Miriam Michelson

Miriam Michelson (1870–1942) was an American journalist and writer.

Biography

Miriam Michelson was born in the mining town Murphy's Camp in Calaveras, California, in 1870. She was the seventh of eight children of Samuel and Rosalie (née Przylubska) Michelson, who immigrated to the United States from Poland in 1855 after fleeing Strzelno to evade anti-Semitic persecution. Eventually, her parents moved west to Virginia City, Nevada where Michelson and her siblings were raised. Her parents were successful merchants who sold supplies to miners in the midst of the Gold Rush. Her oldest brother, physicist Albert A. Michelson, was the first American citizen to win a Nobel Prize for science; and the youngest, journalist Charles Michelson, became a close assistant to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Michelson began her writing career in 1895–1902 by writing journalism. She worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Call and San Francisco Bulletin and later, in Philadelphia, for the North American. The topics of her articles included race, gender relations, cross-ethnic relations, ethno-religious identity, nationalism, and imperialism. She was known for supporting suffrage causes and addressing gender and political issues in her work. An example of such writing is her review of Charlotte Perkins Stetson's sociological study of gender and power relations in Women and Economics (1898). In her review, Michelson's lighthearted and conversational tone of writing allow her to praise Women and Economics while also educating her readers that Charlotte Perkins Stetson's “radical views” were likely to provoke the male audience regarding gender relations. Charlotte Perkins Stetson's study would eventually become a declaration for the first-wave women's movement and Michelson's review of Charlotte Perkins Stetson's study would bring publicity to the matter. Beginning in 1904, she began concentrating on fiction-writing. Michelson died on May 28, 1942.