Hedwig Kiesler: More than Just a Pretty Face

Posted on December 1, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

By Linda Harris Sittig

Do you use Wifi or GPS, or a cell phone?

Then you should know the story of one strong woman whose research and inventions were the precursor to much of our day-to-day technology. But I bet the name Hedwig Kiesler is not familiar to you.

She did go by another name, one you might recognize, and she did become famous, but not for her brilliant mind.

Hedwig Kiesler was born in Vienna, Austria, in November 1914. She was an only child, adored by her father and criticized often by her mother. Much of her later interest in tinkering came from long walks with her father, who often pointed out objects in Vienna and explained to young Hedwig the technology behind them.

Hedwig might have grown up to become a serious scientist, but she was endowed with incredible beauty and a desire to act on stage. Because of her stunning looks, wavy dark hair, sultry green eyes, porcelain skin, and hourglass figure, by age 16, she had procured a part in a play in Vienna.  Within a few years, her beauty and acting set her on her life’s course.

But Europe was on the brink of turmoil in 1933 when Friedrich Mandl saw Hedwig performing in a play. He was smitten by her beauty and launched a one-person ploy to win her heart. Although he was older, he was also one of the wealthiest men in Austria. Her parents encouraged Hedwig to accept Mandl because of his power and wealth. Hedwig’s father hoped that Mandl would be able to take care of Hedwig as politics were becoming unstable due to the rise of both Adolf Hitler and Mussolini.

The marriage became a disaster due to Mandl’s obsessive desire for control and his mandate that Hedwig gives up the theater and devotes her entire time to being his wife.  Because he owned a lucrative munitions company, the Mandls often entertained the most powerful men in Austria, Germany, and Italy. Although miserable in her marriage, Hedwig decided to act as a dutiful wife while listening intently to the men complain about the failures in weaponry, especially the technical problems with submarines.

After the death of her father and her mother’s insistence that Hedwig learn to be a ‘proper wife,’ Hedwig takes a bold leap and escapes from her husband, fleeing first to Paris and then to London. While in London in 1937, she met the famous Hollywood movie producer Louis B. Mayer – head of MGM studios. He was on a talent-searching trip, and Hedwig was on a search of her own – a way to get to Hollywood.

Mr. Mayer, impressed with her outstanding beauty, offered her a job at $125.00 a week. She turned him down because she believed she was worth more. This is in the day when a loaf of bread only costs 9 cents. Hedwig then sold some of the jewelry from her marriage and booked a one-way ticket on the same ocean liner that Mr. Mayer was traveling back to the United States. By the end of that trip, Hedwig convinced him to offer her a more lucrative contract. He offered $500.00 a week, and this time she accepted.

Hedwig’s move to Hollywood was the escape and artistic opportunity she craved. And while Germany was beginning to succumb to the charisma of Adolf Hitler and Jews were facing the beginning of what would eventually become the Holocaust, Hedwig’s mother refused to leave her lifestyle in Austria.

Hedwig shot to fame after Mr. Mayer changed her name to Hedy Lamarr and cast her in films with famous co-stars like Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, James Stewart, and William Powell, among others. Her ability to lose herself in her character made her performances outstanding and her beauty unforgettable. But Hedwig, now Hedy, needed more. She needed to make a difference in helping her fellow Europeans back home.

In 1940 German torpedoes sank a civilian transport ship, the SS City of Benares, carrying 90 children fleeing worn torn Britain for safety in Canada. Horrified and outraged, Hedy turned her inexhaustive energy to inventing a device that would enable radio communications from ship to torpedo to ‘hop’ and thereby eliminate the jamming of signals by the enemy. She drew upon her memory of tinkering with her father and the conversations of the Mandl’s dinner parties. Working tirelessly with musician George Antheil, Hedy and George did invent a radio frequency hopping system and were issued a U.S. patent number 2, 292, 387 on August 11, 1942.

Although they were unsuccessful in selling the technology to the United States Navy (who turned them down with the reputed comment that an invention by a woman would not be reliable), their invention led the way later for other scientists to develop Bluetooth and GPS technology.  

Hedy Lamarr went on to act in Hollywood in many famous films and was eventually voted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2014 and earned a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. She would go on to marry six more times. Once her eyesight began to fail in the 1980s, she moved to Florida almost as a recluse and died in 2000 at age 85. Her estate at death was $3.3 million.

Austria issued a stamp in Hedy’s honor, and the face looks similar to the face of Wonder Woman. Perhaps because Hedy was a true wonder woman.

If you enjoyed Hedy’s story and would like to read more Strong Women in History stories, please sign up on the right sidebar. You will then receive the blog once a month.

Wishing you and yours a lovely holiday season and peace in the new year.

~ Linda

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Alice Guy-Blaché

Posted on November 1, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

By Linda Harris Sittig

photo courtesy of Gerd Altmann with Pixabay

While my husband and I lived in rentals for 90 days this year, waiting for our new house to be finished, we watched films every night.

A lot of films.

We revisited old favorites and fascinating documentaries and tuned into new releases. And I did not pay much attention to the directors until it hit me that most names were male.

So, I searched to see if there had been any female directors in the early days of cinema. And that is how I stumbled across Alice Guy-Blaché.

The Young Alice

Born in Paris in 1873 after her parents escaped a smallpox epidemic in Chile, Alice grew up surrounded by books. When her parents decided to return to Chile, Alice went to live with her French grandmother.

Throughout her childhood, she lived in both Chile and France. But when her father died in1891, Alice suddenly needed to support her mother. She trained as a typist and, by 1894, was working for a French camera company. The company’s manager was Leon Gaumont, who became involved in France’s fledgling motion picture industry and chose Alice as his secretary.

The following year Gaumont invited Alice to accompany him to the Lumière event, the first demonstration in France of a filmed screen projection. Alice was fascinated but decided that a narrative film with a story would be more enjoyable.

In a bold move, she wrote a screenplay and convinced Gaumont to let her direct it on the screen. That movie, La Fée Au Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages), earned Alice the fame of being considered the first filmmaker to develop narrative filmmaking systematically. And she was probably the only female director from 1896 to the turn of the twentieth century. Sadly, that first 1896 film of hers no longer exists.

Alice Begins Her Extraordinary Career

From 1896 – 1906, Alice became the head of the production for Gaumont’s company. She went on to direct, produce, or supervise approximately 600 silent films with him, each lasting anywhere from one minute to 30 minutes, but all were narrative dramas or comedies.

Then in 1907, Alice Guy resigned from her position with Gaumont and married a Gaumont employee, Herbert Blaché. Gaumont sent them to America to open an American arm of the Gaumont Production Company. And after a rocky start, the couple went to Flushing, Queens, New York, and helped launch the Gaumont Chronophone company to have Gaumont’s silent films distributed as licensed films.

Their most significant competitor was Thomas A. Edison.

In another bold move, in 1910, Alice decided to start her own company, Solax. She continued to make silent films using the Gaumont studio and distributing them through Gaumont. By 1912, Solax was making enough money that Alice built her own $100,000 studio for Solax in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It was the largest pre-Hollywood studio in America, and she became the first American woman to own a film production studio.

To give you some perspective on the $100,000, a loaf of bread in America in 1912 cost 7 cents.

Several of the Solax films that stand out today are the ones where the hero was a woman. However, Solax as a company only thrived financially for two years, and once the popularity of short films ceased, Alice and Herbert then worked as directors for other film companies.

In 1918 Alice almost died from the Spanish Flu, and Herbert moved her to California, mainly because he wanted to be a part of Hollywood. They divorced in 1920, but both continued to direct films. After Herbert died in 1953, Alice returned to France, where she lectured on filmmaking and continued to write scripts.

Alice’s Legacy

She directed, produced, or supervised about 1,000 films in her lifetime—an astonishing accomplishment. And even if you’ve never heard her name, she became a legend in filmmaking. So much so that Alfred Hitchcock often quoted her.

She died in New Jersey at age 94 and is buried in Mahwah, New Jersey.

However, in September 2019, Alice Guy-Blaché was included in The New York Times series titled “Overlooked No More.”

I love it!

The next time you watch a movie, pay attention to who directed it.

If you enjoyed this month’s blog and want to become a Strong Woman follower, sign up on the right sidebar with your email. You will be notified only once a month for each new blog post.

Meanwhile, you can read more about me on my website: www.strongwomeninhistory.com. And stay tuned. My newest book, Opening Closed Doors, should be out by the first of the year with a strong young woman you won’t forget.

~ Linda

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Virginia Estelle Randolph: Keeping the Dream Alive

Posted on October 1, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

by Linda Harris Sittig

Traditional One-Room Schoolhouse in Rural America, photo from Pixabay, Roy Harryman

In the early 1900s, Virginia E. Randolph’s dream was for every Black child in the South to get a decent education.

She was not the only one to hold fast to that dream. Today, the names of many educators from rural Black schools are only vaguely remembered in their small communities. And the one-room schoolhouses they ran during the Jim Crow Era of American history have also mostly disappeared.

The Rosenwald Schools

From 1917 to 1932, thousands of these one-room schools, the Rosenwald Schools, sought to provide at least an elementary education for Black children in the South. The Rosenwald Schools resulted from a unique collaboration between two visionary men. One man, a Jewish German immigrant, Julius Rosenwald, made his fortune establishing the Sears Roebuck Company.  The other was famed educator Booker T. Washington. Together they formed a foundation that allocated funding to develop over 5,300 schools serving over 700,000 Black students across the South.

The schools were staffed by teachers trained at historically Black colleges, but the supplies like chalkboards and maps were castaways from the segregated white schools. The buildings were often white clapboard and faced north or south so a substantial amount of sunshine could flow through the windows, providing light. Each front door was wide enough to accompany a passel of children dashing back in after recess held open by the teacher as they rang the bell for students to return to their seats.

And even though the Rosenwald schools continued operating into the 1950s when Brown vs. Board of Education struck down segregation in public schools, the Rosenwald Schools continued to function without electricity or indoor plumbing.

Now for Virginia D. Randolph.

The child of formerly enslaved people, Virginia Estelle Randolph, was born in Virginia in 1870. Her birth coincided with the formation of the public school system in Virginia, a segregated system where Black students could not attend schools with whites. At twenty-two, Virginia had completed her formal schooling and took a job teaching in Henrico County, Virginia. She taught at the one-room Mountain Road School. The building and grounds were unsightly, so Virginia whitewashed the school, planted flowers in the yard, and even bought gravel with her savings. She organized a Willing Worker Club and visited the community to encourage parents to support her efforts in improving the school. Next, she developed a unique teaching style that combined academic instruction with practical lessons in cooking, weaving, and gardening.

In 1908 the Superintendent of Schools in Henrico County approached the Board of the Jeanes Teaching Fund, asking that they supplement Virginia Randolph’s salary. Virginia then became the first Jeanes Supervisor Industrial Teacher and the supervisor of all the Black schools in her district. There were 20 Black schools in Henrico County, and for forty years, she traveled weekly to each of them to train teachers and build community support. As the success of her program grew, she also trained educators throughout Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Not content for Black students to only have access to elementary education, Virginia began to champion for Black high schools to be built. In 1917, the Virginia Randolph Training Center (later called the Virginia Randolph High School) was established on Mountain Road, Glenn Allen, Virginia. The money to construct the school came from the Rosenwald Fund. 

Although Virginia never married or had children of her own, she cared for over 50 foster children in her lifetime. She retired from teaching in 1949 and passed in 1958 at age 88.

Throughout all the years of her life, she kept the dream alive.

Finding Virginia and Other Strong Women

~ People often ask me where I find my strong women. I keep my eyes and ears open. And I always stop at historical markers to read about the importance of that location. The markers are short history lessons in themselves. This was how I discovered the Rosenwald Schools.

https://www.historicrussellschool.org

Then I read that a former Rosenwald School was still standing in Durham County, North Carolina. A road trip ensued.

I stood in the yard of the Russell School and gazed up at the windows and the front door. I could almost hear the singing voices of students and imagine all the windows open to fresh air.  And I saluted the countless individuals like Virginia E. Randolph who worked tirelessly so that all children in America could become educated fairly.

If you enjoyed this month’s blog and are not yet a follower, please sign up on the right sidebar.  Although the blog is published only once a month, I am busy writing on other days. You can find my three published novels, Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows, in bookstores, on Kindle, and online. My non-fiction book, B-52 DOWN, pays tribute to a five-person USAF crew, the community who searched for their downed plane, and the five wives who had to deal with the tragedy.

~ linda

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Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering: Saving Children’s Lives

Posted on September 1, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

by Linda Harris Sittig

While there is a current controversy over vaccinations, there was a time in our not-so-distant past when a vaccination could mean the difference between life and death for a young child.

EARLY HISTORY OF VACCINES

We currently think about the Covid vaccine, but vaccines have a much longer history. One of the earliest was Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox in 1798. Louis Pasteur’s vaccine against rabies followed in 1885. Diphtheria, cholera, and typhoid vaccines came around the beginning of 1900. By the late 1920s, vaccines existed against tetanus and tuberculosis. And the list went on well into the 1950s when Jonas Salk developed the vaccine against polio.

If you look at the list of lifesaving vaccines and their inventors, you will notice that all the scientists were men.

Until Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering.

They spent their careers studying bacterial infections and one in particular, the Bordetella Pertussis, more familiarly known as whooping cough.

Many of us have had the DPT vaccine against Diphtheria, Pertussis, and Tetanus. But in the early 1930s, Pertussis killed almost 7,000 Americans a year – mostly young children and infants. And it was a horrible disease where the victim coughed violently, fought to breathe, gasping for breath, and desperately gulped air into their lungs, producing a barking type sound –whooping cough.

And there was no cure.

PEARL AND GRACE

Pearl Kendrick was born in 1890 in New York and attended college at Syracuse University and Columbia. Her main area of interest was the study of bacteriology. After college, she tried her hand at teaching but did not feel drawn to that as a career.

At the end of World War I (post-1918), significant strides in controlling infectious diseases were making medical leaps and bounds. As a result, state public health departments began searching for educated men and women with science degrees who could staff their labs. But most men with health science degrees took research positions at universities where the pay was more lucrative than in state public health departments.

Whom did that leave? Women with science backgrounds.

Pearl Kendrick applied and worked for the New York State Department of Health. Then before 1926, she was recruited to work for the Michigan State Department of Health, headed by visionary Cy Young. By 1926 he had named her director of the newly opened laboratory in Grand Rapids.

Pearl received a doctorate in Public Health from Johns Hopkins and returned to Grand Rapids with the singular goal of eradicating Pertussis, which was in full throttle at the time.

Grace Eldering was born in 1900 in Montana, and after college graduation, she took a job as a teacher. Like Pearl, Grace soon realized that a career in education held little appeal, and in 1928 she relocated to Michigan to work in the state laboratory in Lansing. After a year, she transferred to the laboratory in Grand Rapids and met Pearl Kendrick.

The two women became a workhorse duo working with a team of doctors, nurses, and other researchers. At first, their goal was to develop procedures to diagnose Pertussis and limit its contagious possibilities sooner and more quickly.

But then, in November 1932, their laboratory identified a Pertussis specimen. They worked day and night and, by January, had developed their first experimental Pertussis vaccine. Then came the months and years of clinical trials to prove the worthiness of the vaccine and eliminate any potential dangers. They conducted study after study but were always short on funds.

It took the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, who paid the laboratory in Grand Rapids a visit in 1936. Funding for additional staff soon came from the Federal Works Progress Administration, and by 1944 the American Medical Association added Kendrick and Eldering’s Pertussis vaccine to the list of recommended immunizations.

THEIR LEGACY

Deaths from this dreaded childhood disease dropped dramatically. Where Pertussis once claimed 7,000 lives in one year, the statistics showed only ten deaths in the early 1970s.

Today approximately 85 percent of children worldwide now receive the Pertussis vaccine, usually in the combo of a DPT shot.

Neither Pearl Kendrick nor Grace Eldering became famous for their remarkable achievement. They used their scientific knowledge gained from their Johns Hopkins doctorates plus all their years in the field to continue researching how to eradicate infectious diseases.

Neither woman married, and they continued their professional and personal relationship until Pearl died in 1980. They had lived quiet lives, content with the knowledge that their efforts had saved thousands of children.

Unfortunately, Pertussis isn’t dead. It has again raised its ugly head in areas where people decline to take advantage of the vaccine.

 I am indebted to fellow writer Richard Conniff, whose excellent March 2022 Smithsonian Magazine article prompted my curiosity to research Pearl and Grace for Strong Women’s status. Here is the link to his article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unsung-heroes-ended-deadly-plague-180979547/. That article is excerpted from Conniff’s upcoming book, Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion.

If you enjoyed learning about Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering and are not yet a follower of this blog, please sign up on the right sidebar. My Strong Women in History stories are published on the first of each month.

You can also find my novels about Strong Women and Strong Men in local bookstores and online. Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, Counting Crows, and B-29 DOWN. I am working now on a new novel set during World War II. Find updates on my website: www.lindasittig.com

~ Linda

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Joye Hummel: Ghosting Warrior Writer Invisible No More

Posted on July 27, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

by Linda Harris Sittig

Ghostwriting is nothing new; it has probably been in practice since the days of ancient history. And the large majority of ghostwriters never receive proper credit for what they wrote because it was often attributed to someone else. In the annals of literature, one writer taking advantage of another writer’s penned, but perhaps unpublished papers is also nothing new. Controversy still lurks about William Shakespeare and John Steinbeck.

So, it did not surprise me years ago when I read about the controversy over the creators of Batman, supposedly created by Bob Kane, but in reality, co-created by fellow comic strip author Bill Finger. Bob Kane went on to earn fortune and fame from Batman, while Bill Finger died in obscurity. Then enter Marc Tyler Nobleman, who, with the urging from the comic book community, researched the life of Bill Finger and then wrote Finger’s biography so the world would finally give him his due.

Today the Bill Finger Award is given annually to two recipients whose work has made a significant contribution to the comic book industry, even if their names are not well known.

JOYE HUMMEL

This is where we pick up the story of Joye Hummel.

Born in April 1924 to middle-class parents on Long Island, NY, Joye attended college for only one year and then enrolled instead in secretarial school in Manhattan. Shortly afterwards, one of her instructors, William M. Marston, pulled her aside and complimented her on her writing style, which had shown through in several of her essays.

He offered her a unique job. In addition to being an instructor at Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School, Mr. Marston ran an art studio where he had previously created a strong female comic book character three years ago. This character, dubbed Wonder Woman, was drawn weekly by artist H.G. Peter. True success seemed imminent when Marston received a contract for Wonder Woman to be featured in a syndicated comic strip.

He needed two things. One, he needed an assistant who could help with the promotion of Wonder Woman; two, he needed a young woman who could write contemporary slang and who also had a vision of what a strong Amazonian woman with supernatural powers could do.

WONDER WOMAN

Joye Hummel was 19, and the job sounded fascinating. She started the next week and soon began writing scripts for the comic. Shortly after her start, William Marston contracted polio, and Joye took on more and more of a share in the writing of the scripts. For the next three plus years, Wonder Woman continued her burst upon the comic book stage as Americans were emerging from World War II. The Wonder Woman comic provided hopeful escape for many readers.

Joye continued writing the script as a ghostwriter, which meant she received a salary but never any recognition as the actual writer. She continued from 1944 until almost 1948 when she gave up her career to stay home and raise her infant daughter.

DC Comics hired other writers to complete the Wonder Woman saga. Eventually, the character of Wonder Woman changed, showcasing less and less of the original idea of a strong, courageous woman not afraid to fight for what she believed in.

It would take until 2018, four years after Joye donated her Wonder Woman archives to the Smithsonian Libraries, for Joye to achieve the public recognition she had never sought but so richly deserved. Joye was the 2018 recipient of the Bill Finger Award. She accepted the award at age 94 for her uncredited body of work on the Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s.

Even today, you have to dig into the research to find out the large part that Joye Hummel played in the success of those early Wonder Woman years.

As Wonder Woman herself might have said, “Believe in yourself. You are stronger than you know.”

And, may I add, wear your silver bracelets on both arms.

I hope you enjoyed hearing Joye Hummel’s story. Until next month you can still catch me on my website, https://www.lindasittig.com. And check out my three novels of strong female protagonists in history and my narrative non-fiction.

CUT FROM STRONG CLOTH, LAST CURTAIN CALL, COUNTING CROWS, and B-52 DOWN are available from your favorite bookstore or on line.

~ linda

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Kalpana Chawla: Fearlessly Aiming for the Stars

Posted on July 1, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

by Linda H. Sittig

Image by NASA-Imagery from Pixabay

Many of us will gaze up in the night sky and try to locate a particular star or planet or follow a moving satellite. But once upon a time, there was a young girl in India whose dream was to leave the bounds of Earth and travel into space.

That young girl was Kalpana Chawla.

The first thing you notice about Kalpana in photos is her broad smile. It is almost as if she is living her life’s dream and can’t stop grinning.

Perhaps not as well-known as Sally Ride, Kalpana Chawla was the first Indian-born American woman to travel into space after becoming an astronaut at age 35.

HER STORY BEGINS

Born in India, the youngest of four siblings in March 1962, Kalpana became fascinated with airplanes from an early age. It wasn’t long before she asked her father to take her to a local flying club so she could see the planes up close.

Her parents encouraged her in her studies, and Kalpana excelled in school. When further education was still a luxury for girls, Kalpana’s mother supported the idea that her daughter should apply to Punjab Engineering College.

In college, she pursued a degree in aeronautical engineering, even though her professors tried to explain it would be a limited career path. Nevertheless, she persevered.

Because there was not a viable space program in India, Kalpana emigrated to the United States in 1982 and, by age 26, earned a Masters’ Degree from the University of Texas and then a Doctorate in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado. Three years later, she was sworn in as a U.S. citizen and applied to NASA. Along the way, she also became a certified pilot.

LIFE WITH NASA

By 1994 Kalpana was chosen to be an astronaut candidate with NASA. It would take three rigorous years of training before she embarked on her first space flight. That flight was on board the space shuttle Columbia STS-87. The shuttle orbited the Earth 252 times in just over two weeks. One of her jobs as a mission specialist was operating the shuttle’s prime robotic arm. Five other astronauts were with her as the historic November 1997 mission concluded its last orbit and returned to Earth.

Believing that Indian girls deserved to learn about space flight, Kalpana asked NASA to invite two girls from her secondary school each summer to attend the Summer Space Experience Program. Since 1998 two Indian girls have arrived in Houston, Texas, as participants.

What is it like to travel aboard a rocket? Kalpana says, “When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.”

In 2000 Kalpana was chosen for a second voyage into space, this time on the Columbia space shuttle STS-107, but repeated delays occurred. Finally, on January 16, 2003, a crew consisting of Kalpana, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Laurel Clark, Rick Husband, William McCool, and Ilan Ramon shot into space.

Together they completed nearly 80 experiments studying space science, including astronaut health and safety.

However, during their launch, a section of foam insulation broke free from an external tank and struck the port wing. Although foam shedding had occurred on previous launches, no one could know that it would prove fatal this time.

As Columbia began its return and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, hot gases penetrated the internal wing structure, causing immediate aircraft disintegration.

At age 41, Kalpana Chawla died instantly alongside her crew.

ONE WITH THE UNIVERSE

Today there is an asteroid that carries her name, a lunar crater named after her, a series of satellites dedicated to her memory, a street in New York City now bears her name, and perhaps the most poignant – the Kalpana Chawla Award was instituted in India to recognize young Indian women scientists.

If you ever go hiking in Zion National Park in Utah, USA, that is where Kalpana’s ashes were scattered, as per her wishes. And the next time you gaze up into the night sky, whisper her name in remembrance.

Thank you to blog follower Eileen Rice, who suggested I learn about Kalpana. I’m glad I did.

Please forward this month’s blog to friends and share Kalpana’s story. My three books of historical fiction and my narrative non-fiction book are all available in bookstores and on line.

Happy Reading!

~ linda

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Dorothy Kenyon: Early Advocate for Social Justice

Posted on June 1, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

by Linda Harris Sittig

I have long admired Ruth Bader Ginsburg, lawyer, Supreme Court Justice, and champion of women’s rights.

But before Ruth, there was Dorothy Kenyon.

Never achieving the same fame as Ruth B. Ginsburg, Dorothy Kenyon never-the-less left an indelible mark upon our legal system.

Born in 1888 to a well-to-do family in Manhattan, New York, Dorothy spent most of her younger life as a social butterfly.

Then a trip to Mexico changed everything.

Mexico

Possessing a degree in economics from Smith College, Dorothy spent a year living in Mexico and seeing firsthand the effects of poverty on families, particularly women.

Mexico altered her life path. She returned to New York and enrolled in the New York University School of Law, graduating in 1917 and passing the New York Bar the same year.

 From 1917 to 1929, she worked tirelessly in various law firms championing cases for social injustice, focusing on women. However, hindered in advancing her career, she decided to make the bold move and open her own law firm.

In 1930 the law firm of Straus and Kenyon took on clients where equal rights under the law were in question. Dorothy never formally joined any women’s rights organizations but preferred to fight the battle on her own. She penned numerous articles for various New York City newspapers to foster an awareness of how the legal system failed American women.

In 1938 Dorothy was selected as the U.S. representative to the League of Nations for the committee study on the legal status of women internationally.

Dorothy vs. McCarthyism

She made headlines again in 1950 when Senator Joseph McCarthy put forward her name for the first person in America to be investigated for her supposed relationship with the Communist Party.

She confronted McCarthy, denying any association with Communism, and called him a liar. Although the Senate subcommittee cleared her of the charges, her career in public service was tainted.

One of her most notable cases came a few years later, in 1957 when an all-male jury in Florida convicted a woman named Gwendolyn Hoyt of murdering her husband. The defense argument was based on Mrs. Hoyt’s testimony that her husband had been beating her for years.

In 1957 in Florida, all juries were male-only. Women could volunteer to become a juror, but the process was so complicated and lengthy that it rarely occurred. Dorothy took up the challenge and represented Gwendolyn Hoyt, stipulating that Mrs. Hoyt had been denied her constitutional rights by denying her a jury of her peers. An all-male jury did not qualify as her peers.

Hoyt vs. Florida

Hoyt vs. Florida made it to the U.S. Supreme Court (which at that time in history had all-male justices) and lost. The male judges ruled that women were the center of the home and family life and should not have to be considered for jury duty.

Dorothy was furious and frustrated by the loss, but her case would inspire future lawyers championing social justice.

After Hoyt vs. Florida, Dorothy began preparing legal briefs for the NAACP and the ALCU, and she joined the forces seeking to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

Dorothy was a trailblazer, and as such, she often rebelled against societal norms. She never married, preferring to have a series of intense romantic relationships with several prominent men. Her streak of personal independence did not fit the confines of marriage.

Diagnosed with stomach cancer in her early 80s, she refused to stop working and continued participating in President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Up to the very end, she worked as an advocate for the poor.

Her Legacy

Dorothy died five days short of her 84th birthday. The year was 1972, and a young female lawyer had just volunteered as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, focusing on gender equality and women’s rights. She had read extensively about Dorothy Kenyon’s career.

That young lawyer was Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

If you enjoyed Dorothy Kenyon’s story and are not yet a follower of this blog, please sign up on the right hand side.

Passionate about strong women’s stories from history, check out my three novels, Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows. My non-fiction book is B-52 DOWN. All of my books can be ordered from your favorite bookstore, or found on line and available on Kindle.

Watch for my news this fall for my newest book, Opening Closed Doors, where the courage of one woman helps to end segregation in a small Virginia town.

~ Linda

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Rosalind Franklin: the Unsung Heroine of DNA

Posted on May 1, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

by Linda Harris Sittig

Although you know Rosalind Franklin’s scientific discovery, you may not recognize her name.

That is because her accomplishment was overshadowed and credited to three men: Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of DNA.

However, their ‘discovery’ was based on Rosalind Franklin’s data.

Early Years

Born in July 1920 in Notting Hill, London, to an affluent Jewish family, Rosalind exhibited a robust academic aptitude from early childhood. By the age of six, when other children were playing games, Rosalind worked on arithmetic problems she designed for herself.

Recognizing her talents, her parents enrolled her in 1931 at St. Paul’s School for Girls in London because it was one of the few female schools teaching physics and chemistry. While there, Rosalind excelled in math, languages, and science and graduated with enough honors to win a scholarship to university.

However, her father asked her to give the scholarship to a deserving refugee student instead. This humanitarian act most likely stemmed from Rosalind’s parents had taken in two Jewish refugee children who had escaped from the Nazis on the Kindertransport program the same year Rosalind matriculated from St. Paul’s.

Higher Education and Research

Rosalind then attended college in Cambridge, England, to study chemistry and graduated with honors. She stayed at Cambridge on a research fellowship and eventually earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1945.

After WWII, Rosalind went to Paris to study with Jacques Mering, an X-ray crystallographer. With him, she learned how to apply X-ray diffraction to amorphous substances.

Then in 1950, Rosalind received a fellowship at King’s College in London to work in the Biophysics Unit. Her director, John Randall, asked Rosalind to begin work on DNA fibers because she was the only one with experience of experimental diffraction.

Randall then assigned Raymond Gosling to be her research assistant. Gosling had been Maurice Wilkins’ assistant up to that time.

DNA

In 1950 Swiss chemist Rudolf Signer was able to prepare a purified DNA sample from the thymus of a calf. Signer freely distributed the sample to Maurice Wilkins. Then while Wilkins was on holiday, Randall (having reassigned Gosling now to Rosalind) gave Rosalind the go-ahead to proceed with her research with the DNA sample Wilkins had obtained.

She immediately started applying her expertise with X-ray diffraction. She adjusted and refined an X-ray tube and camera to produce better X-ray images than had previously existed. She recorded her analysis in her lab notebook, “Evidence of spiral structure with refined photographs.”

Rosalind then presented her notes on the DNA sample at a lecture at King’s College. The date was November 1951.She continued her research throughout 1952, and by January 1953, she concluded that all DNA forms had helices (spirals). Next, she began to write a series of manuscripts about her conclusion.

At the same time, Cambridge researcher James Watson visited Rosalind’s lab and viewed her DNA X-ray photo.

On March 6, 1953, two of Rosalind’s manuscripts were considered for publication in Denmark.

On March 7th, the next day, Francis Crick and James Watson completed a draft model of their DNA interpretation, showing a double helix. They were also alerted that Rosalind was leaving King’s College to transfer to Birkbeck College.

The Controversy

No one knows the exact moment Rosalind realized the DNA was undoubtedly a double helical molecule. Evidence from her lab books shows that by February 1953, she was convinced of the helical structure of DNA but was not sure if it was a double or single helix.

Crick and Watson, however, published their experimental DNA model on April 25, 1953, with one simple footnote acknowledging they had been stimulated in their research by the yet unpublished research of Rosalind Franklin.

Rosalind and Raymond Gosling did publish their evidence of the double helix, but not until July 25, 1953.

Then Rosalind turned her attention to RNA and the Tobacco Mosaic Virus.

In early 1958 The Brussels World’s Fair decided to exhibit her model of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus at the International Science Pavilion.

The Fair opened on April 17th, and Rosalind died the next day, April 18th, from ovarian cancer.

She was 37 years old, and her gift to the world went largely unnoticed outside of the field of X-ray science.

She had been a gifted student, a young woman who loved to travel and hike, and although never married, she dedicated her life to research and a small circle of like-minded scientific friends.

In James Watson’s 1968 memoir, Double Helix, he portrayed Rosalind Franklin as uncooperative, unattractive, and incompetent.

Really? Might he have chosen three other words to describe her brilliant contribution to science?

If DNA is the blueprint of our cells, then surely Rosalind Franklin should be described and remembered as a scientific architect – a premier architect.

I hope you enjoyed Rosalind’s story. If you are not yet a follower of this blog, please sign up on the right side bar and pass the blog on to a friend.

You can find my novels of three Strong Women, Cut from Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows in bookstores and on line. A kindle version is available from Amazon. I also have a non-fiction book, B-52 DOWN about the 1964 B-52 that crashed in the western Maryland mountains during a blizzard with two nuclear bombs on board.

Wishing everyone well.

~Linda

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The 120 Strong Women I Know

Posted on April 1, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

by Linda Harris Sittig

Back in April 2012, I wrote these words:

Welcome to my blog – Strong Women in History. My name is Linda Harris Sittig, and if you have found your way here, you are most likely also intrigued by the many fascinating women in history whose lives made a difference. I have always been fascinated by the women who dared to be different, those who courageously stood up for what they believed, faced adversarial opponents, and who forged ahead to do something unique with their lives. Join me on the first of every month as I pay tribute to a Strong Woman in History.

In the previous year, I had made two life-changing discoveries.

  1. I had finished reading the biography of Cleopatra only to discover that old high school textbooks and Hollywood had warped my entire view of her. Instead, I learned that she was a truly accomplished woman who spoke eight languages, was well versed in military tactics, and believed in the importance of literacy for her people. Not exactly Elizabeth Taylor, who had portrayed her in the movie version.
  2. I had also discovered an ancestor, Ellen Canavan, who in 1861 had envisioned a better cloth for soldiers’ uniforms. No one took her seriously, so she partnered with a local factory owner, James Nolan, who was my great-grandfather. Together they created a strong cloth of combined wool and cotton for soldiers’ uniforms and sold the fabric to the U.S. government just as the Civil War exploded. Ellen, however, died a few years later and all the credit and the fortune went to my great-grandfather, who buried her with only his name for identification.

Armed with indignation over Cleopatra and Ellen Canavan, I set out to create a blog that would pay tribute to strong women. I started with Cleopatra but then decided to focus on strong women from history who should have become famous (like Ellen Canavan) but whose accounts had been forgotten.

Over the past ten years, I have profiled 120 women whose stories I brought back to life. I have tried to include women from multiple races, religions, nationalities, and locations worldwide.

It takes me approximately 5 – 6 hours per woman to research, write the first draft, edit, find a graphic, and create the WordPress blog. Some of the women’s stories have been easier to write than others, but each woman has left me with a renewed aspiration to do my part in making this a better world.

You can search the blog on the right sidebar to find previous stories, but here is a sampling of some of my favorites.

Sigridur Tomasdottir of Iceland was still a young woman in 1900 when she devoted her life to preserving the Gullfoss Waterfall from being bought by foreign investors for industrial use of hydroelectric power. Today, the Gullfoss Waterfall is one of Iceland’s most prominent tourist attractions.

Cicely Saunders of England became a doctor in 1957 and focused her energies on working with terminally ill patients. Ten years later, she opened the first public Hospice program and operated the program until her death at eighty-seven. Today, there are Hospice programs on every inhabitable continent.

Ka’ahumanu of Hawaii was one of King Kamehameha’s wives, who in the early 1800s bravely broke the taboo system that kept women subservient in the Hawaiian culture. The taboo system had lasted for over 1,500 years.

Josie Murray, in 1957, challenged the unwritten rule of segregation in her small southern town of Purcellville, Virginia, when she marched into the town library to check out a book. Denied access because of her race, Josie and her husband Sam worked with a lawyer to sue for the right to use a public library. Today all public libraries in the United States are open to everyone.

Edyth Fox was an energetic young woman who had worked for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington D.C. But in 1954, she was a young mother of two boys and diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Refusing to let the disease ruin her life, Edyth became heavily involved with community activities for the next 40 years, earning the accolade of Multiple Sclerosis Mother of the Year.

Irena Sandler of Poland was a social worker in 1939 when the Nazi Army invaded her homeland. She immediately joined an underground network that worked to orchestrate escapes for hundreds of Jewish children trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. As each child escaped, Irena wrote their name on a scrap of paper and put it in a jar. By the end of WWII, Irena had multiple jars buried in a friend’s garden. Her effort was to keep the children’s names alive and hopefully be reunited with family.

Karin Bergöö was one of Sweden’s premier textile artists from the early 1900s. However, her art and her life were overshadowed by her famous husband, Carl Larsson, who is still one of the most well-known Swedish painters. However, if you visit an IKEA store, you will see what is known as ‘new Swedish design,’ the art style that Karin Bergöö Larsson started over 100 years ago.

And there were so many more…

Katie Hall Underwood, Emily Roebling, Margaret Sanger, Katherine Johnson, Susan Koerner, and hundreds more.

But perhaps my favorite was Isabelle Romée. I found her name while on a trip to France in a small, off-the-way museum in the countryside. If anyone deserves the Mother of the Year award, it would be Isabelle. Living in the 1400s, she spent most of her life trying to prove that her daughter had not practiced witchcraft. She petitioned the Vatican year in and year out to investigate her daughter’s case, but she died before learning that not only was her daughter exonerated, she became a saint. Isabelle’s daughter was Joan of Arc.

I salute Strong Women everywhere. In my writing room, I have this quote framed:

Here’s to strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.

Happy birthday, blog! Onto year eleven!

~ Linda

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The Couney Family: Giving Preemies a Chance to Live

Posted on March 1, 2022 by lhsittig@verizon.net

By Linda Harris Sittig

You’ve heard the adage, “It takes a village.” But sometimes, it takes just one family to make a profound difference. This month’s blog is not about a strong woman; it is about her family – the Couney Family of Brooklyn, New York.

And as in most good stories, the backstory sets the foundation.

THE BACK STORY

In the nineteenth century, babies born prematurely were considered genetic weaklings and often did not thrive. The mortality rate worldwide was high for children born 3-4 weeks early and weighing less than 5 pounds.

But in the mid-1850s, a French gynecologist named Dr. Etienne Tarnier started using special incubators to help premature babies survive.

By 1880 several research reports in France were extolling the virtues of incubators, even though medical authorities viewed the practice as quackery. Sixteen years later, Dr. Pierre Budin used the incubators with even greater success. In 1896 he gained permission to showcase six incubators, with preemies, to the World’s Fair in Berlin.

Martin Couney stared at the incubators at that exposition, impressed that people would pay to see such tiny babies lying in glass cribs. Two years later, Martin Couney immigrated to America, with dreams in his head of saving babies and making money.

CONEY ISLAND

Martin settled on Coney Island, New York, the most famous vacationland in America. It was known for its amusement parks, seaside bathing, and a 2.7-mile long Boardwalk. Coney Island attracted several thousand visitors every year.  Scraping together all the money he could find, Couney convinced the owners of Luna Park to let him set up an exhibit on the Boardwalk, where people could pay to see tiny babies.

Martin opened his incubator facility in 1903, and at just 10 cents a ticket, viewers flocked to his modest setup, called All the World Loves a Baby.

At first, he found only a few families willing to take a chance to save their premature babies’ lives. Martin did not charge the parents even a cent because he planned on the income generated from ticket sales to cover the cost of running the facility.

1904

The year 1904 was significant. Martin had by then hired a staff of six professional nurses, four registered and two wet nurses who rotated on a 24-hour schedule. In addition, he paid two local doctors to visit the facility daily. An early proponent of the importance of breastfeeding, Martin was adamant that the wet nurses stay as healthy as possible. They were immediately fired if caught smoking, drinking, or eating hot dogs (!). He was also an early proponent of the positive effect of babies being held, and every day each preemie was cuddled and gently rocked by a nurse.

It was also the year he fell in love with one of the professional nurses, Annabelle Segner. Marrying after a short courtship, Annabelle and Martin quickly became a team. Together they handled the intake of each preemie. The infant was immediately given a sponge bath, rubbed down with alcohol, swaddled, and given a small drop of brandy (if the baby was big enough to swallow) before being placed in a glass incubator kept at 96 degrees.

The facility was immaculate, the staff wore starched uniforms, and the babies were fed on a regular two-hour feeding schedule.

And to their credit, the Couneys took any preemie brought to them regardless of race, religion, or social class. And although it cost $15.00 (about $400 today) per incubator for the medical care, parents were never charged. Martin had been right. The entrance fee to the exhibit covered all the operating costs, good wages for the staff, and enough left for the Couney’s to open a second exhibit.

Then in 1907, Annabelle went into labor six weeks early and delivered a baby girl weighing only three pounds. They named her Hildegard.

BABY HILDEGARD

Annabelle and Martin immediately put Hildegard into their program. As each week went by, their baby daughter flourished and grew up to become a nurse at the facility. And although they hired barkers to stand outside the entrance to entice the crowd, the family considered their operation a small hospital, not a sideshow. In reality, it was a functioning neonatal intensive care unit.

I want to share that one of the Incubator Baby barkers was a clean-shaven, good-looking young man named Archie. Archie Leach worked for the Couney family for two years. But you would know him by his Hollywood name, Cary Grant.

SUMMARY

Annabelle died in 1936, and after Cornell Hospital opened the first New York premature Infant Station in 1943, Martin and Hildegard closed the Coney Island facility.

Today, of course, it would be considered unethical to house preemies in a public exhibit. But if you could talk to any parents whose preemie survived because of the Couney’s, I doubt they had any regrets.

Today, 1 in 10 babies born in America is premature. But thank goodness we have neonatal hospital facilities in all 50 states.

But from 1903 to 1943, the Couney family took in over 8,000 babies and boasted an 85% survival rate.

It took a family’s efforts to save thousands of preemie lives.

~ If you enjoyed this month’s Strong Women story, please sign up to follow the blog (on the right-hand side of the page). Then share the blog with friends.

You can always catch up with me on my website www.lindasittig.com. Right now, I am working on my fourth novel celebrating another unsung strong women in history. Happy Women’s History Month!

Linda😊

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