Writing about women athletes is a joy. Women athletes defy expectations and societal norms. They run their own races. They inspire and they revolutionize. This is why slamming into their closets is such a jolt and a disappointment.

Yes, it’s true that lesbians in the spotlight have historically needed to disguise their orientation. The penalties for deviance from the heterosexual template have been swift and severe. This was especially true for women athletes, who, by the very nature of their achievements, posed a challenge to the tenets of femininity. (They had muscles and they were competing!) The media, and sometimes even the fans, were all too eager to find some excuse to invalidate the achievements of a threateningly ambitious and aggressive female athlete. For homophobes, uncovering a lesbian identity provided a comforting assurance that the athlete could not have been a “real woman.”

But that was then and this is now. Or is it? In attempting to uncover and reclaim the lesbian lives of historical women athletes, I am running into a peculiar brand of homophobia. It’s not virulent, but it’s also not the “smiling homophobia” that insists a woman’s sexual orientation is irrelevant to an understanding of her life and her lifework. I would call this new permutation more of a “misguided allegiance homophobia.” I am referring to the folks who insist that these historical figures would not be pleased by being outed posthumously; that honoring their lives requires honoring their closets and perpetuating the fictions they so carefully constructed during their lifetimes.

Babe Didrikson Zaharias is a case in point. She was a tomgirl from the get-go, racking up trophies for a variety of sports in high school and even trying out for the football team. Recruited for an amateur basketball team in Dallas while still in her teens, she made such a name for herself, she was invited to try out for the 1932 Olympic track team. In order to get around the three-event limit for individual athletes, Babe’s handlers were allowed to register her as a team, all by herself!  In two and a half hours, she won five events (shot put, javelin, long jump, baseball throw, and 80-meter hurdles)—setting a world record in the hurdles and javelin. In addition, she tied in the high jump, setting another world record, and finished fourth in discus. She scored eight points higher than her nearest competition—a team of twenty-two women!

At the Olympics, bound by the three-event limit, she scored two gold medals—breaking her own world records in both, and took the silver in the high jump. During this period, Babe was too focused on winning to give much attention to her image. She appears to have been perfectly comfortable with herself, her only concession to “media spin” having been a misrepresentation of her age. Claiming to be eighteen instead of twenty-one, Babe may have been catering to the public’s acceptance of tomboy behaviors in a girl who is still in her teens, as opposed to their expectations for “young ladies.”

Babe’s overnight celebrity attracted enormous attention, and not all of it was positive. She made several enemies, and one of them was sportswriter Paul Gallico, probably best remembered for having written The Poseidon Adventure. Gallico, a ferocious policer of traditional gender roles, believed women should only be allowed to compete in six sports: archery, shooting, fishing, ice skating, swimming and equitation—the “beautiful” sports.

Gallico launched his first attack with an article in Vanity Fair titled “The Texas Babe.” In it he made the comment that this “strange… girl-boy child” would have been right at home in a men’s locker room. He used the word “boy” more than a dozen times to refer to Babe, attributing her athleticism to an over-compensation for her inability to attract men.

What Gallico did not mention was that Babe had made a fool out of him. After the Olympics, fellow sportswriter Grantland Rice had arranged a friendly game of golf to introduce Babe and Gallico. (In the days before television, syndicated sportswriters wielded considerable power in making or breaking athletes, and Rice was one of the most influential. He is arguably responsible for the celebrity of a roster of athletes including Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Red Grange, and Knute Rockne. His support for Babe was a key factor in her success.) Exploiting Gallico’s machismo, Babe challenged him to a footrace in the middle of the golf course, and Gallico idiotically accepted the dare. Needless to say, Babe left him for dead and went on handily to win the game. It was after this humiliation, Gallico began to obsess over the prominence of Babe’s Adam’s apple.

A year after publishing “The Texas Babe,” Gallico wrote an even more homophobic piece for Vanity Fair. Although this was ostensibly a short story, it would have been immediately clear to readers that the central character, a butch Texas athlete named “Honey,” was a thinly-disguised caricature of Babe. In fact, there was a full-page photo of Babe on the facing page. In this story, Gallico imagines the other women athletes trash-talking Honey. They ridicule her Texas accent, comment on her frequent use of obscenities, and speculate about her lesbianism. Gallico depicts his heroine as a genetic freak, filled with self-loathing in spite of her gold medal, sobbing while she smacks her own face and claws at herself—because she cannot get a man.

This was 1933. Suddenly Didrikson began to wear hats, dresses, girdles, lipstick, perfume, and nail polish—all the things she used to dismiss as “too sissy.” And within five years, she was married to George Zaharias, a professional wrestler who, according to Babe’s biographer Susan Cayleff, was “was a caricature of manliness: tough, ferocious, powerful... able to take punishment.” His weight would eventually balloon to 400 pounds. Photographed next to George, Babe did appear more feminine. Also, she was now playing golf, refusing to discuss either her previous career in basketball or her Olympic achievements in track, insisting that her sports career began with golf. Amateur golf—and there was no such thing as professional golf for women at that time—was an elite sport, requiring membership in a country club. These were the “ladies who lunch, ” wives of wealthy men or daughters of privilege, and Babe, an immigrant truck driver’s daughter, had to step up her gender game.

Marriage to George Zaharias worked, and the press eased off. So successful was Babe in presenting herself as a traditional housewife, that, several years later when Babe entered a long-term relationship with a woman, the press was willing to characterize the woman as Babe’s “protégée.” According to biographer Cayleff, Betty was Babe’s “primary partner.” A fellow pro golfer, Betty roomed with Babe on the Ladies Professional Golf Association circuit and lived in her home for the last six years of Babe’s life. Whatever George may have thought of this arrangement, he accepted the situation. When Babe was in the hospital dying from colon cancer, Betty moved in with her, pushing the beds together. Babe trusted her to change her colostomy bag, and it was Betty who, at Babe’s request, shaved her legs for the last time.

I wrote the book and lyrics for a musical about Babe Didrikson (score by Andrea Jill Higgins), and the show includes a love scene and duet between Babe and Betty. The scene marks a turning point in the narrative, as Babe moves from a position of alienation and competition with women to one of intimacy and professional alliance. The play culminates with the founding of the LPGA.

The response from our first studio production was overwhelmingly positive, but not without reactions to this “outing” of Babe. Was this respectful to her memory? Would Babe have wanted it? And, of course, the smiling homophobia: “What does it matter anyway? Babe was still a great athlete.”  Some of the critics who reviewed the play felt a need to talk about George. After all, wasn’t he the great love of her life?

At what point can we recognize that Babe was bisexual—or a lesbian whose marriage may well have been a concession to career-busting homophobia? The larger question is when will the mainstream become so literate about lesbian history and culture that they can recognize and embrace the archetypes and paradigms of the lesbian butch: the aversion to dresses, the achievement in traditionally male arenas, the advocacy for women?

Toni Stone is another case in point. She was the first woman to play Negro league baseball. By age fifteen, she was playing semi-pro baseball, and in 1949 she went professional with the San Francisco Sea Lions. When they failed to pay what they had promised, she went with a team in New Orleans, and then in 1953 signed with the Indianapolis Clowns. Historically, she has been referred to as a “drawing card” for the Clowns, but in her fifty games with the team, she maintained a solid .243 batting average, playing second base—the position Hank Aaron had vacated two years earlier when he was recruited by a recently-integrated Major League team. Toni was sold to the Kansas City Monarchs in 1954. The Monarchs were an unhappy experience for her, and, citing lack of playing time, she retired after only one season.

Toni Stone was a tomboy, but was she a lesbian?  She didn’t like girls’ clothes. In her own words, she was “big and sassy.” She dumped her birth name “Marcenia” in favor of one that “sounded more like ‘tomboy.’”  Like Babe, she excelled in many sports as a child: ice skating, golf, track, high jump. She was especially passionate about baseball. Her parents, a beautician and a barber, were distressed enough about Toni’s gender deviance that they arranged for her to have pastoral counseling at the age of ten. Fortunately, Toni’s priest was sympathetic and signed her up for his Catholic Midget League… And she never looked back.

Toni had it rough traveling with nothing but men. Not only was she having to deal with Jim Crow laws regarding segregated accommodations, but, as the only female player, she was shut out of the locker room. And she was left to her own devices in terms of dealing with sexual harassment. One of her former teammates narrates a story about Toni sliding into base. The second baseman tagged her by running the ball up her crotch and over her breasts. Toni immediately leaped to her feet and began punching him. Another time, she would take after a harasser with a baseball bat. According to Toni, that man never bothered her again.

Because she travelled with men, some people assumed Toni was a prostitute. According to Toni’s biographer, Martha Ackmann, Stone did little to correct them and she began to stay in brothels when touring in the South. At the brothels, she was given a hot meal, a safe place to sleep, and a chance to launder her clothes. “The prostitutes started following the sports pages so they would know how she was doing,” Ackmann says. “It was remarkable.”

In her biography, there is no record at all of any boyfriends. There is, however, a husband. His name was Aurelius Alberga and he was forty years older than Toni. She married him shortly after she moved to San Francisco, when she was struggling with various jobs—including operating a forklift on the docks—while trying to play professional baseball. Alberga, who is credited as being the first black officer in the US army, began his working life as a bootblack, later becoming a successful realtor and insurance salesman. By the time Toni met him, he owned a Victorian house in Oakland and was well-enough off to support a wife. Aurelius was what was known as a “race man,” having helped organize San Francisco’s NAACP as well as a black Masonic lodge in Berkeley. He was an avid supporter of Marcus Garvey.

It was, to the say the least, an unusual marriage. Toni was twenty-nine and her husband was in his seventies. After the wedding, she moved directly into a bedroom on the first floor, while Aurelius’ bedroom remained on the second floor. Was this a love affair, or was it a companionate arrangement between a progressive, older man, who would be in need of nursing care, and an unusually independent and ambitious young woman struggling to survive in a new city? Did Aurelius recognize her enterprise and her self-determination, seeing something of his own character and struggle in her stories? Was he gay?

Toni stayed married to Aurelius, and she did take care of him in his old age. He lived to be 103. Unlike Babe, no female “protégées” or “housemates” turn up in the historical record. History would have us believe that Toni Stone’s only passion in life was for baseball… and a man old enough to be her grandfather. I remain a skeptic.

In an interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, Stoni said, “I loved my trousers, my jeans. I love cars. Most of all I loved to ride horses with no saddles. I wasn’t classified. People weren’t ready for me.”

And perhaps we still aren’t. I am wishing that lesbian athletes, then and now, could all have time capsules, where they could safely store the truth about their lives, including the truth about the ones they loved—the women who stood by them through so much oppression, and whose loyalty has been rewarded with obscurity, so that we historians and cultural workers would not be faced with the closeted record of their lives and perpetual questions about how best to honor the memory of women who were compelled to live a lie.

Recommended biographies:

Ackmann, Martha. Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League. Lawrence Hill Books, 2010.

Cayleff, Susan E. Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. University of Illinois Press, 1996.


This article was orginally published in On The Issues, Spring 2012.

I have been reading about Jeanette Rankin… and reading about Jeanette Rankin compels one to think about peace. Really think about it… not in the rainbow-smiley-face-give-peace-a-chance way, but in the here-goes-my-entire-career way.

Reading about Jeanette Rankin compels one to think about peace from the perspective of the first woman EVER to be elected to Congress, and from a state (Montana) where the women still couldn’t vote… Jeanette was really, truly “representing” in a way that no woman would ever do again. The eyes of the entire world were on her.

And only one month into her term, the resolution to enter World War I came up for the vote. The President wanted to fight. Many, if not most, Americans wanted to fight. The members of the suffrage organizations for whom she had worked wanted to fight. And if there wasn’t already enough pressure on Jeanette, she knew that a pacifist vote from her would be seen as a gendered vote. Because war is men’s business.

_What did she do? She voted her conscience, and furthermore, she did not hesitate to affirm that women had a different perspective on war, because it was women who raised the sons who would be sent off to the slaughter. She made no bones about the fact that this was an investment, and she was vocal in asserting women’s rights in protecting that investment. In many ways, women spoke out with more courage about our difference before we achieved all this token equality that inspires so much disappearing of biological realities.

Jeanette ran for Congress again, two decades later, in 1940. In December 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and this time she was the only member of Congress to vote against war. Withstanding concerted pressure from party leaders from Montana, she refused to change her vote. After Italy and Germany declared war on the US, Jeanette abstained from voting for or against, simply stating “Present.”

And, of course, that was the end of her government career. She continued in her anti-war work, protesting both the Korean War and the Vietnam War. In her words, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” And, “There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.”

She visited India seven times, meeting with Ghandi and studying his methods. She helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She was also a founding Vice President of the ACLU.

_Two other aspects of Jeanette’s life caught my attention. First, she appears to have been a lesbian. That’s a whole other blog.

The second thing was where and how she chose to live. In 1924, she bought sixty-four acres of scrub in Bogart, Georgia, and built a one-room house. It had a fireplace at one end and a car radiator at the other. The theory was that water heated by the fireplace would circulate to the car radiator, but it couldn’t have been very efficient without a pump… and there was no pump, because there was no electricity. There was no running water either. She had an outdoor, manual pump, and she would pour her dishwater into a funnel that led to a pipe that drained to the outside. Her toilet was a wood box that required emptying outdoors.

_She would return to Montana for the summers, driving in her car, but Georgia was her home. Rural Georgia. Jeanette bought a cow. Her mother stayed with her, and so did her sister’s children. Rumor has it that some of her colleagues who came for extended visits were actually lovers. She, of course, started a local peace organization. She planted peaches and pecans.

When this house burned down, she built a rammed earth house with a roof of saplings and tar paper. Now, this was 1942, not 1969…  and Jeanette was an upper-middle-class, two-time former Congresswoman in her 60’s, not a twenty-something hippie.  She ended up abandoning the rammed earth project and moving to a sharecropper’s cabin in Mars Hill, Georgia. Here, she had electricity and other amenities (a chemical toilet!), but she built an annex with a tamped earth floor.

Her friendships with her rural neighbors crossed class and race lines, as she shared her car for shopping trips and organized clubs for the children, teaching them how to make a dam for a swimming hole and then how to sew bathing suits.

Even though she did not preach this lifestyle, I believe it was part of Jeanette’s peace work. I believe that she understood the progression from unsustainable consumerism to unfair distribution of wealth to social and political instability to war. Her peace activism wasn’t just about joining organizations or lobbying politicians. It was down to the roots.  It was “What’s my part in this? And how are my actions contributing to the problem or the solution?”

It’s interesting to me how sources like Wikipedia neither make mention of her lifetime affinities with women and probable lesbianism, nor do they mention her radical lifestyle of voluntary simplicity decades before the environmental movement. I think they overlook the touchstones of her activism.

The Occupation of Wall Street has been making headlines for weeks, with thousands of protestors flocking to the heart of New York’s financial district to register their shock and outrage at a collapsed economy that took the world by surprise.

But there was a consumer activist—a woman—born over a century ago, who would not have been surprised at all.  Her name was Mary Harriman Rumsey, and she was the partner of Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins.

 Frances Perkins was the first woman to occupy a Cabinet position, and she has rightly been referred to as the “woman behind the New Deal.” Her achievements include the banning of child labor, the minimum wage, the forty-hour workweek, worker's compensation, unemployment insurance, employer-provided health insurance, new work programs to create jobs, welfare, and Social Security. The only item on her reform agenda that she failed to secure was universal health insurance. The American Medical Association had as influential a lobby then as now.

(It’s an interesting footnote to history that while the Bureau of Immigration was still under the Labor Department, Perkins fought hard but unsuccessfully to allow entry for hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. Roosevelt transferred the Bureau to the Department of Justice in 1940, but had he not authorized this transfer, Perkins would never have allowed the infamous internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent.)

Perkins had made many adjustments early in her career in order to fit herself into the male-dominated arena of politics. She had changed her name (from “Fannie” to Frances) and also her style of dressing (to remind men of their mothers!) But after her Cabinet appointment, she found herself in a Catch-22 situation. 

_It was expected that Cabinet members would all have wives to run their households and to host the social gatherings where the real business of government frequently was conducted. Perkins could not be “one of the boys,” and, at the same time, conform to the social protocols of a Washington hostess.  The Washington Post had attacked her in an article with the headline  “Capital Has a Rigid Calling-Card Code, Social Ostracism Is the Penalty Paid by Women Who Break It.”

 And here is where Mary Harriman Rumsey came to the rescue. She rented a three-story house in Georgetown and invited Frances to become her “roommate.” History notes that the two were far more than roommates, and that Mary was far more than a typical Cabinet wife.

Mary Rumsey was the daughter of a railroad tycoon, and she had grown up on a twenty-thousand-acre estate in upstate New York, where she later supervised the six hundred employees. She had homes on Long Island and also in Virginia. Her dinner parties with Frances were legendary, and, as one biographer noted, it was not unusual to find Will Rogers, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Bourke-White, and General Douglas MacArthur at her table, along with an unknown Appalachian folk singer.

During Roosevelt’s inaugural year, she founded a Washington weekly named Today, which later became Newsweek magazine.  More significantly, Roosevelt named her to chair the Consumer Advisory Board that had been authorized under the New Deal. 

_It was Rumsey’s job to see that the retail selling price of goods would not increase proportionately more than the increase which wage earners would receive for their labors.  She understood that, for all the pioneering legislation that her partner was putting through as Secretary of Labor, none of these wage protections would have meaning if the price of consumer goods outstripped the purchasing power.  In an interview with the New York Times, Mary explained:

"There have been disagreements between labor and capital in which each has made known its ills, but seldom has the man or woman who actually footed the bills, by purchasing the things that were manufactured or grown, had a voice in the selling price."

Sadly, this principle was forgotten in the decades following the New Deal, when credit cards were introduced to consumers. By the 1970’s the price of goods and services was increasing at a rate higher than wages, but nobody seemed to notice because, suddenly, even working-class folks could get instant “mini-loans” via credit cards for all kinds of purchases that did not require loan officer approval. Magic money! By the 1990’s, the debt load of an average family was $40,000. By that same decade, the credit craze had spread to the housing market, where lack of adequate regulation led to hundreds of thousands of folks taking out mortgages on homes that would be one paycheck away from foreclosure.

Mary Rumsey would have seen right through this smokescreen of a credit economy, to the widening gap between wage and price increases. And she would have decried a government willing to allow its citizens to be seduced by promises of instant gratification and the trappings of upward mobility, even as they slid deeper and deeper into hopeless debt.

Mary died suddenly and unexpectedly on December 19, 1934, from complications resulting from a fall from a horse. At the time of her death, Frances was in middle of the fight for Social Securty, and Roosevelt had given her a Christmas deadline for her Cabinet committee to complete their work.  Because of the closeted nature of her relationship with Rumsey, only a few very close (and lesbian) friends could acknowledge the degree of her loss. As one of these friends noted, “You are going through one of those tremendously alone experiences, yet lacking in importance outside yourself.” Frances would also lose their home, as it was Rumsey who had paid the lion’s share of the rent. Any attempt on the part of Rumsey to provide for Perkins financially would have raised questions on scandal-mongering Capitol Hill.

So, the same week her partner died and she was facing the imminent loss of her home, Perkins called the members of her committee to her home, set a large bottle of Scotch on the table, and told the men that no one went home until they finished the work. As a result of that night, and the woman whose activism was a living memorial to her partner’s death, millions of Americans have been able to retire, and even more have been able to survive.

Watching, the footage of the Occupation of Wall Street, one hears the echo of Mary Rumsey. In this interview, she was referring to her multi-millionaire father, but her words could as easily be applied to the “banksters” of Wall Street today:

"His period was a building age, when competition was the order of the day. Today the need is not for a competitive but for a cooperative economic system."

References: Downey, Kirstin. The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. Doubleday, 2009.

Mitchell, Donn. “Debutantes of the World, Unite! The Irrepressible Mary Harriman” The Anglican Examiner, http://www.anglicanexaminer.com/Rumsey.html

[Originally published in On the Issues: A Magazine of Feminist, Progressive Thinking, Nov. 23, 2011.]

Having just written and performed a play about a severely-abused, nineteenth-century, domestic servant, I was intrigued to discover that a book has been written about Virginia Woolf's relationship to the women who cooked and cleaned in her various homes. The book is Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury by Alison Light.

Before I talk about my responses to this remarkable book, I want to explain what I was trying to do with my play about the servant--which, by the way, is titled Lace Curtain Irish. It's a one-woman piece, and the one woman is Bridget Sullivan, who was a live-in cook and maid in the home of Andrew Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts. Yes, the Andrew Borden who was the recipient of eleven of the famous "forty whacks" presumably delivered by his daughter Lizzie's axe. The premise of my play is that Bridget was the actual wielder of the much-celebrated and conspicuous-in-its-absence ax (or hatchet).  Everything in the trial transcripts  supports that theory, as well as what is known about the habits, attitudes, history, character, and personality of LIzzie Borden.

Obviously the crime was frenzied and spontaneous--an act of passion. (The Bordens were each dead on the first blow.) Murders that are motivated by desires to inherit generally involve either long-range planning (cumulative doses of untraceable poision) or felicitous  opportunities (finding oneself alone with the victim on the edge of a cliff at night). Crimes involving overkill generally are triggered by immediate and overwhelming circumstances... like abuses of power and/or outright sadism.

Bridget had just been vomiting in the yard on the hottest day of the summer when her mistress, Andrew's wife, gave her the order to wash every window in the house, upstairs and downstairs, inside and out. In 1892, this entailed ladders, buckets, trips to an outdoor pump,brushes, and rags. Not surprisingly, Bridget had only washed a window or two before the arrival of the police and the discovery of Mrs. Borden's mutilated corpse.

One of the first actions by the police was a lock-down of the house. No one was allowed to leave. Oh, except the "Irish girl." She was allowed to leave the house to stay with a friend, taking with her an uninspected bundle of possessions. After all, she was just the maid.

What caught my attention was the fact that Mrs. Borden had been stricken with a bout of vomiting just the day before, and had taken to her bed. In other words, she had good reason to empathize with Bridget's distress and physical debilitation. Why would she insist on a chore that certainly could wait a day-- or even a week?  There can be only two answers: sadism or staggering classism. She either delighted in tormenting Bridget or else she considered the "Irish girl" to be of a different species than herself-- a species impervious to heat and illness, and whose responses were either lazy malingering or ungrateful attempts to cheat her employer out of a day's labor!

Reading Mrs. Woolf and the Servants opened my eyes to the fact that Abigail Borden's attitude toward Bridget was far from unusual. In fact, it reflected prevailing attitudes among the privileged classes of England. Servants were expected to work for little more than room and board. They bought their own uniforms, worked from sunup to sundown, and only had two days off a month. Frequently, the kitchens and washrooms where they worked were in basements, and their rooms were cramped and inadequately heated and ventilated. (Bridget's room was under the eaves and must have been stifling the night before the murders.) Often the servants were assigned names at the whim of their employers who were too lazy to learn their real names. (Bridget had been called "Maggie.") Without pensions or insurance, they relied on the patronage of their employers for support in old age and in sickness. Employers, then as now, had strong incentives to "let go" older workers, in order to avoid the fiscal responsibility for their retirement.

In spite of this appallingly exploitive situation, employers expected loyalty and gratitude from their servants. They saw themselves as role models and mentors for their servants, introducing them to a life of refinement and morals that working-class folks presumably could not be expected to find among their peers. Employers felt entitled to enter a servant's room at any time, and to search their possessions without permission. All of this was for the good of the servant, of course.

This world changed, however, and Virginia Woolf lived through the transitional time. When she and her sister Vanessa moved from the family estate to Bloomsbury, they left behind many of the rigid class roles and formal rituals of their Victorian girlhoods. What they did not leave behind, however, were the servants. But in Bloomsbury, there was no need for the liveried fleet of gardeners, coachmen, personal valets, parlor maids, cooks, charwomen, etc. There would only be a maid and a cook. The uniforms and the hated white caps were gone. The servants could say "Miss Stephens" instead of "Madam." Occasionally, they were even invited to eat with their employers. The middle-class youth of Bloomsbury considered themselves artists, bohemians, radicals, socialists.

This must have been enormously confusing for the servants. With the old upstairs/downstairs boundaries gone, where were the new ones? No one seemed to know. The Woolfs would host political meetings in their home which the servants would attend as fellow socialists... at least until it was time to cook dinner. In spite of her repeated attempts to include working-class characters in her books, Virginia would usually end by editing them out of the final revision, acknowledging her near-total ignorance about their lives.

Two things stand out to me from reading about Woolf and her servants:

1) The time when Virginia's cook ordered her out of her room and Virginia pitched a fit.

2) The fact that two of her servants appeared to have been in a relationship of primary intimacy during the eight years when they lived under Virginia's roof and shared a bed in their room together.

The first stands out because Virginia Woolf is famous for her 1929 treatise,  A Room of One's Own, where she argued passionately how women's creativity had been and was continuing to be stunted by their lack of access to a room that was their own. So here we have Nellie Boxall, thirty-seven years old, who has been living with and working for Virginia for eleven years... for five pounds a year, working 341 days per year... and Virginia, who is fighting with her, enters Nellie's room. What does Nellie do? She orders her out. And what is Virginia's reaction? Does she applaud her for defending her territory? Here is Light's description:

"Nellie had got above herself; in reality the room was not 'hers.' Being treated like a servant was so painful and humiliating that Virginia went straight to Leonard and determined to sack Nellie by Christmas. The 'famous scene' was relived in her imagination many times. She found herself muttering  and rehearsing arguments, unable to work, sick and shivery, trembling with anticipation at the day... when she would give Nellie a month's notice. She wrote in her diary as if possessed, copying out replies to Nellie, speaking their parts..." (p. 193.)

Wow. Just wow.

And then there is the fact that Nellie Boxall and Lottie Hope came together to work for the Woolfs in 1916. Nellie was twenty-six and Lottie was a year younger.  These two young women lived, worked, and slept together in a shared bed at Hogarth House for eight years. Before that, they had lived and worked together in Roger Fry's home for five years. Virginia fired Lottie in 1924, but Nellie stayed on for another ten years. In 1941, both of the women moved into a rented home of their own, which Nellie eventually bought,  and where they lived together for another twenty-four years, until Nellie's death. The two were inseparable, being seen together at weddings, funerals, holidays, visiting.

Nellie was the stouter, the butch. Lottie, rumored to have gypsy blood, was the more glamorous. Lottie had been a foundling, raised in the Home for Deserted Children, and Nellie, the youngest of ten, had been orphaned at twelve. Nellie's relationship with Lottie was protective and maternal. They shared a bedroom from the time they were twenty-one until they were thirty- four, and then again from fifty-one until seventy-five. It was an enduring love.

Did Virginia Woolf notice? How could she not? More to the point, what did Nellie and Lottie make of their employer who was not even ten years older then them? Virginia Woolf was a study in chronic discontent, in parsimony, in eating disorders... And then there was her sexless marriage with Leonard--something that would have been difficult to hide from the servants. And friendships? Virginia took malicious delight in writing scathing inventories of her closest women friends in her diaries, and she often peopled her novels with hateful caricatures of them. In the end, she took her own life.

In spite of their oppression, it was  Nellie and Lottie who managed to find a room of their own and to fill it with loyalty and loving companionship. Too bad Virginia never took a page from their book.