Rose Winslow American Suffragette

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In: 19th Century Women, Women's Rights

“God knows we don’t want other women ever to have to do this over again.” Rose Winslow Rose Winslow  was brought as a baby to the United States by her Polish parents so that she could grow up in a free democratic country.  Her father labored as a coal miner and steel worker and as a child Rose suffered from tuberculous which left her in poor physical health all her life. She became a union organizer  and joined Alice Paul in the suffrage movement. In November 1917 she was the first to join Alice Paul in a hunger strike to demand the passage of the 19th amendment givingRead More →

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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In: 19th Century Women, Literature, Poets

How would you feel if you were once an acclaimed poet, but long after your death all that is remembered of your writings are a few clever lines from your poems? Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1900) did not expect to become a writer, but when her family fell on hard times, and they could no longer afford a subscription to her favorite magazine, The New York Mercury, she came up with the idea of submitting three poems. In return, she hoped to earn a subscription. Instead, she received a check for ten dollars. “The check from Leslie was a revelation,” she wrote in her diary. “IRead More →

Sojourner Truth

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In: 19th Century Women, Abolition, Civil War

Which is more important – the words or how they are said?   Born a slave in Hurley in Ulster County, New York around 1779, Sojourner had little chance to learn to read and write. She passed through the hands of numerous owners, many of them cruel, before she was given her freedom at age 30 when New York State abolished slavery in 1827.  In 1844, she joined the Utopian community, The Northamption Association of Education and Industry, a 200 member silk-growing cooperative founded by abolitionists. There she met noted abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass who provided support for her efforts.Read More →

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

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In: 19th Century Women, Abolition, Civil War, Literature

 “I ask no monument, proud and high to arrest the gaze of the passers-by; all that my yearning spirit craves is bury me not in a land of slaves.” Inscription, Contemplative Court,  Smithsonian‘s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was a poet, abolitionist, and suffragist who first achieved renown through her antislavery poetry. Born in 1825, a free woman in Baltimore,  she published her first book of poems at around the age of twenty. Before the Civil War, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she joined the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and worked with William Stills helping slaves escape via theRead More →

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In: 19th Century Women, Religion, Spiritualism

From Ghosts to Palestine Many 19th century women turned to occultism and spirituality as a way to escape the patriarchal bent of the major religions of the time. An example of this is Ada Goodrich Freer. Born in 1857, Ada Goodrich Freer was a British psychic, poet, and folklorist. Orphaned at a young age and fostered by an aunt who ran a girls’ boarding school, little is known of Freer’s early life other than that she was a very talented student. Much of what is available are stories she told about herself. For example, Freer claimed she had psychic premonitions and phantasmal experiences from childhood,Read More →

Anna Maria Jarvis Mother's Day Founder

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In: 19th Century Women, Civil War, Motherhood

The Mother’s Day that we celebrate today with cards, candy, and flowers is not the same as the Mother’s Day that was first conceived of by the women who worked to establish it. Ann Reeve Jarvis (1832-1905) was one of four women (including Juliet Ward Howe, Juliet Calhoun Blakely, and Mary Towles Sassen) who advocated for a day for mothers. These women wanted to see mothers become a political force as community organizers. As mothers themselves, they believed that other mothers, out of concern for their own children, would be strong advocates for peace and justice and addressing vital community needs. The story of howRead More →

Charlotte Forten Grimke

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In: 19th Century Women, Abolition, Civil War, Writing

 Charlotte Forten Grimke was born in 1838 to a wealthy black family in Philadelphia. All her life she was a lover of books and a vociferous opponent of prejudice based on skin color. When she was twenty-two she became ill and had to give up her job as a teacher in Salem, Massachusetts. Unable to be active, she read voraciously, often a book a day, recording her thoughts in her journal. “…how blessed it is to know that all the wealth of the ages can be ours, if we choose to grasp it! That we can live, not in this century, this corner of theRead More →

Wide, Wide World: A Book Review

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In: 19th Century Women, Authors, Civil War, Writing

“Good came out of evil, as it often does…” Thus writes Susan Warner at the end of her novel The Wide, Wide World, a work often considered America’s first best seller. It was certainly a literary sensation. Published by Putnam in 1851 Warner’s novel was widely acclaimed. Henry James, for example, compared it to the work of Flaubert. In two years alone, fourteen editions were issued. It remained in print through 1892 and sold thousands of copies in both the United States and England. The Wide, Wide World is the story of a little girl’s journey to womanhood. Ellen, a spoiled and highly emotional child,Read More →

Ester Howland

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In: 19th Century Women, Business, Daily Life

“…this is the day on which those charming little missives, ycelped* Valentines, cross and inter-cross at every street and turning. The weary and all forespent twopenny postman sinks below a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own.” Valentine’s Day in Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb 1860 (*called) Valentine’s Day was a well-established holiday by the 1860’s, dating back to, it is attributed, the ancient Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia, and to St. Valentine who, it is said, sent the first valentine to the girl who had visited him in prison, signed “From Your Valentine.”  However, it is clear that by the 1860s the religious aspect of the day had been putRead More →