Charlie May Simon defied expectations for an Arkansan woman in the first half of the 20th century, marrying three times, traveling around the world, and becoming a prolific author. While living in Memphis, she was a suffragette who fought for the right of women to vote. Her life resonates with many feminist ideals. Simon's commitment to artistic and literary production from her humble beginnings in Arkansas and Tennessee to her worldly education, her active partnerships with the men in her life, and her dedication to telling people's stories, demonstrate the feminist stakes of her legacy.
The path to Simon's world-travel speaks to the tenuous autonomy allowed for women in her day. Prior to the mid-20th-century legal protections against sex discrimination in the work place (such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963), opportunities for single women to leverage their own wealth met systemic obstacles that privileged white men with power over property ownership, salaries, and political and fiscal independence. Simon, however, gained financial security at 28 years old, with the death of her first husband, Walter Lowerstein, who was the heir to the fortune from the massive Lowenstein's Department Store in Memphis, Tennessee. Though her marriage at a young age suggests a certain adherence to traditional gender roles, the fact that she was able to pursue her studies of art because she was widowed so young reflected first-wave feminist concerns with the material conditions of women's lives. For example, Virginia Woolf's 1928 essay, "A Room of One's Own," famously argued that women need their own money and their own space to be able to fully realize their natural abilities. The tragic death of Simon's first husband gave her precisely such means to pursue her artistic potential.
So, from a relatively modest upbringing, Charlie May Simon became a world-traveler, a remarkable achievement for a young woman without a husband. Her studies took her to the Art Institute of Chicago and then to the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. The mid-1920s was an exciting time, especially for women, in the Montparnasse district on the Left Bank of Paris where the academy was located. Documentarian Andrea Weiss reports:
Women with creative energy and varying degrees of talent, women with a passion for art and literature, women without the obligations that come with husbands and children, were especially drawn to the Left Bank, and never with more urgency and excitement than in the first quarter of [the 20th] century. It was not simply its beauty but that rare promise of freedom that drew these women to it. They came from as near as Savoy and Burgundy and from as far as London, Berlin, and New York, Chicago, Indiana, and California—before the days of the airplane. They came for their own individual, private reasons, some of which they themselves perhaps never fully fathomed. But they also came because Paris offered them, as women, a unique and extraordinary world.
Charlie May Simon's time in Paris coincided with a period of intense literary and artistic production by a vibrant milieu of women authors and artists, including Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Marie Laurencin, and Gisele Freund. Years later, Simon would marry the literary luminary John Gould Fletcher, who was friends with the likes of T.S. Eliot, yet one could easily imagine that she rubbed elbows with these great modernist women in the Left Bank years before she met and married Fletcher.
Before Fletcher, however, Simon met her second husband, Howard Simon, in Paris and they were married in 1926. Howard Simon was an artist as well. Their life together brought them back to the United States: they lived in San Francisco and New York before moving back to Arkansas where they could live more simply on their modest incomes as artists and teachers. Although their marriage dissolved by 1936—precipitated by her affair with Fletcher—Charlie May and Howard maintained a life-long partnership. Howard illustrated many of Charlie May's books well after their divorce. He provided the last name that she would use professionally, even after her third and final marriage to the notable Fletcher. Her continued work with Howard suggests the progressive nature of their relationship, one in which these two adults were able to engage in productive creative endeavors together despite traditional gender roles that would expect them not only to fail to collaborate but also to avoid association with each other all together.
Charlie May Simon and Fletcher remained in Arkansas, where her life continued to resist conventional patterns, troubled as it was by Fletcher's mental illness. The South, where Simon spent so much of her life and to where she always returned no matter how far-flung her travels were, is frequently seen as a region that is antithetical to the progressive ideals of feminist projects. Yet the South's role in women's liberation has been historically underappreciated. Historian Janet Allured argues that "feminism was…part of a regional movement against social injustice that southerners initiated, mobilized, and energized," and that southerners relative invisibility in the prominent narrative of women's liberation efforts in mid-20th century stems in part from a pattern of regionalism that systemically erases the experiences of southerners. Simon herself may not have been an active agitator for feminist change, but her conscientious writing about life in the American South brings visibility to regional circumstances that have been routinely ignored.
Indeed, the very project of relating lived experiences is largely a feminist one, since resistance to inequality and injustice finds strength in a shared understanding of oppressive structures. Gender theorist Judith Butler explains:
Feminist theory has sought to understand the way in which systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices, and how the analysis of ostensibly personal situations is clarified through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural context. Indeed, the feminist impulse, and I am sure there is more than one, has often emerged in the recognition that my pain or my silence or my anger or my perception is finally not mine alone, and that it delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me in certain unanticipated ways.
From 1943 to 1974, Charlie May Simon contributed to such efforts of understanding the world in which we live by engaging in the practice of biography. She authored ten biographies of significant figures in art, philosophy, and theology, along with two memoirs of her own. During this period, Simon also spent time as a writing instructor in Japan at a women’s university, sharing the gift of writing and self-expression with women across the world.
Allured, Janet. "Louisiana, The American South, and The Birth of Second-Wave Feminism." Louisiana History 54.4 (2013): 389-423.
Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal 40.4 (December 1988): 519-531.
Weiss, Andrea. Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2013.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 1989.
Kris McAbee is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work focuses on Renaissance British literature and intersectional feminist cultural studies.