My name is not Dorothy Fitch nor Dorothy Fitch-Jewell. When I was born, daughters took their fathers’ names, so Fitch remained my mother’s “maiden” name, a forgotten middle in Irene Fitch Jewell But certainly part of me is Fitch, reaching back to that Fitch sea captain Joshua, who whaled the New England coast before John Winthrop landed at Massachusetts Bay New Englanders all were the Fitches, listed in neat print on Aunt Ida’s DAR genealogy; One followed Thomas Hooker to Connecticut to find a religion more free. But what of the female Fitches? No records stand of those Colonial “femmes couvertes,” women, wives and mothers, who thought, lived and died under their husbands’ names. The first female Fitch, I note, with Fitch buried in the middle is Mary Fitch Wescott, mother to Charlotte Perkins Gilman Mary counseled her daughter not to read and showed her no affection, lest she become too dependent on human love. Charlotte’s mother lived in abject poverty, abandoned by her well-fed librarian husband who visited home just often enough to leave her with another mouth to feed. Grandma Emma Cornmeyer took her Fitch name from a farmer, a man of middle-age, wed shortly after the death of her beloved husband of three months. When the Fitch husband died of pneumonia, Emma and her daughters, aged four and six, Moved from the farm into Booneville, where Emma cleaned houses, worked in a factory and somehow saved enough to send her girls to Elmira College because “a woman should be able to support herself.” Irene Laura Fitch, one of two graduates to land a job in 1933, taught Latin at Johnstown High School and waited three long years to marry her fiance, so she would be tenured and not lose her job. Married Albert Jewell with two l’s whose ancestors trace back to the mid-1800’s when three Jewell brothers came from England to America. So I became Dorothy Marie Jewell, not Dorothy Marie Fitch, now Dorothy Jewell Altman.