Jessie Tarbox Beals: First American Female Photojournalist by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on May 31, 2018 by lhsittig@verizon.net

I love to profile stories of strong females who vigorously pursued their passions because they had a zeal for life.

Jessie Tarbox Beals was like that. She became a pioneer of American photojournalism in the late 1800s when the competitive field was almost exclusively male.

Born in 1870 in Ontario, Canada, she was bright and precocious as a child. Enrolling in the Collegiate Institute of Ontario at fourteen, she completed her higher education and received her teaching certificate by age seventeen. And Jessie might have stayed in the teaching profession, except that she won a cheap camera in a magazine subscription contest. She used the camera to take pictures of her students and their surroundings. Before the month ended she took money from her savings and bought an upgraded Kodak. Once she saw the crisp black and white images she had shot with the better camera, she became hooked on photography.

In 1893, now living in Massachusetts, she traveled to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and met several other women photographers. That chance meeting made her realize she could pursue photography as a career. Four years later she married Alfred T. Beals, teaching him everything she knew about her camera, her photos, and how to develop the prints. By 1900 she convinced her husband that they should open their own business with Jessie taking portraits and Alfred developing the negatives. Within a year their funds were depleted and they relocated to Buffalo, New York.

Jessie was not a person to quit when the going got tough and she recognized that she was her own best promoter. Within a year she had secured a position as a staff photographer on the Buffalo Inquirer. This event qualified her as the first female photojournalist in America. But the job was demanding. Jessie carried all her equipment which consisted of an 8×10 inch plate glass camera, a bulky tripod, and a total of 50 pounds of equipment.  In addition to the unwieldy gear, she also wore a heavy ankle length two-piece outfit and a large plumed hat whenever she went out on a photography session.

In 1904 the paper sent her to St. Louis to cover the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. At first denied a press pass, she doggedly returned each day until the officials allowed her to shoot pictures. She remained for six months and practiced the maneuvers that allowed her to achieve stunning shots, even if she had to climb ladders or photograph from a rising hot air balloon to capture the angle she wanted.

By 1917 she and her husband had split, their young daughter went to live with friends, and Jessie moved to New York to photograph the Bohemian lifestyle of Greenwich Village. It was in Greenwich Village that she found her muse.

She opened a small gallery and studio on Sheridan Square and fed visitors tea and strawberry shortcake. In the gallery she sold photo postcards of the Village she had designed. While most photographers of this time established themselves as portrait photographers, Jessie broke with tradition and photographed the people of the Village as they went about their daily routines. Her photos show subjects in front of their homes, or in the various tearooms, or out in the street. Unlike portrait artists, Jessie shot her subjects in sharp focus, in their surroundings, using only the natural light available. She freelanced for newspapers and magazines and photographed a wide swath of humanity from New York society figures to the residents of the Lower East Side slums.

Her young daughter continued to battle rheumatoid arthritis and much of Jessie’s money went for medical expenses. By the 1920s she turned away from city scenes and concentrated on photographing the gardens of the upper-class elite. At the end of the decade she picked up her daughter and they left for California. Jessie set up a business where she photographed the lavish homes and gardens of the uber-wealthy, but the fall of the stock market brought her back to New York.

Sadly, at age 71, she found herself in ill health and out of reserves. With no other options she checked herself into the charity ward of Bellevue Hospital and died there penniless and obscure a few months later. Because Jessie had nowhere to store her negatives, hundreds if not thousands, were lost. But those that remain are housed at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, the New York Historical Society, and the Museum of the City of New York.

Without her photos, we would never be able to look back into the past and see Greenwich Village and it residents during the golden era of artists and writers who made the Village their home.

I hope you enjoyed learning about Jessie. If you are not yet a follower of this blog, sign up in the right-hand sidebar so you won’t miss a single monthly story. My passion is writing, what is yours?

You can read the captivating stories of my two favorite strong women, both available on Amazon.

Linda~

      Cut From Strong Cloth www.amzn.com/1940553024

Last Curtain Call www.amzn.com/1940553067

 

 

 

 

Posted in short biographies, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Jacqueline Cochran: a WASP Clothed as a Butterfly by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on April 30, 2018 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Jacqueline Cochran, like her other 1,078 WASP sisters, was among the first female pilots who flew for the Army in WWII.

These women, collectively known as the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or the WASPs, flew together for more than two years and logged in over sixty million miles.

When male pilots responded to the call for an enlistment after Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7, 1941), the military still needed additional reinforcementss with which to challenge the skies during wartime. Over 25,000 American civilian women applied to fill the gap.

From that number, 1,079 graduated from the newly minted program. Demure as a butterfly, but tenacious like a wasp, these women helped to change history.

War airfare was not entirely new. It had emerged on the heels of WWI, also called The Great War because the Allies had hoped there would never be another major world war like it.

Time proved otherwise

In late 1941, when America formally entered World War II, the U.S. Air Force did not yet exist and all army aviators were a part of the U.S. Army Air Corps. A critical need existed for thousands of pilots to conduct combat missions, transportation missions, and testing missions on new aircraft.

Jacqueline Cochran knew that female pilots would not be considered for combat, but she believed that women  flyers could easily fill in for other missions. She was determined to be one of them.

Born into crushing poverty in rural Florida, her first job started at age six in a cotton mill. She earned 72 cents a day for her twelve-hour shift, enabling her to buy her first pair of shoes at age nine.

As a testimony to her perseverance she took charge of her life at an early age, first by becoming a beautician and then earning a pilot’s license so she could be available to wealthy clients.

By 1932 she was already a commercial pilot. By 1939 she realized there were enough certified female pilots in America that they could be trained to help the military and free up male pilots for combat.

Traveling to England in 1939, she worked briefly with some of the British female pilots who helped to move planes on location for the Royal Air Force (RAF).

Once back stateside, she wrote to First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, with the idea of starting a women’s flying division within the U.S. Army. Mrs. Roosevelt put her in touch with General Henry Arnold, the head of the Army Air Corps. It took an inordinate amount of convincing, but he finally agreed that Jacqueline could take 25 female pilots with her back to England to train along with the British Air Force women pilots.

By 1942 Nancy Harkness Love, with General Arnold’s permission, started a women’s auxiliary squadron that would ferry airplanes from factories to air bases. When Jacqueline returned from England with her trained pilots, a competition of sorts broke out between Love and Cochran.

In 1943 both groups found themselves living together amidst the scrubby vegetation and semi-arid region of Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. After much discussion they agreed to join forces and their two units merged into the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

While not specifically trained for combat, the women’s WASP schooling concentrated on endurance flights because they would be testing and ferrying planes and towing targets for bomber practice. The planes they flew were B-29s and AR-6s.

Uniforms did not exist for the women, so they donned mechanics’ overalls as their flight suits.

Then, in December of 1944, the Army decided that the female flyers were no longer needed, the reason being that the Allies were winning the war.

So the WASPS were disbanded after a two-year stint of service, having lost only 38 of their members who died in action. Only considered as auxiliaries, none of the WASPs were conferred with any veteran status or benefits until 1977, a full 35 years after they had become a cohesive flying unit.

In 2009, then President Barack Obama signed legislation to honor the WASPS with the Congressional Gold Medal. The official award ceremony occurred a year later with 250 former WASPs in attendance.

Although Jackie Cochran did not live to see the ceremony, she had accomplished her mission.

Today, a  National WASP museum in Sweetwater, Texas, stands as testimony to the lives and exploits of the brave women who flew as WASPs. It stands near the airfield where Jacqueline and Nancy first flew with their female cohorts.

Thank you to Katie Stirner, whose excellent article, “The WASP”, Elks Magazine, June 1917, inspired me to research Jacqueline Cochran and the WASPs.

If you enjoyed this month’s story of strong women, then please share this blog with a friend and encourage them to become a regular blog follower. An easy sign-up occurs on the right hand side bar.

You can also catch me on Twitter @LHSittig or my webpage, lindasittig.com, or on Amazon where my novels about two extraordinary strong women are available. Cut From Strong Cloth is set during the Civil War and showcases the story of Ellen Canavan who valiantly struggled to break the ceiling of the competitive Philadelphia textile empire. Last Curtain Call pays tribute to Annie Charbonneau who set out to fight the all powerful coal company during the 1894 Western Maryland Coal Wars.

As you can tell, I believe that every woman deserves to have her story told.

linda

 

Posted in short biographies | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Mary Musgrove: Peace Negotiator by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on April 2, 2018 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Back in the early 1700s when America was still a group of loosely knit colonies, England, France, and Spain all vied for control over the New World.

In order to claim the virgin territory for their native countries, enterprising men arrived along the eastern seacoast and promptly started negotiating with the native peoples to obtain land.

One such man was James Oglethorpe.  His vision, to establish a permanent settlement of English speaking people based upon the principles of freedom to pursue honest work, eventually became the colony of Georgia.

Without Mary Musgrove, he might not have succeeded.

Mary Musgrove’s birth name was Coosaponakeesa, a child born around 1700 to a Creek mother of the Wind Clan, and a white deerskin trader.

Mary’s mother died when Mary was still a child, and by tradition, went to live with her Creek grandmother. By the time Mary was twelve, her father moved her to the colony of South Carolina, near Georgetown.

Having grown up in the interior, Mary must have been fascinated by the coastal low country. Sandpipers would scurry along the shore and seagulls would punctuate the sky. Seafood became a part of her diet, and she attended school.

An adept pupil, Mary learned how to read, write, and speak English. Her ability to converse in both Muskogee (Creek) and English, and her understanding of both cultures, would become the linchpin that launched her future.

In 1717 she married John Musgrove, a trader, and together they set up a trading post, several miles north of modern day Savannah. Because the Creeks are matrilineal, Mary was always considered a full Creek and therefore trusted by the local tribes. Her connections to the Creeks and her command of the English language enabled her to become John Musgrove’s valued business partner.

In 1733 when James Oglethorpe landed at Yamacraw Bluff and met with Chief Tomochichi, Oglethorpe was astute enough to realize he needed Tomochichi as an ally. Mary probably had the same realization and offered her services as an interpreter. She did such a good job that Oglethorpe asked her to be his prime interpreter.

For her part, Mary was most interested in protecting the Creek Indians’ interests, maintaining peace on the frontier, and expanding her position as a trader.

When John Musgrove died in 1735, Mary moved their trading post to the Yamacraw Bluff, above the banks of the Savannah River east of Bay Street, today. That trading post did exceedingly well. Having lived among the whites for many years, she understood the three commodities needed for success: land, supplies, and money.

In 1737 Mary married Jacob Matthews and they established another trading post, this time on the Altamaha River near Mt. Venture, approximately 30 miles southeast of modern day Jessup, Georgia. Unfortunately, Mr. Matthews died in 1742, leaving Mary a widow once more.

Mary had now been Oglethorpe’s main interpreter for over nine years. Because of her help, he had peaceful relations with the Native Americans of the area. Mary realized her own value and decided that Oglethorpe owed her compensation for her work.

He agreed, but told Mary the request would have to go through official channels.

Sometime within the next ten months he left on a trip to England, and never returned to Georgia.

By now, Mary had learned a lot about survival, both economically and socially. She enlisted herself as an interpreter to the Reverend Thomas Bosomworth. They married, and through their connections Mary found herself catapulted into the upper ranks of colonial society. Using her solid business sense, she capitalized on her new position to set up yet one more trading post.

With Oglethorpe back in England, Mary appealed to Chiefs Tomochichi and Malatchi for land and cash that Oglethorpe had agreed she deserved. The chiefs had no money, but granted her a plot of land in Savannah, plus the three sea islands of Ossobaw, Sapelo, and St. Catherine’s.

Still a British colony, the English/Georgia court claimed that land could only be granted from the native peoples to another nation, not to an individual. Mary fought the courts for twenty-three years and was finally awarded the sum of 1200 pounds sterling (approximately $172,000 today) and the entire island of St. Catherine’s.

In her mid-sixties, Mary moved to St. Catherine’s Island and attempted to start a farming enterprise. She died a few years later, owning over 14,500 acres of Georgia real estate.

Today, the once small settlement of the Georgia colony now has 10.43 million residents.

Thanks, in part, to Mary Musgrove.

The idea for this month’s blog came from a colonial interpreter who approached me at Fort Frederica, Georgia, and said, “Hello. My name is Mary Musgrove. Would you like to hear my story?”

Want to read more about other Strong Women? Sign up on the right-side bar to become a follower of this blog. Then find my novels about strong women, available on Amazon. Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call.

If you have a woman you would like me to research, email me at linda@lindasittig.com.

Linda😊

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Mary Musgrove: Peace Negotiator by Linda Harris Sittig

Mary Fields: Frontier Pioneer by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on March 3, 2018 by lhsittig@verizon.net

Mary Fields may just be the strongest of the Strong Women I have researched.

Literally.

Even from her early years, she did the unexpected. Born into slavery sometime in 1832 on a plantation in Hickman County, Tennessee, she became friends with a white girl named Sarah Dunne.

The two were an oddly matched pair. Sarah was a blue-eyed blonde from a family of means. Mary was a dark-skinned slave girl with brown eyes, and hair she wore up in a headscarf. Weighing in at 200 pounds and standing 6 feet tall, Mary towered over the more delicate Sarah. Yet, in spite of their differing circumstances, the two women stayed friends.

When Mary was granted her freedom at the end of the Civil War, Sarah took her vows as a Ursuline nun and moved to a convent in Toledo, Ohio. For the next several years Mary worked local odd jobs, like being a chambermaid aboard the steamboat, the Robert E. Lee.

In her thirties, with freedom under her belt, but no family to live with, Mary took it upon herself to move to Toledo, where she could at least be near Sarah. She procured a job at the convent, working alongside the nuns.

In 1884, Sarah (now known as Mother Amadeus) traveled to Cascade, Montana, to help establish a boarding school for Indian girls at the struggling St. Peter’s Mission. Mary stayed behind in Toledo.

Within one year, though, Mother Amadeus became ill with pneumonia and asked for Mary to be sent to Montana, to be with her.

Mary traveled 1,600 miles alone to reach the mission and then devoted all her energy to nursing Mother Amadeus. When her friend recovered, Mary decided to stay in Montana. She started raising chickens and cultivating a large vegetable and flower garden at the mission school.

Mary and The West were made for each other. She took it upon herself to make the needed repairs at the school and drive the wagon to haul supplies or visitors from the rail station in town. Wearing men’s trousers under her voluminous skirt, sturdy leather boots on her feet, and an apron over the skirt, Mary looked formidable… and she was. She also wore a revolver under her apron, just in case she needed it.

Although devoted to the nuns, Mary also frequented the saloon in town and taught herself to become a crack shot with a rifle—the Winchester ‘76 being her favorite. Baseball was her favorite spectator hobby and she would bring flowers from her garden and hand one to each ballplayer as a gesture of good luck.

After ten years, the Bishop of Great Falls, Montana, decided that Mary was not a suitable woman to be living with the nuns, so he banned her from the mission in 1894. All the nuns pleaded for Mary’s cause, but he would not relent.

Mary’s only choice was to move into the town of Cascade. She took all her savings and opened a restaurant, which only lasted a few months because Mary refused to charge anyone down on their luck, and fed any hungry person who came to eat.

When Mother Amadeus heard that the U.S. Postal Service needed a star route carrier, she encouraged Mary to apply. A star route carrier was a private carrier who would carry the mail or freight in a contract with the Postal Service. Mary earned the job when she hitched up a team of six horses faster than any other contestant.

At the approximate age of sixty, Mary carried the mail. She harnessed her horses and her mule, Moses, and made the fifteen-mile trek throughout rural Montana for the next 8 to 9 years. Because she was never robbed and never failed to make a mail delivery, folks started calling her, Stagecoach Mary.

She was, in fact, the first African-American woman to be a U.S. Mail Carrier.

While Mary was a rough and tumble woman, she did slow down a bit with age. But, she still ended the day with a drink and cigar at the local saloon, and even though Montana had a law forbidding women to frequent saloons, the Mayor of Cascade made an exception for Mary.

In her seventies, she gave up the mail route and opened a laundry in Cascade. One afternoon, at the end of the day in the saloon, a man entered. Mary recognized him as a customer who had not paid his laundry bill. She walked up to him, knocked him to the ground and placed her foot on his chest until he procured the coins he owed her. After that incident, all her customers paid on time.

Mary Fields forged her own life and proved that some women were just as capable as a man to carve out a life on the frontier. She served as a role model for a life lived with integrity, fairness, and hard work.

When she died in 1914, at the approximate age of 82, the schools in Cascade, Montana, shut down for the day and the entire community turned out for her funeral.

As I said, one strong woman.

Thank you to Carol Dumas and Ann Livotti for suggesting I research Mary Fields.

If you enjoyed this month’s story, please sign up on the right sidebar to become a follower of Strong Women. The blog is read in over 64 countries around the world. If you’d like to learn more about me, go to www.lindasittig.com, or Amazon where my two novels of strong women, Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call can be found.

linda

Posted in short biographies, strong women | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Dorothy Height: Carrying on the Dream by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on January 31, 2018 by lhsittig@verizon.net

If you look at the 1963 press photo of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. giving his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., you might notice a woman standing off to his left. She is one of the few women on the platform with him. Her name is Dorothy Height.

Known for being an activist and educator, Dorothy Height dedicated her life to campaigning for racial and gender equality for all women, and African-American women in particular. Dorothy became a legend in her own time.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1912, Dorothy’s parents moved when she was five years old to a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This event enabled Dorothy to attend racially integrated schools. Gifted with a talent for oratory, she become socially and politically active by her high school years. With encouragement from her parents and teachers, she entered numerous oratorical competitions. In her senior year, she won an Elks sponsored oratory on the national level.

With this national recognition, came a $1,000 stipend to attend Barnard College in New York. However, before Dorothy arrived for admission, the college informed her that they had already filled their yearly quota for a few black students. Undeterred, she applied instead to New York University in Manhattan and earned an undergraduate degree in education, combined with a Master’s Degree in Psychology in 1932.

After college, she became a caseworker for the New York Department of Welfare, where she saw first-hand the struggles of women trying to gain support for their families. During her time with the Welfare Department, she met Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder, and president of the National Council of Negro Women. Bethune became her mentor, and the two women remained friends for over eighteen years until Bethune’s death.

Following her work with the Welfare Department, Dorothy joined the staff of the YWCA in Harlem, New York. There, she worked tirelessly to integrate YWCA facilities.

I am embarrassed to admit that I never even knew the Y was segregated.

In 1946 when she was the National Interracial Education Secretary for the National YWCA, the organization finally did integrate all its facilities.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Dorothy never wavered in her quest for social justice and worked with every major civil rights leader of the period, even though the press largely ignored her.  In 1955 she became the fourth president of the National Council of Negro Women and held that position for forty years. In 1965, Dorothy became the first director of the YWCA’s Center for Racial Justice, a position she held until her retirement from the organization in 1977.

And, back in 1963, she helped to organize the March on Washington, which is why she was present on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, facing a crowd of 250,000 people, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dorothy Height was a remarkable woman in that she never gave up her dream of helping other women. She shared her goals with American Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson, and she discussed her views with other action-oriented women like Eleanor Roosevelt, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan.

Dorothy Height died at the age of 90 in Washington D.C., after having been bestowed with multiple honors, including prestigious awards from Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

A recipient of both the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Dorothy was hailed by President Barack Obama as the ‘godmother of the Civil Rights Movement.’ Today there is a U.S. Postal Stamp issued in her honor.

Look at the stamp, and you will see compassion etched on her face and evidence of her love of hats.

Dorothy Height, a strong woman worthy of remembrance. Thank you to Jackson Blumenthal who asked me if I knew about Dorothy Height. That question led to this month’s blog.

Linda

If you enjoyed this month’s story, please share it with a friend. If you are not yet signed up to be a follower of Strong Women, use the right-hand sidebar to do that. Like to read longer stories about strong women? Check out my two novels, Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call, both available on Amazon. Want to know more? Go to lindasittig.com.

 

Posted in short biographies | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Ruth Pfau: Humanitarian by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on January 1, 2018 by lhsittig@verizon.net

My first introduction to leprosy was from the movie, The Hawaiians, based on Michener’s epic novel. In particular, I remember when the Chinese character, Mun Ki, was sent for lifelong exile to the leper colony on Molokai; and his wife valiantly went along to take care of him.

I watched in horror as the scenes on Molokai unfolded to show a hellish life for the lepers who lived as outcasts, more of an animal existence than human, completely isolated from the rest of the world.

Leprosy, medically known as Hansen’s disease, dates back to biblical times with the first recorded account appearing on Egyptian papyrus in 1550 B.C.

Although today we know that a bacterial infection causes the disease, for most of recorded history, contracting leprosy equated to punishment for sins. Lepers were the virtual outcasts in all societies.

It is easy to understand the fear felt by non-lepers when the sick patient eventually became covered with lesions all over the body, failing eyesight, disfigurement to the face, hands, and feet. The first instinct was to segregate these victims so the disease would not spread.

In 1873, Dr. Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen of Norway identified the germ that causes the infection. It would take another one hundred years before the creation of successful drugs brought healing from the disease. Before that, all lepers were shunned, regardless of age, and left to fend on their own.

Many people are familiar with the priest Father Damien, who went to live on the leper colony in Hawaii and minister to the poor souls. He devoted his life to helping the victims of leprosy deal with their disease and brought not only spiritual comfort but advocated for their physical needs as well.

But few people are familiar with Dr. Ruth Pfau.

Ruth was born in 1929 in Leipzig, Germany. In her teens, her family home was destroyed by bombers from WWII, and after the war ended Leipzig fell to Soviet occupation. Her family escaped from East Germany to West Germany, and by 1950 Ruth decided to study medicine at the University of Mainz.

While at the university she felt called by God to become a Catholic. She converted to Catholicism in 1953 and four years later joined the order of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary. In 1960 the Order sent her to India, but a problem with her visa derailed her in Karachi, Pakistan. Waiting for the visa problem to be resolved, she decided to visit a leprosy colony and see if she could be of any assistance.

That visit became the turning point in her life.

Rats and other rodents overran the so-called hospital strewn with garbage and human waste. As a young boy crawled on his hands and knees through the filth to speak to her, Ruth was appalled that humans would be forced to live in these conditions.

She decided then and there that God had brought her to Pakistan to help the lepers.

For the next several years, and for the rest of her life, Ruth worked tirelessly to change the horrid facility into a center of healing. She went out into the Pakistani neighborhoods and rescued children whose leprosy had forced them to live in caves or cattle-pens.

Writing home to advance her pleas for needed medical supplies, Ruth obtained money from various German donors. She used the finances to attract other doctors who would help her and procure the drugs needed to help the lepers of Pakistan.

Ruth never retired. In 2017, she died at age 88, due to a respiratory ailment. Her state funeral was attended by both Muslims and Christians.

Today, in the country of Pakistan, leprosy is officially in submission. I can only surmise that Ruth Pfau is smiling.

If you enjoyed this month’s story of a strong woman, subscribe to the blog by signing up on the right sidebar. You will be joining followers from over 64 countries. My goal for 2018 is 1,000 followers! Please also feel free to forward the blog to a friend. You can catch me on Twitter @LHSittig or my webpage LindaSittig.com. For my novels on strong women, go to Amazon: Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call. I am currently at work researching my third novel, taking place in New York City in 1918 amid the Garment Industry scandals.

Wishing you all the best in 2018!

~linda~

 

 

 

Posted in short biography, strong women | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Laura Stockton Starcher and the Ladies of Umatilla by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on November 30, 2017 by lhsittig@verizon.net

It was a calm morning for Election Day, December 5, 1916, in the small Oregon town of Umatilla, population 198. Nestled on the southern bank of the Columbia River, Umatilla was a place where everyone knew everyone else. No one expected a huge voter turnout that day since the same men had held the same town office positions for several years. Voting was not an imperative priority.

The polls opened at 8:00 am, and throughout the morning men sauntered in to vote. No one had even bothered to order any ballots because you simply wrote the name of the person you were voting for on a slip of paper and dropped it in the poll box.

Although the state of Oregon had given women the right to vote four years earlier, no women showed up at the polls during the morning. There were presumably at home, cleaning, cooking, and doing laundry.

But then, around 2:00 pm or so, the women did come to the polls, a large group of women and they wrote in who they wanted to see in office. Unbeknownst to the men of the town, the women planned to write themselves into office.

Laura Stockton Starcher, who headed this effort, voted for herself to become Mayor of Umatilla. All the other women voted for her, too. Then the group proceeded to cast votes for Gladys Spinning, Anna Means, Florence Brownell, and Stella Paulu to take positions on the town council and Lola Merrick to become the town treasurer and Bertha Cherry the recorder.

No one was more surprised at the outcome than the current Mayor – Mr. E. E. Starcher, Laura Starcher’s husband. All seven women garnered enough votes to be formally elected to office, and only two men retained their seats on the council.

The mayor demanded a recount, but the results were still the same: the women had received the majority of the votes.

At first, the election made humorous news throughout the nation, being referred to by journalists as the “Petticoat Government.” The women were now officially elected council members, but the press resorted to naming them in print by their married initials. The new mayor, Laura Starcher, was listed as Mrs. E.E. Starcher. Nonetheless, the women soon proved that they were completely serious about their newly elected positions and took on town-wide projects previously neglected.

Within a month, the Petticoat Government paid the outstanding balance of the town’s electric bill and installed 16 new street lights. Within four years, the town saw many improvements. Updated water and electrical services, street and sidewalk repairs, new railroad crossing signs, the beginning of a town library and monthly garbage collection, were just a few of the initiatives. The council also inaugurated an additional position—that of a city health inspector, which was of utmost importance during the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918.

Laura Jane Stockton Starcher had moved to Umatilla in 1912. She was dainty in stature but robust in character. Few of her neighbors would have predicted how Laura would change the town.

First at weekly card parties, just talking about the possibility of women running for town council seats, to a full-fledged plan on how to write in the votes, Laura proved that women’s ideas should not be taken as frivolous.

Four years later, in the 1920 town election, the town council reverted to all men. But the ladies of Umatilla had proven a point—women could govern just as well as men, sometimes even better.

Thank you to Allyson Hopkins and Dee Taplin who both wrote to me suggesting I look into Laura Stockton Starcher as a candidate for a strong woman.

If you enjoyed this month’s story and have not signed up to become a follower of Strong Women, please add your name to the right sidebar and join the folks in 64 countries who follow this blog each month.

You can also read about my favorite strong women in my two novels, Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call, both available on Amazon.

Happy Holidays to all!

linda

 

Posted in short biographies | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Moina Belle Michael: Champion of Veterans: by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on November 1, 2017 by lhsittig@verizon.net

If you’ve ever worn a red paper poppy in support of Memorial Day or Veterans Day, you can thank Moina Belle Michael. Her tireless efforts of bringing recognition to the plight of disabled veterans is symbolized with the poppy.

Born on a farm near Good Hope, Georgia, on August 15, 1869, Moina was raised by religious parents who valued education. She attended boarding school, and then just months shy of her sixteenth birthday, returned home to take the position of the local community teacher.

When the farm could no longer bring in a profit, she moved the family into town and paid for their rental housing with her teacher’s pay. She remained an educator for the next fifty years, teaching from elementary age all the way to college, and always on Georgia soil.

During the summer of 1914, Moina joined a tour group visiting Europe. While the group was in Germany, that country declared war against Russia. The Americans found themselves as stranded tourists swept up a difficult situation. They finally landed in Rome, Italy, seeking safe passage back to the United States.

Once home on American soil, Moina continued her teaching at the Normal School in Athens, Georgia. (Normal School was the title for schools of higher education training students to become teachers).

But then on April 6, 1917, America entered the Great War, sending thousands of young soldiers to fight in Europe. Moina decided to help the war effort and enlist, but she was rejected due to her age – forty-seven. Instead, she volunteered for the YMCA War Workers and reported to the training headquarters in New York City.

While in New York, she read an issue of the Ladies Home Journal reprinting a poem entitled “In Flanders Field” by a Canadian doctor, John McCrae. He had penned the following excerpted lines after losing his best friend on a battle field in Flanders, Belgium. Dr. McCrae had stood on the grounds where his comrades had fallen and saw that the fields were blooming with vibrant red poppies.

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place: and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders Fields.”

Moina was so touched by the poem that she desired to create a national symbol of remembrance for the fallen soldiers.

She decided to wear a red poppy.

Quite soon her co-workers asked if they too could wear a poppy, and thus began Moina’s new life work. Hunting through the shops of New York City, she found a merchant who would sell her all his paper poppies.

When the Great War ended on November 11, 1918, the day was declared as Remembrance Day or Veterans Day in honor of all the men and women who had lost their lives fighting for freedom.

Simply wearing the poppies was not enough. Moina decided she could best help the veterans who returned home, injured for life, by having them mass produce red paper poppies and sell the flowers for Remembrance Day and Memorial Day. All proceeds would go back to the veterans for costs of their rehabilitation.

Her idea of red poppies for remembrance quickly spread to Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia and New Zealand.

When she died at age 75, in 1944, over $200 million dollars had been raised for the care and rehabilitation of disabled veterans.

Approximately one million soldiers were wounded, missing, or killed in the Great War, also known as World War I, but their legacy lives on through the efforts of one strong woman – Moina Belle Michael. Today, the wearing of a red poppy on Veterans Day or Memorial Day is used in recognition of all the service people killed in a war.

If you wish to wear a crepe-paper poppy this Veterans Day, contact your local American Legion post, and make a donation. The ladies of the American Legion Auxiliary sell the poppies. Then give a nod to Moina Belle Michael.

I hope you enjoyed this month’s story of a not-so-famous strong woman. If you are not yet a follower, please do so on the right side bar. You can catch more stories of strong women in my two novels, Cut From Strong Cloth, and Last Curtain Call, both available on Amazon.

linda

Posted in short biography, strong women | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Mary Louisa Black: Chronicler of Pioneer Movement by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on October 3, 2017 by lhsittig@verizon.net

As a youngster, I was fascinated by the stories I read of the Oregon Trail. Now, I know those stories were only made possible by the efforts of women like Mary Louisa Black.

Mary Louisa kept a meticulous journal of her trek west, at times following the Oregon Trail. In 1865, she left Missouri with her husband and three children and eventually travelled through what today would be Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon.

Her diary, and the diaries of other frontier women, give future generations the ability to read first-hand accounts of brave pioneers who walked away from their eastern homes, knowing they would never see their birth families again.

What led people west?

In the 1840s gold was discovered in California. Also starting in the 1840s, various religious groups, like the Mormons, sought land where they could live in peace. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. This gave any adult 160 acres to claim and farm west of the Missouri River, if they successfully worked the land for five years.

By the turn of the twentieth century, 400,000 American pioneers would make their way west.

The cost of a wagon, supplies, animals, and provisions for a family of four would be $1200. That is the equivalent of $39,000 today. People sold off their possessions to gain the money needed for the trip.

And the trip was not easy. The mortality rate was one in four. Although sickness, Indian attacks, and accidents contributed to the death rate, cholera was the main killer. We think of cholera as occurring in dense populations, but it spreads through contaminated water. There is little documentation of the wagon trains boiling the river water they drank freely along the trail. However, many journals attest to widespread diarrhea. Considering the vast numbers of stock animals that defecated and urinated in the rivers, it seems plausible the water was highly toxic.

Like the wagon train shepherding Mary Louisa and her family, there were approximately 100 wagons in each train that left from Independence, Missouri. The departure date was April 15th, to guarantee passage over the western mountains prior to October 1st, when blizzards could become a deadly consequence.

The pioneers were told to expect the journey of 2,000 miles to take five and a half months –  all of it on foot.

But wait, if they had wagons, why would anyone walk 2,000 miles? The wagons were small Studebaker wagons, not the large freight-only Conestoga’s popularized by Hollywood. The four-wheel wagons, or two-wheel hand carts, were crammed with everything the family owned, and without springs, the wagon bed lay directly over the axles. This meant that riding in the wagon was a noisy, bumpy, jostling ride. Walking was easier.

So, they walked the entire journey; men, women, children, the elderly, and the stock animals. On a good day on the prairie, the trains could average 20 miles, going 2 miles an hour. Yep, that’s a 10-hour day. At night, the travelers slept out under the stars, weather permitting, or bundled under their wagon for cover.

Here are some of the more telling details from Mary Louisa’s diary.

By early June the wagon train reached Colorado under brilliant blue skies, but where they find the remains of a settlement sacked by Indians. By late June the train encountered other Indians and traded with them. Grass on the prairie was waist high and the stock became well fed.

However, as they camp alongside the rivers and drink the water, almost everyone in the train comes down with forceful diarrhea. The remedy is to take laudanum (opium).

In July, the mosquitoes swarms in Wyoming are so thick that the pioneers continuously swat the insects away from the horses, mile after mile, after mile. Wagons break down, some stock animals drown while crossing the Laramie River and two women give birth. None of the newborns survive.

By August the diarrhea is so pervasive that the women need to sew new clothes for everyone. As wagons climb up into the mountains, the grass becomes scarce and the pioneers resort to feeding the livestock the grain reserved for emergency food.

In Idaho, the river water is green in color. They drink it anyway. Everyone gets sick, again. Arriving at a settlement, Mary Louisa trades her feathered mattress for a sack of flour. Food supplies are diminishing. She is thankful for the fish they catch in the Snake River.

By late August the heat in Idaho is heavy, dust infiltrates everything, and Mary Louisa now has a decayed tooth that needs to be pulled. Fortunately, there is a doctor on their wagon train. By early September they are eating the oats intended for the stock animals.

On September 29th they arrive at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. They have walked 2,000 miles in five and a half months, buried loved ones, suffered hunger and disease, and have traded precious possessions for food. But they have survived.

Mary Louisa Black is thirty years old. She puts her journal in her trunk, presumably to share with her children when they are older.

Hats off to strong women like Mary Louise who walked with their families, side by side, on the trails west and chronicled such an important part of American history.

Little did I know at age nine, I would one day walk a very small portion of the Oregon Trail and stand on the same soil that Mary Louise Black trod one hundred fifty-two years before me.

If you enjoyed this story, and have not yet become a follower of the blog, please sign up on the right-side bar for once a month notification.

My novels of strong women who brought history to life are available on Amazon in print and Kindle. Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call.

Linda

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Grace Fryer: Workers’ Advocate by Linda Harris Sittig

Posted on September 1, 2017 by lhsittig@verizon.net

 

I sat in the dentist chair while the technician placed a heavy leaden blanket from my chin to my waist. Then, she walked into another room, and the X-ray machine took pictures of my teeth.

Grace Fryer never had that luxury.

At eighteen, Grace took a job at the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey. America had just entered WWI (1917), and Grace wanted to help her family financially since her two military brothers were going overseas.

There were other factories near her home, but the USRC paid three times the going wage. And, Grace was the perfect candidate – she was young and had small hands.

The USRC made watches with the new element of radium to illuminate the dial faces. Discovered less than twenty years before by Marie Curie, the exact danger of radium was not completely understood.

Grace worked side by side with other girls. They obediently followed the painting technique. First, they moistened the tip of the paint bristles in their mouth. Then, they dipped the brush into the glowing green paint. Finally, they hunched over their workspaces and carefully painted the dials.

They repeated this procedure of lip, dip, and paint, over and over. By day’s end, they each painted 250 dials. In the process, they swallowed a bit of the radium paint each time they placed the paintbrush in their mouth.

At first, the girls were excited because, in addition to the high pay, their teeth took on a glow that gave them a dazzling smile. None of them realized they were slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning – all for $3.75 in daily wages.

Questions were initially raised by the girls, as to the safety of the procedure. The managers assured them that it was not dangerous and they shouldn’t worry.

However, the male chemists in the factory all wore masks and lead aprons and handled the radium with tongs.

Hmm.

Four years later, one of Grace’s friends, Molly Maggia became so sick she had to quit her job at USRC. At first, it seemed she needed only to have a tooth pulled. But soon after, an agonizing ulcer appeared on her gums, seeping blood and pus.

Next, Molly’s limbs began to ache so severely she was unable to walk. Baffled, the local doctor had never seen anything like it. Within months, Molly lost all her teeth, and the ulcers had spread to her lower jaw and roof of her mouth. Eventually, her lower jaw was removed.

Grace must have watched in horror as her friend deteriorated. Molly died several months later when the infection spread to her throat and ate its way through her jugular vein. She was twenty-four years old.

After Molly’s death, other factory girls developed the strange infection; including Grace Fryer.

Residents questioned about the number of female workers falling sick. For two years the USRC denied any connection between the girls’ deaths and the workplace.

As deaths increased, an independent firm was hired to investigate. When the horrifying results were made clear, the USRC refused to accept the findings and had the report hushed. After two more years, doctors were consulted. The announcement came that the workers had ingested radium which had honeycombed itself throughout their bones.

Grace had her spine collapse; another girl had her jaw eaten away. Several girls had spontaneous fractures of their legs.

Once the doctors pinpointed the radium as the poisoning agent, then they had to acknowledge to the girls that nothing could be done to save them. One by one, the girls died horrible deaths.

Grace, however, survived, and she began a campaign to have the USRC acknowledge that the girls were due medical compensation. Discovering that there were other radium factories in the U.S., Grace decided that she, and the other surviving girls at USRC, needed to bring awareness about their radium poisoning to the American public.

In New Jersey, however, there was a statute of limitations. Victims of occupational poisoning only had two years to bring a law suit. Unfortunately, the radium poisoning was not evident until five years after being ingested, so the USRC skated clear of all accusations.

Grace, determined, fought on. With the help of her father, she found a lawyer. Although the girls eventually settled out of court, they made America aware of the travesty.

As newspaper headlines raged across America about radium poisoning, factory girls at other radium firms realized the danger of their jobs and began to seek legal counsel. The radium firms denied any culpability, even when their female dial painters showed acute signs of radium poisoning. The firms insisted the girls were dying of syphilis since this announcement would smear their reputations and hopefully dissuade other workers from filing any suits.

By 1928, radium girls from three prominent factories in Orange, NJ, Ottawa, IL, and Waterbury, CT were suing the radium firms. Many of these girls had huge cancerous bone tumors that had grown all over their bodies and were too ill to testify in court. However, in each lawsuit, the judges found the companies culpable.

Thanks to Grace Fryer and her fellow Radium Girls, the right of individual workers to sue their employers for labor abuse was established. Today, we have OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration to ensure the protection of labor rights.

Grace died five years after the lawsuits. She was only 34 years old. The cause was complications from radium poisoning. If we exhumed her skeleton today, the bones would still have radium embedded in them, because radium has a half-life of 1,600 years.

Thanks to Kate Moore, whose new book, Radium Girls, debuted on Amazon this spring.

Catch me on Twitter @lhsittig, my website LindaSittig.com, and Amazon for my two novels, Cut From Strong Cloth and Last Curtain Call.

Linda

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 5 Comments