Maud Allan Dancer

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In: 20th Century Women, Actresses, Artists, Women's Rights

I am sure you have heard of the Dance of the Seven Veils, but do you know who created it? Dancer Maud Elizabeth Allan (c.1873- 1956), born Ulla Maud Durrant in Toronto, Canada, was raised in San Francisco. Musically talented on the piano, she went to Germany to study. While she studied there, her brother committed a brutal murder in San Francisco. Unable to return, she changed her name, and encouraged by the director of the Meister-schüle, gave up the piano and took up dancing professionally. For five years, she toured Europe dancing to classical music. In 1906, she performed the dance Salome based onRead More →

The Westbrook Drives

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In: 19th Century Women, Activists, Authors, Medicine

Henrietta Payne Westbrook (1834-1909) was a physician, reporter ,and author, who was also a close friend and early supporter of Ida Craddock, the heroine of my new novel Censored Angel: Anthony Comstock’s Nemesis. A believer in the right of a woman to choose her own husband, she was the free-love wife of the American secular advocate, Richard Brodhead Westbrook, a former minister, and later a lawyer and judge in Philadelphia. (Note: In a free-love marriage a couple choose to live as a married couple without benefit of a marriage license. For a definition see Free Love.) In 1880, Henrietta Westbrook graduated from Women’s Medical CollegeRead More →

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In: 19th Century Women, Business, Women's Rights

Not Just a Madam: Lula White of Basin Street Getting to know Lula White (c.1868-1931) means getting to know her world. In the thirty-eight block New Orleans “red light district” of Storyville, and between 1897 and 1917, there were too many houses of prostitution to come up with an accurate count. Reigning over them all was Lula White’s house, Mahogany Hall. Reigning over Mahogany Hall, was Lula.  Lula seized the crown of the New Orleans sex trade because she put her eye to the keyhole that was New Orleans and shrewdly assessed the world she saw through it. She had to have noted: Women asRead More →

Frances Burney

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In: 18th Century Women, Literature, Writing

At the age of fifteen, Frances Burney (1752-1840) tossed the plays, poems, and first novel she had written into a bonfire. Why? She was consumed with guilt. After all, in 1767, women were not supposed to spend their time writing anything but private letters. Better they perform useful household chores and fine needlework. Luckily, Frances Burney’s resolve to be a proper lady did not last more than nine months at which time she began a journal which is remarkable recounting of the history and personages of the late 18th and early 19th century. Over a lifetime that took her from England to France and back toRead 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 →

Lucretia Mott

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In: Abolition, Education, Women's Rights

The Quaker minister, Lucretia Mott, lived from 1793 to 1880. During that time she fought to reform society in every way she could. She believed that forming organized groups and taking action against social injustice was the way to bring about change. She founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society(1833), was the impetus behind the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention (1948), founded The Female Medical College of Pennsylvania (1850), and Swarthmore College in 1864. In a very busy life time she fought for temperance, peace, equal rights, woman’s suffrage, common schools, improved prisons, and the abolition of slavery. I desire to escape the narrow walls of a particular church, to liveRead More →