Great Second Acts

In Praise of Older Women

Marlene Wagman-Geller

• Publisher: Mango
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781492603054, 9781455546046
• eBook ISBN: 9781633538238
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Empowering biographies of older women in history

A feminist and motivational collection of stories: Antony said of Cleopatra, "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety." Shakespeare's sentiment can be applied to the women profiled in Great Second Acts who refused to be defined by the dates on their birth certificates. Their lives are testimony that one can be feisty after fifty and to those who think otherwise, in the words of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, "I dissent."

Biographies of leadership and female empowerment: Marlene Wagman-Geller, author of Once Again to Zelda and Behind Every Great Man, presents a fascinating collection of biographical vignettes of dozens of women of a certain age who have excelled, inspired and achieved. Learn how these women changed their respective fields of art, politics, science, mathematics, media, literature, activism, education, and more.

Motivational achievements: From actresses, yoga teachers, folk artists to business women, prime ministers, monarchs and authors, these group of exceptional women will illustrate that women can achieve anything no matter their age. Be motivated by their grit, perseverance, and passion. Readers will find:

• Biographies of influential women such as Prime Minister Margert Thatcher, chef Julia Child, Mother Teressa, feminist Gloria Steinem, actress Rita Moreno, inventor Ruth Handler, Judge Judy Sheindlin, and many more
• Empowering quotes from strong women who refused to be kept down
• Motivational, inspirational and educational stories of older women

Written in an accessible narrative style, readers of all ages will enjoy Wagman-Geller's entertaining storytelling prose of these remarkable women. An excellent gift for students, mothers, sisters or friends, Great Second Acts will endure and delight.

Learn the history of older women who changed the world.

Chapter One

Rainbow (1860)

Whether Ms. Moses found the sobriquet “Grandma” a term of endearment or an unwelcome reminder of the onslaught of time is a matter of conjecture, but in either contingency, she was inextricably bound with the name. Her life, one supposed to be exempt from Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, was as fanciful as her canvases. Her biography serves as a testament that one can receive a late-night knock at the door from the hand of fate.

Anna Mary was born in Greenwich, New York, to a frugal farming family. One of five daughters and five sons of Russell King Robertson and Margaret nee Shanahan, Anna took immense pride that one of her great-grandfathers fought in the American Revolution and had left a powder horn with the inscription, “Hezekiah King. Ticonderoga. Feb. 24th 1777 Steal not this horn for fear of shame / For on it is the owner’s name.” As a child, she discovered the beauty of nature when her father took his children for walks, an activity he felt brought them closer to God than services at the Methodist church. What little formal education she received was from a teacher in a one-room country school. She recalled that girls did not often go to school in winter, due to the cold and inadequate clothing, and consequently, many only progressed through the “Sixth Reader.” Her favorite pastime was to color paper dolls with a tint she made from the juice of grapes and lemons. Her first experience with actual paint was when her father refurbished their farmhouse and shared the leftover paint. The precious product enabled her to create what she mispronounced as “lamb-scapes.” Mr. Robertson was encouraging, but her mother thought she should spend her time in other ways. Those other ways involved household chores such as making candles, soaps, and dresses—skills she would need in a job as a hired girl.

At age twelve, her parents sent her to work as a maid at a larger farm where she met, and fifteen years later married, her employer’s hired hand, Thomas Salmon Moses. She said her husband was “a wonderful man, much better than I am.” With $600 in savings, the young couple rented a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Anna bore ten children and raised the five who survived childbirth. She supplemented the family income by making butter and potato chips (a novelty in those times) to sell to neighbors. After eighteen years in the South, the Moses family moved north again to Eagle Bridge, New York, where they bought a dairy farm. The children married and had large families; the grandchildren helped alleviate the passing of an adult daughter and the loss of Thomas that left Anna a sixty-seven-year-old widow. With the assistance of son Forrest, she managed to keep her home. To distract herself, she turned to embroidery and “worsted pictures,” but this hobby ended when she developed debilitating arthritis. Her sister Celestia, remembering how she had loved to paint as a child, suggested a return to her first passion. Anna Mary agreed; she could no longer hold a needle, but she could handle a brush, and she had been too industrious all her life to be idle. She recalled, “I painted for pleasure, to keep busy, and to pass the time away, but I thought no more of it than of doing fancy work.” Looking out the window of her home onto corn and tomato fields that stretched to the Hoosier River, Anna, propped on pillows, sat in a battered swivel chair. Foregoing an easel, she painted on a canvas that rested on her old kitchen table that held jam jars filled with paint. In her “studio” was an electric washer and dryer. In 1935, at age seventy-six, Anna Mary’s career was born. The local county fair organizers finally persuaded Ms. Moses to send some of her pictures to exhibit, and she complied, bringing along her canned fruits and jams to sell. While her preserves won prizes, her canvases attracted scant attention. In the nearby town of Hoosick Falls, the owner of a drugstore placed some of her pictures in its window-priced from $3.00 to $5.00, based on size—alongside jars of jam, a gesture that helped soothe her ego. The brightly colored canvases attracted the attention of Louis Caldor, a New York art collector, who bought them all, then drove to the artist’s home and purchased her ten remaining paintings. In the city, he tried to interest gallery owners in the elderly, rural artist; however, they did not share his enthusiasm and shrugged them off as “primitive.”

Two years later, Caldor presented Anna’s work to Otto Kallir, owner of the Galerie St. Etienne, who had introduced the work of Gustav Klimt to the United States. In 1928, Kallir had been one of Vienna’s most prominent Jewish art dealers who found himself arranging the sale of a painting to history’s most sinister art lover: Adolf Hitler. The dictator wanted Portrait of a Young Lady by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, and Kallir was the unwilling middleman. Denying the Führer a coveted painting would have been a fatal mistake. Although the heavy eroticism of Klimt was far afield from the pastoral Americana of Moses, Otto took on Anna as his client. He believed that a public mired in the Great Depression and fearful of the rumblings of a World War would embrace a world of innocence. Grandma Moses did all of her painting from her remembrance of things past. In Wash Day, newly laundered garments flap in the wind so vividly one can almost smell their crispness. The shape of each shirt and towel makes the canvas resemble a patchwork quilt. Even the depiction of a threatening blizzard that causes hats to fly away, branches to bend against the onslaught of the wind, fails to elicit a sense of doom. Anna tinged her canvasses with the nostalgia of Thanksgiving preparations, the pristine beauty of a snowfall, the arrival of spring, a pigmented, pragmatic poetry. They were as cheery, nostalgic, and commonsensical as Grandma herself. She said, “I like to paint old-timey things—something real pretty. Most of them are daydreams, as it were.”

Under Kallir’s patronage, Anna became an American idol. Her first one-woman show, in 1940, had a title that would precipitate a feminist uproar today: “What a Farm Wife Painted” proved a runaway success. However, the artist, who had recently celebrated her eightieth birthday, was a no-show. She explained that October was a busy month on the farm, and, besides, she had already seen the pictures. In a review of the exhibition, the New York Herald Tribune noted that the elderly artist was known locally as “Grandma Moses,” and the name stuck. When Anna finally consented to come to New York in November for a Thanksgiving festival featuring her work at Gimbels Department Store, she drew a sizeable crowd who gathered to hear her talk about technique. Instead, she spoke about how she made preserves and concluded by opening her handbag and showing a few samples. The jaded urban public was delighted. She captured the craze for quaint, and the little lady became big business. Kallir brokered a lucrative deal with Hallmark Corporation to have her images reproduced, and they appeared on sixteen million Grandma Moses Christmas cards in 1947, along with reproductions that graced aprons, dishes, and lampshades. The following year, the cards debuted in Vienna and in fifteen other European cities. Merchandisers used her name to push everything from Wheaties to Old Golds. Behind the blitz was Otto, a master marketer, and the artist became an octogenarian photo-op queen. Dressed in old-fashioned clothes, hair pulled into a no nonsense bun, she posed with movie stars and politicians and appeared on a television show with Edward R. Murrow, where she demonstrated her artistry. Norman Rockwell, a younger practitioner of Americana, became a friend. Anna appeared on the far-left edge in his painting Christmas Homecoming, which served as the Saturday Evening Post’s 1948 holiday cover. The zeitgeist of America preferred authentic subjects, as opposed to abstract paintings, and the public lionized the little lady. Anna earned a further niche in pop culture when Granny Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies was given the name Daisy Moses in homage. Devotees compared Moses to the great self-taught French painter Henri Rousseau, as well as to Breughel. Until the comparisons, she had never heard of either.

Further fame arrived in 1939, when Anna had a private showing of her works at the Museum of Modern Art. During World War II, she became a patriotic darling, and as Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas,” she painted White Christmas. As a goodwill gesture during the Cold War, the United States Government sent fifty of her paintings to Europe. At this juncture, her work had appeared in more than 160 exhibitions, and she had the only Ecole Americaine picture hanging in Paris’s Museum of Modern Art. The artist, patron saint of small-town life, stayed at home. Other honors arrived when Russell Sage College made her an honorary doctor of humane letters. Her concern was, “They didn’t let me keep the cap.” After President Truman presented her with an award, she stated, “I talked with him, and I could not think but that he was one of my own boys.” General Eisenhower’s card from Europe manifested his admiration, “For Grandma Moses, a real artist, from a rank amateur.” In 1952, Lillian Gish portrayed Moses on a televised docudrama based on her autobiography, My Life’s History. One can only imagine Anna’s emotion when she appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in 1953 at age ninety-three, dressed in a black dress and white lace collar.

Even as the years piled up, Anna refused to let age put the brakes on her spirit, and she produced three or four paintings every week. She said she only stopped when she became too tired— “Then I leave it to do something else; when my hand gets tired, it isn’t so stiddy.” When she allowed herself to rest, she watched television Westerns, not for the drama, but because of the horses. Her great fame at an advanced age pleased her because of the people she met, though it troubled her when their numbers proved daunting. A “Do Not Disturb” sign from a hotel room hung outside her front door to ward off the thousands of tourists who besieged the Moses’ homestead. A visitor who got past the printed plaque asked her of what she was most proud, and the answer could not have been more Christian, or more grandmotherly: “I’ve helped some people.” As she wrote at a time when she was enduring infirmity and had outlived all but two of her children, “It was foolish to sleep when there is so much to do all over.”

Ms. Moses passed away in 1961, at age 101, survived by nine grandchildren and more than thirty great-grandchildren. As with most artists, posthumously, her paintings increased in value. In 2006, her Sugaring Off sold for $1.2 million; in 1969, a six-cent US postage stamp bore the image of her painting Fourth of July; the original resides in the White House. President Kennedy paid her tribute and said Americans mourned the loss of the artist who had restored a primitive perception of the country’s past. However, the most fitting epitaph came from her autobiography, “I look back on my life like a good day’s work, it was done, and I feel satisfied with it. I was happy and contented, I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.”

While naysayers criticized Anna’s creations as primitive, this quality held the key to her timeless appeal. It was a secret Pablo Picasso had understood: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Grandma’s final work, created just before her death, was aptly entitled Rainbow.

Chapter Two

Know It Was Not Easy (1894)

When we think of an activist, the image that might come to mind is of an emaciated man marching to the sea in India, a Buddhist monk immolating himself in Vietnam, an athlete with an upraised fist in Mexico City. No one would envision a radical as a toothless woman who spoke in black Southern dialect. Despite her nickname and ancient appearance, she emanated a vivacity that makes “Moms” forever young.

Dorothy Parker hid heartache behind a wisecrack, and that was the stock in trade of Loretta Mary Aiken. Although she spent seven decades making people laugh, her own life had more than its share of grief. Loretta was the great-granddaughter of slaves and grew up in conditions scarcely better. Aiken, from rural North Carolina, was one of sixteen children, raised in poverty and segregation. At age eleven, she was raped by an older black man, a traumatic event repeated two years later by the town’s white sheriff. The molestations resulted in pregnancies and the removal of the babies at birth. Shortly afterward, against her wishes, she married an older man whom she despised; she eventually bore a daughter who became a drug addict. Further events also made her life the stuff of Greek tragedy: Loretta’s father, James, died in an explosion of the fire truck in which he was a passenger, and a mail truck ran over and killed her mother, Mary, as she was returning home from church on Christmas Day. At the age of fourteen, Loretta ran away and ended up in Cleveland, where she pursued a job in entertainment, hoping to find an escape from grimmer-than-is-bearable reality. She joined the Theatre Owners Booking Association—the only venue where blacks could perform during the reign of Jim Crow—colloquially known as the Chitlin Circuit. It derived its name after chitterlings, the soul food staple consisting of cooked pig intestines. Fellow performer Jack Mabley was her boyfriend for a brief period, and she adopted the name Jackie Mabley. Later, she quipped that he had taken so much from her that it was only fitting she take something from him. Mabley, in alchemist fashion, turned the base metal of tragedy into comic gold. Arsenio Hall explained this formula when he stated, “If pain makes you funny, we definitely know why Mabley was hilarious.” Moms Mabley became the Southern version of the Italian crying clown who masked his tears through laughter.

Jackie’s professional alter ego, the origin of her stage name, Moms Mabley, was based on her grandmother, the sole ray of light and love from her Dickensian childhood. In the...

Table of contents

• Great Second Acts
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• ChapterSixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-One
• Chapter Twenty-Two
• Chapter Twenty-Three
• Chapter Twenty-Four
• Chapter Twenty-Five
• Chapter Twenty-Six
• Chapter Twenty-Seven
• Chapter Twenty-Eight
• Epilogue
• Bibliography