Marion Hamilton Carter

Marion Hamilton Carter (April 9, 1865 – March 12, 1937) was an American Progressive Era educator, psychologist, children's literature editor, short story writer, and artist.

[13] In addition to her community work, Mary Nelson Carter published a collection of seventeen first-person sketches of western North Carolina local life, written in rural dialect, and including stories of the Civil War and its aftermath in Appalachia.

[15] Marion Carter and her younger sister Kathleen received a science-based education in Philadelphia that prepared them for acceptance into elite east-coast women's colleges.

Working under the direction of Paul Henry Hanus and William James,[22] she patented seventy-five paper dolls for use in schools to stimulate creative writing abilities in children.

"[22][29] By 1902 Carter was also serving as Superintendent of Nature Studies in the public schools of Greater New York and lived as a "Special Student" at Barnard College.

Although Carter expressed progressive views with regards to education, science, psychology, and women's rights, some of her investigative journalism was contrarian or reactionary in nature.

[39] Years later Carter revisited the subject in an article for The Housekeeper series on "The Truth About Public Schools" in which she described kindergarten as "Infant Vaudeville," "Joy Saloon," and "one of the most insidiously immoral institutions in the country.

[42][43] Still obsessed about kindergarten in 1911, Carter gave a speech to the Iowa Press and Authors Club in which she denounced it as "the country's greatest menace to prosperity, not barring liquors or drugs.

She took an anti-suffragist and pro-liquor lobby stance and argued, "when the underlying motive of such laws is largely spite against a sex in general on the part of a few disgruntled woman suffragists it is shocking to every sense of decency."

"[45] Legal Journalism Carter established her reputation as a muckraking journalist through her months-long coverage of the sensational 1906 Josephine Terranova murder trial.

Terranova herself participated in the jury selection process and chose twelve fathers who, after being instructed by the judge to weigh in on the side of the prosecution, took less than fifteen minutes to acquit her.

[48] Carter, having spent years of scientific research on aural hallucinations and trance phenomena, focused her coverage on Terranova's psychological state and the fact that the murder case was the first in legal history to present hallucinatory voices as part of the defense.

[49] Science/Medical Journalism In 1909 McClure's Magazine commissioned Carter to spend a summer in South Carolina and write investigative pieces on two epidemics raging among the poor: pellagra and hookworm.

[51] She also reported the most recent scientific research on pellagra in the United States, which was first noticed in South Carolina in 1902, broke out as an epidemic in 1906, and by 1912 had resulted in 30,000 cases and a death rate of 40%.

[53] Carter's story on hookworm focused on the two million sick poor white people in the South whom she described as "shiftless, ignorant, poverty-pinched, and wretched ... as purely Anglo-Saxon as any left in the country.

"[70][71] Her proposed staff included suffragist, journalist, and novelist Mary Holland Kinkaid; Carter's sister Kathleen Carter Moore; N. Parker Willis from the New York Journal of Commerce as associate editor (not to be confused with editor Nathaniel Parker Willis); art director Joseph Cummings Chase; and former lecturers from Cornell University, Louise Sheffield Brownell Saunders and Alexander Buel Trowbridge.

"[78] Written in the first person, it tells the story of an elite widowed woman from Richmond, Virginia—feeling hopeless, devastated, and purposeless after the deaths of her husband and only child—who converts to the women's suffrage cause after meeting a young suffragette distributing pamphlets on the street.

Carter quoted from her friend William James' Memories and Studies to argue for the narrator's inner growth[79]—from grieving widow to suffragist to militant suffragette.

The narrator bears a slight resemblance to an unnamed black-clad Virginian suffragist in journalist Mary Alden Hopkins' contemporaneous account of the May 4, 1912 New York suffrage parade.

"[90] This evolutionary rhetoric is echoed in the description of another of the novel's characters, "the offspring of a German immigrant girl" and an Englishman, who exemplifies "the worst in both strains of blood...."[91] Similarly, Carter's antisemitism[34] influences her stereotypical portrayal of Dora's brother's tragic "mixed marriage.

[94][95] By 1922 Carter had moved to Christiantown, Massachusetts, an unoccupied Native American reservation on the northwest side of Martha's Vineyard that she had loved since she was a child.

[96] She had known Wampanoag families in the area before the town was wiped out by smallpox in 1888, held fond memories of those earlier years, and felt spiritually connected to the land and the dead.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Henry Beetle Hough visited her on her last day in the cottage shortly before her death and he reflected afterwards on the place she left behind, "the record of years lived differently, valiantly, and to a particular taste and interest.

[99] She left her Christiantown property to Cornell University with a provision that it remain intact for thirty years for family use, and she bequeathed her art, including J. M. W. Turner watercolors, Max Klinger etchings, Chinese paintings, bronzes, jades and other objets d'art, to Vassar College .

[100] Her recovered oeuvre represents a cross-section of early twentieth-century American popular literature that traces a typical trajectory, like the paths that journalism scholar Jean Lutes explores,[101] of women journalists who became novelists.