Chapter revisions of the Jane Grant book continued over this past week. Did I get as much done as I wanted? No. As I hoped? Again, no. Right now it looks like chapters two and three need to expand a bit to make room for some important historical context. I managed to answer a couple of questions I had about changes to the passport system during World War I and how the influenza pandemic affected New York City. Both had an impact on Jane’s wartime journey to France.
And I’m also thinking that chapter two needs to include something about Jane’s love life. There’s evidence that she had one well before she met Harold Ross, and I find it interesting that marriage did not seem to be her end game.
Women’s History Month
Just when I thought this would be the first Women’s History Month in recent memory that I didn’t have some kind of event planned, John Heckman, known on social media as The Tattooed Historian, invited me to appear live (!) on his YouTube channel on March 24 to talk about Dr. Mary Walker. You can find his page on Facebook, follow him on Instagram, listen to his podcast, read him on Substack, and/or watch his YouTube channel.
Here’s the information about my presentation/discussion, which bears the bold title, “She Defied Them All.”
And remember to check out Pamela Toler’s annual WHM series on her blog, History in the Margins. She runs the best Q&As with people who write or produce/promote women’s history.
What I’m Reading
I’ve started Mike Pitts’s Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if I hadn’t seen reference to Katherine Routledge. In the book’s preface, Pitts writes, “Though I had never heard of Katherine and Scoresby Routledge, their visit was well known on the island, where it was said they had conducted the best statue survey and collected important histories. … Who was Katherine Routledge? My quest brought ever more surprises as I leafed through piles of rarely seen manuscripts in archives across England. …Why had the lifework of this woman, who seemed to have understood the place like no other outsider, vanished? The loss of this perspective mattered because, I realized, the story being told of the island’s ancient past, even today, is profoundly wrong.” (p. xviii) Of course I’m very curious to see where Pitts’s story goes.
I finished Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress by Lorissa Rinehart and liked it.
What I’m Watching
I saw the first episode of the new season of Call the Midwife (PBS), and it had a couple of interesting twists.
New in the rotation are the police crime drama Hope Street (BritBox) and the quirky, comedic, kind of murder mystery How to Get to Heaven from Belfast (Netflix).
Finished The Game (BritBox), which was an effective thriller, and All Creatures Great and Small (PBS), dependably sentimental.
Saw the latest, better than most, episode of Starfleet Academy (Paramount+) and watched more of The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix).
The filler sitcom is still Ghosts (Paramount+), and if there’s time for a filler drama, it’s been The West Wing (Netflix).
What Else I’ve Been Doing
Took a whole day away from revisions this week to go up to Green Bay. Visited the Neville Public Musuem for the first time and found the exhibits well done, especially in ways that promote learning for children. Then it was off to lunch at the Copper State Brewing Company where no beer was actually consumed, but the food was good.
Weekly bowling, two games. Both quickly slid from mediocre to awful. That’s not the direction I was aiming for.
Finished a very small sewing project, in which I turned an outdated eternity scarf into a wraparound, making it much more versatile.
Thanks for reading. March has indeed arrived like a lamb, with slightly warmer temperatures and rain instead of snow. And now, in most of the United States, we’re headed into daylight saving time. Don’t forget to set your clocks forward. Regardless of how it registers on the clock, I’m always happy with more light in any given twenty-four hour period. See you next week.
Revisions on chapters two and three of the Jane Grant book have re-ignited my interest in the Great War of 1914-1918, now more commonly known as World War I, and have given me the opportunity to dive back into primary and secondary sources about women’s support of the conflict. One of my favorite books on the topic remains Kimberly Jensen’sMobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War.
The U.S. military dragged its feet about female enlistment, but thousands of women found ways to get overseas to do something to contribute to the cause. Most of them went under the auspices of the Red Cross and YMCA, and officials of those organizations worried about the women’s motivations. Patriotism was ideal, of course, but a belief in “proper” moral standards or religious convictions would do. Adventurers, career opportunists, and romantics were discouraged, but they were not easily recognizable.
Jane sailed through the YMCA application process, but understanding her motivation(s) for going overseas is more complicated than choosing a category. It is emblematic of her life that she could not be easily pigeon-holed. And that makes her a fascinating character.
Women’s History Month
March is Women’s History Month. The National Women’s History Alliance has designated the 2026 theme as Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future.
Don’t miss Pamela Toler’s annual WHM series on her blog, History in the Margins. She runs the best Q&As with people who write women’s history.
What I’m Reading
Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress by Lorissa Rinehart has once again moved to the top of my reading pile. It’s especially (unfortunately) timely. Rankin was passionately devoted to pacifism, and she voted against U.S. entry into both world wars.
Yesterday I retrieved my library copy of Alia Hanna Habib’sTake It From Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch. It’s very nicely organized and well written, and I think it will be especially useful for those starting out. I’ll be able to pick up a few tips about writing a book proposal, which I appreciate.
I finished Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, and it’s a big WOW for me. Wade presents a well-crafted biography that focuses both on the literary and personal aspects of Stein’s life. I also appreciated Wade’s insights on research and on the form of biography itself.
Despite a strong start and vivid characters, Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness just didn’t work for me. YMMV.
What I’m Watching
Yesterday was a very charming movie about a struggling singer/songwriter who wakes up after a bicycle accident to find himself in a world where the Beatles never existed. Great premise, well executed.
Nothing new in the rotation. The final episode of Grace did a nice setup for next season. Saw the latest episode of Starfleet Academy (Paramount+) and watched more of The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix).
Finally, finally polished off the last episode of Stranger Things. It did not need so many seasons, just like Lost, which started off intriguing but devolved into convolution. Also got through all of Young Sheldon, which I was really fond of. Now the filler sitcom is Ghosts (Paramount+) because I’m behind on this season. It’s total fluff.
I’m looking forward to two new Masterpiece series available this month on PBS: The Count of Monte Cristo and The Forsytes (not to be confused with the earlier series, The Forsyte Saga, which I always referred to as Soames Behaving Badly). I’ll also resume Call the Midwife, but this series is getting a bit dusty.
Still haven’t finished The Game and All Creatures.
What Else I’ve Been Doing
Not much.
Weekly bowling, two games, both very mediocre, devoid of any interesting frames. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.
Last week’s 6-7 inches of snow left the streets a bit tricky to maneuver on foot, which limited outside walks. But March is supposed to start off with a gradual warming trend so, fingers crossed.
Feels like late winter doldrums.
Thanks for reading. Tune in next week to find out if March has indeed arrived like a lamb—and if that matters one iota for the progress of book revisions.
Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker, writer, and newspaperwoman, worked and/or crossed paths with many intelligent, ambitious career women. Like her, most of them were well known in their lifetimes but have since fallen into historical obscurity. As I tell the story of Jane’s involvement with The New Yorker, I weave in bits of those women’s lives, too—to remind the world of their accomplishments and to show how they may have inspired Jane.
Caroline Singer was one. By 1909, when she was still in her early 20s, she worked as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco, the city she grew up in, and had her own byline. Caroline married newspaper man William (“Doc”—he would, for a short time, practice dentistry) Mundell in 1911; two years later he changed careers again and opened a private detective agency.
In 1918, while the United States was involved in what would come to be called the First World War, the couple temporarily lived in Washington, D.C. Mundell was recruited for “secret service work” for one of President Wilson’s cabinet members. Caroline served as a member of the education committee of the War Camp Community Service under Raymond Fosdick, chair of the Committee on Training Camp Activities.
The American Red Cross then hired Caroline to go to France as part of its news service and to assist with publicity. She arrived during the last weeks of the war in 1918. She quickly found the Stars and Stripes office in Paris, where she made an immediate impression on its all-male staff. Caroline was not only a smart, seasoned journalist, she also commanded attention, standing at six feet tall, with inquisitive hazel eyes and cropped brown hair, all of which later earned her the nickname “the Goddess.”
Jane Grant, who also frequented The Stars and Stripes office, made fast friends with Caroline. The two women spent time together when free from their other obligations—Jane performing with the YMCA and Caroline gathering information for a book she would co-write about the history of the Red Cross during the war. Jane later remembered how “Caroline and I were called the Stars and Stripes camp followers by this mad crowd.” The women surely understood the double entendre.
Cyrus Leroy (known as Roy) Baldridge, the artist-illustrator for the newspaper whose own height surpassed six feet, was particularly captivated by Caroline Singer. A romance ensued. But when her Red Cross work wrapped up in 1919, Caroline returned to San Francisco and, presumably at least for a while, Mundell. The marriage did not last; Caroline and Baldridge wed in November 1921 and settled in Harmon, an area of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, about an hour north of New York City.
They built a blue stone cottage on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. A reporter noted a few years later that the locals, “more or less accustomed by now to the queer ways of bohemians, still watch them, wide eyed,” and “can’t tell Caroline from Roy at a distance, for they both wear flannel sport shirts, riding breeches, and her hair is cropped as close as his.”
[Caroline Singer, c. 1920s]
Every Sunday for about three years, visitors from New York City—mostly editors, publishers, writers, painters—made the trek north to spend the day soaking in the natural beauty of the place and having fun. It is likely that Jane Grant and Harold Ross were among them.
In the summer of 1924, Caroline Singer and Roy Baldridge rented out the cottage and headed off to Asia for six months. The result was a book, Turn to the East (1926), written by Caroline and illustrated by Baldridge. They continued this professional partnership as they traveled widely during the rest of the 1920s and into the 1930s, producing White Africans and Black (1929) and Half the World is Isfahan (1936). The books earned positive reviews, both for Caroline’s narrative style and Baldridge’s artistic talent.
International travel became more dangerous by the end of the 1930s, and the couple adjusted their careers accordingly. Caroline wrote children’s books (she also volunteered for children’s organizations in New York), which Baldridge illustrated. They both became involved with liberal political causes. Caroline may have attended meetings of the feminist group, Heterodoxy, and she joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the League of Women Voters.
Caroline also continued to write articles, mostly for magazines, including Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League. A reporter for the Black weekly newspaper the New York Age described her in 1941 as “one of America’s better known white writers.” The article highlighted a piece Caroline had recently written for Opportunity, in which she asked white women to “make real democracy work here in America.” Caroline labeled “Anti-Negroism the most deeply-rooted and the most wide-spread of our Anti-Democratic and Anti-Social prejudices.” She believed they were a “national vice.” Caroline called on white women to admit Black women into their clubs and organizations, especially—and crucially now that it was wartime—those involving civilian defense.
Caroline Singer and Roy Baldridge left New York in 1952 and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Baldridge joined the faculty of the Hill and Canyon School of the Arts. Caroline apparently stopped writing, perhaps due to ill health. She died in 1963.
“Mrs. Baldridge, Noted Writer, Dies After Illness” announced the obituary that ran in the local paper. It identified, with little elaboration, that Caroline was an “author and artist of renown in her own right,” and acknowledged that “her name before her marriage was Caroline Singer.” Such a cursory nod to such a remarkable career for an American white woman in the first half of the twentieth century.
After Caroline’s death, Baldridge donated to the University of Chicago, his alma mater, some of his drawings and copies of the books they published. His papers are also there, a modest accumulation amounting to four boxes, probably bequeathed after his death in 1977. Traces of his wife can be found in the collection’s Series III, labeled Caroline Singer, containing pieces of her published and unpublished work, portraits, and photographs from 1920 to 1943. They comprise three file folders.
The Chicago art critic, poet, and world traveler Blanche Coates Matthias, a friend of the couple, saved many of the letters she received from Caroline Singer. Those are located in the Blanche Matthias Papers (17 boxes, 2 file folders of Caroline’s letters that have been digitized and make fascinating reading) at the Yale University Archives.
That is what remains of Caroline Singer: her books and articles, plus some modest archival holdings.
In 1927, the journalist and critic Alexander Woollcott, who had been one of Jane Grant’s first friends at the New York Times, wrote about Caroline Singer and Roy Baldridge for a newspaper piece. Woollcott was particularly fascinated by Baldridge’s “penchant” for traveling, and pointed out that “Caroline Singer is far from his silent partner in vagrancy. She goes along and helps.” According to Woollcott, how did this wife help her husband? When Baldridge decided, while out on one of their adventures, to make a sketch, Caroline “pitches in” to arrange the subject. “Or they come out of Japan with a book in mind, and, as in the case of their beautiful Turn to the East, she will write its text.”
How is writing the text of a book—actually writing a book—considered helping? The title page lists Caroline’s name first, as it was on the couple’s subsequent books. Caroline was not “far from” being Baldridge’s silent partner; she was not silent at all. She was an equal partner and deserved, in all situations, to be recognized as such. Yet despite her accomplishments, because Caroline was married, many people like Woollcott assumed she was the helpmate of her husband.
Jane Grant faced the same assumption about her role with The New Yorker. This is one of the ways in which women disappear from or are obscured in the historical record. Uncovering and restoring these women’s lives is essential to documenting and understanding a complete history of any given society. (And “complete,” these days, is especially important.) This is why Women’s History Month remains crucial.
Its goals and objectives in choosing this theme are listed as:
Honor: Recognize the achievements and contributions of women educators, mentors, and leaders.
Inspire: Motivate all generations to pursue education and leadership roles.
Educate: Raise awareness about the unheralded legacies of women from every walk of life, highlighting their unique contributions and diverse backgrounds, including socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, culture, abilities, and personal experiences.
Unite: Bring together communities to explore, share, and celebrate women’s history and achievements.
Envision: Create a blueprint for the future that honors our foremothers and builds bridges for the next generation of women.
This would be challenging during the best of times, and politically, these are not the best of times. I was surprised—but very relieved—to find that an official government website still exists for Women’s History Month and that it contains good, solid information about a diversity of women.
Yes, I used diversity, as in the first word in DEI, which the current administration is trying to wipe out. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals a fair, common-sense definition:
Organizational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity or disability.
Nothing to be afraid of here, nothing evil.
Women historically have been underrepresented and subjected to discrimination. Movements to end those practices have existed and continue to exist while those practices continue. Sometimes these movements have been successful.
That Women’s History Month exists at all represents one of those successes. You can read about its history here.
Unfortunately, women today are confronted with the reality that hard-won rights can be taken away. Vigilance is required more than ever. Complacency is the enemy. Do what you can. Follow current events. Vote. Read. Read women’s history.
Not sure where to begin? Historian Pamela D. Toler writes a marvelous blog called History in the Margins. During the month of March she is featuring (as she has done for the last six years) interviews with very smart people who focus on women’s history. She started a bit early this year, with a late February post about Amy Reading and her biography of editor Katharine White. There will be great stuff all month.
Since I’ve declared 2025 the year of Jane Grant, I will be posting about some of the women (both well-known and decidedly less so) she crossed paths with in her lifetime.
I’ve been trying to write this second part of the 2912 Tale since last November. Every time I get to a certain section of it, my brain refuses to move forward. I keep thinking, nope, this is too much. Even though I’ve been writing and publishing for close to thirty years, for this part of the Tale, words fail me. Repeatedly.
Anyway, a quick reminder of the preceding post: Back in October, as I sorted through family pictures with my sister Kathi, I was hit with both memories and momories—my term for the stories our mom (aka Irene junior) told. I know that what I’ve been calling momories are really a form of oral history, the process of verbally passing along information and stories to the next generation. But for me, calling them momories makes their provenance clear and keeps our mom centered in my memories.
As Kathi and I went through those snapshots, we ran across a few of our mom that I didn’t remember seeing before. They had our mom’s careful all-capitals printing on the backs, where she jotted a few identifiers. These jarred a couple of more momories that made me further ponder the relationship between Irene junior and her paternal grandmother, Irene senior.
The first photo is of Irene junior at about a year old, with her father George, Irene senior’s firstborn son, who is holding her hands to help her walk. They are in the yard of the tiny summer home (always called the cottage) owned by Irene senior and her husband Edward (who died before we were born) near a small lake in northern Illinois.*
The second, which I found as startling as the one of Irene senior sitting on a donkey in Capri, shows our mom, probably no more than twenty years old, wearing a strapless swimsuit, smiling at the camera. This picture was probably taken in that same yard at the cottage. Despite the smile, Irene junior did not like warm weather and direct sunshine.
I have a momory about an incident that took place at the cottage probably sometime between the 1940s and early 1950s. Irene junior would have been old enough to be in the room when it happened—the only bedroom in the house, where a small group of female relatives, including her mother and grandmother, changed into their bathing suits before heading down to the lake—but I don’t remember her saying how old.
A younger married woman first raised Irene senior’s hackles by not modestly turning away from the others as she removed her clothing. Flashing portions of her naked body, this woman complained about her husband, said she wasn’t happy in her marriage, and wanted to leave him and get a divorce. Irene scolded the woman—I don’t remember if our mom said it was a niece, perhaps, or a younger cousin—telling her to stop talking foolishly, to behave herself, and go on home with her husband. Our mom related that the young woman felt properly chastised and indeed continued in her marriage, never again mentioning leaving her husband. Nana, our mom said in a tone ladened with finality, didn’t approve of divorce, so there was no divorce in our family.
Lately I’ve been considering that momory alongside another one that should be prefaced by this piece of information. At some point early in our parents’ marriage (or maybe just after they’d become engaged—my memory of the momory is faulty here), Nana bought our dad Mike a pair of sturdy leather work boots. Even if this had been a birthday or Christmas present, it was a generous gift and not inexpensive.
I have wondered if the boots might have been Nana’s way of apologizing for a remark she made, not in Mike’s presence, but one all the members of the Berwyn bungalow household probably chuckled about as they gleefully relayed it to him. Our mom still laughed about it decades later whenever she brought it up; our dad did something like an eyeroll when she did.
The story went like this: While our mom waited for our dad to pick her up for one of their first dates, Irene senior watched as he got out of his car and headed up the concrete front steps of the bungalow. She noted his appearance—loose-fit khaki pants, a Hawaiian-style shirt, dark sunglasses, probably a cigarette in his hand—and announced, “A hoodlum’s come to pick up our Irene.”
(Mike, about 10 years before he met Irene junior, cultivating that “hoodlum” appearance.)
Nana must have changed her mind soon after having an actual conversation with our dad. The two of them ended up liking each other. The work boots she bought for him were a thoughtful gift. Mike learned land surveying in the army, a trade he continued in civilian life, and quality footwear made a huge difference to his on-the-job comfort.
(Mike, somewhere in Korea sometime in 1951, wearing boots similar to the ones Irene senior later gave him.)
Our dad kept those boots for the rest of his life, carefully cleaning and polishing the leather, getting the soles and heels replaced when they wore down.** They probably reminded him of Nana and of that early kindness. He cried when she died, our mom told us. We understood the weight of that sentence. We never saw our dad cry so Nana must have been really special to him.
I sometimes think about the momory of that event at the cottage—our mom’s pronouncement that Nana would not tolerate divorce—and the momory of Nana’s first glimpse of our dad that prompted the hoodlum comment which may have led her to buy the boots. Then I imagine the connections among all these, and the subsequent strong bond between our dad and Nana that prompted his tears at her death.
But to explain how I’ve imagined those connections, I’d have to delve into two family secrets of 2912. That’s what brings me to a dead stop every time I reach this point. I’ve tried to write about them, and I still can’t. While the cat has long been out of the bag about both secrets (at least within the family), they are entangled in many other issues that seem too daunting to unravel. So every time, I just stop writing.
Why bring this up now? Well, sorting through those photographs made me think about it. Plus I’m at the beginning-ish stage of a new book project, which involves a lot of research, some of which ends in frustration because of what’s missing. Or what I believe is missing.
Researching and writing biography requires tracking down a variety of sources, including pictures, letters, and memoirs. I rely on not only what other people decided to save in terms of physical artifacts, but also what they chose to write about, whether as notations on the backs of photos, information passed along in correspondence, and/or remembrances included in memoirs and/or autobiographies.
Decisions and choices like these produce silences in the archives leaving researchers to constantly ask how materials have been selected and saved, but also, very specifically, what’s missing and why it might be missing.
I’ve imposed some silences in my family’s archives by saving some photos and pitching others and by sharing some specifically collected and very consciously edited memories and momories.
After Kathi and I finished looking through all those pictures back in October, I headed off for my first major research trip for a book about Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker magazine and lifelong women’s rights advocate. And there, in the vast collection of her papers, I faced silences. More on that in the next post.***
(Jane Grant, c. early 1940s, Jane Grant Photograph Collection, PH141, University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections.)
Some asides:
*Decades later, when our parents Irene and Mike took us to the cottage in the summer, the first thing my dad had to do when we arrived was clean up the outhouse, especially to get rid of the spider webs. None of us siblings would go in there if we saw spider webs. Even in the 1960s, the cottage lacked an indoor toilet. Our mom disliked being at the cottage, probably because, with four children, she had more work to do during what was supposed to be a vacation. But, because of the four of us, our parents could only afford cheap vacations. The cottage was free to use, within a couple of hours’ drive, and was right near a lake that kept us busy during the long summer daylight.
**After Mike died, Charles, my husband, took the boots. They were still in relatively good shape, but after many decades they only fit one pair of feet so had finally outlived their usefulness.
***It’s Women’s History Month, so I hope to post one or two pieces about Jane Grant and what’s been happening with my research. This year, the National Women’s History Alliance has chosen the theme of “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” which is a good match for my Jane Grant project.
Theresa Kaminski 
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