Three Astonishing Belles

This episode features three unique women, all of whom are notable in their own way. The two things they have in common: They each have a surprising aspect to their stories, and they each have the name Belle.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
have another episode in which we're going to devote some
time to three unique women, all of whom are notable

(00:23):
in their own way. And the two things that they
have in common is that each of them has an
element to their story that really surprised me in some way,
and the other is that they each have the name Belle.
If you're wondering, hey, Tracy, why is this not a
six impossible episodes, It's because a lot of the other
Bells were already taken. You will find Belle Boyd, Bell Starr,

(00:47):
and Bell Ganness in the archive, along with Gertrude Bell,
whose name doesn't have the E on end, and even
the Bell which he was not a person. The three
three women today are Gertrude Bell, Ellien Aldo, Costa Green
and died O Elizabeth Bell. Died O. Elizabeth Bell is
a frequent listener request, including more recently from Renee and

(01:08):
Melissa and then other The other two are people I
learned about kind of stumbled over in various travels. Gertrude
bell Elien, known as Trudy, was born on January twenty third,
nineteen eighteen. Her father, Robert, was a dentist who had
immigrated from Lithuania and moved to New York at the
age of twelve. Her mother, Bertha Cohen, had immigrated from

(01:29):
a part of Russia that is now Poland when she
was fourteen years old. The family was Jewish, and Robert
was from a long line of rabbis. Ellen grew up
in a Manhattan apartment adjacent to her father's dentistry practice,
and when she was six, a younger brother, Herbert, was born.
Not long after that, the family moved to the Bronx,
which was at the time considered more of a suburb

(01:52):
than an actual part of New York City. In nineteen
thirty three, elim graduated from high school, and her family,
at that point in pretty dire financial streets. Like much
of the rest of the country and in some cases,
the world, they had suffered huge losses in the Great Depression,
and her father had declared bankruptcy. Fortunately, though, because Ellian

(02:13):
had been such an exceptional student, she was accepted at
Hunter College, which was at the time a tuition free
Women's College. Ellien's grandfather died of cancer the same year
that she graduated from high school, and she wanted to
pursue a career that would let her fight the disease.
But she also had kind of an aversion to dissection,

(02:34):
so she got around this difficulty by studying chemistry. Ellian
graduated from Hunter College summa cum laude in seven, but
in spite of her excellent academic record, she couldn't find
work as a chemist because of her gender. She got
a job teaching biochemistry to nursing students at the New
York Hospital School of Nursing, but that was only a

(02:56):
temporary position, with the course only taught once every nine months.
When she finally did find a job working as a
lab assistant, it was unpaid and it's slowly and gradually
increased from zero to twenty dollars a week. She saved
as much money as she could. Her parents gradually recovered
from the Great Depression thanks to her father's loyal dentistry patients,

(03:19):
so by ninety nine she had enough money to go
back to school. She enrolled at New York University in
the chemistry department, as its only female master's degree student,
earning her MS in ninety one, not long after the
United States entered World War Two after the bombing of
Pearl Harbor. We often talk about World War two as
a time when more women were entering the civilian workforce

(03:42):
because so many men were entering the military, and that's
often discussed in terms of factory labor or wartime industries,
but the same concept applied to other jobs as well.
So during the war, Alien was finally able to get
work as a chemist, starting out in the Quaker Made
Company's quality control department. She didn't really love doing this work.

(04:05):
She was doing things like testing the acidity of pickles,
and it was pretty repetitive, but it did give her
a lot of practice at conducting tests quickly and efficiently
and doing them accurately. When she felt like there wasn't
anything else she could learn at Quaker Mate, she looked
for another job and was hired in a research position
at Johnson and Johnson, but that company shuttered the research

(04:25):
lab when she had been there for only about six months.
Then in n she got a position doing what she
had really wanted to do since high school, working as
a research chemist at pharmaceutical company Burrows Welcome, where she
started out as an assistant to Dr. George H. Hitchings.
Side note that after many moves and name changes, Burrows

(04:46):
Welcome is now Glaxo Smith Klein. This new role was
really ideal for her. Hitchings encouraged her to learn as
much as she could, including branching out from the field
of chemistry. He progressively gave her more and more responsibility,
and often when Hitchings got promoted, she got promoted into
his old role. By nineteen sixty seven, she had risen

(05:09):
through the ranks to become Burrow's Welcome's Head of Experimental Therapy,
a position that she would hold until the end of
her career. When Elian started working at Burrow's Welcome, a
lot of pharmaceutical research was carried out basically on a
trial and error basis, but Elien and the rest of
their team took a different approach, examining and then exploiting

(05:31):
biochemical differences between healthy cells and pasages so that they
could develop targeted drugs. While at Burrow's Welcome, Ellien and
Hitchings developed the first successful chemotherapy for the treatment of
childhood leukemia. They developed the world's first anti rejection drug,
which made kidney transplants possible between people who weren't related

(05:52):
to one another. Ellian also developed treatments for a number
of other diseases, including gout, lupus, malaria, meningitis, and arthur itis.
In the late nineteen sixties, after she had become head
of the Department of Experimental Therapy, Elien did pioneering work
in anti viral drugs. The conventional wisdom at this point
was that any drug that could successfully work against viruses

(06:15):
would be far too toxic to be tolerated by the
human body. The department's first breakthrough was a cyclavier, invented
by Howard Schaefer. A cyclavier, used to treat herpes, was
the world's first truly successful targeted anti viral medication. There
were a few other anti viral drugs at this point,
but most of them had been developed as treatments for

(06:36):
non viral diseases, they were discovered to actually have some
antiviral efficacy, or they were broad spectrum treatments that were
really hard on the patient. Elien's worked with a cyclavier
included refining its development, as well as figuring out exactly
why it worked, and then applying those findings to other drugs.
Elien's techniques also led to the development of a zendo thymidine,

(06:58):
more commonly known as a z T, which in ven
became the first drug approved by the FDA for the
treatment of HIV. By the time a z T was developed,
Elliant had retired and was serving as Scientist emeritus and consultant,
so she had more of a supervisory role than a
hands on one. Early in her career at Burrow's Welcome,

(07:19):
Ellien had wanted to continue her education. She enrolled in
the PhD program at Brooklyn Polytechnic, going to school part
time while continuing to work. But after two years in
the program, the dean told her she needed to choose
between her job and her studies. She chose the job,
and she never finished her doctorate. So she rose to
these incredible heights with two strikes against her, the fact

(07:42):
that she was a woman and the fact that she
didn't have a PhD. Be in her own words quote
years later, when I received three honorary doctorate degrees from
George Washington University, Brown University, and University of Michigan, I
decided that perhaps that decision had been the right one.
After all, in d eight, Gertrude bell Elian and George H.

(08:03):
Hitchings were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
In the words of the Nobel Assembly, they quote demonstrated
differences in nucleic acid metabolism between normal human cells, cancer cells, protozoa, bacteria,
and virus. On the basis of such differences, a series
of drugs were developed the block nucleic acid synthesis and

(08:24):
cancer cells and noxious organisms without damaging the normal human cells. Elien,
in that moment, became the fifth woman to earn a
Nobel Prize in medicine, the ninth woman to earn a
Nobel Prize in any science category, and one of a
very few people to earn a Nobel Prize in the
sciences without having a doctorate. As a side note, also

(08:47):
receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in was
James W. Black, who developed beta blockers, which are used
to treat high blood pressure and heart disease, and H
two antagonists, which are used to treat peptic ulcers. Ellien
is also listed on the patents for more than forty drugs.
She received more than twenty honorary doctoral degrees. In nineteen

(09:09):
sixty eight, she was awarded the Garvin Medal from the
American Chemical Society, and in nineteen eighty five she earned
the American Chemical Society Distinguished Chemist Award. She also earned
the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, the National Medal
of Science, and the Lemlson M I T Lifetime Achievement Award,
among others. In nineteen ninety one, at the age of

(09:30):
seventy three, she became the first woman inducted into the
National Inventors Hall of Fame. She also served as a
leader in several organizations dedicated to health and research, including
serving on the board of directors of the National Cancer Institute,
the American Cancer Society, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society. She
was also a member of the American Academy of Pharmaceutical Scientists,

(09:53):
the National Academy of Sciences, the American Chemical Society, and
the American Association of Cancer Research, also serving as its president.
In addition to all of this, she did a lot
of outreach to encourage children to study the sciences, especially girls.
She was an avid traveler and photographer, and she also
loved music that she subscribed to the Metropolitan Opera for

(10:16):
forty years. Eventually, Bro's Welcome moved its headquarters to Chapel Hill,
North Carolina, and Elian moved as well. While in North Carolina,
she taught at both the University of North Carolina and
at Duke University in Durham. She died on in Chapel
Hill on Sunday, February one, at the age of eighty one.

(10:37):
I learned about her at the National Museum of Jewish
American History in Philadelphia. I had never heard of her before,
and it is amazing that she did such important and
groundbreaking work in the field of chemistry, and especially in
pharmaceutical chemistry without as would typically be expected a PhD.
Like for her to be at that rank within the

(10:59):
company without a p HD and also a woman is amazing. Yeah,
we're gonna talk about another fascinating lady with the name
Bell in just a moment, but first we're gonna pause
and have a little sponsor break. Beginning in about eighteen ninety,
wealthy financier and banking titan John Pierpont Morgan, Sr. Started

(11:22):
amassing a huge collection of rare and antique books, artifacts
and art, and other assorted treasures at his home at
two nineteen Madison Avenue in New York City, he acquired
a Guttenberg Bible on vellum, the first of three Guttenberg
Bibles that he would go on to own. Also for
Shakespeare folios, signed manuscripts by John Keats and Charles Dickens

(11:47):
fourteen fifty nine edition of The Man's Psalter, on and on.
A very impressive collection. Uh. It was extensive and expensive
as well as being impressive, so much so that in
nine You Know Too, he commissioned an architect to build
a library adjoining his home to house it all. And
while he did seem to have the knowledge, taste, and

(12:09):
money to build a good collection, he didn't really have
a head for curating or organizing it. For that, he
needed a librarian. That librarian was belled Acosta Green, who
he hired in nineteen o five when she was twenty two.
Green born on December eighty three, was of Portuguese heritage.
She had been born in Virginia and grew up in Alexandria,

(12:31):
and she had gone directly from public school to working
at the Princeton University Library in nineteen o one or
nineteen o two. Although she had no prior training as
a librarian. Her time at Princeton had made her quite
skilled at cataloging and reference work, and she'd had a
lifelong affinity for rare books and illuminated manuscripts. I would
imagine that would seem like a dream job. Then, at

(12:54):
least that is the biography that she probably gave to
JP Morgan, who had been introduced to Green through his nephew,
Junior Spencer Morgan, associate librarian at Princeton, and it is
also the one she presented to the world at large.
And you will still find some of those details in
articles about her life. Green did go to public school

(13:14):
and work in a Princeton University library, but biographer Heidi
Artistone puts her birth at November eighteen seventy nine in Washington,
d C. So slightly different place than also a little
older from there, her family moved to New York in
eighty five, and then after graduating from high school, Green
went on to Teachers College, as well as possibly taking

(13:36):
a library apprenticeship at New York Public Library and a
bibliography course at Amherst College. And her name was not
initially Belle A Costa Green. It was Bell Marian Greener.
Her father, Richard T. Greener, was the first black man
to graduate from Harvard, the first black librarian and professor
at the University of South Carolina, and a former dean

(13:59):
at how University, a historically black university in Washington, d C.
Green may have had some Portuguese ancestry. Her parents both
had very light complexions, but the name the Costa and
the change of her last name from Greener to Green
both came after her father left the family and moved
to Russia to take on a consular post. The race

(14:21):
that was listed on Green's birth certificate was colored. It's
virtually certain that Belda Costa Green could not have gone
on to the life that she had and the work
that she did had she presented herself to the world
as a black woman. Her father was able to rise
to some prominence, largely thanks to when he was born.

(14:41):
His admission to Harvard and his job at USC were
products of reconstruction happening during the brief window when the
nation made reluctant strides towards rachel equality. But Belda Costa
Green went to work for JP. Morgan in nineteen o six,
well into the Jim Crow era. Even though the South
is a much more notorious reputation for segregation and racist violence,

(15:04):
segregation and racism were present in the rest of the
nation as well, although often in a somewhat subtler way.
We have a whole library of podcast episodes called not
Just in the South that relate to this whole idea,
which we will link to in our show notes. So,
after her father's departure, Green, along with her mother and siblings,

(15:24):
changed their last names, with a brother adding Da Costa
to his as well. They distanced themselves from Richard T. Greener,
his reputation and his color, and they joined the white world.
For Bell's part, she had far more opportunity available to
her as a white woman straight out of high school
than is the daughter of a black Harvard graduate who

(15:45):
had attended college and possibly completed a library apprenticeship. I
want to take just a moment to talk about the
idea of passing because it has come up yeah previous
episodes a couple of times, like the idea of passing.
So a person of color living within the white world
as a white person has this connotation of deception and

(16:06):
doing something wrong. But to be clear, what is wrong
is the society that made it impossible for people of
color to live the same life as white people had
access to. So what what she was basically doing here
was just not playing by the rules that white society
was establishing for people of color, doing her own thing. Yeah,

(16:29):
it is one of those things that sometimes framed as
sort of sneaky, but when you look at it, really
is the comparative that Tracy laid out in these notes
of like, here's a woman who is educated, she has
all of these skills, she is super smart, but if
she presents herself as black, she will never get this job,
versus saying, oh, no, I'm just an enthusiast straight out
of high school, but I'm white and gets the job.

(16:50):
Like that's a pretty clear indicator of why passing became
something that people tried to do. Yes, So, for her
first three years working for Pierrepont, Morgan, Green spent most
of her time sorting out this collection he had accumulated,
organizing catalog and curating this whole haphazard mess into an
actual private library, and then from there, while still acting

(17:13):
as his personal librarian, she started traveling around the world
on his behalf, basically as an acquisitions agent in this.
Green was highly confident and completely competent. Particularly in her
early career. There was quite a bit of media coverage
that painted her as a fluberty gibbet, but she carried
herself with such assurance that it increasingly offset the fact

(17:36):
that she was, to everyone else's eye, a twentysomething woman
who had never been to college. She was also quite
stylish and fashionable, playing up her so called quote exotic appearance,
reportedly saying, quote just because I am a librarian doesn't
mean I have to dress like one. She was openly
flirtatious with everyone, and she had a string of lovers,

(17:58):
rumored to include women and men. She was briefly engaged
to a few of the latter. There were rumors that
she was involved with Morgan himself, which she neither confirmed
nor denied, just saying we tried when asked about it,
like what does that even mean? I don't know. Her
longest and most important relationship was with married art historian

(18:21):
Bernard Berenson, who she wrote more than six hundred letters
to between nineteen ten and nineteen four. Green also neither
confirmed nor denied speculation about whether she had quote crossed
the color line. Which went on throughout her life. Instead,
she lived exuberantly and passionately, presenting herself as a mysterious,

(18:42):
intriguing woman with a sharp tongue and shrewd bargaining skills,
who also became highly and internationally respected for her work
as a librarian and her ability to negotiate for new acquisitions.
Bald Acosta Green expanded pure pot Morgan's holdings into one
of the finest of a library collections in the world.

(19:02):
By the time Morgan died in nineteen thirteen, his library
contained six hundred rare and valuable volumes. It included an
incredible collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, along with a
sizeable collection of books printed by William Caxton, in large
part thanks to Green negotiating a private purchase the night
before an entire set was supposed to be sold at auction,

(19:26):
and one of her most famous acquisitions, she secured another
caxton an edition of La Morte d'artour forty two eight
hundred dollars, which is a lot of money, but it
is a whole lot less than the hundred thousand dollars
that Morgan had offered her had authorized her to pay
for it. After Morgan's death, Green's future was briefly uncertain.

(19:49):
His son JP Morgan Jr. Known as Jack, was not
particularly interested in his father's collection, but in about nine
twenty he changed his mind, and Green resumed her travels
to Europe to continue acquiring manuscripts, books, and art, now
hoping to develop the Morgan Collection until it rivaled the
world's finest public institutions and make it into something that

(20:10):
the public could access. Jack Morgan ultimately agreed with this goal,
and the Morgan Library became a public institution in nineteen
twenty four, at which point Green became its became its
first director. For the next twenty four years, Baldacosta Green
worked to transform the Morgan Library into an internationally recognized

(20:30):
center for academic study. She developed an information services department,
copying services department. She arranged public lectures and publications. She
also continued to travel and acquire new works until nineteen
thirty six, when her health started to decline. She worked
at the Morgan Library until her retirement in nineteen and

(20:51):
she died on May tenth, nineteen fifty. Although she was
seventy one and the people in her life thought she
was more like sixty seven. People wondered what there she
had been ill or whether her lifestyle had contributed to
her early death. She was a lifelong smoker and a
heavy drinker, and she'd always burned the candle at both
ends in a life of passion, travel and adventure. The

(21:14):
Morgan Library, which is now the Morgan Library and Museum,
held in an exhibition the year before her death which
featured more than two hundred and fifty of the most
notable items she had acquired for the library, and today
her presence is still definitely felt there. Uh there's including
a piece about her in the free audio tour that

(21:34):
you can get if you go to the Morgan, which
is how I first learned about her. It was actually
on my second trip to the Morrigan. For whatever reason,
my first time there I hadn't I hadn't flipped through
to that part, and I was there my second time
around with my husband and he came over to me
and was like, Hey, if you listen to this about
the librarian, listen to the one about the librarian. She

(21:56):
sounds amazing. So we have one more amazed woman to
talk about. After one more quick sponsor break, hanging in
skun Palace in Perth, Scotland is a striking and beautiful
portrait of two young women. The woman on the right
is in a pink gown with a gauzy white overlay.

(22:19):
It's pretty traditional, maybe even a little bit old fashioned
for the time. She's holding a book in one hand
and the other woman's farm and the other. Her expression
is a little reserved, but it has kind of a
playful little smile. The woman on the left is dressed
more exotically, a white satin dress with a silken blue
shawl flowing back from her arms. In a white turban

(22:40):
decorated with a fashionable ostrich plume and little gold embellishments.
She's carrying a basket of fruit and holding one finger
up to her cheek, wearing a decidedly mischievous expression. Given
their clothing, their jewelry, and the setting, both women are
clearly wealthy. They're also obviously fond of one another. The

(23:01):
paintings composition suggests that they might be sisters, and in
what's most striking about the portrait, which dates back to
the late seventeen seventies, that the woman on the right
is white and the woman on the left is black
in a dramatic departure from what would have been accepted
at the time and what is really depicted in paintings
from the time. It presents them as near equals. That

(23:23):
woman on the left is Dido Elizabeth Bell, and on
the right is her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray. Both were
grandnieces of William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield and the
Lord Chief Justice of Britain, who along with his wife,
raised them at the estate of kentwood House. Their fathers
were two of Lord Mansfield's nephews. Lady Elizabeth Murray's father

(23:46):
was an ambassador and her mother had died when she
was still a baby, which is why she was being
raised at kentwood House. Died o Elizabeth Bell's father was
a British Navy officer, Sir John Lindsay. Her mother was
an enslaved woman named Maria, who Lindsay either stole or rescued,
depending on who you ask, from a Spanish vessel in

(24:07):
the Caribbean. We know virtually nothing concrete about Maria's life.
We don't know whether she was bound from Africa to
the Caribbean when Lindsay encountered the ship she was on,
or whether she had already been in the colonies and
then was being transported elsewhere. We don't even know what
ship it was. We also know virtually nothing about her

(24:28):
connection to John Lindsay. It was extremely common for a
ship's crew to rape enslave women in transit, but it
was unheard of for a British officer to return home
with an enslaved woman who was carrying his child, which,
according to what the one surviving second hand account that
we have, is what John Lindsay did. It would have

(24:50):
been simple enough for Lindsay to set Dido and her
mother up with comfortable living arrangements somewhere in London, the
city's black community numbered about fifteen thousand in eighteenth century,
but instead he acknowledged his daughter and made arrangements for
her to be brought up as a lady in a
manner befitting his family and his station, and in seventeen

(25:11):
seventy two, roughly eleven years after Dido's birth, he gave
her mother land in Pensacola, Florida, suggesting both that she
was free and that they had an ongoing relationship. In
the years after Dido's birth. In seventeen sixty one, there
is just so much we don't know here. Bell and
her cousin were raised, not quite as equals, but much

(25:33):
closer to one another than one would have expected given
Bell's birth and color. Lord and Lady Murray had no children,
and while there's some debate about exactly what Bell's position
was in the family, they seem to have raised both
girls as daughters. Household accounts show orders for things like
betting and dresses being ordered in pairs. Dido was able

(25:54):
to read and write, and seems to have had the
same education that Elizabeth did at the same time time,
there were clear differences in their stations. Both ladies received
an allowance, but Didos was thirty pounds a year Elizabeth's
was one hundred. At least some of the time, Dido
was not allowed to eat with the family when they
were entertaining guests, and she was also expected to work.

(26:17):
She supervised the dairy and the poultry yard, and took
dictation for Lord Murray's letters. All of this was pretty
typical for how the aristocracy treated quote, poor relations and
out of wedlock children who they actually liked, but it
was not at all typical for how the aristocracy treated
people of color Bell's life at Kenwood House and her

(26:38):
relationship with the Lord Chief Justice drews and criticism. Lord
Mansfield was already the subject of some scrutiny. He was
a scott from a line of Catholic Jacobites. Although he
had distanced himself from Scotland and from his Scottish family
in his young adulthood, having his nephew's multi racial natural
daughter living in his home and treating her with obvious

(26:58):
familial affection raised even more eyebrows. This was particularly true
when it came to Lord Mansfield's work as Lord Chief Justice,
especially when it came to cases relating to slavery. In
seventeen seventy two, Lord Mansfield heard what's known as the
Somerset case. Charles Stewart, accustoms official from Boston, had brought

(27:19):
his enslaved servant, James Somerset with him to England. Somerset escaped,
was recaptured, and was forced onto a ship bound for
Jamaica to be sold back into slavery. So the question
was whether the capture and sale of Somerset was lawful.
After a lengthy and often delayed process, Mansfield real quote,

(27:40):
no master ever was allowed here to take a slave
by force, to be sold abroad because he deserted from
his service, or for any other reason whatsoever. Therefore the
man must be discharged. This meant the enslaved people who
had escaped their enslavement in England could not be recaptured
and sold back into slavery, and more specifically, that James

(28:02):
Somerset was free. Mansfield's ruling also noted that there was
nothing in English common law specifically establishing slavery as legal,
so the decision was widely misunderstood at the time as
freeing all slaves in Britain immediately. There continues to be
some debate about how it was put into practice at
the time, but this was certainly more of a starting

(28:24):
point than an ending point, bolstering the movement for abolition
throughout the British Empire. So naysayers suggested that Mansfield's decision
was influenced by the by the fact that Dido Elizabeth
Bell was living in his home as a member of
his family, It's certainly possible or even probable, that her
place in his life shaped his views. At multiple points

(28:47):
he described slavery as odious and unnatural, but his work
as Lord Chief justice was really dedicated to meticulously interpreting, clarifying, consolidating,
and following the law, particularly commercial law, and there are
other cases where it's hard to imagine that he was
thinking of Bell at all. For example, he was also

(29:08):
involved in the case of the Zong massacre. This was
a seventy one incident in which the crew of a
slave ship threw more than one hundred sick and dying
enslaved people overboard during an epidemic, claiming that this was
necessary because the ship was running out of water. The
ship's owners filed an insurance claim over the loss of

(29:28):
their enslaved property, which was granted. Lord Mansfield held a
hearing regarding the insurer's appeal in seventeen eighty three. Lord
Mansfield did suggest that a new trial might be in order,
largely because of evidence that the ship's captain and crew
had passed up the opportunity to take on fresh water
and had continued calling the enslaved people after rains had

(29:52):
replenished the water supply, But he didn't really consider the
question of whether this was murder. He approached it strictly
for the perspective that the people on board were insured property.
Even at one point, comparing them to horses. The insurers
may be worried that another trial might lead to murder
convictions stopped pursuing the case, even though Man's Field down

(30:13):
in their favor. Dido Elizabeth Bell lived with Lord Mansfield
until his death in seventeen. At that point, his wife
Elizabeth had also died, and the younger lady, Elizabeth Murray,
had married and left the house. Lord Mansfield left Bell
five hundred pounds upon his death, plus one hundred pounds
a year for the rest of her life. In his will,

(30:35):
he also confirmed that she was free, so that there
would be no doubt about it in anyone else's mind.
It's also the way that he phrased that was not
that he granted her her freedom, but that he confirmed it,
so he was basically confirming something that already existed. The
following year, Dido married a Frenchman named John Davinier, and

(30:56):
they lived on land that had been left to her
by her father, who by this point had also died,
leaving a thousand pounds to his children, named in his
will as Elizabeth and John. It's widely believed that this
Elizabeth is died of Elizabeth Bell and not another Elizabeth,
even though Elizabeth was a really common name in that family. Obviously,
John would have been either her brother or a half

(31:19):
brother by another woman. John Lindsay had no children with
his wife Dido, and her husband John had at least
three children together and could have lived comfortably on her income.
There's little else about her in the historical record, but
she died at the age of forty two in July
of eighteen o four. Her father's obituary and the London Chronicle, though,

(31:41):
suggests that she was admired outside the family, and also
sums up her story a little bit. It describes her
as quote a Mulatto who has been brought up in
Lord Mansfield's family almost from her infancy, and whose amiable
disposition and accomplishments have earned her the highest respect from
all his Lordship's relations and visitants. There is also a

(32:02):
highly fictionalized dramatization of her life, a film that came
out a couple of years ago that's simply titled Bell.
I watched that. It's enjoyable, but it is highly fictional. Also, uh,
at times maybe a little melodramatic. What a movie melodramatic? Ever,
so those are those are the three astonishing bells that

(32:26):
I found talked about on the podcast today. I'm not
going to disguise the fact that unabashedly love all of them.
Did you find astonishing email? Uh? Not exactly what I
did find some email. It is from Carrie and it
is about our recent two parterre on the Fort Shot
Indian School basketball team, specifically Part two, and Carrie says,

(32:48):
Dear Holly and Tracy, I just finished listening to Fort
Shaw Indian School Basketball Champions Part two podcast. In the
description of the St. Louis World's Fair, the fact that
babies and incubators were on display there was mentioned. This
was no surprise to me, as I had previously written
an article on the most famous of these incubator babies.
A long running dispute over the custody of the baby

(33:10):
between the birth mother and a woman who wanted to
adopt the baby drug on for years and at one
point involved kidnapping. The case involved the Kansas Supreme Court,
the Illinois Supreme Court, and finally several decisions by the
United States Supreme Court the debate. The debate was a
sensation and made national headlines on and off rou for
ten years, little girl named Marian by her birth mother

(33:32):
and Dorothy by the attempted adopted mother, was known across
the country as the incubator baby. Eventually the birth mother
one out and what is a heartrending story of two women,
their love for one baby girl and the links they
would go to try to get custody of her. H
And then she sent an article that she wrote about
this to us. UM. This is the major emphasis of

(33:54):
the article is the local connection to the story. UM.
But Uh points out at the time everybody had heard
of this incubator baby. She says, I think this would
make a good topic for one of your podcasts. Keep
up the good work, sincerely, Carrie. Yes. So, in addition
to these incubator babies in the World's Fair, there were
other incubator babies that were in public display, like is

(34:16):
that at at like at Tony Island, um, and that
that has come up as a podcast request before, so
it may be something we do in the future. A
lot of times it was like the the hospitals didn't
have funding for all these incubators, but if they made
a public display of the incubators and charged admission, they
could keep the program running. There's a lot of complicated

(34:38):
ethics going on there, for sure. It's like you, uh, yeah,
it's easy to see that it is not as simple
as a black and white wrong and right situation there. Yeah,
maybe in terms of custody, the custody I haven't read
the custody article, to be honest, though, I don't know
if that is entirely clear cut. But yeah, the question
of whether it's ethical to to just play babies for

(35:01):
public consumption if not displaying them means that they wouldn't like,
that's a whole complicated thing. Yeah, I imagine it would
be a scenario on the Good Place. It's sort of
is a scenario on The Simpsons where a boo afoo
and his wife have so many children that they cannot
reasonably manage or um provide for them, and so they

(35:22):
kind of make a bad deal with someone who wants
to basically make them an entertainment object. But they're thinking
is that it will enable us to you know, actually
support these children. But it turned up to go not
so well. But it's the Simpsons. So aside from the
issues raised by Harry Kondabolou in his recent documentary The
Trouble with a boo. The story itself is you know it.

(35:43):
It plays out in a humorous and goofy way. Yeah,
that sounds in a way horrifying. I have not seen
that episode, so uh if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast or a
history podcast at how stuffworks dot com. We're all over
social media as missed in History, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. Uh.

(36:05):
We have a website missed in History dot com where
you can find show notes for all the episodes we
have ever worked on. There are pictures of all three
of these women. Two of them are portraits, and the
one of Belba Costa Green looks I'm just gonna say,
a lot wider than photos of her did um. So
note that if you have a look at that, that's

(36:28):
on our website, along with a searchable archive every episode
we have ever done. So you can do all that
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
missed in History dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, is it howtof works dot com