Two stories this week, a century and a half apart, are really about the same thing: someone deciding that no one else gets to write how their story turns out. One is a journalist from Philadelphia who refused to publish under a fake name. The other is an eighty-year-old actress who still manages her hardest days one smile at a time. Neither story is loud. Both are worth sitting with.
The Column No One Else Could Have Written
Gertrude Bustill Mossell was born in Philadelphia in 1855, into a family that believed strongly in education. Her mother died when she was very young, but her father raised her and her sister to read, and by her teens Mossell was already writing. Her commencement speech, on the subject of “influence,” was published in the Christian Recorder the year she graduated.
She taught school before turning to journalism in the early 1870s, writing for Black newspapers and, eventually, for publications that served white audiences as well. But in 1885 she took on a role that mattered more: writer of “Our Woman’s Department” at the New York Freeman, a Black-owned weekly founded by the journalist and activist T. Thomas Fortune.
The column was hers alone — devoted to the education, rights, and daily struggles of Black women and girls. In one surviving piece, Mossell wrote that the department would track the “success, progress or needs” of Black women, and she asked readers to write in themselves. She wasn’t just filling column inches. She was building a place where Black women decided, in their own words, what counted as their story.
She kept building after that. In 1894 she published The Work of the Afro-American Woman, a book documenting what Black women had already achieved in literature, education, suffrage, and the long fight against slavery. She also helped raise $30,000 toward a memorial for Frederick Douglass.
Her life surfaces now in an unlikely place: HBO’s The Gilded Age, where a character named Peggy Scott faces almost the exact choice Mossell did. A white editor offers to publish Peggy’s work — if she writes under a pen name and makes her Black protagonist white. Peggy walks away and writes for a Black newspaper instead. The show’s historical consultant has said Peggy is modeled in part on Mossell, alongside journalist Ida B. Wells and novelist Julia C. Collins.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
Goldie Hawn’s Smile Is Doing More Work Than It Looks Like
Goldie Hawn is 80 now, and for decades she’s said something plenty of people in her position wouldn’t: fame did not protect her from depression and anxiety. It started in her 20s, right as she was becoming famous.
In 1967 she landed a role on a sitcom called Good Morning World. She called home to tell her mother the news — and then, by her account, the anxiety arrived. Panic attacks. Dizziness in restaurants. A need to leave and go home that she couldn’t explain. She’s said her childhood had been joyful, and she didn’t recognize what was happening to her. “I tried to fake my smile,” she said. “It’s the scariest thing that has ever happened to me.”
She got help — nine years with a psychologist, learning, in her words, how to forgive herself and how to manage other people’s perceptions of her without disappearing inside them.
Decades later, one of the tools she still reaches for is almost absurdly small. She smiles at people. In the elevator of her New York apartment, she’ll ask a stranger how they’re doing and mean it. “People are so sweet,” she said. “And then when they get in the elevator again — ‘Oh, I got to see you again!'” Even forcing a half-smile on a bad day, she’s said, changes something about how her brain is facing it.
She doesn’t call it a cure, and she still points people toward real professional help. But in 2003 she turned the lesson into something bigger, founding MindUp, a program that teaches students and educators how to manage stress before it hardens into something heavier. It’s a straight line from a young woman who couldn’t leave her house to a woman spending her 80s trying to make sure fewer children ever get there.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
What connects a newspaper column from 1885 to a conversation on a talk show set this year is smaller than it looks: two women, a lifetime apart, decided no one else got to author how their story turned out. Neither waited for permission. If something is going right in your corner of the Boro — a comeback, a kindness, a story only you could tell — send it our way.