Like Abigail Adams, Malvina Shanklin Harlan witnessed—and
gently influenced—national history from the unique perspective of a
political leader’s wife. Her husband, Supreme Court Justice John
Marshall Harlan 1833–1911, played a central role in some of the
most significant civil rights decisions of his era, including his
lone dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous case
that endorsed separate but equal segregation. And for fifty-seven
years he was married to a woman who was busy making a mental record
of their eventful lives.
After Justice Harlan’s death in 1911, Malvina wrote Some Memories
of a Long Life, 1854–1911, as a testament to her husband’s
accomplishments and to her own. The memoir begins with Malvina, the
daughter of passionate abolitionists, becoming the teenage bride of
John Marshall Harlan, whose family owned more than a dozen slaves.
Malvina depicts her life in antebellum Kentucky, and her courageous
defense of the Harlan homestead during the Civil War. She writes of
her husband’s ascent in legal circles and his eventual appointment
to the Supreme Court in 1877, where he was the author of opinions
that continued to influence American race relations deep into the
twentieth century. Yet Some Memories is more than a wife’s account
of a famous and powerful man. It chronicles the remarkable
evolution of a young woman from Indiana who became a keen observer
of both her family’s life and that of her nation.
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg began researching the history of
the women associated with the Supreme Court, the Library of
Congress sent her Malvina Harlan’s unpublished manuscript.
Recalling Abigail Adams’s order to “remember the ladies,” Justice
Ginsburg has guided its long journey from forgotten document to
published book. Some Memories of a Long Life includes a Foreword by
Justice Ginsburg, as well as an Afterword by historian Linda
Przybyszewski and an Epilogue of the Harlan legacy by Amelia
Newcomb. According to Library Journal, “This is the sort of book
you call a publishing event.”
From the Hardcover edition.
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