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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mary Louise Chambers, Depression Generation Survivor by Linda Harris Sittig

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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Alice Paul, Suffragette by Linda Harris Sittig

I am able to vote today because Alice Paul and her contemporaries determinedly campaigned for women’s suffrage a hundred years ago.

Alice Paul was born in 1885 to Quaker parents who instilled in her the notion of gender equality and the need to work for the betterment of society. As a child growing up in the New Jersey countryside she often accompanied her mother to meetings of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, thus learning at an early age about the importance of women having the right to vote.

After high school, Alice studied at Swarthmore College graduating in 1905 with a degree in Biology. Post graduation she was active for a while in the Settlement Movement in New York City promoting social equality, and then she left to study social work at the Woodbrooke Settlement for Social Work in Birmingham, England. Her stay in England exposed her to the suffragette movement in Britain, and it was there that she learned the power of collective action and protest.

By the time she returned stateside, the suffragette movement in 1913 Washington DC was being supported by many women, but the movement made a giant leap through the theatrically staged parade orchestrated by Alice Paul and her contemporaries. The parade was strategically planned to coincide with the date of Woodrow Wilson’s Presidential Inauguration. The parade involved thousands of women, including the founding members of the African-American sorority Delta Sigma Theta from nearby Howard University. On March 3, 1913 as Wilson entered Washington DC, some 250,000 people were lined up along the city’s main route; but not to see Wilson, they were there to see the suffragettes. Floats, bands, mounted brigades and approximately 6,000 women marching down Pennsylvania Avenue commanded the city’s attention. The parade made front page news everywhere, illustrating that American women were not going to back down on the issue of getting the vote.

When Wilson was re-elected, Alice organized the 1917 picketing of the White House, which led to the arrest of the female demonstrators. Their crime consisted of marching in front of the White House carrying placards asking “When Will Women Have Liberty?” Sentences ranged from six days to six months’ incarceration in the Occoquan Workhouse in Occoquan, Virginia. Alice and the other women were treated as prisoners, force fed when they attempted a hunger strike, robbed of their street clothes and given filthy prison garb, and thrown in rat infested cells as justification for their actions of supposedly obstructing traffic.

While the women languished in the workhouse, underfed and overworked, sometimes even being beaten, the world outside Occoquan preoccupied itself with World War I. It wasn’t until news of their prison conditions were leaked to the public, that citizens began to demand the women’s release. Upon leaving, it was noted that many of the prisoners had to be taken to local hospitals because of their deteriorated conditions.

Alice walked out of the prison on her own, and immediately took up the cause once more for a suffrage amendment.

Two years later, both the Senate and the House passed the 19th Amendment, and the battle for state ratification began in earnest. In order to ratify the amendment, three-fourths of the states needed to vote for it. Alice campaigned tirelessly, speaking in public every chance she got.

By the summer of 1920, only one more state needed to approve the amendment. When Tennessee voted in favor, the 19th Amendment became a reality. On August 26, 1920 American women won the right to vote. Alice had herself photographed toasting the victory.

But she did not stop her efforts in procuring equality for all. She worked to have the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratified so there would be absolute equality for all men and women in America. The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in Congress every year from 1923 until it finally passed in 1972. Alice died five years later at the age of 92 having seen the seeds of her labor bear fruit.

I can vote because Alice Paul helped to earn that privilege for every American woman.
For additional information on this strong woman, visit www.alicepaul.org.

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Ruby Bridges, Child of Civil Rights by Linda Harris Sittig

Some women become strong with age and others are forced to learn strength during childhood. One such woman is Ruby Bridges.

Artist Norman Rockwell painted her before her ninth birthday. Look, a popular magazine of that era, featured her the year she turned ten. All the major newspapers of her childhood captured her story. And all of this because Ruby Bridges was the first black child ever to attend an all-white public school in New Orleans, Louisiana. The year was 1960 and Ruby Bridges was only six years old.
It’s often hard to look back on history and judge events by today’s standards. But in 1960 when the Civil Rights Movement was gathering momentum, a Louisiana judge selected six young black girls to attend white elementary schools and begin the process of integration in New Orleans. Two of the girls chose to remain in their old schools and three of the girls were assigned to McDonough Elementary. Ruby was sent alone, by herself, to William Frantz Elementary.
It would have been a daunting experience to go to a school where you were the only minority child, but Ruby encountered unprecedented hate as crowds of angry parents withdrew their children from the school and teachers went out of their way to avoid Ruby, except one: Barbara Henry would become her year-long teacher. On Ruby’s first day she entered her classroom to find it completely empty – she was in a class of one.
Day by day townspeople grew angrier and shouted ugly names at her as Ruby walked to school. Soon federal marshals were ordered to escort Ruby along her route. Those marshals may have protected her body, but the loneliness of going where no one wants you, had to tug at her heart. She had the love of her parents, the caring of her teacher, and by luck the support of Dr. Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist who volunteered to work with her and her family to help with the ordeal of Ruby’s isolation.
Ruby learned to further her reading and writing skills in that first grade classroom without any peers, without any friends, without any company other than her teacher. She couldn’t go out on the play ground for recess or eat lunch with any other child; but she persevered and continued to study, continued to learn, and continued to go to school each day – with perfect attendance by the end of the year.
By her second year in elementary school, the angry mobs had dispersed and she was placed in a regular second grade classroom along with a few other black students. Her beloved first grade teacher Barbara Henry, however, did not have her contract renewed. It was a message that even Ruby understood.
Ruby Bridges went on to graduate from public high school in New Orleans, become a travel agent, and then marry and start a family. When one of her brothers died, Ruby took it upon herself to walk his three young daughters to school – to William Frantz Elementary School. Walking back into that building had to resurrect the ghosts of her early childhood. Undaunted, Ruby decided to begin volunteering at Frantz, working as a liaison between parents and the school.
Eventually she became a popular speaker, going out to schools and talking about the greatest lesson she ever learned: that each child is a unique being fashioned by God and that schools can be the place where children of all races and backgrounds can come together and learn from one another.
Ruby Bridges was a strong child who grew into a stronger woman.

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Edythe Donovan Fox, Multiple Sclerosis Fighter, by Linda Harris Sittig

In her day she must have been a real looker, the type of woman who makes men stop to gaze at an hourglass figure and confident stride.

Born in 1913, Edythe Donovan was a physically striking woman with a magnetic personality who grew up in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, around 182nd Street. Most girls her age married right after high school, but Edythe persevered to attend both Fordham University and City College of New York. Intensely interested in politics and born a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, she landed a job after college in a law firm in New York City; acting as the office manager by day and at night she read everything she could get her hands on about American history and the Democratic Party.

Somewhere in her 20s, two magical events occurred. First she met a young handsome artist named Val Fox, and second – she was offered an appointment by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to become the Assistant Secretary to the Attorney General of the United States. Although in love with the artist, she wistfully explained that job offers like this came only once in a lifetime and she moved to Washington D.C. while the artist remained back in New York City.

World War II erupted and when FDR died and a new administration entered the White House, Edythe returned to both New York City and the artist. They married; he continued to further his dual career as an electrical engineer and an artist, and she became pregnant.Then the unthinkable occurred. In 1954 Edythe fell and broke her knee cap, which refused to heal correctly. The doctors performed tests and concurred on a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Upon that pronouncement, her life dramatically changed.

Only 41 years old, with two young boys, and the prognosis of a rapidly crippling disease, Edythe took stock of her life. Where other women might have railed against God, she proclaimed it was the hand she had been dealt and she would see it through.

At first she maneuvered with a leg brace and cane, but within ten years she became confined to a hospital bed: one she insisted on installing in the living room of their suburban New Jersey rambler so people could come to call. While Ann Landers and Dear Abby may have been the queens of advice in print, Edythe kept her house continually open to a steady stream of neighbors and friends who came by to ask her advice on a variety of topics. She hired three high school girls to cook and clean, and encouraged her now teenage boys to hold their rock band practices in the basement. Her devoted husband, Val, continued to work, paint and take care of her.

When the Glen Rock High School graduating class of 1965 asked Val Fox to be in charge of designing the elaborate backdrop sets for the all night graduation party, “A Night in Paris”, Edythe decided to launch a one woman campaign to secure door prizes for the seniors. Phone calls and letters went out to every senior’s parents, asking that they save all their S & H Green Stamps and mail them to Edythe’s house.

By now the multiple sclerosis had rendered the right side of her body useless, but she still had partial movement in her left arm and hand. For months she used a wet sponge and painstakingly pasted the S & H Green Stamps into booklets and then redeemed thoughtful door prizes from the company’s catalog. On graduation night she lay in her hospital bed with the windows wide open so she could hear the all-night band playing at the high school party. By the wee hours of dawn, each graduating senior, all 248 of us, received a wonderful door prize with which to remember our commencement.

The Multiple Sclerosis Foundation recognized Edythe with a deserved accolade as the MS Mother of the Year. But everyone in our small town already knew she was a phenomenon. She died over the 4th of July weekend in 1986 at the age of 73, having lived almost half her life with a disease that may have crippled her limbs, but never her spirit.

A true strong woman and I am proud to have known her.

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Harriet Hanson Robinson, Factory Child by Linda Harris Sittig

The city of Lowell, Massachusetts hugs the Merrimack River, grateful to the water source that once played host to ten giant textile mills starting back in the 1830s. Energy surged through the town as over 10,000 power looms transferred raw cotton into finished cloth and 300,000 spindles guaranteed employment. In its heyday the mills produced a million yards of cloth per week.

But of course people had to work in those mills to produce the fabric. A better terminology would be that they toiled in the mills; and by ‘they’, I mean women and children. Lowell stands today as a testament to the once mighty power of the New England textile industry, but it was also the first place in America where workers went on strike. The most notable striker was an eleven year old girl – Harriet Hanson.

In today’s culture professional athletic teams strike, transportation workers shut down mass transit and auto workers can paralyze Detroit. But the strikes in Lowell were different because they were led entirely by women.

By ‘Turning Out’, as the early strikes were called, the female workers demonstrated that unfair practices would no longer be tolerated. They did not strike because of the thirteen hour workdays, or weekly wages of just under $2.00, or the unhealthy practice of nailing all windows shut to insure a constant humidity in the mills; they ‘turned out’ because the mill owners had decided to raise the profit margin by reducing the women’s wages in a unique way. Since most of the women had to board in town during the work week, and the mill owners also owned the boarding houses, they simply raised the rates of room and board, and then deducted it directly from the women’s take home pay. If any woman did not comply, she was promptly fired, and replaced by a new worker.

However, everything changed in 1836. Harriet Hanson had been working for a year as a bobbin girl, where she removed full bobbins of thread from the giant spinning frames and brought empty ones in replacement. At the age of eleven, she was a full time worker and readily understood the unfair and unhealthy treatment of the women in the factory. Lowell may have boasted its claim as the first planned industrial city in America, but for the women and children who worked in the mills it was a life of pure drudgery. Many workers only survived ten years, and deafness was a common result from the incessant noise of the behemoth machines. When the new higher board fee was announced many women complained and some talked about Turning Out. Others were too afraid to resist, lest they lose their jobs. The air hummed with indecisiveness.

Then Harriet stood up in the spinning room at the Lawrence Cotton Mill and announced that she for one was Turning Out. Miraculously, most of all the women in that room followed her. Once the other workers saw the women coming out with Harriet, a mass exodus occurred and the Lawrence Mill was effectively shut down for the day. Eventually the owners reconsidered the raise on room and board.

It would be wonderful to report that mill conditions improved, but they did not for many decades. Harriet continued to work as a mill girl, then got married, and became a lifelong participant in the Suffragette and Abolitionist Movements. She claimed that her most proud moment however, was when she led the Turn Out in 1836.

She died at the age of eighty six in 1911, before the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, or women were granted the right to vote, or the Jim Crow Laws were abolished. But she held to the belief that courage and standing up for what you believe in, does make a difference – even if you have to wait years to see the fruits of your convictions.

Thanks to author Emily Arnold McCully for making me aware of Harriet Hanson Robinson.

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