The Francelia Butler Watershed:Then and Now Gillian Adams (bio) In this talk, the initial Francelia Butler Memorial Lecture, I want first to describe Francelia Butler's personal and intellectual Odyssey from wife and mother to driving force behind the development of the academic study of children's literature; second, to emphasize her extraordinary prescience about how the study, criticism, and teaching of children's literature would develop; and, third, to demonstrate why some of her lifelong concerns and interests are still relevant to today's scholars and teachers.1 I believe that, like many women of the next generation, Butler's extraordinary energy and achievements were fueled by her continuing outrage at the treatment of women, children, and minorities, an outrage initiated by events in her childhood and adolescence and continuing until she died. She saw herself as a lonely visionary, fighting her battles, particularly in the second half of her life, without the support that later women and social activists would provide each other. Francelia McWilliams was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1913. She did not have a happy childhood, and her mother was psychologically abusive, openly preferring Butler's younger brother, her "pride and joy." When Harriet Taylor Upton, Vice-Chair of the National Republican Committee and instrumental in obtaining women's suffrage, came to visit, Butler's mother pointed to her seven-year-old daughter and said: "I prayed God for a beautiful daughter and I got that" ("Lifestyles" 1). Upton, a wise woman, took an interest in Butler and kept in touch with her through college, remaining a major influence until Upton's death. The abuse by her mother, and perhaps others, made child abuse a subject that concerned Butler to the end of her career.2 She would go on to make abuse, physical and mental, a part of her teaching syllabus (see Sharing Literature and Wide World) and a topic in her 1983 NEH Seminar. She returned to the subject in her preface to the 1986 Garland edition of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and in her 1986 essay, "Abused Children and Their Triumphs in Literature," where she obliquely refers to her own abuse (see 110-12).3 Alice Mills' insightful essay on Pollyanna in the 1999 issue of Children's Literature is proof enough that child abuse, in this case psychological, is still a topic well worth critical engagement. Butler went to Oberlin College, and I believe that her experiences there were formative. Oberlin was one of the earliest colleges in the U.S. to admit women as equals, and the first to admit African Americans on the same basis as whites ("Lifestyles" 8). Butler's partner on the debating team, Eva Mae Parker, was black, and their experiences traveling together to debates must have had much to do with Butler's life-long battles for social justice for blacks and other minorities ("Lifestyles" 2-3). Butler graduated in 1934 with a major in classics; because of the languages involved, it is arguably among the most intellectually rigorous of the humanities. In the 1930s, classical scholars were still engaged in researching the connections between oral folklore, myth, ritual and games, drama, and the role of the audience, no doubt initiating Butler's life-long interest in these subjects. After Butler's graduation in 1934, she was told that she was on her own. She went to Washington to seek her fortune but lost several jobs there, one because she staged an interracial Oberlin alumni dinner, and another, with an educational association, because she voiced her objections to Hitler ("Lifestyles" 5-6). Deciding to try Europe, Butler took a freighter to Hamburg, and after a number of exciting adventures, by the fall of 1937 she was starving in Paris, doing odd jobs, and beginning to collect skip-rope rhymes (Skipping 74). In 1938 she became drama critic for the International Herald Tribune. An attractive woman and always a snappy dresser, she told the story that she wrote a drama review off the cuff and got in to see the day editor, Jerome Butler, with it. He saw at once that this was her first attempt but offered to help her, and she got the...