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.

Theresa Helburn

Theresa Helburn

Theresa was born on January 12, 1887 in New York City.  As a child her mother frequently took her to the theater which she loved! She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1908 and took up writing producing a few plays, none of which were terribly successful.  In 1914 she co-founded the Washington Street Players in New York City, later called the Theatre Guild, which presented European plays.   

The Guild enjoyed a successful first season and gained a reputation as America’s foremost art theater, specializing in bringing the highest-quality drama of Europe and America to Broadway stages. Theresa was the executive Director and took part in all aspects of production, using her writing talents to rewrite dialogue, (with- and sometimes, without - the playwrights approval) and became known as the “play doctor.”

Despite some great success, the Guild was bankrupts in 1943. Theresa decided to turn the play Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical and hired Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to write it.  The result was the musical Oklahoma! which became a great success and revolutionized American musical theater.  The Kiowa Indian tribe of Oklahoma made Theresa a chief and named her “Little Lady Who Sees Far.”

Two years later she again hired Rodgers and Hammerstein to turn the play Liliom into a musical and the result was Carousel, another great hit. She continued to bring serious plays to the American public and established close working relationships with Eugene O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw.  

"Aunt"Clara Brown

Clara “Aunt Clara” Brown

Happy New Year!

Wishing all a very peaceful, prosperous 2014 filled with joy, love and creativity!!
To begin this auspicious New Year a quote from Mary Oliver, one of my all time favorite poets.  It is if she writes for me, and me along!  Of course I know that isn't the case but she so often really hits my heart as if it had a bulls eye and she can see it.

" I want to think again of dangerous and noble things...I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as thought I had wings."

Wishing you all wings for this fresh, new year!


Mary and her best friend!

Poet Mary Oliver is an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Oliver’s verse focuses on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.” Kumin noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.” Oliver’s poetry has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award. Reviewing Dream Work(1986) for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America’s finest poets, as “visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson.” 

Mary Oliver was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work. Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin the New York Times Book Review, American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical.” Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.” Holly Prado of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also applauded Oliver’s original voice, writing that American Primitive “touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.” 

Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’...into the world of historical and personal suffering...She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.” 

The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms is also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award.The volume contains poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noticed that Oliver’s earliest poems are almost always oriented towards nature, but seldom examine the self and are almost never personal. In contrast, Oliver appears constantly in later works. But as Reynolds noted “this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition.” Just as the contributor for Publishers Weekly called particular attention to the pervasive tone of amazement with regard to things seen in Oliver’s work, Reynolds found Oliver’s writings to have a “Blake-eyed revelatory quality.” Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” 

Oliver continues her celebration of the natural world in later collections, includingWinter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004),New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems(2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Muir, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry contributorRichard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.” 

A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver publishes a new collection every year or two. Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting. Jeanette McNew in Contemporary Literature described “Oliver’s visionary goal,” as “constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully confers subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition…At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.’”

Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

From the National Poetry Foundation