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New book from Drumlummon Press highlights life of Frieda Fligelman
August 21, 2009
Editor@montanaliving.com
The life of Frieda Fligelman is a cautionary and exemplary tale of a brilliant 20th-century woman who struggled to be taken seriously as a thinker. She was a woman who didn’t marry, who wouldn’t wed someone who was not a real companion, yet who felt like a failure both because she missed marrying and having children, and because her work never received the kind of recognition she hoped for. A native Montanan who in advanced age returned to the town where she was born, after an early life of study abroad, she maintained connections with friends and scholars all over the world to combat the forces of isolation in her life. Though she couldn’t get a teaching job in a university, she envisioned and outlined linguistic sociology (now called sociolinguistics), an immensely important field of study, well before its time. She thought and wrote widely about many issues of international policy and domestic social concern, composed over 1,200 poems in English, and a few in French, penned hundreds of letters, and self-published two sociological pamphlets, and an English translation of a 17th-century Spanish play, The Discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus. sweetheart may have been Hu Shih, a fellow Ph.D. candidate at Columbia, who would become China’s most Until she died at 88, January 16, 1978, Frieda was active and able to get around. She died peacefully and quickly, of a heart attack while accepting an order of groceries from the delivery boy. The Winestines asked me to go through her two apartments and determine how to disburse the remains of Frieda’s life of the mind. Three large cabinets full of files containing most of her work—a lifetime of newspaper clippings and notes on social logic, public policy, national character, and related topics—were delivered to the archives of the University of Montana library. Her sociological journal collection was sent to Books for Asia, a non-profit organization providing materials to Asian educational institutions. |
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