I have been reading about Jeanette Rankin… and reading about Jeanette Rankin compels one to think about peace. Really think about it… not in the rainbow-smiley-face-give-peace-a-chance way, but in the here-goes-my-entire-career way.

Reading about Jeanette Rankin compels one to think about peace from the perspective of the first woman EVER to be elected to Congress, and from a state (Montana) where the women still couldn’t vote… Jeanette was really, truly “representing” in a way that no woman would ever do again. The eyes of the entire world were on her.

And only one month into her term, the resolution to enter World War I came up for the vote. The President wanted to fight. Many, if not most, Americans wanted to fight. The members of the suffrage organizations for whom she had worked wanted to fight. And if there wasn’t already enough pressure on Jeanette, she knew that a pacifist vote from her would be seen as a gendered vote. Because war is men’s business.

_What did she do? She voted her conscience, and furthermore, she did not hesitate to affirm that women had a different perspective on war, because it was women who raised the sons who would be sent off to the slaughter. She made no bones about the fact that this was an investment, and she was vocal in asserting women’s rights in protecting that investment. In many ways, women spoke out with more courage about our difference before we achieved all this token equality that inspires so much disappearing of biological realities.

Jeanette ran for Congress again, two decades later, in 1940. In December 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and this time she was the only member of Congress to vote against war. Withstanding concerted pressure from party leaders from Montana, she refused to change her vote. After Italy and Germany declared war on the US, Jeanette abstained from voting for or against, simply stating “Present.”

And, of course, that was the end of her government career. She continued in her anti-war work, protesting both the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In her words, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” And, “There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.”

She visited India seven times, meeting with Ghandi and studying his methods. She helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She was also a founding Vice President of the ACLU.

_Two other aspects of Jeanette’s life caught my attention. First, she appears to have been a lesbian. That’s a whole other blog.

The second thing was where and how she chose to live. In 1924, she bought sixty-four acres of scrub in Bogart, Georgia, and built a one-room house. It had a fireplace at one end and a car radiator at the other. The theory was that water heated by the fireplace would circulate to the car radiator, but it couldn’t have been very efficient without a pump… and there was no pump, because there was no electricity. There was no running water either. She had an outdoor, manual pump, and she would pour her dishwater into a funnel that led to a pipe that drained to the outside. Her toilet was a wood box that required emptying outdoors.

_She would return to Montana for the summers, driving in her car, but Georgia was her home. Rural Georgia. Jeanette bought a cow. Her mother stayed with her, and so did her sister’s children. Rumor has it that some of her colleagues who came for extended visits were actually lovers. She, of course, started a local peace organization. She planted peaches and pecans.

When this house burned down, she built a rammed earth house with a roof of saplings and tar paper. Now, this was 1942, not 1969…  and Jeanette was an upper-middle-class, two-time former Congresswoman in her 60’s, not a twenty-something hippie.  She ended up abandoning the rammed earth project and moving to a sharecropper’s cabin in Mars Hill, Georgia. Here, she had electricity and other amenities (a chemical toilet!), but she built an annex with a tamped earth floor.

Her friendships with her rural neighbors crossed class and race lines, as she shared her car for shopping trips and organized clubs for the children, teaching them how to make a dam for a swimming hole and then how to sew bathing suits.

Even though she did not preach this lifestyle, I believe it was part of Jeanette’s peace work. I believe that she understood the progression from unsustainable consumerism to unfair distribution of wealth to social and political instability to war. Her peace activism wasn’t just about joining organizations or lobbying politicians. It was down to the roots.  It was “What’s my part in this? And how are my actions contributing to the problem or the solution?”

It’s interesting to me how sources like Wikipedia neither make mention of her lifetime affinities with women and probable lesbianism, nor do they mention her radical lifestyle of voluntary simplicity decades before the environmental movement. I think they overlook the touchstones of her activism.

Okay... Albert Nobbs... 

Is the glass half empty or half full?

I'm going to go with half full, because there is a pretty spot-on depiction of a lesbian butch in the film. And a working-class butch,at that. Not addicted, self-hating, or self-destructive. Comfortable in her own skin, happily married and living in a cozy home.... Sassy, self-confident, compassionate, helpful to a sister in need. Does not die. Yep, nicely half-full. Janet McTeer knocking it out of the park.

So that's where I would focus. Yes, a representation of a butch character that neither exoticizes nor excoriates. See the Butch Visibility Project for a little context.

If, however, I were to focus on the title role, Albert Nobbs... well, I'm afraid that's the "half-empty" part. And it's too bad, because this was apparently Glenn Close's project. In 1982, Close was in a stage production where she first performed the role. This was an adaptation of a short story by Irish author George Moore. She had a dream of making it into a film, which she worked toward for fifteen years. I wish I could say something nice about her portrayal.

Well, I can. It's not her fault. Someone else wrote the story. She plays a survivor of a gang rape, who has adopted male drag in order to secure better employment and (implied) indemnity from more assault. She appears to be in a freeze state of PTSD... either that, or arrested development. She has a nervous breakdown over a flea, nearly passes out at the sight of another woman's breasts, and (spoiler alert) has a heart attack over the excitement of a fist fight.

Let me just say here, it takes a lot of gumption for a woman to pass as a man. Especially in a culture with criminal penalities and incarceration for the deed. Nobbs' character just doesn't make sense. She appears more like Tony Hopkins' fussy butler from the BBC's Remains of the Day. Hate to say it, but it's more from the archive of prissy gay male stereotypes than any lexicon of lesbian butch characters. This is the kind of thing that can happen when  men attempt to create lesbian characters in the absence of visible butch culture.

There is a completely incoherent scene where the butch and Nobbs put on women's clothing (from the turn-of-the -century) and run along the beach. Nobbs is weeping with liberation. The metaphor is completely misguided, in my opinion, because it is their male clothing that has liberated them both. The female clothing signifies "other," subordinate status, sexual prey, economic dependence, and--as Nobbs trips and falls in the sand--serious literal as well as figurative challenges to mobility.

And while we're on half-empty...  the film depicts both Nobbs and then later the butch character sexually objectifying a femmy (and snotty) servant in the hotel where they work. Both of them are not above exploiting her out-of-wedlock motherhood and the stigma that goes with it, to pressure her into partnership with them. One might make the case that the glass is half-full in that they are chivalrously willing to come to her rescue. I see it as half-empty as the woman, clearly in love with another person (a man), is being pressured to prostitute herself in a coerced marriage for the sake of the baby. Not cool.

The author of the short story from which the stage play was adapted, from which the film was adapted, gives us some clues about the character of Albert.

George Moore attended a Catholic boarding school in England where he was the youngest of 150 boys. Not surprisingly, he had a breakdown and was sent home.When he returned, he refused to study the assigned subjects and was sent home for good. Later on, he made a career writing about prostitution, extramarital sex and lesbianism. According to Wikipedia, "Moore was believed by some to be impotent and was described as 'one who told but didn't kiss.'"

Gertrude Stein wrote about George in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She describes him as "a very prosperous Mellin's Food baby." [See Mellin Food ad below.]

_Where am I going with this? I think that Albert Nobbs is Moore's alter-ego. He is writing about himself. He is writing about his surviving of  sexual assault, his desire to escape, his sense of delirious liberation in women's frocks. He is the one fainting at female nudity. He is the one who cannot dare imagine a woman being attracted to him.

You know what? George is half-full. He appears to have been quite a rebel, defying his school, going with a disreputable publisher, rejecting the church, taking part in the Irish Literary Revival, and disinheriting his brother...I'm going to give him a pass  for his appropriation of "passing women."

So, go see the film. Appreciate that Close is opening territory for women. And then enjoy every second of McTeer's remarkable performance.

_ I have just discovered that Tonia Thelma Grant died in 2005, and I don’t remember reading any memorials about her passing, so I wanted to write something.

Tonia was born in Brooklyn on March 28, 1927, and she moved to Gilboa, New York, in 1971. Here she founded Damas Gracias Writers’ Workspace, where lesbian writers could offer workshops and retreats for women.

_The year before Tonia’s death, I had the privilege of teaching a lesbian theatre workshop at Damas Gracias, and one of my favorite memories is sitting around in the evening and listening to Tonia’s stories of being an early “out” lesbian in Brooklyn. I believe she said she had worked as a reporter for the Amsterdam News, one of the historic African American newspapers.

She had a passion for lesbian culture that was undiminished, and Damas Gracias, located on a beautiful creek, reflected the dream of a “room of one’s own.”

The one obituary I have, sent to me by Basil Kreimendahl, who attended my workshop, notes that “She is survived by two sisters, Hazel Chambers of Brooklyn and Ruby Grant of Gilboa; a brother, Edgerton Grant of Brooklyn; a son, Tonio M. Grant of Gilboa; and two grandchildren, Mychal and Amaya Grant of West Virginia.” And, it notes,  there was a service for her in Grand Gorge. 

_Basil, who wanted Tonia to perform in one of her plays, added this:
"I also remember Tonia telling me how much she enjoyed every year going to the Carribean and that she had family there. She also told me that she had a brownstone in Brooklyn. At one point, she had a private club for women in it. This was when that was the safest way to meet. She was also an actress."

Because I am unable to locate more information about Tonia, I  want to turn to the land she chose for her dreams : the small town of Gilboa located in the Catskill Mountains.There are two facts about this small town that seem to me to stand as metaphors for the greater and seemingly lost story of Tonia’s life.

First, in 1926, the year before Tonia’s birth, the original town was razed and flooded by the damming of the Schoharie Creek. Many of the townspeople fought “eminent domain,” right up to the flooding and for two decades beyond. The project was built by African American and Italian immigrant labor.

The Occupation of Wall Street has been making headlines for weeks, with thousands of protestors flocking to the heart of New York’s financial district to register their shock and outrage at a collapsed economy that took the world by surprise.

But there was a consumer activist—a woman—born over a century ago, who would not have been surprised at all.  Her name was Mary Harriman Rumsey, and she was the partner of Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins.

 Frances Perkins was the first woman to occupy a Cabinet position, and she has rightly been referred to as the “woman behind the New Deal.” Her achievements include the banning of child labor, the minimum wage, the forty-hour workweek, worker's compensation, unemployment insurance, employer-provided health insurance, new work programs to create jobs, welfare, and Social Security. The only item on her reform agenda that she failed to secure was universal health insurance. The American Medical Association had as influential a lobby then as now.

(It’s an interesting footnote to history that while the Bureau of Immigration was still under the Labor Department, Perkins fought hard but unsuccessfully to allow entry for hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Roosevelt transferred the Bureau to the Department of Justice in 1940, but had he not authorized this transfer, Perkins would never have allowed the infamous internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent.)

Perkins had made many adjustments early in her career in order to fit herself into the male-dominated arena of politics. She had changed her name (from “Fannie” to Frances) and also her style of dressing (to remind men of their mothers!) But after her Cabinet appointment, she found herself in a Catch-22 situation. 

_It was expected that Cabinet members would all have wives to run their households and to host the social gatherings where the real business of government frequently was conducted. Perkins could not be “one of the boys,” and, at the same time, conform to the social protocols of a Washington hostess.  The Washington Post had attacked her in an article with the headline  “Capital Has a Rigid Calling-Card Code, Social Ostracism Is the Penalty Paid by Women Who Break It.”

 And here is where Mary Harriman Rumsey came to the rescue. She rented a three-story house in Georgetown and invited Frances to become her “roommate.” History notes that the two were far more than roommates, and that Mary was far more than a typical Cabinet wife.

Mary Rumsey was the daughter of a railroad tycoon, and she had grown up on a twenty-thousand-acre estate in upstate New York, where she later supervised the six hundred employees. She had homes on Long Island and also in Virginia. Her dinner parties with Frances were legendary, and, as one biographer noted, it was not unusual to find Will Rogers, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Bourke-White, and General Douglas MacArthur at her table, along with an unknown Appalachian folk singer.

During Roosevelt’s inaugural year, she founded a Washington weekly named Today, which later became Newsweek magazine.  More significantly, Roosevelt named her to chair the Consumer Advisory Board that had been authorized under the New Deal. 

_It was Rumsey’s job to see that the retail selling price of goods would not increase proportionately more than the increase which wage earners would receive for their labors.  She understood that, for all the pioneering legislation that her partner was putting through as Secretary of Labor, none of these wage protections would have meaning if the price of consumer goods outstripped the purchasing power.  In an interview with the New York Times, Mary explained:

"There have been disagreements between labor and capital in which each has made known its ills, but seldom has the man or woman who actually footed the bills, by purchasing the things that were manufactured or grown, had a voice in the selling price."

Sadly, this principle was forgotten in the decades following the New Deal, when credit cards were introduced to consumers. By the 1970’s the price of goods and services was increasing at a rate higher than wages, but nobody seemed to notice because, suddenly, even working-class folks could get instant “mini-loans” via credit cards for all kinds of purchases that did not require loan officer approval. Magic money! By the 1990’s, the debt load of an average family was $40,000. By that same decade, the credit craze had spread to the housing market, where lack of adequate regulation led to hundreds of thousands of folks taking out mortgages on homes that would be one paycheck away from foreclosure.

Mary Rumsey would have seen right through this smokescreen of a credit economy, to the widening gap between wage and price increases. And she would have decried a government willing to allow its citizens to be seduced by promises of instant gratification and the trappings of upward mobility, even as they slid deeper and deeper into hopeless debt.

Mary died suddenly and unexpectedly on December 19, 1934, from complications resulting from a fall from a horse. At the time of her death, Frances was in middle of the fight for Social Securty, and Roosevelt had given her a Christmas deadline for her Cabinet committee to complete their work.  Because of the closeted nature of her relationship with Rumsey, only a few very close (and lesbian) friends could acknowledge the degree of her loss. As one of these friends noted, “You are going through one of those tremendously alone experiences, yet lacking in importance outside yourself.” Frances would also lose their home, as it was Rumsey who had paid the lion’s share of the rent. Any attempt on the part of Rumsey to provide for Perkins financially would have raised questions on scandal-mongering Capitol Hill.

So, the same week her partner died and she was facing the imminent loss of her home, Perkins called the members of her committee to her home, set a large bottle of Scotch on the table, and told the men that no one went home until they finished the work. As a result of that night, and the woman whose activism was a living memorial to her partner’s death, millions of Americans have been able to retire, and even more have been able to survive.

Watching, the footage of the Occupation of Wall Street, one hears the echo of Mary Rumsey. In this interview, she was referring to her multi-millionaire father, but her words could as easily be applied to the “banksters” of Wall Street today:

"His period was a building age, when competition was the order of the day. Today the need is not for a competitive but for a cooperative economic system."

References: Downey, Kirstin. The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. Doubleday, 2009.

Mitchell, Donn. “Debutantes of the World, Unite! The Irrepressible Mary Harriman” The Anglican Examiner, http://www.anglicanexaminer.com/Rumsey.html

[Originally published in On the Issues: A Magazine of Feminist, Progressive Thinking, Nov. 23, 2011.]