Kate Field Research Articles

Early American Women, the Novel, and God

Early American Women, the Novel, and God

Figures of modernity: Heinrich Schiemann, Kate Field and a Smithsonian Collection

This paper intends to document how an assemblage of 177 archaeological objects excavated in Troy in the nineteenth century became entangled within the historical circumstances of the era and Heinrich Schliemann’s continuous social movement. The circumstances that led to the donation of this Trojan collection of antiquities by Sophia Schliemann to the Smithsonian Institution in 1893 and the earlier background of the story shed light to the protagonists of this historical event, namely Heinrich Schliemann, the U.S. journalist Kate Field and the U.S. diplomat Truxtun Beale. The story of the movement of the artifacts from the Troas, to Greece and, ultimately, to Washington DC is mostly based on archival research. The paper also explores how facets of Schliemann’s archaeological conduct were enhanced by universal social aspects of modernity, such as the connection with capital and the use of the public sphere profile. It also discusses how the donation of the Trojan collection attracted media attention by making an appeal to the late nineteenth˗century American antiquarianism and, eventually, made the archaeology of the distant Troas -- at that point a part of the Ottoman Empire -- a subject of public interest for the Americans. Ultimately, the Smithsonian ‘Schliemann Collection’ acquired some form of agency fostering future research and providing the foundations for American involvement in the exploration of Aegean prehistory in the twentieth century, mainly through Carl Blegen’s excavations.

Trollope, Orley Farm, and Dickens’s Marriage Breakdown

ABSTRACTAnthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861-2) is peculiarly aware of Charles Dickens, the seemingly unsurpassable celebrity of English letters in the 1850s. This essay examines narrative features of Orley Farm that indicate Dickens was on Trollope’s mind-and then asks why. My first answer is that Trollope was, as he began Orley Farm, newly confident and ready to test himself against the towering presence of Dickens. My second is that Orley Farm covertly responds to the public revelations in 1858 of Dickens’s marriage breakdown and, presently, his affair with a much younger woman. Trollope plots this, implying a coded rebuke to Dickens and sympathy for his abandoned wife. But this element of Orley Farm is also, I conclude, a coded admonishment to himself since he was conscious of his affection for the much younger Kate Field, whom he had recently met. A Dickensian text in form, appearance, mode, and plot, Orley Farm is also an unusual essay for Trollope on marital infidelity that was, I think, prompted partly by his cloudy anxiety about the implications of Kate and, more clearly, by his vexation with what he perceived to be Dickens’s shameful disloyalty.

‘The Paradise for Women’: How Oscar Wilde was Embraced by the Women of America

This article explores the influence of prominent literary and society women on the success of Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of North America in 1882, when he was a minor poet with a fashionable reputation in London. At that time, several commentators remarked on his popularity with women, and contrasted this with the hostility often exhibited towards him by men. Key influencers included Mrs. Frank Leslie and Jane Cunningham Croly, who shaped public opinion through their ownership or editorship of organs of the press. Others who championed Wilde, including Kate Field, Jane Tunis Poultney Bigelow, Marietta Paran Stevens and Anne Lynch Botta, wielded immense power through their patronage of emerging writers and artists. Had he not secured the public approval of these women and gained entry to their homes, Wilde would have struggled to generate positive publicity for his erudite lectures.

The Author on Stage: The Redpath Lyceum Bureau and the Promotion of the “Literary” Lecture

Abstract Identifying the “literary” lecture as a bridge between oratory and print, I argue for the platform’s centrality to the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. American lecture bureaus like the Redpath Lyceum Bureau employed an intricate system of print and oratory to create a market for lectures that both responded to and challenged notions of authorship at the fin de siècle. Authors such as Kate Field, Mark Twain, and James Whitcomb Riley used and were used by the platform to promote works in progress and works in print by offering readings, dramatic interpretations, critical commentaries, and personal reminiscences about writers and writing. By studying the promotional materials of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, I demonstrate the lecture’s importance in defining literary activity and authorial celebrity during this period. Attending to the lecture and its wide influence, I argue further, allows us to examine orality’s unstable position in a then developing intellectual hierarchy.

Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist

Journal Article Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist Get access Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist. By Scharnhorst Gary. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xiv + 306 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95.) Sherilyn Cox Bennion Sherilyn Cox Bennion Emeritus Humboldt State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 40, Issue 3, Autumn 2009, Pages 384–385, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/40.3.384 Published: 01 August 2009

Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist; Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics

Book Review| June 01 2009 Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist; Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics Melissa J. Homestead Melissa J. Homestead Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2009) 81 (2): 392–394. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-009 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Melissa J. Homestead; Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist; Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics. American Literature 1 June 2009; 81 (2): 392–394. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-009 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist. By Gary Scharnhorst. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xvi, 306 pp. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8156-0874-5.)

Few today have heard of Kate Field, one of the best-known personalities of the nineteenth century. Author, playwright, lecturer, actress, editor, writer, and publicist, Field knew almost everyone who was notable after the Civil War on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, Walter Savage Landor, George Eliot, Mark Twain, and Grover Cleveland, among others. Outspoken, witty, and charming, Field became one of the first celebrity journalists, receiving equal billing on the lecture circuit with Twain, who was contemptuous of her style, and the famed speaker Henry Ward Beecher. Field interviewed scores of prominent people for her newspaper columns, magazine articles, and books and, in turn, gave multitudinous interviews herself. Born in St. Louis in 1838 to Joseph M. Field, a playwright, theater manager, and newspaper publisher, and his wife, Eliza Riddle Field, an actress, Kate Field was taken to Florence by a rich uncle in 1859. Her contacts with the writers' colony there laid the foundation for her kaleidoscopic career that continued until her death in Hawaii in 1896. Not an active suffragist, Field nevertheless personified the independent woman of the Victorian age, supporting herself after her uncle refused to make her his heir because she vehemently favored the North in the Civil War despite his Confederate sympathies.

Kate Field: the many lives of a nineteenth-century American journalist

Kate Field: the many lives of a nineteenth-century American journalist

A Recovered Early Letter by Charles Chesnutt

In preface to first volume of their edition of Charles Chesnutt's letters, Joseph McElrath and Robert Leitz HI contend that Chesnutt among most visible figures . . . testing commercial viability of Afri can-American authorship at turn of [twentieth] century.1 In a letter to Hough ton, Mifflin & Co. dated 8 September 1891, however, Chesnutt downplayed his racial heritage: In his case, he insisted, the infusion of African blood is very small?is not in fact a visible admixture.2 And in a recently discovered letter signed with a pseudonym?the earliest extant personal letter he sent anyone?Chesnutt both hid his biracial identity and seized opportunity to vent his frustrations. this was a private letter, not intended for publication, it provides additional evidence that Chesnutt wanted to hide or at least obscure his racial identity. In an article entitled The Color Line in Kate Field's Washington for 19 December 1894, Field editorialized on a controversy over admission of a black woman to Chicago Woman's Club. Although virtually unknown today, Kate Field (1838-1896) was most prominent female journalist in United States during last half of nineteenth century. She was a contributor to early issues of Atlantic Monthly and had numerous articles printed in Nexo York Tribune between 1866 and 1889. In her es say, Field argued that Because men's clubs draw color line is very reason why women should set their brothers a good example by displaying a more catholic spirit.. . . Were Christ to walk on earth he would assuredly make no distinction between white and black.3 Chesnutt responded to Field's editorial in a letter published in paper a few weeks later but hitherto lost to scholarship:4

Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830-1910 (review)

Reviewed by: Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 Juliette Berning Schaefer (bio) Sharon M. Harris , ed., Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 (Boston: Northeastern UP, 2004), pp. xxxvi+279, $45.00 cloth. In Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands, editor Sharon M. Harris includes twelve essays that examine American women editors during the period from 1830 until 1910, as well as representative selections from the original periodicals. She groups the essays into three main parts, depending on the subjects' role in editing periodicals: "Apprenticeship," "Editing as Impetus," and "Career Editors." In the foreword, Ellen Gruber Garvey states that "new research on women editing periodicals is allowing us to examine and reexamine questions about magazines as a genre: about their creation, about the communities surrounding them, about how women, who might have been excluded from other kinds of careers, created and ran them" (xxii). Harris states in her introduction that "[p]erhaps the most important aspect of studying women editors and the periodicals they produced is understanding how women wielded the editorial pen to influence public opinion" (xxxv). In Part I, "Apprenticeship," Harris includes essays that address young schoolgirls who published a school paper and editors of special issues. Lucille M. Schultz writes about The Jabberwock, a student-run school paper, and argues that it "provided a site where a girl might experience herself as a writer in a public forum of students, faculty, and friends of the school" (7). In the next essay, Ann Mauger Colbert discusses women's editions of newspapers from 1894–1896. Colbert states that "[w]hatever the rationale for publishers' permission, the women used their foray into publishing to form firm links of communication and marketing with other women's groups around the country" (23). In Part II, the longest section of Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands, "Editing [End Page 83] as Impetus," Harris includes essays about "women for whom editing was an impetus to other kinds of literary or activist endeavors" (xxvi). Jennifer Blanchard argues that Ann S. Stephen's "rhetoric of modesty, femininity, and local loyalties" in the Portland Magazine is "steeped in nineteenth-century ideals of gender and class" (46, 44). Linda Frost describes Miriam Frank Leslie's "Ladies' Conversazione," a column that invited female readers to engage in a "free exchange" with the editor, as an outlet for "the domestically isolated reader" (60, 63). Carolyn Karcher describes Frances Wright's mission in the Free Enquirer as an attempt to "raise the level of the American press" by adopting "an aggressively masculine voice" (85, 80). Katharine Rodier describes the life and work of lecturer and activist Lucy Stone who used the The Woman's Journal, "a weekly newspaper dedicated to women's issues," to "help create a public record of her remarks" (99, 100). Jacqueline Fear-Segal asserts that Marianna Burgess created an anonymous persona who interjected "comments and opinions all through the paper," the Carlisle Indian School's publication The Indian Helper, to "control, intimidate, and manipulate the children" who read it (124, 126). Hanna Wallinger discusses Pauline E. Hopkins's work on the Colored American Magazine, where she "chan-nel[ed] ... her literary activities" which were replete with her main political concerns, gender and race (148). In the final essay in this part, James H. Cox explains that "we can understand [Gertrude] Bonnin's work as editor [of The American Indian Magazine] most clearly by focusing on her role within the context of continuing and emerging Native intellectual traditions in the era in which assimilation was federal policy" (174). In Part III, Harris includes essays about "women for whom editing was their primary work" (xxvi). Steven Fink discusses antebellum periodical editors such as Sarah Josepha Hale, Caroline Kirkland, and Ann Stephen, as "engaged in the business of periodical publication" in their relationship with the owners/publishers, with contributors, and with readers (208). In the next essay, Paula Bernat Bennett argues that Mary Louise Booth "exploited" Harper's Bazar from its inception "as a cover for her advocacy of social and, in particular, gender reform" (226). In the final essay, Gary Scharnhorst discusses Kate Field and her "campaigns for progressive causes" in her Kate Field's Washington. This volume...

Whitman and Kate Field

Documents American feminist journalist, lecturer, and actor Kate Field's (1838-1896) admiration for Whitman.

Kate Field and the New York Tribune

novel The Portrait of a Lady. 2 Though she never held a salaried position with the paper, never was a regular correspondent for the paper but always an occasional one, Field published between 1866 and 1889 over a hundred commissioned and freelance articles, editorials, and letters in the New York Tribune, nicknamed not entirely facetiously the Great Moral Organ; and she regarded her success as a contributor to the Tribune the benchmark of her achievements as a journalist. How- ever, she is not mentioned in any of the various histories of the Tribune, the most significant, reliable, and respected paper in the country, with a daily circulation of between thirty to forty thousand copies. Like many prominent nineteenth-century women, Field has been virtually erased from the modern historical record even as her critical recovery may illustrate her repudiation of traditional gender roles and her struggle to forge a professional career.

Kate Field: A Primary Bibliography

Kate Field: A Primary Bibliography

Kate Field: A Primary Bibliography

Kate Field: A Primary Bibliography

James and Kate Field

James and Kate Field

"He is Amusing but Not Inherently a Gentleman": The Vexed Relations of Kate Field and Samuel Clemens

Though she has virtually disappeared from history of American journalism, Kate Field (1838-1896) was a forerunner of such famous turn-of-the-century women reporters as Nellie Bly Dorothy Dix. According to her obituary in New York Tribune, she was one of best-known women in at height of her career Field Dead). A member of expatriate community in Florence in late 1850s, she befriended Brownings, Trollopes, Walter Savage Landor while still in her early twenties. One of first women to contribute to Atlantic Monthly,(1) a prolific travel writer theatre reviewer for New York Tribune, she was also, I believe, model for character of Henrietta Stackpole in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. (2) She first won fame for her dispatches about Charles Dickens's final visit to United States, or, as Clemens later reminisced, she made a wide, spasmodic notoriety in 1867 by some letters which she sent from Boston--by telegraph--to Trib une about Dickens's readings there in beginning of his triumphant American tour. At time the idea of telegraphing a newspaper letter was new astonishing, he explained, and wonder of it was in every one's mouth. Kate Field became a celebrity at (Twain, Mark Twain's Autobiography 1:157). She soon revised these dispatches into a book, Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens's Readings (1868), that passed through two editions that remains an extremely valuable reference resource about style manner of Dickens's stage performances. She later published two popular travel books, Hap-Hazard (1873) Ten Days in Spain (1875). Many of her pieces collected in former volume are written in a breezy style reminiscent of Clemens's The Innocents Abroad (1869). For example, she opened a travel letter from Ems, Germany, originally contributed to Paris American Register in June 1872, as follows: I am requested to say something about Americans abroad. Well, I am sorry to make confession, but either there are a great many fools in America, or all fools in America visit Europe. I have not yet arrived at a definite conclusion on subject, for truth is said to lie in a well, a great deal of rope is required to get at it; but judging from fact that I never met such peculiar specimens at home as I meet or hear of abroad, I am inclined to believe that a large proportions of our idiots seek an asylum on this side of Atlantic. Perhaps this is retort courteous we make to Europe for sending us her adventurers, thieves, burglars. (172) In late 1870s, moreover, Field worked as a publicist for Alexander Graham Bell, once even singing Irish folk songs over telephone to Queen Victoria, she was instrumental in founding of Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford John Brown Memorial in Adirondacks. Between 1890 1895 she edited published her own weekly paper, Kate Field's Washington, to which Charlotte Perkins Gilman contributed thirty of her earliest essays, stories, poems (Scharnhorst 5, 6, 8, passim). Nevertheless, Field struggled for a livelihood throughout her career. Two years after she covered Dickens's tour for Tribune, she turned to more lucrative lecture platform. In effect, she began to trade on her celebrity. As she asked Whitelaw Reid, managing editor of Tribune, in June 1869, Do you expect Hood, Charles Lamb George Alfred Townsend [to write] for $15 per column? (Letter to Whitlaw Reid). She explained to actor Noah Miller Ludlow next month, I've gone into because it pays better than anything else, I am tired of grubbing along.... There is no more reason why a woman should not lecture than that she should not sing or act. At least I shall try to make lecturing fashionable as well as profitable (Kate Field: Selected Letters 48). She debuted in Boston, Brooklyn, New York in spring of 1869 with a defense of Woman in Lyceum before audiences that included Edwin P. …

The Face as Legible Text: Gazing at the Portraits of George Eliot

The Face as Legible Text: Gazing at the Portraits of George Eliot George Griffith Susan Sontag, in On Photography, presents this fantasy choice: which would people prefer—that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted a portrait of Shakespeare, or that the camera had been invented early enough to have a photograph of him? People would all want the latter, she claims, not simply because the photograph would be a more accurate representation, but also because "having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross" (154). Unlike the painted portrait, the photograph seems not to be an interpretation. It seems a relic of the real thing, a tracing, like a footprint or a death mask.1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, writing about the daguerreotype to a friend in 1843, asked her to "think of a man sitting down in the sun and leaving his facsimile in all its completion of outline and shadow." She wanted a portrait of everyone she loved, she said, because "It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases but the association, and the sense of nearness involved in the thing . . . the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever!" (Rabb xxxvi). For such a relic of the real thing George Eliot's fervid worshipers prayed, all of them disappointed by a camera-resistant woman who would not be appropriated, "photo-possessed." She was not alone. The popular Victorian novelist Marie Corelli was like-minded, but they were in a small minority among Victorian 20volume 27 number 2 The Face as Legible Text writers. Corelli's resistance was so strong that late-century candid photographers pursued her, finally succeeding in 1905 in publishing in The Sketch a photograph of her alighting from a cab. Beneath, in triumph, a caption reads: "A photograph of a woman who would not be photographed" (Federico 33). Corelli was at war with the commodification of writers and their lives which seemed a necessary part of promotion in a competitive publishing market. That process was well underway a half-century earlier, given an immense boost by the invention of photography in 1839. By the 1850s photography was a passion of the middle classes as people traded "cartes de visites, tiny 4" ? 21/4" photographs, mass-produced by London photographers in stereotyped settings with stereotyped lighting" (Ford 19). By the 1860s there was a flourishing trade in the cartes of the famous, from the Royal Family, photographed byJ. E. Mayall, who is reported to have earned £35,000 for his cartes of Royalty, to the most minor of writers (Howarth-Loomes 82). Hugh Diamond, an early, influential amateur photographer, published Menof the Time, a collection of photographic portraits, in 1856, and PhotographicPortraitsof UvingCelebrities began serial publication the same year. For the publishing industry, photography made possible a new means of creating celebrity and marketing books. As the vogue of illustrated books indicates that the public wanted to "see" their literature, photography gave them the opportunity to see the writers as well. Writers themselves for the first time became visible, no longer just creators of images but images themselves. Accomplished photographers Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron did formal portraits of Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle, Browning, the Rossettis and others. Tennyson complained to Cameron, "I can't be anonymous by reason of your confounded photographs" (Rabb xxxvi), but most writers shared the excitement of the public over the new invention and many participated eagerly in photographic self-promotion. Both Hawthorne and Whitman boldly used daguerreotypes or photographs as frontispieces for their work, the former for The Marble Faun in 1860, the latter for editions of UavesofGrass. Over one hundred portraits by more than thirty photographers chronicle Walt Whitman's life, and the image of a Victorian Review21 G. Griffith white-suited Mark Twain was as well known in his own age as it is today. George Eliot, by contrast, wrote to be heard and not seen. As though anticipating what would be said about Corelli, the American journalist Kate Field called Eliot "the only woman in the civilized world who has never been photographed" ("To the Editor"), when she wrote...

Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5, 1872–1873 ed. by Lin Salamo, Harriet Elinor Smith, and: Mark Twain by Peter Messent

BOOK REVIEWS 4 2 9 Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5, 1872-1873. Edited by Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 939 pages, $60.00. Mark Twain. By Peter Messent. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 235 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico W. D. Howells called him “the Lincoln of our literature,” a comparison which evokes his common western origin with Honest Abe. Simply put, no other American writer with the possible exception of Ernest Hemingway enjoys so privileged a critical and popular reputation as Mark Twain. Whether his celebrity is measured in column-inches of citations in the MLA Bibliography or the frequency with which his words and image are appropriated by Madison Avenue, Twain often seems to bubble to the sur­ face of public consciousness. Fortunately, in the midst of a canon reforma­ tion whose most radical protestants proclaim the “death of the author,” most Twain scholarship remains historically and biographically contextualized (and so, in my opinion, it is reasonably assessable). For better or worse (the former, I believe), the ostensible “cult of personality” that surrounds Twain prevents his disappearance down the poststructuralist rabbit hole. I daresay that more ink has been spilled over his life and writings than any other nineteenth-century American author, and he seems to many of us as familiar as an eccentric neighbor. Not that we know all our neighbors as well as we should. The fifth volume in the definitive edition of Twain’s correspondence contains 309 letters, well over half of them never before published, all of them thoroughly annotated. A model of documentary editing, the volume opens with Twain on a lecture tour in the Midwest in January 1872 and closes after he has delivered a series of lectures in London in December 1873. This truest type of biogra­ phy describes in inimitable detail the prosperity he enjoyed in the wake of the sales success of Roughing It, his repeated visits to England to work on a travel book he eventually abandoned, the birth of his daughter Susy and the death of his son Langdon, his collaboration with his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner on their novel The Gilded Age, and his oft-vexed asso­ ciations with such figures as Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune; Bret Harte, his old friend from California and erstwhile literary rival; Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly; and Kate Field, a popular lecturer and journalist. Editors Salamo and Smith append genealogical charts of the Clemens and Langdon families, transcriptions of the journals Twain kept during his 1872 trip to England and of the contracts he signed with publishers during these years, as well as a veritable family album of photographs and a sheaf of eleven newly discovered letters written between 1865 and 1871. 4 3 0 W A L 3 3 ( 4 ) W INTER 1 9 9 9 To be sure, there are no bombshells here, nothing that fundamentally alters our view of Twain’s career, though the annotations alone should be grist for a few dissertations. For example, Twain’s brief letter to Elisha Bliss, the president of the American Publishing Company, dated November 5, 1873, which consists of little more than the names of people he wished to receive copies of The Gilded Age, is followed by over seven pages of notes. Only in one minor respect would I fault the documentation: the “F. B. P.” whose column Twain mentions in a letter to the editor of the Boston Literary World in December 1872, who is otherwise unidentified, was undoubtedly the Boston librarian Frederick Beecher Perkins, best-known today (if at all) as the father of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. One of the joys of teaching literature—I assert without apology— is that we get to read other people’s mail, occasionally even letters that are explicitly proscribed. “Please don’t let a word of this letter get into print— these things are from private conversations &. the footprints must be all covered up carefully before they see the light,” Twain wrote Mary Mason Fairbanks from London in November 1872 (206). If there are no sensational revelations here, there are...

"The Liberty of Self-Degradation: Polygamy, Woman Suffrage, and Consent in Nineteenth-Century America

These are strange times, charged Kate Field in 1886, when a female lobby asks Congress to give to Utah the liberty of self-degradation! The degradation Field spoke of was polygamy, a practice she condemned as monstrous, a rock that need[ed] blowing up with the dynamite of law. Popular lecturer, political activist, and arbiter of intellectual taste and fashion, Field was also a passionate opponent of polygamy and of the hierarchy that practiced it in Utah Territory. Her Mormon Monster lectures drew sellout audiences in the mid-1880s. Her talk was crafted to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of listeners, guiding their thinking while entertaining them with her unrelenting and unembarrassed discussion of a slightly naughty topic.' Field rode the crest of a wave of antipolygamy sentiment in the mid-1880s. Her work crystallized the ironies of the liberty of self-degradation, but she was by no