9. Dorothy Canfield Fisher - The Home-Maker

Note: Lost Ladies of Lit transcripts are generated using human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

AMY HELMES, HOST: Hey, everybody, welcome to The Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Amy Helmes...

KIM ASKEW, HOST: And I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: We’re best friends and co-authors of the “Twisted Lit” series of young adult novels, and we’re on a mission to unearth some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.

KIM: We’re all stuck inside in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic and basically staring at our filthy houses. Am I right?

AMY: I do have an anecdote relating to that. Did I tell you about my experiences this week with Old English wood polish?

KIM: No, but I can’t wait to hear it.

AMY: Okay, earlier this week, I decided on a whim that I needed to use Old English wood polish, which I have never used before. I guess maybe the name of it appeals to me? “Old English?” That sounds right up my alley. I used it on my wood desk and it was like magic to the point where I had to call my husband out of the office and be like, “Look at this! Would you look at this?” and he was like “Oh, my gosh, that’s amazing.” I spent an hour going through all the wood in my house. I have wood steps and they’re starting to look kind of worn. So i did one tread — the bottom tread — and it’s oil. And as soon as I did it, I was like, “Oh my god, my family runs up and down these stairs all day, someone is going to slip and break their neck!” So then I had to put a bath towel over the stair. At one point, I was like, “How do I dirty it up? Can I sprinkle dust on it or something?” It was just so ridiculous and stupid. 

KIM: Well, I don’t do a lot of cleaning, as my husband will happily tell you over and over. That’s his favorite joke. But i am doing a lot of childcare while I’m working, and this week, Cleo, my 18-month-old, decided to make a special unplanned guest appearance during a Zoom meeting. She’s teething, so she was not a happy camper. I got flustered. Everyone was really nice about it, but it was still really embarrassing. She is the cutest little distraction I could ever want and I am loving getting to spend so much time with her, so that is the silver lining to all this insanity, but I would be lying if I said my productivity hasn’t suffered. It has suffered. Very much.

AMY: Of course, our domestic challenges kind of feel intensified in recent months, but the book we’re going to discuss today takes “House-cleaning rage” to a whole new level.

KIM: Oh, yeah, and yet Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s novel, The Home-Maker also takes a more serious deep dive into child-rearing, women in the workplace, and gender roles in a book that was pretty eyebrow-raising in the era it was written.

AMY: I had never heard of the book before we chose it for this episode, but once I started reading it I wasn’t surprised to find out that it sold like hotcakes back in the day.

KIM: No, and it was actually among the 10 bestselling novels in the US in 1924, so it’s a pretty big deal. It’s a pretty simple story but it has relevance that makes it well worth revisiting, and I’m looking forward to diving into this discussion. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

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KIM: So I think we could use a rundown about who Dorothy Canfield Fisher was. 

AMY: She had a pretty interesting life, I’ve gotta say. Born in Kansas in 1879, her father was kind of a big shot at several universities (including being the president of Ohio State University at one point) and her mother who was a painter, who I think was maybe a little bit of a frustrated artist. She probably wanted to spend more time pursuing that than she did, but she took Dorothy to Paris for a short while when she was a girl when she was pursuing painting there. 

KIM: It’s interesting about her father being an academic, because his favorite book was Middlemarch, and his favorite character was Dorothea, and that’s who he named his daughter, Dorothy, after. And Dorothea, in the book, is idealistic and intelligent, which seems really apt, because Dorothy received her PhD in Romance Languages from Colombia University. That’s a pretty rare accomplishment for a woman in that time period. Amy’s going to be telling us more about how she put her idealism to work. It’s almost as if she lived the very life Dorothea would have lived had she not married Casaubon. 

AMY:  Yes, as you said, I think she made a better marital match. She married John Redwood Fisher in 1907. He was a Colombia grad, just like she was. That same year is when she also inherited her great-grandfather’s farm in Arlington, Vermont. She basically spent most of the rest of her adult life in Vermont, and that’s the state she’s really most associated with. She was a highly engaged activist, particularly in the fields of education and child development. She managed America’s first adult education program. She did war relief work in Paris while her husband was a medic in the war, and it’s there that she also established a Braille press for blinded veterans. She worked for many years to improve rural public education as a member of Vermont’s board of education. She was really into prison reform — especially in women’s prisons. 

KIM: And then, think about the fact that from 1925 to 1950 she was a Member of the Book of the Month Club Book selection committee, too. She shaped, basically, what Amercians were reading for 25 years. Wow, I mean…

AMY: How did she find time to do all this? It’s incredible.

KIM: I can’t even… it makes me feel lazy.

AMY: One hundred percent. In addition to all that we just mentioned, she also became an expert on Montessori teaching methods. She brought the technique back to the States, and we definitely are going to see a shout-out to this in the book we’re talking about today, The Home-Maker. She had a clear belief system with regard to how children should be nurtured and raised — namely, with respect and with great attention paid to their feelings. This was kind of radical for a time period that still subscribed to the mentalities that “children should be seen and not heard” and “spare the rod, spoil the child” sort of thing. Over the course of her lifetime, as if she didn’t do enough, she also wrote 22 novels and 18 nonfiction books. One of the most famous that people know about is a children’s book she wrote in 1916 called Understood Betsy, which is sometimes compared to The Secret Garden which I’m intrigued by.

KIM: Okay, so she’s doing all this, all these amazing things for society. She’s writing all these books. In a 1920 review of The Age of Innocence that was in The New York Times Book Review it referred to four women writers as being “in the front rank of living American novelists.” She was up there with Edith Wharton — that was one of the other writers mentioned. I mean, come on, how do you do everything she did and also be right up there with Edith Wharton and how do we not know about her now?

AMY: Exactly. How did she just kind of fade away from our consciousness?

KIM: An interesting anecdote about her: She refused to wear corsets, calling them an “implement of the Inquisition.” I love the drama of that!

AMY: This doesn’t surprise me that she was busting out of the constraints that were put on women in her era, both figuratively and literally!

KIM: She also had a decades long friendship with Willa Cather, whom she met when both were traveling in Europe. They wrote letters to one another for almost 50 years. And she corresponded with other writers including Isak Dinesen and Robert Frost.

AMY: Also, Norman Rockwell was her neighbor and in their later years she and her husband posed for one of his portraits 

KIM: Eleanor Roosevelt called Canfield Fisher “One of the 10 most influential women in America.” Wow, her bio is just mind-blowing.

AMY: So, like many figures from previous eras, Canfield Fisher has not escaped controversy. In a few of her books she depicts Native Americans and French Canadians with the sort of insulting stereotypes that would make the modern reader kind of bristle. And though it’s difficult to tie her directly to the eugenics movement of that era, it seems likely she was in tacit agreement with the idea of having the “right people” populate the state of Vermont. 

KIM: Yikes, yeah. Not great to hear that. And you could argue, maybe, that this belief was just one blemish in an overwhelming record of admirable public service and advocacy, but it’s become increasingly problematic in the same way that people are taking a look at Laura Ingalls Wilder because of her support of eugenics. So I think it’s something important to talk about.

AMY: In 2019 the Vermont Board of Libraries opted to remove Canfield Fisher’s name from the children’s literature award that was created more than 50 years ago to honor her. There was a lot of back and forth about whether or not they should do this, and they ultimately decided to change the name of the award on the grounds that, as a writer she was “no longer relevant to today’s young people.” Regardless of what you feel about Canfield Fisher’s life, that quote feels like a blanket statement meant to make the controversy go away … it doesn’t necessarily seem accurate to me to call her writings irrelevant.

KIM: I think it’s a good time to point out right now that in the process of exploring books written in previous eras, we’re going to bump up against difficult conversations like this in the course of future podcasts. 

AMY: I guess the best course of action we can take when that happens is to just acknowledge any offensive or insensitive information that we find problematic, without necessarily shying away from it or setting it aside altogether.

KIM: Basically, our goal in such cases is to “air it out” in a way that we hope proves productive and useful for all of us. Because it feels like the only way to begin to address these issues is to confront them head on, and that’s what we want to do. And we also want to hear what you have to say about this, so if you have thoughts or suggestions on this, we would love to hear them. Please feel free to send us an email, leave a comment on our site, or message us on Instagram. We’re listening.

The Home-Maker was published in 1924 by Harcourt Brace, and wow, the first sentence throws us right into the subject matter: “SHE was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room." (She is one of the book’s main characters, a homemaker named Evangeline Knapp, or Eva for short.)

AMY: That word, “furiously” really yanks us into things. There is so much bottled-up rage in this first chapter. It feels so raw to read this depiction of an OCD mother and her frustrations with having the perfect house and the perfect children. There’s something almost unnerving about the descriptions of Eva. She literally causes her own family to cower and become physically ill as a result of her passive aggression, wouldn’t you say?

KIM: Absolutely, and then there’s a moment where all this tension boils over while she’s cleaning up after dinner, and her husband and her three children just turn white as ghosts and they try to pretend everything is normal. I’m going to read from the book here: “They heard her begin to pile up the dishes at the sink, working rapidly as she always did. They heard her step swiftly back towards the kitchen table as though to pick up a dish there. They heard her stop short with appalling abruptness; and for a long moment a silence filled the little house, roaring loudly in their ears as they gazed at each other, across the table. What could have happened? And then, with the effect of a clap of thunder shaking them to the bone, came a sudden rending outburst of sobs, strangled weeping, the terrifying sounds of an hysteric breakdown.” 

AMY: And what happens immediately after that, I found so heart-breaking. Her middle child, Henry, becomes sick to his stomach. He actually throws up, and his older sister, Helen, sort of sneaks off under cover to go clean it up because they are all so terrified that Eva will find out about it and lose her you-know-what again. It seems like the whole family is walking on eggshells around her. So yeah, what was your reaction to that whole chapter?    

KIM: One, it was so clear that this was just an almost every-night occurrence. They had such a routine for how they handled it and they were always waiting for that thing to happen — the terrifying thing. I felt awful for the entire family, but I felt the worst for the children. It almost seemed liked community-sanctioned child abuse. And it really made me think about all the women in the past, even people in my own family, who may not have felt a true calling for being a housewife or a mother, but — societal expectations being what they were at the time — they just never had a real choice in the matter. 

AMY: Eva is so carping and critical and her husband and kids are just silently flinching and trying not to anger the dragon. There’s a mention of the clock ticking and how it’s almost taunting her, because she has so much work to do. And Canfield writes, “What was her life? A hateful round of housework … which was never done. …. The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming out. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another, full of drudgery…. These were the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence.” Man, that’s not only intense, but it’s also true.

KIM: Oh, that makes my blood run cold. I really did feel bad for her too. I mean, she really hates her life, and she doesn’t seem to be able to see any way out of it. And then there’s her husband, Lester. He’s described as a “broken reed” by one of the other ladies in town as they gossip, and while they say that Eva is “a wonder of competence.” Lester is the epitome of a square peg in a round hole. He’s this dreamer and a poet at heart. It’s even strongly implied that there’s almost something unmanly about it, so the community is not very supportive of intellectuals at this time and this place.

So those are the parents, but what about the children? They all three have issues, Helen is a nervous, insecure wreck, Henry has terrible stomach issues, clearly as a result of Eva’s rage and emotional abuse. But the worst is Stephen! And having a toddler, oh, that was so hard! He’s a troubled child. He’s misunderstood and angry and he already has a bad reputation with everyone at the ripe old age of three or four for his rages and lashing out at neighbors. He and Eva are locked in this daily battle of wills, and actually, it does get physical, which is really hard to read! So to give you a little insight into Eva’s mindset, I’m going to read a couple lines from the book: “Eva had passionate love and devotion to give them, but neither patience nor understanding. There was no sacrifice in the world which she would not joyfully make for her children except to live with them.”

AMY: Oooh. I feel like that one stopped me in my tracks, too. In the same way that Eva is at the end of her rope, Lester also reaches a breaking point. He despises his job working at a department store (and he’s terrible at it.) He gets fired one day (not surprising) and actually contemplates suicide immediately after, but in a strange twist of fate, on his way home from work he suffers an accident that leaves him incapacitated. Of course, we’re left wondering, was it really an accident? This is where we really get to the crux of the plot.

KIM: Right, this is what everything hinges on, basically. So the owner of the department store where he worked, Jerome Willing, he feels terrible about the situation and what’s going to become of Lester’s family, so he ends up offering Eva a job at the store. The interesting thing is, she actually takes the first step by approaching him about this, and we see on several occasions that she has a really take-charge personality and he loves that.

AMY: He sees potential as soon as they meet and talk. I loved that he seemed to have a very modern attitude about hiring women. He was even willing to consider a woman for store manager at what seemed like equal pay to what a man would be offered. And his wife, Nell, she seems very much like an equal partner and sounding board to him. So I thought that couple was pretty cool. 

KIM: Yeah, she does the advertising for the business, and they have this lighthearted and fun banter between them, and they challenge each other mentally in a positive way. Unlike Eva, Nell balances being a wife and mother with this ease and confidence. I will say that that might partly be because they have the money to afford help and they have a different lifestyle because of it. They seemed like a thoroughly modern couple, though, for that time period. But even Nell, in the beginning, she has some doubts about Eva’s experience. She says that “women who have spent 15 to 20 years housekeeping are no good for anything else.”

AMY: I unfortunately think there are some bosses today who still feel that way. Kind of ludicrous, really, because if anything, motherhood should make a woman an asset to any company, right?

KIM: Definitely.

AMY: I mean, you have to be organized, you have to multi-task, manage definitely difficult personalities at times and trying situations. I personally feel like becoming a mom has made me even better at being more efficient and more focused, because I HAVE to be.

KIM:  Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s made me more efficient, a stronger personality. And I’ve heard some moms describe their job as being the CEO of their family, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement after experiencing it! So can we talk for a minute about how Eva kicks ass at her new job and she’s quickly promoted, so she’s blossoming at work.

AMY: It’s the opposite of Lester. And you feel so proud for her, right?

KIM: Oh, yeah. It’s like, okay, this is what she’s meant to be doing, and it’s amazing seeing her getting to use all the things that made her so miserable at home into something that makes her happy and successful and makes her customers happy, too. She still tells people, almost as an afterthought, but she says it over and over, how she hates to be away from the children. We know she’s not being genuine here but she feels like, for society’s sake, that she has to say that and that she’s supposed to feel that.

AMY: Which I can identify with because when my two kids were young, I really loved Sunday nights. Sunday nights were like what Friday nights were in my early 20s because after spending an entire weekend with children, you are absolutely exhausted and Monday morning would mean getting to go to work, sit still at a desk and think about something in a more adult sphere for eight hours. So work to me suddenly felt like a relaxing retreat! I could understand why Eva is sort of secretly reveling in getting to go to work.

KIM: I totally understand you now when you would tell me that. I have felt that, and when I was actually able to go into the office before Covid, I felt like I was going on vacation on some level. As much as I love being a mom and obviously love my baby, it is hard work — babies and toddlers especially are hard work. And just because we love our children doesn’t mean we have to love every single second of caring for them. It’s freeing to live in a time and place where we can admit that.

AMY: Amen and Hallelujah! I always sort of thought that women really didn’t find their place in the work world until WWII in America made that kind of a necessity, but when I was reading a little bit about this book, it seems like the idea of women going to work wasn’t necessarily considered outrageously radical in the 1920s. What WAS considered unthinkable, on the other hand, was for a man to stay home with the children. Which is what brings us back to Lester.

KIM: Okay, so this “Freaky Friday” situation has been great for Eva, but it’s actually equally good for poor Lester with time. He’s recovered a bit. He’s still wheelchair-bound; he’s still an invalid, but he’s actually capable of doing some of the housework and taking care of the kids and (surprise!) he LOVES it. He has time to do all the musing and ponderings his heart desires. He’s thinking poetically. And under his watch, the homelife of the entire family is thriving. Okay, so the house isn’t as clean as it was with Eva, but Eva’s too fulfilled in her new job to notice. He and the children are collaborating together to solve problems, they’re putting the newspaper down on the kitchen floor all day to keep the floors clean so all the miserable feelings that Eva had about the stuff dripping on the floor, they’ve just swept it away with an idea that actually came from the toddler. He has the time to provide the attention the children need. The whole family is even playing a card game together every night. Basically, their entire world is turned on its head, in a good way. Who would think that this family that we’ve been reading about is capable of having so much fun every night? So basically, dads can have their own ways of doing things. It’s not worse, it’s just different. So putting down the newspaper on the floor to keep it clean… it’s pretty smart, if you think about it. 

AMY: I thought that the egg-cracking scene between Helen and her dad was so adorable because they’re flying blind in the kitchen for the first time. Neither knew how to crack an egg, but they figured it out together and it was super cute. 

KIM: Yeah, to see Helen have confidence from that and actually gain it instead of being insecure. It was great! In my family, Eric is much more rough and tumble with Cleo, for example. The other day, he had her climbing up the back of the outdoor couch and up the pergola, and I was in hysterics practically, afraid she was going to fall down, but she’s learning this physical confidence, and she’s so happy. It blows my mind (and terrifies me) what she can do, and he brings that out in her, which is fantastic.

AMY: Yeah, dads can get it done, too. I mean, it’s like I’ll never forget, Kim, when you and I had that crazy deadline on our first two novels. I think we had three months to write one of the books from start to finish, and I, meanwhile, had a two-year-old and a nine-month old and a full-time job, and I had no idea how I was going to do it. So I turned to Mike and said, “Give me three days in this house without kids so that I can finish this.” And he packed some bags, hopped a flight to Northern California by himself with two babies to go visit his parents in Northern California, which to me is nothing short of a warrior because I get hives just thinking about taking two kids to the grocery store with me, so I don’t even know how he navigated that on his own. But he did!

KIM: I’ve never even taken Cleo to the grocery store because she hates the car seat, and I would be scared of taking one kid to do that, so yay, Mike, and also, yay, YOU! Oh my god, now that I have a baby, my mind is blown at all the stuff that you did, too, that I didn’t even realize how hard it was.

AMY: We did it though. You get through it, right?

KIM: Yep.

AMY: So getting back to The Homemaker, Lester’s presence at home as “Mr. Mom” has a dramatic effect on the children, as we’ve already mentioned, but particularly on little Stephen, who was described as this holy terror at the beginning of the book, but as we come to understand, through Lester’s eyes, we learn that this little boy has just been misunderstood all along.

KIM: So this is where we see a major plug for the Montessori philosophy that Canfield Fisher espoused. It has an experiential approach to learning. One day in the book, for example, when Lester and Stephen are home alone, Lester sees that Stephen is about to lose his temper. He’s just on that edge where he can see it’s going to go badly, and he decides to give him a little hand-held egg beater to try to figure out how it works. And this is an old-fashioned egg beater, not an electric egg beater. Stephen gets really into it. It magically diffuses his anger. It’s amazing. Basically, this part of the book really shows the idea of thinking of children as human, not just an extension of their family, and actually, it’s very emotional and moving.

AMY: I agree, especially when we’re reading the book from the children’s perspective. She shifts back and forth between Eva’s perspective, Lester’s perspective and then all three children. You get to see how this change in circumstances affects everyone differently. So at this point in the book, things are coming together so beautifully for the whole family. Eva is kicking butt at work, Lester is writing poetry, and the rest of the family are so happy with the new domestic arrangement. But, is it just me, or did you feel like Canfield-Fisher almost laid it on a little too thick?

KIM: Yes.In fact, that was one of the issues i had with the book from the very beginning. It does lean a little toward the melodramatic (or maybe a lot toward the melodramatic). Everything was utterly tragic and then they are all so enraptured by this new, idyllic existence.

AMY: All i know is, I could definitely picture millions of American housewives in the 1920s reading this book and saying, “Damn straight!” 

KIM: Oh yeah, can you imagine the dinner table conversations this book might have sparked in homes across America? 

AMY: Yes, probably intense, maybe not always good conversations. I do feel as though Canfield Fisher seems a little more sympathetic toward Lester in this book. Though Eva is celebrated, of course, as a wonderful career woman, she isn’t quite put up on a pedestal as much as Lester seems to be. Is that just me?

KIM: Yeah… I mean, really Lester comes out as the hero of the book, and so I wondered if maybe even with the feminist notions on display here, the simple fact that Eva wasn’t capable of nurturing her family in this traditional sense was still held against her on some level, even by the author herself? 

AMY: The Knapp family is operating like a well-oiled, happy machine, and right around this point is when I started to get like a sinking feeling in my stomach like, “Oh, no…  something’s going to happen. The other shoe is going to drop.”

KIM: Yeah, you see how many pages are left and it’s like, “Aagh!” And it actually really does drop, but maybe not in the way you might expect, which is interesting. We will not spoil it for you, but let’s just say that something happens that calls everything into question for the entire family, for Lester, Eva, and even the children.

AMY: This book kind of struck a chord with me right from the outset. Newsflash to everybody: I was laid-off from my job a few months ago. The magazine I was on staff with was a casualty of Coronavirus and, you know,  being laid-off really did, on the one hand, free me up to oversee the chaos of two kids at home trying to manage distance learning and dealing with the household, but at the same time, I now sort of find myself feeling kind of adrift in this limbo between stay-at-home mother (but not by choice necessarily) and someone who had had her own career for 25 years. I feel this weird little identity crisis, and the book appealed to me on that level because right now, cleaning the house feels like my new mandate in life basically.

KIM: I get it and I think a lot of women are in the same boat as you or at least feeling it. It seems like women’s careers are more likely to take the hit in this Covid Crisis. 

AMY: Yeah, I’ve read data on that and in terms of couples working from home, the women are still doing the bulk of the childcare. And, I mean, studies show that they did the bulk of it prior to the pandemic, as well. So yeah, women’s careers are under strain and are going to continue to be, and when it comes down to one parent having to leave their job to manage the fact that schools are not back in session, it’s predominantly the women who are walking away from their careers it seems like. The longer schools are closed, the more women will be forced to set  just aside their jobs for a while.

KIM: I mean, you’ve got to think that’s going to have lasting repercussions. 

AMY: And I think one of the reasons why women are the ones who by default are sort of having to leave their jobs is because their salary is not as high as their husband’s, and that’s another whole issue boiling down to pay disparities. So you’ve got to wonder what Dorothy Canfield Fisher would say about all this?

KIM: That’s an interesting question. Based on the theme of this book, though, I think her concern at the end of the day is about making sure that what’s done is in the best interest of children. So she didn’t see The Home-Maker as a feminist book, but she considered it to be more centered around the rights of children — that children ought to be listened to, respected and have their feelings affirmed.

AMY: That reminds me that there was one aspect of the book that I did take umbrage at when I was reading.

KIM: I think i can guess. Tell me.

AMY: So there’s this whole passage where Lester is sort of affirming his role at home (and congratulating himself on what a great job he’s doing, by the way) and he mentally notes that there’s no one who can raise a child better than its parent. I understand the root of that statement, but my experience is that my kids absolutely thrived in the care of someone else when I was working. They benefited from having exposure to someone else who also loved and cared for them. So I’m more in the “It takes a Village” camp, and I don't think working parents should ever feel like their kid is somehow being deprived or harmed in some way by not being raised by a primary parent during the day or during the work hours. If anything, I think it helps a child’s growth to have more than just the parents contributing.

KIM: Absolutely. I mean, if you hadn’t brought this up, I was going to bring it up too. I mean it affects a family, and it affects the entire society. That passage made my hackles rise too. It was a rough transition for me when I went back to work — you know this — but my daughter is so happy, and I think it’s great she is surrounded by several people who love her, not just my husband and I. Also, neither my husband nor I want to be (or would necessarily be good) full-time homemakers. 

AMY: So Universal actually made this book into a silent movie in 1925. I can’t really imagine it being a film now, but for the same reasons this book was such a conversation starter in the 1920s, I can understand how it must have been almost scandalous back then and would have made a pretty juicy movie. But it’s funny to think of the story being told without words. I have a feeling it was probably fully ridiculous.

KIM: Oh my gosh, I can completely picture it in full melodramatic glory in a silent film with dramatic music and captions. It’s perfect for that era. 

AMY: That said, in wrapping up our discussion about Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Home-Maker, what did we learn today?

KIM: Well, we learned that Old English Wood Polish is something a person can really get excited about.

AMY: Yes, that’s right! We learned that it’s okay to rage over housework.

KIM: We learned that dads, when given the opportunity, can really shine as parents. 

AMY: And we’ve learned that while women have come a long way when it comes to gender equality, we still have an awfully long way to go.

KIM: And that’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode!

AMY: Speaking of, in our next episode, we’ll be discussing Simone Schwarz-Bart’s 1972 masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond, which spans three generations of women. 

KIM: Got ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know. For more information on this episode, as well as further reading material, check out our website, LostLadiesofLit.com. And if you loved this episode, be sure to leave a review. It really makes a difference!

AMY: Until next time, we hope you check out Dorothy Canfield Fisher and some of our other lost ladies of lit. Help us turn “I’ve never heard of her,” into one of YOUR new favorite authors.

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