Mary Bookstaver

Who was Mary Bookstaver?

Mary A. Bookstaver was a feminist, political activist, and editor, widely known by the nickname "May." Daughter of Judge Henry W. Bookstaver and Mary Baily Young, she attended Miss Florence Baldwin's School and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1898 in History and Political Science. After graduation she moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she was part of a circle of lesbian Bryn Mawr graduates, including Bookstaver's lover, Mabel Haynes. Gertrude Stein, then a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine student, became infatuated with Bookstaver, who found Stein's naïveté literally laughable, but introduced Stein to physical love. The experience made a deep impression on Stein, whose first novel, QED, completed in Baltimore in 1903, was an autobiographical account of this love triangle, with Bookstaver's character named "Helen Thomas."

In 1906 Bookstaver married Charles E. Knoblauch, a broker on the New York Stock Exchange and Rough Rider veteran of the Spanish-American War, at her father's summer cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. After a honeymoon in Europe, she and her husband lived in "The Wyoming" in New York City. She took the name of "Mrs. Charles E. Knoblauch."