San Francisco's connection to Forteanism preceded the San Francisco Renaissance and founding of the Fortean Scoiety. What historian Kenneth Starr calls "Provincial" San Francisco had its Forteans, too--Miriam Allen de Ford and her husband Maynard Shipley.
Miriam Allen deFord was born in 1888 to a pair of Philadelphia doctors, Moses deFord and Frances Allen. She was the oldest of three children. Her paternal grandfather had emigrated from France, and she remembers the Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood she grew up in as being mostly French. Moses made helped put himself through college and medical school teaching French classes, which is how he met Frances Allen—she was one of his students. Frances Allen descended from a long line of Philadelphia Quakers. They were engaged around 1883; Moses attended Jefferson Medical College (graduating 1886) and encouraged Frances’s interest in medicine. When he started his second year of school, she started her first at the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia (now part of Drexel University). She graduated in 1887, the year that they married.
Her parents practiced from home (her father eventually opened an office downtown) treating mostly dockworkers and textile workers. As deFord remembered it much later, the neighborhood was quite rough. Indeed, she was abused quite bit by one boy, who attempted to rape her. Later, she was moved to a more respectable part of the city, although that that incident—as well as her mother’s quiet example—helped shape her into a feminist. Despite the unconventional lifestyle (certainly for the 1890s and 1900s), de Ford averred that her family was not radical, nor did it draw from any radical traditions. It was her, later, who turned toward radicalism.
Her independence started to show in high school, when she preferred courses in English to the scientific ones that would be needed for her to become a doctor and continue the family business. She also worked for the suffragette movement stuffing envelopes, starting when she was around 14—although in this case it was at her mother’s urging. She took to doing more for the movement, PR work and marching. She became a journalist, working first for the Philadelphia North American while attending Wellesley for one year. (After her scholarship ran out, she went on to Temple.)
In 1912, graduated from college, she moved to Boston and took a number of odd jobs. Her passion was writing, but not necessarily journalism, so she looked for jobs that had some writing component, but did all manner of things. She also continued her activism, taking to the soapbox for women’s suffrage as well as women’s rights more generally—such as the right for women to control their own income. Two years after arriving in Boston, she met her future first husband, William Armistead Nelson Collier, Jr., who, she said was a “sort of a combination of Southern aristocrat and anarchist”; he more fully introduced her to radical causes. (He was also a mystic.) They married and moved to San Diego (which, ironically, paused her suffragetting, as California already allowed women to vote).
De Ford spent a few years moving around Southern California, taking odd jobs, and becoming involved in radical causes. She joined the IWW to protest the Great War. Theoretically, her marriage with Armistead was an open one, but only he ever slept around, which became too much for her. She spent some time with friends in Spokane, Washington, doing more soapboxing and—as she had throughout this period—continuing to write. Finally, her father reached out to her, saying he had finagled a job in Baltimore writing for an olive company. Broke and frustrated, de Ford agreed.
Her surrender to her father, however, only made her more radical. In Baltimore, she became associated with the Socialist Party of Maryland and, through it, met Maynard Shipley. Both de Ford and Shipley were still married to other people—and de Ford was still shy and prudish about matters sexual—they became lovers. (Armistead would later stay with de Ford and Shipley for six weeks, while they were living together under the guise of being brother and sister, provoking the neighbors by announcing he was rooming with his wife and her lover!) In light of the draft taking many men from work, de Ford applied to be an insurance adjuster. She was accepted, sent to Chicago for training, and then on to San Francisco. In Chicago, she made connections with many anarchists. Shipley went on a lecture four for the socialist party, declaiming against the war. In California, both their marriages officially ended (it took three years for a divorce to be consummated; Shipley’s wife died before the three years were up), they married.
Her parents practiced from home (her father eventually opened an office downtown) treating mostly dockworkers and textile workers. As deFord remembered it much later, the neighborhood was quite rough. Indeed, she was abused quite bit by one boy, who attempted to rape her. Later, she was moved to a more respectable part of the city, although that that incident—as well as her mother’s quiet example—helped shape her into a feminist. Despite the unconventional lifestyle (certainly for the 1890s and 1900s), de Ford averred that her family was not radical, nor did it draw from any radical traditions. It was her, later, who turned toward radicalism.
Her independence started to show in high school, when she preferred courses in English to the scientific ones that would be needed for her to become a doctor and continue the family business. She also worked for the suffragette movement stuffing envelopes, starting when she was around 14—although in this case it was at her mother’s urging. She took to doing more for the movement, PR work and marching. She became a journalist, working first for the Philadelphia North American while attending Wellesley for one year. (After her scholarship ran out, she went on to Temple.)
In 1912, graduated from college, she moved to Boston and took a number of odd jobs. Her passion was writing, but not necessarily journalism, so she looked for jobs that had some writing component, but did all manner of things. She also continued her activism, taking to the soapbox for women’s suffrage as well as women’s rights more generally—such as the right for women to control their own income. Two years after arriving in Boston, she met her future first husband, William Armistead Nelson Collier, Jr., who, she said was a “sort of a combination of Southern aristocrat and anarchist”; he more fully introduced her to radical causes. (He was also a mystic.) They married and moved to San Diego (which, ironically, paused her suffragetting, as California already allowed women to vote).
De Ford spent a few years moving around Southern California, taking odd jobs, and becoming involved in radical causes. She joined the IWW to protest the Great War. Theoretically, her marriage with Armistead was an open one, but only he ever slept around, which became too much for her. She spent some time with friends in Spokane, Washington, doing more soapboxing and—as she had throughout this period—continuing to write. Finally, her father reached out to her, saying he had finagled a job in Baltimore writing for an olive company. Broke and frustrated, de Ford agreed.
Her surrender to her father, however, only made her more radical. In Baltimore, she became associated with the Socialist Party of Maryland and, through it, met Maynard Shipley. Both de Ford and Shipley were still married to other people—and de Ford was still shy and prudish about matters sexual—they became lovers. (Armistead would later stay with de Ford and Shipley for six weeks, while they were living together under the guise of being brother and sister, provoking the neighbors by announcing he was rooming with his wife and her lover!) In light of the draft taking many men from work, de Ford applied to be an insurance adjuster. She was accepted, sent to Chicago for training, and then on to San Francisco. In Chicago, she made connections with many anarchists. Shipley went on a lecture four for the socialist party, declaiming against the war. In California, both their marriages officially ended (it took three years for a divorce to be consummated; Shipley’s wife died before the three years were up), they married.
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