Tracy and Holly talk about the care needed when exploring the biographies of people in history who offer representation, but won't reflect the experience of everyone like them. They also talk about Sonora Webster Carver's autobiography and what an enjoyable read it is.
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Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy Eaglon and I'm Holly Fry. One of our episodes this week was about Tersa to Cartagena, who I was very excited about because I love the medieval women writers. As I said, uh, most of whom are writing in some kind of a religious context. But I also love that part two. It is incredibly different from my own experience, but I always find their work so fascinating, and Tersea Cartagena is one that I don't think I had really heard of until I stumbled across her, uh looking for something completely different, and I was like, wait, I've never heard of this particular nun. I'm very intrigued by this whole story. Uh. One of the things that really interests me about her is that I found several, uh several sources from places like Gallula University, people who have studied deaf history, who talk about her as one of the sort of the four mothers of Deaf culture and one of the earliest voices in deaf history in what's now Spain. But some of the ways that she writes about her own disability while totally making sense in the time, are also ideas that people find damaging today, which makes it kind of complicated. Well, and I think that's that's one of the things. Anytime we talk about somebody with a disability who writes about it, particularly if they write about it as eloquently as she did, it's still one person's experience and it may not be the beneficial viewpoint for other people experiencing that same disability. That's like always the trick when we look at historical figures. Yeah. Yeah, just in my own personal life, I know, I know multiple people, include multiple people in my own family who have some kind of a disability or a chronic illness and have just taken a lot of comfort and support in their religious faith um related to all of that. But then I also know people who are maybe not religious, or maybe have been religious and aren't anymore or whatever, and just find it incredibly harmful if they're talking about their disability and somebody says, well, this will bring you closer to God, Like, please do not use this episode as a reason to do that, because it can be really harmful and upsetting to people. Yeah, first of all, every human is having their own experience, and you can't really apply anyone else's. Sometimes other people's experience and and viewpoints will be helpful and comforting, but other times not so much, so you can never assume. Yeah. Yeah, I'm hopeful that um more things about her will eventually be unearthed because those two petitions sort of showing up in a in a doctoral thesis in two thousand one. They give me some hope that there maybe is more detail out there that that we might be able to piece together a little bit more about her and as a person, because like, we don't even know when she became a nun Like within the time it would have been um within reason for people to join a religious order when they were as young as twelve or fourteen, but the fact that she had also been betrothed suggests that maybe it was a little later. We just don't know. We don't have the detail on any of that. Fingers crossed. Yeah. I also went down a rabbit hole of trying to confirm whether the Deluna family that gets a very brief name drop in here UM is at all connected to the the Deluna side of the Nino Taro Warren family that we talked about UM and I was like, Uh, too bad, I don't have that book anymore because I remember there being a family tree and that would have at least given me more of a starting point than I have right now. Tracy, you don't memorize every page of every book that you used for research. And I know, I know not everyone with the last name Deluna is related to to anyone else, but like, this was specifically a very prominent family that talked about their their lineage from Spain right, and how how extensive and how many, how high placed many of those folks were. So anyway, maybe I will manage to figure that out. I definitely ran out of time to try to figure out. Before recording this episode, we talked about Sonora Webster Carver. This week we did. I was deeply surprised that you had chosen this one because you you sent me a ping uh, in which you asked if I had her on my list? Um, and wow, did I have a giant soft spot for that movie which came out when I was I think sixteen. Um, I was extremely into it and just fascinated by by Gabrielle on Noir. And UH was like, wait, Holly, Holly is picking one about diving horses. This surprises me. Yes, um, and I'm glad I did, because I will say, um, reading her autobiography is one of the delights of this year so far for me. That book is so fun. I recommend everyone grab it you can. Um. You can get a digital version for super cheap UM. And it is a legitimately very fun read. Like a lot of times when you and I either check out a book or we buy a new book for the research for the show, I would say probably neither of us often reads them cover to cover, right, We're kind of looking for the information we need. Um. But in this case, I literally couldn't stop reading a school I'll just read the next chapter. I know this doesn't really have anything to do with the show, but I just want to read. Yeah, because her writing and it's it's written as told to another writer that helped her put the book together. But like her tone is so funny. Her descriptions of her mother had me just crying with laughter. I posted a couple of them on Twitter because they made me laugh so hard. Um. But Yeah, it's a super enjoyable one. And there's uh. I admitted to the top of it that I had a lot of trepidation about it, because I am one of those people that doesn't like to see animals used in entertainment. Um, But I won't say that. I came around it was like, yes, you should absolutely do this, but I softened about my kind of hard reaction of don't ever do that. Um. Again, we're getting it through the lens of people that did this and loved it. But they honestly do all seem when you read accounts from her sister things that Dot Carver said, thinks that she said, it really does seem like they were all very devoted to the animals as well. Um. And we're in in Doc Carver's case, anybody that ever had any minor injury like or more serious injury like their nose got hurt there, you know whatever. He was always like, it's never the horse's fault, is your fault, you're the dummy, um. Which is interesting and it apparently broke his heart when he would have to take horses out of the show for whatever reason. There was one horse she talked about that just developed some habits that weren't safe anymore, and normally they would like theoretically they would sell the horse, but he couldn't bear to part with it. So they carried this horse with them everywhere to all of their tours, just to stand in its stall and eat and go for rides. Now to get like somebody would ride it. And her husband was always, you know, like before he was her husband. It's like, why why are we Why are we paying this really expensive to keep a horse? And it's just because you can't bear to sell. We are a business. So we've talked before how I grew up kind of out in the country and our neighbors had a pasture where they periodically would board horses, and whenever there were horses in that pasture, going to look at the horses was like, so, I'm so excited about it, and I kept trying to get my parents to get a horse, which was way beyond our financial need, like ability, because horses are expensive. And I was like, but like, we could board the horse with the neighbor, it would be right here. I would take care of the horse. Was no. I think a lot of people had that. I am actually one of those people that never went through a horse fascination as a kid. Yeah, I had a friend that jumped horses and I went with her once and I was like, this is terrifying. I don't want to be round these animals. I think they're absolutely beautiful, but they always scared me a little. They're just so large. They're very big. Well, and I was always separated from these ones in the pasture by the fence. You know, the horses could put their head over the fence, but there was a barrier between me and them. So it wasn't until I was a a probably in college, that I saw and rode on a full sized adult horse instead of like a pony at the fair or whatever. It was like, this animal is quite large. Yeah, it's a yeah. Um. There are some really really wonderful passages in her autobiography where she talks about learning just all the basics again without her sight, and some of which is very as I said, very funny. She is a very funny woman. Um. And she talked about how we quoted her talking about people um always trying to help the blind in a way that actually is in some ways demeaning or her surfeelings. And she got really upset when one of her friends came over and she was making the bed and she had only started making the and again recently at this point, it was pretty early in her recovery after her her surgery and her other treatments, and she found out later that she had put the bedspread on upside down and that this friend had not wanted to hurt her feelings by telling her, and it got her so angry about she's like, that's how I'm gonna learn and figure this out, Like, people have to be honest with me at all times. Um. The other ones that were honestly, very very funny. We're her talking about her husband al because he of course knew who he was marrying and that she was this very independent person. But she found out a little ways into her her um, you know, post vision life, that he had been secretly moving her food around on her plate for her, like to make sure her fork got into the potatoes and stuff. And she was so furious, Oh my goodness. And of course he's again trying to help, but she's like, I have to learn how to eat for myself. But she does mention that soup was particularly difficult, and that peaches really alluded. They're very They're slippery and hard to eat when you can see perfectly well what you're doing. So but she was really like she took those challenges. She also talks a lot about how she was always pretty fastidious about her appearance um and how she did not want that to go away. Like she was like, I don't want to look like a sloppy mess and have people go, oh, it's okay because she's blind. She's like, no, I want to look as great as I can at all times. And if you see pictures of her throughout her life, she could turn a look like she was always super put together. She always looked perfect. She learned how to apply her makeup um even though she couldn't see, and she would get her husband to just spot check it. But like, how this what I really loved and it was almost kind of inspiring for me to rethink how I handle things. Is that she was saying, I've always been fastidious, but I also used to be careless, Like I would just throw things wherever. I didn't have that approach of like everything has its place, And I found that I needed to get really systematic about where I stored things, learning my clothing by touch, where I could be like I know this is this dress because I have done it. You know I can feel this button on it. She even started sewing the buttons, sewing buttons onto her swimsuits, so she had like a code of like if it has a button on the right shoulder, that's a red suit, If it has a button on the left leg, that's a blue suit. Which is pretty interesting. But it's just a wonderful read, and she's so frank about what was difficult and and what came easy to her, and she has such great humor about it that it it's really an enjoyable look at her process and how very you realize she was. It's almost a pity that she dropped out of school because she also could have done a million things in academia because she was very smart. Um not. But she's on her great love, which was horses, of course. But yeah, she's I found myself with great admiration for her. By the end of it. I think I will uh pick this up and read it myself. Although I do have a soft spot for that movie, the way that they framed her accident and recovery does kind of come off as like inspiration porn, which is not great. Yes, she did not like any of that treatment at all, Like she was like if my if my story inspires people great, but it needs to be my story as it happened. And I like that. She always, I mean, not long before she lost her sight. She was always very sort of pragmatic, and she recognized like it's when she talks about like, oh, I I was doing interviews, but it wasn't about me. I couldn't get a big head. They cared about diving horses and uh. She talks a lot about her relationship with Doc Carver and how it was all about like him kind of testing her for a long time to see if she had like the grit it took to do this job, which for a lot of people would be nerve racking. Um. Their relationship fascinates me. He started calling her after she started diving. UM. Up to that point, he had been a little standoffish with her, and she realized it was because he was testing her and didn't want to invest emotionally in her. But once she started diving, he started calling her Daddy's girl as her name all the time, and like to her like that was like the greatest praise she could have ever received. So that relationship that plays out in the press, I think to them they were father and daughter in a lot of ways. So uh, there's a whole that's a whole lot to unpack and like the psychology of two people that need each other in that way, uh that we can't ask questions about it at this point is a lot to conjecture about, but it is pretty interesting to read. So thank you for spending time with us this week. We hope that you have a great weekend the head. If you have time off, we hope that you relax and recharge. And if you don't have time off, we hope that everything goes as smoothly as possible it in your days. We will see you here tomorrow with a classic and next week with all new episodes. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.