The Knight's Tomb
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O’Kellyn?
Where may the grave of that good man be?—
By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,
Under the twigs of a young birch tree!
The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,
And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,
And whistled and roared in the winter alone,
Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.—
The Knight’s bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;—
His soul is with the saints, I trust.


"The Knight's Tomb" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Public Domain.  (buy now)

It’s the birthday of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815) (books by this author), the American feminist, women’s rights pioneer, and abolitionist who, with fellow suffragist Susan B. Anthony, worked to convince the world that women had the right to vote, purchase property, and divorce their husbands if they so chose. Arguably, she was mostly concerned about the rights of white middle-class women.

Stanton was born in Johnstown, New York, the eighth of 11 children. Her father was a prominent lawyer, judge, and congressman who made no secret of favoring his sons over Stanton. Nevertheless, she was allowed to study Greek and mathematics and to have the full run of her father’s law library, where she first became aware of the laws that restricted women’s freedom. Incensed, she once tried to cut out offending passages from her father’s books in order to invalidate them. Later, she said, “Thus was the future object of my life foreshadowed and my duty plainly outlined.”

Stanton married fellow abolitionist Henry Stanton. They agreed to omit the word “obey” from the wedding vows and settled in Seneca Falls, New York, where Stanton, an advocate for birth control and what she called “voluntary motherhood,” had seven children. She was unable to travel very much because of her children, referring to herself as a “caged lioness,” but she’d forged a deep friendship with fellow suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who had no children, and so was free to travel. In between bathing her children and preparing their meals, Stanton took to writing speeches that pressed the need for women’s rights, and Anthony delivered them. Stanton later wrote of their partnership, “I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them.”

Stanton and 300 women’s rights activists, including Lucretia B. Mott, gathered in Seneca Falls in July of 1848 for what is now known as the “Seneca Falls Convention.” They drew up the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a document that essentially rewrote the Declaration of Independence to include women. In it, they argued for a woman’s right to vote.

Even though she was not legally allowed to vote, Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the first woman to run for Congress, in 1866. She received 24 votes. She also pressed for more liberal divorce laws and marriage laws, including a wife’s right to withhold sex from her husband. She wrote to a friend, “We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male can possess.”

During the later years of her life, she became increasingly consumed with addressing sexism in the Bible. In 1895, she published the first volume of The Woman’s Bible, which challenged the religious orthodoxy that women should be subservient to men. It was an instant bestseller, going through seven printings in six months, but her fellow suffragists felt that Stanton’s views on the Bible distracted from their goal of attaining the right to vote, and she was ousted from the National Women’s Suffragist Association.

Stanton was unapologetic, saying, “Whatever the Bible may be made to do in Hebrew or Greek, in plain English it does not exalt and dignify women.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that another serious examination of sexism in the Bible was undertaken by feminist scholars.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s autobiography is Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897. She died, bedridden and ill, in 1902, 18 years before the 19th amendment was passed. Though she was not allowed to attend college or university because of her sex, her daughters were, and did.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, “I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives, but as nouns.”

Today is the birthday of French sculptor Auguste Rodin, born in Paris in 1840. He created the masterpieces The Thinker and The Kiss. He said: “I invent nothing, I rediscover,” and “Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.”

It’s the birthday of philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes (books by this author), born in Cherbourg, France (1915). His father was killed in World War I, and his mother struggled to support the family, working as a bookbinder. Barthes did well in school and wanted to be a professor of literature and philosophy, but he came down with tuberculosis as a young man. Because of his frequent relapses, and the periods of time he had to spend in sanatoriums, he couldn’t hold down a teaching job.

So instead of writing long books about great works of literature, he began to support himself by writing short essays about popular culture. He was one of the first literary critics to apply sophisticated literary theory to things like movies, stripteases, toys, and wrestling matches. He said, “I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and […] it’s been pretty fun.”

He greatly expanded the scope of cultural studies, and it is partially thanks to him that college students can now take classes on subjects like Bugs Bunny. His essays are collected in books such as Mythologies (1957) and Empire of Signs (1970).

It’s the birthday of novelist Katharine Weber (books by this author), born in New York City in 1955. Her novels include Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (1995), The Little Women (2003), a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s classic story, and Triangle (2006), about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. She decided to write about the fire because her grandmother worked at the factory, although she left her job two years before the fire because she was pregnant with Katharine Weber’s father.

Her latest novel is Still Life with Monkey (2018).

Weber writes: “Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That’s the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what’s left, that’s the part you have to make up as you go.”

It’s the birthday of Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young, born in Toronto in 1945. He had a rough childhood: he was stricken with polio when he was six years old, and nearly died. Even after he recovered from the outbreak, his health was so bad that he could hardly walk.

Even as a kid, he loved music, and he learned to play the ukulele after he received a cheap plastic one in his Christmas stocking. As the years went by, his love for music deepened, until it meant more to him than school. He dropped out of high school to form a band — the Squires — in 1963. They played in coffeehouses and clubs around Winnipeg, where Neil had moved with his mother after his parents’ divorce. Neil bought himself a car to get the band to their gigs. It was a hearse, which he dubbed “Mortimer Hearseburg.” When “Mort,” as he called it, inevitably broke down beyond repair, Young bought another hearse, a 1953 Pontiac that he named “Mort II.”

He got to know a lot of up-and-coming musicians, like Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills, and the Guess Who, while touring on the Canadian folk circuit. Mitchell loved his song “Sugar Mountain” so much that it inspired her song “The Circle Game.” By 1966, Young had formed the band Buffalo Springfield with his friend Bruce Palmer, along with Steven Stills, Richie Furay, and Dewey Martin. “For What It’s Worth” was the first single off their debut, self-titled album, and it hit the Top Ten. That same year, Young developed epilepsy, and began having seizures — sometimes while on stage with the band. And in 2005, he suffered a life-threatening brain aneurysm.

Young broke his toe in 2011, which took him out of commission for a while. To kill the time, he wrote an autobiography: Waging Heavy Peace (2012). In the book, he writes: “Writing is very convenient, has a low expense and is a great way to pass the time. I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn’t know what to do next.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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