Owens, Claire Myers

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OWENS, Claire Myers

Born 11 February 1896, Rockdale, Texas; died 7 May 1983, Rochester, New York

Wrote under: Claire Myers Spotswood, Claire Myers-Saidla, Claire Myers Wanders, Claire Myers Alexander

Daughter of Coren L. and Susan Allen Myers; married (common law) Leo Saidla, 1918 (divorced); George Wanders, 1931 (divorced); H. Thurston Owens, 1937 (died)

From the time she was ten years old, Claire Myers Owens experienced altered states of consciousness, mystical moments of intense spirituality she found both enriching and unsettling. These transcendent moments informed her fiction and nonfiction, inspired her lifelong quest for self-discovery, and ultimately led to her participation in the human potential and transpersonal psychology movements at their inception. Though she never called herself a feminist, her writings champion women's rights, sexual freedom, and financial independence.

Growing up in Temple, Texas, Owens struggled to define herself against the expectations of her mother, Susan Allen Myers, and her maternal grandmother, Laura Smith Allen, fundamentalist Baptists who romanticized the ideals of antebellum South. Although they tried to mold her into a perfect lady, a true Southern belle, Owens gravitated to the philosophy of her father, Coren Lee Myers, who championed Jeffersonian principles and free thought. "The woods were my father's cathedral," she often remarked, comparing his open-mindedness to the narrower views of her maternal influences. Her father's intellectual approach to life fostered a longing for the excitement of the wider world she glimpsed as an avid reader and student.

In 1916, at age twenty, she graduated from the College of Industrial Arts in Denton (now Texas Woman's University) and left home, intending to "change the world overnight." She did social work at a settlement house in Chicago and later at an Alabama coal mine. Too much a "lady" to deal with the seedy side of life, in 1917 she moved to New York's Greenwich Village. She worked at Dauber and Pine Book Shop on lower Fifth Avenue, wrote reviews for Publisher's Weekly, and fell into the New Woman lifestyle of the late 1910s and 1920s. Early short stories and novels explore male-female relationships, the vicissitudes of life as a single woman in New York, and a rarely discussed phenomenon in American history: women's hotels—cheap, "respectable" rooms with strict rules against male visitors.

In 1920 she and Leo Saidla attempted to establish a utopian community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia, based on their concepts of "free love" and "companionate marriage." The relationship ended in bitter disappointment when Owens discovered Leo was, if not gay, sexually impotent. Though the couple never married, Leo insisted Owens obtain a legal divorce to clear him of technical obligation.

Resettling in Greenwich Village, Owens became involved in a tumultuous affair with married British artist Carton Moore-Park. Short stories describing the end of this affair are comical, even burlesque, but in life she was shattered. In 1931 she married George Wanders, a journalist for the New York Sun, whose astute economic analyses placed him in high demand during the Depression. Eroticism and passion, laced with violence and emotional domination, marked their year-long marriage. Owens left Wanders and entered a period of hard times, searching for jobs in Depression-riddled New York, trying to earn a living through writing.

The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Female Independence (published as Claire Myers Spotswood, 1935) dramatizes Owens' journey from Temple to New York and satirizes her childhood and both marriages. The protagonist's quest for self-definition turns on woman's universal struggle to balance love and work, spirituality and religion, freedom and responsibility. Burton Rascoe, her editor at Doubleday, extolled her for writing the kind of book "no women have had the courage to write." Considered by Carol Farley Kessler to be "the most significant of the nine utopias published by United States women during the 1930s," the novel was banned by the New York Public Library for being "too risqué for its shelves."

The second half of Owens' life stands in stark contrast to the first. In June 1937 she married H. Thurston Owens, a successful businessman who shared her love for art, literature, and theater. They moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where she wrote and performed radio plays for the local chapter of the American Association of University Women, attended classes at Yale University, and maintained an active social schedule. Although her spirit of rebellion mellowed, she authored a column for Today's Woman magazine (1946-48) dealing with independence issues married women confront.

In 1950 Owens experienced a psychological rebirth she called a "Great Awakening" that changed her life and the focus of her writing. Two autobiographies, Awakening to the Good: Psychological or Religious? (1958) and Discovery of the Self (1963), explain her spiritual experience in scientific terms, explore the nature of the unconscious, and examine right and left brain functions. She became a "key figure" in the human potential movement, along with Abraham Maslow, Aldous Huxley, and Jean Houston, and an ardent follower of Carl Jung, whom she interviewed in Geneva. Her article based on their meeting, published in the New York Herald Tribune, Paris Edition, as "Tourists Abroad," won the 1954 Tribune Travel Story Contest and was reprinted in C. G. Jung Speaking (1954).

Widowed by Thurston Owens at age seventy-three, she began meditating with a group of graduate students at Yale. After several months, she sold her home on prestigious Livingston Street and along with her young friends moved to Rochester, New York, to join the Zen Center. During this period, she contributed chapters to two anthologies on mystical experience: The Highest State of Consciousness (1972), and Transpersonal Psychologies (1975). Her autobiography, Zen and the Lady (1979), combining anecdote with scientific research, traces Owens' spiritual journey toward enlightenment, describes her intellectual and erotic connections with a man nearly 40 years her junior, and dispels negative stereotypes surrounding old age and women's sexuality.

Two manuscripts followed: Meditation and the Lady, her fourth autobiography, and Varieties of Self-Realization, scientific and philosophical theories on enlightenment. Owens died on 7 May 1983. Her ashes are buried beneath a tree in the garden of the Rochester Zen Center.

Other Works:

Gaily Bedight (circa 1921). Belle Randolph (also titled Love is Not Enough and Sons and Lovers, circa 1939).

The Claire Myers Owens papers are in the Woman's Collection at the Blagg-Huey Library, Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas. Numerous articles and manuscripts, video and audio tapes, photos and memorabilia comprise the collection.

Bibliography:

Harris, M. K., ed., The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman's Independence (1993). Harris, M. K., Claire Myers Owens: Life, Work, Art—1896-1983 (dissertation, 1997). Iles, T., ed., All Sides of the Subject (1992). The New Handbook of Texas (1996). White, J., ed., Small Ecstasies (1983).