Feminism is my family tradition, and I learned it at my Granny's knee. My strongest memory of her is a compound, of the many, many times when she'd talked about the battle for the right to vote, of the marches, of taking trains to New York and Washington, DC. Her head would slowly shake back and forth, and a faraway smile would leave her radiant. Seeing Granny happy of course made me happy, and thus I learned at a tender age that marching for women's rights was a good thing.
x-posted from Unbossed
Constance Fuller graduated from MIT in 1914 with a degree in architecture. While still an undergraduate, in 1913 she researched and co-authored the book
Details of Old New England Houses with
Lois Lilley Howe, the first woman elected a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and founder of the Boston architectural firm Howe, Manning & Almy. Upon graduation she took work as a draftsman for Lois Lilley Howe and other Boston architectural firms, but from what I recall of the stories she told, at that point her work simply financed a life of activism. Some of the organizations she worked with for women's suffrage seem quite the epitome of hidebound conservatism today--the D.A.R., the Women's Christian Temperance Union. They were conservative at the time as well in many ways, but they were organizations filled with socially active women, and thus natural allies of the suffrage cause, and so Granny worked with them. Her own politics were quite different; in a staunchly Republican family with a tradition reaching back to the very founding of the GOP, she styled herself an "independent." Her family religious heritage was of oldtime New England Universalists and freethinkers, she wasn't too keen on this merger with the Unitarians, they were a bit too rigid and dogmatic for her taste.
Along the way, she met and married my grandfather, also an architect. She came with him to his hometown here in western Massachusetts, and together they started not only a family but also a joint architectural firm. Despite the acceptance of Howe by the A.I.A., the small but growing numbers of practicing women architects in the state caused alarm among some of the men in the profession. At some point in the 20s, they prevailed upon the houses of the Sacred Cod (Mass. State Senate) and the Holy Mackerel (Mass. State House) to adopt a statute requiring that all architect's plans required approval by a licensed civil engineer, and set about convincing male engineers not to approve plans by female architects. Granny, ever the practical one, immediately saw the flaw in their scheme. At that time, becoming licensed as an engineer in Massachusetts did not require a specific academic curriculum, but was simply a matter of taking and passing a test. Which Granny promptly did. I believe she not only approved her own plans, but my grandfather's as well.
Even late in life Granny found ways to break new ground. In 1963, at the age of 70, she got her pilot's license. I suspect she may have been proving a point to a son-in-law, my uncle Ken, classic "man's man," Korean War fighter pilot and owner/operator of Big Red's Flying Service in Alaska. Sadly, shortly thereafter what we now call Alzheimer's set in, and a painfully long slow process of the lights going out around Granny took place. She died at 83.
Like every grandmother, Granny told us stories about people in the family. Granny, being the canny one, used stories concerning the names of the kids in my generation to make sure we knew the stories of remarkable women in her family tree. You see, the roots of feminism in my family go back further than Granny. At the time, such family tellings were likely the only way those names were remembered. I was thus dumbfounded as a young man in the 70s when at a gathering at the apartment of a political friend, I saw she had a book of the writings of Granny's greataunt Margaret Fuller. As Granny had explained long ago, there are reasons why my sister is named Margaret.
Feminism is my traditional family value. I plan on keeping faith with Granny. What's your progressive traditional family value?