Mary Sewell Gardner

Mary Sewell Gardner

Mary Sewall Gardner was born in Newton, Massachusetts on February 5^th, 1871.  Her mother died when she was only four and her father remarried a woman who was a physician. 

Most of Mary’s early education was in local private schools but she went to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington in her teen years.  In 1890 she returned home and spent many years nursing her invalid stepmother and doing work in the community.  When she was thirty she attended the Newport Rhode Island Hospital Training School knowing that she wanted to become a physician, probably inspired by her step mother. When she completed a four year program she became superintendent of nurses in the Providence District Nursing Association.  Her leadership led the organization to become a model for other district nursing associations.  She implemented organized, regular meetings, an efficient record keeping system and introduced uniforms.

In 1912 Mary and another nurse founded the National Organization of Public Health Nursing, serving as its president. She helped create a monthly periodical Public Health Nursing, which has been revised twice and translated into several languages and long considered a classic.  Mary contributed many editorials and scholarly articles.  

When World War I broke out she took a leave of absence and went to Italy where she served as chief nurse on the American Red Cross Tuberculosis Commission.  She also established training programs for Italian women who wished to become nurses.

She received an honorary Master’s Degree from Brown University in Rhode Island and received the Walter Burns Saunders Medal for distinguished service to the nursing profession.  She has been inducted into the American Nursing Association Hall of Fame.

Mary Kenney O'Sullivan

“I refused to do a man’s job without a man’s pay.”

Mary Kenney O’Sullivan was born on January 8, 1864 in Hannibal, Missouri.  She was working class Irish and began her formal schooling at age nine but in her early teens she left school and became a dressmaker and then worked in a printing and binding factory in Missouri and several binderies in the Chicago area.  She was supporting her invalid mother after the death of her father.  She learned every job available to a woman and became a forewoman.  She knew the working conditions to be horrible and this propelled her to organize her co-workers to form a union.  She established the Chicago Women’s Bindery Workers’ Union finding much support for this union from Jane Adams and Hull-House where she did volunteer work.   In 1891 she was appointed the first woman general organizer of the American Federation of Labor, appointed by Samuel Gompers.  During the time she held this post she organized garment workers in New York City and Troy, New York, and printers, binders, shoe workers and carpet weavers in Massachusetts. This led her to travel extensively throughout New York, Massachusetts and Illinois organizing women’s unions.

In 1894 she married John F. O’Sullivan the labor editor for the Boston Globe.  They had four children but Mary continued her labor work, organizing local rubber makers and laundry workers speaking frequently at union meeting.

In 1902 John was run over by a train leaving Mary to support herself and their three children, which she did, while still remaining in the forefront of the labor movement.  At the age of fifty she became a factory inspector for the Massachusetts Department of Labor and Industries, a position she held through her seventies.  

Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds

Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds was born in December 1841 in New Brunswick, Canada. She received scant education as a child but she did enjoy reading and was inspired by Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain by Maturin Murray Ballou. Sometime in the 1850’s she ran away from home and was an itinerant Bible salesman, dressing as a man and going by the name of Frank Thompson, the disguise undoubtedly inspired by Ballou’s book .  She gradually made her way west and by 1861 was living in Flint, Michigan where, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, she enlisted (as Franklin Flint Thompson) in a volunteer infantry company that became Company F, 2^nd Michigan Infantry.  She took part in the battles of Blackburn’s Ford, the first Bull Run and in the Peninsular campaign of 1862 and was at Fredericksburg in December where she was an aide to Colonel Orlando M. Poe.  Several times she undertook intelligence missions behind Confederate lines in various disguises; first as a male field nurse, then as a black man (skin died with silver nitrate and using a black wig) named Cuff; an Irish peddler woman named Bridget O’Shea selling apples and soap, then as a black laundress.  Some of these times, places and disguises have been disputed but most seem historically correct.

Her military career ended when she contracted malaria and fearing discovery, checked herself into a private hospital to recuperate.  With her health restored she discovered that Franklin Thompson was now listed as a deserter so she turned to work as a nurse for the U.S. Christian Commission using the name Sarah Edmonds.  In 1865 she published a detailed, lurid and very popular fictional account of her experiences in Nurse and Spy in the Union Army. 

She married in 1867 and began securing affidavits from old army comrades in order to apply for a veteran’s pension which was granted in 1884 (12 dollars a month) to “Sarah E.E. Seelye (married name) alias Frank F. Thompson.  She was the only woman to be mustered into the Grand Army of the Republic as a regular member.  She was introduced into the Michigan Hall of Fame in 1992.

Leonel Ross Campbell Anthony O'Bryan

Leonel was born on November 11, 1857 on a Mississippi Plantation. She was educated at a private school in St. Louis until, at the age of 15, she scaled a wall to elope with George Anthony.

In 1878 she left her husband and arrived in New York City where she asked a friend of the family for a position at the New York World.  She did such a great work that they sent her to Panama as the Latin American correspondent.  After twenty years she moved to Denver, Colorado to be near her parents, and began writing for the Denver Post.  She assumed the pen name “Polly Pry” which was a rhyming tribute to her role model, Nellie Bly.

While writing an article on Colorado prisons, she met Alfred Packer who was serving a reduced sentence of forty years in prison for eating five prospectors to save himself from starvation. She argued his case as an investigative journalist stating that he had not killed them but only eaten the men after they were already dead.   She secured Packer’s release in 1901.

When union workers boycotted the Post for her stance on labor issues and immigration, Leonel started her own liberal feminist magazine named “Polly Pry”. In January of 1904 answering a knock on her door, she was shot twice by an unknown assailant.  Luckily the bullets missed her and she claimed it was organized labor trying to silence her.

She closed her magazine in 1905 and married Denver Lawyer Harry J. O’Bryan who died four years later while she was on assignment in Mexico doing a story on Pancho Villa.  She spent World War I in Greece and Albania, an advocate for free speech and as director of publicity for the Red Cross. She also came to the aid of French war orphans.  After the war, she settled again in Denver, where she continued work for the Red Cross. 

Sharlot Mabridth Hall

She was born on October 27, 1870 in Barbour County, Kansas, “When I was twelve my parents moved from Barbour County, Kansas (in which state they had been among the earliest pioneers), to Yavapai County, Arizona.  We started on the third day of November with two covered wagons drawn by four horses each.  I rode a little Texas pony and drove a band of horses.

We followed the old Santa Fe Trail nearly all the way.  In many places the deep ruts worn by the old caravans could still be seen; rock cliffs were marked by names, painted or cut into the stone, and all along the roadside were sunken graves, mostly unmarked and nearly obliterated. Often I would slide out of my saddle, as I drove the band of young horses behind the wagons, and try to read and brace up with rocks some rotting bit of board that once told who rested there.”

The family settled on lower Lynx Creek, just outside of Prescott Arizona. Her education was informal but her mother taught her to love literature.  She began writing poetry when she was twelve and progressed to short stories and historical articles. When she was 30, she became editor of Out West Magazine.  

In 1909 she became the first woman to hold public office in the Arizona Territory, serving as Arizona’s historian. In 1928 she purchased the Old Governor’s Mansion in Prescott and moved in with her extensive collection of Arizona artifacts opening it as a museum.  She also traveled extensively giving lectures on Arizona history. Her dream, The Sharlot Hall Museum continues as a state institution.  In 1981 she was named to the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame for her contribution to the literature and history of Arizona.

 

Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell was born September 23, 1863 in Memphis Tennessee.  Her father was a former slave who opened a saloon after her was freed by his master, who was also his father.  During the yellow fever epidemic of 1878-79 he invested all his money in real estate as people fled the city becoming the South’s first black millionaire.  When she was six her parents divorced and she was sent to board with a family in Ohio.

She attended Oberlin College majoring in the classics.  She took the four year curriculum of men’s courses rather than the suggested two year “ladies’ curriculum.  She received her bachelor’s degree in 1884; one of the first African American women awarded a college degree.  She then studied in Europe for two years becoming fluent in French, German and Italian.

In 1891 she married Robert Heberton Terrell one of the first black graduates of Harvard. They settled in Washington D.C. where she began a long and illustrious career in community service; as high school teacher and principal for eleven years served on the District of Columbia Board of Education, the first black women to hold such a position.  Mary was also president for life of the National Association of Colored Women. She joined the suffragist cause and lectured at the 1898 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.  Beginning in the 1920’s Mary served as an advisor to the Republican National Committee, assisting black women with their newly won right to vote.

She had a thirty year career as lecturer on such topics as racial injustice, black history and culture, and the black woman’s advancement since Emancipation.  She wrote for newspapers and magazines, resulting with the publication in 1940 of her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World.

At the age of eighty seven Mary staged a sit in at a Washington restaurant in an attempt at desegregation.  Her efforts failed, so she sued and took her case all the way to the Supreme Court, where she was victorious.

Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey

Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey was born in Locust Grove, New York on August 8, 1863.  Her interest in nature began in her early childhood and when she entered Smith College she was specializing in ornithology.  Florence published her first book, Birds Through a Looking Glass in 1889. Several years later she headed west in hoping that a milder climate would help her tuberculosis.  The next three years were spent travelling through Utah, Arizona, and finally California observing western birds.  Upon returning home she turned her experiences in the west into three more bird books.  Her travels did result in an improvement in her health and eventually resulted in several other books. Her experiences in Utah, Southern California, and Arizona were chronicled in My Summer in a Mormon Village (1894), A Birding on a Bronco (1896), and Birds of Village and Field (1898).  

In 1899 she married Vernon Bailey who worked for the U.S. Biological Survey where her brother was director.  They traveled to New Mexico for Vernon’s work but Florence took great advantage of the time and published the classic Handbook of Birds of the Western United States in 1902.

The Baileys spent more than thirty years walking and riding through the Dakotas, the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest and Texas collecting and identifying specimens. Florence was the first woman to receive the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists Union and then in 1933 she was given an honorary L.L.D. degree from the University of New Mexico.