Rewriting Herstory with Alexis Coe
11/23/18 - Our favorite herstorian, Alexis Coe, joins us to bust Thanksgiving myths, shade male historians who always disparage the wives and mothers of U.S. Presidents, and shine light on some of the amazing women she profiles in her new podcast for The Wing, No Man's Land.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Destry Maria Sibley
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Ad sales: Midroll
TRANSCRIPT: Rewriting Herstory with Alexis Coe
[Ads]
(1:02)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: I am very excited about today's episode. I talked to friend-of-the-pod Alexis Coe who is undoubtedly my favorite historian. She wrote this great narrative history book called Alice and Freda Forever. If you have not read it you should probably read it before the movie comes out. The movie will be coming out. And she is now the host of this podcast called No Man's Land.
[Theme Song]
(2:00)
Aminatou: Hey Ann Friedman! Is the vacation treating you right?
Ann: You know what? This is pre-recorded so I'm just going to guess yes.
Aminatou: Yes!
Ann: When does vacation not treat me or you or anyone right? Honestly.
Aminatou: When we're foolish enough to work during it so I'm really glad that you're completely offline.
Ann: You know, thank you for your support. Honestly your direct support in enabling this vacation.
Aminatou: I am so into this. I am very excited about today's episode.
Ann: Tell me.
Aminatou: I talked to friend-of-the-pod Alexis Coe who is undoubtedly my favorite herstorian. She wrote this great narrative history book called Alice and Freda Forever. If you have not read it you should probably read it before the movie comes out. The movie will be coming out. Alexis is also curating the ACLU's Centennial so all of the exhibitions around the country will be her work. That's pretty cool. And she is now the host of this podcast called No Man's Land. She was the co-host of a podcast that I recommend to people all the time, Presidents Are People Too. If you care about history, especially women's history, if you like smart women commenting on everything, Alexis is the person to follow across all platforms.
Ann: I mean I'm so glad you talked to her. That is the best setup that any ghost could ever hope for.
Aminatou: So here's Alexis. We talk about some Thanksgiving feels and a lot of just forgotten women's history and why -- like why it's so important to know these stories.
[Interview Starts]
Aminatou: Hi Alexis.
Alexis: Hi Amina.
Aminatou: Thanks for coming on Call Your Girlfriend today.
Alexis: Thanks for having me.
Aminatou: I'm glad that you're here for many reasons, because you wear many, many, many hats. So can you give the people at home kind of an abbrieved bio?
(3:55)
Alexis: I'm a historian and I guess I work across all mediums, so this year has been interesting. I launched the podcast for The Wing, No Man's Land, which I write and host. I am producing a series with Dorris Kearns Goodwin for The History Channel. I turned in the first draft of my feminist biography on George Washington.
Aminatou: Can you tell people what it's called? Because it's amazing.
Alexis: You Never Forget Your First.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Alexis: And I'm curating the ACLU's nationwide centennial exhibitions.
Aminatou: You have too many jobs as we have discussed.
Alexis: Agreed.
Aminatou: So let's start with the podcast because I started listening to it and it is very, very, very good and you excavate a lot of new history that we did not know about or that we completely misunderstood.
Alexis: I've never met history that I'm satisfied with and that's definitely a problem. And so as I approach certainly the first episode on Queenie Stephanie St. Clair, as soon as I started looking into the sources, I mean you don't take anything as fact. You always look into the sources. I just found things were wrong. They were just completely incorrect whether it was where she was buried, who she was married to, the years that she had arrived in America, where she came from. And some of it is her own master laying of misinformation and some of it is just bad history. But with women's history often there's never enough time. It's always this game of catch up and that's no excuse to sort of do it halfway.
Aminatou: Yeah. So Stephanie St. Clair who is also known as Queenie is this character that I certainly did not know about until you talked to me about her. And I was so shocked at how so much information about her life was still available, you know? Even though she was not somebody who has been taught in the history books or, you know, even people who are very steeped in New York history for example might not know about. And so I'm wondering if you can talk about how you encountered her the first time.
(6:00)
Alexis: I found her -- first of all don't sleep on academic press books. They're so good. You know this. I'm always giving them to you.
Aminatou: [Laughs] 100%. They're so good. They're so precise and so good.
Alexis: And they have the best stories and this was one where I had been interested in the book of Dr. LaShawn Harris who's a professor in Michigan and I saw that she had a new book on sex workers, numbers runners, and I found this chapter on Queenie in it and I thought this is so interesting. Why is it just a chapter? And realized that while there was a lot it's just not the sort of history -- like you have to spend a lot of time. You have to have resources. You have to be sort of a really creative researcher in order to go a little bit further with it.
And so that's what I did. I really utilized being in New York. It's a New York story. She's from Harlem. She's a numbers runner there, originally from the West Indies. And I just kept pulling everything that I could think of. So every time I hit a dead end I thought okay, I can't figure out where she's living but maybe housing records have something. And the housing records once I really studied them were really revealing. Then I'd go to naturalization records and called every cemetery in Harlem and just sort of kept going. And eventually I would find what I was looking for but it's really tireless work.
Aminatou: Yeah. I mean this is kind of the work I think that you have been engaged in for a long time, right? Is really re-teaching -- it's both like teaching and re-teaching and teaching people to unlearn a lot of things they think they know about women's history. So for example another episode that you have deals with Sylvia Plath and I will be very honest that I know the bare minimum about Sylvia Plath. Like I've never even read Bell Jar. It's not in my aesthetic of things that I care about. And even then the idea of Sylvia Plath is so ingrained in my head as this one-dimensional person and you do -- in the second episode of No Man's Land you do all of this work to actually show that, you know, that story is not true, the story that we know.
(8:00)
Ann: But don't you think that's because she's been presented as a phase you're supposed to have in college? And so if you don't go through that phase it's like well your opportunity to read Sylvia Plath has sort of passed.
Aminatou: 100%. I was like I am not this moody, broody . . . there's also something that is very I would say inherently like white college culture about it that I was not interested in exploring. And shame on me because turns out Sylvia Plath is a very interesting person and not for the way that her life ended and not for who she was married to for example or who she was in a relationship with.
Alexis: But it's definitely one of these stories you think you know her. You think you know what she's about. As soon as you start looking into it you think this doesn't match up with anything I know about a suicidal, depressive personality. She worked too hard. Those were episodes. And so immediately I saw that, and then also benefited from the fact that history is constantly changing. So a couple of years ago there was a discovery in an attic -- this is always just a gift. I get so excited when I read it.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Alexis: Even if it's unrelated to my research I'm like someone out there is going "Yes!" There are these letters to her psychiatrist that told us so much information about the aftermath of Ted Hughes. So we imagine Sylvia Plath as Gwyneth Paltrow in that terrible movie that actually didn't license any of her work so if you re-watch it you'll see it has nothing to do with her.
Aminatou: So ripping the phone out and all of that stuff was not real? [Laughs]
Alexis: I mean she was obviously upset but she never looked like that. She was really proud of her appearance which is another thing you don't associate with people who are severely depressed. She had platinum blonde hair which people really didn't do at that time and she dressed to the nines and when Ted Hughes had an affair, when she discovered it, yes she got upset but also she found his letters about the woman who he was eventually going to leave her for and the first thing she wrote to her psychiatrist was "These are really well-written."
Aminatou: [Laughs]
(10:05)
Alexis: And that's shocking and it's really interesting. It shows this detachment and it shows also she's not coming from this place of anger or . . . she's sort of realistic about who he is and she always was. But then when she actually kicks him out -- he doesn't leave; she kicks him out. She drops him off at the train station and she comes back and she says "I'm so excited, I can finally work and everything looks good." And what happens is she moves to London. All this time passes between when he leaves and when she commits suicide and it really isn't because of a man; it's because of a mental illness. It's because of this proclivity in an earlier episode of her life. And just learning that and also traveling upstate to talk to her best friend from Smith, going to Smith College, and looking through all of her materials, all of that is so important to crafting this story about who she really was.
Aminatou: You know the thing that I . . . whenever I have these conversations with you, what I'm so struck by is the work of learning who the women are that came before us. It's like tireless work but it's also work that we have to do in order to understand this moment that we're in. And, you know, obviously I understand how the forces of patriarchy and sexism work so that we don't know these women's stories but on a large level it's also very concerning. We just don't know them at all. And so I'm just curious about how -- if this was something you knew, when you decided that you were going to be a historian, if it's something that you knew you were going to do or if it is, you know, you're always like "Oh, I have to do my work then I have to undo the work of these other men who also came before me." [Laughs]
(11:48)
Alexis: Well it often feels like that. I think initially I just liked public engagement and so when I was in grad school I had an internship at the Brooklyn Historical Society and I found that I enjoyed that so much more than teaching undergrads who were sort of texting under the table. I don't like obligatory history. I really want people to enjoy it. But that's on me. If history is boring it's the historian's fault. And then you know I left academia to be a curator at the New York Public Library, so all of this is very much about public engagement.
So it's more about figuring out okay, this doesn't read well. It's not engaging. There's something missing from this. You know, people of color and women exist and that just doesn't seem to occur to the historian.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Never does. Never does.
Alexis: No, and so that's how it started and then I just often find there's a lot of fault or in this -- either women have been ignored, or in the rush to insert them in the narrative we missed a lot. So in the third episode, Ida B. Wells, there are all these comprehensive biographies and all these posts, you know? And overlooked in the Times about her. But we miss moments of genius. And so I really focus just narrowly on 1892, a six month span, when a 29-year-old Ida B. Wells has a moment of genius. I think young women don't just want to know what happened but how it happened because that's a part of learning about someone is how their mind works and how they engage with the world. So I want to know how did she become the foremost advocate for anti-lynching? And it's because of a personal experience and it's because she set out to understand it. And in that process of investigating discovered a whole new world.
Aminatou: I mean that episode is really -- hearing you talk about that episode was really fascinating because again, Ida B. Wells, somebody who is being re-excavated and studied. But that connection, you know, I won't spoiler alert it. I won't spoil it for anyone. You should listen to it. But that experience of like oh, it's rooted in a personal experience. It was also an assumption that a lot of people had made and that she sought to correct and that changed the face of the world, you know? And reduced lynching. And also blazed a new path for women reporters everywhere.
(14:05)
Alexis: And she's inspiring in so many different ways and that's an example of a story that took years in some ways for me to find my way in. I spent a lot of time in Memphis because I wrote a book about Memphis, Alice and Freda Forever, and when I was there because I'd spend these large amounts of time, and it's the same year, 1892, Alice Mitchell is actually in jail with Thomas Moss and Ida B. Wells' friends who were lynched. And so that brought it to my attention, this idea that this well-to-do white lady who was being tried not for insanity when she committed murder was in a jail with men who were being tried for simply starting a business that charged people of color fair prices. And I thought about that story. It just sort of sat with me for years and I thought we need to tell this very specific story and I always have to find the right medium. I work across all these mediums, because a story's not necessarily right in print. It maybe needs to be told in audio. Maybe it needs to be TV or film. Whatever gets the public to really see the point.
Aminatou: You've also made some very -- you know, you made some really inclusive choices when it comes to the first season of No Man's Land. I'm just like whatever your identity is, there's something in here for you. [Laughs] Which, you know, I always trust that you'll do that. But also I know that that's hard work. Like it's very hard work to say we're making a season of one thing and we are going to try to be as inclusive as possible and we're going to try to touch on as many experiences as possible. Can you talk a little bit about how that decision-making happens?
(15:45)
Alexis: I think a big part of that decision-making process is I set out to do that. I really set out to be as diverse possible, and to think who has been excluded from the narrative? Who has been misunderstood within the narrative? And of course we're talking about the way men have crafted history and what they've allowed to be in textbooks and what they haven't. And at the same time, as you know, I never feel like I've done enough. I never feel like I've been inclusive enough. And so I think you just have to constantly feel like you're working towards a goal but never quite feel like you're there.
So now we're crafting an episode on social clubs and that's so important to me because it's how I came to The Wing a year before it opened. It's how Audrey and Lauren, the co-founders, found me because I was interested in this. And I really want to dismantle this idea that there are these fancy clubs, white gloves, ladies who lunch, legacies. Everyone has disposable income. Because they're not. Women's clubs throughout the country are responsible for major civic programs. They literally built roads out west during expansion. They are responsible for at least 70 to 80 percent of the library system. Ida B. Wells of course was in like 20, half of them bearing her own name. Japanese internment camps had social clubs.
Aminatou: I mean that was the most radical thing that I learned from you speaking about this because I think that even in this -- you know, we've had a lot of conversations about The Wing and people have a lot of conversations about The Wing here, especially in New York, and in all the cities that they're in. And there's still this idea that it is a very white space or that it is a very white idea. And that's just not true, and it's also historically not true. So hearing you talk about women's clubs during Japanese internment was something that had not even occurred to me. But, you know, that civic mindedness, that has run through our historical DNA for a long time.
(17:44)
Alexis: And so much of that is based on early reactions to social clubs. So Grover Cleveland, a president, in the Lady's Home Journal disparaged women's social clubs and said there is nothing more dangerous to a woman's mind.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Than hanging out at a women's club? Ugh.
Alexis: Because men are scared by women gathering and they always have been. In the beginning in the 1860s these social clubs were white, but history's long so these things can change over time. So Sorosis which is, you know, uptown and now definitely all the stereotypes started out with women who were barred from seeing Charles Dickens speak. And they wanted a space in which the six women writers in 1868 could get together and talk to each other instead of having one kind male editor, one progressive husband. They wanted a community. And then over time it became something really different.
And you know then we see social clubs changing. Women of color start social clubs. It's really important to enfranchisement, to suffrage, you name it, to every political movement. And then in the '70s we see people like the Jane Club out of Chicago keeping a network of abortion providers. And then they sort of fall out of style. Rooted in the initial rejection of social clubs there is this idea that women, why do they need these spaces? Oh, it's a sorority. When it's really nothing of the sort.
Aminatou: You've been really good about connecting everything that happened in social clubs with the library system for example and for, you know, really pushing forward really big institutional ideas that have lived beyond the women's clubs. And again women's clubs don't get no credit for that.
Alexis: Even equal pay. I mean there was the first business women's club in New York conducted one of the first studies about women's wages, and the first line got me immediately. I remember seeing it six years ago when this was just like a side interest and I always try to look away.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Like another thing I'm going to get excited about!
(19:50)
Alexis: Yeah. And I mean almost every side interest I've had has kind of paid off. Like my first book was a side interest in grad school. I thought I can't study this; I won't be taken seriously. And now, you know, it's a huge part of my life. But they opened up with saying stop justifying giving women unequal pay by saying it's pin money. Pin money is money to go to the movies.
Aminatou: The theatre.
Alexis: To buy a hat. No, these women maybe don't want to get married. Their husbands have left them. They've been widowed. They're off fighting in a war. They need money to support their families just like a man does.
Aminatou: And what year was that?
Alexis: This was in the 1890s.
Aminatou: You're trying to tell me I didn't invent equal pay two weeks ago on my Instagram? That is shocking. This is the kind of stuff you always suspect but you don't -- if you're a civilian like me and all you have is Wikipedia University you . . .
Alexis: Ugh, my nemesis.
Aminatou: Your nemesis. [Laughs] I don't know how to tell you this, I went to grad school at Wikipedia University so it just always feels like there are so few resources.
[Music and Ads]
(23:42)
Aminatou: I want to talk about Alice and Freda, the book that you wrote, and also that you've been alluding to for a while. I didn't realize that, that it was a side interest that you'd had. And I mean it's going to be a movie so it has obviously paid off but also has done, for me at least, brought into focus and consciousness so much on a human level what it was to be like a queer person in this specific time in history and connected the dots so much to many other experiences that you can have. And so I'm just wondering if you can talk about that.
Alexis: That story keeps changing for me in so many ways. The protagonist, Alice, who's 19, and Frederica Ward, her same-sex fiancee who's 17, why are they an anecdotal opening? And then it gets into this speak that everyone glazes over. This is such a great story, a conduit of sort of . . . definitely a way to sort of fool people into thinking about modernity at the turn of the century and white men's apprehensions. And also this idea of sexuality and what it means to love someone else when you don't have a word for it because lesbianism is 40 years into the future. That story I told from the beginning as much as I could because there are never as many primary sources on women as there are on men so it does take far more sleuthing which is why I think I've gotten better at that. It's much, much harder than my other interest in presidential history, in political history, because there's a lot there. There's too much.
But then now I'm focused in one of the episodes on the end of that story, this idea that a doctor there, Dr. Frank Simm, wrote the first medical report in which he said "Okay, we have this test case in which obviously if a woman loves another woman it's going to drive her insane and it's going to make her violent. So we need to classify this as a mental illness." And then that is the origin story for so much prejudice and for eventually it being included in the DSM, in the Diagnostic and Statistical List of Mental Illnesses, that it is in fact a mental illness and it takes so long. It takes 100 years and activists and doctors and all sorts of people to get it eradicated. And that struggle I found so moving.
(26:03)
So what's really interesting about history is not only does it change as new information comes out but that your relationship with it over time changes and you realize different points of the story are compelling to you at different moments in your life.
Aminatou: Anything that young women and women ultimately care about is important because that's a message that we hear over and over again like oh, skincare? No. Kardashians? No. Even though we're on the outs with the Kardashians right now but that's another episode of this podcast. But, you know, generally those things tend to not get seen as very serious. Did you have any kind of fear when you started writing this, or kind of apprehension when you started going down this path, especially because you left academia, that your work would not be taken seriously?
Alexis: I didn't fear that and I just left thinking oh my god, this is -- everything's going to be so small. No one's going to benefit from this work. It's not going to cause any sort of conversation. And when I say start a conversation it's not like I want people to sit down and change the tenor of their dinner parties. I want the history that I tell to be so fun that when you go to a cocktail party you turn around and you're like "I learned this crazy thing about Ida B. Wells." That's what I want.
Aminatou: Oh, the kinds of dinner parties you go to are the kinds of dinner parties I aspire to and want to go to. [Laughs] Why did you decide to write a book on George Washington, the most written-about president?
Alexis: Well I think he's third actually.
Aminatou: What?
Alexis: I think it's Lincoln then FDR then Washington.
Aminatou: See, I'm learning something new right now.
Alexis: Penguin is still confirming this, my editor just told me this, but I might be the only woman to write a comprehensive biography of George Washington in the last 200 years.
Aminatou: That's wild.
(27:55)
Alexis: I didn't know that when I took this on, and certainly there are times I think what was I thinking? Who decides to write a feminist biography of George Washington? And it's really not feminist. It's just a normal approach as I would approach anything else, any other subject.
Aminatou: So it's feminist. [Laughs]
Alexis: Yeah, so it's inclusive which I guess means . . .
Aminatou: Or feminist, yes.
Alexis: Radically feminist. So I'm a presidential historian as well and I had a podcast on Audible called Presidents Are People Too that was on for three or four seasons and covered all the presidents. And I felt like every biography I read, I could get a good sense of who he was. You know, there were definitely limitations and criticisms I had. But with George Washington never. There was always so much praise of him and his body and his success and yet the biographies all start out the same. They say he's too marbled to be real. And I think okay, well that's probably because all you do is praise him the whole time.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Alexis: And they don't -- it's the same story over and over again. That was the other weird thing, there were no iterations. There's been no realizations. And there has been something called documentary editing within the primary sources around the presidents which is the gift to historians and again does not really exist with women's history. As soon as I started looking into it of course I found ten things that were wrong by the great Ron Chernow who by the way women's historians, my favorite dance parties -- literally, that's not a joke, they are really fun at dance parties -- they call him He with a capital H. And I took you to the grant biography lecture.
Aminatou: You took me to a Ron Chernow grant biography lecture and it was something. It was quite something.
Alexis: It was a sea of white people, white men mostly, older, and he was just hating on Julia Grant the entire time. Everything that happened was her fault. And that's also what I find throughout his biographies, it's not just that he's sexist and that a lot of -- then they get so distracted by Washington's physique. We all know he was great. We don't need to go on and on about it. I think this is an accepted thing as far as his body. There are other things he was definitely terrible about.
(30:05)
But I noticed that he kept defaulting to this really negative view on women, and it's not just that that's bad which obviously it is, it's that if you approach one thing in that way I have to question how you approach everything because it means that you're biased and it means that you're missing things. And sure enough he's missing things. He's completely conflating primary sources. He's misquoting. I mean talk about failing upwards. [Laughs]
Aminatou: I mean yeah, this is -- it happens in every industry. It just so happens in your corner of the world it has huge consequences on how people think that they know the world and that they know history. What is a thing in your Washington book that you think, you know, the dad historians have missed?
Alexis: They have all complained about George Washington's mom quite a bit and they . . .
Aminatou: Yeah, she's a nag, that lady.
Alexis: Yeah. And Chernow calls her crusty which I think is sort of unconscionable. I would never call someone in history crusty. I think that's insane.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Alexis: And that's just an example of the kind of words that he uses with women. And he talks about her for example, that she was difficult, that she was exacting with finances, that she rode horses too much, that she did all these things. Those are all the things that George Washington is praised for, for being exacting, for keeping these records, for being a great horseman.
She's also a great dancer. He's praised for being a great dancer. So that's what I mean, like it blinds them and they just approach everything in a biased way. And it made me feel like honestly sort of shit, like I've got to do this. And I do feel like if I don't do this, whether it's George Washington, whether it's Ida B. Wells, whether it's Sylvia Plath, Alice and Freda, that I am somehow complicit in this perpetuating of a very patriarchal approach to history.
(32:05)
Aminatou: Is there like a secret club of lady historians and you all divide out the work and you go okay, here's everything that is bad and we have our work to do but here's the stuff -- here's the slack we're going to pick up?
Alexis: No. I wish more women historians would take on presidential history. There are too many. I can't do them all.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Alexis: No, there's not. Sometimes it feels a little bit lonely. I have gotten really close with Dorris Kearns Goodwin over the last six months and it's been kind of amazing and I realized she was all alone for a long time.
Aminatou: You and Notorious DKG are . . . [Laughs] that's what I call her at least, are working on a TV project together, yes? Can you talk about it?
Alexis: Yeah. So it's sort of funny. So there are three male writers who I was in a writer's room but otherwise it's really women.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Alexis: I'm the producer. She's the executive producer. It's a three-part series and it's coming to History. It's very different even in the test shoot which I wrote a good portion of and I picked which boat to use. I got a woman in in most of the -- and she sort of steals the show in an actual battle scene because she existed. And if you want to talk about heroism it's a woman during the American Revolution. Her husband is murdered in front of her. She does not hesitate to man the cannon and she's so good that the British soldiers train their field cannons on her.
Aminatou: Wow.
Alexis: And she doesn't stop until her shoulder is blasted out, her chin is displaced, and she's the only woman -- she goes by Molly Pitcher. That's sort of the general term for her which shows you sort of how she's been treated in history that she's referred to as a woman who brings water. That's what a molly pitcher is.
Aminatou: Ugh.
(33:55)
Alexis: She's the only woman -- she's the first woman to receive a military pension. She's the only woman buried at West Point. And she's in there with George Washington stealing the show.
Aminatou: So the book is out in 2020. We'll obviously talk about it before then. The TV show is out.
Alexis: 2020. Almost everything is in 2020 except for the podcast.
Aminatou: I love this. 2020, your presidential year. [Laughs]
Alexis: Yeah.
Aminatou: Like the election. It's also Thanksgiving week this week. Today is the Friday after Thanksgiving, or this is when people will hear it. Thanksgiving is a very, you know, talk about historical lies. [Laughs] And just nonsense. What's one thing you wish people would know about Thanksgiving like once and for all?
Alexis: Well there's a silly thing then there's a depressing thing of course.
Aminatou: Okay, let's do both.
Alexis: Well I don't know if everyone knows you bake really excellent pies but they would not be a part of Thanksgiving because the pilgrims had gone through all their sugar.
Aminatou: What? There were no pies at Thanksgiving?
Alexis: No, and so I mean it's sort of the basic story . . .
Aminatou: Also thank you for your pie compliment. Most people don't know this about me so thank you.
Alexis: You make really good pies and homemade crust. The Thanksgiving story is sort of true, you know? The Plymouth colony was struggling. The corn had yielded because Indians -- first people -- had taught them how to farm but the celebratory dinner had more to do with venison which you don't see on the table, wild turkeys because they were plentiful. These pigeons that are now extinct. Vegetarian trigger warning.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Alexis: Where colonists -- early settlers -- will say that they could shoot into the air and 200 pigeons would fall down.
Aminatou: Ahh.
Alexis: So they were eating a lot of pigeons and yes, there was corn as well. That was like the big to-do. But the Native American people that they invited to share in this bounty, first of all they brought the good meat if you will. They brought five deer so that was like -- that's never talked about. And then 50 years later the second generation of all the people who attended this dinner are being massacred by the second generation of these settlers.
Aminatou: [Sighs] This is what settlers always do.
(36:15)
Alexis: Absolutely. And what's amazing is the justification still -- this is again white men history -- so I was in this documentary on the History Channel last year called Frontiersmen and I dared to say the truth about William Henry Harrison, everyone's favorite president, who they remember constantly was president and his grandson Benjamin Harrison was also president.
Aminatou: [Laughs] I'm Googling this right now.
Alexis: The forgotten about presidential dynasty. But in fact his early career was defined as basically an Indian hunter. He was in the military and his job was to settle areas that had strong Indian populations that were being obliterated. And so, you know, I said I don't know if he had a personal vendetta against Native Americans but his military career is defined by it. And the names that I've been called on Twitter for saying that? Like some of . . . I don't know. Someone the other day was like "How dare you, where would we be without that land, you cunt?"
Aminatou: Oh wow. Oh yeah, for one, you can definitely say cunt on CYG. But also wow!
Alexis: And this was just for stating the historical record on the History Channel which is adjusting to include more women. It's one fleeting sentence and I have gotten hundreds of responses like that. I've gotten emails. And it's that I dared to say it. I dare to be a woman who knows history. It's sort of incredible.
(37:42)
Aminatou: Yeah, I mean, and it's because it's so ingrained in our lizard brain that this is, you know, this is how we have freedom and this is how we have America and America is amazing. And that amazingness means people had to be murdered, you know? And that white people settling land is cool.
Alexis: But why can't we hold those two things at once? Why can't we understand that America got land and expanded and tell this story of western expansion that's usually so romanticized and also understand how that happened? That doesn't seem to be at odds to me.
Aminatou: I mean because I have always felt -- and maybe I'm the naïve one -- but I feel if people are presented with that information consistently that that is a truth they can hold. But when it's not in our textbooks, when it's not in our media or our media definitely works towards just doing very simplistic, unnuanced things, it's harder to have people un-learn things, you know, later that they've known than actually just tell the consistent truth of what something is all along. And so I -- you know, not to say I sympathize with assholes but I understand why they don't know. And I think that a lot of times it also scares me that they will never -- they will never un-learn it because their whole lives . . . I'm like this is how we get fake news narratives, right? Because people think that now you're trying to -- you know, you're trying to pull a fast one on them. And it's like no, you've just been lied to since the beginning. And also this is how people stay in power is by telling these romantic stories about who they are and where they come from.
Alexis: But that's like one of these fundamental things about approaching history, about approaching any situation that you encounter is your first reaction shouldn't be "Well this is against everything I've ever known so I must automatically reject it." It should be like "Oh, this is new information. How do I reconcile it with what I know?" And so it is very much fear-based when people react that way and that is bizarre to me and does account for so much of what we see in the world and certainly in our nation today that's divisive. But also when George Washington left the presidency after the second term it's because he was like factionalism is terrible. Partisanship is going to ruin the country. So there's also something really comforting to knowing that things were never okay so the fact that they're not now, yes, it has real consequences for generations. But honestly this romanticized idea, it's never been true.
(40:20)
Aminatou: Are you seeing any kind of trend or of, you know, historical correction that is giving you a little hope in this time that we're moving in a positive direction?
Alexis: Yeah. I think that there has been a sort of commercialization of feminism happening, and I think the fact that the first podcast season that The Wing put out is women's history and it's the kind of history that I would tell in any publication I've written for, I would tell this history in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the New Republic, anything that starts with New. Any of these places, that it exists here in podcast form for Wing members but beyond. That it's also free. There's no paywall. To me that's really encouraging and it's encouraging for us. It's encouraging for our conversations that we could be having. And for where we can go as a country.
Aminatou: Alexis, you are the best. Thank you for coming on Call Your Girlfriend today. No Man's Land is out now wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to learn about for the first time or more about Ida Bay Wells -- Ida B. Wells. I always say Ida Bay Wells because I'm a black teen. You know, Ana Mendieta.
Alexis: And Sylvia Plath. The idea of same-sex love, how it was criminalized, Queenie, social clubs.
Aminatou: Oh yeah. Yes, on a personal note I just -- I'm so happy that you do this work and that it is . . . it's available and it's accessible and I hope over the years it gets less lonely because there are more people that come to this with you. And it's always such a pleasure.
Alexis: Thank you.
[Interview Ends]
Ann: Wow. I wish I learned history from Alexis, like from day one in elementary school.
Aminatou: Ugh, she's the best. She's the absolute, absolute best. I'm so glad that we pre-recorded this, Ann, and I hope that when you listen to this you know how much I love you and I'm so happy that you're enjoying the sun somewhere so good for you.
Ann: Oh my god. Thank you for interviewing Alexis. She's the best. Thanks to Alexis for being on this podcast and I will see you on the Internet.
Aminatou: See you so soon boo-boo. Happy Thanksgiving!
Ann: Oh right, Thanksgiving.
Aminatou: Or happy the day after Thanksgiving. [Laughs]
Ann: Happy Indigenous People's Day too!
Aminatou: Yes, yes, yes. You can find us many places on the Internet, on our website callyourgirlfriend.com, you can download the show anywhere you listen to your favs, or on Apple Podcasts where we would love it if you left us a review. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. We're on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at @callyrgf. You can even leave us a short and sweet voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music is composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, our logos are by Kenesha Sneed, our associate producer is Destry Maria Sibley. This podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.