For most of the 24 years Richard Hofstadter was a professor in the Columbia University history department — from 1946 until his death from leukemia in 1970, at age 54 — he and his family lived in an apartment near campus, on Claremont Avenue. A disciplined writer, Hofstadter woke early to keep to his daily regimen of three pages. His desk stood toward one end of the front room of the apartment, a double parlor. (French doors separating the two rooms had been removed.) When they were home the children played in this room, and in this room his wife, Beatrice, occupied Mother’s Reading Chair, as the family called it. In the spring they would decamp to Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, where they bought a house in the mid-1950s. As the Hofstadters summered with members of New York’s intellectual elite, the likes of the Kazins and the Trillings, Richard continued writing in the mornings. Beatrice made sure the house was quiet.
Nearly all of Richard’s iconic works of history, including the Pulitzer Prize winners The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), emerged from domestic arrangements like this. Both Beatrice and Richard had outlived their first spouses. Both were from Buffalo, though they hadn’t known each other growing up. Soon after they married, in 1947, she adopted his son, Daniel, who was just a toddler. A daughter, Sarah, was born in 1952. For historians who analyze gendered labor in the home, this domesticity raises questions about the role of faculty wives in scholarly production. If nothing else, keeping the crowded house quiet afforded Richard the ability to concentrate. But, in fact, Beatrice did much more.
The problem with wanting brilliant faculty wives to be recognized as coauthors is that some aspects of their situation aren’t unique.
Beatrice Kevitt Hofstadter (later White) used her skills as an editor to help her husband — contributions he credited in rich acknowledgments. In The Age of Reform, he wrote, “Thanks are due above all to my wife, ... who has developed the art of the editor and the textual critic into a major gift for asking the right questions. Her advice has been indispensable.” She played a large part in the second edition of Social Darwinism in American Thought (1955), originally published in 1944 as Richard’s revised dissertation. As he put it in a prefatory note, “Beatrice Kevitt Hofstadter shared equally with me in the task of revision.” And in a literary profile published several years later, he showed the reporter a passage from Social Darwinism he and Beatrice had polished: “We made — I say ‘we’ because I get a tremendous amount of editorial criticism from my wife — some seven or eight hundred changes, nearly all of them purely stylistic.”
Beatrice’s role as an editor matters because of Richard Hofstadter’s reputation among historians today: Many dispute his interpretations, but he is almost unanimously lauded for his confident, pithy prose style. The Age of Reform, on 19th-century agrarian dissatisfaction: “Here was the irony from which the farmer suffered above all others: the United States was the only country in the world that began with perfection and aspired to progress.” This quotable copy probably helped raise his profile during and after the 2016 presidential election season, when journalists cited his work on populism (The Age of Reform) and conservative backlash (Anti-Intellectualism; The Paranoid Style in American Politics).
With the growing importance of feminism in academic culture today, the history of the domestic work of faculty wives has become more urgent. Last year on Twitter, academics using the hashtag #ThanksForTyping posted images of acknowledgments in which male academics thanked their wives for typing their manuscripts — a sexist trope that feminist scholars first called out in the early 1970s. As the conversation grew, the tweeted acknowledgments included gratitude to the wives who copy-edited and proofread their husbands’ manuscripts. Twitter users, then bloggers, began asking, not for the first time, to what extent these thank-you’s actually obscured women’s scholarly work. (The Rutgers historian Bonnie G. Smith wrote about such erasures in The Gender of History, 1998.)
I had been asking myself the same question about Beatrice Hofstadter since I read those sparkling acknowledgments as an undergraduate. But in the aftermath of the 2016 election, with Richard’s name on pundits’ tongues, it occurred to me that Beatrice might deserve some credit for the ideas and quotations being bandied about.
I wasn’t the only one. Last month the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Blog ran a post about “Mrs. Hofstadter,” speculating that her editing, if brought to light, could bring down a collective illusion about the “Myth of the Heroic Lone Scholar.” Comments on the post descended into rank chaos, with a few arguing that Beatrice probably deserved coauthor status, based mostly on Richard’s acknowledgments and a short obituary profile that quoted Sarah describing her mother as the “writer behind the throne.”
Some comments insisted that it should be easy to establish Beatrice’s behind-the-scenes editorial prowess, even though she died in 2012, at age 90: Go to the archive and find her markup on Richard’s drafts. Evidence of extensive intervention could warrant a reevaluation of most of the Hofstadter oeuvre. It would also show that academic authorship is rarely the result of a single person’s efforts, that no one, not even so-called great men, can survive without collaboration, perhaps especially with their spouses.
I took a trip to Columbia last year to consult the Hofstadter papers, expecting to find obvious and extensive markup in Beatrice’s hand. I focused on the available research files, manuscript drafts, and proofs for three books: Social Darwinism and The Age of Reform, because of Richard’s striking acknowledgments in both; and the unfinished, posthumously published America at 1750, because Beatrice worked to bring it out in late 1971 with Richard’s student Paula Fass (who went on to a distinguished career at Berkeley). I consulted with Sarah Hofstadter on identifying handwriting and even the different typewriters her parents used. (There were at least four: one for each of them in New York and two more in Wellfleet.)
There was direct archival evidence that Beatrice influenced Richard’s writing, but not much. From the Age of Reform research files came two book summaries she wrote, one of which contributed passages to the final volume. But the page proofs for Social Darwinism (the archive’s only documentation of the book’s revisions) bore only Richard’s markup. The early chapter drafts of America at 1750 were edited unsparingly, but the handwriting was either indeterminate or Richard’s.
This was more complicated than a hashtag, a comment war, or a Hollywood narrative of the uncredited work of women behind the scenes. Beatrice helped Richard materially — he said so, in print, repeatedly — but the sources obscured what he might have meant by “editor” and “textual critic.” The evidence is suggestive, not conclusive.
Beatrice deserved a great deal of credit. But isn’t that what she got?
In addition to Richard’s reading checklists, outlines, and other materials, the Age of Reform archival files include research assistants’ book summaries, notes, and even an amusing diagram explicating part of the book’s argument (drawn by Eric McKitrick, later a Columbia history professor). Sarah Hofstadter confirmed that two undated, typewritten book summaries with handwritten marginalia were written by her mother, including a write-up of the Minnesota populist Ignatius L. Donnelly’s 1890 novel Caesar’s Column, two passages of which were absorbed into the book, but streamlined and given an edge.
Beatrice’s summary describes Donnelly’s imagined slum as populated with “undersized men and women, sullen and hungry-looking, wearing rags, children with ... ‘not even the chirp of a winter bird’ about them, of all national extractions.” The Age of Reform massages these words: in the city live “urban laborers, a polyglot, silent mass of sullen, underfed humanity.” Nearly every word in the first is accounted for in the second, but now expertly tuned: “of all national extractions” becomes “polyglot”; the precious quotation about chirping birds is distilled to “silent.” “Hungry-looking” is transformed into “underfed,” implying that someone should be feeding these people but isn’t — a moral assessment within one word turned just so. This is classic Hofstadter: a turn of phrase containing a breadcrumb hinting at a further line of inquiry.
The other passage from the summary also exemplifies the intimacies of prose revision. In a bit of marginalia, Beatrice notes with her candid wit that one “whole scene [is] exceedingly lascivious in the repressed way of the ’90s.” This became more formal: “the work is full of a kind of suppressed lasciviousness that one finds often in popular writing of the period.”
In this case, the meaning shifts along with the voice. “Repressed” is an activity of the Freudian unconscious. The Age of Reform backs away from psychoanalysis by changing “repressed” to “suppressed.” But if repression is an internal process, suppression might be undertaken by an external person or force. Another breadcrumb.
The final versions of these passages are better than the originals. Richard was seemingly an expert craftsperson who shaped the raw material supplied by others, including Beatrice. In the case of this husband and wife, it may be no wonder that some ponder who was the writer and who the editor.
The connection indeed was close. Characteristically, every chapter went through at least three drafts, each an opportunity for stylistic adjustments. Even if we had manuscript drafts of everything, it might be impossible to know how and when those adjustments were made, and by whom. I asked Beatrice’s longtime friend, the Brooklyn College historian Ann Burton, how exactly Beatrice edited Richard’s work. They discussed ideas, she said, adding that he might draft something and show her, to which she might respond in writing — but perhaps not. Beatrice and Richard lived together, ate together, slept together. They were certainly close enough to ask each other for the right word when needed.
The problem with wanting brilliant faculty wives to be recognized as coauthors is that some aspects of their situation aren’t unique. Most scholarship is the product of intellectual networks of relatively small groups of people, which can include colleague readers, grad-student researchers, journal peer reviewers, librarians, and funders. There are also advisers, mentors, teachers, friends, parents, and spouses.
Acknowledgments are there to describe those networks. That is why graduate students pore over monograph front matter: Reading acknowledgments is an important part of professionalization. They help new academics discover their discipline and find themselves within it. And, as Richard noted in his own, Beatrice was a critical part of the network that helped him.
She was, moreover, personally to be taken seriously as an intellectual. She would instigate and hold her own amid the banter at the Columbia and Wellfleet dinner parties she loved hosting, she would serve as “first reader” not only to her husband but also to some of their friends, she could even knit and read at the same time. And, while raising Dan and Sarah, she earned a master’s degree in the Columbia history department (1965) and taught at the Brooklyn College School of Continuing Education in the mid-60s. The domestic and the academic intertwined in her life, as they did in the lives of other fiercely smart women who became faculty wives.
Beatrice entered the Columbia history Ph.D. program in 1967, just as a critical mass of women began earning doctorates in the discipline. Although she sometimes managed to be part of the gang — joining study groups for orals, for example — she was still Mrs. Hofstadter, her superstar husband still adviser to some of the students she now befriended.
After the chapters of America at 1750 that were close to completion when Richard died were shaped into a publishable manuscript, Beatrice finished her dissertation, on the weakness of the Anglican Church during the American Revolution. But she never formally filed it: she backed away from the final step to the doctorate. This was her quiet secret.
Over the years there have been faculty wives whose “typing” belied rigorous editorial engagement, even to the point of ghostwriting. One story floating around an Ivy League university concerns a widow who, at an event dedicating an endowed chair in her husband’s name, proclaimed that she had written his books. A memorable episode in Natalie Robins’s 2017 biography of the critic Diana Trilling has her frustrated that her husband, the renowned Lionel, destroyed the drafts of his books, which bore her editorial markup. That way no one would dispute his sole authorship.
But even stipulating that most faculty wives in some way assisted in their husbands’ work, making Beatrice Hofstadter into a symbol of invisible oppression asks very little of the historical imagination, to say nothing of providing any evidence of what she actually did. Faculty wives don’t need to be coauthors to be admirable intellectuals. Women’s work after World War II was more variegated than domestic drudgery, and faculty wives’ “careers” were just that: careers.
Beatrice deserved a great deal of credit. But isn’t that what she got? If many male academics condescended to their wives with nods to typing, Richard might be an example of a scholar who actually did represent his wife’s contributions in the magnitude they deserved — if not in the detail historians would wish for. Perhaps we should take him at his word. Beatrice deserves respect for the choices she made, for the work that she did — as a faculty wife, an intellectual, and an academic.
Allison Miller is editor of the magazine Perspectives on History, published by the American Historical Association.
