Behind the Scenes Minis: Ellen and Eliza

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Friday. One of our episodes this week was on Ellen Sweller Richards and as I said at the end of the episode, I wish there had not been so much eugenics in there. And there's just like I just I have a hard time sometimes articulating just how mainstream those ideas were. Like there were textbooks, your regular high school textbook that just laid out eugenics as though it was accepted fact, and like a lot of the same groups that the movement targeted as inferior also adopted those same ideas for their own improvement. Like no group is a monolith. There were of course people in every group that were like this is maybe not the best plan, but it was just everywhere. And so there are so many people that you will research, especially at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and you'll be like, this person was really cool. Oh no eugenics, and so much about euthenics was also like all about preserving clean water and clean air and having adequate ventilation and indoor spaces, which sure has revealed itself to be incredibly important over the last years of a pandemic. But then also like there's just a thread of like and we're going to improve the race with this, and I was like, what if what if we didn't? Right? I mean, it's interesting because, as you said, it was very accepted, but I think what we don't often acknowledge is that it was also lauded for how smart and like progressive it was. Is. Yeah, so I always think of things like that when we tackle stuff today and we're like, this is the new ideology. Let's go. I'm like, will it be this way forever? Though, well, the most terrific parts of the eugenics movement were after she had died. Yeah, So, like I think that they're like there were some like sterilization programs that I think did start before she died, but it was really after it where after she had died that like that became widespread and then obviously like the whole Nazi race science and eugenics program was after her death by a lot. But those core ideas that like there are people who deserve to have children and other people who shouldn't have children, like It's just we could have instead spent so much time recognizing that humanity has like we all have innate worth rights and and maybe instead of thinking about like which people should be having children and which people should not have children, like instead, we could have been spending all of that time and energy talking about how to make society accessible and welcoming to everybody. But like that, Oh not icy, that's not and like the same same idea is about like encouraging the right people like that. You they still come up today, like I remember, they're just being a big feurer. Maybe twenty years ago that was about how the educated people aren't having enough children, and I was just like, this is eugenics, Like right, eugenics again, I mean that gets said all the time. Yeah, still that's ongoing. Yeah, I don't know how to how to help those people. No, I did chuckle to myself when we talked about her early learnings in maintaining an efficient, orderly and well kept home. I'm like, what's that? Like, I don't Yeah, I was sort of thinking. When I first lived in my own apartment, I kept it very clean, and I would start Saturday morning. I had like a cleaning ritual that I would clean the rooms of my apartment, but I was also living by myself, and it was like technically a two bedroom apartment, but I used one bedroom as the bedroom and the other bedroom was like a home office computer room type space. And I'm mostly the thing. I just didn't have a lot of stuff. Yeah, I was living on my own for the first time, and I had like furniture that had come out of my parents' basement or which some generous neighbors sold to me for very cheap, and I like that. They're just we're not a lot of possessions in my home. And now you know, twenty seven years have passed and there's just all this stuff everywhere. Yeah, we have we have piles and we collect a lot of stuff. So our house is like a crazy phone house the time. Um, you described your house to me one time when we were we had just met, as if Sanford and Son were really creative. That's sort of accurate. I mean, we've been really making like a more progressive approach over the years to like, okay, but how do we take this? Uh? And for me, I've realized, like I tend to have a very all or nothing approach, which doesn't work right, Like, you can't because then things will like get set up, and the second they get a little askew, I'm like, well that didn't work. I don't it's ruined. Um. Right now, I am in the middle of a fairly significant closet overhaul, which anyone who knows me knows that's a lot. Yeah, where I'm trying to. I'm I'm trying to I'm trying to cull the collection because I have a lot of clothes. I mean, I have clothes I've had since I was thirteen, sure, and some of them I will keep, but others I'm like, I got this T shirt at like a five K that I dropped into like day before. I don't need to Yeah, why do I have this shirt? But it's I have realized though, that if I am a little more generous with myself and go listen, just do a little bit each day, you're fine. It's actually way easier to just maintain things than if I were being quite so stringent and like, no, you must do everything and overhaul though, I'm like, all right, it's fine. Yeah, yeah. Well that was one of the other things about that first apartment is that I moved in in a process that took like a couple trips with a pickup truck. And the reason it took more than one trip was because my parents let me take my old bedroom furniture from my childhood bedroom and so like we didn't rent a U haul or anything. Six couple trips in the pickup to do it. Yeah, So that meant that, like, once I was unpacked, everything was clean and it was easy to keep it clean. Even with three cats in that apartment, it was able to it was able to pretty much keep it clean. Something that we didn't get into you in this episode because we have gotten into it in other episodes about home economics as a field is that there's kind of multiple ways to look at it in terms of the effect that it had on women, because home economics programs made a college education a lot more accessible to a lot more women, especially women whose families would have objected to their idea of going to college, but since they were going to college to study home economics, like, it was more acceptable. But also there are arguments that home economics as a field like further focused immen's lives on the domestic field right like on the sphere of homemaking and child rearing and things like that, and like we didn't we didn't get into that as much in this episode, both because we had talked about it and in episodes that are still fairly new compared to the Hall archive, but then also because like this was toward the end of her career when she had spent so much of her time focused on education for women outside of that sphere of economics. Like, I loved the part about her becoming head of the science section for correspondence courses to make it possible for all kinds of people to study that they would not have had otherwise. Yeah, I love that. It also reminded me a bit of when we did the interview about Sears and talked about how mail order opened up like consumer purchasing to people who had been discriminated against in stores. Yeah. I still that's still probably the most mind blowing moment I've ever had on this show. Yeah, because I just never thought about it until Jared said, like, no, that's yeah. Why That's why Sears was so popular with black customers for so long, because it was the one place they knew that like they had they could go for mail order and not have to deal with being stared at or treated as though they were unworthy or going to do something wrong in the store, and I was like, oh, my goodness, that is obviously my privileged white perspective. Ever took that into account, makes all the sense on earth. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, keep picking people to talk about on the show that turn out to be complicated, well, because that's what humans are. Yeah. And I knew there was going to be complications with Ellen Swaller Richards because I already knew like how much of the whole economics movement was connected to eugenics and other issues. But yeah, part of me wanted to take a little field trip over to her house on and Jamaica plane. But I'm pretty sure it's just somebody's private residence now, and that felt creepy. Hi. We talked about the frustrating story. I'm Eliza Fending. We did on a lighter note because I always like to talk about food. Huh, what is chicken and dumplings to you? Or what do you called dumplings? Okay? Well I called dumplings two different things. Okay. There are dumplings that are a shell made of dough that is stuffed with something and is steamed or fried right more in the Asian cuisine. Yet dumplings are also yeah, this is what I were, like a biscuity type thing that is like topped onto like chicken and dumplings is like chicken and also like these like peas and carrots and onions and stuff like that, and also a broth and then these things that are more like a Doughey, maybe biscuity is not like little like but portions of dough put on top of that and then it all goes into the oven so that it's sort of simultaneously poached in the liquid and maybe baked a little bit on the top. When my mom would make chicken and dumplings when I was a kid, the dumpling parts, I think were always like totally submerged in the liquid during the cooking, and they just they were doeier and not as delicious to me as when my husband does it and they go on top not exactly like a crust, but kind of I feel like this is very a very long winded description. This is like all I want all of this. It's uh. When it gets to be really cold weather, I'm often like, when are we having chicken and dumplings. What if you made chicken and dumplings tonight? Um. Growing up, I think my mom made up what chicken and dumplings were, okay, because she would do them like in the pan, and she would make like a very biscuity dough and the same pan that she had fried chicken in. She would just drop that dough in with them towards the end and let them puff up, and you got these nice like buttery heads of chicken grease in them like biscuits. Essentially, that sounds really good and delicious, unlike anything, unlike anything I've ever seen anybody else do. But that's what I grew up with. And then we moved to the South, and I remember being at a restaurant and seeing chicken and dumplings on the menu, and I ordered it, and when it came and it was like submerged dumplings and what appeared to be a stew, I was just like, what is this gloss? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. When Patrick does it, it's like, uh, occasionally they come out heavy, which is the term that's used in here. With the dumplings. They were allegedly poisoned, like when something has gone not quite right in the mixing process. Occasionally they will come out of in a way that we both describe as too heavy. But I find them to be really delicious because they have like that more Doughey almost poached texture, but there's often like a more biscuity, crispy top layer two. It delicious, it's a it's I find it very very yummy. And maybe I'm going to text him right now and when when are we having chicken and dumplings? Yeah, there's you know, if the yeast doesn't interact properly with the gluten or any of the sugars in it, like it will get really heavy. They won't puff up and be beautiful. And there was a point where Eliza mentioned during one of her statements that the yeast kind of left this weird red residue which she thought was poisoned. But I think like your yeast was just not active anymore. Yeah, the other thing that gets me. Let me tell you about the villain in this story in my book, because it is Charlotte Turner. Yeah. I don't think Charlotte Turner did the poisoning. I think Robert did it, but I think Charlotte covered it up for him. And I was also a witch because there's a whole thing that I didn't include here where she just like hovered over Eliza, who was a cook, she had been cooking professionally for like years at this point, whereas Charlotte was not, and she was like a newlywed wife hovering over her, telling her how to do every step, and I'm like, I know you're technically the boss would get out, yeah yeah. And it was actually Charlotte that insisted that milk went into the sauce because Eliza I was like, I'm making, I'm not making that, We're doing like a gravy kind of sauce, and She's like, no milk in the sauce, and so I'm like suspicious. I make the Simpson's Dog suspicious eye face. Allegedly, the doctor John Marshall did get John Joseph Hume, who was developing ways to test for arsenic involved, and he did in his test determined that it was arsenic, although it seemed like John Marshall kind of like got there before he had done any of the testing, like he was kind of looking to support his assumed thesis instead of really doing the scientific method where you try to prove it by disproving it essentially, but yeah, that's a little bit weird. John Marshall also wrote a pamphlet after Eliza had been executed that is essentially a smear campaign against her. It's completely opposite to the way most accounts and recordings of things she has said and her letters and like the way that press reporters found her. He makes her sound like this really braddy shrew who just barks at everybody, and it's like so discordant to every other account we have of her behavior and her temperament that it's like, dude, no, yeah, I haven't even gotten to the gross part, okay, which is Sylvester the Judge because he was known as a hanging judge. Yeah, he just loved to prosecute people. There were a lot of those in Britain during this era, yes for sure. And he also had a really horrible reputation for demanding sexual favors of women who came to him for help. And I'm just like, you're the grossest of gross. Yeah. Yeah. We've had a couple of episodes before and we've talked about how the justice system worked in Britain over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and other periods too, But like we've we've talked about several things that have been related to like how often it really was just stacked against whoever was the defendant, Like the there was just a presumption that this was rubber stamping the fact that the person who had been accused was guilty. And this was maybe fifty years or so prior to this was when we talked about women being transported to Australia to try to offset the gender imbalance in the convicted men that were being transported to Australia, and like how many people were being transported for and just incredibly minor alleged defense is like stealing somebody's underwear off the clothesline like that kind of stuff. So this is a way bigger case because it's like possibly an attempted murder, right, But like I saw just a lot of the same traits in the way that the trial played out. Yeah, there is also a detail that comes up in the most scant mentions isn't focused on, at least in none of the documents or information that was available to me, that Charlotte Turner was apparently pregnant when all of this happened, and it didn't impact her pregnancy negatively to the best of our knowledge. But like you would think that would be a huge focus, right, right, she tried to poison a pregnant woman, but it never seems to come up or it was just not recorded properly in court documents, because that is also a thing. Yeah, that was very common. Yeah, you know, they weren't getting everything word for word for sure, and there there were mentions in some I read a couple of different books that talked about this trial, and there is like an acknowledgement that eventually, like between arraignment and like the old Bailey trial, that people would have eventually those documents would carry over, like the statements from the arraignment would make their way to the trial. But that wasn't always happening at this point, so it was a lot harder to catch in consistencies, a lot harder to have a basis to go off of on other records to like prompt questions. So weird. One of the other things that came up for me is we were recording this, like it's clear that some of the things that were done to determine whether there was arsenic present were specious at best, and like, that's not over. There continue to be all kinds of like forensic methods that have been used to convict people and in some cases execute people that turn out to just not hold up at all. Like I remember a whole case where a man had been convicted of arson in a fire that killed his children, and there were all these things about the burn patterns on the floor that the prosecution was like, you, this is evidence that there was an accelerant drift in all these places, and then they did the fire department later did like a training burn of the house next door, with part of the purpose being seeing if the same thing held up when they knew for sure what was used in the house, and it was like the exact same burn patterns were present when no accelerant had been used. And it's like they're just keep being things like that coming up, where a lot of things that have been sort of accepted as evidence work out to be like, oh, that's not actually how that works, right. Yes, there is some interesting speculation that was going on at the time and has been expounded upon by some other writers right up through you know, modern writing, that this whole thing was actually kind of intended to send a message to the servant class, like at a time when there was starting to be some mobility going on of like stay in your place, right, don't sess because we can literally have you kilt, yeah, which is terrifying. And I also wonder though, too, there's this whole other tertiary thing that I found myself thinking about while I was making dinner last night, of We've talked about it many times on the show before. People can convince themselves of things that are not true or real sure, and so I really do part of me also wonders if this is not a case where like or Labar introduced the idea of like, I think we were all poisoned, and then they're all like, Eliza must have poisoned us, and then they're just backing that up in their head without even really consciously doing so, where they're like, it does all make sense. This is the only possible thing, and it's like, well, you've just literally condemned a person because you got spun up on an idea that someone introduced. There was also a something that was pointed out in some of the writings of the day that made me very very sad, which is that you know, Eliza's father had been a soldier that served with honor for the military, for the government, and like he had no like no one seemed to care about any of that or respect any of that as he was fighting to like save his daughter, to pay for his daughter's body, etc. It's just like a weird you know, that kind of thing where people treat other humans as like disposable, even if they have been very integral to something they have done. It's frustrating anyway. I'm sorry. I'm in a very murdery space in my research lately, so there might be more things like this. This was in case anyone is curious, a case that came up when we were breaking the first season of Criminalia and we were like, no, she's not actually a lady poisoner. I don't think so, we can't. But I really really was intrigued by her story, which is why we are here just cross pollinating. It works out great. If this is your weekend coming up, I hope that nothing horrible happens to you or by you, and that you have a RESTful time and you take care of yourself and others as much as as possible. And if you don't have time, off. I hope that you still manage to carve out a little space for yourself to eat something delicious and wholesome that has nothing tainted in it whatsoever, and just to rest and relax and rejuvenate your mind, body and spirit. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday there'll be another new one. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.