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lowbrowanthro · 4 years

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Maud Wood Park: Forgotten Feminist, Proto-Anthropologist, Bad Bitch

In the summer of 2018, I spent three weeks in the Library of Congress researching twentieth-century women political leaders (think suffragettes, early legislators, etc).

Mostly I skimmed workshop pamphlets and stared, unblinking, at indecipherable handwritten correspondence. But one woman in particular had me rapt.

[Extremely Stefon voice] Maud Wood Park’s story has everything - suffragette drama, a trip around the world, and a secret (second! Post divorce! That scandalous queen!) marriage that *definitely* disappointed her dad.

(Photo from: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collection/papers-maud-wood-park-in-womans-rights-collection)

Born in 1871 in Boston, Maud Wood Park was a no-nonsense activist ahead of her time. I call her “forgotten” even though she’s well-known to scholars of women’s suffrage (NERRRDS), because she’s largely left out of public school lessons featuring big names like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Yet her work as a lobbyist with the National American Woman Suffrage Association and as the first president of the League of Women Voters made her a centrally important figure in the struggle for American women’s suffrage.

(Maud pictured 4th from the right. Photo from: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collection/papers-maud-wood-park-in-womans-rights-collection)

Even more interesting than her activism (lol sorry, women’s rights) was her personal life.

Maud did her own damn thing - she chose not to have children, eschewed religion, traveled around the world without a male escort, and never stopped fighting for women’s rights. She married her first husband after meeting him in college (she went to Radcliffe, A.K.A. ~Lady Harvard~ because She Smart And She Fancy), and then divorced his ass when she was 35. Two years later, she ~secretly~ married Robert “Bob” Hunter Freeman.

(Above: Bob and his bowler hat. Photos from the LoC collections)

Bob was ~an actor~ and theatrical agent (yes Maud, I feel you, who among us has not pined for a sensitive artistic type). They both traveled so often for work that they were never able to officially, publicly settle down and cohabitate. Instead, their marriage remained secret to all but a few close friends, and they met clandestinely in hotel rooms during Maud’s lecture circuits. They also shared a robust (there are SO MANY LETTERS, you guys) correspondence. Many of their letters focus on their interpersonal drama and semi-tempestuous but deeply-loving relationship, and you bet I read all that shit.

They had serious differences and disagreed constantly. Bob gave Maud shit about her temperament and lack of religion, and she gave him shit about his lack of logic.

In the 1915 letter to Bob below, Maud openly and unrepentantly admits to being a stone-cold bitch (my heroine..!), describing herself as “a cold, hard, self-contained, self-centred, ambitious and extremely critical woman.”

(Maud’s a Slytherin. Obvs.)

Maud knows herself. Maud accepts herself. Maud does not care about your feelings.

Bob, on the other hand, was a total Hufflepuff. In the funny 1915 letter below, Maud writes to him about how much her “man-hating” spinster friends love him, seeing him as more of a womanly kindred spirit than a man. Their high praise even inspires her to (grudgingly, poorly... Maud is all of us) embroider Bob’s initials onto some handkerchiefs, even though she “hadn’t done anything of that sort for over 20 years.”

Ah, ~True Love~ :’)

(Above: Maud and Bob, basically)

Maud was an independent thinker, and her lack of religious belief troubled Bob at first. She explained her outlook on life to him in a 1908 letter:

“I feel a sort of responsibility to myself and to others, irrespective of God’s existence or non existence. I think it is the effect of my keen perception of the rights of all other living creatures, black, white or brown, animal as well as human. It explains my passionate democracy and my sense of outrage at the injustices that women have to bear. It does not rest on love of God or recognition of Him; not even on love of men, but rather on the craving of my whole nature for justice. It’s the best thing in me, my only effective weapon against my egoism.”

Clearly, humanist ideals fueled her activism at a time when many involved in social reform movements held beliefs rooted in Christianity.

(Above: the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, for example! Photo from: https://sites.google.com/site/orangewomenstemperanceunion/background-on-women-s-christian-temperance-union)

Maud was also kind of an amateur anthropologist - she traveled around the world to study the conditions of women in various cultures.

Funded by a wealthy sponsor who supported her work for women’s rights, she struck out on a two year journey in 1909 to investigate women’s lives in far-flung locales including Singapore, China, India, Australia and New Zealand, New Guinea, Bhutan, and elsewhere.

(Above, postcard of Chefoo, China, circa 1908, from: https://www.hippostcard.com/listing/street-in-chefoo-china-postcard-c1908/16726374)

Her views reflect the times and an understanding of universal womanhood that’s been deconstructed by postcolonial feminist scholars, but she recognized the importance of cultural differences.

Before women could even vote in the U.S., Maud was going around stressing the need to understand the various ways women lived around the world.

Rather than just exoticizing foreign tropical locales, she described their complexities. Maud talked about the widespread poverty in Chinese villages in the wake of nineteenth-century British imperialism and described India as “huge and enormously complicated” in a February 9th, 1920 letter written on a train from Darjeeling to Calcutta, for example.

She exhibited an anthropological curiosity (even if she lacked a little tact), writing this detailed description to Bob on June 18th, 1909:

“This afternoon I did get off by myself in a rickshaw in a town I never heard of and poked around for an hour in unimaginably dirty and crowded streets. The Yang-tse-Kiang is a beautiful broad river, but almost deserted on the banks except for occasional cities of large towns where the foreign “Concession” is nearly opposite the landing. If we can we get away from the Concession in these places and into the Chinese town, usually enclosed by a wall. There indeed everything is different: muddy, smelly, narrow streets, swarms of men, some children and fewer women, (those who are well-to-do stay in the “Inner Apartment”) endless little dingy restaurants half on the street where the cooking is all in plain sight, ramshackle one-story houses leaning against each other in order to stay up at all. Most foreigners are disgusted and flee as soon as possible, but I enjoy it all and want to go poking up every lane and into every courtyard.”

Maud also recognized the pervasiveness of Western culture way before scholars started theorizing about “globalization.” In 1909, she wrote:

“Fate seems always to pull at my skirts and drag me back to the surroundings of the inescapable West. It’s marvelous how pervasive that is out here in the Orient – the trace of the West. –I begin to believe that there isn’t a village in Asia where you can’t buy bottled waters and find at least one Englishman. I may have to go to central Africa to get the unadulterated East; and even there I suppose I’d find T. Roosevelt or his remains.”

I choose to believe that she would have made a good intersectional feminist activist and anthropologist had she been born a few decades later.

Maud stressed that women deserved freedom above all in both her personal and professional life. She lobbied for women’s rights tirelessly both to legislators and to Bob, who started out skeptical but was eventually won over.

In the 1915 letter below, Bob wishes Maud success and writes that he’s come around in favor of women’s suffrage once and for all, finally convinced “of something which perhaps should always have been obvious, but wasn’t.”

(That’s f***ing right Bob, get it together)

Maud Wood Park - world traveler, legislative expert, and even playwright - was a fierce feminist. She seemed to foreshadow the third-wavers of the future. In a 1912 letter (one of her many extended arguments with Bob), she considered the future of the women’s movement and women’s ultimate place in society:

“I resent so bitterly the arrogance of men who attempt to say that what men want is the measure of what women should be – or the added insult of attempting to interpret Nature or the Creator for women. Certainly if there is any record of what nature intended it is to be found in the powers that she has given women. If a woman has a beautiful voice it seems likely that nature meant her to sing, etc., etc.

The moral of all this is – don’t spend any more time or words or ink in trying to show what women were meant to do. Spend your energy in giving women themselves a chance to show what they were meant to be.”

Amen.

#Maud Wood Park #Feminism #suffrage #women #women's rights #feminist #history #anthropology #research #archives #womens liberation #suffragette #votes for women #romance #star-crossed lovers #herstory #women's history

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anxiously-shipping · 4 years

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MESSY MURDER {3}

FIRST / PREVIOUS / NEXT

Description: The dead body of Ali Blacksky is found in his English country mansion, broken and bloody. The detectives get called in. It's obviously a murder. For ex world-famous detective Logan Croft and his brand new assistance, Roman Milton, this is just another day in the figurative office. But murder gets messy. Murder gets especially messy when Roman has a crush on the best suspect and Logan gets himself an admirer among the staff. And when new bodies begin to pop up. Yeah, that can complicate things too...

Triggers: Dead bodies, injuries, police, murder, previous case mentions, PTSD

Ships: Eventual prinxiety, eventual logicality, pre-existing demus/dukeciet

Back on the train in the early hours of the morning. By early hours in the morning, I mean the usual time logan wakes up and two hours before Roman's' alarm. And that was even counting the time they woke up.

Let's just say, it took Roman five minutes to wake up, two to get out of bed, forty minutes to get dressed in his tired state, they both had a shower -Logan only took up ten minutes, Roman took up fifteen- and they brushed their teeth at the same time, talking up two minutes. They waited for half an hour for the train and they only left the station at 5:05. In the morning.

Roman did not look good. His hair was still wet and it hung in front of his face, damp and dripping, clamping up together no matter how many times he brushed it. His eyes were drooping, he kept collapsing onto the table and he wasn't even listening to Hamilton. Dressed in a pale yellow v-neck, blue jeans and a red letterman jacket, Roman's' outfit wasn't nearly as formal as he expected it to be.

Logan, on the other hand, looked fine. His hair was brushed and tamed, swept across his head, he was attentive and alert and he was dressed in formal greeting clothes. He'd usually wear his uniform for first inspection but that had a lot of bad memories tied to it. So he just wore a dark polo, with a navy tie, and black trousers.

Logan raised an eyebrow at Roman as the younger started making a high-pitched noise. "Are you okay?"

"No."

"Could you elaborate?" Sighed the detective.

Roman looked Logan dead in the eye as he said, "You woke me up at, like, the middle of the night, of course I'm not okay."

"Okay, now you're sounding quite petulant."

"It's too early for you to use fancy words, specs, shush..."

Logan was quiet for a bit and then said, "How old are you, Roman?"

"Twenty-five."

"As young as I was, then," Logan nodded, keeping his eyes as Roman looked up curiously.

"What d'you mean?"

Logan replied, "I mean, you're as young as I was when I solved my first case. Be careful you don't get sucked into this like I did." He finally looked up and locked eyes with Roman. "It's not worth it."

Roman hesitated, biting his bottom lip. "Why... Why did you quit?" Logan stiffened and Roman continued to talk about it. "Your career was going so well, you were becoming the most famous detective in the whole world and then you walked into the police station, go up to Archie and then say you quit. Why?"

The older kept his eyes firmly on his phone, hands beginning to shake. "I don't like to talk about it."

"It's just, there isn't a single interview about it alone, nothing in the papers. Every news channel was talking about the great Logan Croft quitting and going elsewhere and there was no explanation." Roman continued, seeming not to have heard Logan. "Like, you had the world at your feet and-"

"I don't like to talk about it!" Snapped Logan loudly into the empty carriage, making Roman jolt back, eyes wide. Logan took in a deep breath. "I... I'm sorry. My last case wasn't as... seamless as they usually were."

Roman bowed his head. "No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have pressed it..."

Logan sighed slowly. "Let's talk about something else." He pondered for a moment, leaving the empty carriage awkwardly silent. An idea formed in his head and he smiled. "So, Roman," he began, "You seem like a nice, young, slightly too romantic man."

"Uh, thank you?"

"And there must be some fools who are into that."

"I feel insulted while you're trying to compliment me, and I'm not entirely sure how to respond."

"What I'm trying to say," Logan huffed, "Is do you have any romantic partner in your life? Any lucky girl?"

Roman stared at him and then burst out laughing. "Oh my god!" He cackled. "And you're being serious!"

Instantly, Logan grew defensive. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You thought- You thought I was straight!" Roman burst, clutching his sides.

Logan's' confusion melted away. "Oh... You're not?"

"I am- the gayest bitch- you - will ever meet!" Roman struggled to say between bouts of laughter, looking on the verge of tears. "Jesus, you- you should- you are- holy christ, that was funny."

"It was an honest mistake!" Flushed Logan, crossing his arms.

Roman rubbed his eye with the palm of his hand. "Jesus, nerd, you are great."

Logan failed to hide a small smile and he instead turned to stare out of the window to the slowly lightening sky. Maybe this wasn't too bad...

~'^'~

"Why aren't we going straight to the scene of the crime?" Groaned Roman as Logan walked stubbornly towards a village market.

"Because we need to get outside opinions of the suspects before anything else," Logan answered. "Honestly, I struggle to understand how you solved the Portsmouth kidnappings sometimes..."

Roman gasped, offended, but took the time to shut up so Logan could observe the village.

Well, 'village' was an overstatement. It was shaped like a horseshoe, just one individual row of houses, shops and school all on one lane. The houses had a Tudor or Georgian style to them, painted beams along the walls and several older buildings had thatched roofs. In fact, Logan would say it was more of a hamlet than a village. The market was happening on a huge stretch of land in the centre of the horse-shoe shaped hamlet. Stalls were set up, children were screaming happily and Logan felt a sense of security wash over him in this place. It was all just so calming and safe, there wasn't any danger at all.

Then people noticed him. Groups stood still as Logan and Roman approached them, conversations dwindling. Logan hesitated and walked up to a currently empty stall.

The woman who stood behind was portly, with rosy cheeks and short, stubby pigtails. "Hello, you two seem new," She commented before her face paled in realisation. "You're here for the Blacksky murder, aren't you?"

Logan nodded his head sharply. "I am." He pulled out a small recording, turning it on and holding it up to the woman. "What can you tell me about Ali Blacksky?"

"W-Well, he was an interesting character, to say the least," She stammered. It was obvious she didn't want to disrespect to dead and Logan wasn't the most comforting person to be around, because of the reasons for his fame.

So, Roman stepped forwards. He smiled calmingly at the woman. "It's okay, we won't repeat any of this to anyone," He gently worked the recorder out of Logan's' grasp, holding it a little lower to give the woman more room. "What did you mean by interesting?"

"Well, he had sudden mood switches. One moment, he's laughing and then he's yelling at you the next. It put his poor brother through a lot of emotional things, the poor boy never deserved a man like that to be related to him-"

Logan interrupted. "It sounds like you favour the brother over Ali."

"Of course, I do," The woman narrowed her eyes and leaned in close. "Ali was not a good person. His little brother is a sweetheart, I've had Virgil visit me plenty. Ask anyone else, they'll tell you that Ali was a bad, bad man."

Roman tilted his head. "Is there anything else you can tell us?"

She nodded. "Yeah. Rumour was going around a few weeks ago, that Ali was gonna fire two of the people who worked for him. I'm not sure who they were, but it definitely upset the village."

"Why did it upset the village?" Logan pressed, feeling the rush that had once been so familiar to him but now felt foreign in his veins.

"Because all his workers were so nice to us," The woman mused. "Far nicer than him, anyway. Now, you're keeping me from serving customers, so if you could move onto the next person?"

Roman glanced behind them to see a shy-looking family and he pulled Logan away, saving and switching off the recorder. He started to walk around the large market, looking about for more people. "Curious interview. Are they always like that?"

Logan shrugged. "They vary. Those reactions are common. People don't want to get pulled into things and they always have a bias. Other reactions are sobbing and blabbering, collected but nervus, shy but useful and closed off."

"Seems reasonable," Roman replied, sticking his hands in his jean pockets. "Who next?"

The detective swung his eyes across the hamlet and smiled when he saw the next station. "The church."

"The..." Roman hesitated. "The church? You know that I'm gay, right? What if they're the homophobic type of church?"

"Unless you announce it, no one's gonna think you're gay, Roman," Logan pointed out as he started to walk over to a slightly shabby, classic church. "Besides, the woman at the stall wore a Christian cross around her neck but we've passed several Hindus in this hamlet."

"So?" Frowned Roman. "What does any of that have to do with a church?"

Logan sighed loudly. "So, what it means is that either the practising Hindus go out of town for prayer or this isn't a church and it's just a repurposed, multi-religion building."

Roman blinked slowly. "Oh, that makes so much more sense. And if we've already seen groups of people publically showing their faith, we can assume that they do practise their religions somewhere. This church is our best bet to get a rough image of this community and see what the prominent faiths are. We can then ask whoever is in charge if Ali Blacksky ever came to pray and then we'll be able to think more like him!"

"Exactly." Logan turned back to Roman with a subtle smile. "We'll make a nearly decent detective out of you yet."

"Well, I am-" He paused and pulled back in offence. "Hey, what do you mean by 'nearly decent'?!"

"I mean exactly what I said."

You could practically hear the pain Roman's' ego was in and Logan tried hard not to laugh.

#sanders sides #sanders sides fic #messy murder au #prinxiety #logicality #tw murder #logan sanders #roman sanders #virgil sanders #patton sanders #janus sanders #remus sanders #ts joan #ts talyn #this whole story is filled with platonic logince so...#platonic logince

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