An Ode to Sigourney
the name in literature that they attempted to bury
I’ve looked up the etymology of my name, Sigourney in the past… however I was recently asked by someone about the roots of my name and it prompted me to look it up again and dig deeper.
This time, something chilling was revealed through my search.
Two names were pulled up, of famous “Sigourney’s” — one being Sigourney Weaver, who I know. She actually named herself after a minor character in The Great Gatsby called when she was just 14 because she found her former name, Susan, boring & unsuitable.
Anyway, I knew this already… but what I find interesting is that there is a woman that is almost as famous (maybe even more so) that has largely been forgotten, called Sigourney.
A 19th century writer… and the first commercially paid writer in the US, publishing 67 books and over 300 magazine articles.
So important and revolutionary in her era, a town in Iowa was named after her (Sigourney). She had clubs and institutes form in her name.
During the lyceum movement of the 19th century, women across America named literary societies and study clubs in her honour, including the Sigourney Society in Oxford, New York (founded at the Oxford Female Seminary around 1836), and the Sigourney Society in Gaffney, South Carolina.
She wrote about themes similar to me— grief, death, motherhood. She wrote for ordinary mothers, who had no way of expressing and sharing about the daily griefs of their identity, with Motherhood. A big theme in my latest book, The MotherWild Revolution.
And as i’m reading about this woman, chills through my whole body, I had flashback to a little card reader I saw on the streets of Woodstock some years ago. She told me that I had a strong guide around me - a famous writer in the US, with a prolific voice in the same field I write within— motherhood, politics, theology and more. At the time, what she said didn’t resonate. Seeing images of Lydia Sigourney today on my research rabbit hole, my body responded strongly — it is her.
It turns out that Lydia Sigourney also wrote about other topics I write about and am
passionate about. She was passionate about philanthropy, politics and justice.
The male literary establishment hated that she outsold them. They called her sentimental. Minor. Popular — as though that were an insult.
I am talking famous male writers, like Edgar Allen Poe.
And yet… despite the public mockery she received, she kept writing anyway.
When she died, a poet composed verses for her memorial tablet. A town kept her name on its courthouse. Women across America had already been gathering in her honour for decades, forming literary societies, naming their study clubs after her.
And yet.
Ask anyone today who Lydia Sigourney was.
Most will not know.
Her name lives on most visibly through the actress Sigourney Weaver who borrowed it from a Fitzgerald novel — not even knowing the weight of what she was carrying.
It makes me wonder… how often we do this when we name ourselves, or our projects…
The world often uses what was built in powerful women’s names. And forgets who laid the stone.