Journal Notes

Before I write about another extraordinary woman from history I’d like to congratulate Barbara Bognanno-Badger for winning the wedding dress given away at the launch of the book Object: Matrimony. Barbara’s name was selected at random from more than two hundred ten entries. The gown is from Prairie Lace Designs and is valued as $5,000. Enjoy the gown, Barbara. And now, from bridal wear winners to physics. 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 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.

Bessie Smith began her professional singing career at the age of eighteen in 1912, earning eight dollars a week. For many years she toured on the minstrel and vaudeville show circuit until she made her first recording in 1923. “Down Hearted Blues,” which sold over 750,000 copies in the first year, thereby making her the most successful black performer of her era. Her stage performances then earned fifteen hundred dollars per session, a tremendous sum at the time, although she received no royalties from the recordings; Bessie Smith received only thirty dollars per record of the one hundred sixty she recorded. Although many would now consider that she was duped into signing such a recording contract, Bessie was a hard-drinking, swaggering woman who reportedly would get into a knockdown fight over the slightest insult. The woman known as Empress of the Blues lived hard and fast. She died at the age of forty-three in 1937, in Mississippi. The speeding car she drove in as a passenger slammed into the rear end of a truck. Her arm was nearly severed, and she died of trauma and blood loss. Her bootlegger boyfriend, Richard Morgan, the driver of the car, was unharmed. No Breathalyzer tests were available to determine the root cause of the accident. Newspaper reports suggested that Bessie Smith died because she was taken to a segregated white hospital that refused treatment. However, records confirm that she was transported directly to Clarksdale’s, a black hospital, where she died six hours later.

Pocahontas, a nickname meaning “little spoiled one,” was born Amonute, daughter of Chief Powhatan in 1595. She was an extrovert from a young age, inquisitive and naturally good-natured. At eleven years old she played a minor role in securing John Smith’s survival. Later she was the go-between for trade among the settlers and Indians bartering at Jamestown. The fictionalized version of her love affair with Smith may, in fact, bear some truth, but in a much more disturbing way for our modern sensibility. Today, a thirty-year-old having sex with a preteen in pedophilia and a crime. But, in that era, intercourse with non-Christian pagans of any age was not considered wrong. Pocahontas was known to have “long, private conversations” with Smith during her frequent visits to the Jamestown complex, yet the true dimensions of these encounters are a matter of conjecture. A few years later she was betrothed to the older Englishman John Rolfe, only after she agreed to be baptized in 1614. Two years later Rolfe took her to London, where she was received as a celebrity, billed as a real live Indian princess by high society, and held an audience with King James. In 1617 she believed the smoky air of London was the cause of her coughs and bouts of weakness and wished to return to the forests she had known. Along with Rolfe she boarded a ship to return to Virginia, but the vessel only made it to the end of the Thames River before it turned back. Pocahontas died in London at age twenty-two of disease called the king’s evil, a form of tuberculosis characterized by swelling of the lymph glands.

Few women choose their hero path via exploration. One notable exception was May French-Sheldon, a wealthy American woman who became known as the first woman explorer of Africa. In the 1890s, with an entourage of 130. Zanzibarian men, she explored East Africa and the Congo. The press at the time called her a raging madwoman, but she didn’t care. She went on to lecture for many years about her travels, stressing-way before it was fashionable-that a “woman could do anything a man could.” She died of pneumonia in 1936 at age eight-nine. And in other female first… Amelia Earhart was the first female aviation hero. She was a likable, slender woman with an independent mind. Determined to do anything a man could do, despite the obstacles, she drove a truck and worked at the telephone company to earn the money needed for her first flying lessons. She had the right image and was photogenic enough to be asked to make a sponsored, first female-copiloted flight across the Atlantic. Publisher George Putnam was going to do a book on this and met the young woman to determine her candidacy. Apparently, she was more than photogenic because this meeting ultimately led to their “open marriage” and a relationship with Earhart agreed to only if the “medieval code” of fidelity by either party was not followed. I’m not sure my grandmother was first in anything, but I’m sure missing her a lot today. I love you, Mama.

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.

I’ve been working feverishly on a new book due to be released next fall entitled Love Lessons Learned by Women of the Old West. It’s been quite the education and since I’ve been focusing on teachers this month I thought I’d share a few things women like Calamity Jane and Agnes Hickok (Wild Bill’s wife) have taught me. Here’s what men wanted from women in the wild west: One – They wanted women to understand that they don’t care about clothes. Their own or anyone else’s. All they needed was a pair of Levis, one pair of boots, and another pair of better looking boots. That’s it. Two – Don’t talk to them while they’re trying to watch a boxing match or bear wrestling. Very simple. Match is over, they talk. Match is on, they don’t talk. Three – Hey, I’m sorry, but some men see a beautiful sunset and think, “You know the whiskey is better at the Long Branch in Dodge City than it is at the Oriental in Tombstone.” Four – Have a sense of humor. Without a sense of humor a relationship lasts about as long as John Wilkes Booths’ stage career. Five – Love them unconditionally. Help them out of the testosterone-induced fog they sometimes dwell in and lead them into the light. With the exception of bear wrestling these lessons seem applicable today. I had a wonderful time working on this title and am confident readers will enjoy it as well. I dedicated the book to George Brett. You’ll have to wait until the book is out in late 2013 to find out why.