Historically Speaking: Sending Cards for a Happy Birthday

On Oct. 26, imprisoned WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich will turn 32. Since ancient times, birthdays have been occasions for poems, letters and expressions of solidarity.

The Wall Street Journal

October 13, 2023

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich turns 32 on Oct. 26. This year he will be spending his birthday in Lefortovo prison in Moscow, a detention center for high-profile and political prisoners. He has been there for the past six months, accused of espionage—a charge vehemently denied by the U.S. government and The Journal.

Despite the extreme restrictions placed on Lefortovo prisoners, it is still possible to send Evan messages of support via the U.S. Embassy in Moscow or the freegershkovich.com website, like a birthday card, to let him know that the world cares.

Birthday cards are so cheap and plentiful it is easy to miss their cultural value. They are the modern iteration of a literary tradition that goes back at least to Roman times. Poets were especially given to composing birthday odes to their friends and patrons. The Augustan poet Horace dedicated many of his poems to Maecenas, whose birthday, he wrote, “is almost more sacred to me than that of my own birth.”

The custom of birthday salutations petered out along with much else during the Dark Ages but was revived with the spread of mass literacy. Jane Austen would write to her siblings on their birthdays, wishing them the customary “joy,” but toward the end of her life she began to experiment with the form. In 1817, she sent her three-year-old niece Cassy a special birthday letter written in reverse spelling, beginning with “Ym raed Yssac.”

Austen’s sense that a birthday letter ought to be unique coincided with a technological race in the printing industry. One of the first people to realize the commercial potential of greeting cards was Louis Prang, a German immigrant in Boston, who began selling printed cards in 1856. Holiday cards were an instant success, but birthday cards were less popular until World War I, when many American families had a relative fighting overseas.

Demand for birthday cards stayed high after the war, as did the importance attached to them. King George V seized on their popularity to introduce the royal tradition of sending every British citizen who reaches 100 a congratulatory birthday card. In 1926, to show how much they appreciated the gift of U.S. aid, more than 5 million Poles signed a 30,000-page birthday card commemorating America’s 150th anniversary.

During the Cold War, the symbolism of the birthday card became a power in itself. In 1984, Illinois Rep. John Edward Porter and other members of Congress sent birthday cards to Mart Niklus, an Estonian civil rights campaigner imprisoned in the U.S.S.R. By coincidence, the Soviets released Niklus in July 1988, the same month that Nelson Mandela received more than 50,000 cards for his 70th birthday. The frustrated South African prison authorities allowed him to have 12 of them. But the writing was on the wall, as it were, and Mandela was released from prison two years later.

Rep. Porter didn’t know what effect his birthday card to Niklus would have. “I doubt he will get them,” he told the House. “Yet by sending these birthday cards…we let the Soviet officials know that we will not forget him.”

I am sending my birthday card to Evan in the same spirit.

Historically Speaking: Women Who Popped the Question

Tradition holds that women only propose marriage on leap days, but queens have never been afraid to take the initiative.

February 20, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

An old tradition holds that every leap year, on Feb. 29, women may propose marriage to men without censure or stigma. Sources disagree about the origin of this privilege. One attributes it to St. Brigid, who became concerned for all the unmarried women in 5th-century Ireland and persuaded St. Patrick to grant them this relief. Another gives the credit to Queen Margaret of Scotland, who supposedly had the custom written into Scottish law in 1288.

Neither story is likely to be true: St. Brigid, if she even existed, would have been a child at the time of St. Patrick’s death, and Margaret died at the age of 7 in 1290. But around the world, there have always been a few women who exercised the usually male privilege of proposing.

In the Bible, the widowed Ruth, future great-grandmother of King David, asks her kinsman Boaz to marry her—not with words but by lying down at the foot of his bed. On the Bissagos Islands off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, women propose by offering the man of their choice a ceremonial dish of fish marinated in palm oil.

Queen Ankhesenamun of Egypt, who lived in the 14th century B.C., is believed to have made the earliest recorded marriage proposal by a woman. Based on a surviving letter in the Hittite royal archives, scholars have theorized that Ankhesenamun, the widow of the boy king Tutankhamun, secretly asked the Hittite king Suppiluliuma to agree to a match with one of his sons, so that she could avoid a forced marriage to Ay, her late husband’s grand vizier. The surprised and suspicious king eventually sent her his son Zannanza. Unfortunately, the plan leaked out and the Hittite wedding party was massacred at the Egyptian border. Ankhesenamun disappears from the historical record shortly after.

The Roman princess Justa Grata Honoria, sister of Emperor Valentinian III, had marginally better luck. In 450 she appealed to Attila, King of the Huns, to marry her, in order to escape an arranged marriage with a minor politician. When Valentinian learned of the plan, he refused to allow it and forced Honoria to wed the senator. In retaliation, Attila launched an attack against Rome on the pretext of claiming his bride, capturing Gaul and advancing as far as the Po River in northern Italy.

The idea that marriage was a sentimental union between two individuals, rather than an economic or strategic pact between families, gained ground in Europe in the late 18th century. Jane Austen highlighted the clash of values between generations in her 1813 novel “Pride and Prejudice”: Lady Catherine de Bourgh insists that her daughter and Mr. Darcy have been engaged since birth, while the heroine Elizabeth Bennet declares she will have Darcy if she wants.

Two decades later, a 20-year-old Queen Victoria came down on the side of love when she chose her cousin Albert to be her husband. As a ruling monarch, it was Victoria’s right and duty to make the proposal. As she recorded in her diary on October 15, 1839, “I said to him … that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished.” The 21-year marriage was one of the most successful in royal history.

Although it’s still the custom in most countries for men to propose marriage, leap year or not, there’s more to courtship than getting down on one knee. As the Irving Berlin song goes, “A man chases a girl (until she catches him).”

WSJ Historically Speaking: Austen, Anonymous Writers and History

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

It is a truth universally acknowledged that “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen —who died 200 years ago this month—is one of the most romantic and popular tales ever written. Behind the global adoration she enjoys today lies the irony that in her own time Austen’s name never appeared on her books. Continue reading…

The Wall Street Journal: Amanda Foreman on five novels about the status of women

Amanda ForemanThe Tale of Genji
By Murasaki Shikibu (c. 1000)

1 . “The Tale of Genji” is the world’s first novel in any language, which is all the more remarkable considering that until the Heian era (794-1185) there was no native written tradition in Japan. The male educated elite wrote in Chinese, a language forbidden to peasants and women. In frustration, Heian elite women invented their own form of writing by transliterating Chinese characters into Kana, a form of phonetic Japanese speech. Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973-1014), a lady in waiting at the imperial court, transformed that desperate act of the dispossessed into the purest expression of aesthetic genius. The result is that Heian culture is the only one in the world that was conceived and curated by women. The greatness of the novel lies in its astute psychological portraits and exquisite evocation of time and place. But at its core lies a meditation on the female condition—on whether there can be any meaning in a life of gilded isolation.

The Book of the City of Ladies
By Christine de Pizan (c. 1400)

2. French Renaissance writer Christine de Pizan (1364-1430) was not only the first female political philosopher in history but also the first writer to do battle with the misogyny of medieval Europe. Her “Book of the City of Ladies” is an unflinching defense of womanhood. She wrote it, she claimed, so that no woman would ever have to feel the shame that she herself experienced after reading endless denunciations of the female sex. From Aristotle down to Boccaccio, the message was clear—women are morally wicked and intellectually inferior. The book is, all told, a remarkable work, not least for its audacity: The author delivers, slipped between inspirational histories of female paragons, the first enunciation of “no means no”: “It therefore angers and upsets me when men claim that women want to be raped . . . that it could give women any pleasure to be treated in such a vile way.” Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: A Valentine to the Bad Boys of Literature

Among the ancient Greeks, the greatest ‘bad boy’ of them all was Zeus. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Among the ancient Greeks, the greatest ‘bad boy’ of them all was Zeus. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

In “Pride and Prejudice” Jane Austen highlighted a truth not universally acknowledged when she made Elizabeth Bennett fall for the dark and brooding Mr. Darcy rather than for a sweet-tempered suitor like her sister Jane’s Mr. Bingley.

Readers just love the bad boys. As Lady Caroline Lamb once said about her lover Lord Byron, it’s the men who are “mad, bad and dangerous to know” who set the heart racing.

Among the ancient Greeks, the greatest “bad boy” of them all was Zeus, who had his wicked way with innumerable nymphs and princesses, though his Olympian brothers were little better. For sheer priapic energy, however, the prize goes to Gilgamesh, god and hero of the Sumerian epic that bears his name. His lust, we’re told, left “no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior’s daughter nor the wife of the noble.” Continue reading…

WSJ Historically Speaking: Resolved to Lose Weight in ’16? Join a Venerable Club

English Romantic poet George Gordon Noel Byron (from around 1810). To keep his weight down, he subsisted on a diet of flattened potatoes drenched in vinegar. PHOTO: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

English Romantic poet George Gordon Noel Byron (from around 1810). To keep his weight down, he subsisted on a diet of flattened potatoes drenched in vinegar. PHOTO: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Resolutions and Jan. 1 have a fatal attraction for one another—much like beer and pizza. The vow most often cited, “to go on a diet,” also happens to be the one most quickly abandoned. According to a 2013 British study, two out of five dieters don’t make it beyond the first week.

The problem isn’t that people are lazy or spoiled. It’s that the purpose of a diet has become divorced from its original intentions. The ancient Greeks were largely responsible for the concept. “Diatia” means “way of life” or “regimen.” How a person approached the business of eating was as important as what entered his stomach. Balance, self-control and proper order were thought to be three key aspects to living the good life. Only barbarians, such as the Persians, gorged on luxuries.

The two greatest doctors of the classical world, Hippocrates (around 460 to 375 B.C.) and Galen (A.D. 129 to about 216) had strong ideas about the kind of diatia everyone should follow. They argued that the mind and body were controlled by four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. The goal was to keep them in equilibrium. A surplus of phlegm, for example, could make a patient lethargic, requiring more citrus in the diet. Too much black bile, on the other hand, made a person melancholic—which, Galen thought, required bloodletting or purging to remove the noxious humors from the body.

Continue reading…