User:Grace428/sandbox/Miriam Michelson

Biography

Miriam Michelson was born in the mining town of Calaveras, California, in 1870. She was the seventh of eight children of Samuel and Rosalie (née Przylubska) Michelson, who immigrated to the United States (New York) from Poland in 1855 after fleeing Strzelno to evade anti-Semitic persecution. Initially, her parents had settled in Manhattan, but eventually headed west to Virginia City, Nevada. Miriam and her siblings would be raised here. Her parents were successful merchants who sold supplies to miners in the midst of the Gold Rush. Her oldest brother, physicist Albert A. Michelson, was the first American citizen to win a Nobel Prize for science; and the youngest, journalist Charles Michelson, became a close assistant to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Miriam began her writing career in 1895-1902 by writing journalism. She worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and later, in Philadelphia, for the North American. The topics of her articles included race, gender relations, cross-ethnic relations, ethno-religious identity, nationalism, and imperialism. She was known for supporting suffrage causes and addressing gender and political issues in her work. An example of such writing is her review of Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s sociological study of gender and power relations in Women and Economics (1898). In her review, Michelson’s lighthearted and conversational tone of writing allow her to praise Women and Economics while also educating her readers that Stetson’s “radical views” were likely to provoke the male audience regarding gender relations. Male audiences would be provoked by the headline that reads, “She Says … That Women Are Not Entitled to Financial Support from Men” as Stetson’s study would eventually become a declaration for the first-wave women’s movement and Michelson’s review of Stetson’s study would bring publicity to the matter.. In 1904, she concentrated on fiction-writing. Michelson died on May 28, 1942.

Career and Literary Works

Michelson maintained a 40-year career as an American/Jewish writer. She spent the beginning of her career as a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work as a journalist was quite notable, especially considering she wrote in the 1900s, a time when women of her profession were usually limited to Society reporting. The "Women's Page" section often consisted of articles about content aimed toward the stereotypical American housewife, such as fashion, food, etc., but Michelson's work subverted the gender norms of her career and era by covering topics such as crime and politics. Her articles were so successful that they were featured as a part of San Francisco's top daily news (i.e., San Francisco Bulletin and San Francisco Call), Philadelphia’s North American, and Arthur McEwin’s Letter. Miriam mainly addressed gender relations, but she also wrote about progressive culture. Topics on progressive culture included critiques about imperialism, racism, temperance, suffrage, and debates about women’s education, voting, and marriage status.

When Michelson moved from the Call to the Bulletin in 1898, she was assigned to what she called “the Chinatown detail”. Michelson was a part of a team of reporters covering the corruption in San Francisco’s Chinatown and California controlled by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The power of the press and the audience’s fascination with the exoticness of Chinese immigrants allowed Michelson to cover issues on the matter such as rampant police corruption and sex slavery. These efforts were meant to expose the dark racism of the city and to promote the success of rescuing victimized Chinese women. Michelson was aware of her own white privilege and wrote about gender and racial dynamics in Chinatown by avoiding the “condemnatory, moralizing tone” often found in missionary writing about Chinese immigrants.

In a Bishop's Carriage

Subsequent to her profession as a journalist, Michelson pursued a career as a fictional writer. Her first novel, In the Bishop’s Carriage appeared in 1904. Although this was the first of Michelson’s many novels, her literary talent is evident in the novel’s immediate popularity. The style of her novels was progressive as the settings of the novels take place in Michelson’s time, but her characters challenged the way in which women’s roles were viewed by exploring female victimhood and agency. In a Bishop’s Carriage was inspired by the story of the Hollywood film She Couldn’t Help It (1920) written by Channing Pollock (writer) and Douglas Bronston. Michelson’s success as a writer stemmed from her ability to create bold and interesting female protagonists who were not restricted by gender relations. In a Bishop’s Carriage is no exception in that the novel revolves around a female protagonist placed in the unconventional role of a pick-pocketer. Michelson’s characters often reflect of her own qualities, aspects and values of femininity. Her characters do not allow their gender to place limits on who they are or what they do professionally. Michelson’s characters often break traditional and stereotypical roles for women in that they are not housewives or submissive to a male protagonist but rather are characters who are independent with bold attitudes and mannerisms..

A Yellow Journalist

Another of Michelson's better-known works of fiction is A Yellow Journalist, published in 1905. The novel features another unconventional character that closely resembles Michelson. The protagonist, a successful female reporter, breaks gender constraints within journalism just like Michelson. The novel was published as part of a collection of stories in the Saturday Evening Post (1897-1963), an American magazine that published weekly during Michelson's life and career.

Other Notable Works

Michelson published several other novels including:

• Anthony Overman (1906), the romance novel involving a pure-minded reformist and determined female reporter
• The Awakening of Zojas (1910), a collection of four science-fiction novellas
• Petticoat King (1929), a story of Queen Elizabeth I
• The Wonderlode of Silver and Gold (1934), Michelson's final book

Although these works were not nearly as popular as In a Bishop's Carriage and A Yellow Journalist, they demonstrated her ability to sense the social realities at the time. Her use of female characters reveals Michelson's own journalistic experiences that required her to challenge gender stereotypes, women’s roles in politics and society, and the responsibility of women in a professional setting such as journalism (e.g., writing columns strictly for housewives).

Popularity

Merging her skills in newspaper journalism and writing for narrative fiction contributed to Michelson's success as a female writer. Her writing is characterized by her creativity in formulating quick-paced plots, using slang in character dialogue, and featuring young female characters as heroines in her novels. She also employed the first-person in her articles, reminding the audience of her role as a reporter and the sympathetic subjectivity she acknowledges as an “outsider” to the events and stories she experiences. Michelson's presence as a journalist was emphasized by her name appearing in many headlines and bylines of her work, despite most published stories at the time going unsigned by the author.

Michelson's journalism and writing were media that enabled her to express the growing presence of women's involvement in the political sphere.. Michelson helped to promote the activism of suffragist leaders (e.g., Susan B. Anthony and Charlotte Perkins Gilman) by writing about their activism. She also wrote about progressive issues ranging from the prejudices in the Spanish-American war experienced by black soldiers, Indian boarding school conditions, etc.(), and knew how to draw her audience in by using a light-hearted approach when addressing women's issues. In effect, writing about the diversity of women’s experiences in a vivid and entertaining style appealed to a broad range of audiences, but her articles especially appealed to the young, independent-minded women dominated by men in their professional environment.

Absence From Scholarly Discourse

Michelson's celebrity was gained through her work and literary techniques as a journalist, yet these acheivements were not deemed worthy of preservation. The emotional and strategic effects of her writing, its documentation of racial and ethnic diversity, and passion for championing societal prejudices were not considered sophisticated. Renowned critics such as H.L. Mencken admired the literary prowess of Michelson’s plots in novels such as Michael Thwaite’s Wife, but he dismissed her work as a “literary joy ride”, as he was unable to recognize the complex feminist tone of the writing. Although her work remains in obscurity as an American-Jewish writer, her popularity and success at the time suggest that Jewish women/writers’ voices were not silenced to the same degree as Michelson’s literary fore-mothers. That is, minority writers such as Michelson were given a voice as suffrage was an issue-selling topic that publishers wanted to benefit from. Michelson’s work in both fiction and non-fiction gave her the platform she needed to address a progressive mindset that was not limited to suffrage, exposing women’s political and social issues such as prejudice against the merits of “a single life and an independent career”, and the economic status of housewives.