In recent years, the expression “Nevertheless, she persisted” has become a watchword of the feminist movement and the women who refused to accept the limitations put on them by familial, social, and cultural expectations. It’s an expression that sums up the careers of the seven women Kathleen Courtney Stone profiles in her thoughtful and stimulating They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to ‘Mad Men’.
A Boston-based lawyer and writer, Stone has done an excellent job of selecting a group of women from different racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds to profile. Born between 1917 and 1931, they grew up during what the author describes as a “stagnant period” that followed the first wave of American feminism during the early 20th century. The line of her inquiry is clear: “How did they find the ambition, confidence, sense of self — whatever it was — to have a professional career when the culture said not to, and most of their contemporaries agreed?” Her subjects include the Dahlov Zurich Ipcar, an artist and children’s book illustrator; Muriel Petioni, a Trinidad-born, Harlem-based physician; Cordelia Dodson Hood, an intelligence officer for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and later for the CIA; Martha Lipson Lepow, a pediatrician and virologist; Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus, a physicist at MIT known in her field as “the queen of carbon science”; Frieda Garcia, a Dominican Republic-born, Boston-based community organizer and nonprofit leader; and Rya Weickert Zobel, a half-Jewish federal judge who survived her childhood in war-torn Germany and later emigrated alone to the United States as a young teenager.
Stone, a Baby Boomer, emerges as the eighth subject, participating not as a detached narrator but by encouraging readers to enter her world when, as an “eight-year-old girl sitting cross-legged on the living room floor,” she looks at her father’s law school yearbook and wonders why his class consisted of “more than a hundred men in jackets, ties, and trim haircuts, and maybe ten women:
“I don’t know any women lawyers. In our neighborhood, most women are like my mother — home taking care of kids — but I’m intrigued by the idea that some women, somewhere, are different. I want to know what makes a woman become a lawyer … Only two women on our street have jobs outside the home; one is divorced, and the other has no children … I have no clue why these women took a path different from my mother’s, but I suspect some secret ingredient is at work, something I have not yet discovered.”
Through the examples of the women she profiles, and the “Intermezzo” that follows each chapter in which she describes her own life path, Stone recounts her journey in search of this “secret ingredient” that sets these women apart from so many of their generation.
By the end of her search, the author recognizes that there is no “secret ingredient [that] explained everything, if only I could discover it. Obviously, there is no one ingredient. Every woman lives a mosaic of experiences that meld in unique ways.” She does identify several shared qualities that characterize her subjects: almost all were immigrants or the daughters of immigrants; all but one was a college graduate and several had graduate degrees; most had strong positive relationships with their parents; all were the oldest daughter, and four of the five women who had children had stable, long-term childcare arrangements (she does not mention that those who had long-term marriages seem to have had husbands who were supportive of their careers).
In the book’s “Questions for Discussion” (perhaps developed by Stone’s editor), one finds this: “Some of the women in the book talked about the role of socioeconomic classic their lives. For example, Muriel Petioni said her middle-class upbringing meant that she, as a doctor, substantially overcame the challenges posed by race and gender. In your life, is socioeconomic class as significant as it was for Dr. Petioni? Is it a positive factor for you?” But consider that the women profiled in They Called Us Girls (with the exceptions of Mildred Dresselhaus and Freida Garcia) come not only from educated and supportive families, but ones with useful social and professional connections.
During a post-college trip to Europe, for example, Cordelia Dodson Hood visited the parents of an old school friend, Emilio Pucci, who will not only become a renowned fashion designer, but was also “the son of one of the oldest noble families in Florence.” While in Switzerland, she learned that an Austrian-Jewish friend has been arrested and sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. Hood reached out to her father, the scion of an old pioneer family in Oregon and aide to U.S. Senator Charles McNarry (R-OR), who pulled diplomatic strings to arrange for the young man to be released and come to the United States.
Ipcar’s parents, who were “noted members of the early modernist movement,” met as art students in Paris; her mother was an “occasional visitor” to the home of Gertrude and Leo Stein, and she herself grew up in an artistic environment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Rya Weikert Zobel was separated from her parents during the War (her mother survived and later joined her and her brother in America). She was met on arrival by two uncles and a grandmother who had no doubt that she would go on to college less than three years later. When she was turned down by Cornell, her first choice, a family friend suggested she attend Radcliffe. The “family friend” was the renowned philosopher Susanne Langer, herself a Radcliffe professor.
This is an atmosphere far removed from the lower-middle-class world in which I grew up. As a Baby Boomer who is a first-generation college graduate, I was fulfilling my parents’ dream for me, not their expectations and, lacking professional contacts, had to develop a career on my own. I deeply respect the women Stone profiles — but perhaps for some of the younger readers who will encounter the question above about “socio-economic class,” Stone’s women may seem exemplary and admirable but also beneficiaries of influence. For women of my background, perhaps the watchword “Nevertheless, she persisted” should be supplemented to include the advice to “Bloom where you are planted,” a slogan that is perhaps more realistic of the lives and experiences of not only most American women of my generation, but of new generations aspiring to thrive.
[Published on March 1, 2022 by Cynren Press, 236 pages, $30.00 hardcover]