I was formally introduced to antiracist pedagogy in the spring of 2016, several months before I traveled for the first time to the Rosedale Freedom Project (RFP) in Rosedale, Mississippi, to teach a course on music and politics to high school students. Oft romanticized as the place where blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, Rosedale is a small town in the Delta region. The majority of its population is Black, and consistently, more than half of this population has lived below the poverty line. The RFP seeks to help send its students, the majority of whom are Black and profoundly underserved by the state of Mississippi, to and through college. In preparation for the summer (and at the request of the director of the RFP), I read a number of foundational texts on antiracism and critical pedagogy including Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), and Beverly Daniel Tatum's “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations About Race (1997). As a white woman with no prior experience in Mississippi, I also read Nan Elizabeth Woodruff's history of the Delta region, American Congo: The African American Struggle in the Delta (2003) and Jesmyn Ward's novel Where the Line Bleeds (2008), among other texts, and reflected on how to design a course that would further the RFP's mission of “supporting the Mississippi Delta's young leaders in the development of critical consciousness and the practice of justice.”
In 1945 Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein began working on The Mother of Us All, their second and final opera. If the pair’s chosen subject matter—the life and work of Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)—was radical in and of itself, so too was the librettist’s approach to it. As Stein scholar Jane Palatini Bowers has carefully documented, Stein quoted heavily from political speeches as she crafted her libretto, using numerous “male-generated texts” but ultimately telling an “antipatriarchal” story. Bowers and others have argued that Stein’s revisions of these texts tell not only Anthony’s but also Stein’s story. I argue that in its final form, The Mother of Us All tells yet another story, for it was Thomson who revised Stein’s libretto after her untimely death in 1946, approximately one year before the opera’s premiere at Columbia University. Drawing extensively on both versions of the libretto text, as well as the musical score, I assert that Thomson sought to buy into Stein’s feminist project, and I read his revisions to The Mother of Us All as his attempt to refashion himself as her political and artistic partner. At the same time that The Mother of Us All represented a very personal project for Stein and Thomson, it was a more broadly political project as well, a critique of the status of women in the United States following World War II. As Stein and Thomson looked back on the significance of the women’s suffrage movement, they chose not to bring their story to an unequivocally rousing conclusion celebrating the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Instead, they suggested an unfinished struggle, one that so-called “second-wave” feminists would task themselves with furthering during the latter half of the twentieth century and one that would nourish productions of The Mother of Us All well into the twenty-first century.
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