A Graphic Novelist Captures the Lives of Vermont Lesbians Ahead of Their Time
Article excerpt
Graphic novelist Tillie Walden has created a visual biography of 19th-century Vermont seamstresses who lived together for decades, drawing on archival letters and documents to tell the largely untold story of women whose domestic partnership predated modern LGBTQ+ visibility. Walden, who grew up near the historical sites, conducted extensive research into the written records these women left behind, correspondence that reveals the depth of their relationship and daily lives. The resulting graphic work transforms primary sources into a narrative that challenges conventional historical assumptions about women's domestic arrangements, giving visual form to lives that institutions largely erased from the historical record. By combining rigorous archival work with the intimacy of the graphic medium, Walden recovers a story of connection and resilience that complicates how we understand both regional history and queer identity in America.
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
Last night, panelists joined a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss the state of democracy 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, and the successes and challenges of the American experiment.
Compared with the nation founded 250 years ago, the United States of today appears to be in an “epistemological crisis,” Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued.“You have people who no longer share a lived reality, or no longer operate from a common baseline of fact and information.” What’s so striking, Alberta continued, is how people have “reached the conclusion that no one is looking out for them, that no one has their best interest in mind, that no one can be trusted.”
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, in this discussion about the nation’s 250th anniversary: Alberta; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Idrees Kahloon a staff writer at The Atlantic; Susan Glasser a staff writer at The New Yorker; Ashley Parker a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Watch the full episode, “America: The Next 250,” here.