Tag: YWCA

My Mother’s Lesbian Affair

Chapter 6 My Brother Finds Pictures

Group photo at the 1937 conference. Is that Eddie leaning against Flo (center)

Lately I’ve been walking around with my head in the 1930s.

I’ve been thinking about my mother  and what her life was like as a young person. Mom was born in 1913 and graduated high school in 1929. She came of age in the 1930s. Born in 1949, I came of age in the 1960s. They were two very different worlds.

I thought I’d gone through all the evidence we’d found of our mother’s dalliance with another woman. Love letters we discovered revealed attempts at seduction, but there was nothing to prove that they had been lovers. 

Then my brother called me. “I found pictures!” he said.

In an envelope in a forgotten file cabinet, Don found a slew of photos of my mother and her friends in the 1930s. Some were clearly pictures of the YWCA meetings in 1937 and 38 where our mother, Flo, met and roomed with her lesbian admirer, Edna Lauterbach (Eddie). Maybe Eddie is in the pictures! Of course Eddie is in the pictures! 

I’m posting some of the pictures here and I hope readers will weigh in. I think these photos are from the 1937 conference where Flo and Eddie first met in Chicago. I’m pretty sure Eddie is in one of these photos, but which one is she? Here is what we know: Flo was 24 and Eddie was 37 in 1937. I know from the census records that Eddie’s father was ethnically German. I would love to know what she looked like.

Flo on the left. Are her two handsome companions a lesbian couple?

The photos show groups of women, many with their arms around each other, hands on legs or shoulders. My mother had her hands on several of them. These women seem way more physically affectionate with each other than my generation of female friends ever were in public. Were they all lovers? 

In her seminal book Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, Lillian Faderman posits that women in “Boston marriages” and “romantic couples” did not necessarily have sex. She writes that “romantic friendships” between women were accepted in the Western world up until WWI. After that, as women’s status in the culture changed, these friendships started to become less accepted. Today girls and women are not encouraged to hold hands in public or to enter into romantic friendships, presumably because they might turn lesbian. Today if there’s not a sexual component, we don’t take the relationship seriously. But Faderman argues that in the past these relationships were as serious as those between men and women. 

By the 1930s American culture was changing, but close physical friendships between women were still more accepted than they were in my youth. My mother couldn’t understand why my generation was so focused on co-ed activities. She told me she had much more fun with her girlfriends than she did with boys. Mom maintained life-long friendships with women. She even named me, her only daughter, after her best girlfriend. 

Flo and an unidentified girlfriend

Society was much more permissive by the time I was coming up than it was when Mom came of age. By the late 1960s, sex had become a hot topic. We thought about and experimented with sex all the time. For one thing, we had the birth control pill. For another thing, we had women’s and gay liberation. In three decades, our culture had changed. Women were now free agents. But women were no longer free to be so physically affectionate with each other in public.

From the moment we discovered the love letters, my question has been: Did Flo and Eddie have sex? From Eddie’s letters we know that she was crushed out on Flo. If any of Flo’s letters to Eddie existed it might be easier to determine how she was feeling. But even then we might not know whether they engaged in sex. Faderman uncovered letters throughout history in which women in nonsexual romantic friendships declared undying love for one another.

It’s not as if sex wasn’t going on. There were definitely lesbians involved in the YWCA, unions, and progressive organizations in the 1930s. Eleanor Roosevelt’s inner circle included women in Boston marriages, and Eleanor herself carried on a closeted affair with her press attache, Lorena Hickok. We know from their resurrected letters that they were deeply in love with each other, but there is no evidence that their relationship had a sexual component. 

Flo (left front) with hands on two others

By the 1960s, physical closeness between women had become suspect. I have a lesbian cousin, Sandy, who is ten years older than I. That’s a whole generation in the gay universe. I’ve depended on Sandy to school me about her older gay generation. She was closeted. She worked for the YWCA in Seattle in 1963 and told me there were many dykes there. They all knew each other and they were all closeted. You had to be if you wanted to keep your job. Sandy had affairs with a couple of them. They did not feel so free to show affection in public as my mother’s generation of women did. They worried about being outed.

My guess is Eddie knew what she was doing when she wooed Flo in 1938. She wanted a lover. But, at least in the beginning, I believe Flo was oblivious. I believe she thought Eddie just wanted to be friends. Eddie may have been the first lesbian she encountered in her life. She was probably shocked when Eddie came out to her.

Eddie was a good romancer. She managed to lure Flo to New York City from Yakima, Washington in 1941. She bought Flo gifts, took her out to dinner and the theater, and squired her around the city. And that is when I imagine Eddie came out to her and declared her love. At least, had I been in Eddie’s shoes, that’s what I would have done.

1937 group photo. Can you spot the lesbians?

A small town gal, Flo was pretty green when she first met Eddie at the YWCA conference in Chicago. She may not have even known what the word lesbian meant. By the time they met up in New York, Flo was no longer so young or naïve. She was 28 and had traveled to cities across the U.S.

I just had an epiphany. What if I’m culturally biased?

I see now that I’ve been evaluating my mother’s generation through the lens of my own. My generation thinks the word lover describes people who have genital sex. Maybe I need to redefine the term lover. Perhaps we should expand the definition of lover to include what Faderman calls “romantic friendships.”

My mother and her friends were activists in women’s organizations who enjoyed working and playing together. Maybe being lovers then was not all about sex. If we expand our notion, then we can imagine a culture in which physical affection extended to all. It’s fun to contemplate an army of female lovers. 

Maybe for women like my mother the defining factor in a relationship was not sex. Maybe there’s a third choice: romantic friendship. Maybe I should stop asking whether they had sex. Maybe I should start with love.

Chapter 1: https://mollymartin.blog/2016/09/03/my-mothers-lesbian-affair/

Who Was My Mother’s Lesbian Admirer?

She came of age in New York City in the 1920s

Did My Mother Have an Affair With a Woman? Chapter 4

Flo (L) in the 1920s

After I discovered love letters to from a woman to my mother in an old scrapbook from the 1930s, I endeavored to find out as much as I could about my mother’s admirer, Eddie. Who was she and what was her story?

Over a couple of years my brother Don and I uncovered some answers. A big breakthrough came when we discovered her last name in a letter stuffed in another scrapbook. Once we had that we looked her up in census records where we learned more details. She was Edna Lauterbach, born in 1900. She lived in Brooklyn with her family including two sisters. She worked in advertising and she was active in the Business and Professional Women’s group within the YWCA. She had encountered my mother, Florence Wick, at conferences in Chicago and Columbus in 1937 and 38 where they roomed together.

From one of Eddie’s letters

The letters convinced me that Eddie was at least a self-acknowledged lesbian who had a serious crush on my mother. There is so much more I want to know about her. Did she remain a closeted lesbian all her life? Was she part of a lesbian subculture? No doubt the environs of New York City afforded more possibilities than those of smaller towns. We know that, as in Berlin, gay culture flourished in the 1920s in New York City, the epicenter of the “Pansy Craze” and the accompanying “Sapphic Craze.” Eddie came of age at a time when gay and lesbian characters were featured in pulp novels, stage plays, radio songs and (before the Hays Code) in movies. Born at the cusp of the 20th century, she would have been just the right age to experience this flowering of gay culture in New York.

Did she frequent the lesbian and gay gathering places in Manhattan during the 20s and 30s? We know Eddie worked in advertising, though the census doesn’t tell us which firm she worked for. But we can assume she traveled daily from her home in Brooklyn to her work in Manhattan. My mother, Flo, was a small town gal from Yakima, Washington. But I imagine Eddie, who grew up in New York, to be far more citified and sophisticated. Maybe she taught my mom some things.

Did she know Eve Adams, the notorious lesbian café owner who was arrested in 1926, jailed, and later deported, and sent to Auschwitz where she was murdered? Eve Adams is a Jewish radical lesbian foremother, but I had never heard of her until I read her biography by the gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz. The New York Times recently included her obit in its Overlooked No More obituary section and she was profiled in the New Yorker. 

Read this book!

Eve Adams (a taken name alluding to Adam and Eve) was friends with anarchists Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Ben Reitman. In New York she mingled with the likes of Margaret Sanger and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Adams came to the US in 1912 and spent four years hitchhiking around the country before settling in New York. I learned from Katz’s book that one of the places she visited was my hometown of Yakima. What drew her there at the height of the nativist backlash in 1922? I’m still trying to find out.

In 1925 Eve Adams published the first American book with lesbian in the title, Lesbian Love. In that year she opened a café in Greenwich Village called Eve’s Hangout, which became a destination for New York’s bohemian contingent. 

Did Eddie visit Eve’s Hangout? I bet she knew about the place. She may have been afraid to visit, especially after Eve was arrested in 1926 by an undercover policewoman for “disorderly conduct,” a charge that referred to her alleged sexual advances and for having written an “obscene” book. But if I had been in New York in 1925 you can bet I would have checked out Eve’s Hangout.

Gay culture flourished in the Roaring Twenties in New York. Then in the 30s with the Great Depression and the end of Prohibition, a backlash began and gay culture went underground. By the time Flo and Eddie met in Chicago in 1937 you were taking a chance going into a gay gathering place, if you could even find one. I speculate that Eddie’s two sisters may also have been lesbians. The 1940 census finds them all still single in their 30s and still living in the family apartment on 88th Street in Brooklyn. I bet Eddie and her sisters had fun together in New York. Flo traveled to New York to visit Eddie in 1941 and, whether or not she met the family, I know she met one of the sisters, Gertrude. The three women saw a Broadway play together, the antifascist play by Lillian Hellman, Watch on the Rhine.

Was Eddie involved in the blooming lesbian feminist culture in the 1970s? She would have been 70 in 1970, but there were plenty of older women who joined the feminist movement, including my mother. Did Eddie continue to be active in the YWCA? The YW may not have harbored anarchists, but my mother and Eddie did rub shoulders with a progressive element who wanted to change the world. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI went after activists in the YW, calling them communists, but the attacks never stuck, maybe because of the Christian in the name or because they were allied with wives of industrialists. Researching the YW for this series, I am impressed with all the organization accomplished, and the stance it took against racism, even in its early years. It is a fascinating history, yet to be compiled into a book. I believe my mother’s progressive anti-racist politics were formed in the YW, and my own world view benefitted from activism in the organization.

The YW was at the forefront of the most critical social movements including women’s empowerment and civil rights. The activism of Flo and Eddie set the stage for my generation’s second wave of feminism and our gay rights movement.

I thought I had reached the end of my Eddie research and speculation. But now my brother has unearthed a batch of photos of our mother and her YW pals. We’ve been able to place them at the conferences in Chicago and Columbus. So in a final chapter of this story I’ll ask readers to weigh in on the possibilities.

To be continued.

Chapter 5: https://mollymartin.blog/2022/08/04/my-mothers-lesbian-affair-2/

I Find Eddie’s Last Name and More

Chapter Three

I had given up finding out any more about my mother’s admirer, Edna L. Then, looking through a box of family photos and letters that my brother Don had taken with him to Vancouver BC, I found another scrapbook made by my mother. This was mostly high school-era, 1920s-1930 (Flo had graduated in the class of 1929½). But Flo had tucked mementos from other decades into it. Among the high school graduation notices I was delighted to find another note from Eddie (as she sometimes signed her name) in her now familiar diminutive handwriting. It was an invitation to a party during the Columbus YWCA conference. It said:

In the Wick and Lauterbach den

On Wednesday night at half past ten

We hope you’ll join us for a spree

To give us one more Council memory

Then there is one of Eddie’s cute stick figure drawings—two skirted figures with F and E written underneath. At the bottom it says, “Just to be sure that my roommate will be here to act as co-hostess with me.” While they were roommates Eddie could never keep Flo at home it seems. It was written on the Neil House stationery and dated April 27, 1938.floeddie

I had found Eddie’s last name—Lauterbach—the one thing I’d been searching for in the scrapbooks, the one thing I needed in order to find out more about the woman with a crush on my mother! I was so happy I danced around the house singing her name.

Googling her name got me to the Edna A. Lauterbach scholarship fund for the education of nurses. She was a nurse who championed home care. Then I started making up stories. I imagined Edna was an important historical figure, an organizer. Perhaps she had been a speaker at the conference. I imagined she traveled around the country on speaking tours seducing women in every town. I wondered whether Eddie had had lots of lovers, or no lovers at all. Was she the archetype of the lonely lesbian who never found her mate? Was it hard to seduce women in the 1930s?

I wrote to the scholarship fund to see if they could provide more biographical information. The marketing director got right back to me saying it was a different person, as the age didn’t match up. This Edna Lauterbach was not even born until after the meeting in Columbus took place. Scratch her and all my associated fantasies.

Then Don and I got on the computer and looked at census records. We found an Edna R. Lauterbach, born in 1900 and died in August 1979 who lived her entire life in Brooklyn, NY, after 1930 in a 43-unit apartment house on 88th Street. I found pictures of the building, built in 1926, online. The apartments now sell in the million-dollar range, so I’m guessing the neighborhood was gentrified long ago. But when the Lauterbach family moved in, this would have been a working class neighborhood. Edna had two sisters, one named Gertrude. This was a deciding clue, as her sister Gertrude had been mentioned in one of the other notes found in Flo’s scrapbooks. Don found records for Edna in the 1910, 1920, 1930 and 1940 censuses. In all, she was single and living in the family home. By 1940 their father (a truck maker whose parents had emigrated from Germany) had died, but the three sisters were all still unmarried, in their thirties and living at home with their mother. A household of old maids! Perhaps all the sisters were lesbians.

According to the census, Edna worked in advertising. She was there for the Mad Men era, although she would have been 60 years old in 1960. I imagine her as the staid older secretary who runs interference for her philandering boss while correcting his spelling and grammar and making him look good. She may have worked in the industry until she retired, possibly at the same job. Had she remained a closeted lesbian all her life? Was she part of a lesbian subculture and if so, where was it centered? No doubt the environs of New York City afforded more possibilities than those of smaller towns. But I’m imagining big lesbo parties through the decades at the apartment on 88th Street in Brooklyn on the parents’ bowling nights.

It turns out Edna R. Lauterbach wasn’t anybody famous. I couldn’t even find a funeral notice for her, although we did learn that she is buried in the famous Brooklyn Greenwood cemetery with some 560,000 others. She was a workingwoman, a stenographer, who managed to keep a job through the Great Depression. In 1939 she worked in advertising 44 hours per week and 52 weeks in the year. Her income was $2040 that year.

Her parents were ethnically German and my guess is they were not Jewish. The YW is a Christian women’s organization, but it did work with Jewish groups against anti-Semitism and to prod the government to increase numbers of Jewish refugees allowed into the U.S. during the Nazi era. Jewish women did join the YW, but usually as members of the Biz-Pro groups or associated Jewish organizations.

Edna Lauterbach and my mother were two of the thousands of workingwomen who benefited from their membership in the Business and Professional Women’s organizations under the umbrella of the YWCA. One benefit was being able to make friends with other workingwomen from around the country.

Eddie surely had a giant crush on Flo and my heart aches as I read her letters. My mother never revealed that she’d had a sexual relationship with another woman but when I came out to her in the 1970s she did confess that she had known lesbians. And the name Edna Lauterbach is vaguely familiar to me. Did Flo tell me about her? I can’t remember. But it seems as if they kept up the friendship for some years at least. What was the nature of their relationship? They were certainly close friends, and possibly lovers, although I found no conclusive proof.

I have no evidence that they ever saw each other again after 1941 when Flo traveled to New York to visit Eddie. My mother returned to her hometown of Yakima, Washington where (after a stint in Europe with the Red Cross during WWII) she married, raised four kids and lived the rest of her life. Edna L. lived out her life in her family home on 88th Street in Brooklyn.

There is so much more I want to know about my mother’s admirer. Did she frequent the lesbian bars in Manhattan? Was she involved in the blooming lesbian feminist culture in the 1970s? Did she continue to be active in the YWCA? I do know that, even if she and my mother were lovers, the affair would have been long-distance and periodic. And perhaps Eddie’s attentions were not returned at all.

Dearest Eddie, I hope you found love in your lifetime. I hope you found a woman who could love you back.

Chapter 4: https://mollymartin.blog/2022/08/03/who-was-my-mothers-lesbian-admirer/

Looking for My Mother’s Lover

My mother's scrapbook
My mother’s scrapbook

Chapter Two

Among the many questions I wish I could have asked my mother: When did you first have sex? Were you ever attracted to a woman?

We came of age at very different times. My mother turned 20 in 1933, the nadir of the Great Depression. I was 20 in 1969, the zenith of the Countercultural Revolution.

As close as we were, there were things her generation just didn’t talk about—private things. My generation talked about everything, even things that probably should have been kept private.

Whether or not my mother was ever attracted to a woman, I have found evidence that at least one woman was attracted to her. After I discovered the letters from Edna L., my mother’s ardent admirer, I searched in vain for her last name and any identifying information in Mom’s scrapbooks. They had roomed together in the Neil House Hotel in Columbus, Ohio for the national YWCA convention in April 1938. But “Eddie” (as she often signed her name) suggests in one note that they had met the previous year at a YW conference in Chicago.northwest

“It has been fun to continue our friendship begun in Chicago (or even earlier) and I hope we shall be friends far into the future,” wrote Eddie.

I can’t imagine what Eddie means by “even earlier.” I didn’t think Flo had traveled east from Washington State before the Chicago trip, but I have one piece of evidence that suggests otherwise. She gave me a small painting and wrote on the back, “Bought at Dayton’s in Minneapolis in the 1930s. Sent to daughter Molly in San Francisco 2/82. Flo Martin.” So perhaps there had been previous meetings where they connected that Flo had not recorded in the scrapbooks. Had Flo and Eddie schemed for a year to room together in Columbus? They must have planned ahead at least.tuckin

So, my new obsession: Edna L. Reading her love notes to Flo warmed my heart and I began to identify with Eddie who slyly references “baths” and late-night “tuckin’ in” (her quotes, not mine). From reading her notes, I conclude she wanted to seduce my mother. Did she?

Some things I know about Eddie: She lived in New York. She was participating in the YWCA conference, so she could have been active in a Business and Professional Women’s Club, as was Flo, or in the YW. Chances are that Eddie was older than Flo, who was only 24 when they roomed together in Columbus. One clue I found in Eddie’s letters: they are literate with perfect spelling and punctuation. This suggests that she worked in an office and not a factory.cometoNY

What did she look like? My mother’s scrapbooks from the 1930s are filled with pictures, but as far as I can tell there are none of Eddie or the YW conferences. But who knows? Flo didn’t caption anything in these early scrapbooks. In trying to imagine how Eddie looked, I could not even assume that she was white. Even in 1938, the YW strove to include racial minorities.

Participating in these conferences must have felt to my mother and her comrades like early feminist gatherings did to my generation of feminists. The meetings were focused on making institutional changes to give women and minorities more comprehensive rights. These women were leading a movement for social change, just as we did. The artifacts Flo saved in her scrapbooks show that many of these women built loving friendships with each other. The warmth expressed in their greetings illustrates deep feeling. From receipts she saved, I see they sent flowers to each other as thank yous, a practice I wish in retrospect my generation of feminist activists had adopted.youretops

The Columbus conference was a continual round of meetings. In her love notes Eddie grumbles about not getting to see Flo back at the room until late at night.

“Aren’t we having a good time even though I have to sit up nights and wait for a chance to see you?”

“I certainly am enjoying being with you—even if I don’t have that opportunity ‘cept in the wee hours mostly, after I’ve tucked you in. I’ll be tuckin’ you in any minute now when you get back from your meeting on findings…”

Apparently the meetings went long into the night. Another participant noted, “Here’s to more 2am meetings.”

Flo had saved the banquet book from the YW convention and its inside covers were filled with inscriptions from attendees. Altogether there are 27 signatures. Nicknames were popular and they seem to have nicknamed Flo “Cricket.”

They all signed their full names, except Eddie who signed “Love—Eddie.” It’s an indication that their relationship was special, but disappointing for me because Eddie never signed her last name.

In the banquet book Eddie wrote: “Dearest Florence—You are one grand girl and a swell pal! These interludes of Council and Convention will always be happy memories because you shared them with me. I hope you’ll “bother” me “for years to come” and some day I’m coming to see you in the Northwest! Love—Eddie L.”

Did Eddie ever visit the Northwest? There is nothing in my mother’s scrapbook to suggest that she did. But items she saved show that Flo visited Eddie in New York in 1941. There are menus from the Swiss Village Inn and Struppler’s (next to the Cordova 917 Grand Ave.) I found a cocktail napkin from Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Bar and Cocktail Lounge, “Meeting Place of the World.” She kept a newspaper article citing record heat in NYC, a humid 91 degrees on the hottest Sept. 10 in a decade. There’s also a receipt from Sweden House Inc. (Swedish decorative arts) at Rockefeller Center for $1.53 dated 9/10/41, and a receipt for a single person at the Taft Hotel, 7th Ave at 50th St. NYC, and a menu from the Taft Grill.

The Taft Hotel, a 22-story high-rise built in 1926, was one of New York’s premiere tourist hotels with 2000 rooms right on Times Square at Radio City in Midtown. My mother, a small-town gal from Yakima, Washington, must have been thrilled to stay in such a glamorous big city accommodations. I bet she had a great view from room 1045.

How could my mother afford this trip? Had she been saving pennies for three years while working full time and helping to support her family? I could never afford to stay in hotels as a young working person, nor could my family afford hotels when I was growing up. On vacations we drove to the Cascade Mountains and pitched a tent. When I traveled I always arranged to stay in the homes of friends or comrades. It made me wonder if Eddie had chipped in to pay for the room at the Taft Hotel. Or maybe Eddie sprang for the hotel while Flo paid for the train trip. Perhaps she and Eddie had been corresponding furiously for three years, planning this tryst.

Flo also saved a Christmas gift card in its envelope from Macy’s New York. It is signed “With much love to you, Wickie dear—Edna L.”

There’s another note on a card with a monogramed L with no date: “My best love to a very good pal—Edna L.”

Then there’s a note that reads “Florence dear—Just got tickets for Watch on the Rhine—only chance it seems—Gertrude (my sister) will be joining us—will call you about meeting for dinner & theater tomorrow night. Edie L. (The play, by Lillian Hellman, won the New York Drama Critics prize in 1941).

Did Flo travel to New York just to visit Eddie? I can’t find any evidence of meetings of the YWCA or Biz-Pro in NYC in September 1941. Did she stay in a hotel and not with Eddie because she and Eddie wanted a place to be alone?

roundpic
Painting bought in Minneapolis

From the evidence, it looks like Flo travelled to New York by herself. In those days you could take the North Coast Limited on the Northern Pacific Railway all the way from Yakima to Chicago. Then you transferred to the Pennsylvania Railroad for the final leg to New York. Of course, by this time Flo was a veteran train traveler, having already been to Chicago, Columbus and Minneapolis.

As much as I’ve fantasized about my mother’s lesbian affair, I think the evidence is mixed. It wasn’t just that Flo had had lots of boyfriends, or that she married a man. That’s a story many lesbians tell. While I never married a man, I spent a decade experimenting with heterosexual sex before I came out.

picback
Flo’s inscription on the back of the painting

My mother definitely struggled with homophobia. As liberal as she was politically, Flo had difficulty accepting that my brother and I are gay. He came out first and she felt justifiably burdened by the widely accepted Freudian theory that mothers are responsible for sons’ homosexuality. Then, when I came out a few years later, she at first chalked it up to a phase I was going though. Could that be because she went through a lesbian “phase” herself?

I made up all sorts of sensational stories about Eddie and Flo from the information I found in the scrapbooks. But since Eddie’s last name remained unrecorded, I gave up learning any more about her. Whatever happened between Flo and Eddie, I’m sure my mother had to wrestle with her own internalized homophobia and that of the dominant culture. At that time, in the 1930s, homosexuality was highly stigmatized and even in the big city of New York, lesbians stayed closeted to protect their jobs and reputations, meeting mostly at private house parties.

There remains the possibility that Flo was deeply in denial about her attraction/affair. I have some evidence to support this theory. My mother’s sister, Ruth, also had gay children and, while much more politically conservative, Ruth took a stand when her Presbyterian church excluded gays. She was proud of her gay kids and publicly quit the church in support of them. But she complained to me that she could never get my mother to talk about the issue. She couldn’t understand why Flo, her closest sister, had shut her out, especially with regard to a subject they both shared. I never understood this. I just assumed it had to do with Flo’s avoidance of the personal like so many in her generation, but perhaps my mother feared that her own sexual past would be revealed.

Did Flo have an affair with Eddie? I’ll never know for sure. If she were still alive, I think I could ask her now. When she died in 1983 at the age of 70, I still felt restrained from asking personal questions that I knew she would refuse to answer. Then again, maybe she never would have revealed the truth. She believed some things are best kept private.

Chapter 3 I find Eddie’s last name and more: https://mollymartin.blog/2016/11/27/i-find-eddies-last-name-and-more/

My Mother’s Lesbian Affair

FloHSgrad
Flo in about 1930

Chapter One

Rummaging through my mom’s scrapbooks from the 1930s I came across a packet of letters, a rare find. My mother saved minutiae from her life: bridge tallies, restaurant menus, cocktail napkins, greeting cards, dance cards, wedding invitations. But she saved almost no personal letters, although I know she wrote and received troves of them.

OpenFriSatSunThe envelopes are all addressed to Miss Florence Wick and marked on the outside: “Via the usual route,” “To be read on Friday,” “To be read on Saturday” and “To be read on Sunday.” Carefully opening the tattered envelopes, I found hand-written notes on stationery from the Neil House Hotel in Columbus, Ohio. They looked to me like love notes—from a woman named Edna L.

Florence, darlin’—

Haven’t we had fun with meetings and parties and “baths” and rushin’ ‘round! And what am I going to do without you when you are gone? You will just have to come to New York sometime soon so we can share some other experiences….

Love and a hug—Edna L.

What did she mean “baths”? OMGoddess! I had to call my brother Don immediately.

“Flo had an affair with a woman! I have proof!” I blurted. Perhaps I could have approached the delivery of this information differently, building up to the climax with more suspense. My brother’s lack of excitement revealed my failure.

“You’re making up things again.” He could have added, “just like Dad.” Our father was an accomplished teller of tales, amusing but not to be believed.

My wife Holly was equally suspicious. I hadn’t realized I’d built such a reputation for exaggeration. No one believed me. I just had to revel in my discovery alone.

ELtrainI delved further, looking for more information about Edna L. I read the letters over. Edna sometimes signed her name Eddie or Edie, but she never included her last name. I love that she called herself Eddie, a definite lesbian cue. She illustrated the notes with endearing stick figure drawings. From the letters I learned that Eddie and Flo had roomed together at the national YWCA council meeting in Columbus. Eddie had written the notes during their time together and given them to Flo to be opened each day on the train ride home to Washington State. How romantic!

I read through all the accompanying articles and programs about the national YWCA council meetings that Flo had attended in Chicago and Columbus in 1937 and 1938, but I couldn’t find any mention of Eddie. I looked at every picture in the two scrapbooks. Flo had devoted two pages of one scrapbook to pictures of a woman who had died, kind of a shrine. The pictures show Flo and the friend on a camping trip in the mountains. The woman’s death photo, showing her body lying on a coffin-like bed, is in an envelope pasted in the scrapbook, but there is not a single clue as to who she was. I pulled up the photos to see if there was anything written on the reverse side. Nothing.

camping
With the friend who died

The woman in the photos looked rather morose. Could the dead woman be Eddie? Did Eddie kill herself after Flo spurned her advances? Reading the letters, I can see she was clearly smitten, but there’s no indication that Flo felt the same. I let my imagination run wild. My poor mother! She must have felt terrible guilt. No wonder she left no clues about the identity of the dead woman.

She is still a mystery
She is still a mystery

My brother seemed slightly more interested in this new theory and he agreed to help me research the dead woman’s identity. We found one clue in a picture that decisively ties the dead woman to Flo’s hometown Biz-Pro group, and from her letters we know that Eddie was from New York, so I had to abandon my romantic story about Eddie. However, I’m holding onto the suicide theory until we can identify the dead woman. I can totally see how my adorable young mother might have inspired unrequited love.

Chapter 2 Looking for my mother’s lover: https://mollymartin.blog/2016/11/22/looking-for-my-mothers-lover/

In the Company of Women

 

Florence Wick early 1930s Florence Wick early 1930s

My mother used to wonder aloud why my generation of girls and young women chose to hang out in co-ed groups. Why was there so much pressure to be with boys? She told me that as a young woman she’d had loads of fun communing with sisters in same sex groups. They invited boys to dances and events that they organized, but otherwise they sought the companionship of other women. Now, looking through scrapbooks she made in the 1930s, I can see what she was talking about.

My mother, Florence Wick, had graduated from Yakima High School at age 16 in the class of 1929½, just as the country sank into the Great Depression. She was planning to enroll at Washington State University (my alma mater) when the stock market crashed and ended her dream of going to college. SeattleSecyInstead she went to secretarial school. She got a job as a stenographer and worked steadily throughout the decade, living at home and supporting her family when her father lost his teaching job. In the 1930s my mother actively participated in women’s organizations that I now see set the stage for the feminist movement of the 1970s.

Flo was Biz-Pro president in 1936 Flo was Biz-Pro president in 1936

While she could never afford college, she did join a sorority, Epsilon Sigma Alpha, which had been reorganized from a college group to include businesswomen. She was also a member and president of the Business and Professional Women’s Club (Biz-Pro) one of the “business girls” clubs that fell under the umbrella of the YWCA. These linked organizations provided opportunities for what we now call networking, but they also promoted the rights and welfare of workingwomen by sponsoring legislation for equal pay and to prohibit legislation denying jobs to married women. Founded to address the surge of women into the workforce during WWI, Biz-Pro still continues to advocate for workingwomen promoting equal pay, comparable worth and family leave legislation.

 

The ESA flower was jonquil
She saved dance programs
Biz-Pro dance program
The sorority met twice a month, once for a study program and once for a social event. My mother saved programs and newspaper articles reporting on their events. Flo sometimes appears in the programs reviewing books (Stanley Walker’s Mrs. Astor’s Horse) or authoring skits. She participated in a bridge club and took home prizes. She directed a questionnaire on current event topics at one meeting. At another she reported on the biography of Nijinsky written by his wife. Politics was also on the agenda. On the Oct. 6, 1936 program, Miss Sylvia Murray presented a “Symposium of Nazism and Fascism.” Flo presented “Excerpts from Days of Wrath by Andre Malraux.” They had picnic summer potlucks. They played games. The local news reported: At the Thanksgiving party, 30 members and their friends were expected. The colors were yellow, orange and brown.

 

Sorority sisters
Sisters’ Ski Trip
Smart cotton frocks of today’s vogue and demure fashions of 50 years ago vied for supremacy last evening when Epsilon Sigma Alpha sorority members entertained at a dessert bridge party in the Woman’s Century clubhouse. The sorority will have a horseback riding party as a feature of its next meeting, reported the local Yakima newspaper. In news articles the married women are referred to by their husbands’ names. A dinner and theater party were planned by sorority members at their meeting last evening in the home of Mrs. Malcolm Mays.

Bridge Tallies Bridge Tallies

The Biz-Pro meetings, too, sought to combine business and pleasure.

Miss Edith Livingston had charge of decorating the tables with white cellophane Christmas trees, snowmen, blue streamers and white tapers. Girls made a contribution to the iron lung fund.

Despite their name, the business and professional women were not above movie stars and gossip.

Mrs. Gledhill, the former Miss Margaret Buck of Yakima, related interesting Hollywood anecdotes and described the YWCA work in the southern city. She particularly mentioned the Studio club in Hollywood where girls who are hoping for a “break” live and rehearse, “even tap dancers,” she says. Among board members are Mary Pickford and Mrs. Cecil De Mille.pledge

Both my mother and I were active in the YWCA during the 1970s when its “One Imperative” was to “use its collective power to eliminate racism by any means necessary.” Together we attended the 1973 national conference in San Diego where the farmworker leader Cesar Chavez spoke. But I hadn’t realized how involved she had been in the YW during the 1930s. After its members demanded a focus on workingwomen at the 1910 world conference in Berlin, the YW’s objectives changed from protecting women from the vagaries of industrialization to promoting their equal inclusion. To this day the YW remains a worldwide force working against violence and supporting women, racial minorities, people with AIDS and refugees.

 

ESA invitation
Biz-Pro dance program
Flo represented Biz-Pro as a council member at its conference in Chicago in November 1937. A newspaper report of the meeting quoted her: “It was grand and I liked Chicago so much,” says Miss Florence Wick, all in one breath, of the National Business and Professional Women’s Council of the YWCA meeting in Chicago from which she returned this week. The article says of the 26 council members, she was the youngest (she was 24). The meetings were held in the McCormick residence in Chicago, a memorial to Harriet McCormick, an early supporter of the YW. “The loveliest building you ever saw,” according to Miss Wick. “I met so many notables in YWCA work, I feel so very insignificant,” Miss Wick remarks, laughing.

Flo as drawn by her sister Ruth Flo as drawn by her teenage (biological) sister Ruth Wick

In April 1938, she traveled to Columbus, Ohio to the national YWCA convention and later explained the “reorganization of the business girls’ groups” to her local chapter. She traveled around the Northwest to represent the local group along with others including her best friend and my namesake, Molly (Mildred) Hardin, another single workingwoman. By that time they called themselves the “Business and Professional and Industrial Girls.” Industrial referred to women who worked in factories and plants, as opposed to the “business girls” who worked in offices.

Flo told me she had accepted that she would be an “old maid” when, at 33, she met my father. Still working as a stenographer, she had assumed the identity of “career girl.” Her sister Eva, my aunt, told me Flo was always popular. She had lots of boyfriends but she was in no hurry to get married. She enjoyed the independence and self-esteem that came from earning her own living as a workingwoman. And she thoroughly enjoyed the rich friendships and associations she cultivated in the women’s organizations she joined.

 

Me at the ’73 YW convention
Me and my namesake
Flo in her office 1970s
 

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