One of my great-great-great grandmothers was named Dorothy Phelps. I've been able to trace her ancestry back to an immigrant ancestor, William Phelps from Crewkerne in Somerset, which is cool. The Phelps family has the single nicest given name I've ever come across. One of my ancestors had a sister named
Delight. With all of the bad stuff that has come down from my repressed and oppressive Puritanical New England progenitors, that was a nice surprise.
William Phelps, the immigrant, was one of the founders of Hartford Connecticut. I once read a list of the laws from that city and they would go very well with my previous post. The list of things that were punishable by death is astounding and children were not exempt from execution.
Not long after I found out about my connection to the Phelps family, I heard about Fred Phelps, that sleaze that runs godhatesfags.com (I won't link to it) and is known for going to the funerals of AIDS victims, celebrating and carrying their hate in signs. These creeps even demostrated at the funeral of Mr. Rogers (of "the neighborhood") because he never came out on his children's show condemning homosexuality to little children.
I've been a bit reluctant over the years to claim my Phelps heritage, both because of William of old and Fred in contemporary times. I don't know whether Fred is from my same family, at least. There were five apparently unrelated Phelps immigrants from England to America. My hope is that Fred is from one of the others.
Today I found out about another Phelps descendant, though, which gives me a great deal of hope for the family. Again, I don't know if she was a descendant of the same progenitor that I am, but she's someone I would be pleased to claim as my own.
Mary Phelps Jacob was the inventor of the modern bra, for one thing. It seems that she got a new dress that was quite revealing and the whalebone stays of her corset showed through. So she, with the help of a servant, sewed together some silk handkerchiefs and pink ribbon to make a more attractive undergarment. The resulting style was a big hit among her ritzy friends and everyone wanted one. Her bra had no support, however, resulting in a rather flat-chested look. It was the impetus for the popularity of the non-buxomness of the flapper era.
She created a business and used the name Caresse Crosby (she was married to a man named Crosby then). Although she went through a number of different surnames through the rest of her life, she kept the name Caresse as her given name.
As for the surnames, her first husband was Richard Peabody who, it is said "had only three real interests, all acquired at Harvard: to play, to drink, and to turn out, at any hour, to chase fire engines." She had two children by him and then fell in love with Harry Crosby. She divorced Dick (apt name) and married Harry. Her second marriage was quite tumultuous and ended when Harry committed suicide in a lover's pact with a young mistress. She later married Selbert Young, who was nearly 20 years younger than she, but she eventually divorced him and lived on her own.
While she was married to Harry Crosby, she started the Black Sun Press in Paris, which published books by Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Dorothy Parker, among others. She was friends with Henry Miller and took over as a ghost writer for him when he felt he could no longer fulfill a contract he had made to write pornography for an Oklahoma oil baron. "Caresse's smut was just what the oil man wanted-no literary aspirations-just plain sex. In Caresse the agent had found the basic pornographic Henry Miller. Caresse churned out another 200 pages, spending her time writing while her husband, Bert Young, fell into a drunken stupor every night."
Part of me wishes I could have lived a romantic, avant-garde sort of life like that. I don't think I'd manage it, though. It's a nice thing to think about, but I really don't think I have the temperament for it.
Still, Mary Phelps Jacob is a nice contrast to Fred.
