Timothy A. Joseph (College of the Holy Cross)
The figure of Dido, the mythical queen of Carthage whose story is most famously told in Virgil’s Aeneid, was appropriated in a variety of ways in popular publications in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper explores how Dido’s name and myth were put to use by both advocates and opponents of the women’s rights movement in the U.S., and it argues that her identity as a refugee and enterprising leader, and as a person of Asian and African origins, made her an extraordinarily malleable representative of the struggles by white women but also the (often competing) struggles by African-Americans and immigrants to the U.S.
Recent scholarship has examined Dido’s reception in early modern Europe (Ferguson), Russia under Catherine the Great (Torlone), and twentieth-century Tunisia (Ben Youssef Zayzafoon), with helpful conclusions about the capacity of her story to “dramatize the existence of competing histories” (Ferguson 2), and her standing “not only as a liminal figure who defies all boundaries, but also as an aesthetic tool to both resist and endorse the hegemonic discourse of the state regarding national, racial and gender identity” (Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, 72). Building on that work, this paper begins by tracing Dido’s popularity in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century in sympathetic translations (Thomas) and all-female theatrical productions, before examining the co-options of the Carthaginian queen by those fighting for and against women’s rights.
Newspapers from around the country reflect the range of employments of Dido. For example, a series of 1895 letters to the Edgefield (South Carolina) Advertiser penned by a pseudonymous “Dido” and advocating for women’s suffrage demonstrate the power of this name to represent female authority and political leadership; while the use of the apparently fictional name “Dido Stubbs” for a “famous suffragist” in a 1904 essay for The Independent (New York) on “race suicide” seems to reflect that the name could be used by opponents of women’s suffrage as a dismissive shorthand bearing racist undertones. The 1916 doggerel poem “What Dido Did” by the syndicated columnist Herbert Kaufman imagines Dido as a “feminist party” leader who outsmarted her male rivals for power, and he does so with nativist and misogynist language – rendering Dido and the empowerment she represents as threatening to white male supremacy in two ways. An example underscoring how pliant Dido became is the use of the Latin phrase dux femina facti (“a woman was the leader of the deed,” of Dido at Aeneid 1.364) in the presentation of the Lemhi Shoshone woman Sacagawea as a representative of the marches of all American women. The phrase appears as the title of the booklet celebrating the 1905 installation of a statue of Sacagawea in Portland, Oregon, and also as the opening line of the speech on that occasion by the suffragist Eva Emery Dye. Just as Sacagawea could be appropriated and reimagined (Richards), so too was Dido transfigured, with her particular identity and backstory at times made largely invisible, for a variety of aims.