Frank Duveneck and Elizabeth Boott

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Welson. I was in New York recently, and, of course, as I try to do every time I get to New York, but it doesn't always work, I went to the Met. Oh I love the Met had a little scare. People thought there was gunfire. There wasn't, but it was scary in the moment, so I didn't get to hang as long as I wanted to. But while I was there, there's a piece of art I have seen there many times, and I have never really stopped and read the little placard on it. And then when I did, I felt sort of foolish because it was a piece by an artist whose work I already liked, and I just never had realized what that piece was and what its significance was. I'm not even gonna say right now what it was, because it up later in the narrative of the episode, and I'll notice as the inspiration then. But today we are talking about two painters, Frank Duvenick and his relationship with Elizabeth Boot And to start, we're gonna give Frank's background, We'll get a little bit of Lizzie's later and how their lives came together. It's sort of sweet, but a heads up, there's a little bit of sorrow in here as well. Frank Duvinick was born Frank Decker on October ninth, eighteen forty eight, in Covington, Kentucky. His father was Bernard Decker, a German immigrant, and his mother, Katherine, was also from Germany. Frank was named after his father's brother, also Frank Decker. When the younger Frank was only a year old, his father, Bernard died of cholera. Catherine got married again to a man named Joseph Duvenick, and Frank's last name changed to that of his stepfather. When Frank was twelve, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, into a house at twelve twenty six green Up Street that had been owned by Frank's uncle. Frank, Catherine, and Joseph opened and ran a beer garden next to the house. Just in case you don't know, Covington to Cincinnati like today is like a seven minute drive. That wasn't a big fat move. Yeah, they're pretty close to one another, but not long after that move, when Frank was fourteen, he started an apprenticeship with a church decorator named Wilhelm Lamprecht, who was also German. Sometimes you'll see this reported as him being thirteen when this starts. It's not entirely clear, but the timeline that made the most sense to me put him at fourteen, although it seemed like the wheels were in motion before that. But this work that he was doing with Lamprecht involved a lot of work in primarily Catholic churches and monasteries, and this was a big operation. There was a pretty wide geographical range of clients, so their work would reach us far north into Quebec and also east into Pennsylvania. And doing this exposed Frank to a lot of religious art, and he learned how to paint and sculpt to fill the needs of the very churches that they decorated. But he didn't really have artistic freedom. But boy, he was getting a technical education. Again. It's an interesting thing to me to think of an artist getting all of the technical stuff and none of the art stuff until later. But that is how his life worked. His earliest signed and dated picture is from this time in his life. And that's a painting that he did of the Madonna and Child in eighteen sixty seven for a church. An offshoot of that work was that being an apprentice to a German decorator meant he heard a lot about Germany, specifically about Munich and the art scene there, and because of that, when he was twenty one, Frank traveled to Munich to study at the Munich Academy study art specifically. This was something that his mentors had been advocating for with his parents as well, and Frank found that Germany and art school were very much to his liking. Because Frank had grown up in a German speaking home and was bilingual, he didn't have any problems with language. In Munich, he fit right in with his peers, and as an American student from abroad, he was popular. This was a lot different from being an apprentice in Cincinnati. Yeah. I read one article that said it was essentially like going from even though he did not have a lot of money, going from being you know, a pauper in Cincinnati to being a prince in Munich because everyone loved him and he was like the coolest kid on the block. As an art student, Frank studied under Wilhelm Dietz and Alexander Strauber, and he really flourished in art school. He was deeply influenced by the work of the Baroque and Renaissance masters, which he was exposed to for the first time while he was in Munich. Because he had so much technical skill from that apprenticeship, he was able to learn really quickly about art and then express his ideas really well. And when it came time for the student prizes, he won most of them his first year. That was kind of unheard of, and Duvinac's reputation at the school became one of consistent excellence. He was a very fast painter. His style of quickly getting work onto canvas with at this point little or no sketching, focusing on spontaneity instead of planning, is also known as fa presto. That's an Italian word for me quickly. The style that this was part of, which was very very sort of assertive, is one of the words that comes up a lot. Was very popular in Munich at the time, and this was kind of a perfect match for Frank Duvinik. When he was just twenty four, Duvenec painted one of his most famous works called The Whistling Boy. This is a dark, kind of moody piece. It features a young boy with a cigarette in one of his hands. The idea of kids with jobs being depicted in sort of adult attitudes really echoed through several of his paintings. Others included The Cobblers of pres which was in eighteen seventy seven, and He Lives by his Wits, which he painted in eighteen seventy eight. This period was one in which Duvenik was creating a lot of the art that would define his legacy, including Professor Lufts, which is a portrait of one of his friends from school. That's a relatively simple composition. Ludwig van Luft sits in partial profile, wearing a dark jacket and hat and gazing out at the viewer, and overall this is pretty indicative of all of his work of this time. The palette is very dark, but there little touches, like a pink flushed cheek that make it feel really just incredibly alive. Descriptions of Duvenik, who was called Duf by his friends, make him sound like somebody a lot of folks would really want to be around. He was really supportive of other students, and because of his excellence, he naturally fell into a leadership role with his peers. He made people feel at ease, and he sort of swept his friends up into his work old he shared things that he loved with them. By all the accounts that we have, he was very well loved. And in eighteen seventy three he had his first solo show in Munich and that show went well. But later that year Duvenik moved back to the United States to Cincinnati, Ohio. He probably would have stayed in Munich much longer had it not been for a cholera outbreak in Germany. Additionally, his family just did not have the money to keep supporting his life abroad. And there's another little twist, which is it in nineteen ninety nine, that's not a misstatement. In nineteen ninety nine, letters were found in the home that the Duveniks lived in in Cincinnati, and those letters suggested that Frank's half sister, Mollie, had gotten into our relationship with a married man, and that Frank had been asked to come home to help sort out that matter and keep Molly from ruining her life. And even though Frank was returning home. It seems like he may have had a much harder time adjusting to life back in Ohio than he had to life abroad. In Germany. He was the toast of his school and his social group, and in Cincinnati there really was not much fanfare over him, no matter how good he was as an artist. Those dark, sort of brooding pieces were not popular at the time. He did a little more work in decorating churches, but it wasn't enough. He kind of had to rebuild his reputation there because he had been gone for several years, and so ultimately he decided to move to Chicago, but that also did not work out, and then he moved on to Saint Louis, which also was not a great fit. After almost two years of struggling, Frank had a solo show at the Boston Art Club in eighteen seventy five. It really wasn't especially successful, but then that same selection of paintings was shown a second time in Boston, this time at the doll And Richards Gallery, and with that second show, almost overnight, his life changed. Both painter William Morris Hunt and writer Henry James were really vocal in their support of his work. They called him a genius. There's really not a lot of documentation about what pieces were in this show, though, and what we do know about it is largely from different descriptions that were written in reviews. It included portrait of William Adams, portrait of Ludwig Loffs, and the old Professor. Yeah, there's some question marks about how many pieces were even in that first show, and some of this is going to come up in behind the scenes. So the Boston Evening Transcript wrote of that show, quote, the name of this gifted young painter, almost unknown in our art world a few months ago, has been made famous by the exhibition of a small number of portraits and studies in our city. These works displayed such striking originality, vigorous painting, close observation, and power of rendering individual character that one was forced to admire and even compare him with the great masters. The same write up reported that because the exhibition had gone so very well, Dubenac sent additional portraits to Boston. He kind of added to it as like a second phase of the show. And while this initial group for display only included male figures, in that second batch, he included a portrait of a woman that earned him a new round of acclaim for being able to quote paint a refined and graceful portrait of a lady as well as the courser more powerful types of manhood. We'll talk about Frank's process as a painter, which he apparently told to the reporter who wrote this piece about the Boston exhibition. First, though, we will have a quick sponsor break. Perhaps most interesting in that August eighteen seventy five Boston Evening transcript write up is a pretty detailed description of how Duvenek worked, which the writer says came from speaking directly to the artist, and it reads, in part quote, his palette is very simply made up, the only thing essentially different from that in use by most portrait painters being his use of black in the grays instead of blue. Upon a slight drawing, he begins painting in thick, square patches of color, laying a broad mass wherever it is possible, and imitating the model at once as closely as he can. He depends very much upon his background color to assist in modeling the face, as for instance, on the shadow side. He will paint that color in first, then overlay the flesh tones firmly, and then, according to the article, he lets his what they call his first painting they really mean his first pass dry and then, according to the write up, he quote rubs the surface down with ossiscipia until he obtains a surface almost as smooth as glass, and by using raw linseed oil upon it and with his color, keeps it wet as long as possible. Okay for art folks in the crowd, this description is confusing. Osiscipia is used to refer to a couple of different things, one being one use mold casting that's obviously not what would have been going on here. The other is a lithographic negative technique that involves pitting a stone surface, so that is not what this is either. It's hard to know what specifically the writer was talking about here, but suffice it to say Duvenik was smoothing out his painting with something to prepare it for further work on it, and he would, according to this account, sometimes work for weeks on a painting, not because he was spending so much time on the actual painting, but because he liked to go to museums in the early part of the day and then paint in his studio for a few hours in the afternoon. That sounds like pretty good life to me. It does to me as well. We do. I also know that he liked to really lay varnish on quite heavily, because he wanted to make his paintings look like the old Masters, just kind of charming. The other tidbit that's dropped in that discussion of Frank's work is that he was headed back to Europe, but that he planned to move to Boston once he returned. It's unclear whether that was true. It certainly wasn't how things actually played out. One point of interest regarding the sales of duven 's paintings, though, in that successful Boston show, one of them, portrait of William Adams, was purchased by kind of a he's sometimes referred to as an amateur composer named Francis Boot, and that name is going to come up again just a little later. Frank Duvenec's decision to return to Europe just as he was gaining success in the United States might seem counterintuitive, but he really wanted to return to Munich. He knew he could always send art back to the United States if he wanted to for shows, which he did. He had ample opportunity, on the heels of that instant name recognition to stay in the United States, and particularly to stay in Boston, but he took the advice of other artists who had gone abroad and then returned home in the United States to find us audiences kind of slow to engage with their art. William Morris Hunt, in particular, had traveled through France, Italy, and the Middle East and then had returned to the United States to find that American audiences had what he called the quote unpardonable conceit of looking down on French painting. French painting was one of his most significant influences, so it makes sense that Frank wanted to recapture the joy and enthusiasm that he had experienced in Munich during his early twenties. This actually worked. Duvenec spent two years back in Munich and became known as much for his fondness for parties and socializing as he was known for his art. Next, Frank moved on to Venice with two of his friends from art school, and at this point they were pretty low on cash. They kind of made a go of things, but then a serious illness hit one of his best friends, and then a lucrative job offer was tendered as that friend was recovering to that friend, not to Duvenik, and Duvenik went back to Munich with his friends to kind of get them ready to leave again. But when they headed back to the United States, he decided that he was going to stay in Munich and to support himself he started teaching. So at this point in Frank's story, we need to pause for a minute and catch up with a young woman named Elizabeth Boot. We mentioned composer Francis Boot earlier. On April thirteenth, eighteen forty six, Francis and his wife, Elizabeth Lyman Boot, welcomed a daughter into the family. They named her Elizabeth Lyman Boot after her mother, although she went by Lizzie. In a sad parallel to Frank's life, you we said earlier, he lost his father when he was just a year old, Lizzie lost her mother when she was on that same age. Unlike in Frank's family, though, Francis did not remarry and instead decided to move with his infant daughter to Europe. Lizzie grew up traveling, but the Boots eventually called Florence, Italy home. Francis saw to it that Lizzie had a comprehensive education, and particularly in the arts. She took music lessons right alongside her father, and when she expressed interest in visual art, he was very supportive and made sure she had lessons in tutors. She also had language instruction in French, Italian and Latin. Lizzie spent her entire childhood in Europe until she and Francis moved back to Boston when she was nineteen in eighteen sixty five. It was in the eighteen sixties that the Boots became close with the people who would be influential in Frank Duvinik's career. They were close to the James family and Henry, who was three years older than Lizzie, he was particularly fond of her. The families were so close that they vacationed together, and it was during one of those vacations that the Boots met William Morris Hunt. At the time, Hunt was putting together an art class for women's students and Lizzie enrolled. And it was while Lizzie was in Boston taking lessons from Hunt that she went to an art exhibition of paintings by Frank Duvenek, And while some sources suggest that she was the one who purchased portrait of William Adams, it kind of seems like it was more like she convinced her father to buy it, kind of for her. He probably had the cash to do it and she didn't. But that's kind of a picking knits thing. But sometimes you'll see that Francis purchased it, and other times you'll see that Lizzie purchased it. So if this were a romantic comedy, that would sort of seem like things were conspiring to put Frank and Elizabeth in each other's paths more than anything, though, this was just the result of both of them traveling in the same circles. But it is kind of romantic to think that Elizabeth's art tutor Hunt was one of Dubank's early supporters and that her father had been one of his earliest benefactors by purchasing a painting from the Boston Show. But that romanticized version kind of robs Lizzie of her agency, because she later sought Frank out herself. When he was in Venice. She was taking lessons in Villiers Le Belle, France, and she decided to go to Italy to see him. There's some debate about whether she met him in Boston. It seems like probably not, but she wanted to meet him at least, so she did some travel because if you look at this whole situation on a map, it is obviously that she was not at all in the part of France that would have been nearest to Venice. This wasn't like a quick hop. She was in the north of France and it was a hike. It was almost eleven hundred and forty kilometers, that's more than seven hundred miles. And then when Frank traveled back to Munich and started teaching, Lizzie went to Munich and signed up for lessons. Frank moved his painting school to Florence, something that Lizzie may have been the one to suggest. She encouraged him to start a class for women there, similar to the one that she had taken with Hunt. She was instrumental in managing all the move logistics, and this was a considerable task because Frank moved all of his students with him. Lizzie also kind of taught Duvenak how to move in higher society circles among the expatriots in Italy. He had been a really poor artist right up until his success at the age of twenty seven, and this was only a couple of years after that. They still really hadn't gotten the knack of handling his own finances. He had to have proper clothes picked out for him. The young men who were Frank's devoted students had gained the nickname the Duvenik Boys, and one of them became Frank's sort of de facto accountant. Since Frank struggled so much with handling money. I had such a bless your heart moment when I was reading about that. He's like, I had nothing, now just have money. I don't know how to do any of this. It didn't seem like he was like spendy spendy. He just literally had no concept of that much money coming in. What Frank was really good at, though, was being the life of the party. There are stories of him climbing under tables in restaurants to make animal noises to confuse the diners. He would also stage elaborate audio dramas from under tables in the same way, making people think, for example, that they were overhearing a couple in the crowd having an argument. During this time, Duvenik was as popular in Venice. It seemed as he had been in Munich as a younger man with an endless array of romances, and his social schedule sounds quite dizzying. Frank Duveneck was young, talented, suddenly flush with cash, admired by his peers, and really had a very carefree personality and everyone wanted to be in his circle. His students absolutely adored him. There are lots of accounts that people are like, yes, they all worshiped him, and it's because he was all of these fun things. But he was also a really good teacher. He was very insightful and could give people critiques that actually made them better artists. Duven X started to create etching pieces in Italy and also started experimenting with different styles of art. Sometimes this is attributed to his desire to make more saleable art, but it's also sometimes attributed to Frank's developing relationship with Elizabeth Boot. We'll talk more about their relationship right after we hear from some of the sponsors that keep the show going. While in Italy, Lizzie and Frank fell in love, much to the dismay of the men who they had in common. Francis Boot and Henry James both thought that Duvenik was a great painter and a charming man, but neither of them thought he was refined enough to be with Lizzie. Francis Boot probably resented someone else becoming important to his daughter, and he was worried that Duvenik was after her for her money. It has long been theorized that Henry James may have been in love with Lizzie himself. He was very public in his negative opinion of the couple. There was also a concern that Frank, because he was kind of a party boy, was a little bit unfocused and that he wasn't going to be able to maintain his reputation as an artist. But Lizzie really seemed pretty good for his art. She seemed intent on making sure his work was a success. Several of her society friends commissioned portraits by Frank, including Gertrude, Elizabeth Blood and Mary E. Goddard. Blood and Duvenac were even interested in each other and may have had a brief affair for a short period of time, but it obviously didn't last. Frank even painted during this time a gorgeous portrait of Lizzie's father, Francis. It kind of mimics Titian's portrait of a man in a link's trimmed coat. This is the postulated that this is a thing he painted as a way to curry favor with France's Boot. It is a gorgeous painting, although Francis seems to have been kind of unconvinced when it came to Frank's suitability as a suitor to his daughter Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Lizzie was busy working on her own painting career, and during their breakups she would travel for that. She had her first exhibit in Boston at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in eighteen eighty three alongside Annie Dixwell. Lizzie also traveled to the United States Southern States in eighteen eighty three and painted several pieces depicting farm and plantation life there. The relationship between Boot and Duvenek was kind of on again and off again as they would travel away from each other. They loved each other. They would be engaged and then break off their engagement, try to end things, only to realize again that they wanted to be together. All of that happened multiple times, but after several years of being engaged on and on, I think it's like over five years, during which Lizzie often saw other society women basically throwing themselves at Frank, the pair finally decided they wanted to be together forever, and they got married. Lizzie wrote to a friend, quote, this has been a long affair, lasting for years. The thing was given up entirely at one time, but on meeting again, we find the old feeling is not dead and we are going to make up life together as we did not like it very well apart. Their ceremony was performed by a civil servant at Lizzie's apartment in Paris on March twenty fifth, eighteen eighty six. Frank, still kind of a mess financially, had to borrow money from one of his students to pay for that service. Lizzie was thirty nine at the time and Frank was thirty eight. This is also allegedly when it became a parent due to some needed paperwork that although Frank had been using the name Duvenik since he was a tiny child, his name had never legally been changed from Decker. Henry James wrote of this marriage, quote for him, it is all gain. For her, it is very brave. But the thing is Francis Boot, her father, had actually intervened to make sure Lizzie was financially protected before the marriage. Allegedly, just the day before, he had required Frank to sign a document that gave up all rights to Lizzie's estate. Frank had moved to Paris the year prior with the hope of exhibiting at the salon there. Lizzie followed, and they announced their plan to get married not long after, although Francis might not have been a fan of the union. When the newlyweds finished their celebratory travels, they moved in with him at Villa Castillani in Florence. They set up a studio space. They both worked there. Frank's work changed, which we will talk more about in just a minute, and more and more he was capturing the sunny scenes that were unfolding before them in Tuscany. This was also a time of anticipation because Frank and Lizzie were expecting a baby at the end of eighteen eighty six. Baby Frank was born on December eighteenth and Lizzie wrote in a letter to a friend, quote, it seemed so strange, after so many years of spinsterhood to get so much domestic life in so short a time. With the whole family living together, Francis Boot had softened on his opinion of Frank Duvenek. He withdrew the legal papers that had kept Lizzie from combining her estate with Frank's. Yeah, it seems like because Frank really did seem to be a very good husband and he was very devoted to the baby. Francis kind of realized, like, oh, he's actually in love and not trying to just steal from my family. Uh. The Duvenec and Boot household traveled to Paris in eighteen eighty eight, and while they were there, they saw a lot of their old friends and they kept a very busy social schedule. But though she was painting a large watercolor for the Paris Salon, Lizzie was not entirely happy. They had a nurse for the baby, but they had trouble finding a doctor for the baby. Lizzie was still really tired from child care and trying to make art and keeping up with all of their social engagements. The late winter in Paris that year was especially cold, and Lizzie caught a chill which quickly developed into pneumonia, and she declined very rapidly, and just over the course of a few days, things got very bad, and she died on March twenty second, eighteen eighty eight. Francis wanted baby frank to be raised by the Boot family with relatives of Lizzie's who lived in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Duvenac agreed to that. Frank moved back to Cincinnati, but spent summers at the Rocky Neck Art Colony in Gloucester, which was close enough that he could see his son. Yeah. Sometimes he would bring baby Frankie over to the art colony and spend time with him there, and sometimes he would go into to Waltham and spend time there. Frank was unsurprisingly devastated by the loss of Lizzie, and his reaction to her death was art. He sculpted a funeral effigy monument to her that completed in eighteen ninety one. I have also seen later years, but that is the most common one that I see, and it was placed on her tomb in the Cemeterio Evangelico dely Alori in Florence. This monument depicts Lizzie lying down peacefully, and her face was created using her funeral mask. She's draped in folds of fabric and there is a palm covering most of her body. This is a spectacularly beautiful piece of sculpture and her father was so moved by it that he asked Frank to make a copy of it in marble that could be displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston so that the Boot family could always see it. It would be the first of many copies of that. The bronze and gold leaf cast of it that was made in nineteen twenty seven that is on display at the MET in New York was what inspired this episode. It is so pretty. If you're at the Met, it's in that big sculpture garden that's right by the little cafe. Highly recommend going to see it. Frank's longtime critic when it came to matters involving Lizzie, Henry James, wrote that the sculpture exemplified quote the jolly great truth that it is art alone that triumphs over fate. The impact of Lizzie on Frank's work in both her life and her death has been something that art historians have analyzed and theorized about for a long time. His work shifted pretty markedly in tone. From the darkness that he had become famous for. This moved to a much lighter style associated with the French school of the time. This change is really obvious when you look at his body of work. His painting The Whistling Boy, which he completed in eighteen seventy two, is right in line with the detailed description of his work that we gave earlier. He clearly used a deeply dark background to create a bed against which he painted this figure of a boy. It's really dramatic in its contrast. But then when you look at the painting The Water Carrier, which he painted in Venice in eighteen eighty four, it almost looks like the work of a different artist. The brushstrokes have some commonality, with some sections sort of having the suggestion of a shape rather than a realistic rendering, but overall it's a lot more detailed and realistic than The Whistling Boy. Most obvious is the fact that it is set against a light gray background the painting. That's perhaps the most obvious moment of Transition is a portrait of Lizzie that he was working on when she died. It is light in its background, although she's depicted in a dark brown gown with a muff that was actually her wedding dress. Yeah, it's an interesting reversal because his early work was dark background, lighter figure than he had done some of those light background, more detailed figures, and this one is light background with a darker figure. It's quite drmant and beautiful. Frank continued to teach after Lizzie's death in Cincinnati, in New York, and in Chicago, and he also traveled to Europe frequently, so though he was in mourning, he was still Frank. After teaching with the Art Academy of Cincinnati for a decade, he was made a member of the faculty in nineteen hundred. Prior to that, he had kind of been a contractor. He actually became head of the school in nineteen oh five, and that was a position he held for the rest of his life. Without Elizabeth, it seems that Frank really poured all of his love into his work and his students. He also became a member of the Cincinnati Art Club and was really influential in the city as both a painter and a supporter of other artists. He kept working in his studio in Covington, Kentucky, and also managed to ruffle some feathers still. His nineteen oh two painting Siesta depicts a naked woman asleep on a bed and her body is twisted in this unself conscious way. That was bought for a saloon but turned out to be too salacious even for that venue. Yeah, there's kind of a joke that the person that owned the saloon was like, this is actually too much. Maybe this would be better in a high society place, even though it was, you know, Lascivius allegedly for the time, it's quite beautiful. In nineteen fifteen, he traveled to the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco with his sister Molly and some friends of theirs, and while there he received the Medal of Honor for his contributions to art as an artist and a teacher. Duveneck died on January third, nineteen nineteen. One of the things that Duvenac believed was most important for young artists was to have access to art, so he bequeathed his entire art collection, both his works and those of many other important artists, to the Cincinnati Art Museum. You can still see a lot of them there now. They did a big exhibit two years ago, but I think it is down now or it started in twenty twenty. Art historian Mahonri Sharp Youung wrote of Duvenik when he died in nineteen nineteen, he was worshiped locally and completely forgotten everywhere else. Doesn't seem entirely true, since he had just gotten that metal, but he did kind of fade out for a while, and there's been a lot of effort in recent years to recognize his work, which is really quite lovely. That is Frank Duvnik. I have so many things to say about Frank on Friday, you just get ready. I love him. I have listener mail from Aaron about Lucy Stone, which points out a thing that I don't think we expressly said about Lucy Stone, but becomes kind of important to me. Okay, So Aaron writes, dear Holly and Tracy, happy summer. I've been listening to the podcast for about five years now, and I love anything to do with history, especially stuff that I have maybe heard about. But never really known anything in detail. Something new by listening to your podcast makes me happy. I recently caught up with the podcast. By listening to your episode on Lucy Stone, I was inspired to hear about her life growing up. Listening to how her father paid for her brother's schooling but wouldn't support her educational aspirations until later on reminded me of my middle and high school years. I attended a challenging all girls high school where I lived. When I complained about the hard and difficult work out loud one day to some close family members, they just told me I should quit. This was sad and tough to hear when many of my male family members attended the adjoining brother school and no expense was spared for their tuition when I attended my school on scholarship and the generosity in my grandparents paying my way. However, this did not stop me, and I later attended an all female college and graduated with honors from grad school. All of these experiences made me who I am today. Even though I have become a wife and mom, it hasn't stopped me from running two small businesses. Thank you for continuing to share inspiring true store about women in our history who have overcome challenges like this. To close out my email, I have included a photo of my mom's two cats, Annie and Baxter. My husband is allergic, so me and my kids spend time with her pets. Looking forward to hearing more amazing episodes. Thank you both for what you do. Aaron. I love this, and here's why. I mean one congratulations, Aaron, because it sounds like you made it happen and that's amazing. But I think what's really interesting about Lucy Stone is that she was so ahead of her time that that struggle is something that is more common to hear a little bit closer to our own point in the timeline, because she was one of the first women who was like, no, I would like to get an education please, yeah, which just is one of those things where you know, history is forever reverberating and we are not over those hurdles for everybody, so it's important. That's why it's important to tell those stories. Anyway, Lucy Stone, these cats are so cute and they are spooned up together the way that I love to see kiddies and I want to kiss their faces. They may not like that, so thank you Aaron, because now you have resulted in my poor cats getting the kisses I would like to bestow on others. If you would like to write to us, you could do so at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you haven't subscribed yet, you can do so on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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.