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  When officials discovered she was a woman the commission was withdrawn.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.