Excerpt
A Mind of Her Own
Chapter 1Alexandra Victoria Peterson Bouvier was born in Paris in 1900, the last year of the reign of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. Alexandra’s father was French, and her mother was American. The legendary British monarch had always had particular significance to Alexandra’s American maternal grandparents, Paul and Miriam Peterson. They were born twenty-nine and thirty-one years after the famous queen, and had shared a great admiration for her, for her strength, her values, and the role model she represented for young, independent women.
Queen Victoria was eighteen when she ascended the throne, and she ruled an empire for sixty-three years. Both Miriam and Paul felt that she was a shining example of womanhood at its best. She ruled wisely and well, had been a devoted wife, and had nine children, who eventually sat on nearly every throne in Europe. She was both a modern woman and a traditionalist, and combined these traits effectively. Widowed at forty-two, bereft over the early death of her beloved consort, Prince Albert, she ruled alone thereafter. She was the longest reigning sovereign of her day. Paul and Miriam Peterson named their only child Victoria after the British queen.
Victoria Peterson, Alexandra’s American mother, was born in Illinois in 1875, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, and had been for nearly forty years. Victoria Peterson’s dream for her daughter Alexandra was that she would be a strong, intelligent, independent woman one day, ready to take a stand for the causes she believed in, demonstrating her own ethics and the values she and her husband intended to instill in her. Alexandra matured exactly as her parents hoped she would.
Victoria Peterson had been born and grew up in Beardstown, Illinois, a town of just over six thousand people, two-hundred and thirty-two miles southwest of Chicago. Beardstown was an agricultural community, and Paul Peterson, her father, owned the local newspaper, The Beardstown Courier. He had lived in Beardstown all his life, and ventured out into the world to attend Princeton University, which opened his eyes and broadened his view of the world. He did a year of postgraduate studies at Oxford, took classes at the Sorbonne in Paris, returned to his hometown, and used the money his grandfather had left him to found the newspaper that became his passion. No matter how remote Beardstown was, or how distant from Chicago, he wanted to bring its citizens a deeper, more complex view of the world, and keep them fully informed of what was happening around the globe.
The Beardstown Courier was his pride and joy. It covered local, national, and international politics, world events, anything of major interest happening in Chicago, important agricultural news and innovative developments, and whatever that widened the perspective of the locals, some of whom had never been as far as Chicago, and rarely left their farms. Paul Peterson made it possible for them to be up-to-date on a variety of subjects, no matter how small and remote their town was. He had a global mentality.
He had enjoyed his time at Oxford, and traveled around Europe when he was there. He had studied hard and returned to Beardstown nearly fluent in French and German. He had read their newspapers as well, and he had fallen in love with Italy. He had brought his exposure to other cultures home with him, and infused his newspaper with interesting information from abroad. He wrote a weekly editorial column on a variety of topics, and his newspaper flourished. People were hungry for what he shared.
Within a year of his return to Beardstown, he had a thriving newspaper, and married Miriam, the girl he had fallen in love with at seventeen, when she was fifteen. Her life experience was the exact opposite of Paul’s. An only child of older parents, she had been sheltered and protected. Her father owned the largest dairy in the state, and she was educated at home, had never left Illinois, and didn’t want to. She didn’t even like Chicago. She was daunted by all the places that Paul had discovered and hoped to share with her. She preferred to listen to his stories about them, and read his editorials, rather than visit the places herself. She was well read and well informed, but her life experience was as limited as his was broad. He never succeeded in making a world traveler of her, but he loved and accepted her as she was. Paul’s own family had a thirst for knowledge and education. His mother ran the local school. His father was an attorney, and both had shared their curiosity about foreign cultures with him. They focused all their attention and hopes on Paul, their only child.
Paul strongly believed that higher education was as important for women as it was for men. He wanted his daughter Victoria to go to a good university. Miriam didn’t like the idea of her leaving home, but Paul convinced her that Victoria deserved to go at least as far as Chicago, and Miriam reluctantly agreed, to please him.
Victoria attended the University of Chicago, and was in the first class of women to be accepted in 1892. She was more like her father than her mother, and thrived on the experience of attending university in Chicago. She loved science the way her father loved journalism, and seriously considered becoming a doctor. She wasn’t sure she wanted to invest as many years in medical school as she would have had to, and she let her mother convince her to become a nurse instead. She got her degree in 1896, and followed in her father’s footsteps, doing graduate work in Europe. She attended Oxford, as her father had. Women weren’t allowed to receive degrees or have full status as students at Oxford then, but they had been allowed to take classes there for the past twenty years.
Victoria thrived during the year she spent in England, and she followed it the next year by becoming one of the first women to attend the Sorbonne in 1897. She spent the year studying there, and learning to speak fluent French. Her parents loved reading her letters, and her reports of traveling in France with some other fellow female students. Her eyes had been opened to greater academic and cultural thrills than Beardstown could offer her, and she begged them to let her stay in France for another year. Her father was more than willing to allow it, but her mother balked. She missed her only daughter and wanted her to come home. She was afraid that she might meet someone and fall in love and never want to return to Beardstown. Paul assured his wife that it wouldn’t happen, and that once she got the travel bug out of her system she would come home, as he had, and settle down. But in Victoria’s case he was wrong, and Miriam’s fears proved accurate.
