Grace Caudill Lucas: the Book Woman by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on January 1, 2020 by lhsittig@verizon.net

I have always been in awe of libraries, and therefore also with librarians.

From the bibliophiles of my childhood, who introduced me to Nancy Drew to the librarians of my teen years who helped encourage my love of historical fiction, book promoters have always been my gatekeepers and heroes.

Especially when I remember that in my first week of teaching, I discovered that none of my students could read the county-issued textbooks, so I walked downstairs and introduced myself to the librarian.

She nodded in understanding, disappeared into the stacks, and returned with a copy of Sounder by William H.Armstrong. Her suggestion was to read it aloud to my students and teach them the principles of literature through that novel.

For the remainder of that year, I consulted weekly with her to discover other novels and short stories for my reluctant readers. As the years went by and my career flourished, there would be Edna, Linda Sue, Cathie, Karen, Willa, Betty, Lois, Vicki, and many other librarians who came to my rescue when I needed the perfect book for my students.

But I took libraries for granted; it never occurred to me that entire sections of Americans did not have access to books.

Grace Caudill Lucas helped to remedy that.

In 1931 Grace Caudill (Lucas) was living in Lee County, Kentucky in the heart of Appalachia. At age 19, she had a two-year-old boy, and a one-month-old girl and her husband had just abandoned her.

This was in the throes of the Great Depression, and times were tough all over America, but especially so in eastern Kentucky, where shuttered coal mines had skyrocketed unemployment to 40 percent.

At first, Grace tried her hand with the WPA Sewing Project. Three years later, she heard about the new Pack Horse Libray Project of the WPA and applied for a job as a pack horse librarian.

The WPA, Works Progress Administration, was established in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. One year later, the WPA initiated funding for the Pack Horse Libraries.

Because eastern Kentucky was one of the hardest-hit sections of Appalachia with high unemployment and 31 percent illiteracy, the Pack Horse Library Project targeted the isolated settlements in the Cumberland Mountains.

Grace quickly learned that she would ride through eastern Lee County and deliver books three days a week for a salary of $28.00 a month. She would have to rent a horse or mule at 50 cents a week and pay for the animal’s feed. That would still leave her with more money then she had previously ever earned.

Her job meant rising at 4:30 am, feeding her two small children and taking them over to her mother’s house, and then saddling up the horse. She was out on the roads by dawn, carrying 100 books in two sturdy bags perched behind her saddle. By the time she returned home, it might be dark and she would have covered roughly 20 – 30 miles. On horseback. In all weather conditions. By herself.

The bulk of her deliveries were children’s books, which were favored by both children and their illiterate parents who could decipher the story through pictures. The other requested materials included The Bible, Robinson Crusoe, and magazines.

Without any paved or gravel roads, Grace would pick her way along deer paths and rocky creekbeds with the sound of rushing water accompanying her journey. She rode in all types of weather, plowing through knee-high snow or sleeting rain that left ice crystals clinging to her coat. Once, her shoes froze to the stirrups.

But she never quit. The money helped her family survive the Depression. In Grace’s own words:

“In the Depression, times were tough. Many a night my children and me went to bed with just milk and bread for supper, and it’s still good enough for me.”

Some of Grace’s deliveries were to one-room schoolhouses where as many as forty-five children clamored for her to distribute the precious books. Other times she stopped at isolated cabins and offered to read aloud to the family. Each family was allowed one or two books or magazines and had two weeks before Grace would return. Grace then collected her materials from the previous visit and set out again, this time to perhaps another remote cabin in a deep hollow where she had to lead her horse and was the only visitor the family had from month to month.

Grace never calculated her mileage, although she made a full circuit in eastern Lee County from Bear Creek on toward Tallega. Estimates exist that most of the Pack Horse Librarians logged from 80 – 90 miles each week.

While the WPA paid the Pack Horse Librarians’ salary, all of the books were donated by fellow Americans, mostly from outside of Appalachia.

When the program finally ended in 1943 due to a lack of funding by the WPA and American employment skyrocketing with WWII, the Pack Horse Librarians had circulated books to approximately 100,000 Appalachian families. And all those books were delivered by steadfast women from rural Kentucky, willing to ride up into the hollows where mountain folk clamored for the stories inside the books.

When Grace died in 2001 at age 89, rural Kentuckians were able to obtain books from motorized bookmobiles. And by 2014, Kentucky had more bookmobiles than any other state.

Grace would be pleased.

Thank you to Strong Women follower Donna Haarz, who sent me a magazine article on the Pack Horse Librarians. Once read, I plunged headfirst into researching these women.

If you enjoyed this month’s blog, please sign up on the right sidebar to become a Strong Women follower, and encourage others to do the same. In the meantime you can catch me on Twitter @LHSittig and discover my strong women novels: Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows – all available from bookstores and online.

Happy New Year. Happy new decade. Happy reading!

Linda:)

Posted in history, short biographies, strong women, women who made a difference, world history | Tagged , , , | 18 Comments

Phyliss Latour Doyle: the Knitter Was a Spy by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on December 2, 2019 by lhsittig@verizon.net

The knitter was a spy, or the spy was a knitter?

Phyliss Latour Doyle belongs to a unique group in history — steganographers, who hide secret data within ordinary pieces of everyday life, like a knitted scarf.

While the term steganography is a more modern term, the practice is not. There are references to spies in the American Revolution using codes written in routine correspondence and female spies who transmitted coded data inside the skeins of yarn in their knitting baskets.

For Phyliss Latour Doyle and other women who participated in WWI or WWII as resistance fighters, part of their value were the messages they knitted into their yarns and then stowed away within their knitting baskets to be transmitted without the enemy’s knowledge.

In WWI, Madame Levengle of France would knit while sitting in front of her window watching enemy troop movement below. As she knitted, she tapped her feet, sending coded messages to her children, supposedly doing their homework in the room directly beneath her. The children then copied down the encrypted message, which found its way to the Allies.

In Belgium, a grandmother also knitted at her window, watching the trains pass on the nearby railroad. She would knit a bumpy stitch for one train and then drop a stitch making a small hole for a different type of rail car. The coded scarf message of which trains were passing through was then carried by a Belgian resistance worker to help with the defeat of the German armies.

But, back to Phyllis Latour Doyle. She was a British spy who parachuted into Normandy in 1944 prior to the D-Day invasion. Pretending to be a poor French girl selling soap, she bicycled throughout the area, chatting with the German soldiers. Then she returned to her quarters, knitting Morse code messages into her yarn. The yarn was put into her knitting basket and delivered through Resistance channels back to the British to help pave the way for D-Day.

How does one knit in code?

There are only two basic stitches in knitting: a purl stitch and a knit stitch. The purl makes a stitch looking like a horizontal line or small bump. The knit stitch is smooth and looks like a low V.

By using a single purl stitch and then three in an alternating row together, one can transmit in Morse code of a dot and then a dash. Other knitters tied small knots into the yarn with each knot’s placement denoting a unique code.

While this sounds deceptive, it was. But it was also a risky activity.

All wars since the beginning of man have had spies. And in all wars, the punishment for being discovered as a spy was usually death.

Just because a spy was a woman, did not guarantee she would not be executed. Although in the American Civil War, many of the female spies like Rose Greenhow were left to rot in prison. (She was eventually released).

Women were often recruited as spies because they could move more seamlessly through society and not appear as suspicious as a man might appear.

Louise DeBettignies was a spy in WWI whose masterful techniques became legendary. She eluded the Germans in France during her leadership of the Alice Network but was eventually captured. However, during her time in the network, it is surmised that her group of female spies were able to save the lives of over 1000 British soldiers.

If this topic interests you, then be sure to read Kathryn Atwood’s Women Heroes of World War I or the historical fiction The Alice Network by Kate Quinn. Both books will open your eyes to riveting stories of female spies from the Great War, called that because no one would have believed that only 20 years later another world war would occur.

Thank you to blog follower Cort Johns from The Netherlands for suggesting I research the knitting spies!

As always, please sign up on the right-hand sidebar to become a follower of Strong Women. Once a month, a new woman’s story will arrive in your email box. Followers are important! They show the algorithm gods that humans are reading these stories.

If you would like something more in-depth, then look for my “Threads of Courage Series” consisting of three novels: Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows. All of the books are available from your favorite bookstore or online. Each tells the unforgettable story of a woman who refused to be silenced.

Happy Reading!

linda

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Maggie Canavan – Third Generation in Threads of Courage by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on October 31, 2019 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Maggie Canavan only heard about the sweatshops of Greenwich Village when she read this newspaper article on the infamous Triangle Factory fire.

On a chilly March morning in 1911, 146 young women left their tenements in New York’s Lower East Side and walked several blocks west to Greenwich Village, where they were employed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.

They were young immigrants, all grateful for a job in America where they worked 10-hour days for a sweatshop salary of $4.00 a week.  Together, they moved in groups into the two freight elevators, which transported them to the 8th and 9th floors of the Triangle Factory. It was a Saturday.

Now, imagine a school cafeteria. That space is approximately the same square footage as the Triangle workroom. Each workroom is filled with continuous rows of long wooden tables and girls crammed shoulder to shoulder on both sides. Some girls are pinning patterns, others are cutting bolts of fabric, and some are sewing at machines. The click-clacking of the sewing machines drowns out the hum of the girls’ voices.

Under all the tables are large bins overflowing with highly flammable cotton scraps. Above the tables, thin tissue paper patterns hang from the ceiling like undulating rows of prom decorations. Only two exit doors exist, and one is permanently locked so the girls can’t sneak out to take an extra bathroom break.

At 4:50 pm, the closing bell rings, signifying for the girls to stop work and clean up their stations. What happens next is never documented, but someone, a floor supervisor perhaps, flips the stub of a glowing cigarette to the floor, but it falls into a scrap bin instead.

Within minutes the scraps catch fire, and the flames reach upward to the wooden tables. Next, the tables and the cotton bolts begin to burn, and tongues of flames shoot upward to the tissue paper patterns.

Within 10 minutes, the entire workroom is engulfed. Panic sets in and the girls rush for the main exit door, which has been narrowed to allow only one person at a time to leave.

But with almost 180 people in the room, the possibility of escape is slim. As the fire turns into a raging inferno, the remaining girls have a choice: stay and burn to death or jump out the windows. 62 rush to the windows and leap. None survive.

When a final body count is conducted, 84 victims died from burns, smoke inhalation, or being suffocated, and 62 lie dead on the sidewalk outside.

Seven years later, when Maggie moves to Greenwich Village for a summer job, she is drawn to find the site of the old Triangle Factory. She stands in front of the building, imaging the terror of the 146 girls who lost their lives in the fire, and she feels goosebumps; somehow, she should be an advocate for other sweatshop girls. She doesn’t yet know how.

As she turns to leave, one solitary crow lands on the nearby street sign. It glares at her with its beady eyes, as if to say, “You’re an outsider, and you don’t belong here.”

Shaken, she leaves, not realizing what the future holds in store.

That is the premise that starts my newest novel, Counting Crows, and the third in the “Threads of Courage” series. If you read book #1, Cut From Strong Cloth, you met Maggie’s grandparents. If you read book #2, Last Curtain Call, you met Maggie’s parents.

In Book #3, Counting Crows, you will become immersed in the bohemian lifestyle that Maggie discovers while living in Greenwich Village in 1918. During her stay, she will celebrate the end of the Great War (WWI), live through the devastation of the flu pandemic that kills 33,000, and doggedly attempt to right the wrongs of at least one insidious sweatshop.

The characters and events are all based on the real people who lived and worked in the Village and left their mark. Val Fox, an artist, Mary Simkovitch, manager of a settlement house, Crystal Eastman, a prominent feminist, Jessie Beals, a photographer, and Gladys, the old woman in the park.

I hope you celebrate when Maggie falls in love, wince when her heart gets broken, and understand why she believes love will never come again.

Most importantly, I hope you will applaud the strong young woman she becomes when she refuses to give up and learns that life is not always fair, but it is worth living.

What is Counting Crows? It is an old Irish superstition. “One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a wedding, four for a birth. Five for silver, six for gold, and seven for a secret that can never be told.” But you’ll have to read the book to figure it out for yourself.

Counting Crows is available from Freedom Forge, Inc., bookstores, and online at www.bit.ly/36fMZJQ.

If you are intrigued by Maggie’s story, sign up on the right side of the blog to become a monthly follower of Strong Women!

~ Linda

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Harriet Pullen Who Answered the Call of the Wild by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on October 2, 2019 by lhsittig@verizon.net

What I have learned from the 90+ women I have researched for this blog, is that all of them faced adversity, and striving to overcome the obstacles is what forged them into becoming strong women.

Harriet Pullen is no exception.

Born in Wisconsin in 1860, she grew up with a father who was always looking for a way to make money. He moved the family to the Dakotas where they faced devastating droughts, swarms of locusts, and unimaginable floods.  Next, they moved to the state of Washington to gamble in land ventures, but with little success.

While in La Push, Washington, Dan Pullen, a local land speculator, befriended the family. Despite the age difference of 18 years, he proposed to Harriet in 1881, and she agreed to marry him.

At first, Dan made a lot of money, and Harriet escaped the poverty of her childhood. They had four children in quick succession, but then several of Dan’s land deals were found to be fraudulent. The legal battles that ensued left the family bankrupt. Dan solved the problem by walking out one day and never returning.

Now Harriet was left with four children and no immediate means of income. She had read of the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska and decided there had to be available jobs.

In 1897, she asked a trusted friend to take care of her four children (hello, that friend deserves a halo) and Harriet boarded a ship bound for Skagway, Alaska.

When she arrived, she was 37 years old, had only $7.00 in her purse, and possessed only two skills: cooking and driving a team of horses.

Although Skagway was nothing more than a small town of muddy streets, it was the doorway to the Klondike Gold Rush. Stampeders (men seeking to find gold) flooded the streets.

And what those men needed most, Harriet concluded, was a decent meal.

She became hired as a cook and in her off-hours wandered the streets collecting tin cans. Then she brought the tin home, hammered it into pie plates and set up her own business selling small apple pies to hungry would-be miners.

She knew that after decent food, what the men needed next was pack horses to help them traverse the treacherous trails leading up through the mountains to the Klondike.

Harriet sent for the seven horses she still owned back in Washington and opened up a freight business. That proved lucrative, earning her as much as $25.00 per day (equivalent to $750.00 today), allowing her to send for her children.

But then in 1899 construction began on the White Pass and Yukon Railway. Miners willingly paid to ride the rails instead of climbing with a 100- pound backpack up the treacherous 20-mile White Pass trail with an elevation of 2888 feet.

Harriet’s freight business dried up.

Determined not to be affected by this turn of events, Harriet calculated that wealthy tourists would be willing to visit Alaska.

Knowing that she would have to provide completely different lodgings than what was currently available in Skagway, she used all her savings and bought Captain Moore’s Victorian homestead and turned it into the Pullen House Hotel.

She advertised luxury linens, hot baths, and served all her meals on Captain Moore’s china and silver.

As a hotel proprietor, she banked on the idea that well-to-do tourists from the ‘lower states’ would pay to finance an Alaskan vacation. She began to advertise her hotel and soon tourists arrived in Skagway, often on the newly popular mode of travel – cruise ships.

Within a few short years, Harriet became a wealthy woman. And surprise, surprise, Dan Pullen suddenly appeared back in her life. According to local folklore, she funded an expedition so he could explore the Yukon looking for gold. They never reunited.

Harriet lived out her life in the hotel, dying at the age of 87 in 1947 and buried in the small cemetery that lies on the edge of the White Pass trail. The same trail that a failed miner, but later a successful novelist, wrote about in his books White Fang and Call of the Wild – Jack London.

Today only the chimney remains of Harriet’s hotel and the legends of a young woman who arrived with $7.00 in her pocket and spent the next 50 years helping to put Alaskan tourism on the map.

Thank you to singer Laura Sable, who shared Harriet’s story with me.

I give a disclaimer here to all the dates listed since every written source I consulted listed varying years.

But, hey. A strong woman anyway.

Stay tuned to a mid-month blog where I will be sharing about my newest strong woman novel, Counting Crows. It should be available by October 20th!

~ Linda:)

Posted in history, short biographies, strong women, women who made a difference | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Margaret Rudkin: the Bread Lady by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on September 3, 2019 by lhsittig@verizon.net
The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook

Chances are you have savored a buttered slice of cinnamon swirl toast, or a decadent Pepperidge Farm cookie, or snacked on a handful of Goldfish Crackers. But you may not know the story, or the woman, behind the brand.

Enter Margaret Rudkin, born Margaret Fogarty, the oldest of five in a second-generation Irish family in Manhattan in 1897.  Margaret spent time with her Irish grandmother, who taught her to make cookies and biscuits. Even as a child, Margaret was a hard worker and graduated Valedictorian of her public high school class. From there, she got a job in a New York City bank and worked as a bookkeeper for nine years.

In 1923 she married Henry Rudkin, and he did well enough in the business that they saved money to purchase a property in Fairfield, Connecticut. Margaret promptly named the land Pepperidge Farm because of a pepperidge tree on the property. Three years later the stock market crashed in the Great Depression, Henry lost money, and Margaret resolved to sell products from the farm to help the family’s finances.

Then in 1937, Margaret was faced with a new challenge. Their youngest son, Mark, suffered from asthma and numerous food allergies, particularly with store bread. Wonder Bread was practically the only choice on supermarket shelves. A local doctor suggested that Margaret learn how to bake bread herself.

Her first attempt did not go well. In Margaret’s own words, “the loaf was as hard as a rock and one inch high.”

But she persevered until she arrived at a recipe that worked, and her son’s health improved. The doctor began to order loaves of her bread for his patients. Within months Margaret was taking orders from townspeople who also wanted the health bread.

Made with pure ingredients and no preservatives or artificial colors or flavorings, Margaret made each batch by hand in her kitchen. As more orders came in, she hired a local woman to help with the production.

The success of the bread led Margaret to set up a small farm bakery, and even though she charged 25 cents a loaf when store-bought bread cost only a dime, her business skyrocketed. By the end of her first year of production, she was selling 4,000 loaves a week.

She hired more women employees, stating that anyone who has learned to take care of a family can also learn a business. A staunch believer in the importance of family, Margaret offered her women flexible work hours, allowing mothers with young children to arrive later once their children were in school.

Within ten years, Henry became her marketing director, and together they were selling 40,000 loaves a week in the commercial bakery they opened in Norwalk, Connecticut.

To celebrate, they took a trip to Europe and Margaret discovered Belgian chocolate cookies. She used every ounce of charm available and came back to America with the recipe.

Once home, she expanded her bread business to now include cookies (the Goldfish crackers would come later). By 1955 there were six types of cookies available.

As the decade turned to the ‘60s, Margaret was an oft-requested speaker on manufacturing, and in 1963 she wrote The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook, the first American cookbook to become a bestseller.

She eventually sold the company to Campbell Soup for $28 million, but stipulated that the brand name would remain Pepperidge Farm, she would continue to run the company, and that she would join the board of directors of Campbell Soup—the first female to accomplish that.

Henry died in 1966, and Margaret passed away a year later.

And what of that sickly young son? Mark grew up to be a healthy landscape architect who worked on many of the famous gardens in France. After all, the French do have good bread!

The next time you find yourself enjoying a Pepperidge Farm product, think of the woman whose mission was to create a healthy bread for her child, and in the process created a legacy.

One strong woman.

Now excuse me while I make a cup of tea and open a pack of Milano’s.

If you enjoyed this month’s blog, please join the 1000+ readers from 64 different countries by signing up to be a follower on the right sidebar.

My goal is to pay tribute to the strong women who are lesser-known, and my novels do exactly that. Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows (release date October 2019) are all available from bookstores, Freedom Forge Press, and on-line resources like Amazon.

Linda

Posted in short biographies, strong women | 11 Comments

Liwwät Boeke: An Immigrant Story by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on August 1, 2019 by lhsittig@verizon.net
Hut, Cottage, Wilderness, Cabin

Although this month’s topic is about a strong female immigrant, there is no political agenda intended.

We all know that America was built upon the lives of people who came to our shores either in bondage, indentured or in independently seeking a better way of life. Liwwät’s story is not unusual, except for one thing – she chronicled her entire process from leaving Germany in 1834, to marrying in the United States, and becoming a pioneer wife on the Ohio frontier until her death at age seventy-five.

For almost fifty years, she kept journals, accompanied by her hand-drawn art. Because of her diligence in recording her daily activities, we now have glimpses 185 years later of an immigrant’s life on the American frontier.

Born in 1807 in Oldenburg, in northwest Germany, Liwwät’s father was the younger son and therefore could not inherit the lease rights to the small 15-acre farm where he was born. Even though the family was poor, the local monastery took Liwwät in as a pupil. It was here that she learned to read, write, and draw. Later, she became trained as a midwife.

Her father died in 1828, and under Germany’s feudal system, Liwwät had little hope of rising above her peasant status. America, the land of freedom and opportunity beckoned.

She had hoped to travel with a friend, Natz Boeke, but he left for the German settlement of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1833. Liwwät did not immigrate until 1834. Leaving her home, she walked with a group of people alongside loaded wagons 96 miles through the farmlands to reach the port city of Bremerhaven on the North Sea. She wrote about their slow progress in days of pouring rain, her injured foot, and the houses along the route where they were offered a place to sleep, but not necessarily a bed. Included in her entries are the lists of what each immigrant carried, like knabel (hardtack), extra strumpt (stockings), and a krusifix (crucifix).  

After eight days, they reached Bremerhaven where they waited to book passage. Here, she describes the commotion of strangers and strange customs, of pick-pockets and thieves, and the rough wooden benches piled with straw but no linens on which they slept with their money hidden in their underwear.

Finally arriving in Baltimore, Maryland, she joined a new group of travelers heading west in ox-drawn wagons. As Baltimore receded, Liwwät chronicled each town they walked through on their journey west: Ellicott City, Frederick, Hancock, Cumberland, Frostburg, Grantsville, and then into Pennsylvania.

Each day she records what they ate (often watery soup), where they spent the night (sometimes in barns), how her faith (Catholic) sustained her and how grateful she was for the kindness of strangers; especially those who could converse with her in German.

The group would travel together for 278 miles till they reached the Ohio River at Wheeling, (West) Virginia. There, the wagon masters headed back east and Liwwät’s group traveled by flatboat on the Ohio River, bound for Cincinnati, Ohio, 623 river miles southwest.

Finally, in Cincinnati, Liwwät reconnects with Natz Boeke. They marry, move to the forested, western frontier of Ohio, and begin a new life together.

It is here that we begin to see Liwwät’s personality mature with her midwifery career and her understanding of the difficulties that pioneer women faced. Her entries often detail how she provided advice to young pioneer wives who were struggling in isolation to raise a family, take care of a home, and still be a wife to their husbands.

Liwwät and Natz worked side by side in backbreaking labor clearing 4 acres of forest in 10 months to carve out a home in the wilderness. Liwwät had an extensive list of rules she insisted they follow to preserve their health. Here are a few from 1846:

  1. wash hands every time before you hold a child, return from the outhouse, or feed the stock; bathe the entire body with soap every three days
  2. only drink fresh spring water and boil even that before cleansing a wound
  3. the animals must drink out of their own troughs
  4. no animals should sleep in the house
  5. no one should ever walk around outside in their bare feet
  6. in summer, only drink milk the first day, after that make the milk into cheese
  7. men, women, and children should wear hats in summer to keep the sun off their skin
  8. all edible plants, fruits, and vegetables should be thoroughly washed before eating
  9. avoid stagnant pools of water because of the mosquitos

They built their own house and furniture, while also erecting fences to protect the stock, and full-scale gardening to provide enough food for their family. Liwwät often chronicled her frustration in fighting off the Hessian flies, the black stem rust, midges, weevils, and chinch bugs bent on destroying their crops.

She also proudly recorded that they used manure from the animals to fertilize their fields, now yielding 280 bushels of potatoes per acre.

It was a life of constant hard work. In 1859 Liwwät wrote of her devastation in losing her only daughter at age fifteen. This loss was doubly hard because Natz had died just two years earlier. By age 52, Liwwät had buried both her husband and an almost-grown child.

In her elderly years, she continued to write in the hopes that her children’s children would one day gain some understanding of how difficult life was for immigrants and pioneers. Liwwät then commented on the importance of nurturing the soul with creativity, for humans to be able to express their ideas, images, and facts from the lives they lead.

Little did she know that her words went out this month to over 1,000 blog followers in over 64 countries around the world.

We applaud the efforts of strong women.

Thank you to blog follower Linda Schmitmeyer who sent me numerous pages, copied from Liwwät’s journals.

If you enjoyed this month’s story of an unsung strong woman, please sign up to become a blog follower on the right side-bar. In the meantime, stay posted for when my third strong woman novel, Counting Crows, will be published this fall. The other two, Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call are available from Freedom Forge Press, in bookstores, and online.

~ Linda

Posted in short biography, strong women | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

The Akashinga: Brave Women Saving African Wildlife by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on July 1, 2019 by lhsittig@verizon.net

The rolling hills and rocky outcrops of the Lower Zambezi Valley in southern Africa portray an untamed wilderness with two national parks and various hunting reserves, all without fences or borders. The Zambezi Valley is safari land where the grunting of hippos at night sound like giant bullfrogs. For most non-Africans, our glimpses of this pristine area, elephants drinking at a water hole and leopards slinking in the grass, are formed from television or the movies.

Poaching, however, presents a different and gruesome picture.

More than 10,000 elephants and 7,000 rhinos in southern Africa have been killed in illegal poaching during the last ten years alone and slaughtered mainly for their tusks and horns. The trophy hunting areas throughout Africa comprise acreage that is equivalent to the size of France.

The Akashinga are women trained to stop the rampage.

The name Akashinga translates in the Shona language as, the brave ones. Brave indeed. The elite female rangers living and working in Zimbabwe share the same mission – to thwart the insidious poaching that has for decades decimated African wildlife.

Australian Damien Mander started the program to which the Akashinga are dedicated. Inspired by the story of the Black Mambas, the world’s first female, unarmed anti-poaching unit working near South Africa’s Kruger National Park, Mander saw the possibility of a similar project for Zimbabwe.

Trained in the military himself, he sought out female recruits and interviewed 90 hopefuls. He narrowed the field and put the remaining candidates through three days of exhaustive military-style training. He assumed many would drop out; only three did, and eventually, 16 women formed the unit.

An interesting note is that he also had 189 local men go through the interview process and put them through the same training. At the end of three days, only three remained. Mander decided to stay with his original idea of an all-female ranger squad.

Why women for anti-poaching? Research has shown that women in developing countries are less likely to accept bribes from poachers, and the women invest 90% of the earned income back to their families. Therefore, the women demonstrate an important conservation principle – that wildlife can be worth more to the community alive than dead.

However, traditions are hard to change, especially when you consider that one skinned leopard earns the poacher the equivalent of an entire month’s salary in the impoverished nation of Zimbabwe.

The Akashinga have all been survivors of trauma: AIDS orphans, sexual and physical assault victims, and women whose husbands abandoned them – leaving them to raise their children alone. Mander knew the women would form a cohesive unit, and they did.

They patrol in the bush of Phundundu, a 115 square mile former trophy hunting area in the Zambezi Valley. The women eat together, a vegan diet, and continue to train, practicing in unarmed combat as well as with their AR-15 rifles. When poachers are apprehended, the women, often dressed in camouflage, present an empowered presence. Their guns are real.

Raids are conducted at night with four women to a unit with the accompaniment of a local police officer and Damien Mander. When their vehicle races into a village compound, the women jump out and take their positions. The police officer raps on the door of a poaching suspect and usually finds the illegal animal skins inside the home. Since October of 2017, when their program started, the female rangers have contributed to 72 arrests, without firing a single shot.

By day the women patrol in units in their assigned 12-mile areas, looking for and destroying poachers’ snares. They are well aware of the dangers of their jobs. Last March, two rangers and a trainer drowned while attempting to cross a swollen river.

Working in units, two weeks on, two weeks off, the women are saving African wildlife and saving themselves in the process. No longer feeling like helpless victims, the Akashinga have helped each other gain confidence and independence.

They bank their salaries and invest in their children’s future, a future where African wildlife hopefully roams free.

Thank you to blog follower Dixie Hallaj for sharing the Akashinga’s story with me.

If you enjoyed the blog, and are not yet a follower, please sign up on the right sidebar for more monthly stories about strong women. My historical fiction novels of two unforgettable strong women are Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call. Both are available in bookstores and on Amazon at www.amzn.com/1940553024 and 1940553067.

Here’s to all strong women. They deserve to have their story told.

~ Linda

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Diane Crump: Run for the Roses by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on June 1, 2019 by lhsittig@verizon.net

The year 2019 will stand out in Derby chronicles due to the controversy when Maximum Security was stripped of the win because of jockey interference. The only other horse to win, then lose the title was Dancer’s Image in 1968 who failed a post-race drug test.

The Kentucky Derby is considered to be one of the most famous horse races in the world. An estimated 18 million viewers watched it on television this past May. Over 150,00 spectators attended the race to see who would win the Run for the Roses with a purse of $3 million.

However, there is another controversy few people know.

In 1970, Diane Crump was the first female to ride in the Kentucky Derby, much to the dismay of several male jockeys and a multitude of male spectators.

Her story did not begin in 1970; it started in 1960 when Diane was 12 years old, and her family moved from Connecticut to Oldsmar, Florida. Like many young girls, Diane was fascinated with horses. She convinced her parents to let her have riding lessons at a nearby ranch, and in her spare time, she would go back to the stables and offer to help out.

Each experience around horses only solidified her passion for both the animal and the sport of riding.

This was the ‘60s. Think, Beatles, Bob Dylan, and protests against the Viet Nam War.

Diane did not set out to protest anything; she just wanted to ride, professionally. However, in 1961, women in America were not allowed to obtain a jockey license.

The rules, however, could not stop Diane from being around racehorses. During any free time, Diane would help to exercise horses at local stables or groom them. Eventually, she volunteered at the old Florida Downs track, where she could watch the magnificent animals run.

In January 1969, female trainer Mary Keim nominated Diane for a race, but the horse was not selected.

The following month Diane learned she could ride a horse named Bridle ’N Bit at the Hialeah Race Track, trained by Tom Calumet of Chicago. It was Tom’s wife, Catherine Calumet, who said that Diane Crump should be the jockey. Several male riders threatened to boycott the race, but that did not deter Diane.

The crowds were immense. Over 5,000 came to Hialeah to see the 20-year-girl who would be the first-ever female jockey to ride in a pari-mutuel (gambling-sanctioned) race at a major thoroughbred track.

Diane, wearing the silks, had to shield her eyes from the photographer’s flashbulbs. A full group of policemen escorted her to the track, due to the overwhelming numbers of hecklers in the large crowd; many of whom chanted, ‘Go back to the kitchen and cook dinner!’

As in any race, the air was electrified with possibilities of success. The Florida winter sun warmed the track under a brilliant blue sky. Her heart beating with anticipation, Diane lowered her goggles around her tousled brown hair and raced.

She didn’t win, but as she said later, “we rode well, and we beat two other horses.”

Her shot at the Kentucky Derby came one year later. She rode a three-year-old chestnut colt named Fathom and did not win; yet, in a way she did, becoming the first woman ever to ride in the Derby.

The Kentucky Derby is the longest running sporting event in America. It dates back to 1875 when Meriwether Lewis Clark (grandson of famous explorer William Clark from the Lewis & Clark expedition) procured both the land and the funds to establish a major race track similar to the mode of British racing.

During the inaugural race, 15 horses competed in front of a crowd of 10,000 spectators. Through the years the track would be called Churchill Downs, and in 1925 the race became known as the “Run for the Roses,” because of the garland of red roses worn by the winning horse.

It is still considered to be America’s most prestigious horse race.

When asked about the experience of being the first female jockey to ride in the Derby, Diane said it was a thrill. However, the true joy came from riding the horse, not because she was the first female to enter the event.

During her career of over 30 years of racing, Diane rode 300 winners, in addition to being only one of six women to ever ride in the Kentucky Derby.

After the birth of her two daughters, Diane had to juggle family life with racing. Then in 1992, a nightmare accident with a horse curtailed her riding career.

It had been a normal day, but the horse suddenly reared up and fell over backward, pinning Diane underneath. She had had accidents before, but not to this extent. Her ankle was broken, and her leg bone shattered in six places. It took the doctors over seven hours to pin the ankle, graft bone, and insert a rod into her leg.

Everyone said her riding days were over.

But they weren’t. Diane went on to help train horses and rode again until 1998; then she opened up an equine sales business where she helps buyers find the perfect horse.

What made her a champion? Paraphrased from her words:

“Live your dream. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t or that you’re not good enough. Life gives us something every single day – a chance.”

Strong women often open the door for others.

Thank you to blog-follower Holly Fontaine, who wrote in suggesting Diane Crump’s story. I loved learning about Diane.

Sign up on the right sidebar to become a follower of Strong Women. You can also catch me on Twitter @LHSittig or my webpage, www.lindasittig.com. My two novels Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call are available in bookstores and on Amazon at www.amzn.com/1940553024.

~Linda

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A Mother’s Day Perspective by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on May 2, 2019 by lhsittig@verizon.net

May is the month of Mother’s Day, an appropriate time to honor mothers everywhere. But I would like to pay special tribute to those Native American mothers whose children the federal government relocated for assimilation purposes.

To understand this travesty, one needs to begin back in 1830 when the Indian Removal Act forced Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi River so their homelands could be made available to white settlers. After the Civil War (1865), the government looked for a way to subdue Native American tribes in the west, while supposedly improving their chances of functioning within a white society. The officials of that time decided that if Indians could be re-educated, the ‘Indian problem’ would be eliminated.

How better to do that, than remove Indian children from their families, send them to government-established boarding schools, force them to renege their native language and dress and train them to become working members of society.

The experiment started with an Indian school built in the late 1860s on the Yakima Reservation in Washington state. Then, the first Indian boarding school was built in 1879 in converted military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Named the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, it became the model for all future government-run boarding schools. It was also the only boarding school east of the Mississippi River, but its students came from the native tribes that had been relocated out West.

Additional boarding schools were then built in rapid succession.

In 1891 federal officials were given the authority to forcibly seize Native American children until school quotas were filled. Native American parents were threatened with the withholding of food rations and subsidies on the reservation unless they relinquished at least one of their children.

How does a parent decide which child to give up?

In many cases, parents were led to believe that their children would have a better life if educated by the government. Agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs took children as young as five and the family often did not see that child again for many years. From the time of 1892 forward, thousands of native parents wept as their children were pulled away, loaded into wagons, and driven off the reservations—often to a destination hundreds of miles away.

The anguish of a native mother or father is disturbing to imagine. Some fought back against the government and were promptly arrested. Their children were taken anyway.

Immediately upon arrival at a school, the children received short hair cuts, their native clothing disappeared, and they were assigned Anglo names.  By dinner on their first day, they were introduced to an institutionalized diet based largely on starchy foods. Many children became malnourished.

Packed into overcrowded dormitories with poor sanitation, scrutinized and punished for talking in their native tongue, children fell sick to the diseases of tuberculosis, dysentery, and influenza. Most schools contained a graveyard on the property. While exact numbers are not available, reports from 1926 show 350 Indian schools, with over 60,000 Native children.

In 1928 the Brookings Institute made formal visits to the Indian schools and issued the Meriam Report. Recommendations for badly needed changes were stipulated, including educating younger children at community schools near their reservation homes.

The government disregarded the report.

The boarding school programs lasted for 99 years; from 1879 to 1978. Yes, you read that correctly. It was not until 1978 that the Indian Child Welfare Act guaranteed Native American parents the right to deny their child’s placement in an off-reservation school.

For the children who survived the horrors and the abuse in Indian schools, they became children without an identity. No longer Indian, and never white, these children entered society with the invisible scars of what today would be called PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Now imagine for a moment that you are a Native American mother. The year is 1914, and President Woodrow Wilson has just signed a proclamation that the second Sunday in May will henceforth be set aside to honor and celebrate mothers.

What would you have to celebrate?

Strong women often grieve in silence.

~ Linda

Please sign up on the right sidebar to become a regular follower of this blog. If these stories inspire you, then look for my novels Cut From Strong Cloth www.bit.ly/2SWkCIN and Last Curtain Call www.bit.ly/2TFgOQG on Amazon and in bookstores.

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Anna Lloyd-Jones: the Woman Behind Frank Lloyd Wright

Posted on April 1, 2019 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Frank Lloyd Wright has been hailed the most innovative American architect of the twentieth century.

Few people realize that it was one woman, Anna Lloyd-Jones, who profoundly shaped his destiny.

Born in West Dyfed, Wales, Anna at age six, her parents and five of her ten siblings, emigrated to New York. By 1844 they had arrived in Ixonia, Wisconsin. The family bought and sold acreage until they finally settled on the lush prairie banks of the Wisconsin River, near Spring Green.

Anna’s brothers became farmers, and one studied for the ministry. Two of her sisters became teachers, as did Anna.

In 1866, Anna at age 28 was still unmarried. Characterized by a fiercely independent spirit and austere personality, she may have scared off potential suitors. However, she met William Cary Wright, a widower with three small children, and married him.

Frank Lincoln Wright was born on June 8, 1867, and from the start, Anna idolized him.

While she was not particularly fond of her three step-children, she was determined that her son would grow to become someone of importance. For whatever reason, she landed on the idea of architecture as his calling.

While Frank was still in a crib, Anna tore out pictures from Harpers Weekly and hung them on the nursery walls for inspiration. Each illustration showed in detail a famous European cathedral.

With Frank as a toddler, Anna and William transferred to Iowa and William became a local pastor. For the next eight years, Anna and William would move, again and again, always looking for better employment.

Anna did not trust any local teacher to properly educate her son, so she taught him herself. After discovering Froebel blocks, invented by the German educator who instituted the concept of kindergartens, Anna purchased a set for Frank.

He was nine years old and instantly became fascinated with arranging and rearranging the smooth Maplewood rectangles, squares, cubes, and cylinders. Along with the blocks, Anna purchased squares of shiny paper and long cylindrical rods so that Frank could buttress his creations.

As Frank experimented with the Froebel blocks, he soon realized that all construction was based upon geometric shapes.

Two years later, while his parents’ marriage began to deteriorate, Frank was sent to help out on the Lloyd-Jones farm back in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

Frank hated the drudgery of farm life but took great delight in studying the landscape around the farm. He soon began to notice that even nature was designed upon geometric patterns. This idea would influence his life career.

By 1885, Anna’s brother, Jenkin Lloyd-Jones had become a prominent preacher within the Unitarian church in Chicago, Illinois. He hired an architect, Joseph Silsbee, to draw up plans for a chapel in the Jones Valley, near the Lloyd-Jones farm.

No documentation exists about the construction, except that a young boy offered to work as an assistant. Frank would have been ten years old at this time.

Six years later, Anna and William were living in Madison, Wisconsin when William filed for divorce from his loveless marriage. He gave Anna and the children the house but expected her family to support her. He walked away, and Frank never saw his father again.

Anna now threw her energies into helping her son gain admission to college. While Frank did not possess a high school diploma, Anna worked with him on his application, and he was admitted as a ‘special student’ to the University of Wisconsin. He would enroll in an engineering course, which to Anna was the precursor to architecture.

Not used to the rigors of academia, Frank did not excel at college and left after two semesters. With Anna’s counseling, he headed for Chicago, with only $7.00 in his pocket and stayed with her brother, Jenkin. In a short time, he joined Silsbee’s Chicago firm and started life as a proper architect’s assistant.

From there he moved onto another firm and eventually became America’s best-known designer of organic architecture – using the shapes and colors of the natural environment to give a building its feel of being one with nature.

Frank changed his name legally to Frank Lloyd Wright. It was Frank’s nod to the pervasive influence of his mother. Anna must have been delighted.

As Frank Lloyd Wright gained fame with his architecture, and scandal with his three marriages and a mistress, Anna stayed in the background, never far away. When he moved into his first house in Oak Park, in the distant Chicago suburbs, Anna moved nearby.

His first marriage crumbled, and Anna gave him acreage back on her family farm in Spring Green, so he could build a new house. He did, and named it Taliesin, a Welsh term meaning ‘under the brow’ (of the landscape).

Frank would go on to design some of the most celebrated buildings, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the iconic Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania.

 A larger than life figure, he wore a cape and pork pie hat in chilly weather, and always dressed monochromatically, with a splash of vibrant red for his accent.

I had the privilege of visiting his Arizona estate, Taliesin West, where the desert biome is present in every aspect of his home and studio. My favorite quote from that visit is: The bottom of the sky is the hem of heaven.

When he died on April 9, 1959, at the age of 91, he was buried back in Wisconsin, in a grave near Anna’s side. However, when Frank’s last wife passed away, she left instructions for his body to be exhumed, cremated, and his ashes mixed with hers and interred at Taliesin West in Arizona.

I’m sure Anna was not pleased.

If you like to read more in-depth stories of strong women, here are the links to my two novels, Cut From Strong Cloth www.bit.ly/2SWkCIN and Last Curtain Call www.bit.ly/2TFgOQG.

You can also catch me on Twitter @LHsittig, Facebook as Linda Harris Sittig, and Pinterest as LHSittig. In the meantime, sign up on the right sidebar to become a monthly follower of Strong Women in History!

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