Florence Guy Seabury

Florence Guy Seabury (formerly Woolston; April 1881 – October 6, 1951) was an American journalist and feminist essayist, and a member of Heterodoxy.

Early life and education

Florence Guy was born in 1881 in Montclair, New Jersey,[1] the daughter of Ernest Guy and Cordelia Clark Guy. She studied sociology at Columbia University.[2]

Career

Woolston worked as a teacher in the Settlement movement in New York City during the 1910s.[3] She was on the editorial staff of the Russell Sage Foundation,[4] and editor of The Woman Voter, a suffrage magazine.[5] She was a regular contributor to Harper's, The New Republic, Redbook, The Nation,[6] and other popular periodicals, often writing humorous observational essays about gender.[7]

In 1919, she wrote a satirical essay on the "marriage customs" of the women of Heterodoxy, a feminist debating club she belonged to; it was partly modeled on Heterodite Elsie Clews Parsons' serious study of family dynamics, The Family.[8][9][10] Her comic essays were collected in The Delicatessen Husband and Other Essays (1926),[11] illustrated by Clarence Day.[12] She also published a book on marital relations, Love is a Challenge (1936),[13] and another, We, the Women (1938).[14]

Personal life

Florence Guy married sociologist Howard B. Woolston in 1904. She married her second husband, psychologist David Seabury, in 1923. Both marriages ended in divorce.[15] She died in 1951, age 70.[16]

In 2015, Florence Guy Seabury was included in a large-scale wall diagram of American feminist history, Andrea Geyer's Revolt, They Said, at the Museum of Modern Art.[17]

References

  1. ^ Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner, eds., Redressing the Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s (University Press of Mississippi 1988): pp. 234-235; ISBN 9781617034688
  2. ^ "Florence Guy Woolston" in John W. Leonard, Woman's Who's Who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada, 1914-1915 (American Commonwealth Company 1914): p. 905.
  3. ^ Elaine Showalter, Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (Simon & Schuster 2001): p. 121.
  4. ^ "Florence Guy Woolston" in John W. Leonard, Woman's Who's Who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada, 1914-1915 (American Commonwealth Company 1914): p. 905.
  5. ^ Nancy Walker, "'I Cant Write a Book': Women's Humor and the American Realistic Tradition" American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 23(3)(Spring 1991): p. 61.
  6. ^ Sara Alpern, Freda Kirchwey, A Woman of the Nation (Harvard University Press 1987): p. 49; ISBN 9780674318281
  7. ^ Thomas Grant, "Feminist Humor of the 1920s: The 'Little Insurrections' of Florence Guy Seabury," in Regina Barreca, New Perspectives on Women and Comedy (Gordon and Breach 1992): 157-167.
  8. ^ Kenneth E. Miller, From Progressive to New Dealer: Frederic C. Howe and American Liberalism (Penn State Press 2010): 175-176; ISBN 9780271037424
  9. ^ Louise Lamphere, "Feminist Anthropology: The Legacy of Elsie Clews Parsons", American Ethnologist 16(3)(August 1989): p. 521.
  10. ^ Florence Guy Woolston, "Marriage Customs and Taboo among the Early Heterodites," Scientific Monthly (November 1919): p. 27.
  11. ^ Florence Guy Seabury, The Delicatessen Husband and Other Essays (Harcourt Brace 1926, reprinted by the University of Michigan in 2007).
  12. ^ Guide to the Clarence Day Collection, Yale University Library (2012).
  13. ^ Florence Guy Seabury, Love is a Challenge (McGraw-Hill Book Company 1936).
  14. ^ "Childish Traits in Adult Can Easily Ruin Marriage" The Pantagraph (December 1, 1938): p. 13. via Newspapers.com Open access icon
  15. ^ Joel Phister and Nancy Schnog, Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (Yale University Press 1997): pp. 193, 208-210; ISBN 9780300070064
  16. ^ Obituary: "Mrs. Florence Seabury" New York Times, October 8, 1951.
  17. ^ Andrea Guyer, Revolt, They Said (Museum of Modern Art, 2012 - ongoing). Accessed March 31, 2024.