Interview with Dr. Julie Dobrow

Interview conducted by Madison Verner

January 24, 2025

 

Madison Verner: Can you share your academic background, and what brought you to become a scholar?
 

Dr. Julie Dobrow: (laughs) How much time do you have? 

 

Verner: As much time as you need!

 

Dobrow: I studied anthropology and sociology as an undergraduate, and I did a lot of women’s history. I went to graduate school wanting to take the theories and methods I learned from social sciences and apply them to the study of media, so I got my MA and PhD in media studies. I have had an academic career that has been kind of bifurcated because some of my work has been in social science looking at issues, mostly of children and media, thinking about issues of representation and whose stories get told and whose stories don’t get told. About fifteen years or so ago, a very smart colleague said to me, “you know Julie, it’s about time you started doing the work that’s most important to you,” and I thought that’s right. I returned to my early and deep interests in doing archival research and women’s history and biography, and I got hooked! That is what led me to publish two books so far that are biographies, and I’ve started to work on a third. That’s also what led to the creation of the Half the History Project.

 

Verner: That’s fantastic. I guess we can go into that. Can you tell me about the stories of some of the women featured in the Half the History Project?

 

Dobrow: Sure. Well, what we are trying to do with Half the History is to find and tell the untold and undertold stories of women’s lives, and we use short form biography, film, and podcasts to tell these stories. We have looked at a bunch of different women so far. I mean some of them are people that you have heard of. Many are people that you probably haven’t, and that’s kind of the point. We always use short form because we really want to cast a very broad net and invite a lot of people in. We haven’t officially launched the Half the History website yet, but when we do, it is going to have a feature called Tell Her Story, where, sort of like the NPR story core project, where we are inviting people to tell us, “who is a cool woman who you think should be concluded as part of this.” So far, the projects we have done in the last couple of years have focused on a number of women who lived in Concord, Massachusetts because we always try to include our students. We want to have stories that are kind of close at hand, so that people can get to the place, do the work, and see what that’s like. Last year, we did a lot of our work focused around telling the story of Ellen Garrison, who was a black child who grew up in Concord in the mid-19th century. In 1835, when Concord had its bi-centennail parade, Ellen single-handedly desegregated the parade by walking hand-in-hand with one of her classmates. This kind of pre-figured this amazing life where she grew up to be an educator and a civil rights activist. Decades before Rosa Parks, Ellen Garrison was doing some of the same stuff, and outside of Concord, and even inside of Concord, a lot of people don’t know who Ellen Garrison was. That is what we do. We had a film on her last year, and we have some podcasts that tell different parts of the story that we have up on our website as well. This year, we did a film about some of the women who lived in this historic house in Concord called the Old Manse. The Old Manse is mostly known because it was the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson for a period of time and also the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne, but there were some pretty damn cool women who lived in that house, too. It was an interesting house because it was essentially owned by the same family for 160 years. I became so interested in it and became convinced that there was more to tell than we had time to tell in our short film, that I am kind of reverse engineering this one and going from film to book instead of the other way around. This might well become my next book project, though I haven’t completely decided.

 

Verner: I love that! I am excited to see how that plays out! I saw that there was also some musicians that you featured. I think it was Amy Beach and Betty Carter as well. I like how you have a very interdisciplinary approach to women’s history.

 

Dobrow: We have done a lot on a number of artists of different kinds. A few years ago, my colleague Jenn Burton did a film about Ayodele Casel who is a contemporary Puerto Rican tap dancer and a spectacular artist who is very thoughtful about what she does. She is on Broadway right now. We have done projects on a number of visual artists, and we are always on the lookout for stories about interesting women, particularly stories that haven’t been told.

 

Verner: That’s super cool! Your research on children and how they make sense of race, gender, and ethnicity sounds fascinating. Can you tell us about your empirical research?
 

Dobrow: For many years at Tufts, we have worked on the Children’s Television Project, which is a project in which we take a look at children’s animated programming. We have come up with ways of coding it so that we can talk about the images of gender, race, and ethnicity that are embedded in it. We look both at how characters are drawn and how they talk, and we do a sociolinguistic analysis because we found that dialect and accent are also a really important way of conveying information about demographics. Sometimes writers use things like accent as a shortcut for storytelling, a cue for the audience about who a character is or characteristics they might have. Sometimes this is helpful, like when it suggest cultural connection, but it can also be used to convey stereotype. Over the years, we have found that there is a lot more diversity in children’s animated programming than there used to be. Kids have so many more options today about what they can see, where they can see it, and the platforms on which they see it, so that has really extended the diversity in really positive ways. 

 

Verner: You’re entire project is super cool, so I appreciate hearing a little bit about that. As the writer of After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet, how do you believe Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham influenced the popularity of Emily Dickinson and the differences in interpretations of the poems?

 

Dobrow: Frankly, we would not know Emily Dickinson, at all, if it were not for Mabel Loomis Todd. Mabel singlehandedly edited, rescued, published, and promoted Dickinson’s poetry. It was first published in 1890 in a volume that she co-edited with the abolitionist and literary advocate Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Mabel and Higginson edited  two volumes of Dickinson’s poetry that came out in 1890 and 1891. Then, Mabel solo edited another volume of the poetry and also edited a volume of Emily Dickinson’s letters. She was also lightyears ahead of herself in terms of understanding what you needed to do to promote poetry, especially Dickinson’s poetry, which was so much different than a lot of what was being published at the time, and people didn’t understand a lot of it. Part of what Mabel did is she crafted this image of Emily Dickinson, an image that we still have today as this elusive person who never left her house and only wore white dresses. Some of that’s true and some of it’s not, but Mabel knew it was good copy, so she used it. There is a lot of controversy about the ways in which Mabel and Higginson edited some of the poetry because they changed words to make things scan better and to make it more palatable to 19th century literary tastes. They regularized some of Emily’s rhyme schemes and her use of punctuation and capital letters, which was quite idiosyncratic. Most controversially, they put titles on poems that didn’t have any. In fact,  of the 1800 or so poems that we know today that Emily Dickinson wrote during her lifetime, only about a dozen of them had titles that Emily herself put on them. But Mabel and Higginson felt it was important to have titles on poetry, so they put them on. Then, because of a falling out that Mabel had with the Dickinson family, she ended up taking a lot of the unpublished poems and letters she had, and she stashed them in a camphorwood chest. She locked it up and didn’t talk about it for three decades. Then, in 1930, when the centenary of Emily’s birth approached, Mabel, ever the publicity savvy person,  realized it was time to bring out a new volume of Emily’s Dickinson’s letters. At this time, Mabel was in her seventies and had experienced some health problems. She knew she couldn’t do this work by herself, so she prevailed upon her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, to help her. Now, Millicent was no academic slouch herself. She was, in fact, the first woman to get a PhD in geology and geography from Harvard, and she had a very promising academic career of her own. She was completely thrown into confusion about whether or not she should do this, but filial devotion took priority over her own work and desires. Perhaps against her better judgment, Millicent helped Mabel to bring out a new volume of the letters of Emily Dickinson, to coincide with Emily’s birth. Then Millicent herself became something of a Dickinson scholar, and she ended up writing three different books on Dickinson’s life and poetry. Because her training was not in  English literature, Millicent knew she was never going to be considered to be an authority in the Dickinson world. 

 

Verner: Can you share about the research you have been doing for your new book, Love and Loss After Wounded Knee?

 

Dobrow: Sure! That one’s coming out later this year. That’s also a really cool story. This is a story about a woman named Elaine Goodale who was a white woman who grew up on a farm in a little, tiny town in the Berkshires. Elaine had earned some fame as a child with her poetry. In fact, ironically, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was very busily advising Elaine’s father about the curation of Elaine’s poetry, at the same time as he was advising another young woman and poet in western Massachusetts named Emily Dickinson. Elaine did not have many choices about what to do with her life. As many women of that era did, she became a teacher. Instead of teaching in the little, one-room school house in Mount Washington, Elaine went to Virginia to the Hampton Institute, which was a school that had been opened at the end of the Civil War to teach freed slaves. To generate additional revenue, they started taking in Native American students as well. Elaine became fascinated with Native Americans. She traveled out to the Dakota territories in the late 19th century, first as a teacher. Then, she became a school administrator, where she traveled around, looking at schools and advising teachers. She happened to be in Pine Ridge, South Dakota in December of 1890, right when Emily Dickinson’s first book was being published in fact. She was there three weeks before the Wounded Knee Massacre happened. It was there that she met the man that she would end up marrying, Ohíye’Sa or Charles Alexander Eastman. Charles was born in Minnesota but fled with members of his family when the Sioux were hunted down by the US Army. He lived in a number of different places in Canada and the U.S. as a child. He ended up going to many different boarding schools, which eventually led him to Dartmouth and then to Boston University medical school, where he received  Anglo-western training in medicine. His very first job after medical school was as the agency physician in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, so that is where Elaine and Charles converged. They met right before Wounded Knee. They fell in love, much to Elaine’s family’s great horror. Wounded Knee happened, just this unbelievable, awful, horrendous massacre of at least 250 Sioux men, women, and children who were shot in cold blood by the U.S. cavalry. Charles was tasked with trying to save them, as many as he could. He hadn’t been prepared for this kind of mass casualty at B.U. medical school, and Elaine was also called into service as a nurse. It was just a life altering experience for both of them, and it kind of solidified their resolve to work on behalf of Native Americans and to do this work together. They ended up getting married. They moved to many places in the early years of their marriage as Charles shifted jobs, in and out of government service and in and out of Indian Country. They ended up having six children. Between them, they wrote nineteen books and published hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. Charles became probably the most recognized Native American of late the 19th and early 20th century because he was articulate, handsome, and always in the newspapers. Elaine did a really good job of promoting his career, but as she did, she wasn’t doing much of her own writing, which caused a lot of resentment. They had very significant financial problems. A marriage that had started out with such promise became  a very troubled marriage. It lasted about thirty years. They separated in 1921 but never divorced. It’s a marriage that tells us a lot about the relationship between the U.S. government and Native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It tells us a lot about changing images and attitudes about gender and race in the 19th and 20th century America.. It’s both a story about two people who were pretty compelling, in and of themselves, and also a story that has a lot of resonances about things that were important and continue to be important in this country today. 

 

Verner: Yeah! It sounds like a super interesting story. I’ve heard of the Wounded Knee Massacre, but it’s super interesting to hear about a doctor’s perspective and also a marriage between a white woman and a Native American man during a time when that would not be very acceptable.

 

Dobrow: Well, that’s right. Interracial marriages were rare, but to the extent that they existed, they were much more common among white men and Native women than the other way around. 

 

Verner: Yeah. Do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History course? If so, could you share why you think this course is needed?

 

Dobrow: I support this effort one hundred percent. I think it’s needed because women are half of the population in the United States, but we are not represented in half of the history that is told. There are some amazing women. For some of them, we know their names, and we know their stories, but most we don’t. Understanding more about women and their stories will in turn help us to better understand American history. 

 

Verner: I completely agree! I really appreciate you doing this interview.