Tag Archives: Women’s History Month

Women's History Month

March 8 – Disability: Dorthea Dix

, , , 2 Comments

Shortened from Wikipedia:

Dorothea Dix  was an American activist on behalf of the poor and insane wh800px-Dix-Dorothea-LOCo, through a program of lobbying state legislatures and Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums.

She was made aware of the need for reform during a visit to Britain where she met reformers who were making great inroads on behalf of those suffering from mental illness.  After returning to America, Dorthea conducted a statewide investigation of care for the insane poor in Massachusetts. In most cases, towns contracted with local individuals to care for mentally ill people who could not care for themselves and lacked family/friends to do so. Unregulated and underfunded, this system resulted in widespread abuse.

In 1845, she successfully  she convinced the New Jersey legislature to authorize an asylum for the mentally ill, and many more states followed suit after a personal visit from Dorthea. She continued investigations in various northern states until the Civil War broke out and she was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses by the Union Army, a position in which she served (often ) until August 1865. After the war ended, she focused her attention on crusading for the imprisoned, poor and mentally ill in the south.

Women's History Month

March 7: Teacher – Elizabeth Blackwell

, , , , ,

March 7- TeacherElizabeth BlackwellBorn in England, Elizabeth Blackwell’s family moved to the United States in 1832 when she was 11. Six years later, the family had a run of bad luck and Elizabeth, her mother and sister were forced to open a school to provide income. In 1847, she was accepted to Genevea Medical College in New York, voted in unanimously by the all-male student body. She graduated in 1849, becoming the first woman to achieve a medical degree in the United States. She’s also the first woman on the UK Medical Register.

In the 1860s, she created the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, the first medical school for women in the United States.  She returned to England at the end of her life, where she continued to teach at the London School of Medicine for Women.

Sources:
http://blog.carneysandoe.com/womens-history-month-8-trailblazing-female-teachers/#sthash.v7WwdLyV.dpuf

http://blog.carneysandoe.com/womens-history-month-8-trailblazing-female-teachers/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Blackwell 

Everything else

March 5 – Poetry: Gwendolyn Brooks

, , , , , , 1 Comment

Gwendolyn BrooksFrom Poetry Foundation:

Gwendolyn Brooks was:

  • The first black* author to win the Pulitzer Prize.
  • The first black woman to be poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.
  • Poet laureate of the State of Illinois.

She had a love of reading and writing from a young age and was only 13 when her first published poem, “Eventide,” appeared in American Childhood. By 17,  she was a frequent contributor to the Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago’s black population. She published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville in 1945. Throughout her life, she often wrote with politics and civil rights in mind.

*She preferred this term over “African American.”

Women's History Month

March 4 – Literature: Ann Petry

, , , ,

First black woman writer with book sales topping a million copiesAnn Petry wanted to be a novelist from the moment a teacher praised her writing in high school, but as happens to so many of us, her parents wanted her to do something more practical. So she studied pharmacy (her father’s profession) and worked in the family business for many years. But she wrote and published short stories on the side.

While working in an after-school program in Harlem, Ann saw for the first time how sheltered her life had been and what most African Americans in the early 20th century had to go through. This inspired her to write The Street, her first novel, which was so wildly popular she became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies. She went on to write several additional novels.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Petry

Women's History Month

March 3 – Mathematics: Euphemia Lofton Haynes

, , , ,

(23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) (1)From the Math Department of the University of Buffalo:

Euphemia Lofton Haynes was a principal and deputy superintendent in charge of Washington’s “colored schools” (the schools for African Americans) before she earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics at The Catholic University in Washington, D.C., in 1943, which made her the first African American Woman to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

The title of her dissertation was “The Determination of Sets of Independent Conditions Characterizing Certain Special Cases of Symmetric Correspondences.”

Dr. Haynes taught in the public schools of Washington, D.C., for 47 years and was the first woman to chair the local school board. She established the mathematics department at Miner Teachers College, where she was also a professor, and was chair of the Division of Mathematics and Business Education at the District of Columbia Teachers College. In 1959, she retired, but served as head of the city’s Board of Education, and was central to the integration of Washington, D.C. public schools.

Women's History Month

March 2 – Science: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

, , , , , 2 Comments

March 2-ScienceFrom National Georgaphic.com:

While she was a graduate student and junior researcher in radio astronomy at Cambridge University in England, Jocelyn Bell Burnell made a discovery that changed science. In 1967, she was given the mind-numbing task of analyzing three miles of printed data from a radio telescope she helped assemble. That’s when she noticed recurring signals, later called pulsars. These were given off by the rotation of small stars leftover from huge stars that went supernova.

Her discovery was important because it proved that once supernova happened, the stars didn’t disappear, but rather left behind dense rotating stars.

Despite Jocelyn’s contribution, the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, and another Cambridge radio astronomer, Martin Ryle.

Victoria C. Woodhull, Women's History Month

March 1 – Trailblazer: Victoria Woodhull

, , , , ,

Victoria WoodhullYou knew I had to start with her, right?

In case you don’t remember, Victoria, the poor daughter of a con-man and a religious zealot, was a suffragist in the mid-1800s. She was the:

  • First woman to run a stock brokerage on Wall Street
  • First woman to testify before Congress
  • One of the first women to run a weekly newspaper
  • First female presidential candidate (1872)

Why isn’t she in our history books? Three main reasons I can tell:

  1. She royally angered her former friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They literally wrote the 900+ page book on the women’s suffrage movement, reducing Victoria’s role to an actual footnote. This, then, undermined her importance to future historians.
  2. Not long after her death, a woman named Emanie Sachs published a scathing biography of Victoria that painted her as a harlot and trickster – not the kind of woman anyone would want in the historical record.
  3. She was a woman. (Look at our history. That had to be part of it.)

Victoria Woodhull is the subject of my novel Madame Presidentess, which will be published July 25.

Women's History Month

31 Women of History – March Instagram/Blog Challenge

, ,

For Women’s History Month (March) I decided to do something a little bit different. I’m starting an Instragram photo challenge where you post a picture of a great woman from history (famous or not) for each day of the month. On top of that, I’m going to be sharing a short post (a paragraph or two) each day about my pick right here on this blog. Here’s the list:

Women's History Month - March 2016

I’m hoping some women’s organizations, and of course, all of you, will join me. Don’t use Instagram? Share your picks on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, or whatever social media you like. The point is to make women’s stories known.

Why am I doing this? Well, if you haven’t guessed from my previous posts and choices of novel subjects, women’s stories are near and dear to my heart. I feel a sense of duty to rescue those in danger of being forgotten from being erased or discarded from the historical record. I know that may seem egotistical, but I have to do what I can. My time in an all-girls high school taught me that every woman has a story and they are all equally valuable. So if you like famous women, post about them. If you prefer the obscure ones like I do, make them known. Heck, post stories from women in your family. Just tell their stories.

Be sure to stop back by tomorrow to see the first post in this series. It’s someone we’ve already talked about a bit here…

Please let me know in the comments if you’re participating. I may just pick someone for a prize…