While I was wandering around on the web, I came upon a
lengthy story about a woman I had never heard of who died three days ago at the
age of 105. Marian Cannon Schlesinger
was, by this account, an interesting and accomplished person. She was married for thirty years to Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., L’il Arthur as he was known around Harvard Square to distinguish
him from his famous professor father, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. Marian Cannon Schlesinger’s sister was
married to the great scholar of China John Fairbank. [This was an era when brilliant Radcliffe
students, instead being encouraged to continue their studies, were expected to
marry smart Harvard students and keep house for them, but that is for another
blog post.] If you spent eleven years
hanging around Harvard Square, as I did, you will be interested in the gossip
in the obituary. You can read the whole
thing here.
One brief quote from Marian
Schlesinger really caught my eye, since it confirmed the impression I had
formed from afar. Writing of the Kennedy
White House, she said, “I had a curious feeling that great decisions were made
in an almost frivolous way, like the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which from my remote
perch seemed to have been run by a bunch of hubris-mad teenagers, mostly Yale
boys, who dominated the Central Intelligence Agency and who looked upon the
Cuban enterprise and the catastrophe rather like a Harvard-Yale game they would
win next time.” This line deserves to go
into the histories of that time, if it has not already done so.
3 comments:
She comes from an interesting generation of educated women, expected to defer to their husbands (as you point out above) regarding career achievements, with inchoate feminist sentiments and beliefs more formed by reading Middlemarch than by reading Sexual Politics and thus, less doctrinaire, less politicized and more personal and however, much more heart felt than those of their mothers.
Transitional generations tend to be more complex and if I dare say, more interesting than those on either side of a divide in basic values.
I like the following story about how she publicly supported Stevenson over Kennedy in the Democratic primary:
When Mr. Schlesinger endorsed Kennedy in 1960 for the Democratic presidential nomination, she not only stuck with her idol and Kennedy rival, Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, but also said so publicly — prompting Kennedy’s brother Robert to complain to Mr. Schlesinger, “Can’t you control your own wife — or are you like me?”
The story goes on to record that she and Schlesinger divorced in 1970.
A perfect descriptor: "Classic"
-- Jim
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