Doris Weatherford says winning Story Circle Network’s Sarton Award for her book came at exactly the right time to lift her spirits.
“I really needed it. Victory for the Vote came out just before my husband died, and just before COVID. We had planned big celebrations for the 2020 anniversary of the 19th Amendment, but almost all of that was cancelled. I felt like my life was over, and the Sarton Award helped me through a dark time.”
Doris was born in a small town in Minnesota, the fourth of six children, but moved to Arkansas when she was about four years old. The location for the move, she says, was chosen by her parents for its nearness to a Lutheran Church, and the nearby four-year college, Arkansas Tech.
“Neither of my parents graduated from high school, but both valued education. My father was the custodian at our school, and I thought he owned it: he had the keys, after all.
“Mom encouraged us to go to the library just down the street; she was an avid reader. … I remember telling my mother that I wanted to write books when I was about four, and she said the word for that is author.”
Doris says although she has never practiced religion of any kind in her adulthood, she credits the Lutheran requirements for confirmation as contributing a great deal to her education and self-discipline.
She also says she had some fine professors at Arkansas Tech, including some who were fired for the excessive liberalism that radicalized her. “The other important factor at Tech was that I met a guy named Roy Weatherford. He was grading papers for my philosophy professor, noticed that a girl was making the highest grade, and sought me out. We had been married 54 years when he died last year.
“We broke up briefly while I remained at Tech and he went on to Harvard. … He got a Danforth Fellowship, which wasn’t open to women back then. I didn’t do as well, but I did well enough to get a full fellowship to Brandeis University the next year. That was the best advice I ever had. Before he was fired, a professor named Benjamin Murdzek encouraged me to apply there. He was right about them valuing diversity enough that they would welcome a blonde Lutheran from Arkansas.”
After Roy’s stint in the Army during the Vietnam War, and Doris’ work for US News for two years, the pair moved to Boston, where Roy completed his PhD and Doris taught history at a high school that offered a significant raise if she took one more graduate course. So, in the summer of 1969, Doris took a class on immigration at Harvard’s summer school that turned out to be a life changer.
“One day the professor said women were less likely to adjust to America and more likely to want to return to the old country. I asked for some stats on that, and he was flummoxed. Much later, I learned that they didn’t begin to collect data on returnees until 1910, and then it showed that men were infinitely more likely to return than women.”
Doris said that professor’s thoughtless words encouraged her to read on. “I went to Widener Library—the biggest in the world, except for the Library of Congress—to check out a book on immigrant women. There were none, although there were the books I needed to write my book, Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America, 1840-1930, which I think was innovative when it was published in 1986.”
Then Doris, who had already protested against the Vietnam War, got interested in politics, which benefited her writing as several of her many books are about women and politics, including the one for which she won the Sarton Award.
Doris says she was running a rally for Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988, when she was called to the phone to learn that her agent had sold her book American Women and World War II. “Virtually everything I wrote after that was at a publisher’s suggestion.”
Doris says she was “very fortunate” to have an agent before she was published. Meanwhile, she credits her husband, via his thesis advisor, for giving her the best writing advice: “Just write. Begin at the middle or the end or the beginning, but spell out whatever thought you have at the time and glue it together later.”
“That’s the way I write my newspaper columns, but my book publishers generally have required an outline, so I wrote in the way they expected me to. The bottom line, though, is to just write. It’s a skill that needs practice, like any other skill. Too many people want to be authors without actually writing.”
Meanwhile, Doris says, unless someone comes along with an offer she can’t refuse, she’s not writing another book. “The business has just become too unrewarding. Sometimes I think about pulling out the sample chapters I did for a book on women in the Civil War, but then I remember that this publisher used my ideas with in-house writers, and I get cynical again.
“I do write a weekly column for LaGaceta, the nation’s only trilingual newspaper. It has been published in Tampa since 1922, and is very much a family affair … it’s a reason to get up on Monday mornings.”
