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The Doll Podcast
Martha Chase, Progressive Kindness
The current exhibition at the Barry Art Museum in Norfolk Virginia, USA, discusses the work of Martha Jenks Chase and reveals how one woman’s desire to give her children a meaningful plaything became a movement for change and a company that would create dolls for almost 100 years.
Barry Museum guest curator Brett Day Windham joins host Louisa Maxwell to discuss the exhibition which explores Martha Chase’s work and how she used dolls as tools for social change and innovation. Brett is a multidisciplinary artist whose work uses found objects to create sculptures and images. she has exhibited throughout the United States and created iconic art installations for the prestigious New York Department Store Bergdorf Goodman.
Welcome to the Doll Podcast. I'm your host, Louisa Maxwell. Today we talk about a dollmaker who worked during an exciting time in American history the Progressive Era from 1896 to 1917. A time of social change, political reform, recognition of the rights of women and workers too. Martha Jenks Chase was a wife and mother living in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and she was an advocate of progressive principles. She came from a medical family and observed advances in science, nutrition, child development and medical care. When it came to her children, she wanted toys that would stimulate their imagination, be robust, washable and ready for all their childhood adventures, and they should be cuddly too. Not satisfied with the china and bisque dolls available, Martha worked to create her own doll, more in line with her progressive philosophy. The current exhibition at the Barry Art Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, discusses the work of Martha Chase and reveals how one woman's desire to give her children a meaningful plaything became a movement for change and a company that would create dolls for almost 100 years.
Louisa Maxwell:My guest is Brett Day, Windham, guest curator at the Barry Art Museum. Brett is a multimedia artist whose work uses found objects to create sculptures and images. Brett has exhibited throughout the United States and created iconic art installations for the prestigious New York department store Bergdorf Goodman. Brett, welcome to the Doll Podcast. Thank you, Brett. It's wonderful to welcome you to the podcast. It's going to be so interesting to hear your take as an artist about the work of Martha Jenks Chase. Before we start, Brett, would you like to introduce a little bit about yourself as an artist and curator?
Brett Day Windham:Absolutely. I am based in Providence, rhode Island, and I hold degrees in fine art and creative writing and it's really a pleasure to get to use both of those skills in my everyday life. I think that all of the work, all of the different day jobs that I've had to support my fine art practice, have helped to inform my curatorial approach. So, learning how to research, learning how to be nimble, working at Bergdorf and learning so much about the history of fashion All these different things kind of coalesce and doing my graduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design, which is really a school that champions research, and having a strong concept behind the work that you make, really taught me how to dig deeper into projects and ideas for my curatorial work.
Louisa Maxwell:So when you're working with the dolls of Martha Jenks Chase, how did you react to them as an artist?
Brett Day Windham:Well, I think that the dolls themselves are undeniably beautiful. The faces are painted beautifully. When I first saw one of the dolls in person with her original one of the really early dolls with her original clothing, everything was hand-stitched Every layer of clothing, each hem and petticoat, all had the most exquisite stitching. And I really wasn't expecting not knowing too much about her yet I really wasn't expecting so much evidence of the hand and of fine handwork. They really are. Just. I think that, in combination with the fact that they're not porcelain, that they are, you know, this incredibly tactile material, they really have a warm quality to them.
Louisa Maxwell:They're very inviting really have a warm quality to them. They're very inviting. So can you describe what her dolls are like for perhaps some of the listeners who haven't seen a Martha Jenks Chase doll Sure?
Brett Day Windham:So because her company ran for 100 years, the dolls evolved a great deal, so an early doll would be really different from a later doll. The earliest dolls have very beautiful cotton bodies stuffed with natural cotton and their hands and feet and heads are cast. There's a legend that she made her initial mold for the face of one of the dolls from a beautiful porcelain doll from Europe. It's not confirmed, but that's sort of the commonly accepted understanding of what happened and she figured out how to use this textile called stockinette and press that with sizing, which could have been anything from an animal-based glue to a rubber, to press that shape into her mold.
Brett Day Windham:So you basically have a doll that is completely made of textile and then the face was hardened and covered with more sizing and shellac enough to be able to be painted. So graduates of Rhode Island School of Design were hired to paint the faces. So graduates of Rhode Island School of Design were hired to paint the faces. Her daughter was one of them and you can just see the care taken in each step of the process. They have joints at their arms and legs so that they're moldable and huggable and poseable, but just a flat-seamed joint.
Louisa Maxwell:When I saw the dolls online, they look like you know if you were a child. They look like such fun to play with because they have all that mobility of a porcelain doll, a biscuit doll with a composition body. And yet here the doll is soft, it can sit on your bed. It can fall off the bed.
Louisa Maxwell:You know, children, drag them around, have tea parties with them, do all kinds of things. Yes, that we all did too. You should see some of my childhood dolls. They're a bit scary and it's such a wonderful idea and it's such a contrast to what was being manufactured, mass produced, at the time. It's a wonderful concept and idea.
Brett Day Windham:I couldn't agree more and I would just say that the synchronicity, the way that she found, okay, I don't want a fragile doll for my child because I don't want it to constantly need repair and I don't want it to hurt my child if it breaks. And then she also didn't want the overly mechanized American toys that were being produced at the time. That really didn't leave room for a child's imagination. She really wanted a child to have a doll that she could nurture or he could nurture. I think she was really focused on little girls, teaching them to be maternal, but I'm sure little boys played with them, because you can't stop them. But yeah, you could really love them and hug them and play with them and they could be cleaned off. She's a doctor's wife. She wants them to be clean. So she really found this incredible way to sort of thread this needle. She rejected all these other things that were going on and followed her kind of progressive ethos into this incredible invention and into a really versatile toy.
Louisa Maxwell:So Martha Chase began by making dolls for her family and then friends saw them and the whole thing just became a little bit of a cottage industry at home. But it was a chance encounter at a major department store that brought Martha's doll designs to the attention of a buyer who saw the potential in her dolls. This must have been a huge moment for Martha Chase, where she goes from making a couple of dolls at home to fulfilling orders in a department store.
Brett Day Windham:Absolutely. I think one foundational piece of information about Martha Chase is that she was born into pretty significant privilege. So she was the daughter of doctors. She descended from the founder of her town and the founders of Rhode Island. She married a doctor who passed away. Then she married another doctor, so she was quite well-to and she had a lot of access to people who could help her. But she still had to figure out how to make things work and how to build this industry on her own. Izana Walker, who's the well-known soft bodied folk doll maker from nearby in Massachusetts. Yes, their families knew each other and Martha was given a Nizana Walker doll as a little girl, and I think that we actually found the provenance to that doll via a letter that Martha Chase's daughter wrote to someone who was acquiring the doll. So we have the date that it was given to her and we have the actual sort of prime source documentation, which is really exciting, amazing.
Louisa Maxwell:Yeah, that was a really late discovery and to have found that letter. Do you have that letter? Is that going to be in the Barry exhibition?
Brett Day Windham:It's not in the Barry exhibition it is referred to. And I just fell into such a deep well researching this exhibition and I just found that there were so many inaccuracies and guesses and made-up stories online and there really just was not a cohesive, coherent sort of catalog, resume or biography of Martha Chase, and I just got really frustrated and when I get frustrated I dig deeper. So I kept digging and digging and digging and finally, at the very end of my research, right before we went to press with all of our printed matter, I contacted Carolyn Barry, who's one of the founders of the Barry Art Museum, and I asked her if she could give me access to her doll news subscription. And she did and I was able to access this prime source document, this facsimile of this letter. So it was really really late, but the whole process of researching this exhibition was like that. It was lots and lots and lots of rabbit holes that I just had to go down.
Brett Day Windham:So I think, going back to your original question about building an industry, I think she had a lot of privilege, but she still had to figure out how to make things work and she was also working against the fact that women couldn't vote. I think two women in the country had been to medical school at that point and it was still really just frowned upon. Especially for well-to-do women and for lower-class women it wasn't even on the radar. She couldn't own property, she couldn't have a bank account. She couldn't really do anything without her husband's permission. So I think from that vantage point, the fact that she was able to form this cottage industry and then this whole company is really pretty incredible.
Brett Day Windham:She did first make the dolls for her own children and she was looking for doll or child-sized shoes for one of the dolls that she made.
Brett Day Windham:And she went to this famous department store in New England at the time called Jordan Marsh, which was still around when I was growing up, and asked the saleswoman for help and the saleswoman looked at her doll and said, oh, we have to have these. So that was how it started and initially it really was a traditional cottage industry where she was giving piecework to her neighbors in her community in Pawtucket and also thereby employing other women in her community and giving them their own income, which is incredibly important. And she started having them work out of her garage and some of them who couldn't be there maybe if they had small children at home, she'd send them home with piecework and it just built from there and I think, being such a community-based person already, she had access to her community and she made it work for her. So I think there's a lot to applaud about the way that she was able to form her company.
Louisa Maxwell:It's really women helping women when you think about it and supporting each other, and Martha Chase really is testament to that. It's so wonderful to hear that you were able to find out so much of Martha's true story. Will we be able to access the letter or the I believe that's UFDC doll news? Can we access any of these resources so people can?
Brett Day Windham:study them.
Louisa Maxwell:Wonderful. Yeah Well, we will. Well, everyone will try and share links with that, because I think that's great news to have found out so much about Martha Chase. And I've read about the Zanna Walker connection and I wondered myself, because it's art influencing art. So, after establishing her artist studio, aptly named and I believe she called it the Doll's House Isn't that wonderful? And, as you said, she gave opportunities to mainly a female workforce to sew and paint. She really became an entrepreneur. What obstacles do you think she faced to do all this?
Brett Day Windham:Well, I think you know, because she came from so much privilege, she experienced less obstacles than others. There's not a lot recorded about pushback against what she was doing. I think what she was really good at was recognizing what was around her that she could utilize to be successful, and Pawtucket is known as the birthplace of the industrial revolution in America. Slater Mill, which has very long, storied and somewhat dark history, was down the street from the dollhouse and they produced textiles that helped to emancipate the colonies from Great Britain so that we had our own industry here. Her father and her husband and her brother were all doctors, so she had exposure both to all of the textiles and the medical equipment that was coming through her home with her family members.
Brett Day Windham:The other big industry in Pawtucket was medical supplies. Was medical supplies Because I'm from Rhode Island. I had a little bit of a leg up in recognizing names and places and being able to connect a lot of dots, so she really was able to hone in on a way to make things that were locally accessible work for her in the dollhouse, and so stockinette became this locally made kind of revolutionary material for protecting the skin when setting a cast etc. As a material for her dolls. So I think she was so canny that she didn't really come up against a lot of obstacles. She had the space, she had the funding from her husband and father and off she went.
Louisa Maxwell:It seems like she just didn't let anything stop her, doesn't it? Yeah, she seemed to have a very clear vision of what she wanted to do. It sounds like she worked it out in her own time. First, you know various versions, probably, of the dolls, and then just starts to roll out when it's ready.
Brett Day Windham:I think, yeah, I think when you have as many children as she did, you have a lot of opportunities to keep making dolls and getting that prototype right, exactly.
Louisa Maxwell:And they'll love them. They'll take them off and then you can see if it comes back you know quality control.
Brett Day Windham:She's got her in-house beta testers.
Louisa Maxwell:Very smart, Very smart. So Martha not only made child dolls, but she also wanted to inspire children in different ways and she developed her dolls and introduced literary characters such as Alice in Wonderland, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and it added to the play value. Are some of her storybook dolls included in the exhibition?
Brett Day Windham:They are. We have an original full set of the Alice in Wonderland character dolls which is part of the permanent collection at the Barrie Art Museum. And then we have a doll that I suspect is from one of her Dickens character sets, because she made a lot of Dickens characters. This was a time when there was not a copyright issue and nobody had done very much of this before, so she really could have a lot of freedom without worrying about royalties or copyrights or lawsuits. And the character dolls are so charming. The Alice in Wonderland dolls are modeled after the Tennille illustrations and they're really evocative and I think it really built on her progressive ethics about. You know, she started her company in the year of the child and she was reading doctrines by German and Swiss and American child development specialists who were really thinking about developing the brain, developing the imagination. So this went hand in hand with everything that was important to her.
Louisa Maxwell:The thing I fell in love with the most, researching this was because I'm a passionate fashion doll collector, from Victorian all the way to present day, and I absolutely loved her fashion characters. They're beautifully molded, beautifully painted, lovely bodies, poseable. But the thing that captured my imagination the most was this wonderful work they did with the hair. So the hair on all Martha Chase dolls, or most, because I think there are a few exceptions, but most of them are created with paint effects, aren't they? And they create little curls and sometimes little chignons in the case of the lady dolls, elaborate little styles, and yet what's wonderful about this, from the point of view of cleanliness, is you can wipe this hair over and everything is pristine. How did she create this paint effect on the heads?
Brett Day Windham:So this speaks to the wisdom of hiring artists, hiring artists from Rhode Island School of Design who could create depth and texture and shadow in a curl, in a spit curl or in a baby curl or in a chignon. And that's really what it was. It was the paint, the paint effects, and then those were sealed in by a shellac so that they could be painted. This again going back to the time that she lived in and her family of doctors they're just starting to think about germs and she wanted to keep everything clean and, I think, the beautiful thing with a company that was open for so long, because she passed it on to her daughter and then her grandson took it over.
Brett Day Windham:So over the course of a hundred years, the molds for the doll's heads started to show three-dimensional hair shapes so that as the dolls progressed, when the doll artists were painting the hair on, they actually had a little bit of a relief to paint onto. So they're always solid. The kids are never going to be cutting the hair with scissors or pulling it out or worrying about it getting dirty or muddy or what have you. But they do get more pronounced up until in the 1970s, sort of at the tail end of the company when they were making the heads out of vinyl. They even had these incredibly charming sort of bob haircuts with little things that almost looked like a mother's kitchen haircut Very classic of the time, but yeah, it was pretty brilliant.
Louisa Maxwell:It was a really great idea. And again, it adds to the play aspect. Of course Martha Chase stressed the educational. One of the things I loved looking at the images from the exhibition is you showed advertisements that Martha Chase had done and on them she stressed the educational aspect of her dolls. And it says stressed the educational aspect of her dolls and it says, quote especially made for use in schools. How are her dolls used for?
Brett Day Windham:educational purposes. So her dolls were designed to teach little girls how to be mothers or children how to be parents. I think is what, in retrospect, I'm looking at. But I think her intention was little girls how to be mothers and how to care for a baby and how to be empathetic and kind and keep things clean, and she really believed in instilling that everywhere. There are records that I have not found prime source documents but of her sending dolls even to Native American reservations that had a brown skin color, that she wanted those kids to have access to learning how to take care of a baby and she felt like that matrilineal line was just as important a part of education as anything else. And I think the way that Mrs Chase was always able to see an opportunity and make it happen, nothing seems to have gotten by her. If there was an opportunity, she jumped on it and she made it happen, and I think that was the case with her really canny advertisements throughout her career.
Louisa Maxwell:Yes, she was really someone who saw an opportunity and just went right after it and kept developing we would say today, kept developing the brand and finding new ways of repurposing the original idea of a lovely fun-to-play-with doll. But Martha Chase did not just confine herself to child's play. In 1911, miss Lauder Sutherland, principal of the Hartford Training School for Nurses, saw Martha's dolls, saw how realistic and durable Chase's dolls were, and she commissioned a life-size teaching dummy for her young nurses to practice their skills on. So what innovations and features did Martha have to add to these training dolls?
Brett Day Windham:Okay so now we're getting into the heart of the matter. This is where Martha Chase really really blew me away. The innovations and features evolved over time. She started out with a very simple training doll. One of the first innovations that they had is that they were weighted, so they corresponded to the average weight given out by. The very just formed early American Medical Association was giving out average weights for each age and gender, so they were weighted. The very early ones had ports that could be cleaned at the orifices so the orifices are open. And then, as they developed, they would have a port in the arm for an IV to be inserted or a way to learn how to use a catheter all this kind of nitty gritty nursing training. It's just incredible to think that nurses didn't have anything but real patients to practice on before this right.
Louisa Maxwell:It's just it's a little scary when you think about it.
Brett Day Windham:It's very scary. It's very scary. And they got so good, these training dolls, that she made them adult size, child size, always weighted. The very first doll, she named her Mrs Demonstrator, mrs Demonstrator and she Martha Chase one thing that I gathered from one of my favorite books that I found to research, which is called A Doll's House, which was written by the niece of one of Martha Chase's employees at the dollhouse. Apparently, martha Chase was a cut-up. She was really funny and she would dress Mrs Demon Strader in one of her dresses. She was exactly her height. She made her five foot four, which is also my height, and she would seat her at the dinner table and invite her friends over to dinner and everyone was so polite that no one would really say anything and she would say, oh, mrs Strader, would you like some peas, or whatever it was, and finally she would just break up laughing. So she had a lot of fun with this doll that was modeled after her, but once it went over to Hartford it became affectionately known as Mrs Chase.
Brett Day Windham:Oh, I love that there are a lot of stories.
Louisa Maxwell:How did you find out about that story? Where was the source? Because that's wonderful.
Brett Day Windham:Yeah. So the source is this incredible book called A Doll's House and it was published on the occasion of a Martha Chase exhibition. That happened at the Rhode Island Historical Society, I think in 1986. And my copy of the book is now in the exhibition, which breaks my heart because it became my little totem that I carried around with me everywhere for six months and because it was written in the 80s by a family member of an employee.
Brett Day Windham:She had access to a lot of people while they were still alive to do first-person interviews, and I found one copy of the book on Amazon, a used library copy, and I haven't seen another.
Brett Day Windham:So that's why I felt that there was enough import to include it in the exhibition, because it really gave me a lot of these really funny stories.
Brett Day Windham:There was another one about a fire nearby on the street from the dollhouse and the firemen were using the parking area behind the dollhouse, which was the garage behind her house, to stage their firefighting efforts and the flames were illuminating the windows in the garage. And she saw the firemen start to get alarmed because when you could see in the windows there were all of these dolls hanging by the neck, at all different sizes from child to adult, these silhouettes of people hanging and she just laughed and laughed and laughed and watched them get more and more agitated and then finally went and told them what was going on and invited them inside and everybody had a good laugh. But I think you just can't get help but them get more and more agitated. And then finally went and told them what was going on and invited them inside and everybody had a good laugh. But I think you just can't get help but get really attached to her when you hear stories like that.
Louisa Maxwell:She sounds like such a great personality and so down to earth, and I think that's the key to her success. Yes, she had an artist's eye, she had all this talent. She was able to use the fabrics and the paints and start this whole thing off.
Louisa Maxwell:And I think this humor, this energy she just completely bypasses our image of a Victorian woman and, after all, the driver behind her search for cleanliness and combining medical principles along with toy design really is fueled by the fact that child mortality in this era is very high. There are no antibiotics If you get an infection, if you get the measles, the mumps, a scarlet fever and then TB was a big killer. I hate to say this.
Brett Day Windham:No, the Spanish flu came through Rhode Island Well this is it.
Louisa Maxwell:This is in the early 20th century. People still are battling those diseases. So Martha Chase's energy and her foresight were wonderful, because she's seeing that cleanliness is important in the nursery.
Brett Day Windham:I agree, and I think the fact that she called them sanitary dolls really spoke to those concerns and that she made dolls of all skin colors black, brown, white because she really wanted to educate the general public really about how to keep things clean and not just how to play, not just how to be maternal, but how to keep things clean, Because she had a front row seat to all of these ailments and illnesses that could take people down so quickly.
Louisa Maxwell:Are any of Martha Chase's black baby dolls? Because I've seen them, I've seen pictures of them and they're utterly charming. Are any of these lovely dolls in the exhibition?
Brett Day Windham:They are not. They are not and I was really disappointed not to be able to get my hands on an example, because they are really charming. They were commemor research.
Brett Day Windham:I found this wonderful woman, wonderful resource, debbie Garrett.
Brett Day Windham:She is the founder of the Virtual Black Doll Museum and she had some Black Martha Chase baby dolls on her website and I reached out to her and she was incredibly generous in sending us an image of her doll and just giving me some of her thoughts on what she thought about them and how she approached them.
Brett Day Windham:And I was really thrilled to discover that we were on the same page, that these dolls were made with the best of intentions and were made to be beautiful, and she did not intend to disparage or caricature the Black faces or ideas or anything that she was doing. It was really genuine and with affection and it was really important for me to speak with a Black woman, an African-American woman, about her thoughts, because my thoughts as a white woman they're kind of beside the point. So, debbie, I really am grateful to Debbie and her website and her resource for talking to me about those Black dolls. So we included that in our museum guide, which is available at the entrance to the gallery for everyone. They're free. You can take them away. They have full color pictures, so that was a way that we'll work around that we found to include them.
Louisa Maxwell:Will the museum guide be online at any point, or is there a link where we could read it?
Brett Day Windham:That's a great question. I know that a lot of the research that's in the museum guide is on the museum's website and I know that the museum guide exists in online format, so I could certainly inquire about having that added.
Louisa Maxwell:Because we'll give links to the website and we'll give links to the guide, because it's really important to grow in our knowledge of Martha Chase and how she was representing all cultures at the time and all Americans at the time, because she's a snapshot of America right then at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and when we see how progressive and how she was just such a wonderful force for change and for innovation it's inspiring to know there's a woman like that in our history.
Brett Day Windham:Especially because she was living in a time where there was still child labor in the textile mills in the town where she lived that she was, you know, a founder of, and there were all of these Native American people had been displaced, just forced out to form this town, and there were enslaved people being brought into the community and being brought to the Caribbean as part of the triangle trade to grow the cotton, to make the textiles, and so she benefited from all of this exploitation. So the fact that she was able to take this sort of aerial look, step back, use her privilege to take a bigger picture, look at her community and at the way that the country was being built, and just be magnanimous and just say no, I don't stand for this. I believe in children and I believe in kindness and empathy, and I think that that's also really just at the heart of who she was.
Louisa Maxwell:The other thing about her is that she's thinking about children and play and innovation. And, of course, the thing we love about Martha's dolls is that not only are they representing her society and bringing it a step forward and cuing us into a moment in history in the progressive era, but she designed her dolls to be played with I read that sometimes when they lost a limb or were victims of a child with an artistic bent and we've all done that at some point. Martha Chase had a hospital for her dolls, where dolls could be repaired and sometimes repainted. Today, collectors argue a lot about. Only an original, untouched doll is a true representation of the artist's original work. So how do we work with that? How do we identify an original Martha Chase doll today? And if we notice that that doll has restoration or repair done in the Chase factory, how does it affect that doll? Is it documented?
Brett Day Windham:There are telltale signs, there are ways to tell if a doll has been restored, how recently it's been restored, how professionally it's been restored. I think that for me, as an artist, I'm really interested in the story. So repairs and evidence of a doll being loved add to that history for me and that patina For serious doll collectors and institutions. I understand that they are setting a standard so that we have something to bounce off of and they really want to see the most pristine example of what the doll maker intended the doll to look like. I kind of think Martha Chase is an exception because she wanted her dolls to be played with.
Louisa Maxwell:I mean with restoration, when we think of Martha Chase's restoration, because she had this panel of artists, she really had experts to take these dolls in and keep the look, keep the aspect, because they were made in-house. Yeah.
Brett Day Windham:Yeah, it's an incredible thing. I mean, I think, as with Madame Alexander, who grew up, you know, her father repaired dolls and then she became a doll maker. I think there's a real line of continuity between the two, of understanding that dolls get broken.
Louisa Maxwell:It's amazing to think about all these wonderful people working in the doll's house and the sense of community. It seems to be that her business was something that had such a great impact on so many people's lives. So she really did live up to her progressive values, didn't she?
Brett Day Windham:She really did. She's very inspiring and you know, as someone who grew up here, she's a real personal inspiration to me. As part of my research I tried to kind of retrace her steps around the community and I was really disappointed that her house and workshop are now gone. But my art studio is in Pawtucket, less than a mile from where she lived, so I was able to kind of retrace her stomping grounds. And then we have a very, very beautiful cemetery in Providence called Swan Point Cemetery and you can use an app or the kiosk at the entrance to the cemetery to find where loved ones are buried. There are quite a few notable people who are buried there.
Brett Day Windham:So I was able to go and find her grave, which was really meaningful to me, and I just found myself going deeper and deeper and deeper into my research of her, my wonderful allyship with the Rhode Island Historical Society, who lent dolls to the exhibition and whom I'm still working with, and I called my mother and told her about the work that I was doing and how. You know we grew up on the corner of Jenks Street, so that was my first clue that this was somebody who was going to hit really close to home for me and my mother said you know, I've just been doing all this genealogical work because I did one of those DNA website things and we already knew that we were related to Abigail Adams. So is Martha Chase? She's your cousin.
Louisa Maxwell:Yes, so at the very end, this is like one of those reveals on one of those programs and wow.
Brett Day Windham:So she is my cousin through my mother's side, the Day family. My maternal grandfather was a Day, my maternal grandmother was a May. Being from a Mayflower family is a very fraught thing for me. I don't feel proud of it necessarily because of the behavior of the colonists. It's interesting, it's a privilege to be able to trace your lineage. A lot of Americans don't have that privilege, but it was really wonderful for me to find out that the Day family, who were one generation in front of Abigail Adams, were actually abolitionists and moved from Connecticut to Vermont and really upheld those beliefs.
Brett Day Windham:And then the other branch of the family was Martha Jenks. Martha Jenks Chase was her, I think great-grandmother was a Brown and the woman she was an Adams. Her maiden name was Adams and she married a Brown. So the Browns are an incredibly problematic slave-owning family but the Adams were not. So we come from this same line of concerned, thoughtful, sensitive, hopeful people and it was really incredible, after going down this incredibly deep research, just falling into this well and sort of falling in love with this woman, to find out that we were related.
Louisa Maxwell:That is astounding. I really have to say that you've woven a tapestry now of American history, moving all these threads together, of this wonderful output of work by Martha Jenks, chase and then all these families interleaving and coming together, with the positives but also the negatives. That's something we're exploring now in society and that's an important thing for us to start to recognize that we need to understand our history. So this is extraordinary that you have found so many amazing things to bring together to share with us today, and they'll all be shared in the Barry Art Museum and this wonderful exhibition. Of all the dolls you looked at and worked with in this exhibition, is there one that stands out for you? Is there one of them that you really feel in tune with? Oh, that's a really good question.
Brett Day Windham:I love them all. I love the original Mrs Chase doll, which is still on display at Hartford Hospital I think the baby dolls, because they were the first dolls of hers that I was able to hold and touch and experience and they are from the first couple of years of her company, so I know that her hand was directly involved. And just the beauty that I talked about at the beginning of the episode, of each part of the doll being so beautifully and carefully rendered and just having this really special moment at the Historical Society with the doll, unearthing her from her packaging, looking at her just angelic face, and it was a really memorable experience.
Louisa Maxwell:That's a very beautiful experience you've shared and you've shared so much with us. Brett Day Windham, thank you so much for joining us on the Doll Podcast telling us all the details of the exhibition. We're going to have lots of links to as much of this knowledge as we can share with our audience.
Brett Day Windham:Thank you so much for having me, because I'm obviously passionate about this story and it's wonderful to be able to share it and not just keep it all inside. I want to sort of sing her praises from the rooftops, so I really appreciate you having me on the show.
Louisa Maxwell:Well, it's been really wonderful. Thank you, brett. Thank you for joining us on the Doll Podcast. The exhibition at the Barry Art Museum Martha Chase Progressive Kindness continues until July 28, 2024. To find out more about the exhibition, to see pictures of Martha Chase and her dolls and to get links to lots of interesting information, just go to our website, wwwdollpodcastcom. We look forward to welcoming you the next time. Thank you. Copyright The Doll Podcast and Louisa Maxwel