Welcome to Femilogue!

These pages include a sampling of the women who forged our nation—abolitionists and artists, suffragists and scientists, authors and athletes, inventors, public servants, and more. 

Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin “helping” them. Such a world does not exist—never has. Men and women have built society and have built the world. Women have been central to it. This revolutionary insight is itself a force, a force that liberates and transforms.

 —Gerda Lerner, historian

Note: I intended to commemorate a woman each day of the year. Any gaps are due to my inefficiency and not to a lack of accomplished women to choose from! With any luck (or fortitude) I will fill in the blanks over the coming weeks and months.

United States of America

“Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”

—Abigail Adams

Born this day in 1776: The United States of America!

To read a transcript of the Declaration of Independence, go here. To read a transcript of the Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States, presented by the National Woman Suffrage Association on the nation’s centennial (July 4th, 1876), go here. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage crashed the centennial celebration at Independence Hall and presented the declaration to the acting vice-president.

“While the Nation is buoyant with patriotism, and all hearts are attuned to praise, it is with sorrow we come to strike the one discordant note, on this hundredth anniversary of our country’s birth.… The history of our country the past hundred years, has been a series of assumptions and usurpations of power over woman, in direct opposition to the principles of just government, acknowledged by the United States at its foundation.”

—Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States by the National Woman Suffrage Association, July 4th, 1876

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Grace Raymond Hebard

 “Hard work is the only formula for any achievement.” 

—Grace Raymond Hebard

Born this day in 1861: Grace Raymond Hebard (1861–1936), professor, historian, librarian, suffragist, biographer, and chronicler of the West and woman suffrage.

Hebard was a woman of many firsts: she was the first woman to receive a B.S. (civil engineering) from the State University of Iowa (1882), the first woman to be admitted to the Wyoming State Bar (1898) and the first woman to practice law before the Wyoming Supreme Court. She was also the first librarian of the University of Wyoming, creating it from books she personally collected (eventually expanding the collection to 42,000 books by the time she gave up the unpaid position) and was the first president of the state’s library association (which she helped establish). She was also Wyoming’s reigning tennis champion for a stretch.

Hebard began her working career as a draftsman for the U.S. Surveyor General in Wyoming. She continued her education, as well, earning a master’s degree and later a doctorate. In 1891 became a member of the University of Wyoming (Laramie) board of trustees and also served as secretary. She was a powerful member of the board, using her considerable drive to carve a university out of what she saw as the bleak Wyoming landscape. Hebard also began teaching political economy at this time and by the end of her career was head of the department of political economy and sociology. She was a popular speaker and prolific writer, most remembered for her histories of the American West.

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Rose Cecil O’Neill

Born this day in 1874: Rose Cecil O’Neill (1874–1944), magazine illustrator, writer, and businesswoman who created the Kewpies.

O’Neill was a popular magazine illustrator. Her greatest fame, however—and most of her wealth—came from the creation of the enormously popular Kewpies. Kewpies began as illustrations in the Ladies’ Home Journal. In a blaze of merchandizing Kewpies subsequently appeared as items such as figurines, salt and pepper shakers, inkwells, and on fabric, greeting cards, stationery, and, of course, as dolls. Kewpie dolls were first manufactured in 1913 and netted O’Neill royalties of $1.5 million. The wealth from marketing Kewpies allowed O’Neill to indulge in more serious (and much darker) art, including monumental sculpture, painting, and novel and poetry writing.

Various manufacturers have been churning out Kewpie dolls almost continuously since 1913.

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Agnes Nestor

Born this day in 1880: Agnes Nestor (1880–1948), labor leader and social reformer.

Nestor was known especially for her role in unionizing women workers. She founded the International Glove Workers Union of America and served as its president from 1913 to 1916 and its vice president from 1916 to 1939. She led strikes resulting in higher wages and better working conditions and the organization of the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League, which she led from 1913 to 1948. She played a leading role in the passage of an Illinois law limiting women’s working hours to 10 hours per day. She developed worker education programs and helped write the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which provided the first federal aid for vocational education. She is also remembered for her work in child-labor, minimum wage, maternity health, and woman suffrage legislation.

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Harriet Beecher Stowe

Born this day in 1811: Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe also wrote a social satire on marriage and femininity—Pink and White Tyranny. To download it or read it on line, go here. To download or read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, go here.

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Djuna Barnes

Born this day in 1892: Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), journalist, illustrator, and avante garde writer of drama, fiction, and poetry. Barnes was a well-respected member of the Paris literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s. She is remembered especially for her poetry collection The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings and the novel Nightwood.

A sampling:

From Fifth Avenue Up

SOMEDAY beneath some hard

Capricious star—

Spreading its light a little

Over far,

We'll know you for the woman

That you are.

For though one took you, hurled you

Out of space,

With your legs half strangled

In your lace,

You'd lip the world to madness

On your face.

We'd see your body in the grass

With cool pale eyes.

We'd strain to touch those lang'rous

Length of thighs,

And hear your short sharp modern

Babylonic cries.

It wouldn't go. We'd feel you

Coil in fear

Leaning across the fertile

Fields to leer

As you urged some bitter secret

Through the ear.

We see your arms grow humid

In the heat;

We see your damp chemise lie

Pulsing in the beat

Of the over-hearts left oozing

At your feet.

See you sagging down with bulging

Hair to sip,

The dappled damp from some vague

Under lip,

Your soft saliva, loosed

With orgy, drip.

Once we'd not have called this

Woman you—

When leaning above your mother's

Spleen you drew

Your mouth across her breast as

Trick musicians do.

Plunging grandly out to fall

Upon your face.

Naked—female—baby

In grimace,

With your belly bulging stately

Into space.

SUICIDE

Corpse A

THEY brought her in, a shattered small

Cocoon,

With a little bruised body like

A startled moon;

And all the subtle symphonies of her

A twilight rune.

Corpse B

THEY gave her hurried shoves this way

And that.

Her body shock-abbreviated

As a city cat.

She lay out listlessly like some small mug

Of beer gone flat.

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Mary Jane Rathbun

Born this day in 1860: Mary Jane Rathbun, (1860–1943), eminent marine zoologist, known for establishing the basic taxonomic information on Crustacea.

A native of Buffalo, New York, Rathbun’s formal education ended with high school. But, her own keen mind, curiosity, and passion for zoology engendered a self-education that would make her preeminent in her field.

Her interest in sea life began when her brother, who shared her childhood passion for zoology and who at the time worked at the U.S. Fish Commission, asked her to volunteer at the Woods Hole Marine Research Center. She was later hired by Spencer Baird, head of the Fish Commission, where she organized and catalogued the commission’s vast collection held at the National Museum’s Division of Marine Invertabrates in Washington, D.C., and served as defacto head of the department. She was officially named assistant curator in 1907.

Over a career that spanned more than five decades, she published 158 scientific studies, describing and classifying both fossil and living marine life (Crustacea) and establishing a fixed nomenclature. Her work has been indispensible to ecologists and zoologists.

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Sally J. Priesand

Born this day in 1946: Sally J. Priesand (b. 1946), the first woman in the U.S. to be ordained a rabbi. Now retired, Priesand enjoys being Rabbi Emierita of the Monmouth Reform Temple in Trinton Falls, New Jersey.

“I decided I wanted to be a rabbi in 1962 at the age of 16. Fortunately, my parents gave me one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child: the courage to dare and to dream. With their encouragement, I was able to remain focused on my goal, relatively unconcerned that no woman had ever been ordained rabbi by a theological seminary and determined to succeed despite the doubts I heard expressed in the organized Jewish community.… When I decided to study for the rabbinate, I never thought much about being a pioneer, nor was it my intention to champion the rights of women. I just wanted to be a rabbi.”


 —Rabbi Sally Priesand

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Chien-Shiung Wu

Born this day in 1912: Chien-Shiung Wu, (1912–1997), who during her lifetime was one of the world’s leading experimental physicists. Wu’s experiments tested a notion, put forth by colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, challenging the law of conservation of parity. Her experiments overturned the law of physics that held that nature has a left-right symmetry. Guess who was awarded the Nobel Prize.

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May 29

On this day in 1977 Janet Guthrie became the first woman to complete in the Indianapolis 500. 

"Ain't I a Woman?"

Sojourner Truth—former slave, abolitionist, and women's rights activist—delivered her famous speech in 1851 at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

“May I say a few words? [Receiving an affirmative answer, she proceeded;] I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am strong as any man that is now.

 “As for intellect, all I can say is, if woman have a pint and man a quart—why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much—for we won’t take more than our pint’ll hold.

 “The poor men seem to be all in confusion and don’t know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble.

“I can’t read, but I can hear. I have heard the Bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept—and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part?

 “But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.” —Sojourner Truth, 1851, as reported in the Salem, Ohio, Anti-Slavery Bugle, June 21, 1851

For a discussion of why the speech has come to be known as the “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, go here or here.

Margaret Fuller

Born this day in 1810: MARGARET FULLER (1810–1850), distinguished woman of letters, teacher, literary critic, journalist, Transcendentalist, brilliant conversationalist, critic, activist, the nation’s first feminist, and one of the intellectual prime movers of her day.

For free digital access to Fuller’s groundbreaking feminist work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, go here.

To read about her in a U.S. textbook, you’re shit out of luck.

Ellen Spencer Mussey

Born this day in 1850: Ellen Spencer Mussey (1850–1936), lawyer, educator, women’s rights activist

Mussey was born Ellen Spencer in Geneva, Ohio. Her father operated a penmanship school and promoted his method of handwriting (Spencerian penmanship). At a very young age, Mussey helped her father teach classes. Her father died while she was still a teenager, and Mussey lived with several different siblings and attended various seminaries for the next several years.

In 1869 Mussey moved to Washington, D.C. and managed the women’s department of her brother Henry’s business school (Spencerian Business College). The school trained young women for government work and was well-known in Washington.

In 1871 she married Reuben Mussey, a lawyer, and eventually began assisting him in his practice. After her husband’s death in 1892, Mussey wished to formally practice law in order to support herself and her family. No law schools in the area would accept her as a student because—really, do I have to tell you? She took the bar exam anyway the following year and qualified to practice law. She was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1876 and to practice before the U.S. Court of Claims the following year. Her practice included probate law, general commercial law, and international law. She also served as counsel to the American Red Cross and to the Norwegian and Swedish legations for 25 years.

Discovering young women who wished to study law (and who, like her, were denied admission to law schools on the grounds that they had lady parts), Mussey, along with lawyer Emma M. Gillett, established a law school—the Washington College of Law (1898)—that accepted both women and men as students.

Mussey was also active in the fight for women’s rights, including playing a prominent role in securing married women’s property rights, and drafted the Cable Act of 1922, which granted independent citizenship to married women.

Mussey’s other contributions included playing a leading role in establishing public kindergarten and the juvenile court system in the District of Columbia. She also established a school for developmentally disabled children.

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Sarah Peter

Born this day in 1800: Sarah Anne Worthington King Peter (1800–1877), philanthropist who founded the Philadelphia School of Design for Women

Now the Moore College of Art and Design, the Philadelphia School of Design for Women was the first and only women’s visual arts college in the nation. Due to her wealth and position, Peter was able to acquire her own education, spoke several languages, and was well-respected for her intellect. She believed that all women, however, should have greater access to learning. The school’s original purpose reflected Peter’s lifelong concern with women’s education, the arts, and the less fortunate. The school first formed to provide single and widowed women with skills to support themselves financially.  Students were taught to design articles such as patterns for wall-paper, carpet, calico, and woodwork moldings—all of which were popular domestic items at the time. Peter’s other charitable work included ministering to Civil War soldiers, POWs, and children orphaned by the Civil War and to women’s prisons. She conducted many of her charitable activities  through the Catholic Church.

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