Building Taliesin
Page 18
VISITING MAMAH BORTHWICK
When exactly did Charlotte Perkins Gilman visit Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin?
Borthwick is not specific, but July 7 was less than two weeks before she wrote to Ellen Key of the “recent” visits. Gilman and Gale might have been houseguests of Jane Porter at nearby Tanyderi.107 Gale’s presence during at least one visit is established by Wright in his Autobiography when he discusses his failed attempt to court her in 1923. He says:
“My people all knew Zona. My Mother and my Aunts much admired her. While in Japan I read Lulu Bett. Straightaway I made up my mind to know Zona Gale better when I got home; if not, to know the reason why. I had met her at Taliesin with Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” (Emphasis added.)108
Wright does not mention that Mamah also was in the room. But Mamah was probably the person Gilman most wanted to see. Ellen Key was Gilman’s major rival in the feminist debates of the time, and Borthwick was Key’s American translator. In the edition of Love and Ethics produced by Borthwick, Gilman is called out by name when Key speaks disparagingly of “American feminists of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman type.” In the Huebsch translation of the same passage the name does not appear; the word “Americanism” is substituted for the phrase.109
THE GILMAN TYPE
What did “American feminists of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman type” believe?
They believed that women were no different from men in human essentials, that “female nature” was a social construction. “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver,” Gilman said. “In our steady insistence on proclaiming sex-distinction we have grown to consider most human attributes as masculine attributes, for the simple reason that they were allowed for men and forbidden to women.”110
They believed that the raising of children should be tasked to people with the best qualifications. “It is not sufficient to be a mother,” she said. “An oyster can be a mother.”111
They believed that women should be free to work in any field. “Doing human work is what develops human character,“ she said. “The reason that women need the fullest freedom in human development … is because women are half the people of the world and the world needs their service as people, not only as women.”112
They believed in the liberating power of association and common effort. “[W]hosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it,” she said. “The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is narrowed by the woman.”113
These ideas were never far from the surface of Gilman’s “terrifyingly active brain.” Gale tells of standing with Charlotte “on the platform of a small railway town in Wisconsin. Beautiful red-and-green switch-lights shone out and great engines rushed back and forth.
“‘All that,’ she said, ‘and women have had no part in it. Everything done by men, working together, while women worked alone within their four walls!’”114 She was not always in a state of anger. Gale describes Gilman’s reaction upon leaving a University of Wisconsin building on Bascom Hill during the summer session. “Emerging on that campus, the summer school students streaming over its green swell in the slanting late afternoon sunlight, bright colored groups under the trees, the university band playing, she said: ‘There’s heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People free to come together, and in beauty—for growth.’”115
Gilman believed that the raising of children should be tasked to people with the best qualifications. “It is not sufficient to be a mother,” she said. “An oyster can be a mother.”
“THE TALMUD OF SEXUAL MORALITY”
In contrast to Gilman’s audacity and wit, Ellen Key’s musings on love, marriage and sexuality seem nearly unreadable. But her focus on the individual woman and her erotic emancipation—the freedom to marry for love and be a lover—drew an audience to compete with Gilman’s social vision. “One feminist recalled that even though suffragists regarded Key’s views as ‘anathema’ … everybody who used to read Charlotte Perkins Gilman was now reading Key.”116
Fig. 152. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Zona Gale both spoke at the 12th Biennial Convention of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in Chicago before coming to Taliesin in the summer of 1914. The conference drew 5,000 delegates and 15,000 club members.
Floyd Dell, who profiled both writers in his 1913 Women as World Builders, called Key’s Love and Marriage “the Talmud of sexual morality”—a reference to both to its wisdom and its impenetrability.
“She lacks logic, and with it order and clearness and precision,” Dell says, but “there is a whole universe in Love and Marriage; it resembles the universe in its wildness, its tumultuousness, its contradictory quality. Her book, like the universe, is in a state of flux.”117
“There’s heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People free to come together, and in beauty—for growth.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, observing the summer scene on the University of Wisconsin’s Bascom Hill
Gilman, discussing Mamah Borthwick’s translation of The Woman Movement in the February 1913 issue of The Forerunner, breaks with Key on several big questions, one of which she calls “an unbridgeable chasm.”118 That is Key’s conviction that motherhood and raising children is woman’s most exalted work. Borthwick had been jolted in 1911 when Key urged her to leave Wright and return to her children, which she said would be the proper “choice in harmony with your own soul.” Mamah had rejected that and told Key that Wright had said, ‘I feel as if I had lost a friend.’”119
Key also maintained that women’s work outside the home was “socially pernicious, racially wasteful, and soul-withering,” and criticized feminists “for setting up male models and male standards of success and fulfillment.”120
But Key had made Borthwick’s own professional work—the work of translating and marketing Ellen Key—a hellish assignment. Key had been, among other things, a double dealer, pitting one translator against another and taking money from both.
That is surely why Borthwick made a point of letting Key know in her letter of July 20—the last she would write—that she and Frank Lloyd Wright had welcomed her worst adversary into their living room—more than once—and that they had found Charlotte Gilman “extremely interesting,” and possessed of a “terrifyingly active brain.”
She might have been teasing her mentor, but it was also her moment of defiance.
NOTES
1. Architect Wright in New Romance With ‘Mrs. Cheney,’” Chicago Tribune, December 24, 1911.
2. Edwin L. Shuman, Steps Into Journalism (1894), quoted in Michael Schudson, Inventing the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 79.
3. ”Spend Christmas Making ‘Defense’ of ‘Spirit Hegira,” Chicago Tribune, December 26, 1911.
4. Painting an outcast with hot tar and spreading feathers over the tar before driving the undesirable person out of town was a vigilante punishment used on rare occasions in American communities as far back as the Revolutionary War. See Lawrence Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
5. ”Ask Sheriff’s Aid to Oust Wright,” Chicago Tribune, December 37, 1911.
6. ”Tar and Feathers for Wright and Soulmate,” Des Moines Daily News, December 237, 1911.
7. ”Elopers Guarded From College Boys,” Syracuse Herald, December 26, 1911.
8. ”Sheriff to Raid Love Castle,” Syracuse Herald, December 27, 1911.
9. ”Law Vs. Love,” Syracuse Herald, December 28, 1911.
10. ”To Move Love Castle,” Racine Daily Journal, December 30, 1911.
11. ”Affinities Plan Escape,” Washington, Indiana., Democrat, December 29, 1911.
12. ”Barred Doors Hold Soulmade [sic] Prisoner,” Alaska Citizen, February 12, 1912.
13. ”Affinities Plan Escape,” Carbondale Daily Free Press, De
cember 29, 1911.
14. ”Wright Reveals Romance Secret,” Chicago Tribune, December 30, 1911.
15. Wright Talks: ‘I Won’t Talk,’” Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1912.
16. ”Wright in Castle Fearless of Raid,” Chicago Tribune, December 28, 1911.
17. Floyd Dell, “A New Idealism,” Chicago Evening Post Friday Literary Review, December 29, 1911.
18. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, late February or early March, 1912, Ellen Key Archive, Royal Library of Sweden.
19. ”Wright Case Agitation Develops Temporary News Bureau at Spring Green,” Dodgeville Chronicle, January 5, 1912.
20. ”Wright Case Agitation,” Dodgeville Chronicle, Janury 5, 1912.
21. Richard Lloyd Jones to Frank Lloyd Wright, December 28, 1911. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona, used by permission.
22. ”Wright is Repudiated—Wife Remains True,” Eau Claire Leader, December 28, 1911.
23. Frank Lloyd Wright to Francis and Mary Little, January 3, 1912. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona, used by permission.
24. A. Cole to Frank Lloyd Wright, January 6, 1912. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona, used by permission.
25. ”‘Spiritual Hegira’ Trial; Relatives of Principal Actor to Pass Upon Situation,” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, December 28, 1911.
26. Wright’s open letter, February 3, 1912, notarized in Sauk County by Thomas W. King. Jane Lloyd Jones and Ellen C. Lloyd Jones Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.
27. Numbers from 1915 Hillside brochure via e-mail from Keiran Murphy to author, July 14, 2011.
28. Wright quotes them back to themselves in his letter of January 3. The details of the $9,000 loan are from Anthony Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1993), 72.
29. Ibid. A phaeton is a type of horse-drawn buggy.
30. For the fate of other salvaged remnants, see ”Francis W. Little House II (S. 173),” William Allin Storer, The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 174–175.
31. Wright to Ashbee, July 24, 1910. Reprinted in Robert Sweeney, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Annotated Bibliography (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls Inc., 1978), xxii.
32. Frank Lloyd Wright, Studies and Executed Buildings (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1910), v. 1, 1, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
33. Wright to Woolley, April 22, 1911, Taylor Woolley Manuscript Collection, J. Willard Mariott Library, University of Utah.
34. Alasdair McGregor, Grand Obsessions: The Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin (Victoria, Australia: Lantern/Penguin Group, 2009), 81–82.
35. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Japanese Print: An Interpretation (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), 17, 19.
36. Ibid., 25–27.
37. Julia Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan: The Architect’s Other Passion (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 40.
38. Ibid., 14.
39. Ibid., 14, 16.
40. Ibid., 72.
41. ”Frank Wright Goes to Japan; Departs for Flowery Kingdom on Sunday; Takes ‘Soulmate’ With Him,” Dodgeville Chronicle, January 17, 1913.
42. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, July 8, 1913. Ellen Key Archive, Royal Library of Sweden. The newspaper’s mention of “Satsu,” which might or might not be an accurate rendering of the name, is the only known reference to a Japanese servant at Taliesin.
43. Frank Lloyd Wrght, An Autobiography (Barnes & Noble reprint, 1998), 524–530. Wright appears to conflate the 1913 trip with one in 1915–1916, his fifth crossing. Meech has the most authoritative account of Wright’s life as a collector and art dealer. Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan, 210–218
44. Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and Architecture (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), 144–145.
45. Ibid., 157.
46. Theodore Turak, “Mr. Wright and Mrs. Coonley: An Interview with Elizabeth Coonley Faulkner,” in Richard Guy Wlson and Sidney K. Robinson, eds., Modern Architecture in America: Visions and Revisions (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1991), 157.
47. Leonard K. Eaton, Two Chicago Architects and Their Clients: Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), 82–85, 220.
48. Turak, “Mr. Wright and Mrs. Coonley,” 154.
49. Queene Ferry Coonley, “The Educational Responsibility of the Mother,” Vassar Quarterly (August, 1921), 239–245.
50. Turak, “Mr. Wright and Mrs. Coonley,” 150.
51. Ibid., 158.
52. Ibid., 159.
53. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, July 8, 1913. Ellen Key Archive, Swedish Royal Library.
54. Julia Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan, 80.
55. Ibid., 84.
56. Frank Lloyd Wright, “The New Imperial Hotel, Tokio,” Western Architect, April 1923, reprinted in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), v. 1, 177.
57. Ibid.
58. For Wright’s account, see “Building Against Doomsday” in An Autobiography (New York: Barnes & Noble reprint, 1993), 213–223.
59. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, 176.
60. Ibid., 180.
61. Paul Kruty, Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 28, 32.
62. ”Midway Gardens to Be Formally Opened Tonight,” Chicago Tribune, June 27, 1914.
63. Paul Kruty, Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens, 37.
64. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, 190–191.
65. Paul Kruty, Frank Lloyd Wright and Midway Gardens, 38, 40.
66. Wright to Woolley, March 30, 1914, Taylor A. Woolley Manuscript Collection, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
67. Julia Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, 110. She cites two newspaper accounts, “Wright Exhibit Stirs Chicago Architects,” Chicago Record Herald, April 8, 1914, and “Architects Quit Big Exhibit,” Chicago American, April 9, 1914.
68. Ibid.
69. Lena Johannesson, “Ellen Key, Mamah Bouton Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright: Notes on the Historiography of Non-existing History,” NORA, the Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies 3, no .2 (1995), 126–136. For a more comprehensive treatment of the letters, see Alice T. Friedman, “Frank Lloyd Wright and Feminism: Mamah Borthwick’s Letters to Ellen Key,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, v. 61, no. 2, June 2002.
70. Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, ca. December 1911. All other quotes and facts, except where otherwise cited, are from Borthwick’s letters in the Ellen Key Archive, L 41 A, Swedish Royal Library, Stockholm.
71. Johannesson, Ellen Key, 134. Johannesson argues that Borthwick’s work was deliberately slighted by male biographers who treated women as “secondbest sources to the lives of great men.” However, Borthwick’s papers were destroyed in the fire of 1914, her descendants were killed with her, and succeeding Wright wives suppressed any mention of her. Johannesson discovered the only solid evidence of Borthwick’s work and then accused biographers of ignoring what only she knew.
72. Thorbjorn Lengborn, “Ellen Key,” Prospects (Paris: UNESCO, International Bureau of Education, 1993), 23, no. 3/4, 825.
73. Katrin Bennhold, “In Sweden, the Men Can Have It All,” New York Times, June 9, 2010. Swedes receive 13 months of “generously paid” parental leave, including two months exclusively reserved for fathers.
74. Barbara Miller Lane, “An Introduction to Ellen Key’s ‘Beauty in the Home,’” in Lucy Creagh, Helena Kaberg, and Barbara Miller Lane, eds., Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 22.
75. Ibid., 25.
76. Mary Blume, “Bathing Sweden in Nordic Light,” International Herald Tribune, December 30, 1997.
77. Lane, “Introduction,” 20, 27.
78. Key, “Beauty in the Home,” 35.
79. Ibid., 38.
80. Ibid., 35.
81. Genealogist Karin Corbeil has developed information, supported by obituaries and other sources, that the third child in the Cheney household was Jessie Borthwick Pitkin, Mamah’s niece. Her mother, Jessie Octavia Borthwick Pitkin, Mamah’s sister, died in childbirth on April 10, 1901. The father, Albert C. Pitkin, gave the baby to Mamah and Edwin Cheney, whose own children were not yet born. (John Cheney was born in 1902, Martha Cheney in 1905.) Another sister of Mamah, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Borthwick, also resided at the Cheney home and looked after the children. She was listed in the 1910–1911 city directory as a teacher at Washington Irving Elementary School, in the school’s first year of operation. Jessie at some point left the Cheney household and moved into the Oak Park home of her wealthy cousin, Carolyn Pitkin McCready. Jessie attended Science Hill School in Shelbyville, Kentucky, an elite finishing School for girls, and the Bouve school of Physical Education in Boston (now the Bouve College of Health Sciences at Northeastern University). She taught physical education at the University of Chicago, then married Roger Higgins, an English instructor at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. She was active in music in Andover for more than 50 years, serving as manager and tympanist for the Andover Symphony Orchestra in the 1940s and accompanying vocal and instrumental teachers on the piano. She had two musical sons. Haydn, the older—who remembered growing up with two grand pianos in the living room—became famous as jazz pianist Eddie Higgins, performing in Chicago clubs and international festivals under his stage name. The younger son, Jon Borthwick Higgins, was a renowned singer and an authority on South Indian music at Wesleyan University. Though both are deceased, their recordings are available on Amazon. Sources: Karin (Casey) Corbeil e-mail to author, August 20, 2011. Nancy Horan generously referred the author to Corbeil. “Jessie B. Higgins,” Lawrence Eagle Tribune, North Andover, Massachusetts, April 4, 1983. “Eddie Higgins, 77; Pianist Created Tapestries of Music,” Boston Globe, September 27, 2009.
82. Quoted in “’Love and Marriage,’” New York Times, March 26, 1911. The deck reads: “Miss Ellen Key maintains that motherhood is not only the destiny, but the highest privilege, of womanhood.”