Albuquerque, NM

Jenny Weisberger

Taking a step back into history, when many think of taos, their writers, and artisits, they too remember Mabel Luhan Dodge who oft gave great support to the creative souls and her community. Reading about her reminds us of the brave women of past who had much to share, and were trail blazers for future feminists and women artists. All in a little town called Taos NM.
Mabel Dodge Luhan
Edge of Taos Desert
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937)
and
Winter in Taos
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935)

Mabel Dodge Luhan did not fit into a typical female stereotype. She was born to wealthy parents in Buffalo, New York. She was the only child. She was educated and was socially active. She married at 21 years old and a year later was widowed. Her father died a few months later. She had a nervous breakdown. She went to Europe and met her second husband, married and lived in Florence, Italy. After seven years the marriage ended and Mabel moved to Greenwich Village, New York. She opened a salon for all artists and authors, and intellects. She met and married Maurice Sterne, a painter, her third husband.

Mabel sent her husband to New Mexico to set up a place to live. She arrived a few months later. The book Edge of Taos Desert starts on the last night Mabel spent in New York City, before heading for Santa Fe. She was hoping to spend time alongside the Indians.

She described arriving in New Mexico as her life “breaking in two.” At that moment she arrived in Santa Fe, she felt like it was a New World with new rules. She was able to throw away the ways she had lived before. She believed it was heaven. She hoped Maurice would be inspired to sculpt. She felt like she was in foreign land. Her son was there also. She sent for provisions of food from home and imported her own chef. She moved up in the mountains at the end of Taos sharing a home with an Englishman. She spent most of her mornings visiting the pueblo. She fell in love with an Indian leader, and her marriage to Maurice fell apart. Her love for Tony Luhan became intense. She loved the connection to the earth and nature. She loved the Indian acceptance of life and death. Townspeople became suspicious of her. She was even brought in for questioning by the sheriff because of the goings on in her home and the constant trail of visitors Americans and Indian. Mabel connected with the flowers, the smell of the trees, the sage under her feet. She watched the birds, the seasons change, and the ceremonies of the Mexicans. She bought a place Tony had picked out. She asked Maurice to leave.

Mabel reports being unhappy in Italy, searching for meaning and never finding it. New York was a time of many affairs with little meaning. Mabel reports Tony as kind and sensitive first. Her feelings for him grew stronger daily. Mabel viewed the other men in her life as similar to her, same upbringing, competitive, restless in their aim. They were disconnected from their inner selves.

Tony was free because he was an Indian. He was not educated to write or read but worldly on feelings and how the world works with nature. Tony and Mabel took peyote. They lived communally with friends American and Indian.

Winter in Taos is a poetic journal of her life with nature. The seasons change and the planting, sowing, care, and harvest of her crops on the farm change with the seasons. She writes of the farm animals and how the light hits the mountain. Her moments at Taos had clarity. Her love for Tony became comfortable and strong.

Vera Norwood believes women are distanced from nature as a means of oppression or control. Women were seen as emotional and irrational and were kept in a domestic sphere, to be kept “safe” and watched. Mabel Dodge Luhan was regarded as emotional, irrational, “loose” with men, not to be trusted, and needed to be watched by townspeople. Mabel found her niche with the Indians, to be free from the restrictions placed on her. She can be viewed as a “new” women who was self-determined and in control of her destiny. Mabel was stuck in a gender role where she didn’t fit very well. Mabel did not have to marry for economic stability nor did she need to work to support herself.

Glenda Riley spoke of women being more tolerant of cultural differences than were men. That tolerance allowed Mabel to fit in the pueblo and enjoy the Mexican culture, and marry an Indian.

Further Readings:

Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, ed. Lois P. Rudnick (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).
Lois P.Rudnick, Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).
Lois P.Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984).
Winifred L. Frazer, Mabel Dodge Luhan (Twayne, 1984).
Jane V. Nelson, Mabel Dodge Luhan (Boise, ID: Boise State University Press,1982).
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Taos and its Artists (Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1947).
Patricia R. Everett, ed., A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to be Friends: The Correspondence Between Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein, 1911-1934 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,1996).
Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1993).

–Marilyn Smith

Return to the Western Women’s Autobiographies Database
Researched and written by Marilyn Smith, a student in Professor Catherine Lavender’s History/Women’s Studies 389 (Themes in American Women’s History) course, The Department of History and The Program in Women’s Studies, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Fall Semester 2000.
Send email care of Professor Lavender at lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu.
Last modified: .

blogsville: www.about-tulsaok.com
about-sanjoseca.com