1926

 

“Catnip for women.”

 

July: The Son of the Sheik premiered in New York City, with Rudolph Valentino making a personal appearance at the theater. “Screeching females clawed at him, stole his hat, and tore off his coat pockets. One high-spirited flapper tackled the Latin lover by the ankles, and, frantic for a souvenir, started unlacing his shoestrings,” according to M.M. Marberry. “He had to be rescued by a squadron of police.”

 

*

 

August 15: Valentino collapses in pain, possibly a result of appendicitis. His case takes a turn, and he dies at 12:10 p.m. on August 23. He was 31.

 

H. L. Mencken called the Shiek “catnip for women.”

 

A crowd of mostly females gathered outside the funeral parlor where Valentino’s body was taken. Marberry explains:

 

The frenzied mob rioted and tried to break into the mortuary, shattering a massive plate-glass window. Three policemen, a photographer, and many of the charging women were cut by pieces of flying glass. Mounted police moved in, pushing back the mob with their horses. Some women fainted; others were bowled over and trampled on. All day the riot continued. Ambulances were summoned and more than one hundred police reinforcements were rushed to the scene. Shortly before midnight, when most of the rioters dispersed, the exhausted police were left victors on a field of battle littered with hats, shoes, and torn clothing.

 

Somehow, Valentino had exuded “magnetism” on the screen. Marberry writes, “To millions upon millions of women he was Romance as Romance ought to be, not the way it was in their homes.”

 

Grief drove several women to suicide, including Agatha Hearn, a New York mother. She shot herself, and died clutching “a sheaf of Valentino photographs” in her hand. A Bronx housewife attempted suicide because of what she described as “my love for him” but survived. As far away as London, a 26-year-old dancer named Peggy Scott did away with herself. She left a note: “It is heartbreaking to live in the past when the future is hopeless—please look after Rudolph’s pictures.” It was said, in Japan, that two distraught girls held hands and jumped to their deaths in a volcano.

 

Valentino had been divorced for a second time in 1925; and from that point forward spent much of his time with a young actress Pola Negri. The funeral on August 30 drew huge crowds—lining the streets from Forty-seventh to Sixty-ninth streets. Only 500 invitees were allowed into the service. The hearse arrived “blanketed with pink roses.”

 

Producers of The Son of the Sheik had every reason to fuel wild stories about the death of their star—for the movie was only now going to be released nationwide. Most men, Marberry, says had already soured on Valentino. Some called him a lounge lizard, a pretty boy, a gigolo. Reporters had begun to mock his long sideburns; others referred to him as a “reformed dishwasher.” The Chicago Tribune went so far as to blame the “Powder Puff Hero” for the increasing effeminization of American males.

 

One flack released a statement, quoting Valentino’s last words, “Let the tent be struck!” This reminded fans to go see the movie, including Vilma Banky, his female co-star, known as the “Hot Paprika from Hungary.” There was also the popular song of the day, The Shiek of Araby.

 

In that shocking song, the hero creeps into his love’s tent….

 

These “last words” of Valentino sounded too much like the last words of Robert E. Lee; so other variations were tried. Meanwhile, Valentino’s manager was trying to sell three books, one by the actor himself on How to Keep Fit. A second was a volume of poems, also purportedly written by Rudy. His brother Alberto Valentino now appeared on the scene—reporting that the actor’s real name was Rodolfo Alonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi Di Valentina d’Antonguolla. This seemed to prove Rudy was descended from nobility. Alberto also explained that the deceased had been at home in five languages.

 

Miss Negri appeared—having made the four-day train trip from Hollywood. Seeing Valentino’s body for the first time she swooned. She refused to see reporters, made it clear she would fulfill her contract to make a few more movies, and then would spend the rest of her days in a cloister.

 

The body was laid to rest in California; The Son of the Sheik soon smashed box office records. A line formed fifteen hours before the film was to be shown for the first time in London. Valentino had been in debt up until his death—but the success of his last film wiped out all his bills and left an estate of $600,000. Occasionally, Miss Negri made headlines in years to come. She told reporters she might pay as much as $1 million to purchase a well-known oil painting of Valentino dressed as an Argentine gaucho. At a December auction of the actor’s possessions, however, the painting went for $1,550 to another fan. Just before Christmas, Negri’s lawyers sued the estate for $15,000 she alleged she had lent the Sheik.

 

Eventually, Valentino’s second wife, Natacha Rambova, nee Winifred Hudnut, arrived in the States. Through a medium, she told reporters, she had established contact with Rudy up in heaven. She explained what he had said:

 

I have many valuable friends up here and am happy. Caruso likes me. So does Wally Reid and Sarah Bernhardt, both of whom are doing well in the movies up here. Sarah has been particularly kind to me. These spirits do the same thing as they did on earth, but, of course, in a different way: they act with more soul now.

 

At first the Sheik was unhappy with the small parts he received up in heaven; but he was now serving an apprenticeship and would soon become a star, as he had been during his earthly days. “On earth,” he told Rambova, “the clever artiste could portray any part given him by a director. Not so, here in heaven. All is sincerity.”  American Heritage (August 1965)

* 

August: H.L. Mencken captures perfectly what life was like on a hot night, before air conditioning. He and a group of reporters, seated in a restaurant, are doing their best to stay cool, and come to grips with the story of Valentino. “We perspired horribly for an hour, mopping our faces with our handkerchiefs, the table napkins, the corners of the tablecloth, and a couple of towels brought in by the humane waiter,” he wrote. “Then there came a thunderstorm, and we began to breathe.” 

As for Valentino, he had been stung by a recent story, that put his reputation at risk, as Mencken explains:

 

The trouble that was agitating Valentino turned out to be very simple. The ribald New York papers were full of it, and that was what was agitating him. Sometime before, out in Chicago, a wandering importer had discovered, in the men’s wash-room of a gaudy hotel, a slot-machine selling talcum-powder. That, of course, was not unusual, but the color of the talcum-powder was. It was pink. The news made the town giggle for a day, and inspired an editorial writer on the Chicago Tribune to compose a hot weather editorial. In it he protested humorously against the effeminization of the American man, and laid it lightheartedly to the influence of Valentino and his sheik movies. Well, it so happened that Valentino, passing through Chicago that day on his way east from the Coast, ran full tilt into the editorial, and into a gang of reporters who wanted to know what he had to say about it. What he had to say was full of fire. Throwing off his 100% Americanism and reverting to the mores of his fatherland, he challenged the editorial writer to a duel, and, when no answer came, to a fist fight. His masculine honor, it appeared, had been outraged. To the hint that he was less than he, even to the extent of one half of one percent, there could be no answer save a bath of blood. (49/171)

 

* 

“The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle – a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.” H.L. Mencken

 

*

Summer: Arnold Hano is four year old and living a block from the Polo Grounds, home to the New York Giants baseball team.  His grandfather Ike, a New York City police lieutenant gives the boy his season pass for a seat in the grandstand above first base. 

Long after, Hano, who goes on to be a baseball writer, remembered, “It was a simple matter for my mother to get me off her hands by teaching me to cross streets by myself.” That season he attend a handful of games by himself; and the following season he started spending money he earned to buy 50 cent seats in the bleachers. He was hooked on the sport for the rest of his life. 

The boy had heard that people sitting in the bleachers had the most fun. According to The New York Times, “He began spending Saturday afternoons on those long narrow planks that passed for seats some 500 feet from home plate, growing to love the wide view of that cavernous, horseshoe-shaped ballpark that they afforded and to enjoy the characters he encountered there.”

 

* 

October 31: Harry Houdini, the great escape artist proves that even the great escape artist cannot escape death, succumbing from appendicitis. He leaves precise instructions on how he will communicate from beyond the grave with his wife and friends, if it can be done. No one has heard from him since.

 

*

 

Harry Houdini had been famous for many years, although his act had eventually grown stale. In 1903, for example, he had escaped from the “Siberian Transit Cell,” as The New Yorker explains, “a metal safe on wheels that was used to haul political renegades to prison.” (Houdini might just have made up the name.) Houdini, himself, was Jewish and had come to America with his parents in 1874, from Hungary. He once explained the lure of his act, saying that risk,

 

attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the human fly, who scales the walls of the same building. If we knew that there was no possibility of either one of them falling or, if they did fall, that they wouldn’t injure themselves in any way, we wouldn’t pay any more attention to them than we do a nursemaid wheeling a baby carriage. Therefore, I said to myself, why not give the public a real thrill?

 

David Denby, writing about Houdini, gives his background:

 

He was born Erik Weisz (later Americanized, sort of, to Ehrich Weiss) in Budapest on March 24, 1874. When he was four, he immigrated to this country with his mother and his brothers. His father had left Hungary two years earlier and settled in Appleton, Wisconsin, a mill town near Lake Winnebago, where he found a job as a rabbi. He was no longer young, though, and he didn’t speak much English. The fifteen German Jewish families of Appleton fired him after a few years, and the family moved to Milwaukee, where they were often hungry, and then to Manhattan – to a cold-water flat on East Seventy-fifth Street (at the time a slum) and to jobs in the garment industry, cutting the lining of neckties. In New York, Ehrich, watching his father slide into despair and ill health, vowed, like many immigrant children, never to be poor – and, even more important to him, never to allow his mother, Cecilia, whom he adored, to want for anything. Like Al Jolson and Irving Berlin, who were also children of Jewish clergymen, he launched into show business as the way out of ghetto jobs like stitching garments and rolling cigars. It was the first of his escapes.

 

There is a photo of him as a skinny, angry-looking teen-ager. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the contemporary avatar of self-transformation, he built himself up; he ran, boxed, swam (in the East River), lifted weights, and became both strong and astoundingly flexible. There’s no record that he was aware of the Zionist agitation in Europe at the time, but he came to represent Max Nordau’s ideal of Muskeljudentum, or muscular Judaism, with its rejection of male bodies enfeebled by endless study. He spent little time in school and worked at odd jobs; he may have learned the secrets of locks while employed at a locksmith shop. As a child, he had played at conjuring and had dreamed of becoming a trapeze artist. When he was in his late teens, he acquired a used copy of the memoirs of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French watchmaker who became the great magician of the nineteenth century. Ehrich was so excited about Houdin that he changed his name to Houdini. He thought, Begley says, that the final “i” signified that he was “Houdin-like.”

 

…By 1906, he was throwing himself, chained, into inhospitable bodies of water, dropping twenty-five feet off the Belle Isle Bridge, for instance, into the freezing Detroit River. In 1915 and after, thousands of onlookers saw him straitjacketed and hanging upside down from a scaffold above the streets of Kansas City, Minneapolis, and many other cities. He’d pull himself up, wriggle free, drop the straitjacket, and spread his arms. The reference to Jesus did not go unnoticed.

 

He taught himself to speak in advanced elocutionary English, and to write in the ornate tones of period ballyhoo; sometimes he used a ghostwriter, but he also composed or dictated stories about himself, proclaiming his greatness in leaflets, flyers, books, and pamphlets. He appeared in a few silent movies in the nineteen-tens and twenties, although he was a terrible actor. 

 

In 1920, he became friends with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of the most logical man in popular literature was, paradoxically, devoted to Spiritualism. Doyle was convinced that he had communicated, in séances, with his son Kingsley, who was wounded in the Great War and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. In between writing stories about Sherlock Holmes, Doyle wrote books announcing that humanity had entered into “new relations with the Unseen”; he believed that Harry Houdini, for one, possessed supernatural powers. Houdini was flattered but disavowed any special help. The friendship proceeded in an amiable manner until June of 1922, when Doyle and Lady Doyle, who was a practicing medium, invited Houdini to their suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City. Lady Doyle seated the party around a table, rapped three times, and began communicating with Houdini’s adored mother, who had been dead for nine years. (Hearing of the death while in Europe, Houdini had fainted.) She wrote out fifteen pages of messages in English, a language that Cecilia never spoke. Houdini sat there quietly, thanked his hosts, and departed.

 

He wanted to reach his mother, but he knew that Spiritualism was a con. In the eighteen-nineties, he and Bess had dabbled in it themselves, researching names at local graveyards the night before summoning the dead in public. In the wake of the Atlantic City disaster, Houdini, now thoroughly enraged, decided to expose the entire movement. He took on famous mediums and began lecturing on “Fraudulent Spiritualistic Phenomena.” He testified before Congress about the Spiritualist menace. Travelling all over the country, he interrupted séances, sometimes in disguise (beard, hump), shouting, “I am Houdini!” He flipped over tables and demanded that the lights be turned on, trashing the event for performers and hopeful listeners alike. Why did he care so much? He and the Spiritualists were both engaged in show business. But the Spiritualists, he thought, preyed on the emotions of people in mourning. 

 

The climber, it has been said, assaults the mountain “because it’s there.” But for Houdini nothing was there, except the extinction that he teased and eluded with more and more bizarre feats. For him, a failure of nerve might have been worse than any calamity. Begley lays to rest the legend that Houdini’s death, in October, 1926, resulted from a punch to the stomach, though there were punches that month, administered in a Montreal hotel room by a McGill student who (with Houdini’s consent) sought to test the popular myth that the great man could withstand any blow. But Begley convincingly argues that Houdini was ill beforehand. A couple of days after the Montreal incident, he took the train to Detroit and, refusing to go to the hospital, performed his opening-night show in feverish agony. He died, of a burst appendix and peritonitis, at the age of fifty-two, on October 31st.

 

*

The pre-war style of 1914 is going out.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: As I have mentioned, I’m a retired teacher. Some of the suggestions I offer on this blog, I know worked in my class. I didn’t read Private Pages, until after I retired, but the book of women’s diaries might interest your pupils. Certainly, these two examples – with young women not sure they should even kiss boys – and not knowing about intercourse, sound strange to modern ears. 

Otherwise, the young women of a century ago sound in many ways no different from the people who enter classrooms today.

School “is a seething red-hot hell where tortured souls are crushed beneath despicable work.” 

Yvonne (Eve) Blue was born on May 9, 1911. She started her diary at the age of 12. In Private Pages, Penelope Franklin begins the edit with 1926, when Yvonne was fourteen. As always, with diaries, for purposes of this blog we place the entire content in the year where the diary begins.

 

1926

 

January 16. When I read a diary I want to know just the errors the author made, and the personal parts and so forth. It’s not fair. They would leave out my pet parts and write a lot of junk in the front about me, and make me seem silly and sentimental and senseless. I don’t want anyone to have fun out of what I sweated for, and after I am dust and ashes.

 

February 28. Yesterday I drove to Chicago Heights with Daddy, and when we were halfway there, Daddy stopped the car, and showed me how to work it in first and neutral, and then he let me drive! [She’s fourteen.] He is going to teach me how to drive, and when I am 16 I can take it out alone. Someday I can have it for my own. I adore to drive.

 

March 5. This afternoon I went to the dentists to have my teeth filled. I took gas. It was so queer! I was scared to death, when he stuck a big thing over my nose, and told me to breathe deeply. It had a queer dark red-brown smell too. At first I didn’t feel anything, and then all of a sudden I felt all tingly, – like my foot had gone to sleep, only all over. I seemed to be sinking down and at each breath I took I sank down deeper I lost consciousness then. I didn’t feel like a person at all.

 

April 4. Bobby and I are planning to be wonderful! – to improve ourselves. We want to be very thin and silent, but to say unusual things when we speak, and have people hang on our words. We want to wear our hair straight. We want very pale faces, and red lips, and we will dress nicely. We shall be aloof, above the common mass, and cynical, sarcastic, sardonic, satirical, ironic. Delicious words! I would love to have a skin like Lord Byron’s – with a pallor like moonlight – the genius shining through. He fasted. We want to read illuminating books – like Oscar Wilde.

 

But oh! How we want to be wonderful – and thin. When it gets warmer, I shall go on a four day fast.

 

June 16. School is over – and I have an Incomplete in French, – an incomplete that I will be two months in working off next year. But, hells bells! (a pet expression of Bobbie’s and mine just now) I don’t care! School is over!

 

June 25. Today I went to the Jackson Park [Theatre] and saw Adolph Menjou in “The Social Celebrity.” It was a good picture, but I’m not going to that theatre alone, again. I sat in a row all by myself when the play began, but after a time I became aware of a young man sitting beside me. I thought it rather odd, because if I wanted to sit in a row with only one person in it, I would sit at least a seat away. But I didn’t like to move, so I just sat still. Finally I stole a look at him. He was a nice looking blonde with tortoiseshell glasses. He said to me, “I have never seen this girl on the screen before. What is her name?” I replied as shortly as possible, “I don’t know”… I caught him looking at me, every time I looked away from the screen. Then I became interested in the picture, and forgot all about him until he began crowding over in his seat. I looked down at my lap. His arm was hanging over the seat arm, and his hand was almost touching mine. I moved as far away as I could, but finally his hand did touch mine. I, of course moved mine. I thought it was an accident and I didn’t like to change my seat. But it wasn’t an accident. Every time I looked down and moved my hand he would take his away, and then he would put it back again, but not noticeably. … I was a fool. I didn’t know what to do, and I determined that he shouldn’t drive me from my seat. I was there first! But as soon as I it was over I got up. I saw him waiting in the lobby and I didn’t want to pass him. I thought that there was another exit, but there wasn’t so I finally left quickly and ran to a waiting street car.

 

July 3. I’m so tired of being fat! I’m going back to school weighing 119 pounds – I swear it. Three months in which to lose 30 pounds – but I’ll do it – or die in the attempt.

 

Yvonne has been told to keep her calories down to 1,200 to 1,500 per day if she hopes to lose weight:

 

July 9. So (after four days) I am going to keep them down to about 50 per day.

 

And that’s absolutely all, at least till I lose noticabely. No cake or pie or ice-cream or cookies or candy or nuts or fruits or bread or potatoes or meat or anything. If I could only drink tea without cream or sugar. It has no calories.

 

I have been exercising very little. 100 jumps with the jump rope a day, is all, and I’m scarcely strong enough for that.

 

July 11. I ruined the good work today. I was so weak I could hardly pull myself out of bed. My hands shook terribly and I grew hot and cold by turns. I managed to dress, but when I went downstairs mother said I looked so shaky and pale and sick that she made me eat. And to tell the truth I wasn’t sorry, I had gone 60 hours without food. I ate an immense breakfast – two large peaches, a cup of cocoa with three marshmallows and two pieces of toast. I don’t know what to do. I weighed myself yesterday and I’ve lost 5 pounds – I  weigh 144. But I’ll get thin yet!

 

 July 27. Last week I had an average of less than 140 calories a day and I lost 7 pounds.

 

If “The Good Fairy” on my desk should take it into her pretty head to grant me three wishes I should need no time in which to make my decision. I would say:

 

Eternel Youth

Genius, and

to be a boy.

 

August 13. [Yvonne is visiting relatives in Cleveland.] Wednesday, Lura came over. She is nineteen, but she looks sixteen, because she is small and thin. She is a fool over boys – anything in pants will do.

 

Lura wanted me to go to the Bandbox Burlesque with her the next day. It is a cheap and rather vulgar show for a quarter with a comedy and feature motion picture.

 

I met Lura at 3:30 and we went. The last part of a punk comedy was on when we entered, and I couldn’t see very well. But I lead the way because Lura said she always sat down by boys, and I didn’t want to take any chances. So I sat by an old man and she sat on the aisle. We were almost the only females in there, and all the people looked vulgar. Finally the curtain was raised and the Burlesque began. About 15 girls in very scant, dirty costumes came out and did a little dancing. Then a couple of comedians came out, and “cracked” what Lura calls, “dirty jokes.” One act was terribly coarse and vulgar. And right afterwards they turned on the lights and one of the men said “hello” to Lura and me. I wanted to die – especially after that vile act. It was too awful – that act – I can’t write about it. But the Burlesque was exciting and interesting and I’m awfully glad I went. Lura said afterwards that her boys weren’t there – “There wasn’t much use in my going.” “Why,” I said, “is that why you went? Pay a quarter see a boy?” Sure she laughed, “I’d pay more than that.” Poor perverted Laura.

 

August 23. I have only 7 pounds to go, if I don’t gain. I’ve lost over 20 pounds. Aunt E. and I went to the dime museum but there were just men there. There were pistols and rifles hanging all around, and a great many slot machines where by inserting a penny, nickel or dime, motion pictures could be seen of girls not especially characterized by superfluous clothes.

 

October 3. [Chicago] School! I hate it. It is a seething red-hot hell where tortured souls are crushed beneath despicable work. Underneath the lively chatter, underneath the hundreds of spectacled senior boys and round-eyed bewildered freshmen and laughing slim “popular” girls, underneath the apparently pleasant surface there’s an iron hand that bends the students ruthlessly and molds them in a common pattern.

 

I hate to go back, I know what I am getting into. I see the winter ahead of me – long hours after school in the depressing – deadly study-hall, grinding or French verbs in the cheerless November afternoons – waiting frozen-footed on the cold, windy train platforms – reading in dull history books about battles I don’t understand – cramming for tests – trying to memorize page after page of scientific fact. Summer is gone! Blue sky – green-lawned. wild, free summer. And tomorrow – school.

 

October 11. Here are ten little things I should like to have, even though they may not all be good –

 

1. Self-possession & control

2. Superiority

3. Cynicism

4. Will power

5. Silentness

6. Differentness

7. Subtlety

8. Immense range of knowledge

9. Supreme indifference

10. Great independence

 

November 4. I wonder if anyone in the world has ever hated himself as I hate myself. It is just recently that I have. Formerly I thought more of myself. I thought I could write, and now that illusion too has been shattered…. I hate myself. I really do. But oh why are my emotions theatrical! … I am a fat, crude, uncouth, misunderstood beast. … I am obscene, earthly. I am a gibbering, blundering stupid creature. … The more intelligent people are, the more miserable they are. I shall be ignorant – and happy.

 

December 31. For exactly a year I’ve written here at frequent intervals. I wonder why? … It has been said that a girls day is never complete until she has told someone about it.

 

Moi foi! [My faith!] I was a green little fool! I still am. Writing about life and death! I haven’t seen life. Or tasted it. I haven’t even smelled it.

 

 

1927

 

January 8. Some time ago in home economics I told the teacher that I wrote best when I didn’t organize and plan papers. She disagreed, and said that if I did my papers must be very poor. I couldn’t very well say anything but Marjorie C. Stood up for me and said that I wrote good papers, and the matter dropped.

 

Yesterday, the teacher said that she wished to see me. …

 

This paper, said the teacher, shows as clearly as possible what happens when you fail to organize. I was silent, so she preceded to tell me what a wretched paper it was. … Apparently she didn’t know that I enjoyed the reputation of being able to write, to a small degree, for she told me that being able to express my thoughts clearly would help me later on. …

 

Her poor opinion my literary abilities mattered not a twopenny damn to me. But she didn’t stop pestering me there. Her sermon was organized thusly:

 

A.    Discussion of paper

1.     Critisizm

a)      due to lack of organization

b)     due to lack of interest and attention

2.     How to improve papers

a)      organize

b)     take an interest in things

 

B.     Discussion of ME.

1.     Critisizm

2.     How to improve myself (Lord! she can’t tell me anything about that!)

 

If I am not mistaken B was held in reserve – to be used according to my reaction to A. Or again – observing my reaction to A – it was spontaneous, and that, perhaps, explains why it was not well organized. Personally I doubt if I had a reaction. I just kept silent and tried to practice my subtle sneer. (only it isn’t at all subtle). I must have annoyed her, (I’m really talented at that) for she launched into my personality.

 

January 23. There is only a week more to the semester and work! French! Science! Home Economics! Survey of Art! Biology!

 

Hell!

 

May 10. I was sixteen yesterday. Sixteen. Birthdays are supposed to make one feel old, but sixteen seems an awfully immature age, while fifteen seems absolutely infantile.

 

(Yvonne went on to the University of Chicago. In her diary, she later wrote: “My God! How different college is from high school! In class one is treated as a human being – the instructors swear like hell, and they’re all atheists. Every damn kid on campus smokes, and so I do, of course, I inhale, and I smoke in public.” In 1936, she met B.F. Skinner, they married in November, and had two daughters.)

 

* 

“Darn. Why can’t we women be treated the same as men?” 

A second diary from this period introduces us to Martha Lavell, born in Minnesota in 1909. She first left home in 1926, when she enrolled as a freshman at Mills College in California. Here her “Book of Thoughts” began.

 

1926 

September 26. College life is so different from a home life. But we do have loads of fun. Sunday night, while Alice and I were studying, we heard the awfullest noise in the hall and rushed out to investigate. Beryl Pear (since elected Hall pres.) was trying to play a violin, and she didn't know much about it. Another girl had a cello, and a third a tin horn. I joined in with my harmonica and you would have thought someone was being murdered.

 

November 4. Last night was the Hall dance, but several of us couldn’t go since we couldn’t get blind dates. However we formed the Old Maids’ Club and had one grand scandalized meeting about what the young people were coming to. We went up on the hill to have some ice cream and decided it was our duty to reform the boys and girls. Just think, they bobbed their hair (the girls I mean) and wore stockings that could be seen through! Shocking! 

 

1927 

October 3. [Martha is back home.] I certainly did enjoy reading this over the other day. I only wish I’d kept on writing the rest of the college year, for my impressions are recorded so completely that someday they would have been ever so interesting to read. I’ve noticed that there are not many of my thoughts for those four months, and I believe that I began to think only a few months ago. I was discovering myself, I think, in those five last months of school, first my mind and then one day my body. And it was my friendship with Jane Secrest which started the first, I believe. She’s a very introspective person and I was taking Psychology besides; we differed greatly on several subjects and would argue for hours, though we never reached a conclusion. … I think history was one of the things which woke me up. I got some decided views about religion and war and Jane and I discussed them. Our talks weren’t always arguments; often they were ponderings on the whys and wherefores of life. Jane used to say that she wouldn’t mind being a reincarnationist, but I thought it would be dreadful to believe in such a thing. We had been reading some of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s books which are full of queer ideas, and we had big arguments over them. One was whether a man should always be the wagearner and the woman the homemaker. Then we had innumerable theories on the art of bringing up children. When Jane got going, it was hard to stop. I guess the only thing we never argued over was the existence of such a thing as love. We took it for granted.

 

So that was what started my mind awakening and its been diligent ever since.

 

When I think of the kind of books I read in high school, I just groan.

 

December. I’ve been having several arguments with Grammy over religion and it has just astounded me how little she knows how to reason. … I couldn’t believe in her God. All bunk. Grandmother shudders at our disbelief for Mother has about the same ideas as I have and Gin [her sister Ginny] thinks she has too. It worries Grammy a great deal. I think she considers us atheists.

 

Civilization has been all wrong through all these ages. Of course, it is evolving from something worse to something better all the time, but I sometimes wonder, why did it start out the way it did? Why didn’t men and women live on an equal basis, in the first place? I am glad I’m living in this age; people are beginning to wake up. There was a time when I thought woman suffrage was “insufferable,” and when I was very indignant at seeing a man sitting down in a street car with a woman standing. I’ve changed my mind in the last year. 

 

1928 

Ginny is shocked by the flappers. 

January 8. Ginny gets so worried over the youth of today. She says everyone at school puts on lipstick and rouge and smokes and “pets” and everything. She thinks flappers are terrible. She was horrified at my ideas that the modern youth is better than it ever was. I’m an enthusiastic champion of modern ideas. At last we have reached the conclusion though there will be girls and boys who are coarse enough to smoke, drink and pet, still we can be modern without copying them. She seems to be satisfied with that, though she does refuse to read a story in which a woman smokes.

Flapper style: short hair, and short skirts.

 

January 18. I’ve been wondering lately if it wouldn’t be possible to make a child perfect with only one ideal or teaching – “Be kind.”

 

March 14. It seems so queer to think that my children will have new ideas quite different from my own. Mine seem the best possible to me now, but I suppose that there will be better ones thirty years from now. And I do hope, Oh how I hope that I will be broad enough to accept them.

 

April 2. I was reading something Dorothy Dix wrote yesterday. … Miss Dix said that a girl should not be a good talker, but a good listener and that she should know just a little less than her husband so that he can feel his superiority. That’s all wrong. How are we going to have absolute quality in this world if men are to feel superior to women?

 

May 4. Sometimes I do think I’m a generation ahead of my time.

 

July 7. I’d give anything if I could wear trousers. It’s perfectly terrible to have to sit with one’s knees together for fear someone might see up, and to be in constant danger of having one’s skirt blow up to one’s waist. Darn. Why can’t we women be treated the same as men? 

 

1929 

February 17. Mr. Bird [psychology professor] has been discussing the possibility of the existence of a fighting instinct. He believes that war and the acceptance of war are founded on a great many more things than a fighting instinct. The attitude toward war is mostly habit, he says. Even if the whole thing is habit, I despair of ever educating man differently.

 

April 13. In reading this over today I noticed that I wrote a year ago about the importance of clothes. I think my attitude has changed. Somehow I sort of hate to wear nice clothes, because there are so many girls who can’t. I feel rather guilty and quite uncomfortable when I wear my blue coat and my lovely fur. My friends’ clothes aren’t half so pretty and I wish mine weren’t. There’s so much injustice in this world. It makes me so sorry.

 

October 22. I wish I knew of something I could do to promote the cause of peace. … The 100 per cent Americanism, the anthem singing, the scorn for all other nations, the flag worship which are being drilled into the coming generation will lead inevitably to another war. 

 

1930 

February 12. Gin needs someone who can guide her over the “rough spots” of her adolescence. She has friends who have some wrong ideas, I think, and I’m so afraid she won’t be able to resist them. She came home today with the statement that she didn’t see why one shouldn’t kiss boys as well as girls. I wasn’t of much help because the only reason I could give was that kisses are sexual (and why have sexual relationships at her age?) but she thought that was silly. She’s influenced too much by what the crowd thinks and of course won’t listen to anything her mother says. … And anyhow, what am I that I should know the right answers to her moral problems? I’m not sure for instance, that one ought not to kiss boys…

 

February 20. One thing which annoys me greatly is the fact that our Child Training class is made up entirely of women. Why is it that men aren’t interested in children? If I ever choose a husband it will be one who’s vitally interested. It is the thing to which I look forward most, I cannot imagine living without children. 

[Martha never does have children.]

 

August 6. Our Health and Disease teacher is a wonderful young woman. I respect and admire her very much. She has been lecturing to us on reproduction and I’ve found there was a great deal I didn’t know. Queer how one is always learning things. My sophomore year in college, after I had discovered the man’s part in procreation, I was very disturbed and surprised to see a statement in my psychology book about the individual being formed by the union of two cells – one from the father and one from the mother. Think of it! A statement like that – right in a book! Then I started majoring in psychology and my professors brought up sex a great deal and discussed its emotions and perversions. Think of it! Right out in a mixed class! Then I came here and started reading a psychoanalysis where the word penis is mentioned on almost every page. Would I ever be able to use the word penis in conversation without embarrassment?

 

September 23. I’ve come to the conclusion that I cannot endure another year with no men companions. … Here I’ve sat for the last six years with my mantle before me, placidly waiting for the prince to arrive. It was a rather a rude jolt to discover that nothing happened, and that the only way to have that prince is to go out and get him. … Here am I, at the age of 21, so self-conscious at the thought of talking with a man that I cannot even feature smiling at 1. Very easy to foresee the result: I’ll turn out an old maid. ...

 

One of the girls I met this summer I was especially attracted to. I believe maybe it was her liking for introspection and discussion. Yet Janet and I were as far apart as the two poles in experience and in ideals. She had gone with many men and had “necked” with them. And she didn’t believe that it is possible in this age to ever find a man (whom you would care to marry) who hadn’t had intercourse with other women. I don’t want to accept that! And she was willing to marry a man who had kissed other women. Perhaps someday I will have to give up my ideal in regard to that, but oh I don’t want to! 

 

1931 

January 1. Gin Has turned communist and I don’t blame her period I’m not at all sure communism or socialism would work, but I’m willing to give them a chance. Anything is better than an economic system based on greed and disregard of human life.

 

February 9. Mother was here for a week. … How queer it would feel to be her age, to have one’s life behind one as she has and to be living only for one’s children. My imagination doesn’t work that far ahead. I look forward to marriage and children, to companionship with a husband which will last many years.  But after the children are grown and scattered there’s a blank wall. And if one’s husband died, it seems to me the flame of living would go out. Mother has little to look forward to, except the happiness of Gin and me. Wonder if something like that will happen to me. Perhaps I’ll never marry, and go through the years as a lonesome, loveless spinster.

 

October 8. Well, it’s to be Milwaukee this year. I am leaving behind many good times, but I’m going out into the world to seek my fortune, and I have hopes that I will meet with pleasant and broadening experiences. The new life will perhaps be hard to adjust to, but it will be good for me, that’s certain.

 

October 18. I think I’m going to be quite satisfied with my work. The other workers are congenial, and I am greatly attracted to the supervisor, Mrs. Newbold. Have a feeling that I may learn a lot from her. She has poise, and yet she is vivid. She’s one of the few persons I know who are attractive without rouge.

 

December 6. The next thing on the program is some intellectual companionship, particularly masculine, and where am I going to find it? The girls at the office are not exactly my type; their idea of a good time consists of a date with a wise-cracking man and plenty of liquor and cigarettes. 

 

1932 

January 17. It’s funny how I’ve always looked forward to having children of my own. I don’t know when my fancying considering them began, but in high school it was at its height. I thought of my future children as being aged 14, 12, 10, & eight. Their names, their appearance, their personalities, their interests were firmly fixed. Even the color of their bedrooms and their favorite pets entered into my fancies.

 

It’s a shame for a girl to grow up with ideas and interests like those. For it’s apt to be a difficult adjustment if she has to lead a single life. I have no special abilities in the way of a profession; I don’t really expect to make a good social worker and there’s nothing else I’m fitted for. I don’t know what I’ll do with my life if I don’t marry.

 

October 12. Besides being on the lookout for a job, I’ve joined the Socialist Party. In four weeks I’ve met more people and had more excitement than I ever thought possible.

 

November 9. Recently [Gin] declared that I am her best friend. That certainly pleased me. 

 

1933 

May 30. The condition of the country at this time is certainly puzzling. The papers are full of items proving prosperity is on its way; and Roosevelt has become the people’s idol. It’s hard to tell just what he’s about; quite a bit of liberal legislation has been talked about in the headlines. How far his policies really go is hard to tell.

 

October 8. This book of thoughts is becoming more & more neglected. It isn’t that I haven’t the ideas but I’m always too busy or too indifferent at the moment to write them. Inertia is troubling me this [sic] days, for the same old reason – no male companionship and no vocational success. The Depression hasn’t bothered me half as much as those two. I’ve felt it, I think, only through Mother’s worrying and fretting.

 

(In the waning days of 1936, at age 27, Lavell could still write, “Well, as for the coming year, the only goal in my mind is to find a mate. How and where are the heartbreaking questions. Wish there were matrimonial agencies for such as me. Or at least someone with infinite wisdom to give advice.” She went on to a successful career in social work, but she never did find the prince she had been waiting for.)