Belle Case LaFollette

Belle Case LaFollette, Attorney and Woman’s Suffrage Activist, was born on April 21, 1859, in a log cabin in Summit, Wisconsin.  Upon graduation from the University of Wisconsin, she taught for two years and then married a former classmate, Robert LaFollette.  The ceremony was performed by a Unitarian minister and by mutual agreement, the word “obey” was omitted from the marriage vows. 

In 1883 Belle entered the University of Wisconsin Law School, becoming the first woman to receive a law degree from that university.  She was admitted to the bar but never actually practiced.  Her legal training was of great help to her husband’s career though. She was an active participant during Robert’s three terms in Congress, serving as his secretary and administrative assistant.

Robert was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1906. Three years later Belle created LaFollette’s Magazine, which later became The Progressive. In 1911 and 1912 she wrote a syndicated column for the North American Press Syndicate. She edited the “Women and Education Department” writing articles on health, child care, political news and the social life in Washington. 

In 1913 Belle spoke before her husband’s colleagues in the Senate Committee on Suffrage, in favor of suffrage. In 1914 Belle addressed the colored Young Men's Christian Association, raising an argument that segregation of colored people on street cars. public conveyances and government departments was wrong. She added there would be no constitution of peace until the question is "settled right". In 1915 she helped found the Woman’s Peace Party, which later became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. After World War I, she was active in the Women’s Committee for World Disarmament, and helped found the National Council for the Prevention of War in 1921. She and other women influenced governments to convene the Naval Arms Limitation Conference in 1922.

  

Franc Lynette Johnson

Franc Lynette Johnson was born March 30^th, 1887 in Tunnel City, Wisconsin.  She was named after her father, Frank Lewis Johnson, an architect, who died when she was only three. After his death her mother taught school to support her three young children.  Her mother died when she was twelve, but she inherited a strong sense of self from her mother and continued her education along with her older sister Ella. 

In 1912, eight months after New Mexico attained statehood, Franc came west by rail to teach at the Navajo Indian boarding school in Fort Defiance, Arizona.  She earned $25 a month and lived and ate with the students in the dormitory. Two years later she married Arthur Newcomb, a clerk at the trading post, and became known as “the Indian trader’s wife. Eventually she was recognized within academic circles as a scholar and writer on the Navajo way of life.  Franc befriended Hosteen Klah, a medicine man, and he invited her to attend his healing ceremonies, and she became the first white person to record Navajo symbolism. Her documentation of Navajo art and culture, writing, lecturing, or reproducing ritual sandpaintings onto two-dimensional painted surface, made a significant impact of Southwestern studies.

During the flu epidemic of 1920, when one tenth of the Navajo population died, she used her knowledge of the Navajo religion and healing ceremonies becoming a respected medicine woman.  She was inducted into the tribe, the first white woman to have such an honor bestowed on her, and given the name Atsay Ashon.

Franc wrote numerous books about the Navajo.  She and her friend Mary Wheelwright established the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe.  All of her watercolor re-creations of sand paintings – almost 1,000 in all – plus her pottery and basket collection were donated to the Museum.

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.