Emily "Mickey" Hahn (, January 14, 1905 – February 18, 1997) was an American journalist and writer. Considered an early feminist and called "a forgotten American literary treasure" by The New Yorker magazine, she was the authoress of 54 books and more than 200 articles and short stories. Her novels in the 20th century played a significant role in opening up Asia and Africa to the west. Her extensive travels throughout her life and her love of animals influenced much of her writing. She was the first woman to receive a degree in Mining Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then after living in Florence and London in the mid-1920s, she traveled to the Belgian Congo and hiked across Central Africa in the 1930s. In 1935 she traveled to Shanghai, where she taught English for three years and became involved with prominent figures, such as The Soong Sisters and the Chinese poet, Shao Xunmei (Sinmay Zau).
Early life
Emily Hahn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on January 14, 1905, as one of the six children of Isaac Newton Hahn, a dry goods salesman, and Hannah (Schoen) Hahn, a free-spirited suffragette. Her family is of German-Jewish origin. Affectionately nicknamed "Mickey" by her mother after a cartoon comic strip character of the day named Mickey Dooley, she was known by this nickname to close friends and family. In her second year of high school, she moved with her family to Chicago, Illinois.
With a love for reading and writing, she initially enrolled in a general arts program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but decided to change her course of study to mining engineering after being prevented from enrolling in a chemistry class predominately taken by engineering students. In her memoir, No Hurry to Get Home, she describes how the mining engineering program had never had a female enroll. After being told by a Professor in her mining engineering program that "The female mind is incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics or any of the fundamentals of mining taught" in engineering, she was determined to become a mining engineer. Despite the coolness of the administration and her male classmates, in 1926 she was the first woman to receive a degree in Mining Engineering at the University. Her academic accomplishments were a testament to her intelligence and persistence so that her lab partner grudgingly admitted, "You ain't so dumb!"
In 1924, prior to graduating from mining engineering school, she traveled across the United States in a Model T-Ford dressed as a man with her friend, Dorothy Raper. During her drive across New Mexico, she wrote about her travel experiences to her brother-in-law, who, unbeknownst to her, forwarded the letters she wrote to The New Yorker. This jump-started her early career as a writer. Hahn wrote for The New Yorker from 1929 to 1996.
In 1930 she traveled to the Belgian Congo, where she worked for the Red Cross, and lived with a pygmy tribe for two years, before crossing Central Africa alone on foot.
Her first book, Seductio ad Absurdum: The Principles and Practices of Seduction -- A Beginner's Handbook was published in 1930. It was a tongue-in-cheek exploration of how men court women. Maxim Lieber was her literary agent, 1930-1931.
China and Hong Kong
Her years in Shanghai, China (from 1935 to the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941) were the most tumultuous of her life. There she became involved with prominent Shanghai figures, such as the wealthy Sir Victor Sassoon, and was in the habit of taking her pet gibbon, Mr. Mills, with her to dinner parties, dressed in a diaper and a small dinner jacket.
Supporting herself as a writer for The New Yorker, she lived in an apartment in Shanghai's red light district, and became romantically involved with the Chinese poet and publisher Shao Xunmei (Sinmay Zau). He gave her the entrée that enabled her to write a biography of the famous Soong sisters, one of whom was married to Sun Yat-sen and another to Chiang Kai-shek.
Hahn frequently visited Zau's house, which was highly unconventional for a Western woman in the 1930s. The Treaty of the Bogue was in full effect, and Shanghai was a city divided by Chinese and Westerners at the time. Zau introduced her to the practice of smoking opium, to which she became addicted. She later wrote, "Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China."