the forced resignation of Senator Al Franken back in the day. He was one of the best lawmakers we had, and he was canceled for a misguided joke. You compare the photograph he had taken of himself pretending to fondle a sleeping marine with everything so many Republicans in office have done and I am incredulous. I still can’t believe we let that happen. We need him badly right about now.
It does make me wish we had people I had stronger confidence in leading our party. Like Sophie on the train platform, the funding decision needed to be made almost instantaneously. Even so, I can’t help but think that there had to have been a better option, or, at the very least, a better way to have fought for it. I fear that either way, Senator Schumer is not the guy who could have come up with whatever that might have been.
Out on the street this afternoon, I saw that someone had scribbled in chalk on the sidewalk near Lincoln Center, “WTF Chuck?! If D*&$ld T%$#p is thanking you, you’re on the wrong side.” I can’t say that I disagree with that either.
The Vice President, and in fact the entire radical Christian Fundamentalist movement want us to go back to the time when women were completely subservient to men. I can understand how some men might be so intimidated by women that they would support this, but women? I can’t wrap my head around that at all. Not that we’ve ever achieved full equality, we’ve just gotten a bit closer.
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize-winner has a lot in common with Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson. Like them, Malala’s father is a staunch supporter of education for all. He encouraged his daughter to go to school. She began writing and publishing a blog that advocated for her education when she was only eleven.
Three years later, she was on a bus having just taken an exam when she and two of her friends were shot by Taliban gunmen. She took a bullet in her head and miraculously survived.
She recovered and wrote I am Malala the following year. It became an international best seller. The year after that, the Nobel committee made her the youngest-ever recipient of the Peace Prize. She has been advocating for women’s rights ever since.
Like Emily Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott, Malala Yousafzai has succeeded despite being faced with seemingly insurmountable odds. For that to happen, her father, like the fathers of the two women two hundred years ago, had to break with societal norms and risk the consequences.
These three women, and many others throughout the centuries have had to overcome obstacles their male counterparts could likely never imagine. Why would we ever want to go back to the way things were?
I suppose that’s my question for the Republicans now. Why? Why are you all doing this? Yes, some aspects of our government and our society have needed fixing and alteration for quite a long time. We have, however, been slowly trying to do just that. The wholesale destruction of everything, though, is taking with it the bad and the good. We are going to be left with nothing but rubble. How can anyone support this?
Emily Dickinson died in 1886 and Louisa May Alcott in 1888. They were both nearly the same age when they passed.
Emily wrote a poem that, like many of her others, reflects her preoccupation with death. She doesn’t seem to fear it, though, instead, she seems to be almost comforted by the idea.
Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.
Be its mattress straight,
Be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise' yellow noise
Interrupt this ground.
William Styron referenced this poem in his last line in Sophie’s Choice. “This was not judgment day—only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.”
Life goes on. It’s a good thing it does because I now have a whole stack of new writing I want to read.
Your post and Heather Cox Richardson’s letter landed side by side this evening. You both spoke of Dickenson family. Heather was focused on her father, Edward, while you wrote about Emily. It was an interesting confluence. Heather reflects on the power of unity, while your reflection turned to the lack of unity and the damage Schumer has caused with what seems to be a terrible disconnect from his own party. He might have been right, but we can’t know that now.