We Call This Child Abandonment
And being a really shitty wife.
NYT headline on an obit that has now been reported in their series of overlooked obits from 1851 on:
Overlooked No More: Annie Londonderry, Who Traveled the World by BicycleShe cycled away from her Boston home and into stardom, leaving a husband and three small children for a journey that came to symbolize women's independence.
Bruce Weber writes in The New York Times:
If ever there was an avatar of these combined social trends, "of free, untrammeled womanhood," it was Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, a Latvian immigrant who in June 1894, at about age 23, cycled away from her Boston home, leaving a husband and three small children, for a journey around the world. Though Thomas Stevens, an Englishman, had circumnavigated the globe on a high-wheeler several years earlier, no woman had tried such a feat.Keeping her husband and family a secret for most of her journey, she called herself Annie Londonderry and agreed, in exchange for $100, to attach an advertisement to her bicycle for the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire. Her bicycle and her person became a rolling billboard, the first of many moneymaking schemes she would come up with to finance her travels.
Along the way, she signed and sold souvenirs, gave exhibitions of bicycling and delivered lectures to often sizable crowds, whom she had alerted to her presence by sending telegrams to local newspapers in advance of her arrival.
She delighted crowds with tales of her adventures that reporters dutifully reported -- tall tales, many of them. One was that she had been waylaid by bandits in France, another that she had hunted Bengal tigers in India, and still another that she had traveled to the front lines of the Sino-Japanese War, where she was shot in the shoulder. She claimed, at various times, to be a Harvard medical student, a lawyer, an orphan, the founder of a newspaper and an accountant. With her gift for self-invention and self-promotion, there was as much P.T. Barnum in her as there was Susan B. Anthony.
Her audacious trip was completed in September 1895, her return to Boston reported on in The New York Times in straightforward fashion. She arrived with a broken arm, having pedaled for hundreds of miles with the injury, which she said was from a fall.
Apparently, she put out a good bit of hyperbole about what actually went on. Lady huckster. PT Trumpum.
Now, I'm all for adventuring, and I just commended a friend for the life she and her husband are starting on a hillside in the Balkans. But like me, this friend has only local stray cats she cares for; no kids.
Guess what: You don't get to become "independent" from your three little kids -- which is one reason I chose not to have any kids. Because I really, really love my independence and the freedom to just dive into my science reading and writing and not come up until I feel like coming up. No noses to wipe, no kids to take to the dentist, etc.
And though I didn't go on a bikeride around the globe in my 20s, if I had, I wouldn't have abandoned anything but maybe some houseplants, and that's okay.
Amy, I have some bad news for you about literally every male explorer that ever lived.
Patrick at November 20, 2019 3:41 AM
Patrick makes an excellent point.
Human nature hasn’t changed much in probably 20,000 years.
A lot of children went through the death of one or both parents through accident or disease. Widows and widowers regrouped into blended families.
This lady just went on walk about for a few years? No big deal. Maybe her mother or mother in law was in the home. Multi generational households were the norm.
The trip probably gave her a necessary break from being pregnant all the time.
Isab at November 20, 2019 6:45 AM
That is why explorers tend to make shitty parents. I can't say one way or the other as for being a good or bad wife. I've met couples where that is what works for them. And if it works for them who am I to complain?
As for all the girl power stuff, bleh.
Ben at November 20, 2019 7:26 AM
Yeah, I don't know how I feel about this. A lot of people of great accomplishment were pretty crappy spouses and parents (off the top of my head, there's Joan Crawford). Since we don't know what kind of reaction any of this got from the husband or kids, it's hard to say. The tall-tales aspect of it is hokey, but was not unusual for adventurers of the day.
I think we can say that anyone who pulled a stunt like this today would not get the same reaction. Standards have changed.
Cousin Dave at November 20, 2019 7:27 AM
While I could quibble with Patrick’s use of “literally” since I’m sure there was at least one unmarried male explorer, he raises a fair point about a double standard being applied.
Conan the Grammarian at November 20, 2019 7:39 AM
We have different birth control options now, and no one is forcing us to get married at 19.
ahw at November 20, 2019 8:02 AM
To dispute (somewhat) my own point, I will point out that Magellan's paycheck didn't go to him, but to his wife. At the very least, these male explorers did provide for their families.
Patrick at November 20, 2019 8:40 AM
Conan:
Meriwether Lewis.
Patrick at November 20, 2019 8:44 AM
Edmund Hillary didn't get married until after climbing Everest. From the wikipedia bio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Hillary#Personal_life
Climbing Everest: no big deal. Proposing marriage? frightened beyond the capacity for rational thought.
I R A Darth Aggie at November 20, 2019 9:05 AM
"Climbing Everest: no big deal. Proposing marriage? frightened beyond the capacity for rational thought."
That's because death on Everest is relatively quick.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at November 20, 2019 9:42 AM
Do the childless count as bad parents? I mean most people with a Y chromosome make terrible women. You are usually pretty bad at something you aren't. Or is this like credit history where you have three classifications, 'good parent', 'bad parent', and the worst of all 'I don't effin know'.
Ben at November 20, 2019 9:56 AM
Since we don't know what kind of reaction any of this got from the husband or kids, it's hard to say.
_____________________________________________
The trip probably gave her a necessary break from being pregnant all the time.
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Exactly! If she did this without even discussing it with her husband, THAT would be a rotten thing to do. But there's no reason to jump to conclusions about how he felt about it, especially if someone stepped in to help in her absence. Same goes for any living explorer, male or female, with children.
And re her kids...as the late journalist/essayist Ellen Willis wrote, circa 1994:
"Certainly we need to take children seriously, which means empathizing with their relatively powerless perspective and never unthinkingly shifting our burdens to their weaker backs. On the other hand, children are more narcissistic than most adults ever dream of being — if my daughter had her way, I'd never leave the house."
(I think her daughter was 10 at the time.)
lenona at November 20, 2019 7:06 PM
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