Rose Cecil O’Neill

Born this day in 1874: Rose Cecil O’Neill (1874–1944), magazine illustrator, writer, and businesswoman who created the Kewpies.

O’Neill was a popular magazine illustrator. Her greatest fame, however—and most of her wealth—came from the creation of the enormously popular Kewpies. Kewpies began as illustrations in the Ladies’ Home Journal. In a blaze of merchandizing Kewpies subsequently appeared as items such as figurines, salt and pepper shakers, inkwells, and on fabric, greeting cards, stationery, and, of course, as dolls. Kewpie dolls were first manufactured in 1913 and netted O’Neill royalties of $1.5 million. The wealth from marketing Kewpies allowed O’Neill to indulge in more serious (and much darker) art, including monumental sculpture, painting, and novel and poetry writing.

Various manufacturers have been churning out Kewpie dolls almost continuously since 1913.

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Lucy Larcom

Born this day in 1824: Lucy Larcom (1824–1893), poet and chronicler of the industrial age working girl.

A noted poet in her day, Larcom is best remembered for a literary and detailed account of her life as mill girl in the Lowell mills of Massachusetts. This important account of life for women and girls in the industrial age is still in print today.

Go here and here to read more about Larcom and her contributions to Operative Magazine and the Lowell Offering, monthly magazines that provide a literary outlet and forum for mill workers.

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May Sarton

Born this day in 1912: May Sarton (1912–1995), prolific writer of poetry, novels, and essays who explored themes of love, mind-body conflict, creativity, personal fulfillment, inner peace, relationships, lesbianism, feminism, aging, and illness

Enjoy an interview with May Sarton in her home, reading some of her works and talking about her career, poetry, women poets, and the role of the women’s movement in art:

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Elizabeth Chandler

[I]t is impossible that it can be improper for us to solicit for another, what under the same circumstances it would be right to seek for ourselves. In fact, if we confine our views to the female slaves, it is a restitution of our own rights for which we ask: — their cause is our cause—they are one with us in sex and nature—a portion of ourselves; and only deprived by injustice of the immunities which we enjoy. Therefore as they cannot protect themselves, it becomes an imperative duty to claim for them the respect due to the female character, and we should feel her indignity as painfully as though nature had placed no distinguishing mark of colour between us.

 —Elizabeth Chandler

Born this day in 1807: Elizabeth Chandler (1807–1834), abolitionist who used poetry and essays to draw people, especially women, into the anti-slavery cause

Elizabeth Chandler was born in Delaware, but raised in Philadelphia, mostly by her grandmother after being orphaned at age 8. She was raised as a Quaker and became an active abolitionist and writer at a young age.

In 1826  she won a prize from her local newspaper for her anti-slavery poem “The Slave-Ship.” Hew work caught the eye of abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, who editied the Genius of Universal Emancipation. He reprinted the poem and began regularly publishing her work. In 1829 he asked Chandler to join the paper and edit its “Ladies Repository.” Chandler contributed many of the essays and poetry that appeared in the section. She urged women to take a more active role in the abolitionist movement and to feel a kinship with enslaved women. She promoted the Free Produce movement, boycotting goods producted by slave labor, such as molassas, cotton, rice, and tea. This was one way, she felt, that women could weild their influence.

“You may altogether avoid lending your support to the slave system, by refusing to be benefited by its advantages; and you can aid its extinction, by giving on every occasion the preference to the products of free labor.…[W]ill you not stand boldly and nobly forth, in the face of the world, and declare that American women will never be tamely made the instruments of oppression?”

Women, she believed, should use their position as mothers to teach their families the wrongs of slavery. She also pushed back against those who criticized women’s role in the movement by responding that slavery was as much a moral as a political, issue and therefore most definitely in the woman’s sphere.

Her poems and essays were widely reprinting, making her influential in drawing people into the abolitionist cause, especially women. Several of her poems were set to music and became hymns for the cause and played regularly during anti-slavery meetings.

In 1830 she moved with a brother and an aunt to Michigan. There Chandler founded Michigan’s first anti-slavery society in 1932. It became a way station to Canada on the Underground Rail Road. Chandler died of a fever just two years later at age 28. Her collected poems were published in two volumes in 1836 (The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler: With a Memoir of Her Life and Character and Essays, Philanthropic and Moral). Proceeds of the sale of her works were used to further the abolitionist cause.

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Genevieve Taggard

“A poet, a wine-bibber, a radical.”

Born this day in 1894: Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948), poet and social radical who is most remembered for her important biography of Emily Dickinson and who was admired in her own time for her lyricism and her socially conscious poetry

Taggard spent most of her childhood in Hawaii, where her parents served as Christian missionaries. She worked her way through the University of California, Berkeley. There she threw off her repressive upringing, studying poetry and adopting socialist ideals. She described  herself as “a poet, a wine-bibber, a radical.”  Taggard edited the college literary magazine, the Occident, and some of her poems were published in national publications such as Harpers and Poetry.

After graduating in 1940 she moved to New York City. There she joined the city’s radical literary circle, contributing regularly to left-wing magazines. She also co-founded The Measure: A Journal of Poetry. Taggard was a dedicated social radical, advocating socialism, labor rights, suffrage, equality, and other social reforms.

Much of her poetry reflects her politics. Words for the Chisel (1926), Not Mine to Finish (1934), and Calling Western Union (1936) are among her most political. She was also known for more personal poems and poems describing nature that were intensely evocative of place. Her later poetry explored the art form itself. She was particularly admired for her lyricism. In fact, some of her poetry was set to music by William Schuman and Aaron Copeland.

Though acclaimed for her poetry in her time, today she is most remembered for The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson (1930), an interpretive biography that explores the connection between Dickinson’s psychology and poetry.

In 1921 Taggard married Robert L. Wolf, a writer. They had one daughter. The family briefly lived in California, where Taggard edited a poetry anthology. After returning to the east coast, Taggard began teaching, first at Mount Holyoke College (1929–1930) and then at Bennington College (1932–1935). In 1934 she divorced Wolf and married Kenneth Durant, an employee of Tass, the Soviet news agency, the following year. From 1935 to 1946 she taught at Sarah Lawrence College. She retired due to ill health, and died shortly thereafter at age 53.

Black Laughter

by Genevieve Taggard

Harsh, unuttered thunder
Stood like a stone wall
Above the marsh's silver line.
Crooked cranes, white as lightning–
Flattened for an instant, flashing from the cloud—
Came driving toward us; toward us fell
The long lines of the shade-laden trees,
Soundless slanting thunder:
And the snail-like hills
Dragged nearer
The marsh's slime.

Borne down so
By sullen immensities,
Two caught children we stood,
Waiting the flash, the oblique arm of the parent,
Waiting for speech from the jowl
Of the irritated horizon….

Our love began
Between flash and crash,—
Terror seen and terror heard.
See what a cripple our love is!
It is sullen; sometimes it makes walls of black laughter;
It is fond of words, fond of thick vowels,
It mimics thunder.
Between us it limps:
We wait for it, when we must, faces averted.

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