Helen Marot

Helen Marot

Helen was born on June 9^th 1865 in Philadelphia to a Quaker family.  She was educated at home and al local Friends’ schools and was raised to be fiercely independent. Her father always told her, “I want you to think for yourself – not the way I do. “

Beginning in 1893 she held several positions in a library in Philadelphia and Wilmington Delaware.  After a few years she opened a small library of her own in Philadelphia for “those interested in social and economic problems.”  This library became a gathering place for liberal thinkers.  Helen described it in an interview, “People of all shades of radicalism come there – Single Taxes, Socialists, Philosophical Anarchists – attracted by the unusual books and periodicals and no less by the opportunity for discussion.”

In 1899 Helen was hired by the U.S. Industrial Commission to investigate the custom tailoring trades in Philadelphia.  She discovered dismal working conditions especially for women and children. This changed her overnight from a peaceful librarian into a militant activist.  In 1902 she traveled to New York City to uncover child labor issues there and this resulted in the formation of the New York Child Labor Committee. The following year she helped push the Compulsory Education Act through the New York Legislature.

In 1906 Helen was elected secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League of New York, a position she held for the next seven years.  During this time she lectured on the benefits of unions and her research helped persuade the U. S. Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of a law limiting working hours for women.  Her work led to the great waist and dressmaker’s strike which brought attention to the workers ‘plight and empowered women beginning a great industrial revolution in the garment industry leading to the formation of the International ladies’ Garment Workers Union. 

Isabel Chapin

Isabel Chapin was born April 17, 1845 in Irasburg, Vermont to Dr. and Mrs. Hayes   She often accompanied her father on his medical calls and assisted at home with farm duties. Her parents were forward thinkers and impressed upon all of their children the value of a good education and the recognition of one’s abilities regardless of their gender, “your mother and I both believe girls should do whatever they’re capable of doing…”     At eighteen she married William Chapin who was a Congregational minister.  Just a few weeks later she boarded the Sydenbam with her husband and beloved cat to begin the five month journey to Bombay.

The Chapins had planned to do missionary work in India for ten years but William soon succumbed to diphtheria leaving Isabel a nineteen year old widow.  She stayed alone for six months in India then returning to the United States to study medicine in order to return to India as a medical missionary.

While studying medicine she fell in love with a patient, Samuel Barrows and they married in 1867. He supported her while she pursued her medical degree after which she supported him while he attended Harvard Divinity School to become a Unitarian minister.  Isabel attended the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children then sent a year abroad at the University of Vienna specializing in ophthalmology.  Meanwhile, Sam took a job in Washington D.C., as stenographic secretary to  Secretary of State, William H. Seward. 

Upon her return to America, Isabel opened a private practice in the capital and taught diseases of the eye at Howard University’s School of Medicine.  When Sam became ill, she stepped into his position with Seward and because the first woman stenographic reporter in Congress, the first woman ever to be employed by the State Department and possibly the only female State Department employee to receive the same salary as a man.

Women's History Month

We are in March and it is the annual celebration of Women's History Month.
Women have moved in this world in remarkable ways.  The other evening we celebrated with an amazing audience - there must have been seventy or eighty? - we lost count.  We were hosted by the Cortez Cultural Center.  They are always so welcoming.  We truly appreciate them.
Teri Helm presented Betty Pellett or as she was often referred to, That Pellett Woman!  What a beautiful character she shared with us!  Betty was a legend in her own time and Teri really brought that out!  I could have listened all night.

Ann Bassett, Queen of the Rustlers, arrived with Midge Kirk.  A pretty feisty woman who ruled her ranch in Brown's Park with an iron hand and lots of drive and hard work.  She also romanced many of the outlaws who visited, particularly Butch and Sundance.  Not necessarily a role model, but certainly an exciting character who could rope, ride and shoot better than most men by the age of 9 and as she said, "I only got better with age!"

Then the character of Lizzy Knight was brought to us by her great, great, great granddaughter, Marsha Bankston.  HerStory welcomed her as a guest to tell the tales of Lizzy who was herself a rancher, entrepreneur, blacksmith and many other things in the heart (which she created) of Disappointment Valley.
We thank Marsha for joining us for a great evening.


I think a good time was had by all.

Ruth McCormick Simms

Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms was born March 27, 1880, in Cleveland Ohio. Although attending private schools she received most of her education from her father.  He sent her to investigate living conditions among streetcar employees when she was sixteen.  Later that year he became William McKinley’s presidential campaign manager and she accompanied him on a national tour.  In 1898 he was elected US Senator and she served as his personal secretary.

Ruth married Medill McCormick, a newspaperman, in 1903 and the settled in Chicago and had three children. They shared an interest and politics and she helped him get elected to the US House of Representatives in 1916 and to the Senate in 1918.  Ruth was selected as the first chairman of the Women’s Executive Committee of the Republican National Committee.  In 1924 she became the Republican National Committee woman from Illinois and organized a network of statewide women’s Republican clubs with several thousand members.

After Medill died in 1925, Ruth ran for Republican congressman-at-large from Illinois, declaring, “I am no longer a suffragette or a feminist, I am a politician.”  She won the election but after only two months in office decided to run for the Senate in 1930.  She won the primary but lost the election and sought an elected position again.

In 1926 she bought control of a newspaper in Rockford, Illinois and four years later added a second newspaper and a radio station.

In 1932 she married Albert Simms a retired Congressman from New Mexico.  After this marriage Ruth withdrew from politics and founded a girl’s school in Albuquerque, and maintained a large sheep and cattle ranch in Colorado.  She returned to the political life for a short time to help Wendell Wilkie in his presidential campaign in 1940 and Thomas E. Dewey’s in 1944.

Inez Haynes Irwin

Inez was born March 2, 1873 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where her parents had relocated from New England in hopes of becoming financially successful in the coffee business.  Their efforts failed when she was very young and they moved back to Boston.

She was the ninth of twelve children and from observing her mother’s life of toil and childbearing she developed “a profound horror of the women’s life” that formed the basis for her lifelong feminist views.  At fourteen while researching the topic “Should Women Vote?” for a school paper she became a confirmed suffragist. 

She married Rufus Hamilton Gillmore in 1897 and at the same time entered Radcliffe College founding the College Equal Suffrage League which organized undergraduates for the cause of suffrage.  Upon graduation she and her husband moved to New York City becoming leaders in the avant-garde Greenwich Village community.  Inez published magazine articles and short stories and in 1908 her first novel, June Jeopardy.  During this time she met William Henry Irwin managing editor of McClure’s Magazine.  She left her first husband in 1913, obtained a divorce and married Irwin in 1916.

She now turned to writing full time and accompanied her husband to Europe during World War I reporting on the progress of the war in Italy and France for American magazines. 

In 1921 she published The Story of the Woman’s Party, an inspiring history of the suffrage campaign, produced twelve novels and in 1924 won the O.Henry Memorial Prize for her short Story “The Spring Flight”.  Her biggest success was her Maida series of children’s books in 1910 (Maida’s Little Shop) and ended with the eleventh volume in 1951.

Myra Colby Bradwell

Myra Colby Bradwell was born in Manchester, Vermont on February 12m 1831. She became a lawyer and crusader for legal reform.   Her early formal education was in schools in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Elgin. Myra taught school for a few years before she married James Bradwell who was a lawyer.  They had three children and James began to tutor in law early in their marriage and helped her to publish the very successful Chicago Legal News which was an important legal publication. In 1869 she helped to organize Chicago’s first woman suffrage convention and she and her husband, James, were active in the founding of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland.

She drafted, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore and others and secured the passage of a bill in 1869 that gave married women the right to retain their own wages and protected the rights of widows.  Later she supported her husband’s successful efforts to secure legislation making women eligible to serve in school offices and as notaries public and to be equal guardians of their children.

In 1869 she passed her bar exam in Illinois but was denied admission because she was a woman.  Taking the case to the Supreme Court she lost there as well.  The court stated that it was a matter for states’ jurisdiction. Finally, when she was fifty nine, twenty one years after passing the bar exam, Illinois gave her a license to practice law in her state, and in 1871 she was admitted to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States.

The American Law Review wrote that she “was one of the most remarkable women of her generation.” 

Betherina Angelina Owens Adair

When a pale, frail or nervous woman patient was brought to her she offered this advice:

“Now, in addition to your medicine I want you to take a horseback ride every day, but mind you must ride the new style. “  She was referring to riding full in the saddle rather than side saddle that society had previously demanded.

Bethenia  Angelina Owens was born on February 7^th 1840 in Van Buren County, Missouri.  Her Family joined in the western migration when she was only three and they settled near Roseburg, Oregon.

At 14 she was married but divorced her abusive husband at 16 turning to millinery work to earn a living and raise her son, George. When he headed to college to become a doctor, she went to Philadelphia also to study medicine receiving a degree in 1873 from the Eclectic School of Medicine. She returned to Oregon and was the first woman to practice medicine there.  She furthered her education at the University Of Michigan Medical School and earned her M.D. degree in 1880 at the age of forty. She spent time in Chicago and Europe before returning to Oregon and Yakima Washington to practice medicine.  There were very few women practicing medicine on the Pacific coast. She was involved in medical legislation and the suffrage movement.