Florence Guy Seabury Explained

Florence Guy Seabury (formerly Woolston; April 1881 – October 6, 1951) was an American journalist and feminist essayist, and a member of Heterodoxy.

Early life and education

Florence Guy was born in 1881 in Montclair, New Jersey,^[1] the daughter of Ernest Guy and Cordelia Clark Guy. She studied sociology at Columbia University.^[2]

Career

Woolston worked as a teacher in the Settlement movement in New York City during the 1910s.^[3] She was on the editorial staff of the Russell Sage Foundation,^[4] and editor of The Woman Voter, a suffrage magazine.^[5] She was a regular contributor to Harper's, The New Republic, Redbook, The Nation,^[6] and other popular periodicals, often writing humorous observational essays about gender.^[7]

In 1919, she wrote a satirical essay on the "marriage customs" of the women of Heterodoxy, a feminist debating club she belonged to; it was partly modeled on Heterodite Elsie Clews Parsons' serious study of family dynamics, The Family.^{[8] [9] [10]} Her comic essays were collected in The Delicatessen Husband and Other Essays (1926),^[11] illustrated by Clarence Day.^[12] She also published a book on marital relations, Love is a Challenge (1936),^[13] and another, We, the Women (1938).^[14]

Personal life

Florence Guy married sociologist Howard B. Woolston in 1904. She married her second husband, psychologist David Seabury, in 1923. Both marriages ended in divorce.^[15] She died in 1951, age 70.^[16]

In 2015, Florence Guy Seabury was included in a large-scale wall diagram of American feminist history, Andrea Geyer's Revolt, They Said, at the Museum of Modern Art.^[17]

Notes and References

1. Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner, eds., Redressing the Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s (University Press of Mississippi 1988): pp. 234-235;
2. https://books.google.com/books?id=PMQ-AQAAMAAJ&dq=Florence%20Guy%20Woolston&pg=PA905 "Florence Guy Woolston"
3. Elaine Showalter, Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (Simon & Schuster 2001): p. 121.
4. https://books.google.com/books?id=PMQ-AQAAMAAJ&dq=Florence%20Guy%20Woolston&pg=PA905 "Florence Guy Woolston"
5. Nancy Walker, "'I Cant Write a Book': Women's Humor and the American Realistic Tradition" American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 23(3)(Spring 1991): p. 61.
6. Sara Alpern, Freda Kirchwey, A Woman of the Nation (Harvard University Press 1987): p. 49;
7. Thomas Grant, "Feminist Humor of the 1920s: The 'Little Insurrections' of Florence Guy Seabury," in Regina Barreca, New Perspectives on Women and Comedy (Gordon and Breach 1992): 157-167.
8. Kenneth E. Miller, From Progressive to New Dealer: Frederic C. Howe and American Liberalism (Penn State Press 2010): 175-176;
9. Louise Lamphere, "Feminist Anthropology: The Legacy of Elsie Clews Parsons", American Ethnologist 16(3)(August 1989): p. 521.
10. Florence Guy Woolston, "Marriage Customs and Taboo among the Early Heterodites," Scientific Monthly (November 1919): p. 27.
11. Florence Guy Seabury, The Delicatessen Husband and Other Essays (Harcourt Brace 1926, reprinted by the University of Michigan in 2007).
12. http://drs.library.yale.edu/HLTransformer/HLTransServlet?stylename=yul.ead2002.xhtml.xsl&pid=beinecke:day&query=johnson%20family&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes&hlon=yes&big=&adv=&filter=&hitPageStart=176&sortFields=&view=all Guide to the Clarence Day Collection
13. Florence Guy Seabury, Love is a Challenge (McGraw-Hill Book Company 1936).
14. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/3863144/review_of_seabury_we_the_women/ "Childish Traits in Adult Can Easily Ruin Marriage"
15. Joel Phister and Nancy Schnog, Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (Yale University Press 1997): pp. 193, 208-210;
16. https://search.proquest.com/docview/112138932 Obituary: "Mrs. Florence Seabury"
17. Andrea Guyer, Revolt, They Said (Museum of Modern Art, 2012 - ongoing). Accessed March 31, 2024.