Main

 
KiteCD - Women In History 1 KiteCD

Women In History - Page 1



Susan B. Anthony

Born February 15, 1820
Died March 13 1906 in Rochester, New York

Susan B. Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts on February 15, 1820 and had learned to read and write by the age of three. While attending grammar school in Battensville, New York, her teacher refused to instruct her in long division. This event prompted her father to remove her from school and arrange for a woman named Mary Perkins to teach Susan along with several other children.

In 1850 Anthony met Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and famous abolitionist, as well as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a woman who would help Anthony in her suffragist movement.

On May 12, 1859, as a member of the Anti-Slavery Society, speaking at the Ninth National Women’s Rights Convention, Susan B. Anthony asked, "Where, under our declaration of Independence, does the Saxon man get his power to deprive all women and Negroes of their inalienable rights?"

On January 1, 1868, Susan B. Anthony first published a weekly journal entitled, The Revolution. Anthony worked as the publisher and business manager, while Elizabeth Cady Stanton acted as editor. The main thrust of The Revolution was to promote women’s and African Americans’ right to vote, suffrage, but it also discussed issues of equal pay for equal work, more liberal divorce laws, and the church’s position on women’s issues. Being the mother of seven children, she sometimes included tips for raising children in The Revolution. It was funded by an independently wealthy man, named George Train, who provided $600 in starting funds.

In 1869, long time friends Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, found themselves on opposite sides of a political line. The Equal Rights Association, which had originally fought for both blacks’ and women’s right to vote, voted to support the 15th Amendment to the Constitution which only gave the right to vote to male African Americans. Anthony questioned why women should support this amendment when the black men were not continuing to show support for women’s voting rights. As a result of the decision by the Equal Rights Association, Anthony founded a new organization with membership for females only called the National Woman Suffrage Association.

In 1872 Susan B. Anthony tried to cast a ballot for the presidential election. She was arrested, convicted, and fined for voting illegally. Anthony refused to pay the fine, hoping that she would be able to appeal her case through the system to the Supreme Court. The fact that she did not pay the fine was dropped, so she was unable to pursue it through the courts.

Again, in the year of 1880, Anthony, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, attempted to vote in the national election. When they were refused the right to do so, Susan B. Anthony threw a voting box at the polling booth inspector. However, the inspector placed his hand over the ballot slot and refused to move.

In 1884, during President Chester Alan Arthur’s term, Anthony lead over 100 suffragists to speak with President Arthur to demand that he voice public support for women’s right to vote. In 1890, Anthony’s organization the National Woman Suffrage Association merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. This was an important move for both groups, which overlooked their differences concerning the success of the 15th Amendment giving black males the right to vote.

Women gained voting rights in Wyoming in 1838 and Colorado in 1893. It was 1894 when Anthony, Stanton, and Isabella Beecher Hooker spoke before a Senate committee to promote women's suffrage. Utah and Idaho gave women the right to vote in 1896.

It wasn’t until, 1920, fourteen years after Susan B. Anthony’s death on March 13, 1906 that the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, guaranteeing women the right to vote. Decades later, Susan B. Anthony was honored in the United States as the first American woman ever to be minted on the nation’s currency, the one dollar coin issued in 1978.

Links

[Index of People - A]
[top] [home]


Amelia Earhart

Born July 24, 1897
Died July 2, 1937

Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas on July 24, 1897. As a young girl, she and her younger sister Muriel were encouraged to pursue any activities that interested them. At the time, girls were not supposed to participate in traditional male activities, but Earhart’s parents encouraged any constructive idea and went so far as to dress the girls in special play clothes with bloomers for outdoor play.

On Earhart’s 11th birthday in 1908, her father took their family to the Iowa State Fair to celebrate. One display at the fair was an airplane. Although the Wright Brothers had built the first motorized glider five years earlier, this was the first plane Earhart had ever seen.

During World War I, Earhart served as a volunteer nurse in Toronto, Canada. Some of her patients were pilots and Earhart often spent her time off watching them practice their flying skills. Earhart later worked as a clerk at a telephone company to earn the money to purchase her own plane. In 1921 Earhart took her first flying lessons from a woman named Neta Snook. Then in July of 1922, she bought a plane, painted it yellow and named it Canary. She earned her pilot’s license the following year.

In 1925, Earhart accepted a job as a social worker in Boston Massachusetts. She worked with immigrants, teaching them English and encouraging them in their education. Earhart believed that the best way to help these people improve their lives in the United States was through education. She joined the National Aeronautics Association, attending meetings and flying on her days off. It was through this association that she had the opportunity to make her first famous flight. In 1928, Earhart became the first female passenger on a flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1928, Earhart became the first woman to make a solo round-trip flight across the United States. She set three women’s world records for speed in 1930. Earhart also set an altitude record in an autogiro, a predecessor to the helicopter, in 1931. Then on May 20, 1932, Earhart flew a 13 ½ hour trip across the Atlantic ocean, leaving from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland and landing in Londonderry, Ireland to become the first woman pilot to make a solo transatlantic flight.

Earhart made an even longer flight in 1935. She was the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii to California. That same year, Earhart flew from California to Mexico on a "goodwill" flight requested by the Mexican government. As Earhart’s fame grew, she personally promoted commercial aviation and women’s rights. Her efforts in equal pay for equal work and the education of women were shared by her friend, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Earhart spoke to various groups about women’s rights and later became a career counselor for women at Purdue University in Indiana. It was under the management of the Purdue Research Foundation that Earhart began to plan a trip around the world. She planned to fly directly around the earth’s equator, something that had not yet been tried.

Earhart left Miami, Florida on June 1, 1937, along with her friend and navigator, Fred Noonan. They headed east around the Equator and each stop along the way went well. On June 29th they landed in Lae, New Guinea, having traveled 22,000 miles. After leaving New Guinea on July 2 Earhart and Noonan were to land on a small island in the Pacific Ocean. Because of the island’s small size, the U.S. Coast Guard aboard the ship, Itasca, planned to guide them in to land.

While the Itasca did receive several transmissions from Earhart requesting their location, she did not acknowledge their return signals. Five hours after Earhart’s first message was received, the Itasca got a message acknowledging their signals. Earhart's transmission was brief and they could not get a bearing on the signal. Shortly afterwards, the men on the ship received a last message from Earhart and they attempted to signal her but got no reply. A sea and air search ensued, but Earhart, Noonan, and the plane they were flying were never found.

Books for Children

  • Sky Pioneer: A Photobiography of Amelia Earhart by Corinne Szabo - A wonderfully descriptive biography of Earhart which brings this famous woman to life for children 8 years and older. (amazon.com has it)

Links

  • Amelia Earhart's early life, celebrity years, and the last flight are done in an olde-time photograph style. There are links on the last page that include related documents, aviation, and Amelia Earhart sites.
  • The Earhart Project at the TIGHAR site contains a wealth of information, pictures, and maps.
  • The Official Amelia Earhart page by CMG Worldwide. The biography and photo gallery sections are "under construction", but they do have a nice list of her quotes and a timeline of her life.
  • "Lady Lindy", by C.V. Glines at the Aviation History site. This is a well-written and substantial article about her life and adventures in flight, with a detailed description of the final flight.
  • Jana Leigh McWhorter is a currently performing female wingwalker at The Flying Circus located in Bealeton, Virginia. The show also features Charlie Kulp, The Flying Farmer, an internationally famous stunt pilot who has been flying for more than 65 years. I can personally reccommend the Flying Circus airshow as entertaining and historically educational, and a DVD of Charlie's performance is available.
[Index of People - E]
[top] [home]


Juliette Gordon Low

Born October 31, 1860
Died 1927

Juliette Gordon was born on October 31, 1860. When she was a newborn, an uncle of hers referred to her as "a daisy" and the nickname "Miss. Daisy" followed her throughout her life. She was raised in Savannah, Georgia during the Civil War. As a young girl, one of her favorite activities was making paper dolls.

After graduating from High School, she met and married an Englishman named Willie Low. Shortly afterwards, they moved to England. Low made friends easily and had several friends who were well known at the time, including Rudyard Kipling, the author of the Just So Stories. Low enjoyed drawing, painting, and other crafts. She even created her own blacksmith tools and used them to construct a set of iron gates.

As a young woman, Low had an accident which rendered her almost completely deaf. Still, she traveled the world visiting places such as Egypt and India. She met a man named Sir Robert Baden-Powell who told her about an organization he had founded called Boy Scouts. In addition to the numerous boys in the group, six thousand girls had signed up. His sister was helping him to organize the girls into a group called the Girl Guides.

Low was extremely interested in the idea of a girls’ organization.
She offered to start a troop of Girl Guides in Scotland. Many young
girls in Scotland were unable to attend school and worked in
unhealthy conditions in factories. Low found a woman to teach
her and the girls in her troop how to spin cloth. The troop then
sold the cloth at a market in London and used the proceeds to start
an egg business. The egg business was successful, earning the girls
enough money that they no longer needed their pay from the factories.
As word spread of the troop's success, so did the Girl Guides’ membership.

Low formed another troop in London and made plans to form troops in the
United States. Then on March 12, 1912, Low registered two troops of
girls in her home town of Savanah, Georgia. She called these troops the
Girl Scouts. The troops participated in many activities that
socially were not always considered appropriate for girls at the time.
They hiked, camped, and played basketball in teams they formed. At the
time of her death in 1927, there were 168,000 Girl Scouts in the United States.

Links

[Index of People - L]
[top] [home]

Annie Oakley

Born 1860
Died 1926

Phoebe Anne Moses was born in Greenville, Ohio in 1860. When Annie was five, her father Jacob Moses died. By the time Annie was seven, her mother had remarried to a man named Dan Brumbaugh. He was good to Annie and she often accompanied him on his hunting excursions. It was on one of these excursions that Annie fired a gun for the first time. In 1867 Annie asked Brumbaugh if she could shoot the next game bird they saw. Brumbaugh agreed, however he believed that hunting was a man’s job. To scare Annie from the desire to shoot again, he added a little extra powder to her gun.

The next bird they saw was a wild turkey. Brumbaugh handed Annie the gun. She took aim and shot. The gun did make a louder than usual noise and the kick from the gun hurt Annie. Brumbaugh had not intended it to hurt her, but only to scare her. He was apologetic, but Annie was not discouraged because she had made a clean shot and killed the turkey for their Thanksgiving meal. Brumbaugh was very proud of Annie.

Within a year after their hunting trip, Brumbaugh became sick and died. The unfortunate death of her stepfather left Annie’s mother with very little money and seven children to feed. To help her family, Annie was sent to an orphanage to work. She did not earn any money, but she was provided with her room and board.

Later she was hired by a farmer and his family to work for them. Annie was supposed to be given fifty cents a week for small labor and she was supposed to be allowed to attend school. That never happened. The farmer worked Annie hard, he never paid her, and he never allowed her to attend school. Finally, Annie ran away.

Annie returned home where she got a job working for a man named John Katzenberger. He owned a general store in Greenville, Ohio and he paid Annie for the game she shot and brought to him. Annie was such a good shot with a rifle that she was able to earn enough money to help pay off the family farm.

In 1875 Annie went to live with her older sister and her sister’s husband in Cincinnati, Ohio. Annie’s brother in law took her to a shooting gallery and she hit every target she aimed for. After watching Annie shoot, her brother in law set up a shooting match between Annie and a trick shooter named Frank Butler. Both Butler and Annie shot very well in their match, but Butler missed his last shot and Annie did not. She had defeated Butler by one shot. He was very impressed with Annie and within a year after their match the two were married.

Butler showed Annie how to do more than shoot. He was an expert at thinking of ways to draw and entertain an audience. Butler told Annie that although they were married, she must pick a new last name, because a show called "Butler and Butler" was not impressive enough. Annie selected the last name of Oakley. From then on she was known only as Annie Oakley.

In 1885, Oakley and her husband were having trouble raising enough money for themselves. Oakley joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show where she shot at targets while riding horse back and shot coins from people’s hands. She shot flaming candles off a spinning wheel and hit moving targets behind her back by looking into a mirror.

Another person in the Wild West Show was the Sioux leader, Sitting Bull. He had agreed to work for the show for one year in order to raise money to help orphaned children on the reservation where he lived. Sitting Bull and Oakley became close friends and Sitting Bull fondly called Oakley Little Sure-Shot. Because of their life experiences, both were empathetic with the lives of orphaned children. While performing their show in New York City, New York, they sent free tickets to all the orphanages in the city for a special "Annie Oakley Day" at the Wild West Show.

Oakley continued to perform throughout most of her life. She shot before twenty thousand people in her home town. In 1893 she was recorded on motion picture, appearing at Thomas Edison’s and William K. L. Dickson’s motion picture studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Through all of her performances, Oakley never injured a single person.

In 1901, Oakley and the rest of the Wild West Show were in a train accident. Luckily nobody was killed, but many people were injured, including Annie Oakley. Afterwards, Oakley had to wear a brace on her leg and had to leave the show.

During World War I, Oakley went to Army training camps and taught new American soldiers how to shoot. Following the end of the war in 1924, Oakley was asked to perform once again to raise money for the returning soldiers. Oakley agreed and was a great success. This was, however, to be her last big show. Two years later, in 1926, Annie Oakley died at a friend’s home in Ohio.

Books for Children

  • Annie Oakley by Jan Gleiter and Kathleen Thompson - An interesting biography for children as young as seven. (amazon.com has it)
  • Annie Oakley The Shooting Star by Charles P. Graves - This comprehensive biography is most appropriate for children eight and older. (amazon.com has it)
  • Annie Oakley And Buffalo Bill Paper Dolls In Full Color by Tom Teirney (amazon.com has it)
  • Little Sure Shot: The Story of Annie Oakley (Step into Reading a Step 3 Book) by Stephanie Spinner (amazon.com has it)

Links

[Index of People - O]
[top] [home]

More Women in History

  • Women In History - Page 2
    • Keller, Hellen, struck blind and deaf by illness as an infant she went on to read, write, speak, and become politically active as an adult.
    • Roosevelt, Eleanor, as First Lady of the United States she struggled to gain civil rights for all people in all nations, and became known as the First Lady of the World.

  • Women In History - Page 3
    • Sacagawea, as a young Shoshone woman she was the only female to travel on the Lewis and Clark expedition. She served as a guide and interpreter.
    • Sullivan, Annie, almost blind herself, she became the teacher and companion to a blind and deaf child teaching her to communicate with the outside world.

  • Women Inventors
    • Margaret Knight improved the process for manufacturing paper bags.
    • Stephanie Louise Kwolek invented Kevlar, a polymer that is five times as strong as steel and is used in bullet-proof vests.

  • Women in Black History
    • Ruby Bridges attended an first grade at an all white school in 1960, accompanied by federal marshals.
    • Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. This resulted in a year-long boycot of the bus company by the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama.
    • Harriet Tubman was known as "Moses", helping over 300 slaves escape to the north on the underground railroad.
[top] [home]

home
About KiteCD

In Association with Amazon.com ®

Problems? Questions? Contact webmaster.

AMAZON.COM is the registered trademark of Amazon.com, Inc.
'Girl Scouts' and other GIRL SCOUT Trademarks are registered trademarks of Girl Scouts of the USA and are used herein pursuant to license.