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Reading The London Review of Books in the Dead Sea.

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Cordelia Bleats, and Other News

A production photo from King Lear with Sheep, via Modern Farmer.

Edmund White on the Fourth of July circa 1925: “The last random pops and shots of the Fourth—the effortful spluttering and chugging up a hill—the last wild ride with hilarious yells on its way back to New York. Then the long even silence of summer that stretches darkness from sun to sun.”
And here’s a handbook for firework design from 1785. (Note: The Paris Review does not endorse the unsupervised construction or detonation of homemade pyrotechnical devices from any era, past or present—unless you’re reasonably sure you know what you’re doing, in which case, have at it.)
Forget King Lear with people—that’s old-fashioned. What you want is King Lear with Sheep . “The actors are actually incapable of acting or even recognizing that something is expected of them.” (Because they’re sheep.)
“Here’s the problem for someone trying to give Pride and Prejudice a contemporary twist … Jane and Lizzy Bennet are twenty-two and twenty years old, respectively. This means that, in the novel’s world, the two are pretty much teetering on the edge of spinsterhood. The whole twenty-three-year-old-spinster idea will not resonate, of course, with contemporary readers.”
Is Moby-Dick something of a roman à clef?

The Sartorial Kafka

Kafka was born on this day in 1883.

Kafka before 1900.

But while I thought I was distinguishing myself—I had no other motive than the desire to distinguish myself and my joy in making an impression and in the impression itself—it was only as a result of giving it insufficient thought that I endured always having to go around dressed in the wretched clothes which my parents had made for me by one customer after another, longest by a tailor in Nusle. I naturally noticed—it was obvious—that I was unusually badly dressed, and even had an eye for others who were well dressed, but for years on end my mind did not succeed in recognizing in my clothes the cause of my miserable appearance. Since even at that time, more in tendency than in fact, I was on the way to underestimating myself, I was convinced that it was only on me that clothes assumed this appearance, first looking stiff as a board, then hanging in wrinkles. I did not want new clothes at all, for if I was going to look ugly in any case, I wanted at least to be comfortable and also to avoid exhibiting the ugliness of the new clothes to the world that had grown accustomed to the old ones. These always long-drawn-out refusals on the frequent occasions when my mother (who with the eyes of an adult was still able to find differences between these new clothes and the old ones) wanted to have new clothes of this sort made for me, had this effect upon me that, with my parents concurring, I had to conclude that I was not at all concerned about my appearance.

—Kafka’s diary, December 26, 1911.

Thawing Out

Why are there so few courses in Soviet literature at American universities?

A Soviet poster from Albert Rhys Williams’s Through the Russian Revolution, 1920.

When I was completing a master's in comp lit at Oxford, I kept coming across a curious lapse—while most of my British peers had read at least some of the great writers of the Soviet canon, often as early as secondary school, my equally well-educated American friends had never even heard of them. The more I perused the courses of American universities, the more I found that Soviet literature—by which I mean the proverbial classics penned between the revolution and death of Stalin and published largely during Khruschev’s thaw—was noticeably absent. There were, of course, exceptions at institutions such as Stanford, Princeton, Yale, the University of Washington, and a few others, which are renowned for their Russian literature departments. But the majority of colleges, particularly liberal arts schools, focused on the nineteenth-century Russian novel and then skipped straight to Nabokov, or even to post-perestroika literature.

This absence struck me as odd, especially given the literary tastes of the Russian reading public. The Russian literati ostensibly admire and cherish the greats—your Tolstoys and Chekhovs, your Dostoevskys—but ask them to name their favorite writers and most will cite someone from this isolated literary isle. They might mention Mayakovsky, the macho darling of the Futurist movement, whose thundering poetry shook his listeners into an acute state of consciousness; or Akhmatova, an Acmeist poet who explored suffering, humanity’s great equalizer, with minimal words and explicit emotion. They could invoke Pasternak, whose Doctor Zhivago many Americans assume to be a tragic love story between a man and a woman, when really it’s a tragic love story between a man and a revolution, although in Russia Pasternak is celebrated even more for his poetry, especially his wildly experimental collection My Sister, Life. Then there’s the lyrical sentiment of Platonov, or the satire of Solzhenitsyn. There’s Bunin, Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva, Zoschenko, Babel, Bergholz, Zamyatin, Bely, Bulgakov, and a litany of other luminaries whose surnames have all but disappeared from university syllabi.

Is this a lingering effect of the Cold War, a symptom of our culture’s tendency to seal off what we fear or don’t understand? I’m reminded of the horrific looks I got from people the summer I was nineteen, when I decided to read Mein Kempf. They worried that it would negatively influence my nubile and malleable young mind—a concern I found irritating, since I’ve long believed it’s our moral obligation to dissect the most heinous events in history, to use literature as a scalpel of sorts. Was the fear and scorn of Soviet oppression, I thought, part of the reason its literature was kept behind closed doors, even all these years later?

Alas, in interviewing more than a dozen academics at renowned American institutions, I found my tantalizing theory shot down by a simpler answer: American universities don’t teach Soviet literature because American students show little interest in reading it. All of the professors with whom I corresponded said that universities were full to the brim with Soviet literature courses in the sixties, but interest took a nose dive once Russia ceased to be the Evil Empire. Priscilla Meyer, of Wesleyan University, told me that enrollment in Russian courses has decreased by 40 percent since 1991, with a particular hit in the Soviet department. Darra Goldstein, of Williams College, said that when students do want to study Russian, they’re likely to go for the “big names” like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, as opposed to writers who belong in what they see as “the distant past.” Adam Weiner, of Wellesley, similarly lamented that the students “are missing out on some wonderful books, but how on earth does a professor like me get them into the classroom to study something that they regard as the literary equivalent to the dodo bird?”

On one hand, this reticence on the students’ part is logical. While all the aforementioned authors are concerned with the great questions of the soul and the human condition, writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are part of a mainland tradition—it’s not necessary to know much about the historical context of their era to understand or appreciate their work, whereas the Soviet writers are completely steeped in their historical setting. For me, that was the major appeal of such authors; I wanted to use the books to gain deeper insight into this fascinating and complicated epoch. But it seems modern-day students are less interested in literature for its historical lens and more interested in it for its intrinsic pleasures. Sibelan Forrester, of Swarthmore College, along with others, said that it was easier to “package” this literature thematically rather than historically, slipping them into courses with sexier titles like “Angels of Death” or “Literature Behind Bars.” Once the students discover Soviet writers, they apparently often love them—but reeling them in is harder than ever.

This revelation knocks against the inevitable great question: Why do we teach literature? Is it to shed light on a historical period? To deconstruct the technical foundations of the craft? To ponder profound existential questions? To indulge in what Nabokov famously called “aesthetic bliss”? All of these approaches have their merits, and Soviet literature is conducive to any of them, but it would appear that today’s students, especially in liberal arts schools, are taking the plunge mainly for the latter.

That’s a further deterrent to the study of these books, given that many of them are undeniably more complex than their literary predecessors. Bely’s Petersburg, for example, is a masterpiece considered by many critics to be a precursor to the postmodern novel, but it’s a behemoth of a book that requires a linguistic and mathematical genius to fully comprehend. And technique aside, these books are difficult because they don’t subscribe to a neat, binary way of thinking, i.e., Soviet Union equals bad, democracy equals good. In fact, what’s most fascinating about this genre is how even the famously dissident texts are ambivalent about the Soviet regime. Doctor Zhivago, for example, documents the tragedy and brutality of the civil war, and yet in a darkly poetic way is almost grateful for it, because it is only by enduring cruelty that we can truly appreciate kindness, it is only by witnessing ugliness that we can truly appreciate beauty, and it is only through despair that we can truly appreciate joy. In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn satirizes the evil absurdity and unnecessary suffering of the gulag, and yet he extols the discipline and work ethic that it engenders; since human nature is so lazy and depraved, he muses, perhaps it’s beneficial to have someone forcing you to be your most productive self. And in The Foundation Pit, Platonov realizes that the naïve ideals of the revolution are a shimmering illusion, but at the same time he sees that this fantasy brings people joy. To glean these nuances from the books, it’s pivotal not to approach them with the notion that communism is unequivocally bad and democracy unequivocally good—a binary most students have inevitably inherited in the post–Cold War world.

And then there’s the final, obvious problem, which is that the language barrier here is stronger than ever. Most of the Soviet literature classes that I found, especially the ones in poetry, required fluent Russian, and it’s no surprise: the early literature in particular was all about experimenting with style and structure, breaking apart the essences of words and shifting them around like puzzle pieces, allowing for a metafictional expression of meaning and transforming language into a palpable, visual art form. This approach makes them largely untranslatable—so much depends on puns, jargon, and syntax that are irremovable from the mother tongue.

But new, much-improved translations have been rolling in, delighting hopeful academics everywhere. Forrester also believes that getting the “marketing” right—packaging this literature into thematic courses, and bringing up the historical context for individual works—could further increase enrollment. And let’s not forget Putin. If American and Russian political relations continue to devolve, it’s feasible that we could see a resurgence in interest comparable to that of the Soviet period. It would be one silver lining, at least.

Diana Bruk was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and emigrated to New York at the age of five. She has written for The New York Times, Salon, VICE, Guernica, BuzzFeed, and others. She lives in New York City.

In Limbo

A photo from the German Federal Archive: a waiting room in April 1978.

Twice this week, I was stood up. In both cases there were extenuating circumstances, attempts to communicate, and sincere apologies—which I had no trouble accepting. The truth is, I didn’t mind; the truth is, I love waiting.

Good thing, because I’m writing this from the DMV, an institution that brings us as close as we can come to Limbo, now that Limbo is no more. I can’t seem to find a pattern in the numbers being called, but I have no reason to believe mine will come anytime soon. And this is profoundly relaxing.

I have a friend who has talked about “the power of being early.” This is debatable—if anything, it’s the person who keeps another waiting who wields a certain power—but it’s certainly true that, once you’re waiting, you have surrendered control, which, as any yoga teacher will tell you, is paradoxically empowering.

I am struck by how relaxed everyone is in this DMV. The air-conditioning is on high; someone else is running things; there is a pleasant feeling of solidarity. As Milton said, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” And he knew a thing or two about Limbo—if not the DMV.

Miniature Books by the Brontës, and Other News

Stephanie Mitchell / Harvard University, via the Los Angeles Times.

When Charlotte Brontë was thirteen and her brother, Branwell, was twelve, they designed and wrote a series of tiny books: “Measuring less than one inch by two inches, the books were made from scraps of paper and constructed by hand. Despite their diminutive size, the books contained big adventures, written in ink in careful script.”
Charles Simic is addicted to soccer, though in his youth he wasn’t very good at playing it: “My grandmother once came to watch me play and when she got home told my mother: ‘All the other kids were running around nicely and kicking the ball, except your son, who kept jumping up and down and flailing his arms.’”
Later this month, the Guggenheim will host “ANTI-PASTA: A Dinner Inspired by Italian Futurism,” which observes the tenets set forth in Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine.” “Be rid of pasta, that idiotic gastronomic fetish of the Italians,” Marinetti wrote, enumerating eleven requirements for an ideal meal, including “harmony between table setting and food, the invention of food sculptures, and the use of scents, poetry, and music, as well as scientific instruments during preparation.”
This may not be a cause for pride, but we’re proud of it nevertheless: two of the books in this “Weird Sex” roundup are by recent Paris Review interviewees Nicholson Baker and Samuel Delany. (On House of Holes: “Amid the bathetic histrionics, Holes asserts a striking degree of tender, if debauched, humanity.”)
New York has subways and buses, ferries and trams, but it also has dollar vans, a form of “shadow transit” operating “mostly in peripheral, low-income neighborhoods that contain large immigrant communities and lack robust public transit.”

Radical Middle

John Constable, A View at Hampstead with Stormy Weather, ca. 1930.

July 2 is the midpoint of the year—we’re 182 days into 2014 with 182 to go. This is obscurely depressing, although there is something neat about its falling on a Wednesday. It’s all downhill from here, you might say—although sometimes people use that expression as a positive, meaning smooth sailing, so take it as you will.

Everyone finds New Year’s Day dreary. But summer, for all its promise of leisure and romance and ease, has an urgency that is sad in its own way. From the moment it starts, it’s on the wane—days ever shorter, relentlessly shifting sands in a Wizard of Oz–style hourglass. Outside my window, someone is actually playing “Summertime” on a saxophone. He’s probably thinking that we are in New York in hot weather, and it is iconic. The pressure is immense. The high-pressure weather is stifling.

Ashbery touched on it. “Soonest Mended” is about much more than the mundane, although it conjures the mundane vividly. Amidst the dissection of proverb—and allusions to pressures of art, and youth, and time—he manages to put into words the particular melancholy of the midpoint.

Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,
A moment and it is gone. And no longer
May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.
Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.
Now there is no question even of that, but only
Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off
With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across
The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away
And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash
Against the sweet faces of the others, something like:
This is what you wanted to hear, so why
Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers
It is true, but underneath the talk lies
The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose
Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.

Hooray for Losers

Tim Howard in the rain, 2013. Photo: Steindy, via Wikimedia Commons.

Americans are learning how to lose, and soccer is teaching them how to do it. For the longest time, second place in any competition, domestic or international, has been regarded in the USA as a disaster of unmitigated proportions. (Third was not even worth acknowledging.) While other countries celebrated their silver or bronze medals with parties and parades, American commentators thrust microphones into the faces of the “losers” and asked, sotto voce and with unconcealed disappointment, “What happened?” or “What went wrong?”

But this time around, American irreality, with its dangerous admixture of heady confidence—recall that Times poll, which revealed that a majority of fans in only three countries believed their nation would win the World Cup: Brazil, Argentina, and … the USA?—and its obliviousness of “failures,” has not translated into terminal disenchantment with the U.S. team. Okay, they lost to Belgium, the smallest country (in terms of land mass) in the competition, but the goalkeeper, Tim Howard, put on one of the greatest displays in the history of international football. The team fought until the very end, scored a fine goal, and almost forced the game to penalties. Americans may have thought—absurdly? endearingly?—that their team was going to win the whole shebang, but when it didn’t, they were content to take their place among the multitude of also-rans.

This is extraordinarily good news, psychologically, philosophically, and maybe even in terms of foreign policy. In a way, it made the front page of most papers this morning. Few journalists reporting on the game, or on President Obama’s supportive tweets, failed to observe the good-spirited way in which the team’s fans, both locally and abroad, took the loss. If the U.S. can come to terms with the fact that it doesn’t have to be No. 1 in everything, who knows how far this new humility will take it?

Of course, the loss was made easier to swallow by Howard, who broke the record for saves in a single World Cup match—and they were quality saves, to boot. Howard was by turns brave, acrobatic, positionally astute, commanding, and almost invincible. In Howard, Americans discovered a true hero … and he was a loser.

So now that Belgium, in the powerful form of Romelu Lukaku, has turned out the light, is another big switch soon to be flipped? Last night ESPN culled the highest overnight TV rating ever for a World Cup game. There were 25,000 at Soldier Field in Chicago, outdoor screens and crowds all across the country, riveted attention in offices, packed bars. Is the nation so fickle that France vs. Germany and Brazil vs. Colombia will now hold no interest?

All the signs point in the other direction—and FIFA is already mooting the possibility of the U.S. hosting the World Cup in 2026, smack in the middle of Chelsea Clinton’s second term.

Jonathan Wilson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. He is the author of eight books, including Kick and Run: Memoir with Soccer Ball. He lives in Massachusetts.

Passional Affinities

The free-love couple who pissed off nineteenth-century America.

A lithograph against polygamy from an 1850 book.

In the summer of 1853, the Tribune of New York published a pointed letter directed at the proprietors of the American Hydropathic Institute, a “health institute” in Port Chester, denouncing the establishment for spreading “free and easy notions respecting Love and Marriage.” Its reputation locally was as a bawdy place, a breeding ground for anarchy, free love, and other dubious socialist practices. Shortly after this public cudgeling, enrollment dropped, the institute closed, and its proprietors disbanded, taking their unsavory ideas with them to Long Island. On one hundred acres of wooded land, they rebuilt the institute with the modest aim of rectifying society’s ills.

The institute was, at least nominally, a school for hydrotherapy, or water-cure, a popular nineteenth-century health movement that rejected drugs in favor of precise bathing regimens and an ascetic lifestyle aimed at keeping the body, mind, and spirit in careful order. The school was the vision and creation of Dr. Thomas Low Nichols and his wife, Mrs. Mary Gove Nichols. She was a freethinking novelist, an early feminist, and a health reformer; he was a physician, a progressive journalist, and a social agitator. Together they amassed fervent followers and passionate detractors, synonymizing the name “Nichols” with licentiousness and radicalism.

In the years before the Civil War, America was inundated with reformist ideologies—a response to societal shifts brought on by rapid social and economic changes. The Nicholses embodied this anxiety: they embraced a smorgasbord of nineteenth-century reform movements, sampling generously from socialism, free love, spiritualism, mesmerism, phrenology, hydrotherapy, and other progressive health and social ideologies. Few radical figures were as devoted to the twin causes of individualism and love. Their ideal union was one in which plurality of love was openly embraced and each individually sovereign man and woman was “drawn together solely by the charm of a mutual attraction,” as they jointly wrote in Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results in 1854. “Such a union seems to us to constitute the true marriage of mutual love in perfect freedom.”

Mary was a thirty-eight-year-old mother and a newly minted divorcée when she married Thomas, a bachelor six years her younger, in 1848. The newlyweds swathed themselves in a mantle of free-love utopian idealism under a halo of mysticism. At their wedding in New York City, presided over by a Swedenborgian minister, Mary vowed to Thomas: “I enter into no compact to be faithful to you. I only promise to be faithful to the deepest love of my heart … If my love leads me from you, I must go.” Free-love doctrine rested on the belief that no one can honestly vow to love another person forever; once love is lost, a partner is free to pursue their “passional affinities” and find romantic love elsewhere. Loveless marriages were poisonous, and yet these false unions formed the basis of society. “Everybody knows the evils of marriage institution, but like disease and death they are regarded as inevitable,” the couple wrote in Marriage. The Nicholses recoiled at the idea that the government could legislate love—they likened a woman’s married life to that of a slave’s. They wed as a concession, in exchange for the legal protection marriage afforded them until the laws could be reformed. But by all accounts theirs was a happy marriage—full of shared interests and mutual intellectual admiration.

In their quest to promote freedom and love, and the freedom to love, they influenced and alienated leading figures across the social reform spectrum. Edgar Allen Poe lauded Mary’s writing; he counted her among New York’s literati. On the other hand, Horace Mann, the newspaper editor and social reformer, regarded the pair as highly indecent. The suffragists wrinkled their righteous noses at them, but surreptitiously embraced their central belief: that marriage inherently subordinated women. More than a century and a half later, American society continues to take cues from the Nicholses’ radical attitudes on gender roles, love, sex, and marriage—and remains uncomfortable in its confrontation of those attitudes.

* * *

Thomas and Mary were both born in New Hampshire, she in 1810 and he in 1815. Thomas came from old New England stock—his father was a militiaman in the War of 1812 and his grandfather fought for the rebels in the Revolutionary War. As a medical student at Dartmouth, he attended a lecture on vegetarianism by the influential health reformer Sylvester Graham; he was instantly converted to Graham’s carefully regulated lifestyle system, which promoted physical and moral restoration through hygienic living and a diet free of stimulants and meat. Thomas left Dartmouth believing that he could better attend to his new convictions as a journalist. He made his way to New York City and found work at The Herald, where he wrote a lot of self-described “sad trash.” He was only twenty-one, but growing restless.

He moved to Buffalo and founded a paper to target the local political ring. His denunciations met with rancor, provoking the destruction of his printing press. Undaunted, he continued his counterattacks, which eventually landed him in the Erie County jail on charges of libel. Thus sprouted his first book, A Journal in Jail, and the beginnings of his literary career. After his stint in prison, he returned to New York City, where politics and social reform increasingly occupied him. He was particularly enraptured by Charles Fourier, the French philosopher, whose utopian theories formed the basis of most socialist thought in America at the time. From Fourier, Thomas and Mary acquired a lifelong commitment to the ideals of a liberated society based on plurality of love and communal living.

Mary Gove’s work, meanwhile, can be traced to a single question: To whom does my body belong? While her contemporary early feminists targeted voting reform, Mary devoted herself to educating women on their health, the mastery of which she believed was their sole path to autonomy and equality. A lonely, sickly, and inquisitive child, she married in 1831; though her husband was dismayingly conventional, she found freedom by opening a school and giving talks to women on female anatomy and physiology. But when tensions between the couple grew, culminating in a separation, the backlash was immediate—papers that had previously supported her now refused to publish the work of a woman who had broken her marital vows. This reception would become something of a lifelong trend. By the time she met Thomas at a Christmas party in 1847, she had fallen in with a Fourierist crowd, establishing herself as a potent and controversial voice in New York City, where she also ran a water-cure boarding house frequented by many of the city’s radical thinkers.

Mary was by far the most public female advocate for free love in the 1840s and 50s. Free love is commonly conflated with promiscuity, but the Nicholses advocated—and seemed to have practiced—moderation, based on the Grahamite belief that excessive sex was physically harmful. Still, her reputation was complicated by her promotion of the idea that women possessed healthy libidos and had the right not only to choose their partners, but also whether to become pregnant—and the father, or fathers, of their children. Her suffragist contemporaries were equally devoted to advancing women’s liberties, but Mary’s prurient reputation was a liability to the movement, which actively distanced itself from Mary even as it promulgated her thinking. Effectively, they wrote her out of their history.

A caricature of American suffragist Victoria Woodhull by Thomas Nast, 1872.

In the fifteen years following their marriage, the Nicholses were rarely out of the public eye, and never far from a scandal or a reformist melee. They established various free-love communities around the Northeast, each of which inevitably folded under the weight of public objection. Thomas returned to medical school at New York University and graduated in 1850; he and his wife began to promote water-cure doctrines around New York City and launched the Water-Cure Journal, which amassed twenty thousand subscribers. The following year, the couple established the nation’s first school devoted to the principles of water-cure. They hoped to develop the Hydropathic Institute into a “School for Life,” which would act as the movement’s hub and graduate reformists who would lead the communitarian effort to reconstruct society.

Two years later, they relocated the school, which was increasingly popular, to Port Chester, New York, inviting all those “willing to be considered licentious by the world” to join them. Local outcry swelled, and the school didn’t last long. The Nicholses decamped to Long Island in 1852; they took over Modern Times, an existing utopian community, but doctrinarian and monetary conflicts ensured its brisk demise. Cincinnati was the next stop, followed by Yellow Springs, Ohio, where they established another water-cure institute in 1856 with some 500 followers. It was formally dedicated on April 7, Charles Fourier’s birthday, under a banner that read “Freedom, Fraternity, Chastity.” Horace Mann, the president of nearby Antioch College, was a vocal dissenter. But before he could lead the latest charge to remove them, the strangest twist in the Nicholses’ story came to pass.

Throughout her life, Mary had turned to the spirit world for guidance on philosophical and social matters. During a séance in Yellow Springs in early 1857, St. Ignatius of Loyola appeared to her and directed her to study the history of the Jesuits, prompting the couple to convert to Catholicism. The announcement of their sudden conversion was met with stunned surprise by their followers and incredulity by their detractors. Had Mary finally cracked under the relentless public assault? Regardless of the motivations, they improbably remained Catholics for the rest of their lives, continuing to pursue much of their old work, now stripped of free-love doctrine.

They lectured on their newfound faith around the Midwest, returning briefly to New York with the outbreak of the Civil War, and then moved permanently to England in 1861. In London they continued dabbling in spiritualism and social movements. Occasionally Thomas ventured into other topics, like How to Live on Sixpence a Day, the title of his 1878 book. He also frequently wrote for the New York Times from London during the Civil War. Mary remained a prolific lecturer and writer and outspoken advocate for women’s health for the rest of her life. She died in 1885 at the age of seventy-five; Thomas followed six years later, at eighty-six.

The recent debate surrounding marriage is not precisely the one that the Nicholses had hoped for—Thomas considered homosexuality to be amongst the least harmful of vices, an established practice that the government had no business interfering in—but surely they would have relished the public conversation. The two could not envision a nation in which women would enjoy legitimate rights while the traditional marriage constructs remained intact. Their audacious commitment to what amounts to a rather romanticized view of love, compounded by their confusing conversion, ultimately marginalized them, but it also paved the way for the Sangers, Motts, and Anthonys of early American feminism. They acted as a rare bridge between the private and public realms at a time when exposing a woman’s ankles was considered salacious. As Mary wrote nearly seventy years before women won the right to vote: “The day that I was able to say, I owe no fealty to a husband, or any human being, I will be faithful to myself, was my first day of freedom.”

Adee Braun is a writer in New York City. Her work has appeared on The Atlantic Online, Lapham’s Quarterly Online, NPR.org. and other sites.

Both Sides of Your Brain, Both Sides of the Pond

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