Phoebe Burn: Tennessee Strong by Linda Harris Sittig

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

Before I share Phoebe’s story, I need to tell you it was a story 72 years in the making.

THE BACKGROUND

The narrative begins on July 19, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. You might recognize the town as the setting for the Hollywood Christmas classic, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” starring Jimmy Stewart.

But for over 8 million American women who were the first ever to vote in a national election, Seneca Falls holds far more importance than a Hollywood movie set.

On July 19, 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton stood in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls and offered her Declaration of Sentiments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Elizabeth Stanton was a housewife, soon to be an activist. Her Declaration of Sentiments was modeled after the Declaration of Independence but addressed discrimination against women. At that time in history, American women could not own property, claim their working wages, sue for divorce, serve on a jury, or vote.

Elizabeth was held to ridicule by many in the crowd, but one notable man – Frederick Douglas rose to defend her and stood by her side.

The issue of suffrage (voting) would be hotly contested state by state for the next 21 years until 1869 when Wyoming issued women the right to vote. However, to make the change happen for all women, there would need to be a U.S.Constitutional Amendment.

As the women suffragists were campaigning for an amendment, many marched in protest parades, others were arrested for picketing in front of the White House, and still more were holding political rallies that urged Votes for Women. For a Constitutional Amendment to become law, it must pass by a two-thirds majority in Congress and then be ratified by three-fourths of all the states.

Now fast forward to 1918, just one month before the end of the Great War (WWI), the Senate defeated the proposed Amendment – two votes shy of passing. Then comes early 1919, and the suffragists ratcheted up their campaign. This time the Senate defeated the proposed Amendment by only one vote.

Finally, in June 1919, the 19th Amendment passed both the House and the Senate. And you would think that hurrah, a great feat accomplished!

However, many individual states still opposed the Amendment, especially in the South. By the spring of 1920, only 35 states had approved the Amendment, one state short of the required three-fourths.

PHOEBE BURN

Phoebe Burn now enters into the story.

Born in 1873 in McMinn County, eastern Tennessee, Phoebe Ensminger, known by her nickname of Febb, was by all accounts feisty, strong-willed, and incredibly well-read. After graduating from U.S. Grant Memorial University (now Tennessee Wesleyan), Phoebe became a teacher and then married James Lafayette Burn.

She helped run his farm and became adept at milking cows, churning butter, raising crops, and raising four children. And, oh yes, subscribing to and reading four different newspapers and a dozen magazines.

She educated herself on both local and national politics. And although McMinn County was conservatively anti-suffrage, Phoebe thought of how the illiterate, uninformed male tenants on her farm were allowed to vote, but she could not.

On August 17, 1920, she was reading a barrage of bitter anti-suffrage letters to the editor in the local paper when she felt compelled to write to her son, Harry T. Burn, the youngest Senator from Tennessee. Her seven-page letter started with family and local news but progressed to the real heart of the matter.

THE HISTORIC LETTER

“Dear Son,… Hurray and vote for suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt. I have read the bitter speeches and have been waiting to see how you stood (on the issue) but have not seen anything from you yet. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. ‘Thomas Catt’ with her “Rats.” Is she the one that put ‘rat’ in ratification? Ha!”

Her son received the letter the next day in Nashville, and as the Honorable Harry T. Burn sat in the state capital with the other politicians in the Tennessee House. He conspicuously sported a red rose in his lapel. The red rose was the symbol of those opposed to suffrage, where a yellow rose signified being pro-suffrage.

Today was the special session of the state congress to vote on the proposed suffrage amendment. Harry knew that if passed, it would mean that the 19th Amendment would become law for the entire country. With his mother’s letter tucked in his pocket, he considered how hard she had worked her entire life. The day was already hot and muggy, and the room packed with supporters of both sides. Harry continued thinking about his mother.

One by the one, the votes were cast. When Harry stood to cast his vote, the anti-suffrage people wore jubilant smiles because of the red rose in his lapel.

And then, in a history-making moment, Harry pulled the red rose out of his lapel and voted for the 19th Amendment. Pandemonium broke out, but the die had been cast. With Harry Burn’s vote, urged by his mother, Phoebe Burn, Tennessee ratified the 19th Amendment, and it became constitutional law.

There would be difficult years to come. The Jim Crow laws would deny women of color voting privilege, and the fight for women’s equality in the workplace has continued for decades. August 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote. November 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of women voting for a President of their choice.

There are approximately 39.5 million women in America old enough to vote for the first time, and every single one of us should remember that it is an honor that was hard fought for by our women ancestors.

Remember Phoebe’s words: Hurray and Vote!

If you’d like to learn more about strong women, watch me on this YouTube clip AND become a follower of this blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuTOr2CvZ_Y

~ Linda

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Book Women by Linda Harris Sittig

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

One positive aspect of COVID 19 is that people are reading more. And while reading is always an excellent pastime, please take a moment to consider ordering your books from independent bookstores, whose very existence must compete with the online sites of mammoth distributors.

In 2019 there were 2,524 independent bookstores in America. I hope that they all survive.

One of my earlier work fantasies was to run a bookstore. Like many other bibliophiles, it seems like the perfect existence, just be surrounded by books, book lovers, and cozy spaces.

However, it takes way more than that to run one successfully, as both Elizabeth Timothy and Mary Katherine Goddard soon found out.

Elizabeth Timothy is often credited as the first female publisher in America to own and operate a bookstore. As with many of the colonial bookstores, it was a part of Elizabeth’s printing business. At age 36, in 1738, she found herself a widow and took over her husband’s printing business in Charleston, S.C. On the side, she also printed and sold books, and oh yes, raised her six children.

If we jump ahead to 1775, we find Mary Katherine Goddard. She worked as a postmistress in Baltimore, Maryland, and ran a printing business with her brother. In addition to printing, she also offered books for sale. Her other claim to fame is that she printed the second copy of the Declaration of Independence with all of the signers’ names.

It seems that through the ages, women ran bookstores alongside men.

Of course, without writers, there would not have been any books to sell.

The first female writer to have a secular book published was Anne Bradstreet from Massachusetts in 1650. Her brother-in-law took her book of poems and had them published in London, then returned with the copies to the colony of Massachusetts.

In 1682 Mary Rowlandson wrote of her experiences as a captive of the Wampanoag tribe of Rhode Island. It was a captivating story (yes, an intended pun) because it went through 30 editions.

Within the next one hundred years, poetry from free African-Americans such as Phyllis Wheatley was published and in popular demand. By 1833 anti-slavery books were coming into print, alerting the nation to the evils of slavery in our own country.

One might think that libraries and bookstores would be competing against one another. But that was not the case. Readers who wanted to own a particular book could only do so through a bookstore, and free public libraries were few and far between.

John Harvard bequeathed his 380-book collection to the new college at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638, establishing the most extensive library in colonial America. In 1731 Benjamin Franklin started a subscription library in Philadelphia. If a patron wanted to borrow a book, they paid a small fee to do so.

And as early as 1731, women were running small businesses where they would loan books, sell books, publish a newspaper and run the local post office—often while managing a family full of children.

The large public libraries in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York were established in the second half of the nineteenth century.

What about stand-alone bookstores?

Elizabeth Peabody started one of the early ones in the parlor of her Boston home in 1839 and named it The West Street bookstore. The earliest African-American bookstore seems to have been operated by David Ruggles in 1834, New York.

By 1913 more and more bookshops were being opened by women, perhaps coinciding with the women’s movement for voting rights and equality with men.

In 1916, Madge Jenison and Mary Horgan Mowbray-Clark opened a bookstore in New York City called the Sunwise Turn Bookshop. They would go on to become founding members of the Women’s National Book Association started in 1917 after female booksellers were denied membership in the all-male American Booksellers Association.  

One of my favorite quotes is by educator Horace Mann who said, ‘a house without books is like a room without windows.’ This adage rings even more poignant to me with the many controversial issues now in America. We need books to educate ourselves more than ever before.

Thank you to Jilann Burnett, co-owner of Second Chapter Books in Middleburg, VA, who was the inspiration behind this month’s blog. Also, a hearty thanks to the Women’s National Book Association. Their invaluable work, Women in the Literary Landscape, provided the bulk of the research for me this month.

The photo credit for this month is Sierra Maciorowski, photographer from California.

And I would be remiss without thanking the following indie bookstores who carry my three novels: Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows. In alphabetical order:

G.J. Ford Bookshop – St. Simons Island, GA

Main Street Books – Frostburg, MD

Second Chapter Books – Middleburg, VA

The Book Center – Cumberland, MD

Winchester Book Gallery – Winchester, VA

Stay healthy my friends, curl up with a good book, and pass my blog onto a friend!

~ Linda

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The Women of World War Two by Linda Harris Sittig

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

The Women of World War II by Linda Harris Sittig

In 1942, when thousands of American men marched nobly off to war, thousands of American women made an important decision—they gallantly joined the war effort on the home front.

You’ve probably heard of the Rosie Girls, the women who joined the air industry, riveting military airplanes that would go overseas. But other women built ships, worked as cryptologists, journalists, nurses, entertainers, aviators, and spies.

Countless women, both black and white, stepped up to the challenge of protecting freedom.

One of those women was Ruth Erickson.

Born and raised in Virginia, Minnesota, Ruth became a navy corps nurse and counted her good fortune to be stationed near beautiful Pearl Harbor. She arrived in Hawaii shortly before December 1941.

Then, close to 8:00 AM, on December 7th, 353 Japanese airplanes swooped down out of the calm Sunday morning sky, targeting the U.S. ships lying in the blue waters of Pearl Harbor. Before the day was over, 1,143 servicemen would be injured and require medical intervention.

Ruth treated her first patient within twenty minutes of the initial attack and worked with the hospital staff continuously throughout the day and well into the night, stopping before midnight only when complete exhaustion took over.

For the next ten days, the medical team, including Ruth, did all they could to ease the pain and suffering of the wounded.

After Pearl Harbor, Ruth decided to continue her career as a naval nurse. Eventually, she became Captain Ruth Erickson, director of the U.S. Naval Nurse Corps.

Another Minnesota woman, Mary Welsh, parlayed her journalist talents to become a correspondent for the London Daily Times.

Headstrong and with a keen eye for detail, she was dispatched in September 1938 to Munich, Germany, to cover the visit of the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, with Adolf Hitler, the German Führer.

Mary obtained a suite at the Grand Regina Palast Hotel and settled in to cover whatever story unfolded. She soon witnessed the arrival of Benito Mussolini, Edouard Daladier, Neville Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler—the four most potent leaders in Europe.

The historic meeting became known as The Munich Agreement in which Great Britain, France, and Italy permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland of western Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain held a short press conference announcing the news.

Mary quickly wrote her story, then went to the hotel lobby where she had paid a young boy to read continuously to a London Daily operator, thus ensuring an open telephone line. Mary breathlessly dictated her story via the free phone line and snagged one of the first published accounts of what would become WWII.

Mary continued her stellar journalist career throughout the war, and eventually became the fourth and final wife of Ernest Hemingway.

Charity Adams Early had grown up in Columbia, S.C., and earned a college degree, but wanted to join the military at the outbreak of the war. Since women were not yet allowed to enlist, Charity applied for a position in the newly formed WAAC, the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps.

Thirty thousand women applied for the 440 slots for the first officer training class. Determined, Charity knew she had to be better than best because she was an African-American. The U.S. Army had predetermined that only 10.6% of the WAAC could be black. This was to coincide with the approximate percentage of African-Americans in the U.S. population.

On July 20, 1942, Charity arrived at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, to begin her training. By 1944 she had become Major Adams, the first African-American training supervisor and instrumental in the formation of the first and only Army all-black female band.

Under the guise of ordering recreational equipment, Charity procured the musical instruments. The band had a time order—be prepared within eight weeks for their concert. Most of their members had no formal musical training, and in the act of solidarity, the white female band offered to teach anyone how to read sheet music.

The African-American women’s band performed with rousing success and went on to play together until the end of the war. These were the women to bolster the spirits of the black soldiers far from home and spur the American public to support the war through war bonds.

By the end of WWII, 6,500 African-American women served in the renamed WAC, Women’s Army Corps. After the war, 855 black servicewomen followed now Major Charity Adams overseas to England. Their assignment was to organize the warehouse of stockpiled Army mail. Within months they redirected the stagnant mail to over 7 million soldiers.

Charity had been the first black woman to become an officer in the WAC and ended her career as a Lieutenant Colonel. After the war, she devoted the rest of her life to community service and civil rights awareness.

How about Betty Crocker?

While Betty was fictional, the real woman behind the brand was yet another Minnesota woman, Marjorie Child Husted.

Born in Minneapolis, she earned a degree from the University of Minnesota in home economics. When WWII broke out, she took a job with the Red Cross. Next, she became a home economist for the Washburn-Crosby Company, the producers of Gold Medal Flour.

Marjorie created the Betty Crocker’s Cooking School, a radio program where she broadcast cooking tips, kitchen-tested recipes, and advice to American women faced with food rationing and victory gardens.

So astute was Marjorie’s marketing expertise that she propelled the Betty Crocker brand to ensure that Gold Medal Flour would be a staple in American kitchens for generations yet to come.

Thank you to Virginia M. Wright-Peterson, whose book, A Woman’s War, Too, inspired this month’s blog. Another thanks to Carrie Hagen, a Philadelphia writer, whose research on Charity Adams Earley, allowed me to learn about the African-American women who served in WWII.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Sign up to become a follower, and look for my newest historical fiction novel, Counting Crows, on Amazon at www.amzn.com/1940553091.

~ Linda EVERY WOMAN DESERVES TO HAVE HER STORY TOLD

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June Hart Almeida: Coronavirus Scientist

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

June Hart Almeida rose above her humble Scottish roots, and, discovered the coronavirus in 1964 when she was 34 years old.

Yes, you read that correctly. June discovered the coronavirus back in 1964 – the same virus that has brought our modern world of 2020 to its knees.

Born in 1930, June lived with her parents in a stark tenement apartment complex in the east end of industrial Glasgow.

What the apartment complex lacked in curb appeal became tolerable because of the beautiful Alexandra Park, only a short walk away.

The park allowed June to wander its meandering pathways, enjoy the blossoms of its rhododendrons, and trail her fingers in the ornate Saracen Water Fountain. Children and adults alike were drawn to its 40-foot-high showering plume.

For years, her teachers had told her she was an outstanding student with stellar grades. But smart wasn’t enough. In 1946 her four years of secondary school (high school) ended, and her father explained that his bus driver’s salary couldn’t cover university expenses.

June could have sulked, she could have indulged in a pity party, but she did neither.  She was a Scot, and strength ran in her blood.

Scanning the newspaper, she saw the possibility of applying for a job at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary (hospital). She started as a lab technician in histopathology, where she would examine tissue samples for evidence of disease. This might not have been the job of her dreams, but the salary of 25 shillings a week (approximately 83 pounds sterling today) helped with her family’s expenses.

In a short period, June was pleasantly surprised that she found the lab work interesting. Studying tissue samples peeked her curious mind.

Within a few years, she moved on to a job in London, England, at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where she continued studying tissue samples. Then, in 1954, while working in London, she met and married Enrique Almeida, a Venezuelan artist.

The following year they moved with their young daughter to Toronto, Canada, and June found laboratory work at the Ontario Cancer Institute working as an electron microscopy technician. Toronto would have been a welcomed change. Most of Europe had sustained substantial bombing during WWII, but Toronto was modern and clear of destruction.

Her new job became her gateway to scientific recognition. By 1963 she began to co-author several articles in prominent scientific publications, which without a degree would have been impossible back in Britain. Most of her writings centered around the structure of viruses, which before the electron microscope had not been clearly visible.

June might have stayed with this job, but in 1964 Professor A P Waterson, the chair of the microbiology department of St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London, met her on his visit to Toronto.

They talked about science and viruses and innovative techniques for identifying new diseases. Struck by June’s intelligence, work ethic, and her impressive skill with an electron microscope, Professor Waterson invited her to join him professionally at St. Thomas Hospital Medical School.

While this meant moving back to London, St. Thomas’ was one of the most prestigious schools in England, and June knew she would have opportunities she could not find elsewhere.

Within two years, she was working on the hepatitis B virus and the virus that causes the common cold. She then began to collaborate with Dr. David Tyrell, director of research at St. Thomas. She shared with him her original technique, called immune-electron microscopy, which allowed doctors to obtain better images of viruses.

She then earned her DSc, Doctor of Science, and was now Dr. Almeida. Together, she and Dr. Tyrrell searched to identify new viruses.

They hit upon a virus known in the lab as B814. Obtaining the sample from a nasal washing of a schoolboy, they thought he had a common cold. But under the electron microscope, Dr. June Almeida recognized the pattern of his virus was unlike any other human virus she had studied. June commented that what made B814 distinctive was the crown-like appearance of tiny spikes surrounding the rim of the virus. Together, Dr. Tyrrell and Dr. Almeida named the new human virus, coronavirus.

The year was 1964. June Hart Almeida was 34 years old.

June spent the rest of her scientific career researching and teaching other virologists. In time, her innovative techniques helped to identify many viruses.

In late 2019 the Chinese government used her electron microscopy techniques to identify a unique virus that was spreading through the Chinese population at an alarming rate.

It was the coronavirus, the same one that Dr. June Hart Almeida had discovered fifty plus years ago.

You may be asking yourself, ‘how does a young Scottish girl without any higher education go on to become a prominent scientist?’

The answer would be persistence.

I hope you have enjoyed June Hart Almeida’s story. If you are not yet a follower of Strong Women, please sign up on the right side of the blog. In the meantime, look for my newest novel, Counting Crows, that tells the story of how New Yorkers dealt with the Flu Pandemic of 1918 as it ravaged their city. So many parallels to today! www.amzn.com/1940553091.

~ Linda

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Frances Oldham Kelsey: Medical Advocate by Linda Harris Sittig

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

With everyone anxious about getting a coronavirus vaccine, I thought I would highlight a very different scenario. One that tells the story about Frances Oldham Kelsey, a Canadian pharmacologist who came under intense pressure to sign off on a new drug in the early 1960s.

Born in 1914 on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Frances came to the United States in the 1930s to pursue medical training. She received her Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Chicago in 1938 and her M.D., also from Chicago in 1950.

Along the way, while in medical school, she married Dr. Fremont Kelsey and later gave birth to two daughters.

Continuing to carry dual citizenship, the now Dr. Frances Kelsey was hired by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1960 to review the drug licensing program.

Meanwhile, in Germany, a pharmaceutical company had synthesized a new sedation drug to be used as a safe alternative to barbiturates. The drug, known as thalidomide, did not appear to be toxic or have any detrimental side effects.

Although the drug’s intended use was as a sedative, it also seemed to quell nausea in pregnant women, thereby alleviating the issue of ‘morning sickness.’

At first, the drug was marketed as an anti-flu medication and could be procured in Europe without a prescription. Thousands of free samples were distributed to doctors in Europe, Japan, and the United States.

In a rush to get the drug approved, sufficient long-term studies were lacking.

Thalidomide seemed to be a miracle drug, and although the German pharmaceutical company had no reliable evidence to its complete safety, the marketing campaign was successful.

Frances and her family had moved to Washington D.C. and it was her first month on the job for the Food and Drug Administration. The German pharmaceutical company attempted to woo the American agency in the hopes of receiving the go-ahead for licensing in the United States. Frances hesitated because there was a lack of clinical evidence about potential side effects.

She studied the research, then put her new career on the line, not willing to compromise, and flatly refused.

Within months of her refusal, disturbing reports began to surface that babies born to mothers who had taken the thalidomide were born with severe deformities. By November 1961, the United Kingdom pulled the drug from their markets, and then Germany followed suit.

But it was too late for thousands of unborn babies, some of whom would be born to American mothers who had received the thalidomide samples from their doctors.

As 1961 turned into 1962, American magazines picked up the thalidomide story and published heartbreaking photos of the babies born with deformities.

Over 10,000 children worldwide were born with thalidomide defects, missing arms and or legs, fingers and toes, extra fingers and toes, partial hearing and or vision loss, and even paralysis of facial muscles. Many thalidomide infants died within days of birth.

The United States government quickly advised all doctors to stop dispensing the drug.

On August 7, 1962, President John F. Kennedy awarded Frances Kelsey the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. In his speech, he praised Frances’s diligent efforts that helped to minimize the thalidomide tragedy in America.

She was the second female ever to have been given this award.

Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey spent the remainder of her 45-year career with the F.D.A. and, in 2000, was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She died in 2015, at the age of 101, secure in the knowledge that she had made the right decision in 1960.

Sometimes, strong women are those who do not rush to agree with the popular ideas of the day.

If you enjoyed Frances’s story and are not yet a follower of Strong Women, do sign up at the bottom right side of the blog with your email. If you would like the addition of a small one-page newsletter once a month from me, please contact me, linda@lindasittig.com.

Till next month, you can catch me on Twitter @LHsittig or Instagram @LHsittig or Facebook at Linda Harris Sittig. The links to my three novels of historical fiction, featuring strong female protagonists are:

www.amzn.com/1940553024        Cut From Strong Cloth

www.amzn.com/1940553067        Last Curtain Call

www.amzn.com/1940553091        Counting Crows

~ Linda – please everyone, stay healthy!

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Amazon Warrior Women: Then and Now by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on February 28, 2020 by lhsittig@verizon.net
image by Christian-mts0 from Pixabay

Mention Amazon Warrior Women, and you may think I am referring to Wonder Woman of the DC Comic Series.

However, recent archeological evidence now substantiates the previous existence of such a group.

The Amazon women were profiled in stories told by the Greeks in approximately 700 B.C. and described as fierce horseback riding warriors who rode undaunted into battle while wielding their war bows. Their fame was further cemented when the Greek poet Homer included them in his epic, The Iliad.

Within the last month, archeologists unearthed a grave filled with the remains of four female warriors buried with their cache of spears, arrowheads, and horseback riding equipment – almost identical to the descriptions of the Greek stories.

The location of the burial site is in present-day western Russia, on the steppes, very near to where the Greeks believed the Amazons lived.

The remains have been identified as female Scythian nomads buried approximately 2,500 years ago. The women range in age from early teens to women in their forties, indicating that girls were trained young to become warriors.

But today, there is a new category of Amazon Warrior Women.

There are indigenous women warriors in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil fighting to preserve the legacy of the forest.

This effort is being spearheaded by Ajareaty Waiapi, a female chief, working to alert the world of alarming deforestation and the critical need to preserve the health of our planet.

Ajareaty Waiapi’s village lies in the remote northeastern region of Brazil, in the state of Amapa, close to French Guiana. Her people, who only in recent times have come in contact with outsiders, have lived for countless generations as stewards of the Amazon.

With knowledge passed down from elders, Ajareaty knows the medicinal value of the Amazon plants that surround her. She also possesses the acute understanding that as outsiders come to burn off the trees for illegal cattle farming and push the indigenous people off their ancestral lands for profitable mining, the rainforest is in great peril of survival.

Not formally educated as a child, Ajareaty enrolled in school at age 59 to learn Portuguese, so she could converse in the language of the white man and appeal to them about the plight of the forest.

Lest you think that this is Brazil’s problem, might I remind you that the Amazon Rain Forest produces 20 percent of the oxygen for our planet and is often referred to as the ‘lungs of Earth.’ Without the trees of the rain forest, our climate change could become truly catastrophic.

According to the renowned biologist, Mark Horn, the Amazon forest helps maintain Earth’s water cycle by producing large quantities of rainfall every year. Moisture from the Amazon influences rainfall as far away as Central America and the western United States.

And, the Amazon is home to more plant and animal species than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, including at least 40,000 plant species, 2.5 million insect species, 2,200 fishes species, and 427 mammal species. One in five of all bird species lives in the Amazon rainforest.

But the land of the Amazon is lucrative for hunters, cattle farmers, loggers, and miners.

And no one knows that better than the current Brazilan government.

Ajareaty has spent the last few years traveling outside the forest, speaking to influential groups in Germany and the Netherlands in the hopes of raising support to save the Rain Forest. Male chiefs from her area have also traveled abroad to the United Nations in New York City to ask for international assistance.

While back home, Ajareaty dons the traditional red skirt of her village, rubs her face and arms with a paste she makes from seeds of the achiote bush to protect her from the sun and insects.

She travels throughout the jungle, checking on neighboring villages and teaching her adult daughter and other women the importance of saving the trees.

“If the forest is gone, people will also end. I am fighting for future generations.”

A true warrior.

If you enjoyed this month’s story and are not yet a follower of the blog, please sign up on the right side so you can be counted as a follower of Strong Women. In addition to blogging about Strong Women, I have three published novels about the Strong Women of the Canavan family from Philadelphia. The link is www.amzn.com/1940553091. The titles are Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows.

~ Linda

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Cockacoeske: an Early Virginia Politician by Linda Harris Sittig

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

You may be aware that the state legislature of Virginia recently voted to finalize passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, better known as the ERA.

Virginia is now the 38th state to ratify the amendment that would guarantee equal rights for American women.

Whether this will occur or not, rests on the former time limit imposed for ratification of Constitutional amendments.

In the meantime, the capital city of Richmond has started an ambitious project: the Virginia Women’s Monument: Voices from the Garden. The project will ultimately include 12 bronze statues of notable Virginia women, many of whose names you would not necessarily know. An additional 230 women’s names will be inscribed on the monument, which will rest on Richmond’s Capitol Square.

The chosen women came from all walks of life and represented multiple races. They were selected because they persevered against overwhelming odds and their contributions helped to change the course of Virginia and American history.

In alphabetical order: Sarah Garland Boyd, Adèle Clark, Cockacoeske, Laura Lu Scherer Copenhaver, Mary Draper Ingles, Elizabeth Keckley, Anne Burras Laydon, Virginia E. Randolph, Clementina Rind, Sally Louisa Tompkins, Maggie L. Walker, and Martha Washington.

Here is the story of Cockacoeske, the only Native American woman among the twelve statues.

While there were numerous tribes in Virginia when the English landed at Jamestown in 1607, the native peoples all hailed from three distinct language groups. The Algonquian, the Siouan, and the Iroquoian. The formidable Powhatan Confederacy belonged to the Algonquian language group and their 8,000 members lived on the land where the English wished to settle.

The area controlled by the Powhatans was bounded on the north by the Potomac River, the west by the Fall Line, the south by the present-day North Carolina border, and the east by the Atlantic Ocean.

From the onset of the attempt to colonize, clashes, often fatal, occurred between the native peoples and the English.

Ill-equipped to forge a life in the wilderness the 500 English colonists who populated Jamestown in the spring of 1609 quickly began to succumb. By the spring of 1610, only 60 remained alive. Seen as invaders, the local Indians did not provide the colonists with needed food.

By the time that Cockacoeske was born in approximately 1646, the number of colonists had rebounded but their relations with the native peoples had further deteriorated.

Cockacoeske grew up in the Powhatan Confederacy in the Pamunkey Tribe and was the grand-niece of Pocahontas. Cockacoeske married a tribal leader whose name was Totopotomoi and they lived on land that would be considered the Middle Peninsula of Tidewater Virginia, today. When Cockacoeske’s husband was killed in 1656, she succeeded him as the leader of the Pamunkey Tribe.

At sixteen years of age, she became the Pamunkey Queen.

One of the most undisputed historical facts is her tireless effort to support her people as the leader of the Pamunkey Tribe. Her thirty-year reign ended only with her death.

Another remarkable fact is that she was an astute politician.

In 1676, during Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion, Governor Berkeley of Jamestown requested Cockacoeske’s assistance in providing him with armed men who could help quell the rebellion.  Bacon retaliated by massacring 50 of her people.

The following year, Cockacoeske signed the Treaty of Middle Plantation in Williamsburg, with the caveat that several of the local tribes would be reunited under her authority, hopefully ending hostilities between the English colonists and the Virginia Indians. In return for proclaiming her loyalty to King Charles II of England, she negotiated that the tribes over which she had dominion were granted title to their lands, access to their waterways, and protection from enslavement.

Those lands today are the Pamunkey Indian Reservation not far from Colonial Williamsburg.

Tattooed on her chin, arm, and wrist to denote her royal rank, she was by all accounts an imposing figure when she journeyed to Jamestown to negotiate with the Governor. Not to be outsmarted due to a language barrier, she brought along an interpreter and her son, John West.

Queen from age sixteen to age forty-six, Cockacoeske ruled as an unmarried matriarch and died sometime in 1686, leaving behind her son, John West, fathered by an English colonel. Her legacy ensured that her people’s land would be protected long after she was gone.

Move over Pocahontas, Cockacoeske deserves her rightful fame.

If you enjoyed this month’s story and are not yet a follower of the blog, please sign up on the right sidebar. If you would like to read full novels about Strong Women from the past, check out my titles: Cut From Strong Cloth, Last Curtain Call, and Counting Crows – all available in bookstores and online through Kindle and Amazon.

~ Linda

Every woman deserves to have her story told.

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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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