Edith Stratton Kitt

Edith Stratton Kitt

In her own words: “I was born in Florence, Arizona Territory, on December 15, 1878. That birth was really quite an experience for my father since I arrived while he was scouring the town looking for the only doctor, whom he found later, drunk and playing cards in the back room of a saloon.  The small house in which I was born had dirt walls, a dirt floor and a dirt roof. There was only one board floor in the village and that was in the most prosperous saloon.  Once in a while the townspeople would clear out the bar and hold dances in this saloon.  All the mothers brought their babies and pub them to bed on a long bench.  Mother was from New England, but she did go to these dances until some man sat on me.  After that, she refused to go any more.

Our home was thirty miles from Tucson as the crow flies, but seventy five as the road crawled.  Mother was once on the ranch for eight months without seeing another American woman.”

Edith enjoyed a tomboyish youth; doing chores, riding and hunting.  She began riding as a baby in a sling from an old tablecloth knotted around her father’s neck and shoulder.  She eventually graduated to her own horse, “Little Bill” and was given her first shotgun at ten with which she hunted quail, duck, deer and skunk, because “skunk skins were worth fifty cents to a dollar and in one season I made fifteen dollars.”

She studies at the University of Arizona and became a teacher and taught in Colorado and Tucson for several years before marrying George Kitt in 1903.

She transcribed many oral histories over the years and was secretary of the Arizona Historical Society (formerly the Pioneer’s Historical Society. She is credited with making this library one of the top research centers in the Southwest. 

Ann Preston

Ann Preston

Ann was born December 1, 1813 in the Quaker settlement of West Grove in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia. She attended school but also helped care for her six younger siblings as her mother’s health was poor.  She was also active in the local anti-slavery society.

When her siblings grew to be more independent she began teaching.  At this time she also became interested in physiology and recognizing the need for more information on the subject, she initiated classes in female physiology and hygiene for women and girls.

In 1847 she embarked on a two year apprenticeship with Dr. Nathaniel Moseley in Philadelphia. Completing the apprenticeship she applied to four medical colleges in Pennsylvania but was rejected solely because she was female. In 1850 a group of Quakers founded the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania to meet the needs of the many women seeking a career in medicine.  Just shy of her thirty seventh birthday Ann enrolled in the first class with seven other women.

After graduating she remained at the college as a professor of physiology and hygiene.  In 1858 she initiated a fundraising campaign to build a woman’s hospital in connection with the college to provide hands on clinical instruction.

In 1866 Ann was appointed dean of the Woman’s Medical College, the first woman to hold that position. She applied for permission for her students to attend general clinics at the Philadelphia Hospital but was met with demonstrations by male medical students protesting the impropriety of educating men and women in medicine together.  She fought this narrow-mindedness saying women were patients and it was “in accordance with the instincts of the truest womanhood for women to appear as physicians and students.”  Philadelphia newspapers published her comments.

Annie Lawry

Annie was born on November 13, 1866 somewhere near Lovelock, Nevada.  Her mother was a Paiute Indian and her father was a white man who was often away from home for long periods of time.  While he was away she and her mother reverted to Indian ways but when he was around he insisted that everyone speak English and discouraged anything Paiute.  He enrolled Annie in the local school where she was the first Indian to attend with white children and possibly the first Paiute to go to school at all.

Eventually Mr. Lowry grew prosperous and his Indian family became an embarrassment so he deserted them never to return to them.  When he left Annie gave up all white ways and returned to her Indian heritage and ways. Years later when he died friends urged Annie to travel to Oregon and make a claim to her inheritance.  She refused not wishing to make any trouble for her two brothers who were living as whites. She did domestic work which was the only work available to Indian women for about $1.50 per week.  She married a local man, Sanny in a traditional Paiute ceremony that took five days.  They had nine children, five of whom survived infancy. 

Jessie Annette Jack Hooper

Jessie Hooper was born November 8, 1865 in Winneshick County, Iowa.  She was a very frail and sickly child and was educated at home by a governess but in her late teens she traveled to Des Moins and Chicago to study art.

She met and fell in love and soon married Ben Hooper, an attorney, while visiting her sister in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.  Ben pursued a successful legal career and Jessie took up various civic projects, established the first kindergarten, the first visiting nurse program and a sanatorium for Tuberculosis patients.

She joined the Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association and went on to become a renowned leader in the American Woman’s Suffrage Association frequently traveling to Washington to lobby for a federal suffrage amendment.  When Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, her efforts helped to make Wisconsin the first state to ratify it.  

In 1922 Jessie ran as a democrat for the U.S. Senate and while she realized that there was little hope of unsettling the incumbent, she felt it was her duty as a newly enfranchised woman, to make her voice heard and run for office.

Following WW I, Jessie devoted much of her energy to the peace movement making hundreds of speeches on behalf of world disarmament.  Three years before her death she joined women from around the world in presenting peace petitions with over eight million signatures to the League of Nations disarmament conference in Geneva. 

Abigail Jane Scott Duniway

Abigail Duniway was born on October 22, 1834 in Groveland, Illinois and they migrated to Oregon in 1852. There were nine children in the family and each child was given a specific task for the trip to Oregon and Abigail’s was to keep a daily journal.  This journal laid the groundwork for two novels later in her life.
Shortly after settling in Oregon Abigail married Benjamin Duniway and they settled on a farm and had six children.  In 1862 they lost the farm when a friend, whose notes Benjamin had endorsed, defaulted.  Shortly thereafter Benjamin was permanently disabled by an accident and Abigail became the sole provider for the family. Abigail was incensed that a man could jeopardize his family and their security without even consulting with his wife and thus, began her interest in the women’s movement.  She firmly believed that woman’s inequality with man could only be rectified through the vote and for the next twenty five years she travelled the country lecturing on woman’s suffrage.

Oregon granted women the right to vote in 1912 and Abigail was given much credit for the passage of this legislation. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, she wrote the suffrage proclamation which she co-signed with the governor and became Oregon’s first registered woman voter.

Fannie Moore Richards

Fannie was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia on October 1^st 1840, daughter of a noble black father from Guadeloupe and educated in London and a free black woman from Toronto. In Virginia the law forbade anyone to “sit or stand to teach a black”. Fannie and her older siblings attended a clandestine school in a private home where teachers often reclined on couches while instructing so as not to be in violation of the law as it was written.  They also kept wood splinters available so they could pretend to be teaching the children to make matches if observed.

In 1851 after her father died, the family moved to Detroit where Fannie attended local schools and graduated from normal school in Toronto.  She did postgraduate work in Germany where she was introduced to the new concept of Kindergarten  in 1863 she returned to Detroit and began to teach at Colored School  2, becoming the first full time professional black teacher in the city.  At this time whites received twelve years of education while blacks received only six.  Fannie led the crusade for desegregation which ended up in the Supreme Court.  A favorable decision was rendered and Fannie and her pupils cheered and danced.  Fannie taught for more than forty years in Detroit’s Everett Elementary School, part of that time as the city’s first kindergarten teacher.

The artist Carl Owens presented a portrait of Fannie to the Detroit Historical Commission and the Detroit Public Library presented an exhibition about her work.  The mayor of Detroit declared October 1, 1975, Fannie Richards Day.  

Anne Whitney

Anne Whitney

Born September 2, 1821 in Watertown, Massachusetts, Anne Whitney was educated primarily at home by private tutors but she did spend her thirteenth year at Mrs. Little’s Select School for Young Ladies in Bucksport Maine.  Upon graduation she taught school and dabbled at writing poetry, publishing her first volume of poems in 1859.

Her real passion and talent lay in sculpting however, which she discovered quite by accident upon overturning a watering can in her greenhouse and beginning to create in wet sand.  She traveled to Philadelphia and New York to study sculpture as well as anatomy at the Brooklyn Hospital.  Her first piece, a marble bust of a child, was entered in an 1860 exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New  York.  That piece is now in the National Collection of Fine arts.
                                                                                                        

The Civil War cancelled her plans to study abroad but she remained at home working and exhibiting  several large works in Boston and New York. 

In 1867 she was finally able to study in Italy where she remained for four years.  Upon her return to America she was commissioned to create a life sized statue of Samuel Adams for the Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington.  She worked for the next twenty years from her studio in Beacon Hill creating works that still stand in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Wellesley College and on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston.

A passionate opponent of slavery and an advocate of women’s rights, Whitney’s work often reflected her political beliefs.  This included sculptured busts of Lucy Stone, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Willard, Harriet Martineau, Mary Livermore and William Lloyd Garrison.

 Anne was asked by the city of Boston to re-work a monument to celebrate the achievements of Charles Sumner that she had begun in 1875. She had been a great political support of Sumner in his campaign against slavery.  When officials discovered she was a woman the commission was withdrawn.  This annoyed her greatly but she finally completed the statue in 1902 at the age of eighty one.  The statue stands today at the center of Harvard Square.

Anne Henrietta Martin

”Equality for women is a passion with me.”

Anne Henrietta Martin, daughter of a very traditional Bavarian mother and an exceptionally open minded Irish father, was born September 30, 1875 in Empire City, Nevada. She graduated with a BA from the University of Nevada at nineteen and received a MA in History from Stanford University where she founded the History Department and became its first head. She was a tennis champion, excellent horseback rider, golfer and mountain climber.

She resigned in 1891 when an inheritance resulting from the death of her father allowed her extensive travel in Europe and Asia. While in England she joined a group of militant suffragettes and was arrested several times for demonstrating.

Upon her return to the US in 1912 she was elected the president of the Nevada Equal Franchise Society and within two years she saw her state suffrage amendment win at the polls to become law.

Next she turned her energy toward the national suffrage movement serving on many committees, attending numerous conventions and became the vice chairman of the National Women’s Party.  In 1917 she was again arrested, this time for picketing the White House. In 1918 she became the first Nevada woman to run for state senate, resigning all other positions to concentrate on her campaign.  Although losing two elections she became a role model for other women. She ignored the established, male-dominated political parties and ran as an independent.  Her platform supported aid to mothers and children, farmers, miners and other oppressed laborers.

In 1921 she moved to California where she wrote feminist essays for both American and British magazines and urged women to challenge Men’s control, run for office themselves or support other women who were running.

She was very impatient with the inequality between the sexes. 

Belle Jennings Benchley

Belle Jennings Benchley was born in Pratt, Kansas on August 28, 1882. At the age of four the family moved to Loma, California where her father was sheriff of San Diego County.

Belle received a teaching certificate from San Diego State Normal School and married William Benchley in 1905.  They had one son and when they divorced in 1922 she was left as his sole support. After completing a bookkeeping course in 1925 she took a position at the San Diego Zoo.

The Zoo had between 600 to 800 animals housed on 150 acres with ten employees when Belle first started.  At her retirement nearly twenty six years later, it had grown to 3,000 animals on 200 acres with 200 employees.  During her first week at the zoo she began suggestion to the Director, Dr. Harry Wegeforth, ways for improvement at the zoo.  He would always reply, “Well, do something about it.”  She had wolves moved to larger cages, wrote promotional articles for the newspaper and on her days off collected food donations from local grocers.  In 1827 she was made executive secretary and director of the zoo.

In her first few weeks as new Director she actually did the various jobs of her employees in order to better understand the daily operations of the zoo. She cleaned elephant cages, nursed a sick emu and patrolled the grounds as night watchman.  She believed the zoo was for the animals not people.  She would tolerate no abuse or neglect, warning her employees to always use “a soft word instead of a club, a gentle twinkle of the eye instead of a whip.”

Belle was the first to use moats as natural barriers for bears and big cats.  She made certain every cage had a private place, out of public view as a retreat. In 1931 she obtained two gorillas, out of only five then in the country.  In 1938 she opened the largest bird cage in the world for birds of prey, complete with a real hill with cliffs and trees.  She was very proud of the zoo hospital, the first in the United States and of the zoo’s highly successful captive breeding program.

Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis

Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis was born in Bloomfield, New York on August 7, 1813. She was raised by a very strict and fanatically religious aunt following the death of her parents when she was seven. She was continuously forced to participate in church activities. It was during this time she honed her skills as a staunch feminist resulting from her objection to the discussion as to whether or not a woman could be allowed to speak during a religious meeting when men were present.

Paulina’s aunt was expecting her to become a missionary but she ran away at the age of twenty to marry Francis Wright.  Following Wright’s death in 194 Paulina traveled across the US with a female mannequin, lecturing to women about hygiene and health reforms.

While lecturing in Providence, RI she met Thomas Davis a state representative who shared both her anti slavery and feminist views.  They married in 1849 and adopted two daughters.  Three years later he was elected to Congress and they moved to Washington, DC.

Paulina was elegant, well educated and well spoken and passionate about her cause an able representative of the women’s rights movement.  She helped organize the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in Massachusetts in 1850. In 1853 she began publishing, at her own expense, one of the first women’s rights publications, UNA a monthly periodical. In 1868 she co-founded the New England Woman Suffrage Association and the Rhode Island Suffrage Association.

 

Mary Suzette Sandoz

Mary Suzette Sandoz (Mari Sandoz) was born May 11, 1896 at Sandoz Post Office, Running Water Precinct in Sheridan County, Nebraska. Until the age of nine she was educated at home by her father, then was sent to school only speaking German and walking three miles each way. She knew trappers, traders, Indians and Indian fighters, and learned their stories and their backgrounds.  At ten she published her first story and made the decision to become a writer despite her father’s adamant protestation.

At sixteen she dropped out of school to help support the family which she did by teaching in a rural school in Western Nebraska.  During this time she married Wray Macumber but divorced him after five years and never spoke publicly about her marriage.

In 1922 she attended the University of Nebraska.  Her publication The Peachstone Basket won her honorable mention in 1926 in Harper Intercollegiate Short Story Contest.

She continued to work in various academic positions and further her literary career.  Upon the death of her father she began to publish under the name of Mari Sandoz.  In 1933 her manuscript Old Jules, a biography of her father, was rejected by Atlantic Monthly.  She gave up her dream with that rejection and burned more than seventy five of her stories and dropped into a severe depression.  A little over a year later she submitted the manuscript again and this time won a $5,000 prize and was published. It was the first book in a series of six that captured “the hardship, the violence and gaiety” of frontier life on the plains. 

She worked diligently to complete her last two books, a personal recollection of her life and a novel about the Battle of Little Bighorn.  She succumbed to cancer in March 1966.

Mary French Sheldon

May French Sheldon was born May 10, 1847 in Beaver, Pennsylvania.  Her Mother, a medical doctor, was her role model.  She married Eli Lemon Sheldon, an American banker living in London, in 1876. In 1890 a friend returned to England after years exploring in Africa.  She was fascinated by his tales and decided to mount an expedition to Africa herself.

Everyone except her husband was vehemently opposed to her plan. When she reached Mombasa, the British authorities refused to help her so she went directly to the sultan of Zanzibar to appeal for aid.  He outfitted her with 103 porters and a letter of introduction.  Her goal was to meet the sultans of every African tribe.

During the mid-nineteenth century, Britain and Germany were planning to colonize the Mombasa region of East Africa.  Their intention was to set up plantations and populate them with white settlers. In order to do this they had to force the natives to give up their lands and this was done by harsh military action.  Her goal was to demonstrate that if treated with respect and kindness the tribes would accept whites.  In all, she visited thirty five tribes most of whom welcomed her warmly.

On her return trip she was severely injured when the porters carrying her across the pole bridge slipped and dropped her twenty feet into the river below.  She was rushed to the ship and recovered on her journey back to England where she wrote a book about her experiences.

She continued travelling and lecturing well into her eighties until her death in London in 1936.

Helen Marot

Born in Philadelphia to a Quaker family on June 9, 1865, Helen was schooled at home and raised to be independent. Her father frequently told her “I want you to think for yourself – not the way I do.”

As early as 1893 she took several positions as a librarian in Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware. In 1897 she opened a small library of her own in Philadelphia for “those interested in social and economic problem.”  The library soon became a gathering place for liberal thinkers.

In 1899 she was hired by the United States Industrial Commission to  investigate the custom tailoring trades in Philadelphia. What she discovered about the poor working conditions , especially for women and children, caused her to change from a peaceful librarian to a militant activist.  She went to New York City in 1902 to uncover child labor problems there, which resulted in the formation of the New York Child Labor Committee. During this time she lectured on the benefits of unions to countless members of the garment trade and organized a new union for bookkeepers, stenographers, and accountants.  Her research and assertiveness helped persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of a law limiting working hours for women.

From 1909 to 1910 the League, under Helen’s supervision, led the great  Shirtwaist Strike in New York. The strike brought attention to the plight of the workers, empowered women, and began an industrial revolution in the garment industry that led to the formation of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’.  In 1912, she was part of a commission that investigated the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. From 1913 on, she devoted herself to writing, primarily about the labor movement. 

Harriet Stone Lothrop

Harriet was born in New Haven, Connecticut on June 22, 1833. She always yearned to write but her father objected to women writing for publication.  She began to publish stories and poems in magazines and newspapers using the pen name Margaret Sidney as not to offend her father.

In 1877 she penned “Polly Pepper’s Chicken Pie” for Awake, a Boston based children’s magazine. That was the beginning of the timeless Five Little Peppers series.  Five Little Peppers and How They Grew was first published in 1880.  Over the years she wrote eleven more volumes, the last being ,  Our Davie Pepper in 1916.

In 1881 she met and soon married Daniel Lothrop, the publisher of that Boston magazine,  Awake. They bought  “The Wayside” the former home of Nathaniel Hawthorne and before that, the Alcott family, in Concord Massachusetts.

She went on to write some thirty other books, including A Little Maid of Concord Town and A Little Maid of Boston, set in Revolutionary War times, and in 1895 she founded a national society, Children of the American Revolution.  During her lifetime over 2 million copies of her books were sold, many of which continue to be popular with children today. 

Florence Bascom

Florence Bascom, considered the first American woman geologist, was born on July 14, 1862 in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  Her father was a professor at Williams College.  When she was twelve her father was named president of the University of Wisconsin and they relocated there.  She enrolled in the University at sixteen and in 1882 earned two bachelor’s degrees, one in letters and one in arts.  In 1884 she earned a Bachelor of Science degree.  Her main interest was geology and after studying for several more years with leading scholars she received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1884.  She taught for two years then earned her Ph.D. at John’s Hopkins University the first doctoral degree awarded to a woman in 1893.

In 1895 she joined the faculty at Bryn Mawr College where she remained for the next thirty years.  She introduced geology as an undergraduate major and eventually as a graduate program despite the objections of the college’s president, who felt science should only be an elective in a women’s college.

Florence persevered and brought rock and mineral collections to the college and in 1899 obtained a petrographic microscope enabling her to teach petrography.

Ella Reeve Bloor

“As I begin this story…I am strong and vigorous at the age of 78 and I would really much rather talk about plans and dreams for the future than to delve back into the past.”

She was born July 8^th 1862 on Staten Island New York.  She was the oldest of ten children.  She herself married at nineteen and had six children. She began a long career as a political activist by organizing Philadelphia streetcar workers in the early 1890”s.

She had several marriages and when the last of three failed, after having two more children, she threw herself completely into radical political activities. She was a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and a tireless worker for women’s suffrage but it was labor organizations that interested her the most. 

The author Upton Sinclair, Ella’s friend and fellow socialist asked her to investigate the Chicago meat packing industry which he has exposed in his book The Jungle. She joined forces with another Socialist Party Member, taking his name in order to avoid any scandal of this unmarried investigative team.  In 1919 she helped found the U.S. Communist Party.  Two years later she took the first of several trips to the Soviet Union.  At the age of sixty three, she hitchhiked across the United States recruiting new members for the party. 

She traveled frequently back to the Soviet Union where she was an honored speaker.  Here in the United States she was often harassed and threatened by the police.  She was arrested more than thirty times including once at the age of seventy two for assault and inciting to riot.  Her active work continued for several more years and then she retired to an apple farm in Pennsylvania where she died in 1951 at the age of eighty nine.

Addie Melvina Billings

Born in Pecotonica, Illinois on January 4^th 1858 Addie began teaching school at sixteen while still taking classes at Iowa State Normal School.  In 1880 she married Elmore M. Billings, attorney, and they settled in Geneva, Nebraska.

Addie because her husband’s secretary and became very familiar with the law. She was also a correspondent for the Omaha newspapers, which allowed her to get free publicity for her husband;  when he won a case she would include it in her column and when he didn’t she would simply forget to mention it.  In 1887 she was admitted to the Nebraska bar and became Elmore’s law partner.  They moved to Benicia, California for Elmore’s health but it did not seem to help and he retired.  She continued to practice law joining the Wallace Rutherford firm in Napa.

In 1908 the Billings invested in a wine vineyard near Calistoga and for many years Addie served as executive secretary of the California Grape Growers Association.  When the Woman’s Temperance Union, of which she was also a member, discovered her affiliation with grape growers, she was “read out” of the organization.

In her retirement she took up rug hooking and made more than fifty beautiful rugs.  She died in her home in Berkeley in 1948 at the age of ninety.

Florence Kelley

"she was not afraid of truth, she was not afraid of life, she was not afraid of death, she was not afraid of enemies"  

Florence Kelley was born on September 12, 1859 in Philadelphia.  She was primarily home schooled and graduated from Cornell University in 1882. She applied to the University of Pennsylvania Law School but was refused, because she was a woman.  She traveled to Europe and enrolled in the University of Zurich. Upon her return she settled in New York City but  in 1888 she moved to Illinois where he mother was settled at Hull House and she began her tireless work for child labor laws. Obtaining a law degree from Northwestern University in 1894 she moved back to New York City. Her role in the abolition of child labor, the passage of protective legislation for working women, the establishment of minimum wage laws, and the development of child health services are a few of her accomplishments.  She made important contributions to social reform. She exposed the use of child labor in factories, stockyards and sweatshops with detailed scientific studies and reported her finding of horrific abuse of children.

She and her young colleague, Josephine Goldmark, championed the use of scientific data to urge the U.S. Supreme Court to set and enforce limits on hours of work for women.  She was one of the first reformers to recognize that strategy for social change must address the prevention of injustices and social ills not just remediate them after the fact.  She fought for legal requirements for states to register births and for employers to document workers ages as steps toward ending the exploitation of children.

Kelly was known for her fierce energy. She was called “the toughest customer in the reform riot, the finest rough and tumble fighter for the good life for others.” (James Weber Lynn, nephew of Jane Addams)

Mary Wright Plummer

Mary was born into a Quaker family on March 8, 1856 in Richmond, Indiana.  She graduated from Friends Academy and studied for one year at Wellesley College then began teaching in Chicago. She was an avaricious reader and fluent in German, French, Spanish and Italian.  She wrote many poems that were published in the Atlantic Monthly and Scribners.

She graduated from the first class of the first library school, the Library School of Columbia College, in 1888. She was a cataloguer at the St. Louis Public Library, and then later moved to the Pratt Institute, where she created a program in library studies. She spent nine years as the director of that library, and is credited as being the one to create a separate room entirely for the children's collection. She is also credited with originating the idea of having special training for children's librarians. Upon retiring as director of the Pratt Institute Free Library, she moved to the New York Public Library and founded another library training program. Over the course of her career, wrote several children's books, authored articles in librarianship, published essays in literary magazines, and she held various positions in the American Library Association.  She was elected President of the ALA in 1915 but was taken ill and died soon thereafter of cancer at the age of sixty. 

Edna Adelaide Brown

“Because I had few child playmates, I created imaginary ones, and entertained myself making stories>”

Edna was born March 7^th 1875 in Providence R.I.  Her early health was poor and she was homeschooled until she was ten.  She graduated from Girls High School at Brown University and went on the New York State Library School.  She reflected in her later years that her choice of a library career was due to her love of books and mused that as a child she had not been allowed in public libraries because her parents feared germs.

When she graduated from library school she toured Europe for a few years and upon her return took a job at the Providence Public Library then later joined the staff of Rosenberg Library in Galveston Texas.  She found working in a large library very trying and unsatisfactory. She was happy to return to New England in 1906 where she was chief librarian of Andover Hall Memorial Library, Andover, Massachusetts a position she held for thirty years.  She wrote more than twenty children’s books and plays and most of her stories were about animals.  The American Library Association recommended all of her books.  She retired in 1939 to devote her time entirely to writing and working in her garden.  Her last book, How Many Miles to Babylon?  was published in 1941. She died three years later. 

Jane Adams

Jane Addams was born on September 6^th 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois.  In her teens Addams had big dreams and wanted her life to make a difference.  After graduating at the top of her class in 1881, she and a friend, Ellen Gates Starr, she traveled Europe. It was here that she had her initial encounter with the indigent in the East End of London.  It had a profound impact on her.  Upon returning home Jane was determined to make a difference.  She and Ellen purchased and moved into a dilapidated mansion in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward which was teeming with poor immigrants. They made repairs on the house with their own funds and the house became the residence of about twenty five women.  Hull House was born in 1889. At its height they were visited each week by about two thousand people.  The facility included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes. Clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffee house, a gym, a girls club, a boathouse, a book bindery a music school, a drama group, and a library as well as labor related divisions. Her night school was the forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. Eventually Hull House became a thirteen building settlement complex with a playground and a summer camp.

Her autobiography was published in 1910 and sold more than 80,000 copies during her lifetime.  In 1910 she was the first woman to be awarded an honorary degree from Yale.  She was active in woman suffrage and the peace movement; served as president of the Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  In 1920 she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union. Her efforts were officially recognized in 1931 when she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with a professor from Columbia.  She died in 1935 where her body lay in Hull House for two days as most of Chicago filed by, as many as 2,000 per hour.

Mary Louise Booth

“Do you think women fitted for journalism?  Eminently so!”

Mary Louise Booth born in April 1831 in Long Island, New York.  She attended public schools but was primarily self taught, considered very precocious and is said to have read the Bible and Plutarch at five and Racine by the age of seven. She had a particular aptitude for foreign languages. Her father, an educator, believed that teaching was the only suitable career for a young lady.  She rebelled after teaching in his school for a few years and moved to Manhattan desiring a literary career.  She was eighteen.

She supported herself making vests while studying and writing in the evenings.  Eventually she was hired by the New York Times where she wrote on education and women’s topics. She met and became friends with Susan B. Anthony and became active in the women’s rights movement, serving as secretary at the conventions in Saratoga, New York in 1855 and New York City in 1860.  During this time she also began her own historical writing.  Her History of the City of New York was the first comprehensive history of the city to be published. 

In 1856 that she began her career as a translator and translated more than forty works from French to English. During the Civil War she used her skills to promote the Union cause translating Count deGasparin’s The Uprising of a Great People: The United States in 1861. She worked twenty hours a day for a week to accomplish this task.

In 1867 Harper and Brothers began the weekly magazine Harper’s Bazaar and they hired Mary as its editor.  She held this position for twenty two years earning the then impressive salary of $4,000.  During her tenure circulation reached 80,000.  She never married although she was engaged briefly during a trip to Venice in 1887.

Fannia Mary Cohen

“Our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, never crossed the threshold of a non-union shop” 

Fannia Mary Cohn was born in Minsk, Russia in April 1885.  She and her four siblings were well educated and encouraged to aspire to a career.  In 1903 she immigrated to America, alone, at the age of nineteen. She worked for a year as a representative of the American Jewish Women’s Committee on Ellis Island and then pursued a career in the trade union movement taking a job in a garment factory.

In 1909 she was elected to the executive board of the Wrapper, Kimono, and House Dress Makers, Local 41, of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.  In 1914 she attended the National Women’s Trade Union League’s Training School for Women’s Organizers in Chicago and in 1915 led the first successful strike of dress and white goods workers.

On this reputation she was soon elected the first female vice president of the ILGWU in New York City.  It was her hope that other women would be inspired to take leadership roles in this male dominated business.  In 1917 she was appointed executive secretary of the union’s Education Department.  Her vision was that education would bridge the gap between workers and management and awaken a social conscience.  When funds dwindled for education she turned to organizing.  There were forty five thousand dressmakers employed in New York City under miserable sweatshop conditions.  She worked tirelessly for over thirty years with marked success.

Grace Espy Patton

“Men like to dictate to their wives, and their wives – many of them- seem to like to be dictated to: There is no responsibility in having someone other than self to do one’s thinking.”

Grace was born on October 5, 1855 in Hartstown, PA. At the age of ten the family moved to Fort Collins, CO., where her father became mayor.  In 1885 she graduated with highest honors from state agricultural college and immediately began a career teaching English and sociology.   Her own studies continued during this time and she earned her M.S. in 1885.  She frequently wrote political articles for newspapers in Denver and Fort Collins as well as beginning her own magazine, The Tourney (name changed to the Colorado Woman in 1895), which focused on the intellectual energy of the West and Colorado in particular.  Her goal was to promote an independent public opinion.  She used her magazine as a political forum and gained recognition and influence. Women gained the vote in 1893 in Colorado and she was elected president of the Colorado Woman’s Democratic Club.   Later she served as State Superintendent of Public Instruction (1896) winning the election handily by a large margin. She also served ex-officio as State Librarian.  During her administration she raised qualification standards for teachers, established kindergartens, voc ational training programs and libraries.  She was often called a “new woman”  because of her  can do attitude and the “Little Woman” because of her petite and youthful appearance.

She did much for the State of Colorado but upon marrying Lt. Warren Hayden Cowles of the U.S. Army, her name disappeared from  political records here as she traveled with him to his various military assignments. She passed away on the 22^nd of July, 1904 in Assiniboine,  Montana. 

Anna Morgan

Anna Morgan, born in Fleming, NY on February 24, 1851. She attended the Hershey School of Music in Chicago, IL studying elocution, where she quickly gained a reputation as a dramatic reader appreciated for her natural style as well as her interesting mixture of reading material.  She had become known as “Miss Anna Morgan, Chicago’s Favorite Reader.” She toured the US from 1880 to 1883 and then accepted a position as drama teacher at the Chicago Opera House Conservatory.  In 1899 she established her own school, the Anna Morgan Studios, where she presided until her retirement in 1925. Anna was a pioneer in set design in addition to premiering the works of numerous European playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Maurice Maeterlinck.  She declined offers to teach in New York, Paris, London and Florence in order to remain at her school and active in the Chicago dramatic scene.  

Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell was born February 9^th 1874 in Brookline Ma.  She spent a somewhat solitary childhood and loved to read.  She confided to her diary as a teen, “I should like best of anything to be literary.”  And literary she was.  She was frequently published in Atlantic Monthly and published four volumes of poetry between 1916 and 1921, edited three anthologies of imagist poetry and wrote two volumes of critical analysis. Her last work was a biography of Keats.  She became a literary celebrity.  She was quite eccentric; a short, overweight, flamboyant, spoke in a loud voice, kept her hair in a bun, wore a pince-nez and constantly smoked cigars.  She was the center of attention wherever she went and in great demand as a lecturer.  The story is told that once when her motor car broke down somewhere in Boston she informed the police officer assisting her that her brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, would be responsible for removing and fixing her auto.  When called, at Harvard, where he was president, he said he was not sure it was his sister and asked the officer for a description.  He said she was wearing high boots, foot propped up, sitting on a stone wall smoking a cigar.  Lowell, taking a deep breath and rolling his eyes, said yes,  that certainly had to be his sister!

Eartha Mary Magdalene White 

Born November 8, 1876 in Jacksonville, she was an African-American vocalist, educator, administrator and humanitarian. She was raised by Clara White and graduated from Stanton School and moved to New York City where she attended Madame Thurber’s National Conservancy of Music.  She joined the Oriental American Opera Company, the country’s first black opera company.  Eartha toured as a lyric soprano in American, Europe and Asia with the company but returned frequently for Jacksonville for visits.

On one visit she met and fell in love with James Jordan a railway worker and their wedding was set for June 1896 but while she was still working on the tour in May she received news of his death. She ended her singing career and returned to Florida where she taught at Bayard for a number of years.   In 1901 she began to buy real estate at low prices and selling at a profit.  By 1905 she had saved enough for a dry goods store and several other businesses.  She reinvested her considerable wealth in the black community, establishing Boys and Girls clubs, recreational centers and parks.  She operated the only orphanage for black children in the state of Florida. She was the most proud of the Clara White Mission, named for her adoptive mother, which offered food and shelter to the homeless and destitute.  She became an influential force in Jacksonville’s social welfare, focused in prison reform and established an orphanage for African-American children. She created a home for unwed mothers, a nursery for children of working mothers, a tuberculosis rest home and in 1902 a nursing home for elderly African-Americans.

In 1971 she was the guest of President Richard M. Nixon and was referred to as “an institution in Jacksonville” and even when confined to a wheel chair she remained active.   She received numerous honors and awards and or the last years of her life, her birthday we celebrated in the city’s civic auditorium.  She died in January 1974 at the age of ninety seven. 

Annie Smith Peck

"I decided in my teens that I would do what one woman could do to show that women had as much brains as men and could do things as well if she gave them her undivided attention."

Born October 19, 1850 in Providence RI.  She graduated from RI State Normal School and taught in Providence for a while then took a position of preceptress of the Saginaw, Michigan high school.

While traveling abroad in 1885 she became very interested in mountain climbing after seeing the Matterhorn. As a child she was often in fierce competition with her three older brothers resulting in great courage, stamina and daring all of which she employed climbing.  Her first climb was Mount Shasta in California then in 1895 she climbed the Matterhorn achieving instant acclaim, not only because she was a woman but for her climbing costume of knickerbockers, long tunic and a felt hat with a veil.  In 1897 she climbed an 18,314 foot peak in Mexico the highest peak ever climbed by a woman.  “I often wonder what Wilbur Wright would have thought had he known that I had climbed higher on my two feet than he had in his airplane!”

                                                                                 

She was petite, attractive, extremely feminine always taking audiences by surprise during lectures about her climbs which were illustrated with stereopticon slides made from her own photos.

After conquering the mountains of Europe Annie moved on to parts of South America in her quest to reach “some height where no MAN had previously stood.”  In 1904 she broke her previous record when she mastered the 21,300 foot Mount Sorata in Bolivia. 

At sixty one she was the first woman to climb Mount Coropura in Peru where as a statement for women’s suffrage she planted a “Votes for Women” pennant on its summit.  Her last climb was Mount Madison in New Hampshire at the age of eighty two.  She died in 1935.

Ellis Reynolds Shipp  “I do not wish to make too many resolutions lest I shall not be enabled to execute them, but I believe it is better to make them and break them than do nothing.”

Born January 20^th 1872 in Davis County Iowa but at the age of five traveled with her family to the new Mormon settlement in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.  She met Brigham Young in 1864 and he invited him into his larger family and school where she resided until 1866 and her marriage to Milford Bard Young and others  disapproved of Shipp because he was eleven years her senior and twice divorced but  Ellis ignored advise of family and friends and Milford gradually took on three more wives.

In 1873 Young delivered a sermon urging women “to come forth as doctors in these Valleys.” Within two years Ellis’s sister-wife Maggie and she were sent off to the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. She worked hard and graduated with honors despite being pregnant her final year.  She returned to Salt Lake establishing a private practice with special focus on Obstetrics, diseases of women and minor surgery.  She also opened her own School of Obstetrics and nursing while training others women for service in the western Mormon Community. She practiced and taught well into her eighties and was called “Grand Old Lady of Utah.” She delivered more than 5,000 babies during this fifty year career in addition to having ten of her own!  She did much to educate women in first aid, sanitation and disease prevention.  When she died at ninety-two, a renowned doctor wrote that she was the “outstanding woman of the last one hundred years, and I believe it will be another one hundred years before Utah produces another woman whose service to mankind exceeds that which she had rendered.”