Remarkable Women You Have Not Heard Of
Mapping the rhythms of a vanishing tribal life
Frances Densmore first heard the sound of a Dakota Sioux drum as a child. “I fell asleep night after night to the throb of that drum,” she later recalled. But while others heard the same sound and quickly forgot it, Frances Densmore followed that drum beat for the rest of her life.
Continue reading “Frances Densmore – Song Catcher of Native American Music, 1867-1957”
Fans of the popular PBS show “Call the Midwife” tune in every Sunday night to follow the lives of Trixie, Val, Nurse Crane and Lucille, bicycling through the cobbled streets of London’s East End, as they bring new life into that region’s poorest community. But closer to home, very few people know the name of the woman who brought nurse-midwifery to the United States and, in the process, changed America’s rural health care delivery system forever.
Continue reading “The Mother of American Midwifery: Mary Carson Breckinridge”
Madeleine Albright, America’s first Secretary of State, famously said “there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” If that’s true, writer and adventurer Grace Gallatin Seton certainly isn’t there. Continue reading “Grace Gallatin Seton: Adventurer and Champion of Women’s Rights”
Life for a woman born in the 1800s was full of gender-based taboos and restrictions. She couldn’t vote, run for or hold office. Couldn’t own property or, with few exceptions, get an elite education. Couldn’t serve in the military or on a jury. And she couldn’t easily escape a distasteful or abusive marriage. For a woman to enjoy all the freedoms denied her simply by being born female, there was only one option: live as a man.
Continue reading “Charlotte Parkhurst: Gender Bending “Whip” of the California Gold Rush”
Josephine Baker took Paris by storm, dancing in nothing more than a G-string hung with fake bananas. She had a diamond-collared pet cheetah named Chiquita. Ernest Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw.” But she was also a French war hero, World War II spy and a civil rights activist who raised 12 children she called her “Rainbow Tribe.”
Continue reading “Josephine Baker: Exotic Showgirl and Clandestine French Operative”
When it came to spiritualists and séances, Rose Mackenberg, a savvy, no-nonsense Brooklyn private eye, once said, “I smell a rat before I smell the incense.” In the early 20th century, she became a star investigator for escape artist and magician Harry Houdini, who spent the last portion of his own career debunking psychics and séances.
Continue reading “Rose Mackenberg: Ghostbuster of Phantoms, Frauds and Flimflam Men”
