For a few days before going to the protest, I gathered images of women and girls and arranged them in a group: ancestors, dolls, figures, goddesses, paintings, the living and the dead, some with whom I had been communing. Some are hidden in veils and masks and voodoo. Some are brides or in braids or shy or bold. Daughters, stepdaughters, daughters-in-law, mother, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, great greats, sisters-in-law, relatives in hiding. C. D.
Ulla Dydo (1925–2017)
Ulla Dydo, the preeminent Gertrude Stein scholar of our time, died on September 10, 2017 in New York.
Ursula Elisabeth Eder was born in Zurich on February 4, 1925. Her mother was Jeanne Eder-Schwyzer (1894–1957), a Swiss women’s rights activist and president of the International Council of Women. Her father was Professor Robert Eder (1885–1944). Dydo is survived by her wife, new music pianist Nurit Tilles (whom she met more than a decade ago); a son, Malcolm, from her first marriage to economist John Stephen Dydo (1922–2004) (whom she married in Manhattan in 1963 — the marriage dissolved within a decade); and a grandaughter.
Dydo attended the University of Zurich (1944–45), where she majored in English, as well as University College, London (1946) and received an MA at Bryn Mawr in 1948. She attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from 1948 to 1952, getting her PhD in 1955. Her dissertation was on the poetry of Allen Tate.