Pam Swing reflects on her memories of her suffragist grandmother, Betty Gram Swing. She only learned a few years ago that Betty was one of the 22 suffragists who picketed the Massachusetts State House in Boston on Feb. 24, 1919.
Have you ever wondered if women in your family fought for the right to vote—either in the United States or in your country of origin? I encourage you to ask, or do some family research. Millions of women were suffragists—it’s entirely possible that one of them is related to you.
I am lucky—when I was growing up, my father told me about how his mother had been a suffragist as a young woman. I felt such pride when I learned she had picketed the White House and gone on hunger strikes in jail.
I wouldn’t have guessed this about my Grammie Gram if he hadn’t told me. By the time I came along, she lived a quiet life. I remember her singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as she gently rocked me in a hammock. She had a beautiful voice, and would hum under her breath as she moved about her house. I learned much later that she had aspired to become a professional singer.
I looked forward to our family visits with her. She loved old houses, and owned two antique colonials—one in Connecticut that she called “Coneyhurst” after their home in England, and Spring Farm in Vermont. My grandmother had a talent for restoring houses and furnishing them with antiques. My mother admired her aesthetic sense. “She’d put a vase of flowers on a table,” she told me, “and it would turn into a still life. Her homes were an extension of herself.”
My memories of Grammie Gram are inextricably linked to these houses. I loved them, with their enormous fireplaces, wide floorboards and wavy windowpanes. I know now that her finances were precarious for the last twenty-five years of her life after her divorce from Raymond Swing (link), and that she constantly struggled to maintain both houses. She rented them to raise cash, and put them up for sale more than once. But as a child, they were magical for me. I would wander off by myself and poke around rooms, enjoying the low ceilings and exposed beams. I also loved looking at her artwork, most of it acquired in Berlin in the early 1920s.
I can still hear the crunch of gravel under the wheels of our car as we pulled up in the circular drive in front of her Connecticut house. We’d pile out of the car and gather before the front door, with its wide flagstone step flanked by two wooden highbacked benches. My grandmother would answer our knock with loud cries of, “Hello! You’re here!” and give hugs all around. In the evening, I’d sit next to her on the sofa in front of the fieldstone fireplace while the adults discussed boring topics like politics, or roared with laughter at jokes I didn’t get. She exuded elegance—her clothes were impeccably tailored, her hair always coiffed and relentlessly blond. She generously shared her clothes with me, but I outgrew them when I shot past her diminutive height as a teen. I loved her but was a little intimidated by her at times. She had a way of looking delightedly at me that was almost too much—I liked the attention, but I also felt a bit overwhelmed by it.
During summers in Vermont, she’d serve afternoon tea on the Spring Farm lawn near the stone wall, under the shade of the mulberry trees. This was a formal affair; a chance to sit properly and feel grown up. My grandmother would set the table—white cast iron with a glass top—with beautiful china and silverware. She loved such proprieties. My dad told me that Raymond was even more of a stickler for formal place settings, including picnics. But we didn’t discuss my grandmother’s former husband around her—it was a sore subject for her.
Occasionally, I caught glimpses of her wilder, youthful energy. Once, after a long drive to Vermont from Pennsylvania, we were just about to turn onto Putney Mountain Road. A ’59 black convertible with the top down whipped around a sharp bend, dirt and pebbles flying up behind the wheels, and came straight at us. Behind the red steering wheel was Grammie Gram in dark sunglasses, her hair blown back from her face, come to fetch her mail from the row of mailboxes at the base of the road. She seemed very glamorous to me at that moment.
My grandmother’s parents had both emigrated to the United States from Denmark. She was fiercely proud of her Danish heritage. She told me that when Denmark was occupied by Germany during World War II, Danes wore yellow stars to thwart the Nazi’s attempt to single out the Danish Jews. This is actually a myth, but Danes were able to safely evacuate most of the Danish Jewish population to Sweden—one of the largest actions of collective resistance to German occupation. I became intrigued by my Danish heritage, and spent a summer in Denmark on a Youth for Understanding program, where I blended in well enough that people would speak to me in Danish.
My grandmother did not live alone. Liesbeth was part of the fabric of the Swing family. Liesbeth Wegner had worked as a seamstress for Betty in Berlin. She joined the family as a nanny when my father, the first of three children, was born. She never left. All children, including me, instinctively trusted Liesbeth. She was capable, sensible, and no nonsense. She carried caramels in her old-fashioned leather handbag, and would generously share them. She was tall and wiry and spoke with a German accent that further endeared her to us. “Little” was “liddee,” as in “Look at that liddee birdie!” She could do anything she set her mind to, although driving a car was not her strong suit. I recall a hullaballoo over her backing into a stone wall. She would shoot porcupines with an old rifle at Spring Farm. She had a strong sense of duty and maintained a strict daily routine of housework. She always wore plain dresses and stockings with a seam running up the back, and never used make-up. Liesbeth was indispensable; her role somewhere between housekeeper and companion.
The relationship between Betty and Liesbeth spanned fifty years and household moves from Germany to Great Britain to the United States, but Betty always kept a separation between them. In the Connecticut house, Liesbeth slept in the little room at the top of the steep stairs off the kitchen. As a child, I was oblivious to the class distinction that her room implied. According to one of my cousins, Liesbeth would serve Betty dinner in the dining room and eat by herself in the kitchen. I don’t remember that, but I do remember my grandmother complaining to my father how limited conversations between them were. Liesbeth outlived Betty, but was taken in by my father’s sister and husband after Betty died.
My grandmother died when I was almost sixteen. Her legacies to me have been multi-faceted. For many years, I was most aware of her musical influence. Betty and Raymond always had music in their house, and encouraged my father’s musical talents from a young age (overbearingly so, if you asked my mother).
My father became a Professor of Music at Swarthmore College, specializing in medieval and renaissance music. An excellent amateur cellist, he raised me and my two brothers on a steady diet of family chamber music, just as he had played as a child. The joke in our family was that we weren’t just encouraged to play music; it was a question of which stringed instrument we would play. I initially chose violin, then my father leaned on me to switch to viola so we had a family string quartet. I later returned to violin. In the evening, he and I would play duets, or trios with my brother Tim. My father would host large chamber music parties, and as we grew more competent, we would join in. I did not have the runaway musical talent that Tim did, but music was as natural as breathing to me.
Another legacy from my grandmother was artistic, though I did not realize the connection for a long time. My grandmother loved the visual arts, befriending artists and studying painting herself. When I discovered my own passion for the visual arts, I initially saw it as my own independent journey. I look back now and see that my grandmother had been encouraging me all along. Even before I was born, my grandmother’s artwork had begun to migrate to our house as she gave various pieces to my father. After her death, my father asked for the rest of the artwork as part of his inheritance. So even though I only saw my grandmother occasionally, I was in daily contact with her artistic aesthetic. Particular images—a watercolor of three schoolchildren, a black and white print of a mother holding a child by the hand, walking past a thatched roof cottage—became an indelible part of my childhood.
When I was still a girl, she sent me a photo of the painting, “Boy with Cat,” by Paula Modersohn-Becker, an image that she admired but did not own. “I think this picture shows how animals and their masters grow to look very similar,” she wrote in a note on the back. I loved this picture; the boy looked like my brother Tim, and all of us were very fond of cats. I brought the picture with me when I left home and it hung on the wall of my bedroom where ever I lived. The calm, direct gaze of the boy and cat helped keep me grounded through the turbulent years of college and when I sought adventure in the far-flung Shetland Isles. It was while living in the Shetland Isles that I first became conscious of being drawn to visual images—both natural scenes and people. Over the intervening years, I have enjoyed discovering the ways that I inherited my grandmother’s artistic eye, especially through photography.
When I married and raised two children, I followed in my grandmother’s footsteps in another way. She believed that children thrived best in an open educational environment and educated her children in progressive schools, including one run by Bertrand Russell. My father told us stories about attending these schools. Although my parents sent me to public school, I experimented with more progressive schooling for my children. I homeschooled my son for a year, and then sent him, and later my daughter, to the highly unconventional Sudbury Valley School in Framingham.
Now, later in life, I am embracing and honoring my grandmother’s legacy as a suffragist and woman’s rights activist. Some years ago, I received a phone call. My cousins, who had inherited my grandmother’s Connecticut house, were about to begin renovations. I dropped everything to drive from Massachusetts to pick up the boxes of her papers that had been languishing in the attic since her death in 1969. This was the beginning of my adult fascination with my grandmother’s suffrage work. Over time, I begin to piece together a narrative about her life based on fragments of her unfinished memoir, her scrapbook of suffrage newspaper clippings, her speeches, letters, and my own extensive research. What emerged was a portrait of a young woman who was daring, courageous, impulsive, and committed to social justice. A woman who was willing to speak truth to power. Today, I admire her more than ever.
I am currently writing a creative nonfiction book about how my grandmother came to be a suffragist.
Betty Gram Swing’s papers are located at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Learn more here.