"Not Part of Anyone's Power Structure"

I just finished reading The Firebrand and the First Lady, Patricia Bell-Scott's dual biography of Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt, and am even more impressed by Murray than I was yesterday.  In addition to all her achievements, I learned in the second half of the book that Murray found a partner in her later years, Irene ("Renee") Barlow.  Barlow was the office manager at Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison, the law firm where Murray worked for a few years in the late 1950s.

The relationship proved the most satisfying of Murray's adult life, as it gave her acceptance and the embrace of family again.  Barlow's mother, Mary Jane, who took to mending Murray's "neglected clothing," relieved the void left by the loss of Aunts Pauline and Sallie.  Though Murray and Barlow never lived in the same apartment, together they opened a bank account, owned a car, vacationed, lunched with ER, and would eventually share the same burial plot [265].

They were together for seventeen years, until Barlow's death from complications of a brain tumor in 1973.  She shared Murray's family plot not just with Murray (who outlived her by more than a decade), but with her mother and Murray's Aunts Pauline and Sallie.

I don't know if Murray thought of herself as a lesbian; I don't think Bell-Scott ever says.  I suppose it's most likely she used "homosexual," which was the most neutral term available to her generation, especially for public discussion.  It's the word Bell-Scott uses throughout the book, though it feels a lot less neutral nowadays than it did fifty years ago.  (She does use "lesbian" for Roosevelt's friend Lorena Hickok, however; page 284; which makes it odder, to my mind, that she never applies it to Murray.

Murray still apparently viewed homosexuality as a medical condition in her later years, though she also "increasingly mentioned homosexual rights in her sermons, speeches, and other writings" (346).  I very much liked her retort to a male classmate at the General Theological Seminary in the early 1970s, who

complained that all the talk about discrimination dominated too much class time, ... "If you have to live with anger, I have to live with pain.  I'll trade you both my pain, my sex, my race and my age -- and see how you deport yourself i such circumstances.  Barring that, try to imagine for 24 hours what it must be like to be a Negro in a predominantly white seminary, a woman in an institution dominated by men and for the convenience of men, some of whom radiate hostility even though they do not say a word, who are patronizing and kindly as long as I do not get out of my place, but who feel threatened by my intellect, my achievements, and my refusal to be suppressed. ... If I can't take your judgmental statements and your anger, I am in the wrong place.  If you cannot take my methods of fighting for survival, then you have chosen the wrong vocation" [344].

It might be easy to see Murray's outspokenness as her due, given her age, her achievements, and her intellect; but as you'll see if you read her earlier writings, such as her letters to the Roosevelts criticizing their foot-dragging on racial discrimination and violence, you'll see she was always this bold.  Getting to see that is a large part of what makes The Firebrand and the First Lady such a pleasure to read. 

One of Bell-Scott's historical generalizations struck me as notably off the mark, though:

Adding to [Murray's] worries about racial violence was the escalating hostility toward homosexuals that would lead to police confrontations, such as the 1969 Stonewall riots [336].

This turns the actual situation on its head.  "Hostility toward homosexuals" had been an enduring feature of the American scene all through the twentieth century, and the police had raided "homosexual" events and establishments freely throughout that period.  What had escalated after World War II, and especially in the 1960s, was gay people's unwillingness to accept that we had to accept such mistreatment, culminating in the Stonewall riots, when patrons of a raided Greenwich Village bar turned around and fought back.  Substitute "African Americans" for "homosexuals" in Bell-Scott's sentence and see how it sounds; it's a simplistic and wrong-headed summation of a complex development.

For that matter, Murray's relative openness about her lesbianism made problems for her throughout her career.  In 1966, for example, she was considered to fill a vacancy on the newly-established Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but the Johnson administration "backed away" (333) because her FBI file documented her left-wing past and her declaration to hospital staff that "she was a homosexual" when she was admitted after her breakdown in the 1930s.  When she was ordained by the Episcopal Church in 1977, she "learned that John Thomas Walker, designated ... as the first African American bishop of the Diocese of Washington, was making insidious remarks about her sexuality behind her back" (346).  But she was ordained, and since she was one of the first women to become an Episcopal priest, she must have been the first lesbian Episcopal priest as well.

I love her, not least because she confounded the cliche that people become more conservative with age by becoming more radical she got older.  Murray deserves to be better known, and I hope this book will bring her more attention.

"It Is Curious How Thoughtlessly We Use Words"

While I was in Boston recently, someone recommended Patricia Bell-Scott's book The Firebrand and the First Lady,* about the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Pauli Murray (1910-1985).  Roosevelt, I hope, needs no introduction; Murray was an important activist and writer about African-American civil rights -- and, my informant added, a lesbian.  I'd never heard of her, but my interest was piqued.  The ebook was too expensive for me, but the physical book was on the shelves at the public library when I got back to Bloomington, so I checked it out immediately and am now about 180 pages (out of 360) into it.

It has turned out to be a fascinating read.  I'm surprised that I hadn't heard of Murray before.  Her achievements are too numerous to go into here, and her struggle against poverty and ill health (leaving aside racism and sexism) makes them all the more remarkable.  But here's a taste:

In the fall of 1945, Pauli Murray finished requirements for the master of laws and passed the California bar exam.  The publication of her thesis, "The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment," in the California Law Review marked several milestones.  It was her first publication in a law review journal; it was the first essays ever published in a law review by an African American woman; and it was the first law review essay on the subject of sex discrimination and employment [177].

Unable to enroll at Harvard (her first choice) to get a doctorate in law, because the Law School refused to accept women of any color, or to find suitable employment despite her many connections, Murray felt obliged to move back east to care for her elderly aunt.

Her belongings were packed and her train ticket booked when she met Robert W. Kenny at her swearing-in ceremony to the California bar, on December 8, 1945.  Kenny was a liberal Democrat, an advocate for fair employment legislation, and California state attorney general.  Having just read Murray's groundbreaking law review article, he offered her a temporary post as deputy attorney general on the spot.  Until she passed the civil service examination, her appointment would be subject to the return of employees on military service leave.  Murray accepted Kenny's offer in spite of the shaky terms.  In doing so, she became the first black deputy attorney general for the state of California [178].

There were many such firsts in Murray's life; eventually, for another example, in 1977 she became the first African American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.  She seems to have lived more in one lifetime than most people could live in several.  I look forward to reading the rest of her story.

Right now, though, I'm chafing a bit at the book's scanting of Murray's lesbianism.  I don't assume that this is necessarily due to authorial homophobia; Bell-Scott is more concerned with Murray's public career, which was eventful enough. (Also with Roosevelt's: The Firebrand the First Lady is really a dual biography, following both women's lives even when they weren't interacting with each other.  And Bell-Scott buries Roosevelt's lesbian connections: ER's beloved friend, the journalist Lorena Hickok, has been mentioned in passing but her lesbianism has not, nor her relationship with Roosevelt.  A look at the index shows that Hickok's "intimate friendship" with ER is referred to briefly once, and her lesbianism acknowledged, once, a hundred pages later.

In Murray's case, she evidently grappled with her love of women from her teen years onward, and it's not always clear which of her women friends were actually girlfriends.  That may be because Bell-Scott doesn't know, but Murray was a compulsive writer and documented her anxieties and conflicts pretty fully.  Maybe more information has been published elsewhere, and more may come later in this book.  But I found this passage, about her state of mind in her late twenties, very interesting.

Since Murray's hospitalization [for an apparent mental breakdown] at the Long Island Home three years earlier, she had been consulting with doctors and scouring the scientific literature in search of an "answer to true homosexuality."  That Murray asked one psychiatrist if she had "a mother fixation" demonstrated her familiarity with psychoanalysis.  Having rebuffed psychiatric treatment and the theory that her attraction to women was a manifestation of homosexuality, Murray constructed an alternative explanation.  She convinced herself that she was a pseudohermpaphrodite with secreted testes (and she would hold this belief until X-rays of her uterus, fallopian tubes, and the surrounding area proved her wrong).  Such a condition pointed to biology -- specifically, the presence of male gonads and hormones -- rather than mental illness as the source of her attraction to women, her tomboyishness and her lack of interest in feminine pursuits, such as housekeeping [57].

I'm fascinated by this glimpse into conceptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation in the 1930s.  How odd that, though she rejected a medical diagnosis of "homosexuality," Murray invented and embraced a no less medicalized theory of herself as a "pseudohermaphrodite."  And, of course, "biology" and "mental illness" have always been intertwined, whether for sex or for other conditions.  Professionals never quite made up their minds, in this period or later, whether homosexuality was purely mental or the expression of a physical abnormality.  ("Homosexuality" was originally conceived of as a social and quasi-legal concept when Karl-Maria Kertbeny invented it in 1868; it was only appropriated by the medical profession later on.)

The reference to Murray's "tomboyishness" understates the case too.  "Just a few years earlier, Murray had proudly asked Nancy Cunard to publish a photograph of Pete, her 'boy-self.'"  I wonder if Murray ever read Radclyffe Hall?  Murray also liked to wear "men's" clothing, and it wouldn't be off the mark to think of her as a "passing woman."  Bell-Scott also recounts a trip to North Carolina that Murray made in 1940 with her friend (nudge, nudge?) and roommate (wink, wink?) Adelene McBean (aka "Mac").  They were arrested in Virginia for refusing to stay in the back of the bus they were riding.  Only a couple of pages into the story, with the two women in custody, does Bell-Scott mention that Murray "was apparently dressed in male clothing and had told officers, according to one passenger, that her name was Oliver Fleming" (63).  Murray "gave her name and clarified her sex status as they were booked" (64).  There's no indication that Murray's cross-dressing or her adoption of a male persona added to their legal problems, though I'd have expected it to.  As I read all this, I began wondering just what Murray's "boy-self" meant to her.  Bell-Scott doesn't say, but it appears that Murray's life is very well-documented, as indicated by the detailed witness accounts of her and Mac's arrest and her custom of thinking through personal issues at the typewriter.

I'm not interested in deciding what Pauli Murray "really was."  Invert, homosexual, Urning, gay, lesbian, transman, bulldagger -- such terms, as I've written before, are "the fossils of ideologies of what men and women and sex are."  Many people nowadays would jump to identify her as transgender, for example, but I don't think our categories today are any more correct than those of a century ago.  I just want to know more about how Murray saw herself, especially since she clearly thought and wrote about these questions, and left a large archive behind her.  Since she lived into the 80s, she must have come into contact with later constructions of sex and gender, and thought about them.  Well, maybe another book by someone else will address these questions.  Right now, at this stage in Bell-Scott's book, I am dazzled by Murray's gutsiness, energy, doggedness, and intelligence -- brilliance, really.

* Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship -- Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (Knopf, 2016).