The Feedsack Dress

Searching for role models

Today, almost 89 years after the 19^th Amendment gave women the right to vote, Sonia Sotomayor faces questioning from senators who will vote on whether she will become the 111th justice of the Supreme Court.

If confirmed as expected, she will be the third woman and the first Hispanic American to serve on that august body.

 Judge Sotomayor has told interviewers that her role model as a child was Nancy Drew, the independent, courageous, and clever amateur detective. Why would a poor girl in Brooklyn see this fictitious, rich, small-town character as a person to emulate? Because even in the early 1960s smart, strong girls found few role models in public life.

In the 1940s, the situation was even worse. The only woman prominent in national politics was the beloved and despised Eleanor Roosevelt. For several years after her husband’s death in 1945, she devoted much of her enormous talent and energy to the infant United Nations. No woman served in the U.S. Senate, and few sat in the House of Representatives.

Where did girls find role models? In novels, Nancy Drew held the edge. Other books for girls featured Cherry Ames, a nurse who served bravely in World War II; Beverly somebody, a reporter; and Sally, the pilot of Sally Wins Her Wings. The only real women I remember reading about were Clara Barton, Edith Cavell, Marie Curie, and Amelia Earhart—all dead.

 I don’t remember knowing any woman who was a doctor or lawyer or police woman or community leader in the 1940s and early 1950s. Strong women didn’t show up much in the press, in the movies, or on the radio. One of my favorite radio shows was a daily soap opera, Portia Faces Life, about a woman lawyer.

 In what I saw of the world, men had all the power and boys had most of the fun. Even as a kid, I knew that wasn’t right. So, obviously, did Sonia Sotomayor.

 —Carolyn Mulford

Cooling off without air conditioning

Until the late 1940s, air conditioning was unusual even in cities. Movie houses and bowling alleys were among the first public buildings to have artificial cooling, and that made them very popular.

 

In small town stores and homes, people cooled off with electric fans. On farms without electricity, you fanned with a newspaper or a cardboard fan passed out to mourners by a funeral parlor. And you sweated and drank quarts of cold water pumped from the well by the back door.  

 

In the evenings, most farm families ended their long days in the sun by sitting outside. A slatted-wood porch swing—suspended from the ceiling by chains—was the choice spot because you created your own small breeze.

 

Often the house still steamed at bedtime. My sisters and I sometimes spread an old blanket or quilt on the front lawn. Looking up at the stars was wonderful, but the chiggers and mosquitoes usually drove us inside before morning. My older sister would stretch out on the kitchen linoleum, which felt cooler than any other surface in the house.

 

My father used an old cooling technique—sprinkling water on the sheets. That made the bed bearable until the night air cooled.

 

—Carolyn Mulford

Talking about mysteries

Every spring for 21 years writers and readers have gathered in the Washington, D.C., area to talk about mysteries, particularly (but not exclusively) traditional mysteries written by women. Members of Sisters in Crime started Malice Domestic, which takes place May 1-3 this year.

I’m moderating a panel on a popular subgenre, mysteries in which an amateur sleuth is devoted to a craft or hobby. The panel is called Killer Hobbies: Crafty Authors Discuss the Hobbies That Drive Them to Murder. The panelists are Monica Ferris (needlepoint), Margaret Grace (miniatures), Betty Hechtman (crocheting), and Terri Thayer (quilting). For the last three, the hobbies were a passion before they put them into mysteries.

For centuries all of these crafts were necessities rather than hobbies. All gave women an outlet for their creativity, but they also took hours of labor, often by candlelight. The old saying about women’s work never being done stated a fact. Today most quilters create works of art, but years ago women made desperately needed coverings for the family beds from any scraps of cloth available, usually clothing that no longer held together and, of course, feedsacks. The feedsack quilt that I inherited from my great-aunt is definitely not a work of art, but it’s warm, and the bright scraps sewn together by hand remind me of our heritage.

I, for one, am delighted that I don’t have to piece quilts or crochet doilies or do anything with a needle more demanding than sewing on a button. I’d much rather read books where wannabe detectives do such work as they figure out who committed murder.

—Carolyn Mulford

 

 

 

Shoveling the grass

Shoveling the grass

 

The other day I needed to bag the grass that had blown onto my cement driveway the last time I mowed my yard. Knowing the rake wouldn’t work well on the hard surface, I thought of using a broom, but the grass would just stick between the bristles or float off.

Then I thought of my blue plastic snow shovel. Perfect for scraping the grass from the cement and dumping it into the bag. 

A neighbor driving by slowed and gawked, apparently wondering what I was doing with a snow shovel on a 70-degree day.

I laughed to myself and remembered that in my childhood on the farm we often used something intended for one task to do another. We didn’t have time—or money—to run to town every time something needed repair. Farmers adapted what they had to what they needed. Feedsacks, of course, were bought for one purpose—to hold feed chickens or other animals—and later used for another—to make clothing, aprons, curtains, quilts, etc.

The snow shovel wasn’t my only adaptation this weekend. An earpiece fell off my glasses and the tiny screw vanished. Nothing in my tool chest was small enough, but a threaded needle in my sewing kit would go through the screw hole. I sewed on the earpiece. The thread should hold until tomorrow when I can go an optometry shop.

As the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

 

—Carolyn Mulford

Planting potatoes on Good Friday

I didn’t plant any potatoes today, but in the 1940s my parents talked about planting the crucial staple on Good Friday. I remember them actually doing that only once, and that year we dug up the abandoned garden on our back 40 where a house had once stood.

Most years the soil remained too cold until well after Easter. My father didn’t usually till the big garden behind our house until early May.

You have to prepare not only your soil but also your potatoes. My parents took potatoes stored in the storm cellar and inspected them for quality and eyes, the little white sprouts peeking out of the brown skin. A little before planting they would carve the eyes from the potatoes, leaving a sizable piece of white to ground the sprouts.

They’d toss the eyes into a bucket, and the whole family would go to the garden. My father would work one row, creating a hole with one whack of his hoe, and my mother would go down another. My older sister and I dropped in the eyes, making sure they were looking up at us, and our parents covered them.

I much preferred planting to harvesting, which came months later. When you dug up potatoes, you couldn’t jump on a spade to drive it into the earth or even attack with a hoe. You had to be careful not to cut the potatoes under each plant, and that often meant loosening the soil with the hoe or spade and then digging with your hands. Dirty work, but we had to do it.

—Carolyn Mulford

Documenting history on DVD

The stark differences between how students work today and in 1949 struck me again yesterday when I watched eight DVD documentaries prepared by middle school students.

The students were competing to represent Missouri at the national National History Day contest in June.

In 1949 few children lived in homes with typewriters or televisions. Even in city schools office staff were the only ones with typewriters. Almost no schools had a television. Farm kids attended one-room schools through the eighth grade. They wrote with pencils and fountain pens, and the major research tool was World Book Encyclopedia.

Yesterday Ken Burns workalikes introduced documentaries on people who had made a difference. Only the voice-overs indicated the producers’ youth. They brought together

·      still photos—including Marie Curie as a child, medical practices in the late 1800s, Hiroshima the day after the atomic bomb,

·      news film—including blasts into space, America Football League games, and 1960s civil rights demonstrations,

·      numerous quotations and much information from books and online sources,

·      videotaped interviews—including a doctor, a presidential library curator, and a NASA official,

·      background music.

To pull all of these elements together in a meaningful, interesting narrative required many, many hours of work, culminating in manipulating sophisticated software. A few years ago only professionals could have produced documentaries as sophisticated as those presented by kids age 12 to 14.

Did the kids do the work themselves? I’m betting that they did. I don’t think their parents or teachers possess the skills.

—Carolyn Mulford

Reading articles about Carolyn Mulford

As a journalist, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people for articles. Occasionally I switch roles, answering rather than asking questions.

The Feedsack Dress was the major topic of two interviews published in March. An article by Charlotte Atchley appeared in the Columbia Missourian and on the newspaper’s Web site at http://voxmagazine.com/stories/2009/03/05/write-stuff. Charlotte interviewed several women writers, each of whom has followed a different path. One thing I told her about why I became a writer: “When you’re fond of reading stories, you want to write stories.”

Phoenix, the national magazine of Alpha Sigma Alpha Sorority, published an article called “Alpha Beta alumna authors historical novel.” Cretia Rowlette, another Missouri native who served in the Peace Corps and settled in the Washington, D.C., area, interviewed me for that article.

One quote from that article: “To her delight, the book elicits a powerful emotional response from adults who remember the days of feedsack dresses. The book conveys a true picture of that time and of the timeless trials of adolescence.” 

I enjoy talking about the book, but I prefer to be the one asking the questions.

—Carolyn Mulford

Studying Latin

Today is the Ides of March, a day of infamy because of William Shakespeare’s account of the soothsayer’s warning to Julius Caesar. In Rome, the ides simply marked the middle of the month, and the day when you paid your bills.

The day reminded me of the vanished prestige of Latin. Up until at least the late 1950s, high schools encouraged anyone planning to go to college to take Latin. Even then many students refused to study a “dead” language. Not many studied a “live” language either. The schools offered few opportunities. Most students didn’t envision themselves ever working, or even traveling, in another country.

In my little world, you rarely heard or read a foreign language. Latin seemed exotic, a key to a secret world. That illusion soon vanished, but I enjoyed studying Latin and found it useful for several reasons.

1.     Many English words come from Latin. Even a limited Latin vocabulary helps you decipher unfamiliar words.

2.     Learning another language teaches you how languages work, including your own. We learn our mother tongue through imitation and don’t analyze it. By studying the structure of a foreign language, we gain a better grasp of the structure of our own.

3.     When you study a language, you study a culture—another way of thinking and behaving. You expand your world and become more tolerant of others.

4.     Studying Latin prepared me to study other languages, particularly such cousins as Spanish, French, and Portuguese but also such unrelated languages as Amharic and Chinese.

When I went to high school, most people concerned themselves with local affairs, not a global or even a national economy. Studying Latin—or any another language—is still a good way to prepare to live in this larger world.

—Carolyn Mulford

Preparing to rewrite

Honest criticism of another writer’s work can ruin a friendship or break up a family, but writers learn most from readers, particularly readers who are writers.

I risked cutting the family ties by reading a teenager’s novel and giving her the same kind of feedback I would an experienced writer. That’s tough love. Fortunately she proved dedicated enough to accept criticism of technique as well as praise for creativity.

I gave her the following tips on preparing to rewrite.

Look at each page. Does it have paragraphs of different lengths? If all your paragraphs are short, you probably have too much dialogue and not enough action. If all your paragraphs are long, you probably have too much description.

Does every page look like the one before and after it? Then you haven’t varied the pace. Your writing may be monotonous.

Look at the beginning of each paragraph. Do you start several with the same word? Watch particularly for paragraphs beginning with “The” or the name of a character.

Does every sentence have the same structure? Most should follow the strongest pattern in the language: subject-verb-object.

List your characters. Does each name start with a different letter? If you start names with the same letter, people have trouble telling the characters apart. Do the names have a different number of syllables? If several characters have a one-syllable name (Joe, Bob, Dick), readers may not remember which is which.

Have you described each character the same way all the way through? Be sure no one is short in one chapter and tall in another. Be consistent in describing a character’s personality, too. Either before or during the first draft, write a brief biography of each character. Include not only what they look like but what they want.

 

Rewriting begins with an analysis of what you’ve written.

—Carolyn Mulford

Learning about Lincoln

Happy birthday, Honest Abe.

President Barack Obama has brought additional attention to President Abraham Lincoln, but he has fascinated me, and most Americans, for many years.

My introduction to Lincoln came in first or second grade. Every day after lunch the teacher read a few pages of a book to the whole school—about a dozen pupils in grade one through eight. She read a biography focused on Lincoln as a boy. He faced tragedy early. His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died not long after she taught him to read.

I remember the teacher reading about Thomas Lincoln bringing home a new wife, Sarah Bush Johnston, and her three daughters. She was not the wicked stepmother of Cinderella and Snow White. Instead she gave the lonely boy the love, understanding, and encouragement he needed to thrive in the tiny, isolated log cabin on the frontier. Many of the stories in the book told of his compulsion to learn and his search for books.

Since then I’ve read many books about Lincoln and visited his supposed birthplace, the reconstruction of the cabin in which he spent much of his boyhood, his home and law office in Springfield, the Soldiers’ Home where he escaped the heat of the summer during the Civil War, Ford’s Theater and the house where he died, and his tomb. We’ve made great efforts to feel close to and understand this unique man.

The poor boy growing up in the woods became one of the most complex, inspiring, brilliant men in all history. He embodies the universal dream of rags to power. Yet he remains unique in what he suffered, what he accomplished, and what he said.

On Lincoln’s birthday in my one-room school, we would cut out his silhouette and read the Gettysburg Address. Reading his words is still a great way to remember him. 

—Carolyn Mulford