Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on January 29, 2014 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Strong women sometimes come as a pair, and sometimes they actually do get recognized for their achievements.

Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams were the winners of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in organizing a significant peace movement in Northern Ireland, called the Peace People.  Other women have won the Nobel Peace Prize and other women have protested against the violence of war, but Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams’ accomplishment was a phenomenon because they brought women from both sides of the ‘war’ together, asking for the same peace to come to their land.

To fully understand ‘the Troubles’ as civil war years in Northern Ireland are often referred to, you need a quick overview of Irish political history. This is very short and in no way attempts to trivialize any part of Ireland’s heritage.

In a nutshell: Ireland was populated and ruled by various Celtic tribes until 1169 A.D. when Anglo-Normans took over the island and King Henry II of England declared himself Lord of Ireland. For the next 500 years, vigorous fighting continued against foreign rule, and Ireland eventually became divided into four provinces, comprised of 32 counties and ‘planted’ by the British government with Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. These Protestant settlers would gain a substantial amount of governmental power, especially in the northern areas, thereby relegating the native Catholic Irish to second class status. It would be another 252 years for the 1921 Anglo-Irish Peace Treaty to be signed, dividing Ireland in half. The southern 26 counties became independent and named the Irish Free State (later renamed the Republic of Ireland). However, as part of the treaty concessions, the 6 counties of the Ulster Province in the north remained under British rule and would henceforth be called Northern Ireland.

One land, one history, now two separated halves – not by choice, but by politics.

So Northern Ireland was, and still is, populated by native Irish Catholics, and by Irish Scot-Anglo Protestants whose families had lived in Ireland for hundreds of years.  But because Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, it was ruled and policed by the British.

Enter two modern factions: the Republicans who were mostly Catholic and wanted to sever the tie to Great Britain; and the Union Party, solidly Protestant and wanting to retain the key governmental positions of power in Northern Ireland.

Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams met in 1976.  There had been serious and violent fighting in Northern Ireland for the previous eight years between militant Catholics and Protestants, and the inhabitants of Belfast and Londonderry had become used to, but by no means inured of, the fighting and the presence of British soldiers.

On August 10, 1976 a Belfast mother was out on a Sunday afternoon taking a walk with her three young children. Suddenly a car came careening down the block and plowed into her group, killing all three of her children. The driver of the car (stolen earlier that day) had lost control of the vehicle after being shot by British soldiers.

Innocent children had been run down in their own neighborhood, through no fault of their own.  The grief and anguish caused by this horrible event permeated every home in Northern Ireland and other locations as well.  Whether the mother, Mrs. Maguire, had been Catholic or Protestant no longer mattered, because mothers everywhere were outraged. Mairead Corrigan, an aunt of the dead children, was interviewed on the news the following night. Sobbing into the camera she cried out that none of the women in Ireland wanted this kind of violence.

Another mother, Betty Williams, was also fed up with the violence. She, too, was a resident of Belfast. After watching Mairead Corrigan on the news, Betty began speaking to the women of her neighborhood asking them to band together to make their voices heard in protest against the senseless bloodshed.

Within 48 hours after the death of the Maguire children, Betty Williams went on the news and read a petition she had drafted for peace, signed by over 6,000 women in Belfast – both Catholics and Protestants together.  The next day 1,000 Belfast women journeyed to the site of the accident and together recited the rosary for the dead children.

The children were buried on Friday, five days after the accident, in a funeral attended by people from all over Belfast. This is when Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams met face to face and discussed the petitions for peace. They decided to meet again the next day at what they believed would be a small peace demonstration to honor the deceased Maguire children.  When they met up on the morrow, over 10,000 women came on foot or in cars, and Protestant women came on buses they had chartered. Side by side these 10,000 women linked themselves to each other in the united desire for peace. It was the first time ever in Northern Ireland that Catholic and Protestant women aligned themselves with one another. The massive group sang hymns and then began to walk back to the cemetery where the children had been buried.

And then the unthinkable happened. Militant Irish Republicans, mostly belonging to the terrorist group I.R.A. formed their own crowd and began to assault the walking women, calling them traitors. Many marchers were beaten while the women swarmed trying to protect each other.  By the end of the walk numerous women had been battered and bruised, but not dispersed. They all reached the cemetery and began to sing Irish songs.

It was the first time in modern history that Irish women had collected together and said, “Enough!”  From that day forward Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan worked together to make the world aware of the slaughter of innocents ravaging their beloved country and how the women of Northern Ireland were campaigning together for peace.

Their campaign was long and hard, and not always successful, but together with their Peace People Movement they did make the world painfully aware of what was occurring in Northern Ireland.

For those efforts, they received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.

Yet when my husband and I visited Belfast and Londonderry in 2007, violence was not just a memory of the past. We were counseled by our hosts which pubs were Catholic and which ones were mostly Protestant, just in case we needed to know where to show our loyalties.

Thirty years after  the herculean efforts of Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, Northern Ireland was still acutely aware of its wounds.

Strong women do not always achieve their ultimate goals, but they never give up either.

                 “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

                         Old African proverb taken from Pearls of Wisdom, compiled by Keith Adams

Thank you to my diligent proofreader, Dixie Ann Hallaj

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Karin Bergöö by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on January 2, 2014 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Should a woman’s life change because she marries someone famous? Would her life change even more if both she and her husband share the same career?

In 1882 at the age of twenty-three Karin Bergöö became engaged to Carl Larsson, a young and promising Swedish painter, already garnering a name for his stylistic art. Karin had grown up in an unusually liberal Swedish family where her parents had encouraged their daughters to pursue their own talents and interests. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Karin decided she wanted to paint with a small artists’ colony transitioning to plein-air realism and located in Grez-sur-Loing, France. It was there that she met her future husband.

They both had talent, and they both had aspirations. He came from a background of poverty, while Karin’s family was securely middle-class. Unusual for that time period in Sweden to marry outside your social status – but, they did. Within the beginning years of their marriage, Karin was faced with making some important decisions. Should she, would she, continue with her painting career? If she continued painting, might she eventually become part of her husband’s competition?

It would have been easy to simply give up her art, but she didn’t. Nor did she compete with her husband. Instead, she looked at her new life with family obligations, and decided to turn her artistic flair in a different direction; she began to experiment in enhancing and embellishing their home.

Karin’s parents had given the couple a vintage summer-house near the village of Sundborn in the northern province of Dalarna, Sweden as a gift. Think swaying birch trees in summer and Christmas card perfect snow in winter to grasp an idea of the environment. With its unspoiled rural landscape and pristine Nordic light, it made for a wonderful artistic retreat. Eventually Carl and Karin transformed the residence to become their permanent home.

In Sundborn, Karin started to take weaving lessons. Soon she was fashioning bold geometric designs for their household textiles, often embellished by her original folk art motif embroidery. That step led her in an artistic direction from which she never backed down and gained her lasting recognition, but not necessarily fame for her new style of design.

While raising their seven children, Karin wove table runners, table cloths, pillowcases, bedspreads, curtains, kitchen linens, and portieres (full length curtains that function as interior doors); all adorned with her unique unencumbered style. As she looked around their home she saw spots where practical furniture was needed and she designed it; then she painted her plant stands, chairs, or even the children’s wooden beds, a bright and cheery green.

She also designed all her own clothes, in a free billowy fashion that matched her needs and her busy lifestyle. In addition to also making clothes for her children, she invented and designed a provincial folk costume for the parish of Sundborn, which was adopted by the residents and worn on festive occasions.

For many of her textiles, Karin often selected primary colors so for example, her blues stood out vividly against the background, and her trims, often in a bright cherry red, drew the eye in to focus on the main creation. In every project she undertook, her designs were personal and innovative.

While it was her husband, Carl Larsson, whose art found its way into museums and books, it was Karin’s artistic influence that is continually present in Carl’s pictures of a cozy family room, or a picnic scene with their children wearing outfits of Karin’s design, or of a peaceful spot of solitude in their home with her textiles and furniture nestled in the background. Carl’s books became immediate successes as the Swedish public clamored to see renditions of his family, his home, and his life in the picturesque countryside. It is mainly through these books that visual examples of Karin’s incredible talent still endure.

And if you have ever visited an IKEA store, then you have witnessed the ‘new Swedish design style’ that Karin Bergöö Larsson helped start over one hundred years ago.

Strong women are often smart women as well, knowing when and where to bloom.

“Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
~ Robert Heinlein
from Pearls of Wisdom, compiled by Keith Adams

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Dagmar Wilson by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on December 3, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

If Dagmar Wilson were alive today, she’d be shaking her head about the recent nuclear activity negotiations with Iran. Fifty years ago Dagmar fought a similar issue, but against the Soviet Union. She was enough of a pragmatist to realize one person alone cannot bring about an end to nuclear armament, but she hoped that many voices raised together might be hard to ignore.

In 1961, she and her husband Christopher Wilson, and their three daughters, were living in Washington, D.C. Like many other young mothers of that time, Dagmar worried about potential radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing and how it might affect the lives of her children and millions of other children throughout the world. Unlike most people, however, she decided to do something about it. She started a telephone tree – calling friends, neighbors, and parents of her children’s school acquaintances, asking them in turn to call other women, sharing their concern about nuclear weapons and asking if they would be willing to join her in a protest. Her goal was to demonstrate that American wives and mothers would not sit by while men of powerful nations allowed the possible destruction of the planet via nuclear weaponry.

A short two months later on November 1, 1961, a massive one-day mobilization of over 50,000 women marched in some sixty cities across America. They marched side by side – mothers holding babies, grandmothers clutching toddlers, and women of many occupations walking away from typewriters and telephones. That day, Dagmar and 1,500 women stood at the foot of the Washington monument in Washington D.C. chanting, “End the arms race, not the human race.” President John F. Kennedy supposedly watched their gathering from a window at the White House, while First Lady Jackie Kennedy penned a note supporting their endeavors.

Together, Dagmar’s women formed a sisterhood spearheaded by Dagmar and New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug. Called, Women’s Strike for Peace, it became the largest women’s national peace protest group of the 20th century. Less than six months later, Dagmar led a contingent of 51 of the members to an international disarmament conference in Geneva, Switzerland (April 1962). The women carried with them over 50,000 signed petitions from women all over America asking for a halt to nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Remember that these signatures were garnered in an era before email, social media, or even computer technology.

Dagmar’s goal was attained in the fall of 1963, when the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. The treaty prohibited nuclear testing in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. A success by all accounts, the multi-nation ban finally occurred after a decade of negotiations. President Kennedy said that the actions of the Women’s Strike for Peace were a significant factor in bringing the awareness of nuclear armament into every American home. This national awareness might have helped to force the issue of the dangers of radioactive fallout.

Women Strike for Peace, or WSP as they became known, did not stop there. They launched peace protests against the War in Vietnam, against the House on Un-American Activities Committee, and against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They marched in force supporting the Civil Rights Movement. In short, the WSP sought to make this world a better place, thanks to the vision of Dagmar Wilson and others like her who earnestly believed by linking together, women can make a difference.

Dagmar Wilson passed away in 2011 at the age of 94, after a highly successful career as peace activist, artist, and illustrator of children’s books. One of her daughters, artist Jessica Wilson, has reprinted some of Dagmar’s holiday art onto cards with winsome letters forming “PEACE”, so that Dagmar’s message will never be forgotten. These cards are available from Around the Block Books 540-751-9161, Natural Mercantile 540-338-7080, or from jessnotes94@gmail.com.

Strong women live on through their legacies.

Thank you to Dixie Hallaj, my ardent proof reader.

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Tempe Wick by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on October 31, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Tempe Wick grew up in an era when our country was at war. Actually, we weren’t even a country yet – just thirteen colonies bound together in a rebellion against England.

Tempe was the youngest of the Wick’s five children, and the only one still living at home. Her parents owned a large farm amid the bucolic rolling hills of central New Jersey, near present day Morristown. But when talk of revolution exploded into full-fledged war, life quickly became very serious as the Wick family sided with the Patriots seeking freedom from Britain’s tyranny.

By December of 1779, General George Washington’s Continental Army had dissolved into a ragtag group of starving soldiers anxious for decent shelter, warm clothes, and food. Provisions were so scarce that men were chewing on their worn out leather shoes, hoping for a bit of nourishment. There were no stray dogs left.

Desperate times produce desperate men, and often – strong women as well.

The next two winters hosted brutal weather, where blizzards blanketed the fields for weeks and livestock froze where they stood. General Washington alerted the residents of Jockey Hollow for the need to establish military quarters nearby. More than 10,000 men descended on the area, and stayed in encampments that bordered the Wick farm. The Wick family believed so strongly in the Patriot cause that they voluntarily shared as much of their wheat harvest and butchered cattle as they could. But the war dragged on. Mr. Wick died, Mrs. Wick became quite ill, and Tempe now age 21, became her mother’s full time nurse.

New Year’s Eve 1781 was not an occasion for celebration, but as the moon rose high in the sky spreading fanciful shadows over a snow filled landscape, sounds of musket shots broke the stillness of the night. Knowing that ammunition was precious, Tempe must have feared that the British had invaded. She was wrong. The Pennsylvania soldiers wintering near the farm, fed up with their deplorable conditions and not having been paid for over a year, mutinied.

Regardless of the impending danger, there was no way that she would abandon her sick mother. All through the night, she later said, she kept vigil with a rifle in her lap as over 1,000 soldiers stampeded past the Wick house on their way back to Philadelphia. By morning, Mrs. Wick’s coughing now wracked her body and Tempe left to seek the doctor. Saddling up the family’s last remaining horse, Colonel, she raced to the doctor’s house to obtain the needed medicine. As she left to return home, two renegade soldiers dashed out from behind some trees and demanded that she relinquish her steed.

Instead, she snatched the reins, swung herself up into the saddle, and took off at a full gallop.

And the story, or legend, might have ended here with her mother receiving the medicine. However, Tempe also needed to protect their horse, which she had raised since a colt. Leaving the mare in the barn would have allowed the renegade soldiers to steal her. Instead, she led the horse right into the house, through the kitchen and into her small bedroom at the back. Tying rags under and around the hooves to stifle any noise, and leaving the horse to nibble the hay filled mattress, she was able to keep Colonel hidden while the renegades who had followed, searched the barn.

To keep a horse in the house for even one day and night would have been a feat, but according to local lore, Tempe kept her horse safely inside for almost a week.

How she brought in hay and water and lied to the patrolling soldiers, is all a part of her story. Eventually the mutiny ended, soldiers returned to their posts, and the dreadful winter weather ended. George Washington was able to inspire more patriotic fervor, rally the troops, and we won the war—the War for Independence.

Most of the facts about Tempe Wick are clearly documented: she went on to marry and have five children of her own, and since her older siblings had their own farms, she inherited the Wick farmstead. Her escapade of saving the family horse eventually became a legend in central Jersey.

I’ve been to Jockey Hollow. I visited the Wick House, and took my time lingering in Tempe’s small back bedroom, imagining a horse with rags on its hooves munching a mattress while mutinied soldiers swarmed the nearby countryside.

When you are a courageous strong woman, anything is possible.

“Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.”
Epicurus ~ from Pearls of Wisdom compiled by Keith Adams

Thank you to my wonderful proof reader, Dixie Hallaj.

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Judith Goodman and the Pioneer Women of Big Sur by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on October 1, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

The women who helped to settle the wild coastline that hugs the Santa Lucia Mountains in Monterey County, California came from many different backgrounds. They trickled in over the course of different eras, but were all bound by a love of the pounding surf swirling upon ancient beaches and a feral land that refused to be tamed.

Few of these pioneer women became well known in their own lifetime, but none-the-less, they devoted their energies and passion to carving out a life in tune with nature.

Some of their names, like Judith Goodman, roll easily off the tongue while others highlight the differences in ethnicities among them; Grace Boronda, Elfrieda Hayes, Juliet Pfeifer, Mary White, Lillian Ross, Melissa Blake, Pat Addleman, Lynda Sargent, Virginia Swanson, Rosa Nash, Eve Miller, Theodora Crowley, Esther Ewoldsen, Barbara Spring, Lulu Harlan, and many others. They all came, I suppose, to the rocky coast of Big Sur for personal reasons. Some came seeking solitude. Others wanted balance, or to commune with nature. Perhaps some even wanted to escape the mad pace of urban civilization.

A handful arrived around the turn of the twentieth century seeking adventure, while others were born in the nearby canyons simply seeking survival in a harsh and unforgiving environment. As adults, they all earned their keep with a variety of endeavors from farming to mining, teaching to ranching to running rural resorts. Several were artists and writers. One or two came as spinsters, but settled and married into local families. A few came with husbands in tow on vacation, but then stayed on. More than one chose to retain a single life amidst spectacular surroundings.

Access today via Highway 1, which winds its way north up the coast from San Louis Obispo to Monterrey, was not available prior to 1937. Back then transportation along Big Sur was mainly via horseback or in sturdy wagons bumping along ancient trails. The early pioneers who came, stayed in spite of a lack of modern roads, grocery stores, or conveniences. Children often had to ride horseback three miles to get to the local one-room school. It was not a life for the faint of heart.

But if you read any of their journal entries or snippets of interviews that were conducted, you will quickly see that each of the women had a profound reverence for the simplicity of life that Big Sur offered and perhaps expected. They swept invading tarantulas off their porches and rationed water during dry spells, accepting the arduous living that relevant solitude exacts in exchange for blissful peace and quiet.

Today the modern tourist may stop near Big Sur for lunch at the lovely Nepenthe Restaurant or to browse in a small quaint gift shop along the coast, never suspecting that it took a corps of special people – both men and women – to forge a life protecting this wilderness, so that even today the majestic views remain unspoiled.

Of all the women of Big Sur, Judith Goodman deserves extra applause. It was Judith who in the 1980s set about compiling the narratives of the strong women pioneers whose names might otherwise become lost to time. Her book containing the fascinating narratives is titled Big Sur Women, available at http://www.amazon.com.

Thanks to my awesome brother, Randy Harris, who sent me Judith’s book, knowing how much I loved visiting Big Sur and reading about the strong women who settled it.
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
~ Lao Tzu
From Pearls of Wisdom, compiled by Keith Adams at http://www.amazon.com.

As always, thank you to Dixiane Hallaj, my wonderful proof reader and fellow writer.

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Mary Anning, Paleontologist by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on September 2, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

What if you made one of the most important geological discoveries of all time, but because you were a young uneducated girl, no one paid much attention – at first.

Ichthyosaur, plesiosaur, pterosaur. Today dinosaurs are familiar creatures in story and song, but at the beginning of the 1800s Charles Darwin had not yet begun his work on Origin of the Species and solid evidence of the gigantic prehistoric animals had yet to be disclosed to humanity. Most people believed only in the biblical interpretation of how life progressed from the beginning of creation, and thus held that the world was only a few thousand years old. It took the tenacity and curiosity of Mary Anning in the seaside town of Lyme Regis, to discover the first complete fossilized dinosaur skeleton in England and to awaken the world to a relatively new science, the study of paleontology.

Mary spent much of her childhood roaming the beaches near Lyme Regis, in the southeast of England. With the salt air teasing her tongue, and seagulls calling on the wind, she would race across the wet sand with her dog and collect the small stone curiosities and shells that the tides revealed. Later, her father would polish the items and sell them to tourists. In the winter months she would carefully climb the nearby dangerous cliffs layered of white limestone and blue-grey shale to uncover any profitable ‘finds’ that the treacherous winter landslides exposed.

In 1809, the year she turned ten, her father died and her mother was faced with the daunting task of supporting her two children by herself. Mary soon quit school and began to scour the seaside cliffs as her main occupation, looking for more unusual stone curiosities the family could sell. At one point her older brother, Joseph, found the partial skull of a prehistoric animal, but never located any other part of the body.

A year later while out hunting in the same area, Mary bent down to examine what looked like a stone with curious markings. As Mary carefully chipped and chiseled, scraped and smoothed away the debris, she found what looked like the outline of several large teeth. Peering closely, she saw that the teeth seemed to be connected in a row.

Alerting Joseph, Mary continued to chip with her chisel and hammer to unearth the mystery. Day after day, week after week, in weather so wet and cold that her hands blistered raw, she continued her pursuit. The villagers must have thought her odd, and her mother must have been dismayed that Mary was not earning any money with this endeavor, but Mary continued. One day against the sound of waves lapping at the shore, Mary Anning stood up to examine her work. There in front of her emerged the complete shape of a four foot long animal skull connected to neck and shoulder bones. Mary must have gaped in awe at what appeared to be a giant behemoth arising up from its prehistoric rest. What type of animal, Mary had no idea. But she knew enough about stone curiosities and shells to suspect this large specimen could be one of a kind.

For the next several months, sometimes with the help of her brother, she spent long and tedious days hunched over, chipping and brushing away the limestone. There were times when she was only able to clear a three inch section due to the inhospitable weather conditions. But finally the entire outline of an animal never seen before became clearly delineated in the stone. The imprint of the skeleton was 17 feet long.

Many of the villagers thought it was a huge crocodile or perhaps even a dragon, but a man came to her mother’s house and offered the sum of twenty pounds for the large ‘stone’ Mary and her brother had discovered. The man, Lord Henry Henley, planned to sell it to a wealthy collector of fossils. Twenty pounds was more money than the Annings had ever seen, and Mrs. Anning must have urged Mary to take the offer.

Mary did sell him the ‘stone’ which eventually found its way to the British Museum in London, where the amazing fossil is still on display today. The money from Lord Henley eventually enabled Mary to set up her own business where she sold fossils, petrified traces of marine animals now forever embedded in stone. She continued her work searching for fossils and during the course of her lifetime made additional discoveries of other prehistoric creatures.

She died in 1847 at the age of 48 from breast cancer and was buried in the local church yard in Lyme Regis. As a poor child she never dreamed that one day the entire scientific world would hear her name. For the price of 20 pounds, she gave us a glimpse into life on Earth 200 million years ago.

For further information on Mary Anning, you can read Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier or the children’s book, Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon by Jeannine Atkins. Both are available at http://www.amazon.com.

“The laws of nature are but mathematical thoughts of God.”
~ Euclid
From Pearls of Wisdom, compiled by Keith Adams – available at http://www.amazon.com

Thank you to my wonderful proof reader and fellow writer, Dixiane Hallaj, author of It’s Just Lola available at http://www.amazon.com

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Veronica Guerin, Journalist by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on August 1, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Veronica Guerin was an investigative reporter who paid the ultimate price of being a strong woman.

Back in the mid 1990s the Republic of Ireland earned the nickname ‘Celtic Tiger’ because of the tremendous economic boom that occurred, changing the south of Ireland from a poor country to one of vast riches. But with an increase in the fluidity of money came an increase in drug traffic.

Veronica had been born and raised in Dublin where Vikings had once settled long ago and the revered Book of Kells from the ninth century is still on display at Trinity College. She was schooled at Trinity and later dabbled in accounting, then public relations, and finally found her niche in journalism. Switching newspapers more than once, she reveled in the adrenaline rush of gaining needed information to flesh out a riveting story. Her investigative reporter instincts soon gained her a reputation of disregarding her own personal safety in exchange for coveted inside information.

By 1994 she was writing for the Sunday Independent and began to focus on criminal activity in Dublin – specifically the drug trade. Using her accounting background, she was able to ferret out information on some of the suspected illegal assets of the drug barons; but she could not name any of the kingpins due to Ireland’s strict libel laws.

Instead she assigned them fictitious names and wrote story after story about their wealthy lifestyles and the unaccounted incomes that sustained their lavish way of living. She received numerous death threats, but largely ignored them until a gunshot shattered a window in the home she shared with her husband and small son. Instead of being intimidated, she decided to fight back.

She began an even more aggressive investigation as she wrote about the key players of the Dublin drug trade. The death threats increased and a few months later she answered her door to a hit man who aimed a gun directly at her face, but then shot her in the leg. The message was clear.

Anyone at this point would have been faced with the monumental decision of whether or not to continue writing the exposés in the face of serious danger. But to give up her writing, would be allowing the drug lords to win. She drew a line in the sand, dug in her heels, and refused to compromise her goal of bringing their stories to public awareness.

On June 26, 1996, ten days before her 38th birthday, while waiting for a red light to change, Veronica Guerin was the first reporter in Ireland to be murdered. She was shot to death in broad daylight on the M7 motorway outside of Dublin.

The drug barons had finally silenced her after all.

What they didn’t manage to silence was the incredible outpouring of public outrage over her murder. The resulting investigation of her death eventually led to the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau where the lucrative financial assets of convicted felons could be confiscated by the government.

The two men who had pulled up on the death squad motorcycle and shot her six times at point blank range, were later convicted, as were several of their accomplices. Her death also led to the arrest and or conviction of more than 150 members of the Irish drug empire, and drug crimes dropped significantly.

Since 1996, Veronica has been remembered in word and song, in accolades and on plaques, and memorialized as a folk hero. Her name stands as a whispered prayer among families whose loved ones are investigative journalists all over the world, also pursuing the truth about abusive power and crippling crime.

Today Dublin is still the fair capital of the Republic of Ireland, with bustling shops on Grafton Street and pubs filled with cheers of “Sláinte”. I wish I could report that Ireland is also free of drugs, but that would not be true. According to The Journal, a Dublin newspaper, Ireland still ranks among the top five countries of Europe in terms of cocaine usage.

I can only imagine that the angels are weeping.

For additional reading, consult Veronica Guerin, written by Emily O’Reilly, available at http://www.barnesandnoble.com.

“The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.”
~ Thucydides, reprinted in Pearls of Wisdom by Keith Adams

Thanks always to Dixie Hallaj, my grammar checker.

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Ellen Canavan, Irish Entrepreneur by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on July 3, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

One hundred fifty years ago the Civil War was raging. Thousands of men had already given their lives for a cause they fervently supported, and one woman had risen from total obscurity to the ranks of unimagined riches through the courtesy of soldiers’ uniforms. Unfortunately, no one today even recognizes her name.

After the firing of cannons on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C., President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for the Union Army. Each soldier would need to be clothed in uniform and given a coat, a blanket, and bedding. Philadelphia, being the epicenter of the textile industry, went into supercharge production.

Government contracts were awarded by bids. Several mill owners, wanting to get rich quick, sold the unsuspecting government shoddy bolts of fabric. Shoddy is reprocessed strips of wool glued together, heated at very high temperatures, and then ironed out to appear as a new bolt of cloth. Shoddy can be cut and sewn, and look like new fabric…until it gets wet. Then shoddy wool literally begins to disintegrate.

Documentation supports how many of the defeated Union soldiers trudged back to Washington, D.C. after the first Battle of Bull Run (Battle of Manassas) through hours of unrelenting rain, and watched as their jackets unraveled into a soggy mess. Their shoddy garments, or at least what was left of them, were discarded by the side of the road, and the term ‘shoddy’ entered the vernacular as a synonym for poorly made goods.

Enter, Ellen Canavan, an Irish immigrant in the Kensington district of Philadelphia who had spent her entire childhood surrounded by fabrics. Both her father and brother had been wool merchants, her father had also been a weaver, and her mother was a seamstress. Ellen knew textiles inside and out. In 1861 she was being courted by successful factory proprietor, James Nolan, of the St. John’s Street Mill. She was in fact, courting him as a possible business sponsor who could help her transform from impoverished immigrant to entrepreneur.

According to family folklore, she brought the idea to James Nolan of combining superior Georgia cotton with Pennsylvania wool and creating a blended fabric that would hold up against any mill’s shoddy. Uniforms made from this blended cloth would be more durable and comfortable than the current configuration of one hundred per cent wool. As the government quickly caught on to the shoddy from other mills, the St. John’s Street Factory blended cloth resulted in lucrative war contracts.

But uniforms were not enough for Ellen Canavan. She also experimented with a blend of wool and cotton to produce blankets targeted for military hospitals serving both the North and South.

Within a very short time their business venture was a smashing success. She married James Nolan, they started a family, and they continued to produce the blended cloth that had transformed her from poverty to a woman of means. Then just shy of her 30th birthday, Ellen Canavan Nolan succumbed to tuberculosis. A life cut short, and without recognition.

Sadly her name does not appear on any of the contracts or documentation for the cloth. Only her husband’s name was recorded, per the custom of that era. Then, almost as if to add insult to injury, her burial marker in the cemetery mausoleum only bears the inscription of “Mrs. James Nolan”.

How did I find out about her? I have been researching her life for the past 10 years, ever since I stood in front of her burial vault and looked at my great-grandfather’s name recorded where her own name should have been. I grew up hearing the story of how my great-grandfather became incredibly wealthy during the Civil War. The story always included a small afterthought that supposedly his wife had been his business partner and inspiration. Through old records, I was finally able to substantiate how she had helped him succeed.

Strong women deserve to have their story told. I was so motivated by Ellen Canavan’s gumption and grit, as well as her drive to achieve beyond the ordinary, that I not only dedicate this blog post to her but I have also just finished writing a novel, Cut From Strong Cloth, inspired by her life.

Cut From Strong Cloth opens a window into a time when women had few professional choices and even fewer opportunities to follow their dream. Any literary agent looking for an exciting story of a strong woman who left her mark in the textile industry, but not her name, please contact me.
“Insist on yourself. Never imitate.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson in Pearls of Wisdom arranged by Keith Adams

Special thanks to my invaluable proofreader – Dixiane Hallaj

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Irena Sendler, Resistance Fighter by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on June 1, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

She should have won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her incredible feat of helping over 2,500 Jewish children escape from the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, during the Holocaust.

But she lost out on the prize to someone else, and would most likely have remained unheralded if not for a group of Kansas high school girls who wrote a play called Life in a Jar, about her heroic efforts.

Working as a Catholic social worker in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939, Irena Sendler was alarmed when Nazi soldiers built a wall surrounding the ghetto, isolating the Jews from the rest of the city. Obtaining false identification, she passed herself off as a nurse and was given permission to work within the ghetto tending to the sick.

By 1942, the real intention of the Nazi Party was becoming more visible and Irena feared for the vast number of children trapped behind the wall. She joined one of the Polish Underground parties and began to recruit other women to help her orchestrate escapes for as many children as possible. Their splinter group was small, only ten adults, but with Irena they began to carry out the daring plan.

The adults all understood the consequences of their acts; yet one by one they managed to smuggle out babies packed in suitcases, young children hidden in potato sacks, and children even lying next to corpses in coffins. Often the youngsters had to be sedated in order to keep them silent. As a supposed ‘nurse’, Irena was able to acquire the necessary drugs.

Once the children were safely outside the confines of the city, they were hidden in Catholic convents and orphanages, with new identification as non-Jews. One by one Irena wrote their true names on tiny scraps of paper and then hid the fragments in jars buried in a friend’s garden. Her hope was that one day they would be re-united with their families. As history documents however, a vast majority of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did not survive.

Her efforts in helping thousands of children escape were successful, but not keeping her own identity safe. In 1943 she was captured by the Nazis who broke her feet and legs in an attempt to get her to confess about her activities. She withstood the torture and then was sent to a prison camp, where she narrowly escaped death when a bribed prison guard added her name to the list of prisoners he had supposedly executed. After escaping, Irena continued her mission of saving Jewish children from being sent to the death camps.

After Poland had been liberated, she unearthed the jars and attempted to locate and help the children find their families; but only a few met with success. Eventually most of the children were adopted by other Polish families or were sent to live in Israel. Irena remained in Poland, married, and stayed out of the spotlight. She died of pneumonia at the age of 98 in May of 2008.

So, if she did not win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, then who did? Al Gore, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was awarded the prize.

Not that I don’t believe in the importance of educating people about climate change, I do. But how about educating people about one individual who spared nothing in her attempts to save 2,500 children from certain death?

In my heart, Irena Sendler holds The Prize.

For further reading consult Life in a Jar: the Irena Sendler Project by Jack Mayer or http://www.irenasendler.com.
“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”
~Carl Sandburg, reprinted from Pearls of Wisdom by Keith Adams

Posted in history, strong women, women | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Mary Louise Chambers, Depression Generation Survivor by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on May 2, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

She never published a story, painted a picture, or won an award. She didn’t do volunteer work or help out in her children’s classrooms. Other than a bowling trophy, she never received much recognition in life at all.

Yet she symbolized many women of her generation.

Born in the middle of a large Irish Catholic family in an impoverished coal mining village of western Maryland, Mary Louise Chambers grew up during the Depression when money as well as food could be a daily challenge. In a family of nine children, lard sandwiches made their appearance more than once.

Her father started out in the mines, coming home covered from head to foot in thick black coal dust. Later he worked as a handyman, while her mother continuously took care of feeding, washing, and clothing the family. In order to economize, the family moved in with cousins, sharing the rent and expenses in a large wooden house on a hillside. There were two families under one roof, with a total of five adults and twenty-one children. If it was hard earning your place in the midst of nine siblings, imagine how tough you had to be to compete with twenty.

High school was in the next town, so Mary Louise and her siblings walked over a mile each way and she graduated with excellent grades. A few years later she married a local boy. Then, as with the other young brides of her era, she watched him march off to war, along with her brothers. When World War II robbed the industries of their male workers, women often filled the vacancies. Mary Louise had already done factory work, so she pursued a better paying job and became a telephone operator.

When the war ended, she was one of the lucky ones – both her husband and all her brothers had survived, although each of them was changed forever by the horrors of combat. Life resumed. She and her husband ‘moved up’, buying a small house in town. Children quickly followed and although she may have wanted to be a homemaker, she stayed with the security of the phone company.

Then tragedy struck. At the age of 44, her war veteran husband suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack, leaving her to raise their three boys on her own. The years rushed past in the blur of being a single mom. As the boys grew up, she made the Sunday pot roast stretch into multiple dinners for the week, but always fixed a new dessert for each and every night. She continued to do what she knew best – work, cook, wash, and scrub the floors till they shone. It was the hallmark of her childhood: if you could put food on the table each day, dress your children in clean clothes, and make your house spotless, then you had raised yourself above the stigma of once being deprived.

By the time I met Mary Louise she was in her fifties; a formidable woman, strong worker, deeply religious, highly opinionated, and a source of energy not to be taken lightly. She had a mind like a steel trap that never forgot any wrong done to her or her family.The lingering memory of the Depression caused her to be frugal her entire life, and she expected her family to carry on that same trait. Still trimming her own hedges and cutting the lawn well into her late 60s, she had learned how to survive by staying strong.

I once asked her if she had any regrets, and she told me she had enrolled in a Washington D.C. beauty school after graduation. But she only stayed a month because her mother had called and said, ‘come home’; help was needed with the younger ones. She returned to western Maryland and never left again. “Were you bitter about that?” I asked. She just shrugged her shoulders and answered, “You do what you have to do.” It was her mantra of how to cope with life.

Today my generation spends money in the attempt of trying to remain young. Not Mary Louise. She took life as it was handed to her, critically judging the worth of any item to be purchased, passing on frivolities that did not warrant the price tag, and taking care of everything she owned – including her appearance. As part of her daily routine, she dressed for every day, and being dressed meant having your hair fixed, your make-up on, your nails painted, and earrings in both ears. On the day she was being wheeled in for her cancer operation at the age of 92, she looked up and asked, “Does my make-up look OK?” She was determined if she didn’t make it through the surgery, at least she’d look good on her way to heaven.

If you never achieve anything special, then what kind of legacy do you leave behind? On the week-end she would have turned 95, her remaining siblings, all her children, most of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, along with other family members and friends, drove or flew in for her memorial service and pay tribute to a woman who had impacted all of their lives.

In essence she was a role model for taking what life hands you, and doing what you have to do in order to survive.

That is the real meaning of living strong.

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