Helen Keller was a pioneer for rights of the disabled. In 1891 when she was nineteen months old, she fell ill from scarlet fever, which left her not only blind but deaf as well. At seven years old she was taken to Alexander Graham Bell, an expert on hearing and speech, who encouraged her parents to enroll Helen in the Institute for the Blind in Boston. There, in her frustration to communicate, she would seem wild, thrashing about and was at first considered to have no mind capable of understanding – in short, an imbecile. Helen’s father found a live-in private tutor, twenty-year old Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen how to finger-spell, as Braille was then called. She learned the code for W-A-T-E-R, but never knowing light or sounds, Helen couldn’t correlate the words to the liquid these letters spelled. Anne thrust Helen’s hand under water flowing from a pump, followed by the letters for water tapped into her hand. Suddenly Helen realized that the cool substance coming from the pump had a name and quickly learned how to read, write, and eventually speak. With Anne Sullivan’s continued friendship, Helen became the first blind and deaf person to graduate from college in 1901. In 1915 the two women founded Helen Keller International, a nonprofit organization that worked to prevent blindness. Not only did Helen become an international speaker, writing twelve books, she also starred in a silent movie and tried her hand at a vaudeville tour. She died of Ondine syndrome during a nap in 1968 at the age of eighty-seven. Anne Sullivan also had a visual impairment, caused when doctors rubbed cocaine on her eyes before performing a procedure to treat pink eye when she was a child. By 1935, a year before her death, she was totally blind. She died at age seventy of coronary artery disease.

The first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize was Marie Curie in 1903 for Physics. She became the only woman to receive two Nobel Prizes, when she was awarded the prize for Chemistry in 1911. Her work with radiation and the discovery of the elements radium and the polonium opened the doors for many advances in science and medicine. Soon after Madame Curie won the 1911 prize, she was hospitalized for depression and kidney problems and suffered from ill health the remainder of her life. The dangers of radiation were not understood and she often worked unprotected with radioactive substances. She died in 1934 at age sixty-six of aplastic anemia, a bone marrow condition caused by radiation. In 1938 Marie’s daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her work with neutrons, setting the stage for nuclear fission. She died of leukemia at age fifty-eight in 1956 as a result of being exposed to radiation while assisting her mother years before. Tomorrow is the big launch for the book Object: Matrimony. Everyone is invited to attend the festivities held at the Railroad Museum in Nevada City from noon to 3 p.m.. Register to win a beautiful wedding gown by fashion designer Christian Michael Goodwin. The gown was inspired by the dresses the mail-order brides of the Old West wore, but has a contemporary flair.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893) was an educator and abolitionist. She was the first black woman to graduate from Howard University Law School and the first black woman to vote in a federal election. She helped President Lincoln enlist black men to fight in the Union and her house was frequently a safe haven in the Underground Railroad for slaves fleeing the South. After the war she became a school principal, and then a lawyer in Washington, D.C., at the age of sixty. She died in 1893 at age seventy from heart failure, with an estate valued at $150.

This month I’ll be focusing on tales of the brave frontier women of every profession and walks of life. Women who took on the rugged frontier to make a better life for herself and for the many thousands of women that came after her. Elizabeth Blackwell was a woman who defined the pioneer spirited. American’s first woman doctor was admitted to New York’s Geneva College in 1847 as a joke, and was expected to flunk out within months. Nevertheless, Blackwell prevailed and triumphed over taunts and bias while at medical school to earn her degree two years later. While in her last year of medical training, she was cleaning the infected eye of an infant when she accidentally splattered a drop of water into her own eye. Six months later she had the eyed taken out an had it replaced with a glass eye. Afterward, American hospitals refused to hire her. She then borrowed a few thousand dollars to open a clinic in New York City, which she called the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. She charged patients only four dollars a week, if they had it, for full treatment that might cost at least two thousand dollars a day at the going rate. During the Civil War she set up an organization to train nurses, Women’s Central Association of Relief, which later became the United States Sanitary Commission. In 1910 age eighty-nine she died after a fall from which she never fully recovered. I’m off this morning to participant in a radio program called Insight on Capital Public Radio. The place to tune to on the dial between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. is 90.9 FM KXJZ Sacramento; 90.5 FM KKTO Tahoe City/Reno; 91.3 FM KUOP Stockton/Modesto; 88.1 FM KQNC Quincy. The is the first radio interview leading up to the launch of the new book Object: Matrimony. Hope to see everyone at the launch event on Saturday, October 6 from noon to 3 p.m.. I’ll be giving away a wedding dress designed by Christian Michael Goodwin of Prairie Lace Designs. The dress was inspired by the gowns contained in the book Object: Matrimony and is a stunning garment!

Today’s American education system, quite frankly, ain’t doing so goodly or goodish. This country’s public schools couldn’t be more poorly funded and badly directed if the secretary of education were Marie Antoinette. If you’re lucky enough that you can afford a private school, then much of what follows probably won’t make sense to you, because unfortunately the majority of the problems are in the public schools, the ones called P.S., which is appropriate because they’re treated as an afterthought. Our public school system has become a giant monolithic substitute teacher, an overworked and underpaid civil servant with an impossible load on its back and a huge “kick me” sign on its behind. Maybe I’m not the best person to be addressing the subject of education. Frankly, when I was in school, I generated more C’s than a Spanish soap opera. But the subject of our public schools hits very close to my heart. For years I have been earnestly contributing vast amounts to the California school system. That’s right. I play the lottery. In days gone by, schools used to be orderly one-room red houses were kids would eagerly learn how to use impressive phrases like “in days gone by.” Today’s schools are replete with acts of violence. Violence and intimidation are such accepted parts of school for many kids these days that when the teacher tells students to raise their hands, just out of force of habit, they raise both of them. But I guess we should just be thankful that teachers dare to tell children anything nowadays. You see, being a teacher these days is not limited to the boring educational stuff anymore. Nooooo. You get to do so much more than just teach. You’re a one-man SWAT team, confiscating an AK-47 here, defusing a lunch box pipe bomb there. And then you’re so burnt out by the time you reach the apres-school parent/teacher meeting, you explode and tell some parents that they can take the college money they’ve been saving and buy themselves a septic tank because the only college their kid is going to has the word “beauty” or “clown” in front of it. If I hadn’t have had the brilliant teachers I did, in days gone by, I’m sure my life wouldn’t have turned out as well as it did…and quiet frankly my life stinks. But I digress…it was the teachers that made the difference. Unforgettable teachers like Virginia Upton, Augustus Bock, Gabe Kotter…. Perhaps if those teachers were still on the job the problems with the education system may not seem as insurmountable.