Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854-1911
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Rediscovered by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this unique account of life before, during, and after the Civil War was written by the wife of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who played a central role in some of the most significant civil rights decisions of his era.
“Remarkable . . . a chronicle of the times, as seen by a brave woman of the era.”—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from the foreword
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg began researching the history of the women associated with the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress sent her Malvina Harlan’s unpublished manuscript. Recalling Abigail Adams’s order to “remember the ladies,” Justice Ginsburg guided its long journey from forgotten document to published book.
Malvina Shanklin Harlan witnessed—and gently influenced—national history from the perspective of a political leader’s wife. Her husband, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911), wrote the lone dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous case that endorsed separate but equal segregation. And for fifty-seven years he was married to a woman who was busy making a mental record of their eventful lives. After Justice Harlan’s death in 1911, Malvina wrote Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854–1911, as a testament to her husband’s accomplishments and to her own.
The memoir begins with Malvina, the daughter of passionate abolitionists, becoming the teenage bride of John Marshall Harlan, whose family owned more than a dozen slaves. Malvina depicts her life in antebellum Kentucky, and her courageous defense of the Harlan homestead during the Civil War. She writes of her husband’s ascent in legal circles and his eventual appointment to the Supreme Court in 1877, where he was the author of opinions that continued to influence American race relations deep into the twentieth century. Yet Some Memories is more than a wife’s account of a famous and powerful man. It chronicles the remarkable evolution of a young woman from Indiana who became a keen observer of both her family’s life and that of her nation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These memoirs by the wife of a noted Supreme Court justice, John Marshall Harlan, first appeared last summer in the Journal of Supreme Court History and gained considerable attention thanks to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's enthusiastic support. Now they are being made available in a popular edition complete with foreword by Ginsburg (not seen by PW) and extensive notes by Przybyszewski. Justice Harlan, though a former slave-holder, is remembered for his lone and eloquent dissent in Plessyv. Ferguson, the case that established the doctrine of "separate but equal." His wife's recollections of her married life shed considerable light on the complexities inherent in race relations in America and help explain such an apparent contradiction. Mrs. Harlan was a conventional woman; she shared the unreflecting assumptions of white superiority and wifely subordination common to her class. Indeed her decision, at 50, to visit Italy without her husband's express permission was so uncharacteristic that it went down in family annals as "Mother's Revolt," while her portraits of the slaves in her father-in-law's household, though well intentioned, will produce nothing but deep embarrassment in the contemporary reader. Nevertheless, she stood squarely behind her husband's dissent. No visionary, Malvina Harlan was a thoroughly nice woman who behaved as she knew she should. Her journals will most interest students of the period. Photos not seen by PW.