Hidden in Plain Sight
/by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director
I did not set out to study women’s history. I did not set out to study history at all. I was an English major, hoping to make it as a writer of…well, that part wasn’t so clear. It wasn’t until that fateful GenEd class at UMass Amherst with Dr. Vincent Ilardi, the Renaissance Optics specialist (his groundbreaking book, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes was surprisingly readable), that I fell deep and hard for history.
Much to Dr. Ilardi’s sorrow, however, his passion for Italian eyewear eluded me. I found myself drawn, as many of us are, to areas of study that connect to our lives. History of the Reformation? Yes, please. I was raised in a Calvinist Protestant world. Crime and Punishment in Victorian England? I read Dickens voraciously. Come on in. I broadened my horizons, took courses with Dr. Yvonne Haddad in Islamic and Middle Eastern history. I went to Imperial Russia, joined the World War, and spent one breathless semester helping Stephen B Oates unpack every prevailing theory about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Oh, those were heady times.
I was not initially drawn to women's history, despite its obvious connection to my experience. It was regularly offered at UMass in the early 1990’s. There was an entire Women’s Studies department. Though a strong-willed young woman myself, committed to being the captain of my own ship, I had bought into the pernicious idea that history was a set, established set of facts, albeit facts that could be relayed in a dynamic way, and if those facts were relayed by men, to men, and from an overwhelmingly male perspective, that must be just because that was the way it happened. Women were not on battlefields (they were). They were not political leaders, or inventors, or great philosophers (again, they were) …you get the point. The saddest element of this early part of my history education is that I did not even notice that, by and large, the lives of women were not represented in my history books and classes, and if they were, they were in the sidebar, or the exception that proved the rule.
Then, one blessed day, I met Dr. Joyce Avrech Berkman. I think her Intro to Women’s History course met a requirement for the major. Joyce (I can get away with this familiarity today because we are old friends) had long, gray hair in a loose braid over her shoulder. She laughed a lot, easily, but the coursework was challenging, and her standards were high. She was a veteran activist by the time we met and had been one of the chief advocates for the founding of the Women’s Studies program at UMass in 1974.
Dr. Joyce Berkman enjoying a Fowle’s lunch on a visit to Newburyport in 2021.
I think it was her description of British voting-rights activist Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself under the galloping hooves of the King’s horse in 1913, the force-feeding of Quaker suffragist Alice Paul, the desperation and courage of the women on hunger strikes and in picket lines. It was the fact that a married woman could be thrown out of her own house by her husband, denied contact with her children, even deprived of her clothing because nothing she had was hers – because she did not exist as a legal person. It was the vitriol heaped on women who spoke out. Our own Newburyport Daily News had this to say in 1915 about the idea that a woman could exist (and vote) as an individual.
“If she votes differently (from her husband), then the family ceases to come in contact with the state as a unit, and we have the individual and not the family as the unit of society, which is one of the cardinal principles of feminism. And so, I contend that the only consistent suffragist is the socialist and the feminist, because they believe the result of women suffrage will be to destroy the family…”
In the rare air of Amherst, I followed the well-trod path from surprise, to outrage, to sorrow, to awareness. And when I got to awareness, I began to see women everywhere in the historical record, where before they – we – had been invisible to me. They did not only appear as passive victims or warriors against male oppression, either. They often made themselves known in subtle ways, their lives revealed in whispers, easily drowned out by the shouting biographies of powerful men. Sometimes they had been shouting too, but nobody had been writing it down.
When I left academia and the sheltering wing of Joyce Berkman and others like her, I found myself drawn to historic house museums in part because it is so much easier to talk about women in the spaces where most people expect to find them. And still, I remember giving a tour of Coffin House soon after graduate school and realizing afterward that I had told the group that Joshua Coffin was the last resident owner of the house – which was true, but allowed for the erasure of his cousin Lucy, who outlived him by thirty years in the house, but was never its legal owner. In that case, one word changed – last owner became last resident - and a woman’s life was brought back into focus. From that day on, the tours ended not with Joshua’s portrait in the hall, though we spent significant time discussing his remarkable life, but with a tiny, framed picture of Lucy Coffin seated in a straight-back chair in front of what was, in all but name, her house.
I remember once asking a professor why there were no books by or about women in his entire graduate level course on 18th and early 19th century France. SHOW ME THE SOURCES, he shouted. SHOW ME THE SCHOLARSHIP. IT DOESN’T EXIST! We might find it laughable – I hope we would find it laughable today to imagine that there were no women in the French Revolution, no records of their experience, and no women who could write competently about it.
It has come to feel natural for me to meet women in every stage of life, in public and private spaces, even when they were not included in the narratives of the past. Take a well-known male figure in Newburyport history – Tristram Dalton, widely celebrated for his role as Massachusetts’ first Senator (along with Caleb Cushing). His correspondence is voluminous, his portrait easily recognizable to many in this town. His life spanned the early decades of this country, and he experienced many of the same vicissitudes of fate as his peers, ultimately losing his fortune in real estate speculation.
Now let’s try that again. Ruth Hooper Dalton’s life spanned the early decades of this country, and, along with her husband, Tristram Dalton, she experienced many of the same vicissitudes of fate as their peers, ultimately losing their fortune in real estate speculation. Ruth Dalton, of whom no portrait has been found, worked the levers of her own circles of influence and favor, courting the help of Abigail Adams, Martha Washington, and more to ensure that her family did not wind up in abject poverty. Of course, she was also pregnant, nursing, or recently bereaved of a child for most of her adult life. And she managed a busy household that included extended family members, servants, and for a time, enslaved men and women. Her voice is quieter than her husband’s, and the women that worked for her even quieter than hers, but they are there, and they deserve the attention of historians.
Ruth Hooper Dalton spent more time in the Dalton House than did her husband, and certainly more than George Washington or any of the “distinguished men” who visited them both. She is not, however, on the sign.
So now imagine my horror when I recall myself saying to a student who was interested in researching the Black experience in Newburyport, “well, there’s really not much in the way of sources.” Recent research, like Kristen Fehlhaber’s insightful, detailed research into the life of Caroline Cottrell, disputes this idea that this history can’t be done – that there are no sources. I say what Joyce Berkman said to me when frustrated with a research subject that was proving elusive. “Just keep looking”. Those willing to do the hard work of combing through records, reading “against the grain”, often find details of rich and complex lives, hidden in plain sight. Just keep looking.
