Grace Harriet Macurdy (1866–1946) and her Impact on Women’s History: Response

Sheila Ager, University of Waterloo

The focus on Grace Macurdy’s role as a Classical historian and on Barbara McManus’ engaging biography of her has given us a great opportunity to examine ‘the feminine’ in Classical scholarship on a number of levels. Grace Macurdy wrote most famously about ancient queens, researching and analyzing the lives of these women;[1] in her turn, she became the subject of Barbara McManus’ study, The Drunken Duchess of Vassar. And this set of articles now examines Barbara’s work as well, so that we are in a sense working with a set of nesting boxes where we can uncover more and more levels of understanding as we peel away each successive layer of the onion (and yes, that was a deliberately mixed metaphor).

Judy Hallett remarks that Grace Macurdy came from Canadian roots. In thinking about that, it struck me that Grace was a close contemporary of one of Canada’s most renowned literary artists, Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942). Montgomery’s famous heroine, Anne Shirley (“Anne of Green Gables”), and even more so her slightly less famous counterpart, Emily Starr, face the same kind of struggles to succeed as professional women in this time period as did Grace Macurdy and Montgomery herself.[2] Anne Shirley, the impoverished orphan, and Grace, the offspring of poor working class parents, both prided themselves greatly on achieving an advanced level of education. Grace’s tribute to Vassar College embodies her conviction that the only way forward for women was education:

Thou art our vision splendid
of womanhood to be,
in knowledge pure, from bondage
of vanity set free.

Like Anne Shirley, Emily Starr, and L.M. Montgomery, Grace seems to have had a fondness for the composition of rather sentimental Victorian verse — in all their cases, the true talents of these women, real and fictional, lay elsewhere.

Barbara’s book works through a number of themes, but from this set of papers, I think there are two that stand out: first, the innovativeness of Grace’s scholarship and second, the challenges that she faced building a career as an academic and a woman in her time and place. All of the papers emphasize the uncommon focus of Grace’s scholarship on women and the methodological advances that went with it: as Judy Hallett states, Grace’s research “ranks as the first effort by a classical scholar, female or male, to recover and document the lives of individual women whose names are part of the ancient Greco-Roman historical record.” Methodologically, it meant that Grace had to free herself from the purely philological approach, and delve into the sciences of epigraphy and numismatics, papyri and material culture as well.[3] The great advantage of her novel approach stands out when we compare her work to (for example) that of Arnold Wycombe Gomme, who was actually twenty years younger than Grace. In his extensive and much-cited article on the position of women in Athens, written less than a decade before Grace published Hellenistic Queens, Gomme relied largely on literary evidence.[4] He challenged the prevailing view of his time “that the position of women in Classical Athens was an ‘ignoble’ one” by pointing to the great female characters of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and others. His analysis is a highly idealizing one, concluding romantically that “it was the people of Greece who created and preserved the story of Helen”, as if the figure of Helen in Greek literature was a wholly unproblematic one.[5]

One of Grace’s brave contributions, to which Walter Penrose draws attention, was her frank discussion of the question of sexuality, specifically the alleged concomitance of sexual vice and moral turpitude. If a woman is violent and prone to murder, then of course it stands to reason (and both ancients and Victorians thought alike on this) that she is also sexually promiscuous. But Grace stressed repeatedly the excellent observation (already adumbrated by William Tarn) that in fact very few of the Hellenistic queens (not even Cleopatra VII) can be charged with much in the way of sexual misconduct.[6] Grace does not even blench (very much) at the incest practised by the Ptolemies, though, as Walter Penrose remarks, she could not restrain herself from condemning the triangulated marriage of Ptolemy VIII to both his sister and his niece, her daughter.[7] I wonder whether, in this instance, Grace was actually reacting (perhaps unconsciously) to a particular form of incest that has been identified and labeled by Françoise Héritier as “incest of the second kind”.[8] This brand of “incest” need not actually entail sexual relationships between close kin: the incest is held to be created by one individual having sexual relations with two (or presumably more) individuals who are closely related to each other, not to the sexual partner. It is interesting that, in spite of the fact that there might be no close-kin sexual activity involved, incest of the second kind has been condemned by some cultures as the most abhorrent form of incest possible.[9] In the case of Cleopatra II, Cleopatra III, and Ptolemy VIII, of course, the sexual activity was incestuous no matter which way we look at it; but it is intriguing that Grace responded so strongly to this incestuous marriage in particular.

Sexuality almost always plays a role in historical debate about women’s lives, much more so than men, even though in the ancient societies under examination, the men were probably having a lot more sex than the women. Beth Carney is somewhat critical of Grace for thinking that Eurydice’s physical appearance might have “swayed her contemporaries.”[10] And yet, it is a proven fact that women, more than men, are judged on their physical appearance, and especially their sexual attractiveness.[11] So it may be fitting, even if ironic, that Barbara is drawn into commenting on Grace’s own attractiveness: “her oval face was pleasant, but rather plain, with a broad forehead and long nose.”[12] Queens, of course, are always beautiful and desirable; at least, none of them are ever said to be homely, and in spite of the fact that most royal marriages in antiquity were political, our ancient sources repeatedly stress sexual attraction.[13] Court poets such as Theocritus and Callimachus knew where their own best advantage lay, and were accordingly effusive in their praise of the beauty and sexual desirability of the queens.[14]

Gillian Ramsey comments that “few, if any, of the new studies [on women can] avoid citing Macurdy — her work remains foundational, canonical even.” We certainly cannot avoid Grace’s work, and I think one of the major contributions of Barbara’s book is to revive respect for Grace’s scholarship in this generation. Nevertheless, as all the papers caution us, Grace’s work was still of its time. Barbara herself alludes to this, stating that “Grace frequently employs a moralizing tone that was very common in her time but is not typical of modern scholarship.”[15]

Walter Penrose draws attention specifically to the “orientalist” lens through which Grace perceived the story of Cleopatra VII. “Orientalism” — in the sense of an intellectual and artistic fascination with things eastern on the part of westerners, combined with a sense of moral superiority — was a thriving cultural meme in Grace’s day. It is interesting to note that Grace’s book came out only shortly before the Cecil B. DeMille film Cleopatra starring Claudette Colbert was released in 1934: Ms. Colbert’s portrayal of Cleopatra emphasized a highly orientalising kind of Art Deco pseudo-Egyptianness. To the Romans, Cleopatra was a wicked, eastern, Egyptian queen, the meretrix regina of Propertius (3.11), who entertained legions of lovers and corrupted poor simple-minded Marc Antony with all the soft and decadent luxuries of the east. Grace, as Walter Penrose shows, evidently found it difficult to shake off that perspective completely, even in the midst of her efforts to judge Cleopatra by the same standards as the kings. While she rejects the Roman view on Cleopatra’s alleged promiscuity, in the end Grace does seem to concur that it was Cleopatra’s orientalising, feminizing influence that brought Antony down.

Beth Carney points out that Grace “objected to the numerous lurid and sensationalized comments about royal women.” But in fact, as Beth also remarks, Grace often did accept as true the actual alleged crimes of ancient queens; for instance, she accepts the Potiphar’s wife version of the death of Agathocles, the son of Lysimachus, wherein his stepmother Arsinoë II brings about his murder.[16] What Grace strove to do, however, as we have seen, was contextualize the queens and to apply even-handedly the same standards as were applied to ancient kings. As Beth Carney shows in her discussion of Grace’s account of Eurydice, Grace preferred “a toned down version of the alternate tradition, in which Eurydice was less evil, more victimized, but somewhat less heroic.” Beth is correct in her negative correlation of heroism and victimhood, and I think we may push it further and bring a gendered outlook to this: being a victim, in antiquity at least, was more appropriately the role of the female, and not the male. Euripides’ Trojan Women are tragic and they elicit pity and fear from the audience; but it is hard to imagine that a lot of men helplessly bemoaning their fate would have had the same effect on an Athenian audience. So Grace’s Eurydice is perhaps more appropriately “feminine” than some of her other queens, such as Laodice I or Cleopatra III. In the end, though, I think that Grace’s final assessment of Cleopatra VII, even with its methodological flaws, sums up very well Grace’s approach to all her queens: “She was not a pattern of virtue, nor a monster of wickedness, nor a good bourgeois wife, nor a great and splendid patriot, but a Ptolemy with the virtues and vices of her race.”[17]

We could say that Grace herself was “victimized”, if we wanted to use that term, by the circumstances of her time. But like many women, she refused to be a victim. Judy Hallett and Beth Carney both address Grace’s feminism and her involvement in the contemporary suffrage movement. Judy Hallett references Grace’s “unhappy experiences serving on the male-dominated Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens” during the 1920s. Even more painful, I suspect, was Grace’s treatment at the hands of another woman, a self-described feminist, which must have felt like a great betrayal. Abby Leach, the head of the small Greek Department at Vassar, hired Grace in 1893. But when Grace received her doctorate, and when she made it clear that her mind was her own, Abby Leach turned on Grace, and mounted a concerted campaign, year after year, to have her fired. The description of this conflict is one of the most compelling parts of Barbara’s book. Both Judy Hallett and Beth Carney suggest that Grace’s own experiences — as Beth says, “characterized by struggle against those with greater institutionalized power” — coloured her interest in the experiences of women in an ancient patriarchal society, as well as her own personal determination to resist injustice wherever she saw it.

Grace characterized her work on Hellenistic queens as a “study of woman-power”. The question of female “power” is something that is raised by Beth Carney and Gillian Ramsey, both of whom challenge Macurdy’s rather narrower interpretation of it. Gillian Ramsey is “inclined to call a much wider array of queens powerful” than was Grace. She poses moreover the interesting question of how we may “handle productively the brand of agency and influence wielded by a queen who did not go around murdering people?”, and suggests that since we now have more studies of quiet queens than of quiet kings, we might now be able to “apply terms of reference devised for studying female leaders to male ones.”[18] Beth Carney remarks on the restrictiveness of Grace’s views on female agency, chiefly because Grace saw “power” as institutional, as held only by those in office. Influence, to her, was not “power”.

I confess that I rather lean in Grace’s direction myself on this front, since I tend to see power as a contractual thing: queens may be granted “power” by their husbands or their sons, but it is only provisional power.[19] Those same husbands and sons may choose to take it away again, as was — perhaps — the case with Laodice I.[20] Of course, such a reductionist view of “power” begs the question of the contractual nature of the king’s own power: kings only have power because their followers agree that they have power. The later Seleucid empire was crowded with numerous would-be kings who failed to persuade a sufficient number of followers to grant them exactly that. And in any case, I also accept the views of my colleagues that influence does get results and should be seen as some kind of power. If I can mix metaphors freely, as I did earlier, I think I can get away with holding two diametrically opposed points of view simultaneously.

All the papers emphasize that Grace’s work is dated in some ways, and offer directions for moving ahead, for instance focusing now on the question of “queenship” per se, rather than on individual queens as Grace did. Prior to reading Barbara’s book, I think I myself had a tendency to focus too much on how dated Grace’s work now is, and not enough on its virtues. The Drunken Duchess of Vassar has given me the gift of knowing and understanding someone whom I think I have never really, fully appreciated, and for that I am very grateful to Barbara McManus.

Bibliography

Etcoff, N. 1999. Survival of the Prettiest, New York.

Gomme, A. W. 1925. “The Position of Women in Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries,” Classical Philology, vol. 20, no.1, pp. 1–25.

Héritier, F. 1999. Two Sisters and their Mother. The Anthropology of Incest, New York.

Macurdy, G. H. 1932. Hellenistic Queens. A Study of Woman-Power in Macedonia, Seleucid Syria, and Ptolemaic Egypt, Baltimore.

Macurdy, G. H. 1937. Vassal-Queens and Some Contemporary Women in the Roman Empire, Baltimore.

McManus, B. 2017. The Drunken Duchess of Vassar. Grace Harriet Macurdy, Pioneering Feminist Classical Scholar, Columbus, Ohio.

[1] Macurdy 1932 and 1937.

[2] Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908, when Montgomery was 36 years old, the same age as Grace was when she received her PhD from Columbia University in 1903 (McManus 2017: 56–7). Montgomery wrote several more novels about Anne, but her heroine Emily Starr, an aspiring writer, was much closer to the real-life Montgomery than was Anne. Emily was featured in the books Emily of New Moon (1923), Emily Climbs (1925), and Emily’s Quest (1927).

[3] McManus 2017: 191–2.

[4] Gomme 1925.

[5] Gomme 1925: 25.

[6] Macurdy 1932: 2, 12, 220–1.

[7] Macurdy 1932:116–17, 158.

[8] Héritier 1999.

[9] See, e.g., Leviticus 18.19 and 20.14.

[10] Macurdy 1932: 22.

[11] Etcoff 1999.

[12] McManus 2017: 36.

[13] Grace herself enthuses over the apparent beauty of Arsinoë II (1932: 112).

[14] E.g., Theocritos Idylls 15 and 17 (Berenice I and Arsinoë II); Callimachus Coma Berenices with Catullus 66 (Berenice II).

[15] McManus 2017: 195.

[16] Macurdy 1932: 113–14.

[17] Macurdy 1932: 222; cf. McManus 2017: 198–9.

[18] In April of 2017, a graduate student of mine at Waterloo, Mitchell Elvidge, successfully defended his Master’s thesis on Seleucus IV Philopator, in which he demonstrates very clearly the challenges of the topic: because Seleucus IV, who fought no wars, was sandwiched between two much more active kings — Antiochus III and Antiochus IV — both the ancient and the modern sources on the period tend to be either dismissive or silent on the subject of Seleucus himself.

[19] The Ptolemaic dynasty presents a significant exception to this rule: there it seems clear that female power ultimately became at least as institutionalized as male power, and was thus not held only by the good grace of the king. Nevertheless, such an assertion should still take into account, for example, the mysterious disappearance of Cleopatra V Tryphaena, the wife of Ptolemy XII, and her subsequent reappearance while he was in exile: if she was “put aside” for any reason, it behoves us to ask whether she could have done the same to him.

[20] Grace subscribed to the view that Antiochus II divorced and “demoted” Laodice I when he married Berenice, the daughter of Ptolemy II (1932: 83). As Gillian Ramsey points out, this view, while still held by some today, has rightly been challenged. I use the example here only as an illustration of how a king might remove “power” from a queen.