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

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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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Alice Paul, Suffragette by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on April 4, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

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

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

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

Posted on January 29, 2013 by lhsittig@verizon.net

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

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

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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Sarah Chamberlain Eccelston, Champion of Education by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on December 4, 2012 by lhsittig@verizon.net

For most five year olds in the United States entering kindergarten is a normal event, seen often as a rite of passage rather than a privilege for the masses. This was not always the case. In fact, not until the second half of the 1800s did communities begin to understand the benefits of a transition year for young children to help ease the buffer from play to an academic setting. First started by Friedrich Froebel in the 1850s in Germany, the Kindergarten model quickly spread to the United States.
But in order for there to be kindergartens, there must be kindergarten teachers. Thus, some Normal Schools began to train their pupils in the tenets of early childhood education. (Normal School was the name given to schools preparing teachers for a career in education).
Enter Sarah Chamberlain. Born in 1840 in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Sarah graduated from the Bucknell Female Institute intending to become a teacher. However, within a few years the Civil War erupted and she volunteered instead to become an Army nurse and was sent to serve in Nashville, Tennessee. When the war ended, she married Charles Eccelston, a soldier she had met during her nursing career. Nine years later she became a widow with two small children to raise alone.
Her family offered to take her and the children under their roof, but fiercely independent Sarah announced that she would take the children with her to Philadelphia where she would attend a Normal School that trained kindergarten teachers. Determined to remain autonomous, Sarah finished the training and taught kindergarten to support herself and her two children.
In 1880 opportunity presented itself when the town of Winona, Minnesota advertised the need for a kindergarten teacher. Sarah moved to Winona, taught kindergarten, and later established a kindergarten training program at the Winona Normal School. After three years of harsh winters, Sarah saw a unique opportunity when Argentine President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento asked for North American teachers to come start schools and train teachers so that all Argentine children would have access to an education.
Leaving her college-age son back in Pennsylvania, Sarah took her 14-year-old daughter with her on an arduous journey to Paraná, Argentina. Here, Sarah would find her life calling.
At times homesick, underpaid, and without supplies, Sarah successfully began teaching her first Argentine kindergarten in 1884. Her reputation quickly spread and soon she was training future kindergarten teachers at a nearby Institute. Eventually Sarah went on to establish a large training school in Buenos Aries and became Argentina’s official inspector of kindergarten programs. At the age of 53 she was invited back to the United States for a worldwide educational convocation where she represented Argentina’s kindergarten system. She continued setting up and running kindergarten programs in Argentina until she was 76 years old.
It is never easy to leave one’s homeland, but Sarah was determined to pursue her passion. Sarah Chamberlain Eccelston is fondly remembered in her adopted country as the Grandmother of Kindergartens. For us, she is remembered as a strong independent woman who followed her dream.
Thanks to Pat Parker for sending me Sarah Eccelston’s name.

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Eleanor Roosevelt, National Activist by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on November 1, 2012 by lhsittig@verizon.net

At a physical glance, Eleanor Roosevelt might not be considered memorable. She never opted for the limelight and would have perhaps been perfectly content just marrying the man she loved, raising a family, and working for a charitable cause. Instead she became thrust into the national spotlight as First Lady of the United States, when her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became President.
If you read any of her biographies you might be struck by her shy nature as a young woman, and the nearly impossible situation of starting out marriage living side by side with an overbearing mother-in-law. However, as Eleanor matured from a young woman into a First Lady, she learned how to adapt to family situations and to the American public, simply by becoming a risk taker who worked behind the scenes to make things happen.
Born into vast wealth and privilege, she none the less started working with the poor when at 18 she joined the Junior League of New York City and volunteered in the East Side slums. When she and Franklin began to court, she took him to the East Side tenements so he could see how poor people living in desperate situations needed help from the government.
As First Lady she made appearances, supported causes, and remained loyal to her husband. But in addition, she sought out ways in which to bring attention to groups of Americans who had been largely overlooked by others, including her husband’s administration.
Shortly after Franklin Roosevelt became President in 1933, Eleanor paid a surprise visit to several of the coal mining communities of West Virginia to determine the quality of their living conditions, and subsequently launched a program to relocate several miners’ families to the government built town of Arthurdale, West Virginia where work was made available.
In 1943 she made a personal visit to the Gila River Japanese Internment Camp located in Arizona. After checking on the plight of the Japanese-Americans who had been incarcerated there post Pearl Harbor, she wrote an article for Colliers Magazine in which she decried the position of stereotyping entire ethnic groups and called for Americans to be more humane in their treatment of others.
Perhaps one of her most poignant decisions occurred in 1939 when she wrote a letter of resignation to the Daughters of the American Revolution because African-American singer Marian Anderson had not been allowed to perform at the D.A.R. Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. Eleanor instead helped to orchestrate an outdoor venue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, which drew 75,000 people to hear Marian Anderson perform.
In a time when only a small percentage of women worked in professional jobs, Eleanor held press conferences, wrote a weekly magazine column, and campaigned tirelessly for civil rights and human rights for all.
Regardless of her family and husband, she made her own mark in history, and understood humility. Although not often cited, here is the poem she carried in her purse throughout World War II and was said to have read daily to remind herself of what true sacrifice is:
Dear Lord
Lest I continue
My complacent way
Help me to remember
Somehow out there
A man died for me today.
As long as there be war
I then must
Ask and answer
Am I worth dying for?

November is the month in which we pay tribute to all Veterans, perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt deserves tribute too.

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Lola Herrera, Adventurer by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on September 25, 2012 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Lola Herrera was the youngest daughter of a Peruvian plantation owner at the turn of the last century. Living the life of privilege, she could not have imagined how quickly fate can change in the blink of an eye. Entering her teens, she was seduced by her father’s distillery manager, becoming pregnant at the age of 13.
As her lover had promised undying love, he also persuaded her that a pregnancy would make it impossible for her father to refuse the request for her hand in marriage. When the full picture was disclosed, her father instead followed his Victorian code of honor and wrote ‘deceased’ next to her name in the family Bible. Shocked and most certainly confused, she was told to pack; never to return.
Her father looked the other way as the plantation overseer made provisions for her to live with a family in the city. They turned out to be unscrupulous, using her ‘birthing money’ to purchase a sewing machine. In order to earn her rent and board, she became a seamstress in their garment business, working from sunup to sundown. After giving birth to her baby, Lola made the first of many independent decisions: she decided that to stay with the family would relegate her to a life of slavery. Instead, she took the infant and walked the streets of the city, trying to find a room to rent.
Befriended by a kind stranger, she was directed to a nearby establishment, which in her naiveté she thought was an all women’s boarding house: instead it was a bordello. The madam at first dismissed Lola because of the infant, until Lola convinced her she was an excellent seamstress and could make fashionable outfits for the other ‘women of the house.’
Because of her sewing capabilities, Lola went on to make money for herself and took care of her child; eventually moving out of the bordello and procuring both a small apartment and a job at a dry goods store. It was there that she met and fell in love with Mehmet, her first husband.
After Mehmet’s death at sea, she became a widow; now with two children to raise. Eventually there were three more husbands, and four more children, as she gave birth in each marriage, and ultimately became a widow three times over. Her second husband was murdered, and her third husband moved the family from South America to the United States, forcing Lola to adapt once more to change. Her tumultuous life took her from the Andes of her childhood to the slopes of San Francisco as an adult; living then into her 90s. Along the way she kept discovering that only the strong survive.
If you would like to read more about this strong, independent woman, look for the full story, It’s Just Lola, available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/1478119470/.

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