Book Review: Louise Pound
The Victorian Age Iconoclast and Advocate for Women's Rights
Louise Pound was a renowned athlete, scholar and champion of women's rights, laying the groundwork for equal access to athletic and educational opportunity.
Louise Pound: The 19th Century Iconoclast Who Forever Changed America's Views About Women, Academics and Sports
By Marie Krohn
$18.95 • American Legacy Historical Press
316 Pages • © 2008 • ISBN 978-0979689628
Defined as one who attacks and seeks to change traditional or popular ideas or institutions, genuine iconoclasts are a rarity. But for Nebraska’s Louise Pound, this determined pioneer is certainly among the state’s most notable assailants of the Victorian status quo.
The new book titled simply Louise Pound, bears a mouthful of a subtitle: The 19th Century Iconoclast Who Forever Changed America’s Views About Women, Academics and Sports. With a moving foreword by Dr. Robert Cochran, Marie Krohn's tribute to Louise Pound is the first comprehensive biography of this remarkable frontier woman whose life has been overshadowed by her renowned brother, former Harvard Business School dean Roscoe Pound.
Meticulously researched, this ambitious biography offers insights into a remarkable woman. Her genuinely competitive nature characterizes the turn-of-the-century “New Woman,” and results in her becoming a nationally recognized athlete and international scholar. Her personal accomplishments reflect her resolve to achieve absolute excellence in all her endeavors, and condemn collective mediocrity, often sacrificing her relationships and career in the process.
Whether playing tennis, golf or cycling, she took great pleasure in competing against—and often beating—her male contemporaries. She competed professionally in tennis, but grew increasing unable to find suitable competition. Upon focusing her attention on her studies, she became an internationally recognized philologist, folklorist and pioneer in the origins or American speech. She collaborated with such notables as H.L. Menken and Dorothy Canfield Fisher. She was also the first to advocate that American English should be studied as a separate language from that spoken in Great Britain, a revolutionary idea at the time.
Pound is likely best known for her brief association with famed frontier author Willa Cather. Pound’s physical prowess and athletic abilities had smitten the younger Cather when they both were students at the University of Nebraska. Although many feminists have speculated that Pound reciprocated Cather’s lesbian advances, Krohn is quite convincing in disputing such modern-day assumptions. Listing source after source as to why this friendship was nothing more than casual and plutonic, Krohn deftly spells out how seemingly romantic correspondence seems sexual in today’s parlance, but was in fact strictly plutonic in its inference.
For 50 years Pound taught at the University of Nebraska, and she would often take sides in campus disputes. These conflicts were generally between the powerful and those of lesser influence (usually female students), and she developed her iconoclastic reputation on campus, typically at the expense of her own advancement. Despite her thorny reputation among the leaders on campus, she quickly developed an international standing as an intellectual in the field of language and philology. Although long in coming, she was the first woman elected as president of The Modern Language Association. That same year, at the tender age of 82, she was also inducted into the Nebraska Sports Hall of Fame.
Although scholarly in its scope, its approach is neither stuffy nor verbose. An astute editor could have chosen to eliminate some of the daily minutia unrelated to her career, but those details are rarely tedious. In all, this very readable biography will provide encouragement and motivation to today's iconoclasts looking for a fresh and inspiring role model.
