She let herself be saddened, or almost mourning. She let herself be vulnerable in Chicago. There was a great quote (from Gertrude) about the (Chicago Public Schools superintendent Ella Flagg Young): “It was my idea of a good time to see men afraid of a woman.” She was exposed to feisty women that made men afraid. She was given a vocabulary that she didn’t have before, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. Chicago gave her the causes into which she could channel that anger and that drive. Nina: I think Texas gave her the anger and the drive against degradation. Chicago, where Gertrude studied and taught school in her 20s, was a place where she really blossomed. That’s part of why there’s so little documentary evidence. I think the other thing is that no one would publish it. I think part of that is because we didn’t want to know, as a country. None of those books have stood the test of time. You see it coming out in books that were published at the time: this real, horrible poverty, and how degrading that sort of impossible poverty is. What I do have a sense of was that life on the frontiers, life as a farmer in the Great Plains or the Midwest, was so much harder than “Little House on the Prairie” depicts it, and so much less child friendly. Nina: I don’t have any sense of how common sibling rape was.
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