Iowa's first feminist writer

Iowa writer, Ruth Suckow

Last night, Stephanie Ruhle led off news commentary on The 11th Hour with three guests, two reporters and a veteran law school prof, each of them experts in their fields and able communicators, a formidable bunch and all women--across the screen, just women, only women.

That wouldn't have happened ten years ago, and Ruhle couldn't help but note that as well. When she signed off the segment, she told her cable news audience that there was nothing she liked better than starting her show with three thoughtful and experienced women.

I'd just come from a book club meeting where the writer of the month was a once-upon-a-time famous and prolific Iowa novelist named Ruth Suckow, who, during the first half of the 20th century, made a name for herself by uncovering endless fascinating levels of motivation and hesitation in the lives of women of her era. Suckow, as a writer, is not particularly charming, in part because she is adept at finding the ceilings that thwart possibilities women might otherwise experience. 

All too often, her characters struggle beneath oppression wrought by others but also by themselves. They don't achieve like men, she suggests, in part because they don't have friends, even other women, urging them to look past traditional commitments (as mother and daughter, wife and sister) to a kind of self-fulfillment which may not have existed during her time. 

No one in our group had ever heard of Ruth Suckow, the novelist, even though she was born (1892) in Hawarden and had grown up in several neighboring towns. Her father was a preacher, Congregationalist, who Suckow venerates in a memoir she wrote of her early life--and his. She treasured him, loved his gracious accepting ways and texts, with the kind of expansiveness he and Jesus offered to others. He took theological positions undoubtedly contrary to dominies down the road in Sioux County, the Calvinists who would have nothing of that "Jesus Loves Me" philandering. Ecumenicity would have been a pipe dream.

I'm not an expert, but Ruth Suckow, the preacher's daughter, may well have been the first feminist Iowa writer, in great part because nearly every one of her close to fifty stories has a woman protagonist. Exceptions are few. When I walked in the museum last night, three women were setting the table for our discussion. In just a few seconds, they made it clear that they loved the stuff they'd read, loved this writer, loved the way she peeled back layer after layer of motivation, examining each of those levels in the lives of her often belabored protagonists. 

a bit more sporty Suckow

I had been greatly worried--I'm serious. Reading Suckow, the third entry in our "local" writers discussions (Josephine Donovan, Frederick Manfred, and Ruth Suckow) was all my idea. None of them had ever turned a page of hers, and I was just plain sure the group would tell me that Suckow was interesting but tedious, because it's true, as someone said, "nothing really happens in a Suckow story." Don't look for her on the action/adventure shelf. Things do happen in Suckow, that reader said, but it's all inside. The real stories take place in the mind and heart, where there's always great drama, not to mention action and adventure. 

In a tomboy story titled "A Great Mollie," an effervescent young woman who not only loves "men's work" but is darn good at it, finds a niche in her small town in spite of her preferences. She earns her place by getting down and dirty under the hood, and insisting on cranking her own sputtering vehicle. 

In the very telling end to the story, a woman named Mate says with a kind of calculated assurance that "great Mollie" won't leave town and take off for Chicago, won't try to be something other than she is right there, right then.  "I know she won't," Mate says. 

Frank, her husband, is less sure. He thinks a bit, remembers tears in Mollie's eyes and tells himself Mate is right. "Yes sir, Mollie was a woman! After all, she was unaccountable. She's could do anything for anybody but herself."

Mate knows the truth and wins the argument with a look of "small, calm, satisfied wisdom." Mate knows Mollie, a woman, is powerless in the world of traditional commitments that can petrify caregivers, who, like Mollie, are almost always women. 

Mollie is not free to go to Chicago, as Frank would so much like to think. Mate knows there's no chance of escape.

Or does she? Or is she simply another barrier--and a woman!--between Mollie and an her own chosen destiny? 

Stephanie Ruhle started her show last night with three women, no men, as experts. Times have changed. When Ruth Suckow's stories take on what seems predetermined and often unappealing ends--they don't end sweetly!--it may well be that Suckow understood her characters lived in a world with very low ceilings. 

But then, Ruth Suckow might say, that's life. 

Interesting stuff, finely wrought.