WHM: Dorothea Lynde Dix, Advocate (1802-1887)
Topic: Women's History Month
Fiercely independent, Dorothea Dix left her dysfunctional home in then upper Massachusetts (later to become Maine) at the age of twelve. Arriving in Boston and the security of her wealthy grandparents, Dix took advantage of the greater educational opportunity. While only fourteen years old, she started a successful school for young children in Worchester, which she ran for three years. Dolly, as she was known, started a dame school in 1821, when she was only 19 years old. She a strong disciplinarian, but was also known as a great beauty. The dame school placed a special emphasis on botany, an uncommon curriculum for girls at that time.

Struggling with life-long lung problems and intermittent exhaustion, Dix was forced to take time off occasionally to recuperate. During her lulls, Dix kept busy by writing books about everything from science to church hymns.

Quite unexpectedly, Dix found her calling in 1841 at age 39. Already a "spinster", Dix taught Sunday school at various places around Cambridge. On one such visit to the women in jail, she found a site that horrified and haunted her the rest of her days. Many of the women in the jails had only been guilty of "mental illness", and they were a group that was kept in filthy cages, those cages in cells without any heat. The jailer explained that the women could not feel anything due to their condition, but Dix begged to differ. She begged all the way to the local authorities and the newspaper, and did so loud and often. This effort led to public indignation, and efforts were made to accommodate the women in a more comfortable manner.

After two years of studying the phenomenon of mental illness, Dix again defied the conventions of the day by traveling alone throughout the northeast to research and draw attention to the treatment of mentally ill people. The memorial she wrote as a result of this experience, which she presented to the Massachusetts State legislature in 1843, is called the "first piece of social research conducted in America". In it, she gave a detailed account of the conditions of 958 "insane paupers" in the hands of the penal system. The state responded within weeks with hospital beds, and Dix took her cause on the road. Traveling through New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, Dix was able to get her writing published in newspapers because of her easy-to-read form and the obvious attention scandals brought even then.

In 1844, she was instrumental in helping found the Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, a landmark in the unnamed field of psychiatry at the time. She eventually traveled through fifteen states and Canada, providing impetus for thirty-two new institutions. She also worked as nurse during the Civil War and was appointed as Superintendent of United States Army Nurses, a first in formal command for that area.

Dorothea Dix died at age 85 in the Trenton, NJ hospital she helped build, just as words like sociologist and psychologist were coming into use. She had been both, without benefit of title for over half her life. Her political activism laid the groundwork for the likes of Nelly Bly and others who worked to reform the American Justice system.

Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927)
Topic: Women's History Month

Victoria Woodhull was one of those wild and feisty women who defied all the conventions of her time, and did so publicly and audaciously. She is the stuff of legend, the sort of person whose life reads like a novel.

Woodhull grew up in her father's (Buck Claflin) traveling medicine show. In these early years, she learned how to hold s?ances, read palms, practice psychic medicine, and she held a supernatural belief in the occult for the rest of her life. In this traveling medicine show, Woodhull cultivated the charisma that would help her get around breaking just about every taboo known to humanity regarding women.

She married Dr. Canning Woodhull ay the tender age of fifteen and they had two children, a daughter, Zulu Maud and a retarded son, whom she ultimately abandoned to her family. She and her sister, Tennessee, took Zulu Maud and blazed a trail of criminal notoriety across the Midwest. In the process they were charged with such crimes as prostitution and blackmail, but rather than serve jail time, law enforcement officials just ordered them to leave town.

After divorcing Dr. Woodhull, she married Colonel James Blood, but kept her previously married name. Both believed in the concept of "free love" and the marriage was an open one.

Woodhull and her sister might not even be footnotes in history were it not for Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt had an interest in the occult and a sizable fortune to blow exploring it. As Vanderbilt's relationship with the sisters developed, he began to finance some investments for them in real estate then the stock market. In 1870 they opened their own brokerage firm (Woodhull, Claflin & Co.) with the wealth they'd accumulated, and the firm did very well financially. Living with her odd extended family with an open marriage and a successful brokerage firm, Victoria Woodhull was a hot topic for discussion in NYC.

She decided to capitalize on her notoriety and declared herself a candidate for President of the United States that same year. This news hit the nation and, in particular, the suffragist movement, like a bullet, violently splitting opinion both within and outside the movement. For two years she campaigned on a platform that included dress reform and suffrage. She advertised this campaign through her newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, which, incidentally, was the first newspaper to offer an English translation of Marx' Communist Manifesto. Woodhull ran under the party she created, the Equal Rights Party.

Woodhull was able to use her charisma to overcome much of the initial rejection of the suffragist movement, but made a fatal mistake of declaring Frederick Douglass her running mate despite his protests. That, coupled with her publication of an affair between Henry Beecher--a Boston reverend who had publicly rebuked her for allowing her ex-husband, Dr. Woodhull to reside with her and her then-husband Colonel Blood--and Elizabeth Tilton. Both Beecher and Tilton were married and Woodhull claimed she was just revealing Beecher for the hypocrite he was. It effectively ended her campaign, however, as a young Anthony Comstock began his lengthy censorship career by arresting the sister within hours of publication of the article. They spent the next seven months in jail. Shortly after their release, they sailed for England, where the sisters married wealthy Englishmen and lived until their deaths, visiting America occasionally. The continued their political radicalism in London, and continued to successfully publish their unusual ideas.

Ladies Firsts
Topic: Women's History Month
1916
Jeanette Pickering Rankin (1880-1973)- The first woman elected to congress, she was elected before women had the right to vote in federal elections- Montana.

1924
Mary Teresa Hopkins Norton (1875-1951)- One of the first women elected to the House after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She was the first to be elected from an eastern state (NJ) and the first female democrat who was not preceded by her husband.

1924
Nellie Taylo Ross (1876?-1977)- The nations first female governor- Wyoming. She was elected the same day as Miriam Ferguson of Texas, but she was inaugurated first and thus claims her place in history.

1926
Bertha Ethel Knight Landes (1868-1949)- First woman elected as mayor of a major city- Seattle.

1928
Ruth Bryan Owen (1885-1954)- The first woman elected to the House from south-Florida.

1942 & 1948
Margaret Madeline Chase Smith (1897-) -The first woman elected to both the House and Senate-Maine.

1972
Barbara Jordan (1936-1996)- The first black woman elected, and re-elected, to the House of representatives- Texas.

1978
Nancy Landon Kassebaum (1932-)- The first woman elected to the US Senate who was not preceded by her husband-Kansas.

Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge (1866-1948)
Topic: Women's History Month
Kentucky Daughter

Born just after the Civil War to a distinguished Kentucky family that included a number of elected officials, "Nisba" Breckinridge is one of many successful women who were clearly influenced by their fathers. A liberal lawyer, William Campbell Preston Breckinridge supported both abolition and women's suffrage, and paid his daughter's tuition at Wellesley College.

After graduating in 1866, Breckinridge taught high school mathematics in Washington D.C. while her father was a congressman, and then read law upon their return. In 1895 she became the first woman to pass the Kentucky bar exam, but was not really interested in practicing law. At the invitation of a friend, she attended the University of Chicago and became the first woman in the world to earn a Ph. D. in political science.

In 1907, Breckinridge moved into Jane Addams' Hull House (the first Settlement House, birthplace of modern Social Work) and befriended Grace and Edith Abbott. There she found her life's work and, with Edith Abbott, began to write and publish several books on various aspects of social study. The Delinquent Child and the Home came first (1912), and she published an average of one book every other year in an age when that was the average of births for many other women. Two books, Women and the Twentieth Century, and Marriage and the Civil Rights of Women were written specifically on women's issues.

Dr. Breckinridge focused mainly on her academic career at the University of Chicago, however, and was awarded with a full professorship in 1925. Many of her students were the innovators behind Roosevelt's New Deal policies, but she remained in Chicago to teach, despite being appointed by Roosevelt to the 1933 Pan-American Congress in Uruguay. She taught a full course load until her retirement in 1942 at the age of seventy-six. Professor Breckinridge died on April 30, 1948.

Carry Amelia Moore Gloyd Nation (1846-1911)
Topic: Women's History Month

Ax-wielding Temperance Leader
It is important to remember several factors in any discussion involving the temperance movement and the Eighteenth Amendment (aka Prohibition). The temperance movement was motivated by the lack of married women's property rights, the lack of accountability in the emerging west, and the abandonment and violence against many frontier wives as a result of alcoholism. Also important to remember is that, while women are often blamed for the 18th Amendment, it was passed and ratified a full year before women got the right to vote with the 19th Amendment. Therefore, women cannot be held accountable for the votes that resulted in the "Great Experiment," though they were the driving force behind the movement. That said, THE most fascinating participant in the temperance movement would have to be Carry Nation.

Nation was profoundly effected by her unstable early life with an alcoholic father and an insane mother. Her first husband, Dr. Charles Gloyd was also an alcoholic, though Nation was unaware of Gloyd's condition prior to their marriage. Little more than a year after the marriage, with a new baby to care for, Nation was widowed at twenty-one. After a four-year stint as a teacher, Nation was left without employment and felt obliged to marry David Nation. Very much like her father, Nation moved his family continually to avoid political feuds he had a hand in creating. David Nation eventually divorced Carrie Nation years after she left him for temperance crusading.

Exasperated by the instability that characterized her previously dependant life, Nation turned to the temperance movement and founded her first chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1892 at the age of 46. In May of 1900 she began the crusade that would give her national notoriety. At a saloon in Kiowa, KS, Nation, who had armed herself with rocks she'd hidden in secret pockets sewn into her dress, and bricks and proceeded to destroy the illegal establishment (Kansas was ostensibly a "dry" state). When she ran out of ammunition, she grabbed a hatchet, and her reputation was thus secured.

A six-feet tall, 175 lb woman engaged in the willful destruction of property was such a spectacle that witnesses were paralyzed. In disbelief, patrons and employees stood by as Nation wrecked taverns and saloons. Bolstered by her success in Kiowa, Nation soon moved to Wichita where she expected to find much greater resistance in a town with a reputation for fast and accurate gunmen. She chose the Hotel Carey because if its national fame, arriving at 9:30 in the morning, and proceeded to destroy the fifty-foot cherry bar, antique mirrors and what she considered an offensive nude that hung above the bar. Finally, Nation was arrested and jailed, but nothing could persuade her from her mission and the disarming method she had stumbled upon. During that two week stint in jail, large groups of women sang and prayed outside her cell while word spread quickly about Nation and her deeds.

Jailed time and again, Nation continued her crusade for the next ten years. Not known for her politeness, Nation often referred to judges as "Your Dishonor" and appealed to the governor of Kansas to enforce its laws, which prohibited the sale of alcohol, so the women would not have to. Ironically, her temperance career came to an end when a female "joint" owner in Montana beat her so severely that she never recovered fully. She died a year and a half later. Eminent psychiatrist Karl Menninger commented, "What I have always admired about Carry Nation was the fact that she could not stomach hypocrisy... .I wish there were more people today who felt the same way."

WHM: Sarah Moore Grimke (1792-1873) & Angelina Emily Grimke Weld (1805 - 1879)
Topic: Women's History Month

Like much of the history that lead up to and directly influenced the Civil War era, Sarah and Angelina Grimke have received little attention despite their enormous contribution and sacrifice.

Born into a slave-owning family in Charleston, South Carolina, the sisters saw first-hand the treatment of slaves and the brutality the institution of slavery wrought on the entire community. The sisters were well educated by private tutors, but Sarah protested early when she was not allowed to learn Greek, Latin, philosophy and law like her brothers.

At age twenty-six, Sarah Grimke could no longer tolerate the politics of the south, and she moved from Charleston to Philadelphia in order to join the predominately abolitionist Quakers. Eight years later Angelina Grimke joined her and the two were never to return to the south. Their names would be anathema in their homeland soon thereafter and they were warned never to return, under threat of arrest.

In 1829, William Lloyd Garrison, a leading abolitionist and publisher of The Liberator, published a letter Angelina Grimke had sent him, which gave powerful testimony to the reality of life under slavery. Publication of the letter changed their lives forever, and made them heroines in the north and treasonous villains in the south. So began two lifetimes worth of tireless work and sacrifice for the causes of abolition and women's equality.

The sisters faced opposition even from within Quaker circles and they were publicly rebuked numerously, especially Sarah Grimke, for speaking out on the politically charged topic of abolition. They would not be silence, however, and they became the first women in America to give public lectures on the abolition of slavery. In 1838 Angelina Grimke became the first woman in America to publicly address a legislative body in Massachusetts.

Shortly after this address, Angelina Grimke married abolitionist Theodore Weld in Philadelphia, in a ceremony unusual for its time--the guest list included black friends. This incited a riot in Philadelphia two days later and considerable damage was suffered by abolitionists and their property. Appalled, frightened and discouraged, the Welds moved, with Sarah Grimke, to a farm and effectively retired from public life after this incident.

Later in life, the two women discovered two young mulatto boys who turned out to be their nephews, born of a slave raped by their brother on the family's old plantation. They took these two children in and educated them along with the several children of abolitionists and feminists.


Among the Grimke's literary contributions are Angelina's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South and Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States. Sarah Grimke published, along with Theodore Weld, Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. All three continued to write and publish on political issues until their deaths. The sisters carried on a correspondence with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as well as several other important feminist leaders at the time. In 1872, the frail older sisters went with Susan B. Anthony and 42 other women to cast their vote--a challenge to the 15th amendment and an effort to get the vote for women.

WHM: Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer (1917-1977)
Topic: Women's History Month
(Couldn't post to the blog yesterday, so you get two today. :)

Despite her childhood in Mississippi, where she was given a scant education and worked from the age of six, Hamer was able to contribute in a leadership position in the civil rights movement of the 60's. She was also the twentieth child born to her mother.

Still a sharecropper on a plantation in Mississippi, Hamer became politically active in 1962, at the age of 45, when she attended her first civil rights meeting. Her passions were enflamed and she answered the call, going with 17 people to register to vote at the Sunflower County Courthouse. They were stonewalled for the entire business day and their bus was pulled over and their driver arrested on the way home for "driving a bus of the wrong color." She was subsequently fired from her job as a sharecropper, and she lost her home in the process. She received a $9,000 water bill for a house that had no running water. Her daughter and husband were arrested and she was shot at and threatened when racists targeted her house. She was relentlessly harassed but stood her ground. She got no protection from the police or City Hall, despite repeated requests.

She was later arrested and beaten severely twice, acts which caused her serious nervous and kidney damage. After the first beating, the Justice Department pressed charges against five police officers but the trial was a mockery of American justice and all five were acquitted.

Hamer surprising qualified to run for Congress in 1964, though she was defeated in the Primary. Of the 68% black population in her voting district, estimates put registered voter numbers at 8% because of the obstacles put before black registrants. During that election season she formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party with other black self-appointed delegates, and they attended the Democratic National Convention that year, where they protested the whites-only delegation. As speaker for the party, she spoke before the Credentials Committee at the convention.

Fannie Hamer contributed hugely to the civil rights movement that swept through America in the 60's. In just 14 years, she managed to make an indelible impression on American Women's history, as well as Black history before she died at the age of 59.

WHM: Emma Goldman (1869- 1940)
Topic: Women's History Month
Radical At Large

One of history's more radical women, Emma Goldman was neither born, nor did she die on American soil, but she deserves a place in our history, as her extraordinary life effected so many women and families here, as well as around the world.

Goldman emigrated to America from Russia at the age of 16 in order to escape the practice of arranged marriages that was traditional in the Jewish ghetto where she grew up. After working in the garment industry in Rochester NY for four years, she moved to NYC, where she began a lifelong relationship with Anarchist Alexander Berkman. Four years later, after Berkman was imprisoned, Goldman found herself in jail for speaking out in favor of "food as a right" during the depression of 1893.

Goldman would be jailed time and time again, as every issue she espoused was radical to some element or another. She believed in anarchy, in "free love" and birth control, she did not believe in marriage and discouraged early maternity. She wrote of her opinions in the magazine she published with Berkman, Mother Earth, which enjoyed ten years of publications before WWI. Prior to WWI, America experienced a "political renaissance", where people were allowed to (and did) discourse on subjects like those advocated by Goldman. Systems of government like communism, socialism, and even anarchy were acceptable topics for average Americans. Discussion of notions we associate with the 1960's, like free love, birth control, and a strong peace movement were characteristic of the time.

Spending time in the slums of NYC as a midwife gave Goldman an understanding of the importance of birth control. Because of the "second wave" of immigrants at that time, Goldman was performing social work in the slums and saw how devastating birth after yearly birth was taking its toll on poor women. She decided to help in any way she could in educating poor and overburdened mothers on how to avoid pregnancy. Frankly discussing use of the diaphragm with these women was what eventually got her deported. A man by the name of Andrew Comstock was charged with policing the United States regarding the many "morality laws" passed under his name. He was finally successful in having her deported two years after the start of WWI.

"Red Emma" as she was called, with her outspoken ways and refusal to be silenced, left quit a mark in the annals of American Women's History, though she is little known today.

WHM: America's Criminal Women
Topic: Women's History Month
Mary Eugenia Jenkins Surratt (1817-1865)

On July 7th, 1865 America put to death the first woman.

The story began on April 14, 1865, when, just days after the end of the war, John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln. His co-conspirator Lewis Powell stabbed, but did not kill Secretary of State William Seward, third in line for the presidency. Another conspirator, George Atzerodt was assigned to kill Vice President Johnson, but failed to even attempt his assignment.

The players involved in the assassination of President Lincoln were associated by Sarratt's son via the boarding house she ran, and she had made two business trips to areas of southern sympathy shortly before, and Sarratt was convicted and hung in the fallout after that fateful day. That was the sum of the government's case against her.

Sarratt's cowardly son fled to Canada before capture but returned and stood trial in 1867. The trial was held under military law, and was prosecuted overly zealously in the case of this lone female, involving the suppression of evidence that would have cleared her. She was denied the opportunity to testify on her own behalf, and some of the men involved were intimidated into falsely testifying against her. To add insult to injury, the lawyers assigned to defend her learned of her conviction through the newspaper.

Sarratt was hung, along with four "accomplices," while four others were given life sentences. Before the sentence was carried out, Lewis Powell, who was considered the "brains" of the operation, pleaded for Sarratt's release and proclaimed her innocence.

Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (1915-1953)

Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg and her husband Julius were sentenced to death on April 15, 1951. Mrs. Rosenberg was the first woman to be executed for espionage.

In the "red scare" the followed the second world war, and with the relatively open anti-Semitism of the era, Rosenberg was an easy target for government prosecutors. Her husband and brother were arrested in the summer of 1950; her arrest followed shortly after. There was no specific evidence offered to support the prosecution's claim of espionage, and it was not until months later that they claimed that she had typed notes on atomic secrets for her brother. Both insisted on their innocence, but Rosenberg's sister-in-law, Ruth Greenglass (who was never indicted) testified against them. Rosenberg's brother quickly turned state's witness in exchange for reduced charges and a light sentence.

The sentence of death dolled out by the court came as shock to civil libertarians the world round, but alas their campaign for clemency failed. Even J. Edgar Hoover had recommended a lighter sentence.

The Rosenbergs were not only the first civilians ever executed for espionage, they were the first of civilian and military personnel to be executed for espionage during peacetime. Ethel Rosenberg was not even convicted of treason, but "conspiracy to commit espionage." Technically, the Soviet Union (who the Rosenberg's alledgedly sold atomic secrets to) and America were still allies as a result of their cooperation in WWII. The couple was executed on June 19, 1953, the day after their 14th wedding anniversary. They were survived by two sons under the age of eleven.

WHM: American Saints
Topic: Women's History Month

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917)

The first American citizen to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church, Maria Francesca Cabrini was born in Northern Italy and took vows there in 1877. When she established her order, The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, she hoped to be assigned to China, but was sent to America instead. Arriving in 1889 with six Sisters in tow, she quickly established a convent, school and orphanage in New York. Similar compounds in New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles followed and later, hospitals. Cabrini and the Sisters also cared for prisoners, most of whom were sentenced to death. Among her international achievements were similar compounds in Nicaragua, Argentina, Brazil, and Panama. The order was later established firmly on the European continent as well. She took the oath of citizenship in Seattle in 1909. Efforts to canonize her in were started in1928 and she was elevated to sainthood in 1946, less than a hundred years after her birth.

St. Mary Ann Seton (1774-1821)

The first American-born person to be declared a saint, Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton founded the first American convent. She was a widow and mother of five when she converted to Catholicism, taking her vows in 1809. Her order, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, were responsible for nursing, assisting the poor and teaching. Mother Seton is often credited with the creation of the first parochial school in America. She administered more than twenty orders nationwide while still mothering her own children. She died at age 46 of tuberculosis. Seton Hall College was named for her in 1856. Efforts at canonization began in 1907 and she was elevated to sainthood in 1975.