Never ask permission: Elisabeth Scott Bocock of Richmond : a memoir

Some cities, through hardship or glory or a combination of both, produceextraordinary women.

Richmond in the early twentieth century, dominated by its prominent familiesand still haunted by the ghosts of its Confederate past, produced a galaxy of such characters,including Ellen Glasgow, Mary Cooke Branch Munford, and Lila Meade Valentine.

Elisabeth ScottBocock, Victorian in values but modern in outlook, carried on this tradition with her uniquecombination of family wealth and connections, boundless energy, eccentricity, and visionary zeal.

Her daughter Mary Buford Hitz's candid memoir reveals the pleasures and frustrations of growing upwith a woman who expected so much from her children and from the city whose self-appointedguardian she became.Elisabeth Bocock's vision was of a city that would takehistoric preservation seriously, of a society that would accept the importance of conservation.

Impatient with process and society's conventions, she used her enormous personal magnetism tocircumvent them when founding many of the institutions Richmond takes for granted today.

In thecreation of the Historic Richmond Foundation, the Carriage Museum at Maymont, the Hand Workshop, andthe Virginia Chapter of the Nature Conservancy she played the dual roles of visionary and bulldozer.

While part of a tradition of strong southern women, Elisabeth Bocock's tactics were unique, as shesought to convince others of both the practical and aesthetic links between preservation and theenvironment.One of the "five little Scotts," children of the founder of theinvestment firm Scott & Stringfellow, she grew up with great privilege, and she schooled herchildren in how to take advantage of such privilege and how to ignore it.

Whether in their winterresidence at 909 West Franklin Street in Richmond or at their summer home, Royal Orchard, in theBlue Ridge Mountains, in her household she insisted both on achievement and on avoiding boredom atall costs.As Mary Buford Hitz recounts with intelligence and feeling, her motheroften seemed like a natural force, leveling anything that stood in its way but leaving in its wake abrighter, changed world.

Never Ask Permission is not only a daughter's honest portrait of acharismatic and difficult woman who broke the threads of convention; in Elisabeth Scott Bocock werecognize the flawed but feisty, enduring character of Richmond.