It’s a Pick-A-Book Giveaway.

This month enter to win any book from the catalog of books I’ve pinned.

Winners will be announced April 30.

Rosa May sat beside the bed of a dying miner and wiped the sweat off his feverish brow.  She looked around his rustic, one-room cabin, past the sparse furnishings, and fixed her eyes on a tattered photograph of an elderly man and woman.  “Those are my folks,” the man weakly told her.  “They’re in Marshall County, Illinois.  Where are your folks?”

The question stunned Rosa.  No one ever asked about such things.  No one ever asked her much at all.  Conversation wasn’t what men were looking for when they did business with her.  Rosa glanced out the window at a couple of respectable, well-dressed women.  They watched her through the clouded glass, pointed, and whispered.  She knew what they were saying without hearing it.

Rosa was just one of a handful of “sporting women” living in Bodie, California, in 1900 and she knew what people thought of her.  It used to bother her years ago, but not now.  It was an occupational hazard she’d learned to live with.

“Don’t you have people anywhere?” the miner asked.  Rosa dabbed the man’s head with a cloth and smiled.  “I don’t know anymore,” she answered.  “If I did have, they’d be back in Pennsylvania.”

Rosa’s parents were Irish – hard, strict people.  Rosa had dreamed of the day she would be out of their puritanical household.  She had left home in 1871, at the age of sixteen and soon found there weren’t many opportunities for a poor, petite, uneducated girl with brown eyes and dark, curly hair.  She ended up in New York, hungry, homeless, and eager to take any job offered.  The job offered was prostitution and five years later she came west with other women of her trade, hoping to make a fortune off the gold and silver miners.

Prostitution was the single largest occupation for women in the West.  Rosa hoped to secure a position at a posh brothel with crystal chandeliers, velvet curtains, and flowing champagne.  The madams who ran such places were good to their girls.  They paid them a regular salary, taught them about makeup, manners, and how to dress, and they only had to entertain a few men a night.  If a high-class brothel wasn’t available, Rosa could take a job in a second-class house and work for a percentage of the profits, turning as many tricks as she could each night.  If all failed, she could be a street walker or rent a “crib” at a boardinghouse.  Cribs, tiny, windowless chambers, had oilcloths draped across the foot of the bed for customers in too big of a hurry to take off their boots.

To learn the rest of Rosa May’s story and to read more about the bad girls of the Old West read

Wicked Women:  Notorious, Mischievous, and Wayward Ladies from the Old West.

It’s a Pick-A-Book Giveaway.

This month enter to win any book from the catalog of books I’ve pinned.

Winners will be announced April 30.

Sacagawea was the young Shoshone Indian woman who served as Lewis and Clark’s translator on their 1803 expedition to explore the uncharted western regions of America.  She made the entire journey to the Pacific, and the return trip, with a newborn baby on her back; many believe without her aid, the journey, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, would have ended in failure.  Some accounts say she died in 1812 at age twenty-five of putrid fever, while others believe she died in 1884 on an Indian Reservation in Wyoming.  The child she carried in a papoose was Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, nicknamed Pompy, meaning first-born, who eventually attended St. Louis Academy with tuition paid by Clark.  Pompy later met Prince Wilhelm of Germany while on a natural history expedition and traveled back to Europe with him, where Pompy learned to speak four different languages.  But by the time he was twenty-four Pompy was back in North America, living as a mountain man.  When the Gold Rush of 1849 started, he got caught up in the fever and died from too much time wading through cold rivers panning for gold.  His cause of death was bronchitis at age sixty-one, and his portrait is the only one of a child on any U. S. coin.

To learn more about Sacagawea and other amazing women who settled the west read Tales Behind the Tombstones.  Available everywhere books are sold.

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It’s a Pick-A-Book Giveaway.

This month enter to win any book from the catalog of books I’ve pinned.

Winners will be announced April 30.

In 1929 Jeanne Eagel was nominated for a best actress Oscar for The Letter after she died earlier in the year at age thirty-nine from alcohol and heroin complications.  Eagels had started as a Ziegfeld Follies girl, but her talent and beauty soon moved her from the chorus line to center stage.  Tabloids of the time followed her progress and her secret marriage to a Yale football star, and they especially liked her temper, her no-shows, and her quitting plays whenever she felt like it.  At one point she was banned from appearing on stage by Actors Equity, which had forced her to move to Hollywood to make the “talkie” The Letter, one of the first films that showed the true dramatic possibilities of audio in cinema.  In the fall of 1929, she checked into a private drying-out hospital in New York City a week before the stock market crashed; unfortunately, she left via the morgue.

To learn more about pioneer actresses like Jeanne Eagels read

Entertaining Women:  Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.

Available in bookstores everywhere and through Amazon.com

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This month enter to win any book from the catalog of books I’ve pinned.

Winners will be announced April 30.

The Matrimonial News, a San Francisco matchmaking newspaper, was dedicated to “promoting honorable matrimonial engagements and true conjugal facilities” for men and women through personal advertisements and was a forerunner of the matchmaking clubs and personal ads in newspapers today.  Not all the matrimonial bureaus and agencies were legitimate, however, and many a disappointed bride or groom was left with empty pockets after contracting for a mail-order mate.

Here are a few of the ads posted in the January 8, 1887, edition of Matrimonial News.

283 – A gentlemen of 25 years old, 5 feet 3 inches, doing a good business in the city, desires the acquaintance of a young, intelligent and refined lady possessed of some means, of a loving disposition from 18 to 23, and one who could make a home a paradise.

287 – An intelligent young fellow of 22 years, 6 feet height, weight 170 pounds.  Would like to correspond with a lady from 18 to 22 years.  Will exchange photos:  object, fun and amusement, and perhaps when acquainted, if suitable, matrimony.

245 – I am 48, fat, fair, and plan on losing no weight.  Am a No. 1 lady, well fixed with no encumbrances:  am in business in city but want a partner who lives in the West.  Want an energetic man that has some means, not under 40 years of age and weight not less than 180.  Of good habits.  A Christian gentleman preferred.

241 – I am a widow, aged 28, have one child, height 64 inches, blue eyes, weight 125 pounds, loving disposition.  I am poor; would like to hear from honorable men from 30 to 40 years old:  working men preferred.

To learn more advertisements from frontier women seeking men read

Hearts West:  True Stories of Mail Order Brides on the Frontier.

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This month enter to win any book from the catalog of books I’ve pinned.

Winners will be announced April 30.

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.  A few years later she was betrothed to an Englishman named 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-one of a disease called the king’s evil, a form of tuberculosis characterized by swelling of the lymph glands.

To learn more about women like Pocahontas read

More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Lawmen.

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This month enter to win any book from the catalog of books I’ve pinned.

Winners will be announced April 30.

When times are tough, sometimes we need an encouraging voice

or uplifting story to help get us through. 

Mary Ann Shadd Cary 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 estimated value at $150.

For more stories of encouragement from women in history read

Tales Behind the Tombstones.  

Available everywhere books are sold.  

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This month enter to win any book from the catalog of books I’ve pinned.

Winners will be announced April 30.

On Wednesday, January 25, 1911, physicians across the world gathered at the great hall at the Academy of Medicine in New York to honor America’s first woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell. The tenacious pioneer in the fight for the right of women to study and practice medicine had died nine months prior to the event honoring the contributions she made to the field. The audience was composed largely of women, all of whom owed a debt of gratitude to Elizabeth Blackwell.

Born in Bristol, England on February 3, 1821, Elizabeth immigrated to America in 1832 with her parents. Her desire to attend school and study medicine began at an early age. Elizabeth was twenty-six years old when she was admitted to New York’s Geneva College in 1847. She had applied to twenty institutions before being accepted as a medical student at the prestigious university. The male students there believed Elizabeth’s request was a joke and agreed to let her attend the classes based on that idea, but the daring young woman was not playing around. She prevailed and triumphed over taunts and bias while at school to earn her degree only two years after enrolling.

While in her last year of school, she treated an infant with an eye infection. As she was washing the baby’s eye with water, she accidentally splattered the contaminated liquid in her own eye. Six months later she had the eye removed and replaced with a glass eye. Hospitals and dispensaries refused to admit her to practice at their facilities, and she was denounced by the press and from the pulpit.

After graduating in 1849, Elizabeth found herself socially and professionally boycotted. Public sentiment was so against her for pursuing a career in a field deemed unladylike that she could not find a place to live anywhere in New York. Using funds given to her by her family she built her own home.

In 1854, she borrowed the capital needed to build the first hospital for women in the country. Most of the patients she worked with were poor. Patients were charged a mere $4 a week for services that would cost them $2,000 at another facility. Elizabeth also founded the Women’s Medical College of New York, and, when the Civil War broke out, she assisted in launching the Sanitary Aid Association. In addition to maintaining her practice and creating benevolent community services, Elizabeth also wrote a number of books on the subject of medicine. Two of her most popular titles were Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession for Women and Essays in Medical Sociology.

By the turn of the century, Elizabeth Blackwell had retired from medicine and returned to England. In the spring of 1907, she was injured in a fall from which she never fully recovered. She died on May 31, 1910, from a stroke. The epitaph below the Celtic cross which marks her grave at Kilmun Churchyard on the Holy Loch, near Clyde, includes these words: “The first woman in modern times to graduate in medicine (1849) and the first to be placed on the British Medical Register (1859).

For more stories of hope from women in history read the New York Times Bestselling book The Doctor Wore Petticoats.

Available everywhere books are sold.

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

When Susan B. Anthony and Abigail Scott Duniway stood before the Women’s Rights Convention in Olympia, Washington, in 1871, they were joined by three women who had come west as “Mercer Girls,” young women recruited by Asa Shinn Mercer to come to the Pacific Northwest to work as teachers—and as prospective brides for the men who made up the vast majority of the population in Washington Territory. Women went west for a variety of reasons during the Great Migration of the nineteenth century, coming along with husbands and fathers, but also traveling solo for reasons that included job opportunities, homesteads in some places where they were allowed for single women, and the prospect of more freedom.

Myth and the historical record both place women in professions in the West, where there were shortages of doctors, dentists, lawyers, and journalists, when they might have been denied those same opportunities in the East. Bethenia Owens-Adair, for example, emigrated to Oregon with her family as a small child and then returned to the East to go to medical school, eventually setting up a practice in Portland, Oregon, where she participated in the suffrage movement in the 1880s. Martha Hughes Cannon was a doctor in Salt Lake City in the 1890s, when she also ran for—and won—a seat in the Utah legislature. May Arkwright Hutton went west to the silver camps of Idaho where she started out as a cook in a mining town and became a silver tycoon and philanthropist in her own right. Other women went west to be singers, other performers, photographers, social workers, restaurateurs, scouts, and homesteaders—as well as to take up less savory professions and to be mail-order brides.

Perhaps because educated women went west to practice their careers, perhaps because the mere fact that they were pioneers gave them the conviction that anything was possible, and perhaps because the nascent governments of the West offered pathways to reform that were simply more straightforward than those in more established states, the reforming zeal swept across the West, and by 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the women of the West were already voting.

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

Born in Massachusetts in 1818 and educated at Oberlin College, Lucy Stone lectured widely against slavery and, on behalf of women’s suffrage, helped organize the first national women’s rights convention and the American Woman Suffrage Association and published the influential Woman’s Journal.

After graduating from Oberlin College in 1847, Stone became a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, one of the leading abolitionist organizations of its time. Stone became convinced that parallels existed between the positions of women and slaves. In her view both were expected to be passive, cooperative, and obedient. In addition, the legal status of both slaves and women was inferior to that of white men. Stone persuaded the society to allow her to spend part of her time speaking on the topic of women’s rights. In 1850 she organized the first national Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In 1855 Stone married Henry B. Blackwell, an Ohio merchant and abolitionist. The couple entered into the marriage “under protest”; at their wedding they read and signed a document explicitly protesting the legal rights that were given to a husband over his wife. They omitted the word “obey” from the marriage vows and promised to treat each other equally. Stone also announced that she would not take her husband’s name and would be addressed instead as Mrs. Stone. This action drew national attention, and women who retained their maiden names were soon known as “Lucy Stoners.”

After the Civil War, Stone and Blackwell shifted their energies to women’s suffrage. Although Stone was in agreement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony on the goal of women’s suffrage, she differed as to the best way to secure the vote for women. In 1869 Stone helped form the AWSA. The AWSA worked for women’s suffrage on a state by state basis, seeking amendments to state constitutions. Stanton and Anthony established a rival organization, the NWSA, which sought an amendment to the U.S. Constitution similar to the Fifteenth Amendment that gave nonwhite men the right to vote. Whereas the AWSA concentrated on women’s suffrage, the NWSA took a broader approach, lobbying for improvements in the legal status of women in areas such as family law as well as for suffrage.

Stone also helped found the Woman’s Journal, a weekly suffrage journal, in 1870. She edited the journal for many years, eventually turning the task over to her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, in 1882. As editor, Stone focused on the AWSA’s goal of suffrage.

In 1890 the AWSA and the NWSA merged into the NAWSA. Stone became the chair of the executive committee, and Stanton served as the first president.

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who signed the first call for a woman’s rights convention in the United States, was born in Johnstown, New York, on November 12, 1815. She was the daughter of Judge Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady, both persons of exceptional educational refinement. As a child Elizabeth displayed unusual intelligence and began her education at Johnstown Academy. After finishing the coursework at her homeschool, she went to Mrs. Emma Willard’s seminary in Troy, New York, where she was graduated in 1822.

In 1839 she met Henry Brewster Stanton, an anti-slavery orator of some note, and in 1840 they were married. Immediately after their wedding they went to London where the international anti-slavery convention was to be held.

Mrs. Stanton was one of the delegates from America but was denied participation in the proceedings because she was a woman. While in London she met Lucretia Mott and with her signed the first call for a women’s rights convention. Returning to Boston, Mr. and Mrs. Stanton made their home there until Mr. Stanton was compelled to move to Seneca Falls, New York, because of his health. It was in Seneca Falls on the 19th and 20th of July 1848, in the Wesleyan chapel, that the first women’s rights convention was held. Mrs. Stanton was at the head of the movement at that time and, besides caring for the delegates, wrote the declaration of aims which became the subject of ridicule and jest throughout the United States.

From 1867 to 1874 she went from state to state campaigning for woman’s suffrage and became associated with numerous organizations having that end in view. She became a candidate for Congress from the Eighth New York District, having the support of the New York Herald. She became associated in the management of the resolution with Susan B. Anthony and was the joint author of many books on woman’s suffrage.

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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