104. Miriam Michelson — The Superwoman with Lori Harrison-Kahan

AMY HELMES: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to unearthing forgotten classics by women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner and co-host Kim Askew.

KIM ASKEW: Hey, everybody. Amy, were you a fan of superheroes growing up?

AMY: Um, okay, so I had a crush on Christopher Reeve's Superman . I do remember that, but more importantly, I can recall spinning around manically in the living room, a la Linda Carter in imitation of Wonder Woman when I was a kid. I loved that TV series. I remember wanting those Wonder Woman Under-roos, if you remember those.

KIM: Oh, yeah. I mean, same with all of that. Christopher Reeve, huge crush. And then I wanted to be Wonder Woman. And it's interesting that you say that, because both of those references remind me a little of the lost gem of a novel from 1912 that we're gonna be discussing today. Miriam Michelson's The Superwoman is speculative fiction that imagines a female utopia where women rule the roost. A bit like the tribe of women warriors from which Wonder Woman originated. Before becoming a bestselling fiction writer, Michelson, who grew up in a Nevada mining town, worked as a San Francisco-based reporter at a time when female journalists were mostly relegated to fashion and society stories. She made a name for herself as a girl reporter who covered crime and politics.

AMY: So I guess a bit of Lois Lane thrown in the mix, too. And we have the perfect guest with us to discuss The Superwoman and Michelson's gender-busting career: Professor Lori Harrison-Kahan, who edited the 2019 book The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michaelson.

KIM: Okay. Let's read the stacks and get started!

[intro music starts]

AMY: Today's guest, Lori Harrison-Kahan, is a professor in the English department at Boston College, where she teaches courses on American literature and culture. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. She's the author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black Jewish Imaginary. And as we said, she edited the book we're going to be discussing today, The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michaelson, which won the 2021 Best Book Edition award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers.

KIM: Lori also co-edited a 2020 edition of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf, and listeners, you may remember we did an episode on Emma Wolf's 1892 novel Other Things Being Equal back in September with guest Sarah Seltzer. So welcome, Lori! We're so glad to have you on the show.

LORI HARRISON-KAHAN: It's great to be here and have this chance to talk about Michaelson with you.

AMY: As Kim said in the intro, she had an unusual career for a woman of her time, but let's back up, because her childhood is pretty incredible too. So she was born in 1870 in Calaveras County, California, made famous by the Mark Twain story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Her parents were Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from Poland to flee anti-semitism there. She spent her youth in Virginia City, Nevada, which is a place Kim and I have both visited. In fact, when I was there, I stayed at a B and B that overlooked an old, kind of creepy looking schoolhouse and little did I know at the time that Miriam not only attended that school, she also briefly taught at it! If I had only known.

KIM: That is so cool. I love that. So listeners, if you haven't been to Virginia City, we should set the scene for you. It's an old west town in the mountains that now feels pretty much like a ghost town. There are old mining tours you can go on. They stage duels on the main street at noon. There's a prostitute's museum. Oh yeah, and there's the Bucket of Blood saloon. I think Amy, you probably went there. It's named for a bloody gun fight that occurred there in the 1880s. Anyway, Virginia City is famous for the Comstock Lode silver ore discovery in 1859, which almost instantly made it a boom town.

AMY: Yeah. And Lori, I feel like we emailed about this, but you have not had an opportunity yet to go to Virginia City. 

LORI: That's right. I'm so envious that you have both been there.

AMY: It's really fun. It's really fun. Uh, so yeah, the population of this little town up in the hills peaked in the mid 1870s with an estimated 25,000 residents. It was known as the richest city in the US, filled with brick homes and a world class opera house musicians from all over the world performed there. And Samuel Clemens famously began using his pen name, Mark Twain, while he was working there as a reporter in the 1860s. So he's kind of the most famous writer associated with Virginia City. Lori, can you talk a little bit about what Miriam's life was like when she lived there? 

LORI: Sure. And you both captured the town so well, having been there. A lot of what I know about it is from Miriam's writing. She wrote about it both in fiction and non-fiction , so one of her last books was actually a non-fiction book of the history of the Comstock Lode primarily in Virginia City. Um, and one of her earliest novels was a semi autobiographical novel called The Madigans, and it's from that book that we get a sense of what it was like for her to grow up in that area. And what's really interesting about that book, it centers on a family of six sisters. Those are the Madigans. And this is why it's semi autobiographical: so Miriam was part of a big family, but she had both brothers and sisters. So when she turns her life into fiction, she clearly wanted to center the experiences of girls and women by turning, you know, all those siblings, into girls. It's a book that is clearly inspired by Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, but in this book, it's like, they're all Jo March, right? They're all tomboys. The sisters are all adventurous, they're all athletic. They're constantly pulling pranks on each other. And Miriam herself was athletic. She then went on to cover sports as a journalist. Miriam talks in that non-fiction book about Virginia City being a place where you can make up the rules as you go along. And that applies to a game of marbles, but it also applies to, um, rules about gender. So I think in many ways, that's what shaped her nontraditional views about gender. She went on, you know, this is the late 19th century, to have a career. She never married. She never had children. Um, so a pretty unconventional life for a woman at that time, which I think had a lot to do with where she grew up.

AMY: Is The Madigans still in print anywhere? I mean, is it hard to find because a "Wild West" Little Women sounds intriguing. 

LORI: Yes, isn't it great? I know. So most of her work is out of print. A lot of it is on Google books and I think I include one chapter of The Madigans in my collection, as well. Um, and then in the front of my collection, I do tell you where you could find the things that are available on Google books. I tell you where you could find those.

KIM: Great. So, we talked earlier about Miriam being of Jewish descent. How did that impact her life?

LORI: I have a sort of a complicated answer to this question because Miriam herself would've said that it didn't really affect her. She didn't strongly identify as Jewish. Her family certainly was not religious. But I would argue that in fact it did shape her experiences. There were not many Jews in Virginia City. Her parents were immigrants who spoke with accents. And so it's clear from looking at some of the history that they would've kind of stood out as different, as foreigners. People would've been very aware that they were Jewish. So in terms of how it shaped her, right, she's saying it didn't really matter, but when the press would write about her when she became a famous novelist, they would often point out her Jewishness. There's an article in The Washington Post about her, where they refer to her as a California Jewess who has succeeded with her pen. So people were certainly aware of her religious background. And I think the way that it shows up in her writing is that she doesn't very often write about Jews, but she does really capture the full ethno-racial diversity of the West. So she writes about Native Americans. She writes about Chinese immigrants. She writes about African Americans in the West, which was somewhat unusual for a white writer at that time. She also writes about Native Hawaiians. So I think that being somewhat on the margins, whether she kind of acknowledges an impact or not, allowed her to kind of recognize the experiences of others on the margins and write about them and want to really kind of do justice to the full diversity of the place in which she grew up.

KIM: In the introduction to The Superwoman and Other Writings, you talk about the birth of the celebrity "girl reporter" and the progressive era press, which is really fascinating. Can you tell us a bit about that and where Michaelson fit in?

LORI: Sure. So Michelson began working as a reporter in the 1890s, and this was a period when women are entering the newspaper industry as reporters in significant numbers. And a lot of that had to do with someone whose name is probably gonna be recognizable to listeners, and that's Nellie Bly. So Nellie Bly, in the 1880s, was really the first woman to break into investigative reporting. So women before this were writing for papers, but they would cover society events and fashion, things that editors thought, you know, only women would be interested in. But Nelly Bly changed all that through a series of articles that's now referred to by its book title, which is Ten Days in a Mad House. She feigns insanity and she goes undercover in a woman's asylum on Blackwell's island in New York. And that piece just got enormous attention. Bly became a celebrity. So Michelson is kind of following on the heels of that. Suddenly a lot of papers did want women journalists because it created a kind of spectacle. She herself didn't go undercover the way that Bly did, though in her fiction, she wrote about a woman or reporter who went undercover. This is the era of Hearst and Pulitzer, the sensational journalism. And so she's kind of really fitting into that in terms of creating a spectacle around herself as a kind of woman reporter. So the way that this kind of plays out, this is true for Bly and it's true for Michelson. They often use the first person in their news articles, which we don't associate with, right, we think of news reporting as being objective. It's written in the third person. But Michelson would make herself a character in the stories, and you'd be very aware of her as a reporter kind of tracking down this information.

AMY: I think it's interesting too, that she was really able to do some kick-ass things here because people saw her as non-threatening, right?

LORI: Yeah, it's really interesting, right? And I think she had, in particular, access to other women who might not speak to male reporters, right? So that she could tell stories that male reporters could not necessarily tell, but she was also really invested in making sure that the women's point of view on various issues was present in the newspaper. One of her earliest stories for the San Francisco Call which is the first major daily paper she writes for, it was about a woman's convention in San Francisco that brought, you know, figures like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Susan B. Anthony, and Anna Howard Shaw, the leading suffragists of the time, to San Francisco. And Michelson wrote about that as a reporter, but what's also interesting about this is that she kind of refused to be pigeonholed. So that was her first piece, but then she kind of spread out into all these other arenas. Many of them were associated with, you know, only men reporters could do this work. So she wrote about sports. She wrote about crime. She wrote about politics. She also wrote about the theater. So a really kind of wide range of topics.

AMY: And all of the articles that you mention, and I think some of them are included in the book, but they all sound super interesting, you know? If I was scrolling through on my phone and I saw that, I would definitely read that article.

KIM: Yeah, she has buzzy headlines for sure, too.

LORI: Yeah. definitely. Yeah. 

AMY: And she was writing for mass appeal, for kind of the common man and the common woman. So she wasn't really writing for intellectuals.

LORI: Right, right. At this time in the 1890s, she's writing for kind of one of the major San Francisco papers. Most reporters didn't actually get bylines. Articles were just kind of published without any attribution, but women always got bylines because the papers wanted to draw attention to the fact that women were writing, because that itself sold papers and created a spectacle. And for Michelson, she not only got bylines, but sometimes the headlines and sub-headlines would actually include her name , because she was just a selling point for these papers. 

AMY: And it's interesting that we call this yellow journalism, you know, it was tabloidy, but she was managing to work in these serious feminist issues... she had like a sassy writing style. She was fun. And she was just sort of writing articles about, should women wear pants? Should women ride bicycles? Things like that that probably actually was pretty effective in changing people's minds about a lot of this. And in fact, you pointed out she sometimes used a strategy called conversion journalism, almost like she would trick the reader a little bit. Can you talk about that?

LORI: Sure. Yeah. I mean, she would claim at times that she was objective or she would even go so far as to kind of claim that, um, ... there's a piece that's actually about this woman's convention that she attends where she seems to kind of claim at the beginning that she doesn't really believe in the figure of the New Woman, the independent woman at the time. But then as she attends these events she's persuaded, right? So we see her being persuaded over the course of the article. And I think that was a really deliberate strategy, that she could kind of take the reader on a journey with her and perhaps persuade the reader as well. Or sometimes she would follow a figure who she's interviewing who is skeptical in a similar way and then comes to see things in a very different way through the experiences that she narrates in that article.

AMY: I wish we could do that for some of the MAGA people somehow. Wish that strategy could be employed more effectively today. 

KIM: Yeah. So it seems like Michelson's journalism career was going great, but then she made this transition to writing fiction. Do we know what led to this transition?

LORI: So I have a couple of ideas about this. One is money , um, that, that it would've been more lucrative to be a fiction writer than a journalist at the time. This was a time when magazine culture is really exploding. There are all these mass circulation magazines and they have this very high demand for short stories. She began writing short stories for these magazines, but then as a novelist, she'd be making money from royalties and so forth. So that's one reason. Another is that as a fiction writer you could have a national reputation in a way that most journalists cannot. I mean, Nelly Bly here is really the exception, but most journalists just have a local following, right? But these mass circulation magazines have a national and sometimes international audience, so she's expanding her audience. And then also, there are changes going on in the newspaper industry in the early 20th century, which is when she makes this shift. There's kind of a backlash against the figure of what she calls the "girl reporter," right? The women journalists... there's this pushback against sensational journalism. And I think she was pretty savvy in realizing that that was happening and that she could make this shift in her career to fiction. 

KIM: Yeah, there's definitely a through line between her journalism and her fiction. Some of her first published fiction dealt with human trafficking and the lack of opportunities for women of color. She set some of these early stories in Hawaii and San Francisco's Chinatown, and this brought to mind one of our earliest episodes. It was on Sui Sin Far's short story collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and many of those stories are set in San Francisco's Chinatown as well. How did readers respond to Michelson's fiction?

LORI: Yeah. The Sui Sin Far episode I assigned for my students, um, because we were reading Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and they're really interesting writers to compare. Sui Sin Far is also a bit of an outsider, but she's half Chinese, so more of an insider than Michelson, who's white kind of coming into Chinatown. Um, so really interesting to read those two side by side.

AMY: Is there any possibility that they could have known each other?

LORI: This is such a great question! One of the premier scholars who works on Sui Sin Far, Mary Chapman, is convinced that they must have known each other, but we don't have any hard evidence of that. They're kind of circulating in the same environments at the same time. 

AMY: At the very least reading each other's work.

KIM: Yes, for 

LORI: Yep. Yeah. And probably influenced by each other in some way. Um, yeah, so, uh, the question was about the early response to her fiction. Um, so what's interesting about this is that when you publish fiction, short stories and novellas in magazines, often there are no reviews. And so we don't have a kind of reception history. So some of that early material, we don't really know how readers are responding to those, those fictional Chinatown tales. I don't really have a sense of how readers would have responded except to say that she was enormously popular, right? It's clear that she's getting more and more work. She's publishing stories and then suddenly book publishers are interested in her. It's clear that she's clicking, that she's tapping into something in the time period. And then once she publishes books, we do, of course, have reviews. So then we get a much better sense of how readers responded. And one of the through lines that I see in the reviews is just how much fun her work is to read. So really emphasizing how enjoyable it is. "I can't put this book down." Um, there's this quote about one of her works being, quote, "as catchy as ragtime." So really a very modern, trendy feel to it. It's very slangy. She has this sassy, first-person woman's voice for a lot of her work. The critic HL Menkin, reviewing one of her books, called it "a literary joy ride." so same idea there, but what a lot of these critics miss, that's not really mentioned in their reviews, are the underlying feminist messages of her work. And I think today those are really evident, to readers in a way that they weren't then.

AMY: But just think about it for a second . If you heard that somebody's literary voice was "catchy as ragtime" and "a literary joy ride", you would immediately go read it. And this is a woman that we had never heard of!

KIM: Yeah, it's crazy. I know. Absolutely. 

LORI: Her kind of breakthrough is she publishes a short story called In the Bishop's Carriage, and a publisher contacts her and says, "you should turn this into a novel." And that becomes her first novel, and that's written from the first- person point of view of the female protagonist, who is a pickpocket. And this was quite unusual at the time, to have a female criminal as your main character. So that was a scandalous element, and it becomes a bestseller as a result, but it's also the very kind of modern, as I said, slangy voice.

AMY: There's another one I don't know when it comes in the timeline, but Petticoat King, which is about the life of Elizabeth I. That one caught my interest too. 

LORI: Yes. That's feminist historical fiction, which we have tons of today, but I mean, that's what's interesting as well, because she's trying out all these different genres. Where she wouldn't be pigeonholed in her reporting career, she's writing in all these different kinds of modes and genres in her fiction as well.

KIM: All right. So let's talk about The Superwoman, which was published in The Smart Set in 1912. Do you wanna give our listeners a quick summary of the setup?

LORI: Sure. And this is a great example of what I was just saying with the different genres, because here she's experimenting with science fiction. Um, so The Superwoman, in terms of the plot, it opens up, you almost feel like you're reading a realist novel by Edith Wharton or Henry James. And what's really interesting about it as well, is that the protagonist is a man, which is unusual for Michelson. Our readers who knew Michelson and these strong female protagonists, but suddenly you have a male protagonist and he's on a transatlantic ocean liner. His name is Hugh Ellenwood Wellburn. And as that name, I think, conveys he is a wealthy, white man who doesn't have to work. Family money. Really not the most likable protagonist; he's a bit of a jerk. And he finds himself on this boat with the two women he's considering marrying. One is young and beautiful. The other is a very elegant widow. And he can't really make up his mind, so he goes to the edge of the boat. He's gonna flip a coin to decide which woman he should propose to. And at that moment he is swept overboard and he wakes up on an island, a remote island, that's unnamed in the text. And it turns out that on this island, women rule. So the gender roles have been reversed. Women are in charge. Men are there to fulfill reproductive and domestic functions. And then it kind of goes on from there, so moving from this realist mode into speculative fiction and kind of telling us the story of life on this island, and wellburn's experiences with these women.

AMY: Almost a little like Gulliver's Travels or suddenly arrived in like feminist Oz. 

LORI: Yes, exactly. 

AMY: Um, okay. So this book came out in 1912. Remind us a little bit of some of the historical context that we need to know for this time period.

LORI: Sure. The suffrage movement is really ramping up, and in 1911, California becomes the sixth state of the Union to grant women the right to vote. That's where Michelson is living, and she's involved in the suffrage campaign at this point. So she's kind of taken the celebrity, um, as a journalist and a writer and turned that into kind of getting crowds to attend her suffrage speeches. So she was involved in that successful suffrage campaign in 1911. Right on the heels of that, she writes The Superwoman. So I think in many ways we could see it as a kind of celebratory text, right? She's celebrating the fact that women have this newfound power, but also because it's only the sixth state, right? There's not yet a suffrage amendment, it's a call to action. And so in that story, we see a really strong critique of patriarchy.

KIM: Yeah. And of course we are still fighting that battle for gender equality today. And that's why Amy and I think this novella is such a great read right now. It really is timeless on some level because it's still revelatory to read about a world where women are completely in charge. I was wondering if you'd like to read a passage from The Superwoman, Lori, to give listeners a feel for the prose?

LORI: Sure I'd be happy to. , so I'm gonna read. A passage that comes from, the moment where well burn the protagonist, first meets the leader of this society. Her name is win the mother goddess, and they have a conversation. So most of what you hear is going to be, dialogue, and that it starts with her.

So she's speaking here. Then you may tell where you came from. What is your place? Who is your mother, how you came to be struggling in the water. When the captain of the boats found you? Well, burn sat up. That's all very well. He said deliberately, but I think I'm entitled to know first where I am, who you are you people?

How soon I could have a ship to take me to America above all, where my clothes are, particularly my belt that I wore under my shirt filled with valuables and papers. An indignant murmur arose to his surprise. Well burn watching the men at the table on the left saw that their dissatisfaction was even greater than the women's, but the mother's voice still did.

You are entitled. If you understand the use of the word, you have spoken to nothing. She said gravely to well burn, but without anger, you are thrown naked upon our bounty. Our mercy, you are besides a man and we have already too many men. Well burn turned in amazement from her to the men at the small table, but all he could read in their faces was approval of the speech.

He had heard that and a curious grudging resentment of himself. Do you mean to say he demanded attorney again to win? That I'd be more welcome. If I were a woman of the last hundred babies born to the Klans, 79 are male children. She said severely more than three quarters at I congratulate you. Well, been remarked easily.

They stared at him amazement in every eye and he smiled back politely as one might who questioned the relevancy of such statistics to his own case, but was ready to be interested in them. Nevertheless, Let us understand each other, the mother leaned forward in her great chair and spoke very distinctly.

Do you mean to imply that in the country, from which you come such a proportion of male births would be caused for congratulations? I have never in my life heard of an unwelcome boy, baby laughed well burn, but what has that to do with me? Authoritatively, the mother rose to her feet with a gesture. She dismissed the men at the side table and they withdrew without a word though.

Now upon their faces was a look of doubt and delight the look of a child as it listens to a fairytale, surely well burn interposed, a secret, something in him, responding to the look in every one of their faces. Surely I may speak before men, as well as what have men to do with counseling interrupted the mother harshly concerning war.

Yes. Concerning hunting expeditions. Yes. Or the sailing of the boats. But what have men to say about management of the Klan? I, I guess I don't exactly understand your language sta well burn bewildered. We shall see, she said briefly, the men having departed with another gesture, she bathed the women to be seated, then seated herself and faced well burn.

I am mother of all the tribes she said with dignity, these, she indicated the women about her are mothers of the clans. You may speak openly. Why is the birth of a male child caused for congratulations among your people? Why, why, why? It's obvious. He said impatiently baffled by the parity of the topic and her determination to pursue it.

If a boy has 10 chances to a girls want to make a living. If he has a hundred chances to a girls, want to distinguish himself in business, in the professions as a statesman, an artist, anything, if he is a thousand to one to get the mate he wants and Liberty to, to enjoy himself, besides would you want your child to be a girl or a boy?

She did not answer evidently she could not. She and the women about her were staring at him as though he were mad. It compelled him to further expression. It seems he began tentatively stumbling over the words and trying to make himself clear. It seems to be somewhat difficult for you to credit, but it's true.

I assure you, in fact, I don't see how it could be. Otherwise it's natural and it's right. Who can imagine a world where the ruler is big and little in family and in state were not men, the real rulers. I mean, however, the title of royalty may be vested. We give our women a chance, a very fair chance, but the prizes that the world belong to the men, of course, how else could it be?

How else the mother spoke threateningly her breast teethed and her somber eyes shown with displeasure. How else we shall teach you? How else? An insulted dignity. She faced him. Hush, hush. The woman closes her, but a hand upon hers. C do not be angered mother a wise woman is never angered by a fool nor a truthful one by her who tells lies.

True. True. Thank you. Brida. The mother turned from her and faced well burn. Calmly. What is your name? She asked son of what mother or would you pretend that your top C turvy country dissent is through the father as the man there bear the child and leaning back in her chair. She laughed heartedly while the women about her gave way to a moderate laughter.

AMY: Oh, my gosh. There's so, okay, so much I want to say. First of all, I love every time the mother Wyn, supreme goddess woman is in a scene because she basically is like, sit down, shut the eff up. She is so commanding and stern with him, and at one point he kind of brags like, "Oh, where I'm from my dad is a big deal. My dad is like Rupert Murdoch." And they all just stare at him deadpan. And they're like, "But what does your mom do?" 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: And this whole idea of whether a society descends from the mother's line or the father's line made me laugh because this topic actually occurred when I gave birth to my daughter, Julia. So we were at the hospital. My husband and I are in the room. The nurse comes in with the birth certificate and she has me sign the birth certificate. Then my husband steps forward and grabs the pen. And he's like, "So where do I sign?" And the nurse just looks at him and she's like, "Oh, we don't need your signature." And he's like, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, we know that she is the mother. We don't know that you're the father." And I mean, he was floored, but that's exactly what Michelson is pointing out in this book. There's a line "Who can say what man is one's father? But the mother is different." You know, we can prove it.

KIM: Yeah. And it's so interesting to watch him struggle against all this yet start to kind of get it, too, at the same time. It's actually really a nice comeuppance.

AMY: It is. And it's also funny. I got a kick out of it, so I can only imagine a hundred years ago a woman reading this and just hooting with laughter. So a lot of the story once he gets to the island, a lot of the story involves them just kind of explaining, like, here's the rationale. Here's why we believe women are the ultimate power figures and should be the ultimate rulers of society. The reasons make a ton of sense. 

LORI: Yes. Yeah. 

KIM: So we have this matriarchal, Amazonian society, like Wonder Woman. This way of turning the tables, it's really a great device for illustrating gender inequality. How common was this at the time?

LORI: So it was a kind of amazingly common in the suffrage movement. You had suffrage speakers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton giving speeches in which they would evoke ancient matriarchal societies when women were in power. And I think exactly for the reasons that we were just discussing, to suggest that there's nothing really natural about patriarchy, right? That society could be formulated in a different way. And what's interesting about this, um, that, you know, we've been saying in a couple of different moments that there's something familiar about the story and certainly familiar because this feels very much like the opening of Wonder Woman with paradise island and Steve Trevor arriving. Then the other text that it may remind people of is a novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman called Herland. Because that's a text that's often assigned in college classes. And I'll tell you that when I first discovered this novel by Michelson, it was never published as a book, by the way, it was published in a magazine called The Smart Set, which is a precursor to The New Yorker. So a very popular magazine and, when I first started reading it, I thought, "Oh, she was inspired by Gilman," because I knew that Gilman novel. I had assigned it several times in classes. And then I checked the dates and I see Michelson published hers in 1912, Gilman in 1915. So it was exactly the opposite. Gilman had been inspired by Michelson's The Superwoman.

AMY: I had the same experience, because I had read Herland in college, and I was like, "Wow, this just seems like a rip off." And then it's like, "Oh wait, what? Hers came first." So now I'm kind of thinking, well, "Seems like Charlotte Perkins Gilman kind of ripped her off," but talk about that a little bit. Was she influenced? I mean, she had to have been; it's so similar.

LORI: Think so. The two women knew each other. Um, they actually met at that women's convention that I mentioned that happened in 1895 because Michelson was working as a reporter. Gilman was one of the speakers. Michaelson interviewed Gilman a couple of times, and she reviewed a nonfiction book that Gilman published called Women in Economics. So they had an interesting relationship in that Michelson very much admired Gilman and Gilman, um, didn't really like Michelson very much. And I think there are a couple issues here. I think that whereas we seem to really appreciate Michelson's use of humor, I don't think Gilman appreciated it. She was addressing these feminist issues in a much more serious, straightforward way, whereas Michelson was kind of trying to disarm people through this use of humor. Um, so they had very different strategies, even though their end goals were similar. And Gilman also had a lot of difficulty getting published in mass circulation magazines because of the kind of evident feminist message of her work, whereas for Michaelson, she was often kind of disguising that using elements of popular fiction or genre fiction. So you could see that in The Superwoman, in the ways in which I think the feminist message is clear, but she's also kind of disguising this in science fiction and using an adventure story in many ways, um, as a kind of cover for that. So I think that Gilman probably read this, and it influenced her to write Herland. And what's interesting about Herland is in that female utopian society, she gets rid of men. So it's a society of all women. The story, like Michelson's is told from the point of view of men, three male explorers in that case, who come upon this society and in a very similar way need to be schooled in the way of the matriarchy. But I think that that intervention is really interesting. You know, one kind of flipping the gender roles and the other getting rid of men altogether is suggesting the ways in which the two of these pieces may be in dialogue with one another.

AMY: And we know if The Superwoman was published in The Smart Set, it had a wide audience, whereas I think you point out in your book that Herland was not super widely read when it was first out. I mean, now it's in college courses everywhere... 

LORI: yes. 

AMY: It wasn't a big deal when it came out.

LORI: It's so fascinating. It was published, it was serialized in the Forerunner, which is Gilman's own magazine that she started. She edited and wrote all the content herself. And she did that because she couldn't get published in some of these mass circulation magazines. But you have to think about who would've read the Forerunner, right? It would've been someone already predisposed to the feminist cause and the suffrage movement, whereas Michelson's reaching a much wider audience because she's publishing in these popular magazines. And so I think it's fascinating that that's changed today. There are actually multiple editions of Herland currently in print, whereas, you know, my book is the only one, um, that contains The Superwoman.

AMY: Crazy. At the beginning of your book, I love that you kind of start with that tension between the two authors and there's that moment where Michelson is interviewing Gilman, who's visiting the West Coast, I guess. It's so funny, first of all, and it's also just so awkward because 

LORI: Yeah. 

AMY: Gilman is such a stick in the mud.

LORI: Yes. absolutely.

AMY: And then it makes you love Michelson. You're like, "I wanna know who this woman is!" Yeah.

KIM: So you write that Michelson wasn't as productive or successful after The Superwoman. She died at age 72 in 1942, but over her career she had quite an impact on her readers. I loved in particular finding out in your introduction that her journalism actually inspired one of our previous lost ladies, Edna Ferber, to become a journalist. Listeners, she's a subject of her episode number 45 with guest Caroline Frick if you wanna go back and learn about her. She went on to become the first Jewish writer to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Lori, why do you think Michelson isn't more well known today? And why do you think she should be?

LORI: Um, sure. So, and I also have to credit Edna Ferber with the fact that I found Michelson in the first place, because in Ferber's autobiography, she talks about the influence of Michelson on her, and that was the first time I ever heard of Michelson. And then I started to search from there. Um, so I think there are a number of reasons why she's not as well known. And I think this probably applies across the board to many of the writers that you feature on the podcast, which is the way that the canon got constructed initially, right? It's centered on great white men, um, and so many famous and important women writers kind of got lost to history as a result. And then I think some of this has to do with feminism as well, that when the initial work in the 1970s was done to recover these women writers, certain figures like Gilman were immediately recovered. And then there was this kind of sense that they did the work, they filled the gap, so there was kind of no reason to probe further. But in fact, what I'm showing here is that we could see these kind of more interesting, diverse conversations going on between figures who are using different strategies like Gilman and Michelson. But I think also right, the greater diversity that's going on in a lot of the scholarship now of showing the ways that women of color, as well, contributed to our ideas about feminism and suffrage and so forth. But then also I think the popularity of Michelson' s writing, right, the fact that it, you know, wasn't taken that seriously in its time. It was seen as a literary joy ride. That may be part of why she's not well known today in the way that someone like Gilman, who was much more serious and published very serious books like Women in Economics, is.

AMY: Going back to sort of what I said at the beginning of the episode, I just, there is a place for both of those strategies. Why can't we have a little fun fighting for progress? Why does it have to be stodgy and serious all the time? When we were discussing Heterodoxy a few episodes ago, which Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a member of, our guest Joanna Scutts, she had talked about one of the strategies the suffragists used was likability. When you start to like something, you start to listen more, you know? And so I think she had a power there.

LORI: Right. And then you could be entertained at the same time. 

AMY: Yes. 

LORI: important part of her 

AMY: Yeah, absolutely. Her newspaper articles are entertaining. This story was entertaining, but actually, because I had already read Herland, I kept drifting over to want to know some of these other books. I assume you've read some of the other ones. Which would be your next, that you would recommend?

LORI: Sure. I love her journalism. So I would certainly recommend that people read her journalism, but A Yellow Journalist is the fictional book about her experiences as a reporter, but she really kind of sensationalizes everything, too, in extreme. And it's a lot of fun. The kind of voice of this career woman is really interesting, and she addresses a lot of issues that are incredibly relevant. In one of them that I just want to point out, um, is kind of, an early manifestation of the Me Too movement. She captures what it was like for this woman reporter in this male dominated environment where basically she was being sexually harassed all the time by male reporters. So again, it's another text that feels incredibly relevant to our current moment.

AMY: Is that the one where the main character has a date or is she supposed to go get married or something, but she's like, "I gotta go cover this story instead"? 

LORI: Yes. 

AMY: my engagement or 

LORI: It's a great again, that, that use of humor. Um, this man who's been pursuing her throughout the text and apparently in a weak moment, she agreed to get engaged to him. Um, and then he, you know, shows up for the date to celebrate their engagement. She's in the middle of chasing down the story and she had forgotten that they got engaged and she's like, to get my story in on time.

AMY: Well, that's very Lois Lane.

LORI: Yes, exactly. 

KIM: Yeah, it's also very screwball comedy. If Carey Grant came in at the end and married her instead.

LORI: Yeah. 

KIM: yeah. 

AMY: Um, so Lori, we really enjoyed learning more about Miriam Michelson and reading The Superwoman. Thank you so much for joining us for this discussion and bringing her to our attention.

LORI: Thanks so much for having me. This has been great. It was really fun to do.

AMY: So we'll sign off now, but we encourage you to pick up a copy of The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson. It's actually the only place where you can find a copy of The Superwoman in print. It includes a lot of her journalism reportage, too. It's worth your time.

KIM: And as always check out our website, Lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show and further information.

AMY: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.