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When I was little, I loved a vinyl record of Disney’s Cinderella and I listened until my parents were sick of the sound of it. My feminist mother disapproved of this story of a girl saved by a godmother and handsome prince, but she did not believe in censorship. Instead of taking it away, she bought me a coloring book called Great Women Paper Dolls.
Published in 1978, this book started in the ancient world with Sappho and ended with Golda Meir. No nonsense here about dreams coming true when you wish upon a star. Instead, “I will raise such a battle cry that you will remember it forever!” appeared beneath Joan of Arc. “No time to marry, no time to settle down,” Bessie Smith announced. I colored Lady Murasaki’s kimono blue and orange, then tinted Golda Meir’s boxy pocketbook a luscious pink.
“Golda Meir would never carry a fuchsia purse,” my mother observed, looking at my work. I was hurt, but my mother was a stickler, and I trusted that she knew the colors Great Women wore. Even then, I suspected my mother was one of them.
She was self-confident and, at the same time, self-deprecating. In high school I learned the word sprezzatura, which meant effortless brilliance—the grace and wit Renaissance courtiers were after. My mother embodied that quality. She valued repartee, enjoyed absurdity, and made you think that writing a scientific paper, organizing a conference, or balancing the budget of a large university is all in the wrist. She was witty, elegant, and she loved good style. She did not think lovely clothes were frivolous. She never separated style and substance. On the contrary, she understood the importance of presentation. She was a decisive and fearless shopper, and I, who had less patience and frankly less interest, let her choose my clothes even after I left home.
When I was working for my doctorate and had my first baby, my mother came to visit and took me to the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. While my newborn slept in his car seat, my mother got me to try one elegant outfit after another. “Graduate students don’t dress like this,” I pointed out.
She bought me three suits anyway. “Look like you’re going to finish.”
She could look playful. As a young professor in 1970s Hawaii, she wore a green Marimekko hat, high-heel sandals, sleeveless dresses, and oversized sunglasses. Jackie O. in Honolulu. She could look sexy. One New Year’s Eve in the 1980s, she wore skintight black satin pants and a tube top sequined in colored bands—red, blue, and silver. My sister and I called it her Wonder Woman outfit. She was tall, slender, and younger than other mothers. She was just 21 when I was born, so she was in her 30s when I was a teenager. In the 1980s when she became vice president for academic affairs at the University of Hawaii, she wore suits with boxy shoulders and carried briefcases. Laughingly she asked my dad, “Do I look intimidating?” I still have her pebbled leather bags. I found her card in one.
She could be girlish, but she was tough as well. She hated tears, loved irony, and was proud—so proud she hid her pride with quips and laughter. She was unflinching too. In her 20s she had lost both parents, and more than once she told me that she knew she would die young. Sometimes she said it seriously, sometimes lightheartedly, sometimes superstitiously, as though saying the words would ward off death. But she was right. She didn’t live long. Soon after she took a position as the first woman Dean of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt, she died of a brain tumor at fifty-one.
She did not live to be a college president, or found an art museum, or go into politics—all outcomes easy to imagine for her. She died so young that I felt the loss of her future as keenly as my loss of her. She had been on the cusp, so close to a major career. She might have been a leader and a navigator and a queen for other people, not just me.
Here I might say: But a life well-lived is a great life. Or it’s the little moments that count. Or she was a great mother, and that’s the best work anyone can do. Or a life is so much more than a sum of worldly accomplishments. All these statements are true—but she wanted more. She wanted to make history. To be the kind of woman pictured as a hero. A warrior like Queen Boudicca or an agent of change like Susan B. Anthony.
My mother was ingenious. Smart as she was, politic, and organized, her greatest talent was in dealing with the hand she was dealt. Finding herself in Honolulu because of my father’s job, she built her career there. Running a small Women’s Studies program that was always first in line for budget cuts, she honed her survival skills to advance to university leadership. Taking difficulties as opportunities, she thrived with her unique mix of hope and pragmatism. Even when she received her terminal diagnosis, she acted decisively, cleaning out her desk at work. Half weeping, half laughing, joking that there was a clerical error in her medical records, she boxed up her papers, doing the thing that could be done.
When she died just four months later, I was shocked. Her friends sent me photos of her, but I didn’t look at them. A colleague sent me tapes so I could hear her voice. I could not bear to listen. I did not return to Hawaii. I didn’t want to see my old home or go to my mother’s old haunts. Her campus office or her favorite shops, Carol Mary. Nancy Lang. Liberty House in Kahala Mall. In fact, I wouldn’t set foot in any store. All my life, my mother took me shopping or sent me outfits. Buying clothes alone intimidated and saddened me. For a full year after my mother’s death, I did not try. I was 29 years old and did not know what I liked.
I had two small children; I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I spent much of the year in boots and an oversized down coat thrown over comfortable clothes. I worked at home and spent my weekends at the playground. I hoped to avoid shopping forever—but this changed two years after my mother’s death when my novel Kaaterskill Falls was a finalist for the National Book Award. Suddenly, I had to find a dress for the award dinner. I was also four months pregnant with my third child. I couldn’t wear a dress I had. Nothing fit.
Feeling bleak, I took the T to Copley Square in Boston and searched Neiman Marcus. I tried on silk skirts. I squeezed myself into a ruched dress and stared at myself in the dressing room mirror, where I appeared sad and pale.
Retreating to Cambridge, I ventured into a boutique called Looks, which sold funky vintage-style clothes. The little store on Mass Ave. was dark, lit by lamps with tasseled shades. Here I glimpsed a black flapper-style dress. I held it up and thought it looked antique with its jet beads. I was about to put it back on the rack when I heard a voice. “Try it on.”
This was not the store’s owner speaking. It was my mother coming to me straight from my imagination. “Just try it.”
I tried on the dress, and the fabric stretched and hugged my pregnant body. In the mirror I looked more confident. More like a woman who had written a book and less like a lost waif.
“It’s good,” my mother told me. “It’s one hundred percent.”
I hesitated, surprised to hear her speak so clearly. “Buy it,” she ordered.
I obeyed and felt a little surge of joy as the store owner tied the shopping bag with ribbons. I’d forgotten the power of appearances—that ribbon can change your mood; that fabric can disguise or armor or transform you. This had been the fun of Great Women Paper Dolls—and the lesson too—that great women are changeable. The dolls came with extra helmets. A dress but also battle gear for Joan of Arc. An embroidered robe but also men’s clothes and a sword for Sarah Bernhardt when she played Hamlet. Great women didn’t need fairy tales or magic transformations. On the contrary, women like my mother fashioned themselves—and I could do that too.
“Yes, of course you can,” my mother said, as I left the store. “Don’t make a fuss about it.” Be practical. Get it done. Enjoy the show. That was her message. Find a flapper dress or arm yourself with chain mail. Look the part, and dress for the occasion, as heroines must do.
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Allegra Goodman is the author of This Is Not About Us, published this week.