Category: Gender

Lavinia Ellen Ream: Abraham Lincoln’s Sculptor

As a teenager, Lavinia Ream was commissioned to sculpt a bust of Abraham Lincoln
A famed sculptor in an era that allowed little room for women in the world of serious art, Lavinia Ream worked with President Abraham Lincoln to create two sculptures of him. The largest one, completed after his assassination, has stood in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda for 149 years.

Lavinia Ream had three strikes against her. She was young, she was female, and she had friends in high places. But when Congress selected her to sculpt a memorial statue of President Abraham Lincoln in 1866, the 18 year old made history as the first female artist and youngest individual commissioned to create art for the United States Government.

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Grace Gallatin Seton: Adventurer and Champion of Women’s Rights

Born the daughter of a west coast steel and iron magnate, Gace Gallatin Seton traveled the world as an adventurer, writer and advocate for women’s rights. Here, in World War I France, she and her comrades use their Ford Camionettes to ferry supplies to the front lines.

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”

Charlotte Parkhurst: Gender Bending “Whip” of the California Gold Rush

As a runaway girl dressed as a boy, Charlotte Parkhurst took a job mucking out Massachusetts livery stables in 1824 and went on from there to become a stagecoach driver.

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.

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Lydia Mendoza : The First Lady of Tejano Music

In the mid-1900s, Mexican-American Lydia Mendoza became an international star who paved the way for later Tejano singers like Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. Mendoza produced 1200 recordings during her long career and the President of the United States honored the singer and her work with the National Medal of Arts.

The shocking 1995 murder of Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, often called the Queen of Tejano music, plunged fans into mourning and introduced her to English speakers who became fans. But few of them knew Selena stood on the shoulders of another woman, born 80 years before her death. That woman was Lydia Mendoza, rightfully known as the First Lady of Tejano.

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Rose Mackenberg: Ghostbuster of Phantoms, Frauds and Flimflam Men

In the early 1900s, with the help of Brooklyn private detective Rose Mackenberg (above, right), escape artist and magician Harry Houdini (above, left) launched a national campaign to expose phony psychics and mediums who preyed on the emotionally distraught. Mackenberg’s colorful methods for ferreting out frauds made her a legend in her own right.

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.

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First Native American Female Marine: Minnie Spotted Wolf of the Blackfeet Tribe

Memorializing a local legend seventy six years after her enlistment, the name of a stretch of Montana’s U.S. Highway 89 was changed to Minnie Spotted Wolf Memorial Highway. [Highway photo by John McGill of the Glacier Reporter]
It was “hard … but not too hard,”  is how the 20-year-old woman who broke racial and gender barriers as the first Native American female Marine described boot camp at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune in 1943. After all, growing up on her father’s rural Montana ranch, Minnie Spotted Wolf was used to doing the types of back-breaking physical jobs usually done by men — cutting fence posts, driving two-ton trucks, building bridges and fences, and rounding up and breaking horses while raising cattle and sheep.

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