Grass Widow

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Valerie in Kansas City. Hi, Valerie. Welcome to the program. Hi, I’m glad to be on. We’re delighted to have you. What’s up? Well, my in-laws passed away over the last five years, and I inherited a lot of old letters. My parents happened to be at my house, and we were looking through all these letters, and my parents are, my dad’s in his late 80s and my mom’s almost 80 and this is a letter from my my husband’s great-grandmother to her brother and she was living in Kansas City and he lived in Burlington, Kansas, and this letter’s from 1915. She was trying to get him to come to Kansas City and he was a bachelor and she was going to set him up with friends. So it says in the letter, Ella Arnold Dietrich is a widow, Grace Eastman is a widow, and Grace Clark Lane is a grass widow and she underlined grass so you can have your the choice of widow is when you come.

I think with such inducements you ought to come on the next train.

So I said, grass widow.

Well, first I thought, does that say gross?

And my parents both said, no, it says grass, a grass widow.

And they immediately knew what it was.

My dad’s from southwestern Iowa.

My mom’s from Kansas City.

And they immediately knew what it was.

And I am, in my early 50s, have never, ever, ever heard that word.

And I’m always in tune with listening for strange words.

So my dad said that it meant a divorcee or someone whose husband had left them.

My mom’s was more like, no, it was just a divorcee and it didn’t have a bad connotation.

It was just someone who was divorced, period.

So I’d like to know what that really means.

Well, it’s all of the above, Valerie.

In the 1500s, when the grass widow first appears, it seems to mean a woman of loose morals, one who will sleep with just about anybody.

So sort of like a roll in the hay.

Yeah.

And there’s a very strong suggestion in the historical record that it means someone who just like, you know, go sleep with a man in the hay just for the fun of it and without being married, right?

Right.

Or the grass rather than a bed.

Yeah.

And then a little later, it comes to mean a woman who is separated from her husband for some reason.

Either he’s abandoned or he is away doing military service or he’s, you know, he’s a merchant marine.

He’s aboard a ship and he only comes home a couple times a year, that sort of thing.

And this is what’s really interesting about having grass widow underlined in a letter from 1915, because it’s at a point where it could have been any of those definitions.

It could have meant a woman of loose morals.

Very interesting.

And you can’t really know unless you can find out more about this woman.

But let’s assume that a family member probably would have only mainly mentioned it if it were the polite definition.

When you’re reading old letters, it’s probably a safe bet that they didn’t mean the coarse meaning.

They meant the nice one.

Right?

She was just simply separated from her husband for some reason.

Yeah.

Are there more letters about her?

About this woman, actually, I did notice her exact name mentioned in other letters.

So I actually want to go back and do a little genealogy research on her, because I have her full name, including it looks like her maiden name, because it gives, you know, Grace Clark Lane.

So very interesting.

Yeah.

Well, let us know what you find.

If you find any hints as to which kind of grass widow she was, we’d love to know.

Okay.

Well, thank you so much.

Our pleasure, Valerie.

Thanks, Valerie.

Thanks for calling.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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