Stanton has always been one of my faves, too. I always found her remarkable friendship with Susan B. Anthonyto be so inspiring. PBS did a fabulous documentary on their collaboration. Click on “Explore the women’s movement” within the link to start a mini-doc.
My favourite story takes place at Stanton’s funeral, when above her casket was hung a portrait of Anthony, surrounded by flowers. What a lovely tribute.
Thank you everyone! This is fascinating reading. I especially like hearing from the Canadians.
I had lunch with one of my professors a few days ago. In the 1960s, she was one of twenty women in a class of 600 in the law school in Louisiana. She had a professor there who openly admitted that he didn’t think women should have anything to do with the law.
She was recruited as a teacher for the same institution. She was the third female professor in that law school’s history.
She said she was pretty certain she was the first female law professor to EVER be pregnant while teaching.
She gets class evaluations from students who comment about her looks.
It gives me cold chills to think how far we’ve come yet how little we’ve accomplished in 100+ years. I am going to be a lawyer, I am going to vote for women, and I will constantly give women a leg-up when they need it.
Happy Internaitonal WOmen’s Day to everyone, too!
In the former Soviet Union, it’s a huge holiday, like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day rolled into one. People send cards, bring flowers, the whole shebang. Not that Soviet society did nothing for the status of women - on paper, they were at times quite progressive, with things like really long legislatively protected maternity leaves, with the right to return to the same position - but unfortunately not enough of it has carried over to everyday life, and there’s still a looooong way to go. One of my grad school classmates did her dissertation on the role of women in the workforce after the breakup of the USSR, and she tells some quite hair-raising stories.
Fight the Power!
A lovely thread. I am inspired by and grateful to the women who went before me, who worked and strived against social and legal convention in order to make things right. Without the work of each generation of feminists, I know how much harder life would have been for me and my generation. I think that’s forgotten a lot now we’ve had the vote for so long, and take the right to work and have a career without comment or shame for granted. I do my best to give back and help make the changes that will make things better for the next generation, women, men, all of us.
I had originally composed a post with several thank you’s to the other postes to this thread, but it got eaten. In the interest of saving of time, let me just say THANKS! I’m enjoying reading your stories and responses. 
Now, without further ado, I give you:
Sarah Moore Grimke (1792-1873) &
Angelina Emily Grimke Weld (1805 – 1879)
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 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 they were already teaching.
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.
For more stories about fascinating women who dared to speak up: Susan B. Anthony Slept Here From the big names, to the housewives.
I am constantly humbled by what these thousands of women endured, rose up against and overcame in order to give me and my sisters the freedoms I have today. I can only hope to be an inspiration to the future generations of women as they are to me now.
Carry Amelia Moore Gloyd Nation (1846-1911)
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 the tavern. 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.”
Kentucky Daughter- **Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge ** (1866-1948)
Born just after the Civil War to a distinguished Kentucky family that included a number of elected officials, “Nisba” Breckinridge is yet another example of 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, which gave the field of Sociology a “jump-start”) 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 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.
Ladies Firsts
*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 the 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.
On this day in 1912, Juliette Gordon Howe founded the Girl Guides, the organization that would in America become the Girl Scouts. She was inspired by the English Girl Guides and the Boy Scouts. Today the Girl Scouts operate in 136 countries around the world.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927)
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 séances, 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.
It’s Irish History month too!
so let me combine the events and introduce to you one of my heroes:
Countess Markiewicz
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wmarkiewicz.htm
Wow, that’s cool ToF. I’d never heard of her. Thanks.
Dorothea Lynde Dix, Advocate (1802-1887)
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 right the wrongs borne of their indignation.