Florence Guy Woolston Seabury

Florence Guy Woolston Seabury (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]

Florence Guy Woolston 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): 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): 905.
  3. Elaine Showalter, Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (Simon & Schuster 2001): 121. ISBN
  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): 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): 61.
  6. Sara Alpern, Freda Kirchwey, A Woman of the Nation (Harvard University Press 1987): 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): 521.
  10. Florence Guy Woolston, "Marriage Customs and Taboo among the Early Heterodites," Scientific Monthly (November 1919): 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): 13. via Newspapers.com open access
  15. Joel Phister and Nancy Schnog, Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (Yale University Press 1997): 193, 208-210. ISBN 9780300070064
  16. "Mrs. Florence Seabury" New York Times (October 8, 1951).
  17. Andrea Guyer, Revolt, They Said (Museum of Modern Art, 2012 - ongoing).
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