Dorothy Thompson: (June 1973 | Volume: 24, Issue: 4)

Dorothy Thompson:

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Authors: Bernard A. Weisberger

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June 1973 | Volume 24, Issue 4

by Bessie Rowland James. Rutgers University Press, 447 pp. $15.00

by Marion K. Sanders. Houghton Mifflin Co., 432 pp. $10.00

At one point in her journalistic career Dorothy Thompson, learning of a proposed magazine piece on her life, wrote: “I wish someone would present me as a female. … [It’s] heresy which the feminists wouldn’t like, but … I’d throw the state of the nation into the ashcan for anyone I loved.”

It was not a wholly truthful statement, but an exasperated reaction to the dilemma of a successful woman who always had to face the direct or hinted accusation that competence outside the home was unfeminine. Anne Royall, born 124 years before Dorothy—and likewise a successful writer on topics of the day—once felt compelled in similar fashion to disown fellowship with feminists who downgraded the traditional interests and allurements of their sex. Condemning Amelia Bloomer’s emancipated costume of a loose smock over baggy trousers, she asked: “Do our sisters intend to part with their last and best treasure—modesty … the sweet rounding waist, the unspeakable charm of a swelling bosom?” Yet sweetness, modesty, and charm were never attributes of Anne Royall’s.

Both women, in their careers, offer food for reflection on the changing and changeless elements in womanhood and journalism in the United States. Both are the subjects of lively new biographies.

Anne Royall was born (as Anne Newport) in 1769 and was raised on the Pennsylvania frontier. She was often within earshot of Indian war whoops and had lost both a father and a stepfather by the time she was fourteen. She suffered the humiliation of being “domestic help” for a time but was rescued when her employer, Colonel William Royall, took her to be his woman and later his wife. Royall, a Revolutionary War veteran, was a Virginia planter who had gone west to make his fortune—an objective he never achieved, thanks to an absorption in books and brandy. When he died in 1812, he left his widow a modest subsistence. But relatives who had always resented his lower-class bride successfully sued to break the will.

In her fifties by then—quite old for that era—Anne Royall had to support herself. Frontier energy and self-reliance came to her aid. She had a knack for pungent pen sketches in her letters, and she now moved to Alabama (a brand-new state then, largely wilderness), wrote a number of accounts of people and places there, and then began the tedious task of travelling from town to town soliciting subscriptions that would pay for putting the reports into book form. By the time the volume emerged, she had settled in Washington to lobby for a pension as an exsoldier’s widow.

The Letters from Alabama were a scandalous success. Anne had, with country-girl bluntness, described the fluid, yeasty society she found just as