Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947), 1926. Photo by Edward Steichen.Willa Cather, who w
Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947), 1926. Photo by Edward Steichen.Willa Cather, who was born one hundred and forty-three years ago today, was an American author, best known for her novels depicting frontier life, including “O! Pioneers” (1913) and “My Antonia” (1918), and her Pulitzer Prize-winning “One of Ours” (1922), set in World War I.From the beginning of her career, Cather used her writing to push the boundaries of social norms. Her first short story, “Tommy, the Unsentimental,” for example, is about a Nebraskan girl with a boy’s name and a masculine appearance who saves her family’s bank business. One biographer later wrote that the story was one of several of Cather’s that “demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions.”Throughout her life, Cather had a number of long-term relationships with women, the most significant of which was her thirty-nine year partnership with Edith Lewis.Unsurprisingly, some scholars go out of their way to note that “Cather did not label herself a lesbian…, and we do not know whether her relationships with women were sexual.” While true, @lgbt_history rejects these classic tools of queer erasure. If our community only is allowed to claim those historical figures who definitively labeled themselves as queer and/or about whose sex lives we conclusively are aware, our history effectively starts in the mid-twentieth century.Willa Cather died on April 24, 1947; she was seventy-three. She was survived by her long-time partner, Edith Lewis. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #WillaCather -- source link
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