FAMILY: The feminist in my closet

     I just found out that my mother's father's mother Eva Leonard, whom we called Nana, was a syndicated columnist during the First World War. She wrote five days a week for the women's page in over 200 newspapers, including the Sacramento Bee and the San Diego Union. Later she wrote advice to the lovelorn under the name Elizabeth Thompson.
     Her first series was "The Wife's Money." Promoting the series, the syndicate sent letters to editors saying, "In your quest for material to interest your women readers, who don't care for war news, could you find any subject more vital to them than 'The Wife's Money'?"
     I don't know what my great-grandmother earned, but papers bought the column from the syndicate for $1.50 a week. Her columns are in our family archives (otherwise known as our bedroom closet), pasted onto the pages of ledgers on which someone had kept household accounts. Recycling was one of Nana's salient characteristics--at a time when society considered frugality laudable, and later when it scoffed at frugality as cheap. When Nana wrote letters she saved paper by writing very small from left to right, then rotating the page one-quarter turn, as one would a casserole in the microwave, and writing from left to right across the lines.
     With each column was a photograph of Eva, her hair rolled clear of her forehead, her high collar finished off with lace and a brooch. Her half-smile looks almost smug but in her eyes is an impishness and savvy that intrigue me.
     I have two memories of Nana. I visited her in Madison, Wisconsin when she was 91 and her eyesight was failing. She had had one cataract removed. "That will last me," she said, adding, "Growing old is so interesting. You never know what will wear out next." She would also say, "I want to live until I die!"
     She had me thread a needle for her. I was honored, since at six I was used to having other people thread needles for me.
     Soon after that, I spent a week with her and my grandmother. While I was there, Nana had a stroke and died. There was a lot of commotion and I ran in and out of the house frightened, the adults too busy to notice.
     In her very first column Nana wrote: "Many men feel that women are not producers, that they are supported by the labor of men and that the man should determine what he is willing to contribute to that support. A small percentage of women lead idle lives, their chief thought being dress and amusement, but the womanly woman scorns to be a burden, a clog on the wheel. In a vast majority of homes the wife by her management and labor is a full partner in the business and it is essentially unfair that she should have to ask for a partner's share of the income."
     Each day she would, as she put it, "narrate stories drawn from real life, to prove that women should be spared the shame of economic slavery." There are the newlyweds first learning to budget, the couple in financial straits until the husband turns the book-keeping over to his wife, the rich husband who spends an outrageous $23 a month on cigars and, for balance, the wife who charges $35 hats.
     There is no question about it. My great-grandmother was a feminist. I don't know why that doesn't bother me, feeling about "feminists" as I do.
     I don't think it's just because I'm related to her; I think it's more. It's an attitude she had, a sense of humor, a willingness to compromise. It's her recognizing that a lot of unfairness is unintentional. It's admitting that sometimes it is the woman who is at fault.
     It's seeing marriage as teamwork and working outside the marriage as a contribution to that partnership, not a furthering of personal ambition at the family's expense.
     "The dearest wish of every woman's heart," Eva has an engaged girl tell her mother, "is to help the man she loves and if she can do it better by working outside the home, why in the name of reason should she not do it? The wife in an office is just a capable little partner, putting her part of the money into the domestic firm instead of doing the housework."
     Her solutions are creative. One of her characters gets around a patriarchal husband by spending one of his week-long absences digging up potatoes, picking currants and collecting eggs, selling them, buying cloth and sewing herself the dress he is too miserly to buy her.
     Another confronts her husband in his "dental parlors" when she needs money, knowing that he won't refuse her in front of his patients. (She certainly drew that one from real life; she divorced her dentist husband for things like that.)
     After the series on money, Nana wrote one on "Glimpses of Married Life" and after that one on "Married Life on $80 a Month." Later, she wrote one about the war.

Published July 27, 1989 Long Beach (CA) Press-Telegram. (Note: Now I consider Nana a Biblical, Proverbs 31 woman.)

Here is Nana reading to my brothers, about the time I was born: