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.

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

Josephine Baker: Exotic Showgirl and Clandestine French Operative

Josephine Baker, stage girl and French Spy
Largely remembered in the U.S. as an uninhibited showgirl and glitzy celebrity, Josephine Baker secretly served as an undercover operative for the Free French movement during WWII. She was ultimately awarded the Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honor, France’s highest military honors.

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”

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.

Continue reading “Lydia Mendoza : The First Lady of Tejano Music”

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.

Continue reading “Rose Mackenberg: Ghostbuster of Phantoms, Frauds and Flimflam Men”

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.

Continue reading “First Native American Female Marine: Minnie Spotted Wolf of the Blackfeet Tribe”