Louise Pound (1872–1958), the subject of Robert Cochran’s new biography, may seem an unlikely candidate to become one of the leading folklorists of the first half of the twentieth century. The second child in a prominent family in Lincoln, Nebraska, she received an elitist education at home from her mother and then at the University of Nebraska, the University of Chicago, and the University of Heidelberg, where she took her Ph.D. in 1900. Her dissertation, “The Comparison of Adjectives in English in the XV and XVI Centuries,” represented the painstaking philological scholarship that characterized much academic work in languages and literatures in the late-nineteenth century and was the product of Pound’s reading of an extensive corpus of literary texts not for their content, theme, or style but for their use of comparative and superlative adjectives. Pound tackled this topic with the thoroughness that marked the standard research methods of her era. Her elitism had earlier been evident in the senior oration she had delivered while a University of Nebraska undergraduate. In “The Apotheosis of the Common,” she decried the elevation of that which was commonplace and average. None of this seems all that promising for a future in folklore studies, but that is indeed where Pound made one of her most important contributions. Cochran’s biography suggests, among many other things about this interesting and neglected figure in American academic history, how her interest in folklore came about and the results that it produced.
Pound’s first, and perhaps most lasting achievement, in folklore studies involved the ballad. Her first publication on the subject treated a variant of Child ballad 12, “Lord Randall,” and appeared in Modern Language Notes in 1902. For the next twenty years she published articles on ballads in various scholarly journals as well as a syllabus of folk songs from Nebraska and neighboring states in 1915. This listing, which included some full texts, was among the earliest systematic surveys in the United States of a region’s folk song repertory. Her ballad work climaxed in the publication of the book Poetic Origins and the Ballad (1921), in which she emerged as a spokesperson for one of the factions in what D. K. Wilgus has called the “ballad wars.” The controversy pitted scholars such as Francis P. Gummere of Harvard and Gordon Hall Gerould of Princeton, who believed that ballads were the product of communal composition by what was sometimes called “a singing, dancing throng,” against Pound and a few others, who believed that ballads, especially those canonized by Child, were the creations of individual bards and minstrels. Pound’s position, which she had actually anticipated in her senior oration some thirty years earlier by stressing the importance of individual creativity, won the day in the face of egregiously personal attacks launched by some of her opponents. Her involvement in the controversy, coupled with her characteristic thoroughness and common sense, brought her the presidency of the American Folklore Society in 1925–26. Meanwhile, she was developing another folklore interest, dialect and folk speech. She was a founding editor of American Speech and remained its principal editor for more than a decade after its origin. She was also active in the American Dialect Society. Toward the end of her career she published a set of essays titled Nebraska Folklore, which deal not only with the subjects for which she is best known but with other folklore topics, especially local legends. Cochran devotes a chapter each to Pound’s ballad work and her interest in the American language, and folklorists will be particularly attracted to these portions of his biography.
But Pound was much more than a folklorist, and Cochran stresses her varied interests. Her scholarship included other fields in literature and languages, and in 1955 she became the first woman to be elected president of the Modern Language Association. Even more important in creating a rounded portrait, Cochran thoroughly explores aspects of her life beyond the academic. Throughout her life, Pound, who never married, was devoted to her family, including her brother Roscoe, who became dean of the Yale Law School, and her sister Olivia, a public school teacher and administrator with whom she lived out her life in the house in Lincoln which their parents had built. She was also one of the premiere women athletes of her generation, focusing especially on tennis, basketball, cycling, and golf. In 1897 she won the Women’s Western Championship in tennis, defeating in an upset one of the country’s most accomplished female athletes. She pioneered women’s basketball at the University of Nebraska and led the team in intercollegiate contests as well as in local games. Her cycling feats were legendary, including a ride of a hundred miles at a time when women’s cycling costumes did not lend themselves to aerodynamic efficiency and when bicycles were heavy, cumbersome machines. Pound was the ranking woman golfer in Lincoln during the first quarter of the twentieth century. She remained a supporter of athletics, men’s and especially women’s, at the University of Nebraska throughout her life. Her athletic activities were so important that she became the first woman elected to the Nebraska Sports Hall of Fame in 1955, the same year that she became MLA president.
Meanwhile, through example and encouragement she championed women’s rights to a place in academe equal to that of men. Herself a victim of sexism, she worked with groups such as the American Association of University Women and with individuals, particularly students—many of whom went on to illustrious academic careers—to establish a place for women in academic departments and professional associations. She was a mentor of the first order to students during her half century on the faculty at the University of Nebraska and an advocate on their behalf with the university’s administration.
Cochran’s straightforward biography is a pleasure to read. He has mined a range of sources on Pound, especially the material available in archives at the University of Nebraska Library and the Nebraska State Historical Society. He interviewed people who had known her, including many of the students who comprised what B. A. Botkin, whose dissertation on the play party she had directed, called the “Louise Pound Alumni Association.” Cochran understands the politics of academe with which Pound had to contend and the controversies in folklore studies in which she participated. One of the most appealing features of the biography is his engagement with the milieu in which Pound moved. Even if the reader has no particular interest in the history of the University of Nebraska, the ways in which this institution, which matured from regional school to international center of higher education during Pound’s years there, offers insights into the trajectory that many state universities in the United States have followed. Presenting that development through the perspective of Louise Pound personalizes the institution’s story.
My only quibbles with this important biography are slight and relate to matters that most likely result from the exigencies of publishing. A bibliography of Pound’s publications would have been a nice addition as would a biographical timeline. But Louise Pound: Scholar, Athlete, Feminist Pioneer should rightfully take its place alongside a growing list of book-length biographies of notable folklorists—for example, Cochran’s own treatment of Vance Randolph—and works on other AFS presidents such as John Gregory Bourke, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, and Elsie Clews Parsons.
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[Review length: 1218 words • Review posted on October 20, 2009]