Throughout the thirties Johnson continued to write and to participate in activist union groups on behalf of dispossessed and poverty-stricken victims of the Depression. Indeed, she met her husband, Grant Cannon, then a field examiner for the National Labor Relations Board, in a St. Louis courtroom, as she says, “in those days when unions were young and revolutionary and a force for change” (Seven Houses, p. 88). A Mormon by birth and the grandson of a pioneer, Cannon made his way to St. Louis “by way of San Francisco, where he had arrived by freight cars and hobo camps in search of work” (p. 87). In 1942, at the age of thirty-two, Johnson married Cannon and not long after he went to war leaving her with a young child and pregnant with a second.10 In 1947, now a family of three young children, the Cannons moved to Newtown, just outside of Cincinnati, to the first home of their own, which they called the Old House. Here Johnson mothered her family, deepened her interest in nature, and watched approvingly as Cannon was absorbed by and acted on the world around him. According to Johnson, besides editing the Farm Quarterly, he was also a photographer, a pilot, a potter, an active Quaker, and an amateur playwright. He published Great Men of Modern Agriculture, and won honors, prizes, and awards for his achievements and community service.
In 1956, with suburbs encroaching on the Old House, the family moved ten miles further out of Cincinnati to a thirty-seven-acre plot—the land that became Johnson’s Inland Island, the subject of her 1968 meditation on nature. This land the Cannons deliberately let go wild waiting out the years while Nature restored wildlife, plants, and forest. After ten years of observing, Johnson began The Inland Island; she finished it in a year, and she and Grant drove it to New York where Simon and Schuster declared it a book for the times.
Her return to Cincinnati, however, was fraught with tragedy. As she tells it, as the two got off the train, a porter told them that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot. Very soon after, they learned that Grant had cancer. Grant died in 1969, and Johnson lived on alone on the Island, observing nature, writing occasional pieces for Country Journal, McCalls, and Ohio Magazine, and guiding visitors through the Island. In March, 1990, just as I began this introduction and was making plans to visit Josephine Johnson at her home, she died of pneumonia at age seventy-nine. In June, Johnson was remembered in a memorial service and guided walk through the Cincinnati Nature Center.
Nancy Hoffman
NOTES
1. From a Simon and Schuster advertisement for the book in Saturday Review of Literature, July, 1935.
2. These comments summarize reviews by Edith Walton, New York Times Book Review, 16 Sept. 1934; Fanny Butcher, Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 Sept. 1934; Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune, 13 Sept. 1934; and several anonymous reviewers writing immediately after the publication of the novel.
3. Frederic Thompson, Commonweal, 12 Oct. 1934.
4. New York Times, 6 Aug. 1935.
5. The issue of ploughing brings to mind Willa Cather’s Antonia who, despite the dismissive remarks of farm-hands, ploughs proudly—sweaty, shouting, sunburned—just like a man, and enjoys the hard muscles in her brown arms. (Willa Cather, My Antonia [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918], pp. 122, 125, 138.)
6. See particularly, Carol Gilligan, Janie Ward, and Jill Taylor, eds., Mapping the Moral Domain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
7. The Inland Island draws heavily on the older woman’s experience; she has lived and observed and worked on the land. The later work is informed by science as Now in November is not; she has read deeply and shared her husband’s work as editor of Farm Quarterly. There is now a strong ecological theme, and human voices become the backdrop for observation and rumination on nature.
8. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Women, Culture, and Society (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 67 ff.
9. This account is drawn largely from Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1984), chapts. 11–13.
10. For confirmation of the dates here, for help with photographs and reviews, and for a generousness of spirit, I am grateful to Carol, Annie, and Terry Cannon.
OTHER WORKS BY JOSEPHINE JOHNSON
Winter Orchard (collected stories). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935.
The Unwilling Gypsy (collected poetry). Dallas: The Kaleidograph Press, 1936.
Jordanstown. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937.
Year’s End (collected poetry). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937.
Paulina Pot. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939.
Wildwood (collected stories). New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946.
The Dark Traveller. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
The Sorcerer’s Son (collected stories). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.
The Inland Island. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.
Seven Houses. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.
Circle of Seasons (photographs by Dennis Stock and text by Josephine Johnson). New York: Viking, 1974.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSEPHINE W. JOHNSON (1910 - 1990) was the author of eleven books of fiction, poetry, and essays. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1935 at age 24 for her first novel, Now in November.
Johnson was born June 20, 1910, in Kirkwood, Missouri. She attended Washington University, but did not earn a degree. She wrote Now In November while living in her mother’s attic in Webster Groves, Missouri. She married Grant G. Cannon, editor in chief of the Farm Quarterly, in 1942. The couple moved to Iowa City, where she taught at the University of Iowa for three years, before they then moved to Hamilton County, Ohio. Johnson stayed in the Cincinnati area until her death from pneumonia on February 27, 1990.
The Feminist Press is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. Founded in 1970, we began as a crucial publishing component of second wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much-needed texts for the developing field of women’s studies with books by Barbara Ehrenreich and Grace Paley. We publish feminist literature from around the world, by best-selling authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Ruth Kluger, and Ama Ata Aidoo; and North American writers of diverse race and class experience, such as Paule Marshall and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. We have become the vanguard for books on contemporary feminist issues of equality and gender identity, with authors as various as Anita Hill, Justin Vivian Bond, and Ann Jones. We seek out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story.
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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS
A Woman of Genius
Mary Austin
ISBN: 9780935312447
First published in 1912, this novel draws its inspiration directly from Austin’s own life and experiences as a talented woman—in the novel, an actress—whose pursuit of a career places her in conflict with the values of a midwestern town. The hero’s decision to leave a dull husband to pursue a career, and her rise to fame, are portrayed against the background of the cramping social order of the time.
“Mrs. Austin tells the story brilliantly with a rich, deep knowledge of human nature, and with an individuality in her way of looking at things that affords many a delightful surprise. Her imagination runs on swift, dramatic feet, and ennobles her style every now and then with a seeress-like touch, to which her large outlook upon life and her concern with its deepest meanings give sanction.”
—The New York Times
“A Woman of Genius . . . says no to men and conventional marriage and yes to living and productive work. Far from simply promoting female self-determination, however, or celebrating the romantic right of genius to overrun all obstacles, including the human ones, the novel articulates the conflicts of a transitional generation of women who relinquished the perquisites of protected, genteel womanhood for the rewards and responsibilities of the pursuit of public achievement and service to the community. . . . A Woman of Genius is, like Austin herself, an overlooked classic of feminism. Olivia Lattimore occupies a pivotal position in the long procession of gifted women in literature.”
—From the afterword by Nancy Porter
These Modern Women
Elaine Showalter
ISBN: 9781558610071
In 1926–27, The Nation published these seventeen anonymous essays by “women active in professional and public life.” At that time The Nation editors noted that, “Our object is to discover the origin of their modern point of view toward men, marriage, children, and jobs.” In the introduction, Elaine Showalter discusses the issues raised—from alcoholism to celibacy, from mother-daughter relationships to politics—and identifies and examines the lives of the authors, among whom are Crystal Eastman, Mary Austin, and Genevieve Taggard.
“[This is] an exciting book, painful and exhilarating too. . . . What do they have to tell us, these letters from the feminist attic? Why publish them now . . .? For a number of reasons. First, experience is not all that different. These essays record the continuing effort necessary if women are to become the human creatures they want to be.”
—Elizabeth Janeway
“These brief, often bitter-sweet reflections on their lives by a group of 1920s feminists reveal aspects of our struggle from a time that is too readily overlooked. Elaine Showalter’s provocative and interesting introduction makes clear that we neglect this period at our peril. In calling our attention to facts we might prefer to ignore, Showalter performs an important service.”
—Alix Kates Shulman
The Unpossessed
Tess Slesinger
eISBN: 9781558616356 | ISBN: 9780935312218
The first depiction of radical chic in fiction, The Unpossessed (1934) follows a group of Greenwich Village intellectuals engaged in founding a magazine. In relating the stories of three couples, the novel raises questions that still torment women and men today: Is marriage a viable institution? Should one bear children in hard times? Does sexuality destroy the possibility of significant political action? And what is the political responsibility of intellectuals?
“It’s sophisticated . . . full of cutting observations and over-eager images, satiric, then ecstatic, alternating social criticism with displays of sexual and intellectual coquetry.”
—Village Voice
“The Unpossessed has a ferocious drive, a wild and unfaltering rhythm, a quality of malice and understanding,
a complete grasp of most of the characters concerned in the plot, a terrifically effective denouement, and construction that is impeccable.”
—New York Times
“She has a keen mind and a cutting wit. There is as fine satire of the intellectual near-revolutionists, the empty ‘proletarian’ artists as I have seen anywhere. She writes well. At her best, Miss Slesinger has sheer genius.”
—New York Herald Tribune
Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories
Rebecca Harding Davis
eISBN: 9781558616257 | ISBN: 9780935312393
This 1861 classic of social realism—the first book to be reprinted by the Feminist Press in its series of rediscovered women writers—remains a powerful evocation of what Davis herself called “thwarted, wasted lives . . . mighty hungers . . . and unawakened powers.” The New York Times Book Review said of the novella: “You must read this book and let your heart be broken.” With an insightful biographical essay by Tillie Olsen, and with two short stories never before anthologized, this expanded edition is the most complete volume available from this important nineteenth-century writer.
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