Mary Walker, M.D. (1832-1919). Physician and lecturer. (Shown here about 1908 with Rev. Susanna Harris and Belva Lockwood, first woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.) Dr. Walker was a lifelong campaigner tor nonrestrictive clothing, woman suffrage, temperance and nonsmoking. Unfortunately, toward the end of her life she was Page 62 →more noted for her eccentricities than her achievements. She had a distinguished record of medical service on the battlefronts of the Civil War and spent four months in Confederate prison as an enemy captive. Awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, 1865. Despite public ridicule which kept most women in hoop skirts, she persisted in wearing the sensible bloomer costume—and later a tuxedo. When World War I defense jobs made pants popular for women, Dr. Walker was credited by the press as pioneer of the new fashion. A stubborn political individualist who once associated with Susan B. Anthony and other leaders, she was too outspoken to suit her associates. She was well known (as “Dr. Mary”) in the social and political circles of Washington, D.C. and her hometown of Oswego, N.Y. Her wide circle of acquaintance included several U.S. presidents.
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Two Women in the Klondike, 1898 postcard
From Chapter 1
Two Women in the Klondike, 1898. The exploits of Teddy Roosevelt, among other popular heroes, created a mania for travel and adventure among turn-of-the-century Americans. Among women, Lady Stanhope, Annie Peck, and Isabel Burton were outstanding explorers/travelers of the 19th century. Moneyed vacationers who wanted to follow their example but with less risk paved the way for such leisure escapes as dude ranches and camera safaris. But in 1898 the tenderfeet who tried roughing it for fun usually came back somewhat tougher. Such a pair were Mrs. Roswell Hitchcock and Edith Van Buren, two east coast society matrons who decided to join the gold rush to the Klondike region of the wild Yukon Territory. Before setting out, they donned tailor-made Page 63 →travel costumes and posed with their Great Danes in fake woods and snowstorms. (The photos on shipboard and in the tent are genuine). When they got to the real thing, however, the mud was ankle deep, the weather terrible, the roads nonexistent, and their custom-made tent apparently the worst shelter in the camp city of thousands which popped up around the rough frontier town of Dawson. Mrs. Hitchcock chronicled their trip in Two Women in the Klondike (Putnam’s, 1899). The critics panned it as frivolous because it read like a cheerful gossip column. Nonetheless, they had a rugged trip, and their story is thoroughly entertaining.
Emily Carr postcard
From Chapter 2
Emily Carr (Canadian, 1871-1945). A powerful painter and writer who devoted her life to expressing what she felt and saw in the British Columbia woods, including the totem poles and villages of the Native American West Coast Indians. She grew up in Victoria when it was under English rule and studied in San Francisco during the Chinatown tong wars. She was a true Canadian who lived in the woods simply with her animals including Page 102 →her many beloved sheep dogs. In the conservative atmosphere of 19th-century Victoria, she was considered eccentric and felt a sense of “otherness,” often remaining isolated. She grew produce, raised hens and rabbits, made pottery and rugs, and took boarders to supplement her art. Overdue recognition and fame arrived in the 1920’s and increased with the publication of two of her books, Klee Wyck and The Book of Small. A vivid picture of her life and the places she went and people she met are revealed in these and her other books. All of her work, from painting to writing to rugmaking, remained uninhibited by academic standards.
Women’s Christian Temperance Union Officers postcard
From Introduction
Officers of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Left to Right: Anna Gordon, Assistant Secretary; Agnes Slack, Secretary; Frances E. Willard, President; Lady Somerset, Vice President at Large; Mary Sanderson, Treasurer. Often thought of as a handful of elderly fanatics, the WCTU was in fact among the top few groups of social and political influence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Flourished chiefly under the dynamic and legendary leadership of Frances Willard (1839–1898). Although best Page 14 →known for its concern over the moral and physical effects of alcohol and drugs, the WCTU’s interests and activities extended to every sphere of social reform. They accomplished much for woman’s suffrage, education for the poor, and labor reform. A large part of their complaint against the liquor industries included the money and manpower which booze tycoons poured into anti-suffrage campaigns for decades; and the saloons which were male preserves where poor laborers spent their week’s pay on escaping in drinks instead of feeding their families. For these reasons, the famed “Polyglot Petition” for world temperance easily collected more than 7 million signatures.
Amelia Earhart aviation class postcard
From Chapter 1
Amelia Earhart (1898-1937). A strong individual and often a loner since childhood, Earhart once chose her high school in a new city by interviewing various principals as to their facilities. As a teenage nurse’s aide in Canada in World War I, she developed a lifelong interest in medical science, social work, pacifism—and aviation. Living in California during her early twenties, she worked at the phone company and at a commercial photographer to pay for flying lessons. Later, as a social worker in Boston, she was approached by a group of public relations specialists to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic (1928). On that trip, she was a passenger, but she was the first woman to solo the trip in 1932. She twice broke the transcontinental speed record, and was first to solo from Honolulu to the mainland (1935). She disappeared in 1937 flying around the equator. Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were presumed dead, but the disappearance has never been solved or explained. Earhart was an accomplished scholar, sportswoman, and author. Her publisher and promotional manager was George Putnam, whom she married in 1931, with the option of dissolving the marriage in a year if either wished to, and the household expenses to be split 50/50.
Sojourner Truth postcard
From Chapter 1
Sojourner Truth (1797 -1883). There were many Black women involved with the abolition movement who were known at the time but whose names are obscured today. Harriet Tubman, Frances Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Sojourner Truth. Although she was illiterate, she was a stirring and eloquent speaker and preacher and taught abolition, equality of the sexes, temperance, and prison reform. She understood the relationship between freedom for the slave and equality for all women. She was born into slavery as Isabella in New York and was freed by the antislavery law of 1827. In 1851, Sojourner Truth came forward at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio and saved the meeting. A clergyman had just given a speech ridiculing woman as too weak and helpless to entrust with the vote. "The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain’t I a woman? Look at my arm. I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born 13 children and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton postcard
From Resources only
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902). For more than 50 years (1851-1902), these two leading analysts and activists for women's rights were close friends and co-workers. They emerged from different backgrounds and brought different but complementary skills and talents to their work. Anthony was a great organizer and speaker. Stanton specialized in analysis and writing. Anthony was a spinster who was free to travel and indifferent to hardships. The vote was her central concern, on the theory that all other advances would follow on its heels. Stanton was a homebody who liked to take her time and be comfortable, as much as a household of 7 children would allow. She considered the vote as only one necessity for women's advancement. She authored a rewrite of the Bible - outrageous for its day - refocusing the scriptures in the feminist perspective. In 1869 the two women founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, the first of the major groups whose work would culminate in votes for women in 1920.
Page 61 →Two Irishwomen. Left: Constance Markievicz (1868-1927). Born to wealth and privilege, developed a strong class consciousness in childhood. Deplored Ireland’s poverty and ruling class oppression. Born Constance Gore-Booth, she married a Polish nobleman who moved to Ireland. Noted labor reformer. In 1913, she operated the famous Liberty Hall Canteen for striking workers. A leader in the 1916 Easter Rebellion, she was arrested and tried for treason. Sentenced to be shot, then commuted to life imprisonment. Jailed on several other occasions. She was the first woman to be elected to the British House of Commons but refused her seat while Ireland remained under English rule. Right: Maud Gonne, (1866-1953). Irish Revolutionary. Born into wealth and social position. Devoted her energy and personal fortune to the cause of Irish home rule. Rebuilt homes of evicted farmers herself. Fought for labor reform. Activist, lecturer, writer, polemicist. Jailed twice. Became founding president, Easter Sunday 1900, of Daughters of Erin, revolutionary patriotic and feminist group. Her beauty and 6-ft. stature were acclaimed even in old age.
Frances Willard in Her Study postcard
From Chapter 1
Frances Willard (1839-1898). Photographed in her study. The guiding force of the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union and founder of the World WCTU. An unfortunate image of primness and prudery cloaks Willard and other temperance leaders. This inaccuracy is worsened by the surviving reports of such as Anna Gordon, a WCTU Page 56 →leader whose biography of Willard cast her in the likeness of a Victorian plaster saint. Actually, she was a rugged and colorful individual of many facets, a champion of world peace, equality for women, and reforms in education and labor. She was instrumental in opening Northwestern University to women and was its first dean of women. Her British colleague Lady Somerset wrote: “To no special cause did Frances Willard belong; her life was the property of humanity.”
Frances Willard in Her Study postcard, back, inset photo
From Chapter 1
“Frances Willard (1839-1898). Photographed in her study. The guiding force of the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union and founder of the World WCTU. An unfortunate image of primness and prudery cloaks Willard and other temperance leaders. This inaccuracy is worsened by the surviving reports of such as Anna Gordon, a WCTU leader whose biography of Willard cast her in the likeness of a Victorian plaster saint. Actually, she was a rugged and colorful individual of many facets, a champion of world peace, equality for women, and reforms in education and labor. She was instrumental in opening Northwestern University to women and was its first dean of women. Her British colleague Lady Somerset wrote:” “To no special cause did Frances Willard belong; her life was the property of humanity.”
Carry Nation postcard
From Resources only
Carry Nation (1846-1911). Most dramatic of the temperance superstars, she literally smashed her way into headlines with a hatchet in one hand and a Bible in the other. Her sworn enemies were drink, tobacco, and Masonry, and her ruinous first marriage was to a chain smoking, alcoholic Mason. Mrs. Nation generated much publicity and irreverent amusement, but her influence was wide and lasting, and many thousands took her efforts seriously. She forced public attention to focus on the saloons where American workingmen drowned their woes and spent their pay while their needy families were locked outside without any say in the matter. Admirers everywhere sent her souvenir hatchets, some designed in gold or silver.
Belle Starr postcard
From Chapter 1
Belle Starr (1848-1889). Women outlaws and heroes played an important part in the history of the West. There were many—Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, Cattle Annie, Little Britches, Pearl Hart, and Belle Starr. In surroundings where most women were domineered by men, people became fascinated with Belle Starr’s independent and wild spirit. She was the brains behind a gang of horse thieves and her place was a well-known hideout for outlaws including Jesse James, with whom she may have ridden at times. Although she was well liked and had many friends, including a loving daughter Pearl, she was constantly slandered and felt very persecuted. She rode her black mare “Venus” skillfully with a side saddle, decorated in gold and silver, and she was a good shot with her ivory handled Colt .45 revolvers. She was well educated and accomplished, although Page 58 →she felt about herself that she was ignorant and that from there originated most of her troubles. She was shot in the back while riding home on Feb. 3, 1889. Her murderer is unknown. Shortly before she was killed, she said: “I regard myself as a woman who has seen much of life.”
Rosa Bonheur postcard
From Chapter 2
Rosa Bonheur (French, 1822-99) achieved wealth and fame even in her youth as a superb painter, mainly of animals. She dressed in men’s attire in order to inspect stables and slaughterhouses, and in 1857 was given a legal permit for this attire. She and her lifelong companion Nathalie Micas shared a chateau where they maintained a cageless animal refuge for countless species from parakeets to lions. Micas, a minor artist in her own right, was also a noted mechanical inventor. Bonheur’s portrayals of the animal kingdom are widely considered to be definitive, revealing her passion for, and careful study of all creatures. The painter was small and rotund, described as something of an eccentric, deliberately unpolished character, and was decorated, supported, and adored by the French people throughout her long life.
Radclyffe Hall & Una Troubridge postcard
From Resources only
Radclyffe Hall (left, 1883*-1943) and Una Lady Troubridge (1892*-1963). Hall and Troubridge, both British, lived and traveled together from the time they met until Hall's death 27 years later. Her second book, Adam’s Breed, became an instant best seller in 1927 and established her literary reputation. It was a sensitive and unique story of a prosperous headwaiter who became so weary of rich foods that he starved himself to death. Success spurred Hall to what she considered her duty in writing The Well of Loneliness, a semiautobiographical novel of “inversion" calculated to enlist public understanding. The first British edition was instantly seized by the Home Office and tried in the Magistrates Court. The publicity led to enormous sales and favorable reviews in other countries, but the proceedings took a heavy toll on Hall's spirits and health. Una Troubridge supported all her efforts and became her biographer soon after she died. Both women were well known in the Italian and French cultural salons of the time, including that of Romaine Brooks, the American-born Parisian portraitist who painted Lady Troubridge.
Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton postcard
From Resources only
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902). For more than 50 years (1851-1902), these two leading analysts and activists for women’s rights were close friends and co-workers. They emerged from different backgrounds and brought different but complementary skills and talents to their work. Anthony was a great organizer and speaker. Stanton specialized in analysis and writing. Anthony was a spinster who was free to travel and indifferent to hardships. The vote was her central concern, on the theory that all other advances would follow on its heels. Stanton was a homebody who liked to take her time and be comfortable, as much as a household of 7 children would allow. She considered the vote as only one necessity for women’s advancement. She authored a rewrite of the Bible—outrageous for its day—refocusing the scriptures from a feminist perspective. In 1869, the two women founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, the first of the major groups whose work would culminate in votes for women in 1920.
Sojourner Truth postcard
From Resources only
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883). There were many Black women involved with the abolition movement who were known at the time but whose names are obscured today. Harriet Tubman, Frances Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Sojourner Truth. Although she was illiterate, she was a stirring and eloquent speaker and preacher and taught abolition, equality of the sexes, temperance, and prison reform. She understood the relationship between freedom for the slave and equality for all women. She was born into slavery as Isabella in New York and was freed by the antislavery law of 1827. In 1851, Sojourner Truth came forward at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio and saved the meeting. A clergyman had just given a speech ridiculing woman as too weak and helpless to entrust with the vote. “The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain’t I a woman? Look at my arm. I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have born 13 children and seen most of ‘em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain’t I a woman?”
Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin postcard
From Chapter 2
Rosa Luxemburg, (right, 1871-1919) and Clara Zetkin (1857-1933). Luxemburg was born in Poland into a liberal Jewish intellectual family and was interested in politics from her early teens. Other interests included Russian literature, natural sciences, painting, music and European languages. She often wrote she would like to have been a biologist were it not for the political upheaval of her times. Counterrevolutionary troops raided her home on January 15, 1919. She and Karl Liebknecht, her co-founder of the Spartacist Party, were taken to the troop headquarters and shot. Luxemburg was a great public speaker and wrote 700 books, pamphlets and articles about the political situations of her time. CLARA ZETKIN, born in Saxony, gave up her teaching profession to pursue her interest in Socialism. She was a visionary devoted to an idealized Socialist future and reacted strongly against injustice. When things went wrong, she became totally despairing. Zetkin and Luxemburg met about 1898 and became devoted friends and colleagues. Luxemburg acknowledged women’s rights, but believed they would be included in the advent of Socialism. Zetkin held stronger feminist views, was editor of two Socialist women’s publications, and chief of the German Socialist women’s organization. In 1910 she called on the Second International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen to set aside March 8 each year as International Working Woman’s Day.
Olive Schreiner postcard
From Chapter 2
Olive Schreiner (1855-1920). South African novelist and social theorist. Largely overlooked today, Schreiner was one of the best-known writers in English from the 1880s to the 1920s. Born to English and German missionary parents, she personified rebellion against Victorianism at the height of the Victorian age. She was a passionate pacifist, feminist, and critic of organized religion (although very religious). Her novel, The Story of an African Farm, about a defiant unwed mother, the first specifically feminist work in English fiction, stunned the reading public in 1881. She was both pro-Boer and a supporter of rights for Black Africans; and was militantly opposed to Cecil Rhodes. While imprisoned by the English during the Boer war, she wrote Woman and Labor, a major nonfiction socio-economic treatise. She married S.C. Cronwright in her late thirties, and they shared the surname of “Cronwright-Schreiner.” Hampered by money troubles and asthma all her life, Olive retained a vibrant personality even in her last years. Contemporary accounts use the word “genius” more than any other in describing her. And a poor Lancashire working woman who had read African Farm said: “I think there is hundreds of women what feels like that but can't speak it, but she could speak what we feel.”
Pioneers in Education postcard
From Chapter 1
Pioneers in Education. Emma Willard (1787-1870) believed equal educational opportunities for women required state support rather than relying on private funding. Troy Seminary (started 1821), later Emma Willard School, was unique in its well qualified faculty and varied instruction, including astronomy, physics, and physiology. The sciences were applied, which was unusual even for men’s schools. When she didn’t have the necessary books, she wrote them, and many became standard texts of the day. Rich and poor were admitted, and she gave scholarships to many girls. One pupil, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wrote of Emma Willard in her memoirs, “She was a splendid looking woman . . . and I doubt whether any Page 88 →royal personage in the old world could have received her worshippers with more grace and dignity than did this far-famed daughter of the Republic . . ..” Prudence Crandall (1803-1890). A Quaker, Crandall worked for abolition, temperance and woman suffrage. As a teacher in Canterbury, Conn., she opened a boarding school for girls which in 1833 she changed to an all-Negro girls’ school. The outraged town used violence and legal action against the school, cut off supplies, poisoned the water and made threats of personal violence. Abolitionists supported her with money, and the story was published in William Lloyd Garrison’s “The Liberator” and other papers. The students were devoted to Crandall, but the mob assaults became unbearable, and in 1834 she was forced to close the school. Even so, the school was a landmark in the struggle to extend elementary education to young black females. Crandall was quite well read and inquisitive, and in her “83rd year she is vigorous in mind and body, having been able to deliver the last 4th of July oration at Elk Falls. Kansas, where she now lives and advocates woman suffrage and temperance.” (History of the Woman Suffrage Movement.) Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955), the 15th child of former slaves, was determined from childhood to provide an education for herself and other blacks, against overwhelming odds. A Quaker seamstress in Colorado sent funds for one scholarship to the country schoolhouse where Bethune was a pupil. She was chosen and attended Scotia Seminary and Moody Bible Institute. Disappointed in her ambitions to become a missionary in Africa, she returned to her native South and eventually started classes for children with no funds, beginning in a city dump. Bethune’s energy and powerful personality won the support of the rich and influential, and by 1923 her school was Page 89 →merged with another to become Bethune-Cookman College. Bethune was appointed to many government posts, held 7 honorary doctorates, and was a consultant for the drafting of the U.N. Charter.
Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge postcard
From Resources only
Radclyffe Hall (left, 1883*-1943) and Una Lady Troubridge (1892*-1963). Hall and Troubridge, both British, lived and traveled together from the time they med until Hall’s death 27 years later. Her second book, Adam’s Breed, became an instant best seller in 1927 and established her literary reputation. It was a sensitive and unique story of a prosperous head waiter who became so weary of rich foods that he starved himself to death. Success spurred Hall to what she considered her duty in writing The Well of Loneliness, a semiautobiographical novel of “inversion” calculated to enlist public understanding. The first British edition was instantly seized by the Home Office and tried in the Magistrates Court. The publicity led to enormous sales and favorable reviews in other countries, but the proceedings took a heavy toll on Hall’s spirits and health. Una Troubridge supported all her efforts and became her biographer soon after she died. Both women were well known in the Italian and French cultural salons of the time, including that of Romaine Brooks, the American-born Parisian portraitist who painted Lady Troubridge. *Birth dates approximate; exact dates not known