A Limited Comparison of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Tubman
A Co-authored Series of Posts ‘About 1919,’ that is, about English-language books published from 1914 to 1921, according to the online bibliography and database, Collective Biographies of Women.
Comparing American Women of Achievement, White or Black, in Books, Statues, and Plaques
Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Tubman
We feel compelled to say more about a connection Lloyd Sy made between Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Tubman, women who were contemporaries but so differently represented in cultural memory. Today, CBW as a modern research database brings disparate figures together, a format that encourages critique of their selective representation in older biographical texts. But Lloyd’s blog post compared tables of contents of 1919 that show Alcott and Tubman in separate cohorts, that is, they are not “siblings” as we call the female subjects of chapters in the same table of contents. They never appear in the same book of female biographies until about fifty years after World War II: 1994 and 1995, in the second wave of feminist historiography.
As a context, note especially Isabel’s painstaking bibliography of collective biographies of women 1914-1921. Each of us in this blog series has relied on selective examples, two books, two women, one or two biographers, just as we have limited ourselves to CBW texts published during and a bit after world war. Isabel aptly commented on Lloyd’s notice of Louisa May Alcott (RR=34) and Harriet Tubman (RR=16) as two notable women who occupy quite different documentary social networks in CBW. Alcott and Tubman are “members,” respectively, of an all-white and an all-Black collection of American women published in 1919, as Lloyd’s examination of Bradford’s and Brawley’s collections shows.
As a historian, Isabel wrote to Lloyd to “acknowledge some limited similarities between Alcott (1832-1888) and Tubman (1822-1913) as abolitionists, suffragists, and social reformers objecting to current conditions of labor.” Isabel rightly highlights two more types of biographical data for a prosopographical comparison of these women: war service (US Civil War circa 1863) and disability. Alcott attributed decades of illness to mercury poisoning from typhus treatment received during her three-month service as a Civil War nurse between 1862 and 1863. While contemporary scholars interpret symptoms as suggesting Alcott endured lupus before her early death, Alcott’s own hypothesis intertwines her physical suffering with national trauma. Earlier in the century, Tubman suffered a nearly fatal head injury at the hands of a white overseer and never fully recovered, with symptoms of hypersomnia, extreme fatigue, and epilepsy. During the Civil War, Tubman started her military service as army cook and nurse, before switching roles to scout and spy in early 1863.
Yet we can see great disparities between these lives, inextricable from race and U.S. history: Tubman was deprived of education, whereas Alcott grew up in an educator’s household. Isabel further suggests a spatial measure of the intersecting disadvantages of a Black formerly enslaved person in terms of “generational land and house networks,” in her words, which continue to shape different economic fates according to race in the US.
Alison picks up on Isabel’s spatial observation about the locations of these biographies. In her book Homes and Haunts, Alison traced the history of literary house museums and the writing about them, both in North America and in Britain. In How to Make It as a Woman, the basis of the CBW project, she began her studies of statues of women and other public prosopographies (lists of names, portraits, short biographies) such as Halls of Fame as well as books. Returning to Lloyd’s post about 1919 books: Gamaliel Bradford’s American Women mostly lived in New England (Concord, Boston, Hartford, Amherst) and their fame and the status of their writing led to preservation of their houses as museums, comparable to recognition of male authors.
Color photograph of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts, the original for the house in her novel, Little Women
Several of Brawley’s Women of Achievement achieved much in the Washington DC or Philadelphia circles where post-Civil War freed Blacks of some means could become prominent in arts and politics. Following Tubman’s chapter, Brawley devotes the remainder of the volume to the educators Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954), Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955), Nora Gordon (1866-1901), and the artist Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968). Tubman’s life in a previous generation, born enslaved, appears the opposite of settled in her many rescue missions. She brought her parents to Canada before settling in retirement with them in Auburn, New York, remote from her upbringing and from the hubs of (Euro)American and African American intellectual life. Historic homes associated with Tubman contrast with the single-household format of many authors’ house museums - today’s Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in New York encompasses her residence, the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, and the Thompson A.M.E. Zion Church. Tubman is honored in several civic statues today, ranging from the 1914 memorial tablet depicted in a120 Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, to Nina Cooke John’s 2023 statue replacing a 1927 Columbus monument. Frances E. Willard, possibly the only Midwesterner in these two books, organized internationally in the Temperance movement; she now stands as a statue in the US Capitol building. A statue of Mary McLeod Bethune stands among bronze Black children to indicate her educational mission (erected 1974), opposite a controversial 1876 statue of Abraham Lincoln with a kneeling enslaved man, in a Capitol Hill park in Washington, DC, Washington’s first public “memorial to honor an African American” and “first portrait statue of an American woman”. A statue of Mary McLeod Bethune was placed to represent Florida in the U.S. Capital building in 2022.
Further research could map plaques such as the one for Mary Church Terrell on the corner of Seventh Street and F Street, NW Washington, DC, in honor of her efforts to desegregate Washington restaurants and her suffrage activism; Terrell also helped to prevent the Daughters of the Confederacy from erecting a statue of an allegorical “Black Mammy” in that city. As statues and as biographical subjects, the memorialization of specific, named women makes important claims to local and national histories. Identifying limited similarities among the experiences of contemporaries typically depicted separately is not as directly applicable to these issues. However, the extent to which such similarities were ignored and obscured in previous eras of popular biography suggests the disruptive power of reading nineteenth-century contemporaries in less exclusionary frames.