The full bookswap article is here.

Slightly related, my piece about the Tenement Museum in NYC.

Surely we may agree that human existence cannot be meaningful unless it is imaginative - which is to say, unless it surmounts the routine, repetitive, mechanical elements in life by using them for purposive activity that stimulates our thought with new perspectives, sharpens our sensations while also gratifying them, awakens our emotions to fresh possibilities of expression, and in general encourages the onward flow of consciousness to explore unknown capacities of our being. A life that is boring or without novelty is not meaningful for us.

No anthology would be complete without the black stain of Victoria Woodhull and her speeches about "free love," which were ahead of their time and served to set the movement back a few decades; on the bright side, Woodhull was the first woman to announce a presidential candidacy, with Frederick Douglass as her vice president. Another area I was exposed to for the first time was the NWSA militant strategy pursued in the 1870s of claiming the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, blatantly ignoring the second section's specification of "male" and focusing on the "all persons born or naturalized in the United States... are citizens of the United States and ... no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens..." The ladies voted, were arrested, took it to the Supreme Court which ruled against this strategy (New Departure).

Other sections deal with how the Western states gradually allowed suffrage, black women's participation in the suffrage movement, Jane Addams' role, Francis Willard and the importance of the temperance activists, and the militancy of the early twentieth century activists like Alice Paul. It's a comprehensive and well-researched glimpse into the various stages of the century-long struggle to attain the right to vote.

* Antoinette Brown attempted to speak at the World Temperance Convention in 1853. Horace Greeley's inane comments in the Tribune encapsulate her attempt as "This convention has completed three of its four business sessions, and the results may be summed up as follows: First Day - Crowding a woman off the platform; Second Day - Gagging her; Third Day - Voting that she shall stay gagged. Having thus disposed of the main question, we presume the incidentals will be finished this morning."
* Susan B Anthony's guidance on how to address a mixed audience, "It is perfectly right for a gentleman to say 'ladies and gentlemen,' but a lady should say 'gentlemen and ladies.' You mention your friend's name before you do your own."
* The transcript of United States of America vs Susan B. Anthony, Circuit Court, Northern District of New York, June 17-18,1873. Arrested for voting in the 1872 election, the judge did not allow the jury to decide and simply handed down a guilty verdict. When asked if the prisoner had anything to say as to why the sentence should not be pronounced, Anthony makes an eloquent and impassioned plea. The judge tries to stop her, but she continues despite being ordered to sit down. "As then the slaves who got their freedom must take it over, or under, or through the unjust forms of law, precisely so now must women, to get their right to a voice in this Government, take it; and I have taken mine, and mean to take it at every possible opportunity." After being fined $100, Anthony announces her refusal to pay, mentioning her $10,000 debt incurred by publishing her paper to educate women to "rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison, and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the Government." She closes with "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."

It's my fault for being so interested in a topic that I over-research it and become hypercritical whenever an author misleads on a particular point. I thought I would enjoy a refresher on Webster's views about Cassatt, suffrage, and the 1893 World Expo, since her lecture on the topic at the NYPL last month sent me spiraling to find more information. But her writing style, questionable sources, and lack of clear intent left me cold. Her parenthetical explanations are out of place in a scholarly exploration, and even worse, are irrelevant (see p 13 of the Introduction with her explanation of why she deems Cassatt an "emancipated woman"). On the source front, she quotes from Reid Badger's The Great American Fair to say that "just as Columbus had once discovered America, the Columbian Exposition now discovered women." Badger's original statement qualifies this with "it was often remarked that..." The original quote is actually Bertha Potter Palmer, in her address during the dedication ceremonies that launched the fair: "Even more important than the discovery of Columbus, which we are gathered together to celebrate, is the fact that the General Government has just discovered woman." (Source: Dedicatory and Opening Ceremonies of the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893) A final rant is about Webster misstating facts in her lecture last month; a question from the audience about what happened to the Cassatt mural was brushed off by Webster saying it was lost after the Fair was over. In her book, however, she details that the mural was in Palmer's mansion for eighteen years post-Fair and sustained a bit of water damage which was to be repaired once it found a permanent home, of which the University of Notre Dame was suggested. After that point, the trail goes cold on the Cassatt mural. (Webster boasts that she personally spent a year looking for it.) Webster also dissented to a question of if Cassatt met Bertha Potter Palmer in Paris, but contradicts herself in her own book. Moral of the story is not to give a lecture on a book you wrote a decade prior until you re-read the book?

Rodin speaks his mind to Gsell across many interviews. His great point is that our age (1910) is "one of engineers and manufacturers, not artists."

In modern life, utility is what people want. We are forced to improve existence materially. Every day science invents new means of feeding, dressing, or transporting men. It manufactures bad products economically to give dubious pleasures to the greatest number... The spirit, thinking, dreaming are no longer issues. Art is dead.

Art is contemplation. It is the delight of the mind that penetrates nature and divines the spirit by which nature itself is animated. It is the joy of intelligence that sees clearly into the universe and creates the universe anew by endowing it with consciousness. Art is the most sublime mission of man since it is the exertion of the mind trying to understand the world and to make the world understood.

But today, humanity believes it can do without Art. It does not want to meditate, contemplate, dream. It wants to enjoy itself physically. It is indifferent to lofty and profound truths: it merely appeases its corporeal appetites. Mankind at present is bestial: it has no use for artists.

Rodin invites Gsell to his studio to see him work, where several nude models (men and women) move around or rest. They are paid to constantly move about with the freedom of life, which allows him to discover the expression of feelings in all parts of the body. Rodin leads Gsell through his ideas about modeling, movement, drawing and color.

"There is nothing 'ugly' in Art except that which is without 'character,' that is to say, that which offers neither outer nor inner truth. The ugly in Art is that which is false; that which is artificial..."

There is no rule that can stop a sculptor from creating a beautiful work in his own way. And what does it matter if this be sculpture or literature if the public finds in it reward and pleasure? Painting, sculpture, literature, music are closer to one another than is generally believed. They express all the feelings of the human soul in the presence of nature.

During the war Anthony had discovered... a golden-voiced, new star of the abolitionist movement and the Republican party, Anna Dickinson. Those who heard Anna Dickinson lecture never forgot her combination of authenticity and magnetism, as well as her spontaneous interchanges with audiences... She became a national phenomenon.

National phenomenon! I had to know more. Sadly, there are very few extant books about Dickinson, and I had to bother the page desk at the library to unearth a copy of this book. (Sidenote: "bother" because it always seems as if my request is very tiresome to them. "Are you sure it's here?" they always ask and sigh, double checking my call numbers. I got particular pleasure out of sending them back to gather four books at once, two of which were oversized, and having the attendee wheeze his way back to the desk to unceremoniously dump my tomes.)

At age 21, Anna Dickinson received a request from Congress to come to the House of Representatives to address the congressmen on a topic of her choosing. So in January of 1864, she spoke for nearly ninety minutes about the war to an assembly of Senators, Representatives, and President Lincoln. By this time, she'd been speaking publicly for four years, honing her craft and becoming a widely-sought-after speaker. Her style was to have an overwhelming array of facts, examples, and testimony intertwine with dramatic effect, vivid expression, winding the speech to a climactic point, and carried off with a "rich voice."

Before she made her living as a speaker, she was a teacher, and then worked at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia until she made a speech accusing General McClellan of treason for his poor judgement in the Civil War battle raging at the time. She was then fired for these comments, which propelled her into needing to speak for money, and upped her exposure immensely. She spoke her mind on any topic under the sun, from slavery to women's rights to Grant's corrupt administration, even vilifying gambling and drinking on a tour out West to less-than-agreeable audiences. She was notorious for handling hecklers so well that they felt as if lightning bolts had smote them.

Speeches entitled "Demagogues and Workingmen" and "Things Hoped For" contain Anna's views on the economic and political problems of new industrial America. She was an enemy of sprawling business corporations, "So much for the beauty of the monopoly, and the benefits of the Pa. Central. What fools and worse people are to submit to such tyranny, and help build it up." She condemned the gigantic industrial combines that were plundering the country. "I contend a dead corporation has no right to control the lives of living men."

Times were changing, and the demand for lecturers was waning. As business dried up, Anna had to deal with reducing her household expenses and giving up the house in Philadelphia that her mother and sister resided in. She had invested in Chicago real estate that was now worthless after the 1871 fire. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, she decides to reinvent herself. In 1876 she writes, produces, and stars in her play about Anne Boleyn, launching the debut in Boston to great acclaim except in the New York papers (disdain for a newcomer's audacity to put herself as star and to launch in Boston). The New York treatment poisons the success of the venture, and Dickinson takes the bold move of announcing that she will address her critics from the stage after a Monday night performance of the play. From 11pm to midnight that Monday, she addresses point by point the attacks made on her. "I was almost crushed, but I struggled on as I will struggle on because, having taken up my work in life to do, I put it not down until I utterly fail!"

This appeal did little to help the success of her play, and penniless Dickinson anxiously awaited her next incarnation, that of solely focusing on playwriting and giving up acting. After a tiff with the diva (Fanny Davenport) acting in a play she'd written, Dickinson again fades into the background. But soon she is bursting forth into the spotlight again, this time acting in male roles in Shakespearean plays. A Philadelphia director decides there is money to be made in parading this Quaker woman around in tights, which ultimately ends up yet again in disaster when Anna refuses to open in Philadelphia because the cast hadn't had a chance to rehearse and she suspected she was being set up for failure yet again.

Desperate for cash to pay for her medical expenses, she asks the 1888 Republican campaign for $5000 for a single lecture. They agree to $100 for 20 lectures, with a bonus if they win the campaign (which is never paid). Retreating to the home where her mother was dying and to repair her own health, Anna dips into madness, shutting herself in her room to read clippings of her old successes. On the afternoon of February 25, 1891 a group of people burst in on her and scurry her off to the state hospital for the insane. This serves to reawaken her senses, and she writes letters to her attorneys about her forced imprisonment. Upon being transferred to a different facility, the intake doctor realizes she is not insane and releases her. Then Anna releases her fury via court cases against her sister (for having her committed), the newspapers (for libel saying she was insane), and against the Republican party for not paying that promised bonus.

After the cases, she's left once again destitute. She retires to the home of friends where she lives out her life regaling people with tales of meeting President Lincoln (which no one believes). Upon her death, a probate judge had to deal with disposing of several trunks of documents and letters which luckily were offered to the Library of Congress. Otherwise, this tragic figure's life would have faded even further from history.

Lucy Stone (1818-1893) worked and saved for nine years in order to attend Oberlin college, one of the few educational institutions open to women. She actively spoke out for women's rights and abolition of slavery during a time when it was not acceptable for ladies to talk in public. She splintered from Anthony/Stanton's suffrage party and created the American Women Suffrage Association along with its paper, Woman's Journal. Stone is also the first publicly recorded woman to not take her husband's last name, and their unique wedding vows reject the iniquity of marriage and make no mention of "obey".

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), now replaced by Sacagawea on the $1 coin, morphed from abolitionist activism to a laser focus on obtaining the right for women to vote. She was arrested and jailed for voting in the 1872 election for Ulysses Grant. The Nineteenth Amendment is known as the Susan B. Anthony amendment, although she called it the sixteenth amendment, not realizing that the government would prioritize income tax, prohibition, and direct election of Senators over women's rights.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was considered the movement's Jefferson to Anthony's Napoleon. Saddled with seven children, Cady Stanton wasn't free to roam the lecture circuit like her compatriots, so she fired off her words via pen. She was a powerful writer, coining several of the catchphrases the cause would use: "male-marriage", "satellites of the dinner pot and cradle", " aristocracy of sex." She moved to Seneca Falls to help her husband's health, and there invited Lucretia Mott and a handful of other women to have the famed 1848 conference believed to be the first women's rights convention. Not satisfied for pushing for just the vote, she also wanted divorce reform and women's rights over their bodies. In later life she penned The Woman's Bible, which explores the sexist mindset of Genesis via commentary, and her own autobiography, Eighty Years and More.

I found the description of Frances Willard (1839-1898) fascinating. The media portrait of her has always been a very negative busybody intent on outlawing alcohol. Instead, she was incredibly savvy in using the temperance movement and the "Trojan horse of domesticity" to push for the vote and gain acceptance for the idea from more conservative voters. As always, the real story is more complex than the watered down tidbits we've been force-fed.

Which is a nice segue to Alice Paul (1885-1977) who was force-fed in jail during hunger strikes in both England and the US. We just celebrated the centennial anniversary of the 1913 march on Washington scheduled for a day prior to Wilson's inaugural parade. Unprotected by police, the drunken onlookers got violent and things descended into the usual chaos. After Wilson's re-election, she organized pickets outside the White House, which were the first ever protests of their kind in DC. After a very scary year (1917) which included the Night of Terror when the arrested protestors were beat, kick, dragged and choked by their jailers, the amendment was finally passed in 1919.

I'm haunted by the overall thought that Joan Hoff argues, "women's suffrage was so long delayed that an unequal class got the right to vote when the ballot was no longer the key to equality. During the nineteenth century politics was in the air everywhere. Male participants established themselves as virtuous, civic-minded residents of the new republic by casting a ballot. But by the twentieth century, party politics was less important. Moreover, such a retarded pace meant that supposed progress, such as obtaining the vote or access to birth control, rarely corresponded to the contemporary needs of women."

Today, I've done my research. There are certain branches of the Brooklyn library that allow after-hours book drop. I venture into below-freezing temperatures intent on getting rid of this albatross. Nearing the library, I see a man with bags scattered around him in front of the deposit. I stride purposefully toward the slot, book in hand. "You're not going to be able to fit it in there," he says, gesturing at the overflowing depository. No kidding. Trust and chaos at the Brooklyn Heights library, where people have smashed their books into the bin, and spilling out for anyone to grab.

"Do you know what's been going on? They've been closed for days," the man asks. I mention the system upgrade, which hopefully will bring printers online to place helpful signs in the doors of closed libraries during future upgrades.

"There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes... Its extreme downtown is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries... But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land... They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in."

I am enacting such a literary cliché by reading Chapter 1: Loomings while sitting here, but I cannot resist. There is something magical about the water, some primal impulse that drives us to gaze contentedly at it. "It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all," Ishmael says. I find myself wandering water-ward when the same conditions strike me, "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul... whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off."

Taking the information from poets.org, I created a map of Melville's main locations in New York, although you could argue that the entire area south of Canal Street would have been open to his strolling. The Wall Street of Bartleby is buried deep in the bones of today's monumental skyscrapers. Some buildings that were contemporary with Melville are still visible, like the James Watson house at 7 State Street, Federal Hall, and Trinity Church. For the rest of the tour, it's fun to get a feel for places he names, like Coenties Slip and Whitehall, and to get a sense of the size of his New York.

To do it yourself, check out the Melville walking tour in NYC.