Margaret Fogarty Rudkin, Feminist Founder of Pepperidge Farm

A Pepperidge Farms horse-drawn delivery wagon
After starting a baking business in her kitchen at the height of the Great Depression, Margaret Fogarty Rudkin’s Pepperidge Farm became one of the country’s best known food brands.

Maybe it’s the decadence of a double-chocolate Milano. Or those buttery, melt-in-your-mouth Chessmen. Or the handful of Goldfish (“the snack that smiles back”) a harried mom throws into a Ziploc bag on the way out the door with her little ones. Pepperidge Farm has been America’s bakery for generations. But did you know it all started with a housewife, a sickly little boy and a stately tree on a Connecticut farm?

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Charlotta Spears Bass – Crusading Journalist and Civil Rights Activist

Charlotta Bass in front of her California Eagle newspaper office
At a time when African Americans had little presence in the mainstream news publishing industry, Charlotta Spears Bass became a a powerful journalist and newspaper owner who ran for both Congress and Vice President of the United States.

You might not know her name, but Charlotta Spears Bass was a major badass. She fought the Ku Klux Klan and won. Was the first black woman to run for vice president. And, at the ripe old age of 91, was under surveillance by the FBI.

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Frances Densmore – Song Catcher of Native American Music, 1867-1957

Mapping the rhythms of a vanishing tribal life

Chief of the Blackfoot tribe records his music.
Frances Densmore recording the Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot Nation in the Smithsonian Institution’s castle building.

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.

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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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The Mother of American Midwifery: Mary Carson Breckinridge

Born into an upper-crust family of great wealth and power, Mary Breckinridge had her choice of rich and luxurious options in life. It speaks to her character that she chose to be a horseback frontier midwife in the rugged back country of Appalachia.

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.

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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”