GRIT AND GHOSTS

A historian traverses favorite spots on the American landscape, finding inspirational stories of women who thought nothing of accepting a good challenge.

In future years, the Covid-19 project will emerge as a genre of its own in whatever field it happens to fall. In Foster’s case, driven to online teaching by the pandemic, she walked away, deciding instead “to find those trails of crumbs that would lead me to women who, living under different conditions from my own, each trying to exert her will on a world that has ideas of its own, had done it.” On the face, the eight women on whom Foster settles have little in common except an undeniable scrappiness. One, Gertrude Stein, who famously said of her native Oakland that “there is no there there,” trained as a doctor but also walked away because a male professor refused to give a woman passing grades. Another, Marguerite Lindsley, was the first female park ranger in federal service, growing up and working in Yellowstone National Park after earning degrees in the sciences—and then being sidelined for, yes, being a woman. A couple of her heroes are her own ancestors, young women who navigated the hard years of Prohibition and the Depression, artists and bohemians in a California that Foster herself rejected to move east (“there were no ghosts in those dry grassy foothills or along that foggy coast to guide me; I heard no whisperings in the landscape”). Foster properly recognizes that history is storytelling, and she’s very good about weaving her own experiences into the lives of her subjects without seeking undue attention or shifting focus away from them: a Mexican revolutionary hailed as a saint, women warriors, a singer who fought widespread doubts whether “female jazz musicians were, fundamentally, any good.”

Foster’s subjects are interesting in their own right, if tenuously connected, and well worth reading about.