Partner Mabel Haynes,
Gertrude Stein
Queer Places:
24 E 64th St, New York, NY 10065
Bryn Mawr College (Seven Sisters), 101 N Merion Ave, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
104 Loring Ave, Pelham, NY 10803
The Wyoming, 853 7th Ave, New York, NY 10019
Cornell University (Ivy League), 410 Thurston Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850
Mary
Aletta Bookstaver (October 12, 1875 – 1950) was a feminist, political
activist, and editor, widely known by the nickname "May." She was a member of
the
Heterodoxy Club. She worked
closely with Margaret Sanger as a
birth control activist, and together they were dedicated to promoting the
principle of intelligent and voluntary motherhood. Knoblauch worked
alongside Sanger as the Managing Editor and writer of the The Birth
Control Review, which was a magazine/scholarly journal that publicized the
importance for women to take ownership of their own bodies.
Daughter of Judge Henry W.
Bookstaver and Mary Baily Young, she attended Miss Florence Baldwin's School
(now
Baldwin School) and graduated from
Bryn Mawr College in 1898 in history and political science. After
graduation she moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she was part of a circle of
lesbian Bryn Mawr graduates, including Bookstaver's lover,
Mabel Haynes.
Gertrude Stein, then a
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine student, became infatuated
with Bookstaver, who found Stein's naïveté literally laughable, but introduced
Stein to physical love. The experience made a deep impression on Stein, whose
first novel,
QED, completed in Baltimore in 1903, was an autobiographical account
of this love triangle, with Bookstaver's character named "Helen Thomas."
In 1906 Bookstaver married Charles Edward Knoblauch (1870–1934), a broker on
the
New York Stock Exchange and
Rough Rider veteran of the
Spanish–American War, at her father's summer cottage in Newport, Rhode
Island. After a honeymoon in Europe, she and her husband lived in "The
Wyoming" in New York City. She adopted the style of "Mrs. Charles E.
Knoblauch."
She carried Gertrude Stein's manuscript 'word portraits' of
Matisse and
Picasso to
Alfred Stieglitz's
Camera
Work office at 291 Fifth Avenue, (Little
Galleries of the Photo-Secession) and insisted that Stieglitz publish
them, which he did in the August 1912 edition of Camera Work, a special
edition devoted to Picasso and Matisse. This was Stein's first publication.
As Stieglitz recounted the episode, "In December 1911, or perhaps it was
January 1912, a huge woman leading a huge Boston bulldog entered 291. She had
a portfolio filled with manuscripts under her arm. It was a funny sight to see
the woman with her bulldog and bursting portfolio in that tiny room."
The dog, named Kuroki, was a French bull terrier which became famous when
Bookstaver took him for a walk in 1915 "without any muzzle over his
inconsequential nose," (as reported by
The New York Times) a violation of health regulations. Her lawyer
Bertha Rembaugh argued "as long as children weren't muzzled dogs should
not be …" The case failed, and Bookstaver paid a fine. Also in 1915 she sold
her deceased father's house, a four-story townhouse that still stands at 24
East 64th Street, New York City.
She was later on the Board of Directors of New York Women's Publishing
Company, the publisher of
Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review, which she served as editor
of from February 1919.
She translated
Guillaume Apollinaire's 1913 Les Peintres cubistes [Méditations
Esthétiques] as "Aesthetic Meditations on Painting: The
Cubist Painters" published in
The Little Review in three parts in 1922.
Childless and a widow from 1934, Bookstaver died in New York City in 1950.
She left her entire estate to Elinor
Byrns and George Garfunkel.
Alice B. Toklas jealously demanded Stein burn Bookstaver's letters. Her
other papers are scattered or destroyed.
In 1952, Elinor Byrns and George Garfunkel gave $1,000 to set up
10 annual $100 prizes at Cornell University. The prize was named Mary B. Knoblauch
and was given to the best essay about the history or the problems, present
and future, of the struggle of women's equality.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bookstaver
- The Ithaca Journal
Ithaca, New York
31 Jul 1952, Thu • Page 4