OH MY GOD, THEY WERE ROOMMATES.
“And They Were Roommates” explores Margaret Storrs Grierson (MSG), a former Smith philosophy professor and archivist, and her roommate and fellow professor Marine Leland (ML). We look at how an archivist records her own life and what that means in the pursuit of a true canon, especially in the case of queer history.
rEFERENCES
Flint, W. (n.d.). Boston Marriages: Two Healthy Unmarried Women Cohabiting Legally. History Daily. Retrieved November 28, 2021.
Grierson, M. S. (n.d.). Margaret Storrs Grierson papers [CA-MS-00028]. In Boxes 1-2. Smith College Archives.
Saxon, W. (1997, December 26). Margaret Grierson, 92, Archivist. The New York Times, 7.
Waithe, M. E. (2020). Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, 3, 3-16.
Soundtrack and effects courtesy of YouTube Audio Library.
suGGESTED rEADINGS
Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy by Mary Ellen Waithe
Boston Marriages: Two Healthy Unmarried Women Cohabiting Legally by Wynne Flint
TRANSCRIPT
*introduction music*
SYDNEY KILGORE: Hello and welcome to kNOw Women in Philosophy, the podcast which dispels the myth that there are no women in philosophy. I’m Sydney –
MIRIAM SALETAN: – I’m Miriam –
JENNA LINDSEY: – and I’m Jenna. This is Season Two, Students and Mistresses of Philosophy. In this season, we turn to women who studied or taught philosophy at Smith from the 1880s to 1980s.
SK: In today’s episode, “And They Were Roommates” –
MS+JL: ~oh my god they were roommates~
SK: – we’re gonna be talking about Margaret Storrs Grierson, her contributions to the Smith Archives, and her juicy personal life.
*music ends*
JL: Let’s get into the star of today’s episode: Margaret Storrs Grierson, or, as she reserved to herself, MSG –
MS: Monosodium Glutamate?
SK: Madison Square Garden?
MS: Marxist Study Group?
JL: No, what?! Margaret Storrs Grierson!
ALL: OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHH.
MS: So, she was born in 1900 and attended Smith, graduating in 1922. She earned her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College in 1929, which had only been 50 years since the first woman in the US earned her Ph.D. She taught Philosophy from 1930 to 1936, and she was the founder and first director of the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History. She was in charge of outreach and keeping records, and she traveled a lot for the collection. According to her New York Times obituary, she “traveled the world to document the experience of women from the colonial era to the present.”
MSG married Sir Herbert Grierson in 1938, but they began living apart – he in Scotland and she in Northampton, Massachusetts – within the first year of their marriage… which is an interesting fact that we are definitely gonna come back to later.
*romantic piano music*
SK: Enter Marine Leland, or as MSG called her, ML. She was born in Montreal and got her Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. degrees at Radcliffe College, and then taught French at Smith from 1924 to 1965 with a focus in French Canadian studies. She was also the life companion and roommate of MSG for fifty years until ML’s death in 1983.
JL: Those fifty years together were spent at the same address in Northampton: 66 Massasoit Street. And they had been living there since the early 1930s when they first moved in together, which sure is a long time to live with a roommate.
SK: Now, to be fair, this wasn’t super uncommon for the time. In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was something called a “Wellesley Marriage”, where two academic women lived together, independent of financial support from men. It was called a Wellesley Marriage because of its prevalence at historically women’s colleges, like Smith. So, we know that it wasn’t something super uncommon for the time, or may not have gotten too many raised eyebrows, but when one of them is technically married and still chooses to live with her roommate for fifty years, we can definitely speculate about the nature of that relationship.
*musical interlude*
JL: After their retirement, MSG and ML spent some time in Canada. This leads us to the 1968 Canadian year diaries. So, these diaries entailed several large line notebooks packed full of her cursive handwriting, each date recorded and underlined. And each of these notebooks only lasted about a month because she had so much to say, including the most mundane details. Like, I could tell you what days in January she spent vacuuming the hallway!
ALL: *laughter*
JL: Um, but I couldn’t tell you, like, what she even did with Marine… so the selection of detail here is very interesting… but she was truly an archivist at heart because she just wanted people to know what she did every day. She kept details like at the top of each entry, she would say like, what letter she had coming in and what letters she had going out. And oftentimes you would see letters going in and out, um, from ML. A lot of them were to ML, because for some of the time, MSG was in her hometown or she was in Denver. So she would be writing to ML.
My favorite entry, um, from her diaries was on January 31st. It just opens with “M and M home together again in Montreal.” And it’s just so adorable how she always refers to them as a unit. It’s never us, or we. It’s never MSG and ML. It’s M and M – they’re always a unit.
MS: Something that we found really peculiar was that, although MSG has all these references to letters between her and ML, they are nowhere in the archives. We went looking for them and there is very limited, almost no, correspondence between ML and MSG in the Smith archives. This is in contrast to the numerous letters and correspondence we have between MSG and all kinds of other people – usually over really mundane things – but since we don’t have these letters between her and ML, it almost seems like an omittance.
*musical interlude*
SK: Now all of this could possibly be explained by just a really close friendship, but we did find more evidence suggesting MSG having romantic interest in women that predates ML, all the way back to her childhood. And this was found in her mother’s diary, which was updated between 1900 and 1915, which was MSG’s birth year into her teen years. It’s a small line notebook with brief one-line descriptions of what MSG, or, as her mother called her, Peggy, was up to. But the interesting thing comes when MSG was twelve. Her mother writes “Peggy has her first crush—” not John, not William or James, but “—Carol.”
*crowd gasping*
SK: This really shocked us coming across this notebook entry because we were not expecting to see it put so plainly, in the year 1912, of Peggy having a crush on another girl. And the fact that her mother put this down for posterity, and for her and possibly MSG to look back on.
JL: It was really interesting to see her mother say something so plainly that MSG seemingly was never willing to admit. Um, but that’s not all the evidence there is with regards to her mother’s writing because MSG wasn’t the only one who referred to them as M and M; so did her mom! She saw them as a unit too, and they, and she, wrote down how they would both come back for the holiday, and she was worried for both of them. It was never Peggy and her friend, Peggy and her roommate. It was always M and M.
*musical interlude*
MS: Now to get even juicier, we found some tea on what MSG seemed to have thought of her marriage with Herbert. So to remind you, MSG and Herbert never actually lived together, even though they were married. And we only found two materials in the archives about the marriage. One is the marriage certificate and the other is an article about the wedding.
We did find a 1966 letter from the author of Herbert’s biography; his name was B. Everitt. It’s a typed letter from B. Everitt on official letterhead from the Aberdeen Academy Rowing Club. He’s replying to a letter from MSG requesting that the marriage NOT be included in Herbert’s biography. Everitt writes, “As your marriage is mentioned in the Chamber’s Encyclopedia, it would be rather strange if I were to omit it in a biography… In any case, I will respect your wishes.” He says he doesn’t even think his biography will be published anyways. And he assures her that she will not be “caused any embarrassment.” Her marriage is a cause of embarrassment. OUCH. So MSG wanted it omitted and we can kind of speculate that maybe the marriage was not important or meaningful to her.
*musical transition*
MS: In Mary Ellen Waithe’s piece, Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy, we learn a little bit about the True Canon and the True Canon of philosophy. The idea there is basically that because women’s work has been excluded from our understanding and teachings of philosophy, we don’t have a true history of philosophy.
And the same goes for here. There’s a lot about ML that is left out of the Smith archives, and we can speculate about why that may be, but because we don’t have that information, we don’t know the complexities of the relationship between ML and MSG and are possibly lacking a true history of MSG.
JL: This is a case of a woman censoring herself, of MSG gatekeeping her own True Canon – which isn’t exactly what Waithe is talking about; however, it’s definitely a related situation because it’s still showing how oppressive forces and societal prejudices influence the way people tell their stories.
SK: From what we’ve seen, MSG put too much thought and care into archives to be careless about what was included in her own collection. And I think that her thoughts on archives can be best shown by a quote introducing biography write-ups and anecdotes that she wrote of women she knew at Smith.
*romantic piano music*
SK: “Perhaps some of the back-scenes recollections might add a wisp of warmth to the portraits which already exist in the Smith archives. For me, the fun of remembering serves as a very small down payment on great debts while yet I can handle the coin of this realm.”
JL: So, I think what we can take from this quote and everything else we’ve learned about MSG is that the archives were of great importance to her. But it seems like she had different opinions when it came to her own archival record. It seems like she wanted to be remembered, but not known, especially when it comes to ML. It seems like she wanted to keep her for herself. In this biography right up, she was sharing the stories of these women and how she knew them because she wanted to share these people with the world and future generations, but she didn’t want to share ML. She didn’t want to share Marine. Marine was for her.
*romantic piano chord*
*outro music*
MS: Thank you for listening to this episode of kNOw Women in Philosophy. Your hosts have been Miriam Saletan, Sydney Kilgore, and Jenna Lindsey. Edited by Ryan Turner. Special Thanks to Theresa Helke, Dan Bennett, Nanci Young, and the Smith College Archives. And of course, Margaret Storrs Grierson and Marine Leland, for all of their help in making it possible for us to research and create this episode.