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An Interview with Kathleen Courtenay Stone

March 5, 2022 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

THEY CALLED US GIRLS: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men by Kathleen C. Stone is a wonderful new collective biography of seven women who aspired to professional jobs in the mid-twentieth century. It was an era when women were expected to find fulfillment at home, in the mold of television’s June Cleaver. But these women broke the mold, defying expectations to succeed in jobs reserved almost exclusively for men – as doctor, lawyer, artist, physicist, executive director and intelligence officer.

An Interview with Kathleen Courtenay Stone

Q: What literary pilgrimages have you been on?

A: My first literary pilgrimage was arranged by my mother. When I read Little Women, she took me to Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Alcott’s New England setting was very familiar to me but seeing where she wrote was a new experience.

Since then, I’ve ventured farther afield. In Ravenna, Italy, I paid a visit to Dante’s tomb. My husband and I spent a day in Dublin, Ireland, at the Dublin Writers Museum, the James Joyce Center, and the library at Trinity College, where Yeats’s original papers were on display.

Then, on a trip to the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut to see Turner watercolors, I made an unexpected literary pilgrimage of a sort. After seeing the paintings, we went down to the dock and boarded the Charles W. Morgan, a whaler launched in New Bedford in 1841, essentially the same vintage as the Pequod in Moby Dick. Standing on the ship’s deck, I could practically see the crew crowding around Ahab and cheering his promise of a gold doubloon to the first man who spotted the white whale.

Q: Does writing energize or exhaust you?

A: Both, but mostly it energizes me. I spend a lot of time mulling over the facts I’ve learned and refining what I want to say about them. The tack I take is seldom obvious at the outset, but I like trying out different angles to see what flies. I’m always working on something in my head. Anyway, I wake up in the morning wanting to get started on the next iteration, and that energizes me. But after some hours at my desk, I am exhausted. Then it’s time to go back to the rest of my life.

Q: Does a big ego help or hurt a writer?

A: A truly big ego will get in the way of the essential effort to understand other people and events. Aiming toward a kind of empathy is crucial, whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction.

That being said, most writers face long periods of work when they don ‘t receive much external validation. Having a healthy belief in one’s self is an incredibly useful tool for sustaining the uncertainty that can naturally develop. Thinking that it is possible to get where one wants to go, literarily speaking, is a product of a healthy, but not unduly large, ego.

Q: What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?

A: I love historical research—political, social, cultural. I feel that being a writer gives me license to immerse myself in a subject I want to learn about.

When I started work on my book, I read books on women’s history, which introduced me to some of the best thinkers in the field and gave me a road map of American women’s experiences for the last century and a half.

The interviews themselves are a substantial part of my research. I recorded the interviews, and later had transcripts produced, but at the same time, I made handwritten notes of what I was seeing and understanding, and I incorporated some of that in the various chapters.

Often I needed to fill in gaps with more information, and that led me to talk to the woman’s family and friends. I was constantly learning about subjects like the history of Harlem, intelligence gathering during World War Il, development of the polio vaccine, the advent of nanotechnology. Even census data contained gems about the kind of work women did, and how it differed depending on race, among other factors. The endnotes in the book give a pretty good overview of how I spent my research time.

Q: What do you owe the real people you write about?

A: The short answer to this question is honesty. It’s important to adhere to the known facts. That’s true in any nonfiction writing, including biography, where other people’s reputations are at stake.

But “honesty” is too simplistic an answer. Even within the bounds of honesty, a writer exercises tremendous discretion over what to include and what to omit, what details will make a scene come alive. As I tackle those questions, I rely on advice from other writers. Two in particular come to mind.

Peter Trachtenberg was one of my teachers at Bennington, where I got my MFA. He didn’t rule out including an imagined scene or created dialogue, but if you do, he said, it’s important to clue the reader in. The metaphor he used was a dog thumping its tail to signal that something is coming, by which he meant that with a phrase or a word, you let readers know that what they are about to read is your creation, rather than verifiable fact. Being clear with readers keeps the writer in the position of reliable narrator.

I also think about something Adam Gopnick wrote in the New Yorker several years ago. We should be charitable about the moral failings of our ancestors, he said. He meant this broadly, not only our literal ancestors. As he explained, this is not an act of charity to them but an act of charity to ourselves. “Our own unconscious assumptions and cultural habits are doubtless just as impregnated with bias as theirs were. We should be kind to them, as we ask the future to be kind to us. ” Taking this approach helps keep me humble and empathetic to others and the context in which they lived.

Q: What does literary success look like to you?

A: Based on personal interviews and other research, I was able to create portraits of women who were ambitious, in the sense of using their talents to do the work that interested them, even if it wasn’t considered acceptable for women at the time. I hope my book stimulates conversations among readers about female ambition—what it is, how it manifested historically, and how to foster it today. Cross-generational conversations would be really exciting, particularly if they led to a better understanding of what we can do today to support women with ambition.

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Kathleen Stone is the author of They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men.

Kathleen studied art history at Oberlin College, and holds a JD from Boston University School of Law and an MFA from Bennington College. As a lawyer, she was a law clerk to a federal district court judge, a litigation partner in a law firm, senior counsel in a financial institution, and a solo practitioner. She taught seminars on American law in six foreign countries as a Fulbright Senior Specialist and through the Center for International Legal Studies.

After many years practicing law and writing countless legal briefs, she turned to other sorts of writing. Her reviews of recent books and art exhibitions have been published in Ploughshares and Arts Fuse. Other work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Pangyrus, The Timberline Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. She also co-hosts Booklab, a literary salon.