Margery Latimer

Margery Bodine Latimer (February 6, 1899 – August 16, 1932), born in Portage, Wisconsin, Her Yankee ancestry included New England pioneers Anne Bradstreet and John Cotton.

Latimer published a short story in a local paper in 1917. This caught the attention of her Portage neighbor Zona Gale, a well-known writer, journalist, and suffragist. Gale became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. She became Latimer's mentor and confidante.

Her essay, "The New Freedom", was published in 1924 in The Reviewer. According to scholar Joy Castro, it casts women as "potential literary progenitors". Latimer writes of "the word ... made flesh, and it is flesh with a mind of its own, infused with the possibility of change..."

The goal was, in Toomer's words, "to eradicate the false veneer of civilization, with its unnatural inhibition, its selfishness, petty meanness and unnatural behavior.... Adults can be re-educated to become as natural as little children...." While the participants seemed to enjoy the experiment, the neighbors in the countryside and in Portage were scandalized. Talk of communism, nudity, and sexual license abounded, spiked by Toomer's being of mixed race; hostility arose among the locals. By the end of the summer of 1931, Toomer ended the experiment and documented its demise in his unpublished Portage Potential.

Marriage, childbirth, and death In October 1931, Latimer and Toomer married at her home in Portage. They left on a wedding trip for Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Pasadena and Carmel, California. They were staying in Carmel when a nationwide, anti-miscegenation scandal broke concerning their marriage, fanned by a sensationalist, exaggerated Hearst newspaper story. Because of threats and hate mail, Latimer's parents moved out of Portage temporarily and stayed with their older daughter Rachel in Montana.

Toomer named their daughter Margery after his wife. Two years later, the widower remarried, to Marjorie Content, a white photographer. They retired from public life and in 1940 settled in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where they joined a Quaker meeting.