Born just after the Civil War to a Northern father and a Southern mother, Mamah Borthwick embodied the contradictions of her time. A graduate of the University of Michigan (BA 1892, MA 1893), she came of age, met and married her spouse in the nineteenth century when the word “modern” was just coming into common usage. Like every other educated woman in the 1890s weighing her decision about whom, when and whether to marry, she faced uncertainty mixed with optimism.
Her classmate Edwin Cheney (BS 1892) courted her long after they graduated. After her return to the Chicago suburb of Oak Park she resisted his marriage proposals but Cheney finally won out. They married in 1899. Soon afterward he introduced her to another Oak Park resident, Frank Lloyd Wright.
The affair between Borthwick and Wright became an Oak Park legend but its early progress is poorly understood. Both were married with children. Their desire to break free from their marriages reflected changes in the cultural environment in the Progressive Era. Economic crises, industrialization and rapid urbanization brought greater flexibility in the rules of relationships — including laws of divorce — but such changes came too late for Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright.
She began adulthood as a committed member of the upper middle class establishment and seemed poised to lead a conventional life. Her sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, was one of the most exclusive and socially prominent in the nation. Wright too signaled an enthusiastic embrace of the Establishment by allowing Hamlin Garland to recruit him as a charter member of The Cliff-Dwellers Club. Before the club booted him as a member because of his “immorality,” he was a member of the Midwest’s true cultural elite. It is all the more impressive, then, that he and Mamah gave up their social status to flee to Europe in 1909. Unwilling to accept prevailing norms in matters of love, marriage and gender relations, they had little choice but to leave.
Mamah took the greater risk and travelled the greater inner distance. Wright offered her an emotional and spiritual partnership but Swedish feminist Ellen Key offered intellectual and philosophical guidance after Mamah became her most prominent translator for an American audience. Among her translations Love and Ethics, The Morality of Woman, and The Woman Movement were the most significant. The two cultural giants, Key and Wright, influenced her while she, in turn, left her mark on their work.
Starting out on a frontier full of promise, her life ended in tragedy just as World War I began. The guns of August 1914 signaled the end of happiness for many, one of whom we know was Frank Lloyd Wright. The war’s tragedy temporarily drained the cultural momentum from the early feminist movement but by then much had been accomplished. Mamah and Wright believed passionately that they stood in the vanguard of unprecedented change, she in the cause of women, he in that of architecture. Having become fugitives from a censorious America, they returned and endowed it with a national treasure called Taliesin. If America would not have them, they still had America. They continued to embrace the heartland. For that and more we are in their debt.