Her Story: A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America” by Charlotte Waisman and Jill Tietjen
I knew when I chose the name of my blog it wasn’t all that unique. This book is quality. It represents so many of us. Be prepared to see quotes from this source if you read more from me.
I have just finished a unit on Women’s Literature with one of my classes when this incident in congress occurred. http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/16/politics/women-lawmakers-hearing/index.html?iref=allsearch
I shared it with my students. One young woman gasped, “It’s still going on?”
This may be hard to fathom for a modern young woman of 17. I would like to believe that we are at a time in history when young women can take for granted the rights that women have won. Take this incident of our “leaders” and combine it with the aspirin comment of Rick Santorum backer Foster Friess and more than a “oh my goodness” escapes many women’s mouths.
(Friess has apologized for his national insult on CNN but how can you apologize away an attitude.)
It shows why I still need to teach Women’s Literature, why more women’s history needs to be taught, and why I need to continue writing this blog.
Somehow in 2004 the HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels slipped by my attention. An official choice for the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, one of its actors Angelica Huston earned the honor of best supporting actress in a motion picture made for television. The content of the movie describes how patient one faction of women was as men kept skirting the issue (pun intended) about women obtaining the right to vote. But there was a younger group of women, who took on another attitude and pushed those men and sacrificed so much to give us that right so many of us take for granted.
Alice Paul and Lucy Burns attracted the attention of a president and congress to finally move forward with our right to vote. Alice Paul seemed destined to take her place in history as if her Quaker upbringing, education, and experiences were road signs to guide her down this path. Her family believed in gender equality, education for women, and making contributions to improve society. Her education credits look more as if they were accumulated in a much more modern time than the early 1900s.
Paul was steered in the direction that made her contribution grab attention by Emmeline Parnkhust. Parnkhust was the founder of the British suffrage movement, who Paul met in 1907 while she studied at the Woodbrook Settlement for Social Work, and at the University of Birmingham and the London School of Economics. Parnkhust believed in “taking the woman’s movement to the streets.” While in England, Paul participated in hunger strikes, radical protests, and served three prison terms.
Lucy Burns had a completely different type of upbringing. Irish Catholic and from Brooklyn, she sported fiery red hair and reportedly a matching disposition. She also was well educated and met Alice Paul when they were arrested at a suffrage demonstration in front of Parliament. She became a force supporting Alice Paul’s leadership.
The two women first worked with the National American Suffrage Association (NAWSA). They were appointed to lead the Congressional Committee. Later, these two women formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU).
It was while they worked together under this moniker that what they were taught in England started to emerge. The organization started picketing Woodrow Wilson’s White House and embarrassed the president when they held banners declaring America was not a free democracy as long as it does not allow women the right to vote. Burns was arrested with several supporters for blocking traffic.
During one of six arrests, Burns declared herself and her fellow supporters political prisoners. It was during her incarceration at the Occoquan Workhouse (now the Lorton Correctional Complex) that Alice Paul and she started hunger strikes and, consequently, were placed in solitary confinement. One night, which became known as the Night of Terror, thirty-three women were brutally beaten. Lucy Burns was among those women, but she was also handcuffed and left to hang by her wrists for the night.
News reports across the nation let people know about the force feedings that were ordered due to the hunger strikes, the worm infested foods, and the indignities that were suffered by the suffragettes.
In a modern television script, we would expect the ratification to take place as soon as the women were released from prison, but this did not happen. It finally took until the 1918 election, a year later, leaving Congress with mostly pro-suffrage members for the House to vote for passage 304-89. But there was still the Senate that had voted down the amendment less than a year before. This time the Senate passed the amendment by one vote. In August of 1920, Tennessee became the last of the needed 36 states to ratify the amendment.
A biography of Alice Paul notes, “ The fight took 72 years — spanning two centuries, 18 presidencies, and three wars.”
Alice Paul http://www.greatwomen.org/women-of-the-hall/search-the-hall/details/2/117-Paul
Alice Paul http://www.alicepaul.org/alicepaul.htm
Iron Jawed Angels (2004)
Lucy Burns http://americancivilwar.com/women/Womens_Suffrage/Lucy_Burns.html
Walton, Mary A Woman’s Crucade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot Macmillan
2010
I’ve been reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Spoiler: It is upsetting. She knew when David, her husband, drove her twenty miles to John Hopkins that something was wrong. She had told her girl friends and cousins that she had a knot inside her. She went to John Hopkins because it was the only major hospital that would treat black patients. Now Henrietta was the wife of a steel worker in Baltimore. Her grandfather in Virginia brought her up in a four-room log cabin that was once a former slave quarters. She knew “how to harvest tobacco and butcher a pig, but she’s never heard the words cervix or biopsy” (16).
She knew before her last son was born she had something wrong. But in the doctor’s report she had had a term delivery September 1950. They had not detected the abnormality that Henrietta knew was there.
At the time, Henrietta Lacks walked into Hopkins to be treated, Dr. Howard Jones (Henrietta’s doctor) and his boss, Dr. Richard Wesley TeLinde were involved in a national debate about cervical cancer and its treatment. When TeLinde tried to promote his theory, it was not well received. He returned to Hopkins to prove his theory correct. He turned to another associate for assistance. George Gey, head of the tissue culture research at John Hopkins, had been trying to grow cancer cells outside of the human body for testing. His wife and he had not yet been successful.
TeLinde and quite a few scientists at the time, believed they had the right to use the patients at Hopkins who were being treated for free in the public wards, as research subjects. They felt the specimen which were collected were payment for services. Henrietta Lacks was one of these patients. She signed an operation permit. Before her first radium treatment, Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr. “shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta’s cervix” (33). The samples went into a glass dish and were sent off to Gey’s lab. No one had asked Henrietta if she wanted to be a part of a test, nor had she even been told that anyone was collecting samples for any reason.
As 30-year-old Henrietta went home, her cells were the first to not only survive but multiply in Gey’s lab. They became the first immortal human cells. These cells became known as HeLa cells.
The advances in cancer research which includes many famous discoveries: that cigarettes cause lung cancer, how X-rays and specific chemicals can change healthy cells to cancerous cells, and the National Cancer Institute use of cells, including HeLa cells to determine if chemicals and natural extracts could be used to cure cancer (138), all started with Henrietta Lacks.
No one knows for sure that Henrietta knew that her cells would save millions of people’s lives. A microbiologist, Laure Aurelian, is said to have witnessed Gey telling Henrietta about her cells making her immortal, and Henrietta’s comment that she was glad her pain would bring “some good for someone” (66). When Henrietta died, she was buried in the Lacks cemetery in an unmarked grave.
America's first poet
Her story tells of many women who made a good life for themselves even though it did not initially turn out the way they thought. For all of us who are being challenged in this era of recession, maybe we could take notes on how they managed.
Anne Bradstreet (nee Dudley), our first published and notable poet, is an example. She was raised as a noblewoman in England in the early 1600’s. She married at 16. Simon Bradstreet was a ward of the Dudleys and together they all migrated to the colonies on the Arabella, one of the first ships to bring Puritans to the shores of New England. The three-month journey was terrible for many of the future colonists and many did not survive. For Anne Bradstreet is was no different. Schooled in several languages, history, and literature, this journey was extremely difficult for her.
Even with her husband becoming Chief Administrator to the Boston settlement’s governor, John Winthrop, life was a daily struggle. Anne handled the daily challenges of the colony by praying; believing God had not abandoned them. She also chose to go remember easier times in England.
If all the threats to life, the challenge of finding food, surviving small pox was not enough, ,Anne came down with a paralysis that left her joints weak. She still didn’t give up her passion for living. She and her husband managed to have eight children and built a home around them.
In her poem, Upon the Burning of Our House, she once more shows how she managed to keep herself sustained. Thanks to Simon’s standing in the community, they soon recovered. Anne spent many days and nights alone due to Simon’s position. She kept herself busy reading her father’s many books and teaching her children. From these books, she learned about medicine, religion, science and the arts, which helped her survive the life in New England.
Anne loved poetry and started to write herself. At this time, it was considered wrong for women to air their opinions or pursue learning. To accent this situation one of her closest friends, Anne Hutchinson made her opinions public, and she was banished from the community.
Without her permission, her brother-in-law copied her poems and took them to England for publishing. Her poems contain her love for her God, her family, and her husband. A reader can also read how she valued intellect and knowledge making her one of our earliest feminists.
Her father and husband were involved in the organization of Harvard University. A Bradstreet gate is dedicated to our first poet by the Harvard Community and is located at Canaday Hall.
Anne Bradstreet died at the age of 60 succumbing to tuberculosis.
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General George Washington was the first noted general who used women to spy on the enemy. It seems most gentlemen during these times considered women not only unequal but harmless. The women who worked for the general were maids, cooks, and housewives. They simply used their daily skills to listen and report back to the general what they had heard in the course of their days. These “patriots in petticoats” (The American Revolution). herstories are starting to surface. In the letters to John, Abigail Adams mentioned to John to “Remember the ladies.” Perhaps she was aware of the importance of the these informative ladies.
Elizabeth Burgin was one of these ladies. Prisoners were kept in ships in the NY harbor because it was cheaper than building prisons. Men were not allowed on the ships but a woman like Burgin was considered innocent and no threat. The conditions for a prisoners were horrible. Many died from lack of nutrition or disease. She smuggled food for the prisoners. During the unusually cold New York winter of 1779-1780, the harbor water froze. She reportedly helped 200 prisoners escape by slipping out of the ships and walking to freedom.
Whether you hate politics and think it is not worth following, or you love Sarah Palin, support Michelle Bouchman, or Hillary Clinton, you may want to know a bit about the gutsy woman who was the first woman elected to Congress in 1916.
The Right to Vote for women became law in 1920 nationally, but in some states like Montana, the right became law earlier. In 1916, in the first election that women could vote, Jeannette Rankin won on a nonpartisan ticket. She won during a time of national hostility to political parties. On the night of her election to Congress, she said, “ I may be the first woman elected to Congress, but I won’t be the last.”
Her achievements are many but notably her election was historic, she was one of the few suffragettes elected to Congress and she was the only Congressional member to vote against both WWI and WWII. She ran on a progressive platform that promised to work for a national amendment for women’s right to vote and for social welfare issues.
It wasn’t an easy time for Rankin. She fought hard for the right to vote for women in the House. In 1917, she pushed for the creation of the Committee on Woman Suffrage. When it was a reality, she was appointed to it. The special committee wrote the constitutional amendment on women suffrage in 1918 and she opened the very first House Floor debate on the subject. “How shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?”
With women cheering in the gallery, the resolution narrowly passed House but died in the Senate.
Initially Rankin was elected in an at-large election. In 1918, the Montana legislation changed the elections to districts. Rankin found herself in an overwhelmingly democratic district. She lost her next election.
She continued her work by lobbying Congress for social welfare reform. It was the threat of another war that swept her back into Congress. Rankin won re-election to the House by 54% of the vote – just under 25 years after she was elected to her first term. Due to her later vote against going to war with Japan, and her present votes of going to war against Germany and Italy, the rest of her term became irrelevant.
She remained a pacifist admiring the work of Mohandas Gandhi. Her public life did not end in Congress. In 1968, at the age of 88, she let the Jeanette Rankin Brigade (50, 000 people) in a protest march on Washington to protest the Vietnam War. The march ended in a presentation of a peace petition to the then Speaker of the House John McCormack. Five years later, she was planning to run for a House seat in California as a way to protest the Vietnam War when she died.
“Jeannette Rankin” Women in Congress (August 10, 2011)
http://womenincongress.house.gov/member- profiles/profile.html?intID=202#foot27
First Woman in Congress
This blog came about because I admire Mary B. Relotto and women like her. They are a force unto themselves.
Over lunch one afternoon, Mary challenged me to write a blog about women who have made an impact or could give other women the incentive to come into their own strengths. So this will be a bit about women who have lived. It may be about women who are living. It may be turn out to be about a woman who I saw do something unusually brave, and I may not even know her name. I will look forward to your suggestions and additions as we move forward in Her Story.
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