We left Lady mary rolling her eyes as people found reason after reason to not immunize against smallpox. While she cared about people not contracting a deadly disease, what Mary really want to be was a writer. Those letters she wrote from the road? She edited them into a book that was the first to capture a woman’s perspective of the Ottoman Empire. It would not be published in her lifetime, she had other things to do…like garden, socialize, write more biting commentaries on political and court life, raise two kids, ditch her husband and run off with a n’er do well Count to Italy, tour Europe, then entwine her life with another unscrupulous noble.
For a woman who is not well known these days and who lived way back in the 1700s, it’s surprising that there’s enough of a story to fill two episodes…Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is such a woman!
There are quite a few parallels between Mary Mallon’s story (a series of typhoid outbreaks) and our present-day pandemic, and so there are things we can learn from it.
But was Mary a villain?
Or simply a victim of circumstances?
This episode also serves as a little hint for the one we’re working on right now for next time!
TIME TRAVEL WITH THE HISTORY CHICKS
For photos, things we discuss, and our media recommendations click on over to Mary’s ORIGINAL SHOWNOTES.
This image, from an ancient coin, is believed to be Olympias and the only known image of her still in existence…but even this has been disputed.
She had several names: Polyxena, Myrtale, Stratonice, and the one she is best known by, Olympias. People often get hung up on the snakes she had around her and the faith by which she lived her life– but we focused on the power she had as not only a wife of a king but the mother of a great one: Alexander the Great. We had to go in the Way…Way Back Machine for the story of this woman who was descended from Achilles (or so family lore claimed) and managed to survive a cut-throat court life at a very turbulent time and place in history. (more…)
Liberty Enlightening the World! DoD photo by Lt. Matthew Stroup, U.S. Navy/Released)
The annual revisit of our coverage of the Statue of Liberty is, this year, coinciding with her Little Sister’s arrival in the US! The replica version is on loan first to be displayed on Ellis Island next to her big sister, and then heading to the French Ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C. where she will be on display for the next ten years!
Portrait of Marjorie that hangs in the Marjorie Merriweather Post parlor in the Women’s Democratic Club in Washington, DC. (If you donate enough money to refurbish and furnish a mansion, you get a room named after you.) photo credit, us
When we left Marjorie, she was on her second marriage, this one to E.F. Hutton, and they were moving and shaking up New York and Palm Beach society. Marjorie had “strongly suggested” that the Postum Company should buy a new frozen food company, owned by one Clarence Birdseye, despite most homes and grocery stores not having freezers– and she had begun work on a very unique home in Palm Beach she named Mar a Lago. (more…)
